“The slaves are all marked in the face and on the arms by a hot iron with the mark of C;[Y] then the governors and captains do as they like with them; some are given to the soldiers, so that the Spaniards afterwards sell them or gamble them away among each other. When ships arrive from Spain, they barter these Indians for wine, flour, biscuit, and other requisite things. And even when some of the Indian women are pregnant by these same Spaniards, they sell them without any conscience. Then the merchants carry them elsewhere and sell them again. Others are sent to the island of _Spagnuola_ (_Hispaniola_), filling with them some large vessels built like _caravels_. They carry them under the deck; and being nearly all people captured inland, they suffer severely the sea horrors; and not being allowed to move out of those sinks, what with their sickness and their other wants, they have to stand in the filth like animals; and the sea often being calm, water and other provisions fail them, so that the poor wretches, oppressed by the heat, the stench, the thirst, and the crowding, miserably expire there below. Now all that country around the Gulf of _Pária_ and other places are no longer inhabited by the Spaniards.” * * * * * “Finally, out of the two millions of original inhabitants (of Hispaniola), through the number of suicides and other deaths, occasioned by the oppressive labour and cruelties imposed by the Spaniards, there are not a hundred and fifty now to be found: and this has been their way of making Christians of them. What befell these poor islanders has happened also to all the others around: _Cuba_, _Jamaica_, _Porto Rico_, and other places. And although an almost infinite number of the inhabitants of the mainland have been brought to these islands as slaves, they have nearly all since died.” * * * * *