s. It is true the natives are
contented with a little or nothing, and are not hospitable; moreover,
we have more than sufficiently demonstrated that they receive
ungraciously strangers who come amongst them, and only consent to
negotiate with them, after they have been conquered. Most ferocious
are those new anthropophagi, who live on human flesh, Caribs or
cannibals as they are called. These cunning man-hunters think of
nothing else than this occupation, and all the time not given to
cultivating the fields they employ in wars and man-hunts. Licking
their lips in anticipation of their desired prey, these men lie in
wait for our compatriots, as the latter would for wild boar or deer
they sought to trap. If they feel themselves unequal to a battle, they
retreat and disappear with the speed of the wind. If an encounter
takes place on the water, men and women swim with as great a facility
as though they lived in that element and found their sustenance under
the waves.

It is not therefore astonishing that these immense tracts of country
should be abandoned and unknown, but the Christian religion, of which
you are the head, will embrace its vast extent. As I have said in
the beginning, Your Holiness will call to yourself these myriads of
people, as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. Let us now
return to Veragua, the place discovered by Columbus, explored under
the auspices of Diego Nicuesa, and now abandoned; and may all the
other barbarous and savage provinces of this vast continent be brought
little by little into the pale of Christian civilisation and the
knowledge of the true religion.

BOOK IV

I had resolved, Most Holy Father, to stop here but I am consumed, as
it were, with an internal fire which constrains me to continue my
report. As I have already said, Veragua was discovered by Columbus.
I should feel that I had robbed him or committed an inexpiable crime
against him were I to pass over the ills he endured, the vexations and
dangers to which he was exposed during these voyages. It was in the
year of salvation 1502 on the sixth day of the ides of May that
Columbus sailed from Cadiz with a squadron of four vessels of from
fifty to sixty tons burthen, manned by one hundred and seventy men.[1]
Five days of favourable weather brought him to the Canaries; seventeen
days' sailing brought him to the island of Domingo, the home of the
Caribs, and from thence he reached Hispaniola in five days more, so