d, that the Spaniards of the Indies have
tamed and trained the strongest and most ferocious dogs to kill and
tear the Indians to pieces.
41. Listen and see, all you who are true Christians and also you who are
not, whether such deeds have ever been heard of in the world; to
feed the said dogs they take many Indians in chains with them on
their journeys, as though they were herds of swine; and they kill
them, making public butchery of human flesh; and one says to the
other; "lend me a quarter of one of these villeins to give to my
dogs to eat, until I kill." It is as though they were lending a
quarter of pork or of mutton.
42. There are others, who go hunting with their dogs in the morning and
when one is asked on his return for dinner how it has fared with
him, he replies; "it has fared well with me, because I have left
perhaps fifteen or twenty villeins killed by my dogs."
43. All these and other diabolical things are being proved now in
law-suits started by some tyrants against others. What can be
filthier, fiercer, and more inhuman?
44. I will finish with this, till news comes of other deeds of more
eminent wickedness, if any such there can be: or until, on our
return there, we again behold them, as we continually have with our
own eyes since forty-two years.
45. I protest before God on my conscience that, as I believe and hold
certain, such are the perdition, harm, destruction, depopulation,
slaughter, deaths, and great and horrible cruelties, and most foul
ways of violence, injustice, robbery, and massacre, done among those
people and in all those countries of the Indies, that with all I
have described, and those upon which I have enlarged, I have not
told nor enlarged upon, in quality and quantity, a ten thousandth
part of what has been done and is being done to-day.
46. And that all Christians may have greater compassion on those
innocent nations, and that they may more sincerely lament their loss
and doom, and blame and abominate the detestible avarice, ambition,
and cruelty of the Spaniards, let them all hold this truth for
certain, in addition to what I have affirmed above; namely, that
from the time the Indies were discovered down to the present,
nowhere did the Indians harm any Christians, before they had
sustain