Or the story about Pierre Le Grand, sailing in a small ship, almost out of supplies but with twenty freebooters aboard ready to take on any Spanish merchantman, when he came up against a frigate with seventy-five cannons and two hundred men. The pirate did not hesitate. He sank his own ship, stormed the Spaniard, and launched himself toward the powder stores with a lighted match, ready to blow the ship into pieces if the crew did not put down their arms. Faced with this energetic charge, the surprised Spaniards surrendered. The officers who tried to continue the fight were slaughtered, and Pierre Le Grand had himself a prize that made him rich for the rest of his life.
This was the colorful and triumphant tone of those stories. I never heard them describe how prisoners are tortured, none mentioning what took place when Montbars found Maracaibo deserted but still got hold of two prisoners, an old man, more than seventy, and a young man accompanying him. A slave claimed the old man was rich, whereupon Montbars put him to the ropes, attaching them by the man’s four extremities and stretching his limbs toward the four corners of the room, whereupon he confessed to owning nothing but the hundred crowns the young man carried with him. The pirates did not believe him and went on with the torture, which they call “dry swimming,” but now placing a stone that weighed hundreds of pounds on his torso while four men tightened the ropes that held him, and as he yet would not confess to anything further, they built a fire beneath him until it scorched his flesh. They dealt with the youth in like fashion and afterward strung him up by the testicles until they were almost wrenched off him, at length sword-whipping him and casting him into a ditch. A prisoner taken later on said that the youth still lived. No, I heard none of the infinite number of tales repeated that would have allowed me to get an idea of what their cruelty was like. Our cruelty, because in a few days, we too would take Maracaibo.
I must describe something about Maracaibo, but not the beauty of the town, its houses and hospitals and convents and markets, because none of this remained standing. Nor will I say anything either about the beauty of their women, because we ruined them as well, maltreating them even as they humbled themselves before our vileness, satisfying all our whims just to get bread out of us, or the flour to make it, or some meat or fruit, but most of the time in order to calm the hunger of their poor children, who would die anyway because the occupation lasted so long that no child could resist the hunger and the thirst, water also being scarce.
Neither will I talk about the dignity of their buildings, nor the cleverness and extent of their industry, nor of how excellently their cattle were kept in the surrounding area and on the neighboring islands, the interior being of little use as pasture land, although on the other hand prodigal with fruit; nor will I spin eulogies over their dense plantations of cacao, nor their roads so well planned and laid out, nor their carts and mules, nor their well-equipped strongholds, nor the fortress rising up on the Isla de las Palomas, with its palisade formed of stakes and earth, equipped with fourteen cannons and 250 men — the first thing we attacked and destroyed.
I will not talk about what was not left standing, about what was not preserved from our fury, but of the loveliness of the bay, that some call the Gulf of Maracaibo, and about the Bravo Indians, natural enemies of the Spanish and thus our allies, and a people whose children did survive our wrath. These Bravos helped us get into the bay, and without them it would have been virtually impossible to take so well defended a region with so little cost in lives.
The Bravos, so designated by the Spanish because of their uncompromising courage and their untamable spirits, lived on the islands and islets in the lake of Maracaibo. To save their skins they had left their natural territory on dry land to their enemies. According to them, the name of the lake used to be Coquibacoa, and they paid no attention to the way we called it; although they informed us that the name Maracaibo had been that of a cacique who ruled the region once, an area only recently taken by the Spanish. In 1529 Ambrosio Alfingui founded a village on the site, but as soon as he died, his successor, Pedro San Martín, perhaps because the heat in that region is never mitigated by the feeble breezes or because running water is very scarce, abandoned the village, the Indians then destroying it. Around 1571 Alonso Pacheco founded a city with fifty men, but had to abandon it after three years of intense struggles with the Bravos, who call themselves Aliles or Bobures or Moporos, Quiriquires, Tansares, Toas, or Zaparas, depending on insignificant differences in their customs, using many names for what is all the same to our eyes. In 1574, Pedro Maldonado, with only thirty-five men, managed to wrest the territory from the Indians and founded La Nueva Zomar where Maracaibo is now, the which, when we captured it, had already been twice devastated by pirates; by which it is proven that, given that the Spaniards stole these lands through evil, we had the right to take what they had received from the bounteousness of the lands they had stolen. Because who paid any heed to the Pope, that lackey of the Spanish Crown, whose bull claimed that the Caribbean Sea and the Antilles belonged to Spain? A papal bull? What authority could he have over us when his robes are embroidered with gold given him by the Spanish Crown? As for we who practiced piracy, it was not for us to restore order to the way it used to be but instead to appropriate what had no reason to belong to them: the first treasure of importance that Cortés sent to the Spanish king being seized by Giovanni da Verrazano, called Juan Florín by the Spaniards, in the spirit of their language because, as I have already mentioned, say what you like to a Spaniard, he always finds a way to make it over in his own language.