One Of These Women Was
The Wife Of A Cacique, Who Was Exceedingly Nimble And Had Been Taken With
Very Great Difficulty By A Man Of The Canaries:
She might even have got
from him, but observing him to be alone she thought to have taken him, and
closed with him for that purpose, and even got him down and had almost
stifled him, had not some others of the Christians come to his aid.
The
less of these women are swathed with cotton cloth from the ancle to the
knee, which gives them a very thick appearance; and they gird these
ornaments, which they call Coiro, and consider as very genteel, so
tightly that the leg appears very thin when they happen to slip off[8].
The same swaths are used both by men and women in Jamaica upon the smaller
parts of their arms up to the armpits, similar to the old-fashioned
sleeves in Spain.
The women of this island were excessively fat, insomuch that some were
thicker than a man could grasp round; they all wear their hair long and
loose upon their shoulders, nor do they cover any part of their bodies
except as before mentioned. As soon as their children can use their limbs,
they give them bows and arrows that they may learn to shoot. The woman who
made so much resistance said that the island was only inhabited by women,
and that those who made demonstrations of hindering the landing of our men
were all women, except four men who had come there accidentally from
another island; for at certain times of the year the men come from the
other islands to sport and cohabit with the women of this.
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