Our Sufferings At
This Time Were Excessive, As During All These Four Days We Had Literally
Nothing To Eat, Except By Gathering A Few Nuts And Some Wild Fruits, And
On Getting Across Our Condition Was Not Improved.
We found this colony to
contain forty men and six women, all yellow and sickly, and utterly
destitute of provisions; so that we were under the necessity of setting
out immediately in search of food both for ourselves and them.
For this
purpose, about eighty of us marched, under the command of Luis Marin, to a
town about eight leagues distant, where we found abundance of maize and
vegetables, and great quantities of cacao; and as this place was in the
direct road for Naco, to which Cortes intended to go, he immediately sent
Sandoval and the greatest part of the troops to join us, on receiving the
agreeable intelligence of our good fortune. We sent a plentiful supply of
maize to the miserable colonist who had been so long in a starving
condition, of which they eat to such excess that seven of them died. About
this time likewise a vessel arrived with seven horses, forty hogs, eight
pipes of salted meat, a considerable quantity of biscuit, and fifteen
adventurers from Cuba. Cortes immediately purchased all the provisions,
which he distributed among the colonists, who eat the salted meat so
voraciously that it occasioned diarrhoeas, by which, in a very few days,
fourteen of them were carried off.
As Cortes wished to examine this great river, he caused one of the
brigantines belonging to Avila which had been stranded to be fitted out;
and embarking with thirty soldiers and eight mariners belonging to the
vessel lately arrived, having likewise a boat and four double canoes, he
proceeded up the river to a spacious lake with good anchorage.
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