ABSTRACT
The Indians willingly agreed to this, and pointed out the principal houses to the governor, where his people might lodge; and it was agreed that they should not enter into the part retained by the Indians, nor injure them in any way on pain of death. All our people soon st took the belly of the evil year” (as they say), with the plentiful supply of eatables which they found, of maize, beans, roots, together with abundance of turtle and hicoteas, which the Indians kept alive in ponds near their houses, surrounded with pallisades, and it appeared to the Spaniards that there were alive, without counting those which had been recently killed for food, more than six or seven thousand. The Indians did not feel much confidence when they saw that the Span iards were so numerous; and each one, in his own part of the village, began to take the provisions, and hide them at night by little and little. But they could not do this so secretly as to prevent the soldiers, who were mindful of their former misery, and anxious to avoid its repetition in future, from searching for the provisions which the In dians were hiding, and taking what they found to their huts. The governor, seeing that this was done in the face of fresh threats, and anxious to chastise the insolence of some soldiers, to overawe the rest, seized upon several. Among these was a half caste servant of his A lfe r e z G eneral Don Fernando de Guzman, and this circumstance was made use of afterwards by the discontented, who made it a point of honour with Don Fernando that the governor should have imprisoned his servant, telling him that it had been
done as an insult, or at least that it was a want of respect; and thus they worked upon him to join their side, in which they afterwards succeeded.
