As for the first, your Majesty may be assured that heretofore these Indians never have understood, nor have they been given to understand, that the Spaniards entered this country for any other purpose than to subjugate them and compel them to pay tributes.  As this is a thing which all peoples naturally refuse, it follows that where they have been able to resist they have always done so, and have gone to war.  When they can do no more, they say that they will pay tribute.  And these people the Spaniards call pacified, and say that they have submitted to your Majesty!  And without telling them more of God and of the benefits which it was intended to confer upon them, they demand tribute from them each year.  Their custom therein is as follows.  As soon as the Spaniards have subjugated them, and they have promised to pay tribute (for from us Christians they hear no other word than “Pay tribute"), they say to the natives, “You must give so much a year.”  If they are not allotted in encomiendas, the governor sends some one to collect the tributes; but it is most usual to allot them at once in an encomienda to him who has charge of collecting the tributes.  Although the decree relating to encomiendas says, “Provided that you instruct them in the matters of our most holy faith,” the only care that they have for that is, that the encomendero takes with him eight or ten soldiers with their arquebuses and weapons, orders the chiefs to be called, and demands that they give him the tributes for all the Indians of their village.  Here my powers fail me, I lack the courage, and I can find no words, to express to your Majesty the misfortunes, injuries, and vexations, the torments and miseries, which the Indians are made to suffer in the collection of the tributes.  The tribute at which all are commonly rated is the value of eight reals, paid in gold or in produce which they gather from their lands; but this rate is observed like all other rules that are in favor of the Indians—­that is, it is never observed at all.  Some they compel to pay it in gold, even when they do not have it.  In regard to the gold likewise, there are great abuses, because as there are vast differences in gold here, they always make the natives give the finest.  The weight at which they receive the tribute is what he who collects it wishes, and he never selects the lightest.  Others make them pay cloth or thread.  But the evil is not here, but in the manner of collecting; for, if the chief does not give them as much gold as they demand, or does not pay for as many Indians as they say there are, they crucify the unfortunate chief, or put his head in the stocks—­for all the encomenderos, when they go to collect, have their stocks, and there they lash and torment the chiefs until they give the entire sum demanded from them.  Sometimes the wife or daughter of the chief is seized, when he himself does not appear.  Many are the chiefs who have died of torture in the manner which I have stated.  When I was in the port of Ybalon some