1. In the year 1539 many tyrants joined together and started from Venezuela, Santa Marta, and Cartagena for Peru: and others came back from the same Peru to explore those countries. Three hundred leagues inland behind Santa Marta and Cartagena, they found some very delightful and marvellous provinces, full of numberless people, as mild and kind as the others, and very rich in gold, and in those precious stones called emeralds. 2.2. To these provinces they gave the name of the new kingdom of Granada; because those tyrants who first came to these countries were natives of the kingdom of Granada in Spain. 3.3. As many iniquitous and cruel men among those who gathered from all parts, were notorious butchers and shedders of human blood who were very inured to, and experienced in the great sins that we have said were committed in many parts of the Indies, it follows that their fiendish operations, and the circumstances and qualities that blackened and aggravated them, were such that they have surpassed very many, or indeed all, that the others and they themselves have committed elsewhere in the Indies. 4.4. Of the multitude they have committed in these three years, and continue without ceasing to commit, I will briefly relate a few. As a man who was robbing and murdering in the said kingdom would not allow a governor to also rob and kill, the latter brought a suit against him, calling many witnesses to prove the slaughter, injustice, and massacres he had done, and is doing; this evidence was read, and is to be found in the Council of the Indies. 5.5. The witnesses in the said law-suit affirm that all the kingdom was quiet, and subject to the Spaniards; the Indians continually laboured to furnish them provisions, and to accumulate property for them; they brought them all the gold and precious emeralds they possessed or could obtain: the lords and inhabitants of the towns had been divided among the Spaniards, who lay claim to them as the means for obtaining their final object, which is gold. Having thus reduced everybody to the usual tyranny and slavery, the principal tyrant captain commanding them, captured the sovereign of all that country, without any cause or reason, and kept him for six or seven months, demanding gold and emeralds of him. 6.6. The said king, who was called Bogota, being overcome by fear said that he would give a house of the gold they demanded, hoping to free himself from the hands of his tormenters: he sent some Indians to bring him the treasure, and several times they brought a large quantity of gold and stones: because he did not give the house of gold, the Spaniards declared that he should be killed, because he did not fulfil his promise. 7.7.