In 1561 occurred the rebellion of the mad “traitor” Lope de Aguirre. After journeying down the Amazon from Peru, he sailed up to Margarita, and there robbed the treasury. With his booty he crossed to Borburata, sacked the port, and climbed the mountain road to Valencia, from which town he wrote his famous letter to Philip II. In this he upbraided the monarch for his lack of practical interest in the colonists’ welfare, in lands won by Spaniards for his father, while the latter lived at his ease in Castile; the officials and priests sent out to guide them sought, he said, only their own ends. The monkish historian Oviedo y Baños, incensed by the reference to the laziness of the Churchmen, calls him _aquel bruto_ (“that brute”), but it is probable that most of his complaints were fully justified, though he was hardly fitted to found a new and better order of things. He marched on Barquisimeto and took it, and, hearing that the Governor was approaching with troops from the direction of Tocuyo, wrote him a letter, the humour of which can best be appreciated after reading the early writers’ accounts of the poltroonery of Pablo Collado, for which he was subsequently deposed by the Audience of Santo Domingo. The letter opens: “_Muy magnífico Señor,—Entre otros papeles que de V. md. en este Pueblo se han hallado, estaba una carta suya a mi dirigida, con mas ofrecimientos, y preambulos, que Estrellas ay en el Cielo._”[3] These offers he rejects because, he says, he has thrown off his allegiance to Spain and therefore needs no pardon for rebellion; then he closes with the sarcastic farewell:— “_Nuestro Señor la muy magnifica persona de V. md. guarde_, “_Su Servidor_, “_Lope de Aguirre._”[4] The Governor wept with vexation on reading this epistle, and, after the manner of men of his stamp, said what he would do to Aguirre, were they able to fight the matter out in single combat. Meanwhile the troops surprised and took the town from the rebel, who fled towards San Felipe. He met his daughter there, and killed her to save her from the disgrace she might expect as the child of “the traitor.” Oviedo y Baños declaims at length against the murder as the crowning act of cruelty of his life, but while he was undoubtedly guilty during his career of many acts of wild savagery, this final deed seems to an unbiased mind to be creditable rather than otherwise. Be that as it may, he was captured and killed, and his body was quartered and thrown to the dogs on the various roads leading away from Barquisimeto.