“Would that my mother had suffocated me at my birth! I should then be dead, but I should not have felt death, and I should have escaped the most miserable of lots. How much have I undergone, and who knows what sufferings are reserved for me! Figure to yourself, Father, the miseries which an Indian woman has to undergo amongst Indians. They accompany us to the fields with their bows and arrows: we go there bearing one infant which we carry in a basket and another at the breast. They go to hunt or to fish, whilst we dig the earth; and, after having undergone all the fatigue of culture, we have to undertake that of the harvest. They return in the evening unburdened: we bring, back roots for their food and maize for their drink. Once at home, they make themselves happy with their friends; whilst we go to gather wood and to bring water to cook their supper. When they have eaten, they go to sleep: we pass the greater part of the night grinding the maize and making their _chica_. And what is our reward for our vigils? They drink, and whilst they are in their cups they drag us by the hair and kick us about. “You know, Father, if our complaints are well founded. What I tell you, you yourself see every day; but our greatest misfortune of all is one unknown to you. It’s a sad lot for a poor Indian woman to serve her husband like a slave, sweating with labour in the fields and deprived of repose at home. But it is still worse to see him, at the end of twenty years, take another wife, young, and without sense. He becomes attached to her, and she beats our children, orders us about, and treats us like servants; and if we make the slightest murmur of complaint we are beaten with the branch of a tree.... What has an Indian woman better to do than to withdraw her child from a servitude a thousand times worse than death! I repeat, Father, would to God my mother had loved me enough to bury me at my birth!” * * * * * In the year 1670 a party of buccaneers under Morgan reduced the castle of _San Lorenzo_ at _Chagres_, and captured and burned the town of _Panamá_; for which reason the site of that settlement was transferred to the position it at present holds, being six miles distant from old _Panamá_. In the year 1680 the same Filibusters, under other leaders, having crossed the isthmus, took the city of _Santa Maria_; which proceeding led, five years later, to the closing of the mines of _Cana_. In the year 1698 one William Paterson undertook to establish a Scotch colony at _Puerto Escaces_ on _Caledonia Bay_. Early last century several towns were established on the Atlantic Coast by Catholic missionaries, and likewise on the rivers flowing into the Gulf of _San Miguel_; but unfortunately all these were destroyed by the Indians, with whom, in 1790, a treaty of peace was concluded, in virtue of the terms of which the Spaniards abandoned all their forts in _Darien_.