Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/196

 was thus a great good fortune to find that country at peace.

In the chapter before this, Most Excellent Prince, I related how, during my march after the pacification  Expedition South Coast Provinces of the Province of Panuco, the province of Tututepeque, which had rebelled, had been again conquered, and all that was done there. I received news of a province, called Impilcingo, which is near the South Sea, and which is much the same as Tututepeque in the mountainous and rugged character of its country; and the equally war-like inhabitants had done much mischief to the vassals of Your Cæsarian Majesty on the border of their country; and these had come to complain of them and ask for help. Although my people were not rested, as the road from one sea to the other is two hundred leagues, I immediately assembled twenty-five horsemen and eighty foot soldiers, whom I sent to that province with one of my captains; I instructed him to seek to win the inhabitants by peaceful means, and if unsuccessful to fight them. He went there, and had several encounters with them, but, on account of the ruggedness of the country, it was impossible to conquer it entirely. I had also ordered him, in the same instructions, that, having accomplished this, he should go to the city of Zacatula, and, to proceed with his people and those whom he might collect there to the province of Coliman, where, as I have related in the preceding chapters, they had routed and captured the people who had come from the province of Mechuacan; and to seek to win them by kindness, but if he could not, to conquer them. He departed, and altogether, with the people he took, and those whom he collected there, he assembled fifty horsemen and one hundred and fifty footmen and marched to the said province down the coast by the South Sea about sixty leagues from the city of Zacatula. He pacified several