Hanging over the door of one of the chieftains in Curiana, the Spaniards found the head of a cannibal, which was regarded as a sort of standard or helmet captured from the enemy, and constituted a great honour for this chief.

There is a district on the coast of Paria, called Haraia, which is remarkable for a peculiar kind of salt found there.  It is a vast plain over which the waves of the sea are driven in heavy weather and when the waves subside and the sun comes out, the pools of water crystallise into masses of the whitest salt, in sufficient quantity for the natives to load all the ships that sail, did they arrive before it rained.  The first rainfall melts the salt, which is then absorbed by the sands and thus returns through fissures in the earth, to the sea which produces it.  Others pretend that this plain is not inundated by the sea, but that it possesses saline springs, more bitter than sea water, which send forth their waters when the tempest rages.  The natives set great store on these salines, and they not only use the salt in the same way that we do, but they mould it into brick-shaped forms and trade it to foreigners for articles which they do not themselves possess.

The bodies of the chiefs of the country are laid upon biers under which a slow fire is lighted which consumes the flesh, little by little, but leaves the bones and the skin intact.  These dried bodies are then piously preserved, as though they were their penates.  The Spaniards say that in one district they saw a man being thus dried for preservation and in another a woman.

When, on the eighth day of the ides of February, the Spaniards were ready to leave the country of Curiana, they found they had ninety-six pounds of pearls at eight ounces to the pound, which they had obtained at an average price of five cents.

Although their return voyage was shorter than when they came from Hispaniola, it lasted sixty-one days, because continual currents running from east to west not only retarded their speed, but sometimes completely stopped the ship.  Finally they arrived, loaded with pearls like other people come loaded with straw.  The commander, Pedro Alonzo Nunez, concealed an important quantity of valuable pearls, and thus cheated the royal revenues, to which a fifth of all merchandise belongs.[9] His fellows denounced him, and Fernando de Vega, a learned statesman, who was Governor of Galicia where they landed, arrested him, and he was held in prison for a long time, but was finally released; and even to this day he still claims they robbed him of his share of the pearls.  Many of these stones are as large as nuts, and resemble oriental pearls, but as they are badly pierced, they are less valuable.

[Note 9:  Navarrete, iii., 78.  The treasure was sold in August, 1501, and the proceeds divided among the sailors.]