Luis Ponce was very fond of music, and several cavaliers who attended on him told me that, in the last days of his illness, he desired some one to play on the guitar at his bedside, in order to cheer him up. In his last moments even he desired the musician to play a dance, but as he was not able to move his legs from excessive weakness, he at least accompanied the movements with his lips, and this he continued to do until he breathed his last.
The enemies of Cortes and Sandoval, on this occasion, again began to whisper their calumnies abroad, and asserted that they had poisoned Leon in the same manner as they had Garay. Loudest among these slanderers was father Thomas Ortiz, but the latter himself, with several brothers of his order, died of the same infectious disease a few months after. It appears that the vessel which brought Leon from Spain was infected with a kind of pestilential fever; for of above one hundred persons who were on board, many had died during the passage, and a still greater number perished of the same disorder soon after their arrival in Medellin. Most of the monks, likewise, fell victims to this disorder; and it was even said that the disease had spread to Mexico.