Men and women danced, now in separate bands, now mingled together.  Decorum was kept.  We afterwards knew that it had been a religious dance.  They had war dances, hunting dances, dances at the planting of their corn, ghost dances and others.  This now was a thing to watch, like a beautiful masque.  They were very graceful, very supple; they had their own dignity.

We learned much in the three days we spent in this town.  Men and women for instance!  That nakedness of the body, that free and public mingling, going about work and adventure and play together, worked, thought Juan Lepe no harm.  Later on in this vast adventure of a new world, some of our churchmen were given to asserting that they lived like animals, though the animals also are there slandered!  The women were free and complaisant; there were many children about.  But matings, I thought, occurred only of free and mutual desire, and not more frequently than in other countries.  The women were not without modesty, nor the men without a pale chivalry.  At first I thought constraint or rule did not enter in, but after a talk with their priest through Diego Colon, I gathered that there prevailed tribe and kinship restraints.  Later we were to find that a great network of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” ran through their total society, wherever or to what members it might extend.  Common good, or what was supposed to be common good, was the master here as it is everywhere!  The women worked the gardens, the men hunted; both men and women fished.  Women might be caciques.  There were women caciques, they said, farther on in their land.  And it seemed to us that name and family were counted from the mother’s side.

The Admiral had solemnly laid it upon us to discover the polity of this new world.  If they held fief from fief, then at last we must come through however many overlords to the seigneur of them all, Grand Khan or Emperor.  We applied ourselves to cacique and butio, but we found no Grand Seigneur.  There were other caciques.  When the Caribs descended they banded together.  They had dimly, we thought, the idea of a war-lord.  But it ended there, when the war ended.  Tribute:  He found they had no idea of tribute.  Cotton grew everywhere!  Cotton, cassava, calabashes, all things!  When they visited a cacique they took him gifts, and at parting he gave them gifts.  That was all.

Gold?  They knew of it.  When they found a bit they kept it for ornament.  The cacique possessed a piece the size of a ducat, suspended by a string of cotton.  It had been given to him by a cacique who lived on the great water.  Perhaps he took it from the Caribs.  But it was in the mountains, too.  He indicated the heights beyond.  Sometimes they scraped it from sand under the stream.  He seemed indifferent to it.  But Diego Colon, coming in, said that it was much prized in heaven, being used for high magic, and that we would give heavenly gifts for it.  Resulted from that the production in an hour of every shining flake and grain and button piece the village owned.  We carried from this place to the Admiral a small gourd filled with gold.  But it was not greatly plentiful; that was evident to any thinking man!  But we had so many who were not thinking men.  And the Admiral had to appease with his reports gold-thirsty great folk in Spain.