spoke to his followers in his native language when four of them drew off, two towards each gangway, and the chief and the six remaining Indians seemed to be slowly quitting the quarter-deck.  When the detached Indians had taken possession of the gangways, Orellana placed his hands hollow to his mouth and bellowed out the war-cry used by those savages, which is said to be the harshest and most terrifying sound known in nature.  This hideous yell was the signal for beginning the massacre, for on this the Indians all drew their knives and brandished their prepared double-headed shot, and the six, with their chief, who remained on the quarter-deck, immediately fell on the Spaniards who were intermingled with them, and laid near forty of them at their feet, of whom above twenty were killed on the spot, and the rest disabled.  Many of the officers, in the beginning of the tumult, pushed into the great cabin, where they put out the lights and barricaded the door.  And of the others, who had avoided the first fury of the Indians, some endeavoured to escape along the gangways into the forecastle, but the Indians placed there on purpose stabbed the greatest part of them as they attempted to pass by, or forced them off the gangways into the waist.  Others threw themselves voluntarily over the barricades into the waist, and thought themselves happy to lie concealed amongst the cattle; but the greatest part escaped up the main-shrouds and sheltered themselves either in the tops or rigging; and though the Indians attacked only the quarter-deck, yet the watch in the forecastle, finding their communication cut off, and being terrified by the wounds of the few who, not being killed on the spot, had strength sufficient to force their passage along the gangways, and not knowing either who their enemies were or what were their numbers, they likewise gave all over for lost, and in great confusion ran up into the rigging of the foremast and bowsprit.

Thus these eleven Indians, with a resolution perhaps without example, possessed themselves almost in an instant of the quarter-deck of a ship mounting sixty-six guns, with a crew of nearly five hundred men, and continued in peaceable possession of this post a considerable time; for the officers in the great cabin (amongst whom were Pizarro and Mindinuetta), the crew between decks, and those who had escaped into the tops and rigging, were only anxious for their own safety, and were for a long time incapable of forming any project for suppressing the insurrection and recovering the possession of the ship.  It is true, the yells of the Indians, the groans of the wounded and the confused clamours of the crew, all heightened by the obscurity of the night, had at first greatly magnified their danger, and had filled them with the imaginary terrors which darkness, disorder, and an ignorance of the real strength of an enemy never fail to produce.  For as the Spaniards were sensible of the disaffection of their pressed hands, and were also conscious of their barbarity to their prisoners, they imagined the conspiracy was general, and considered their own destruction as infallible; so that, it is said, some of them had once taken the resolution of leaping into the sea, but were prevented by their companions.