Among this people the women are treated with more decorum than in any part of the Indias we had visited.  They wear a shirt of cotton that falls as low as the knee, and over it half sleeves with skirts reaching to the ground, made of drest deerskin.  It opens in front, and is brought close with straps of leather.  They soap this with a certain root that cleanses well, by which they are enabled to keep it becomingly.  Shoes are worn.  The people all came to us that we should touch and bless them, they being very urgent, which we could accomplish only with great labor, for sick and well all wished to go with a benediction.

These Indians ever accompanied us until they delivered us to others; and all held full faith in our coming from heaven.  While traveling, we went without food all day until night, and we ate so little as to astonish them.  We never felt exhaustion, neither were we in fact at all weary, so inured were we to hardship.  We possest great influence and authority:  to preserve both, we seldom talked with them.  The negro was in constant conversation; he informed himself about the ways we wished to take, of the towns there were, and the matters we desired to know.

We passed through many and dissimilar tongues.  Our Lord granted us favor with the people who spoke them, for they always understood us, and we them.  We questioned them, and received their answers by signs, just as if they spoke our language and we theirs; for, altho we knew six languages, we could not everywhere avail ourselves of them, there being a thousand differences.

Throughout all these countries the people who were at war immediately made friends, that they might come to meet us, and bring what they possest.  In this way we left all the land at peace, and we taught all the inhabitants by signs, which they understood, that in heaven was a Man we called God, who had created the sky and earth; Him we worshiped and had for our Master; that we did what He commanded, and from His hand came all good; and would they do as we did, all would be well with them.  So ready of apprehension we found them that, could we have have the use of language by which to make ourselves perfectly understood, we should have left them all Christians.  Thus much we gave them to understand the best we could.  And afterward, when the sun rose, they opened their hands together with loud shouting toward the heavens, and then drew them down all over their bodies.  They did the same again when the sun went down.  They are a people of good condition and substance, capable in any pursuit.  In the town where the emeralds were presented to us the people gave Dorantes over six hundred open hearts of deer.  They ever keep a good supply of them for food, and we called the place Pueblo de los Corazones.  It is the entrance into many provinces on the South Sea.  They who go to look for them, and do not enter there, will be lost.  On the coast is no maize:  the inhabitants eat the powder of rush and of straw, and fish that is caught in the sea from rafts, not having canoes.  With grass and straw the women cover their nudity.  They are a timid and dejected people.