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j 159 C H A P T E R S E V E N T Y- T H R E E What Happened to the Governor and His People in Puerto Reyes The Governor was in Puerto Reyes for three months, and all his men fell ill with fever and he with them. Everyone hoped the waters would recede and God would give them back their health, because only then could they undertake their expedition into the new territories and explore them thoroughly. But the sickness rose every day along with the waters, and it resulted in the Governor retiring his party from Puerto Reyes with enormous effort. And after they had done us no end of harm, we took along with us mosquitoes of all kinds. They never let us sleep or rest, night or day. They were an intolerable torment to us, a worse sort of suffering than our fevers. Considering all this, Your Majesty’s officials had demanded that the Governor retire from Puerto Reyes downriver to the city of Asunción, where the men might convalesce. The Governor based his action on the opinions of our clerics and royal officials after they had looked into the problem, and he did indeed retire. But the Governor did not consent to the Christians bringing along a nasty little business of some one hundred girls, whom the inhabitants of Puerto Reyes had given to our party when the Governor arrived in the place. The girls’ fathers had offered them to various of our captains and other selected persons in order to butter us up. This was all done, of course, so that our men might do with the young women what they were accustomed to doing with the other young girls they already had. To avoid offending God with this sorry business, the Governor ordered their fathers to keep the girls in their houses until such time as our party returned. The Governor did this just as our company was about to depart for Asunción so as not to offend the girls’ fathers and leave the whole country in an uproar. To add a little more emphasis to the proceedings, the Governor publicized an instruction from Your Majesty, which ordered that “no Spaniard should dare to take any Indian from his own land, on pain of grave penalties.” The Indians were quite happy with this, but the Spaniards were desperate and boiling with complaints. Some of the Governor’s men wished him ill, and from that point on most of them detested him. And with this attitude and in that frame of mind, they did something I will relate in due course. Once the people set off downriver, Christians and Indians alike, they and the Governor arrived back at the city of Asunción in twelve days. This same journey had taken the Governor two months when he had first made it in the opposite direction. Although our whole company was deathly ill, they found a little strength within their scrawny selves from the sheer desire to get home. And it was certainly no little effort to do this (to get back home, as I have noted), because they were so weak they couldn’t take up arms to resist their enemies, nor take up an oar to row or guide the brigantines. And had it not been for the culverins we carried in the brigantines, our labors and the sheer danger of the place would have been all the worse. 1 We traveled with the Indians’ canoes in the middle of our ships so that we might keep them safe until the Indians could return to their own homes and lands. To make them safer yet, the Governor dispersed several Christians among these canoes, where they concealed themselves well as they guarded us from our enemies. We passed through the territory of the Guaxarapos, who ambushed us in great numbers and with a lot of canoes. They came at us on rafts, too, which pulled right up next to us and showered us with darts. Several of these went straight through one Spaniard’s chest and through the rest of him, too, and he fell down dead. His name was Miranda, and he was a native of Valladolid. The Guaxarapos also wounded some of our Indians, and if the culverins had not come to our aid our enemies would have done us much more harm. All our people were just skin and bone because of this. On...

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