Note 1 — Chapter IX

Being near this island, there came out from it a large canoe with a sail, and behind it a fleet of fifty smaller canoes, the people in them calling to the ships with shouts and waving of hands, our men, though doubtfully, calling in return. They arrived. The natives in them were of a black colour; some of them tawny, with frizzled hair; many of them having it white, red, and of other colours. It certainly must have been dyed, and half of it removed from the head in some, and there were other differences. They were all naked. Their teeth were dyed red. Part of their bodies was covered with woven stuff, and all were painted with lines blacker than their own colour, and they had lines on their faces and bodies. They had many turns of a black reed round their arms, and many strings of very small beads of bone and fish’s teeth round their necks, and many plates of mother-of-pearl, small and great, hanging from various parts. The canoes were small, and some came fastened together, two and two, with frames rather high, as counterpoises, like those of the former islands. Their arms were bows, with arrows having very sharp points of toasted wood, and others with bone harpoon-shaped points. Some were feathered, with the point anointed, and carried in quivers. The ointment appeared to be from a herb. Although they do little harm, they carry stones, clubs of heavy wood, which are their swords, and darts of stout wood, with three rows of harpoons, in length more than a palmo1 to the points. They carried from a shoulder-belt a kind of bag, well worked, and full of biscuits, made from a certain root, which they were all eating as they came along, and readily gave away some of it. When the Adelantado saw their colour, he took them for the people he was in search of, and said: “This is such and such an island or land.” He spoke to them in the language he had learnt during his first voyage, but they never understood him, nor did he understand them.