[Note 6:  The text continues:  alibi in eo tractu intra vaginam mentularemque nervum reducunt, funiculoque praeputium alligant.]

[Note 7:  Navarrete, iii., 14.]

[Note 8:  Auri tamen parum apud Cauchietenses:  lectum reperere meaning, doubtless, that they traded away most of their gold for pearls.]

The temperature in the month of November was delicious, without a sign of cold.  Each evening the stars which mark the north pole disappeared, so near is that region to the equator; but it was not possible to calculate precisely the polar degrees.  The natives are sensible and not suspicious, and some of the people of Curiana passed the entire night in company with our men, coming out in their barques to join them.  Pearls they call corixas.  They are jealous, and when strangers visit them, they make their women withdraw behind the house, from whence the latter examine the guests as though they were prodigies.  Cotton is plentiful and grows wild in Cauchieta, just as shrubs do in our forests, and of this they make trousers which they wear.

Continuing their course along the same coast, the Spaniards suddenly encountered about two thousand men armed according to the fashion of the country, who prevented them from landing.  They were so barbarous and ferocious that it was impossible to establish the smallest relations with them or to effect any trade; so, as our men were satisfied with the pearls they had procured, they returned by the same course to Curiana, where they remained for another twenty days bountifully supplied with provisions.

It seems to me neither out of place nor useless to this history, to here narrate what happened when they arrived within sight of the coasts of Paria.  They encountered by chance a squadron of eighteen canoes full of cannibals engaged in a man-hunt:  this was near the Boca de la Sierpe and the strait leading to the gulf of Paria, which I have before described.  The cannibals unconcernedly approached the ship, surrounding it, and shooting flights of arrows and javelins at our men.  The Spaniards replied by a cannon shot, which promptly scattered them.  In pursuing them, the ship’s boat came up with one of their canoes, but was able to capture only a single cannibal and a bound prisoner, the others having all escaped by swimming.  This prisoner burst into tears, and by his gestures and rolling his eyes, gave it to be understood that six of his companions had been cruelly disembowelled, cut into pieces, and devoured by those monsters, and that the same fate awaited him on the morrow.  They made him a present of the cannibal, upon whom he immediately threw himself, gnashing his teeth and belabouring him with blows of a stick and his fists and with kicks, for he believed that the death of his companions would not be sufficiently avenged till he beheld the cannibal insensible and beaten black and blue.  When questioned as to the customs and usages of the cannibals when they made expeditions to other countries, he said they always carried with them, wherever they went, sticks prepared beforehand which they planted in the ground at the place of their encampment, and beneath whose shelter they passed the night.