While The Admirals Brother Was On Shore, Using His Endeavours To Learn The
Nature Of The Country, It So Happened That A Canoe Eight Feet Wide And As
Long As A Galley, Made All Of One Piece, And Shaped Like Those Which Were
Common Among The Islands, Put In There.
It was loaded with commodities
brought from the westwards, and bound towards New Spain[7].
In the middle
of this canoe there was an awning made of palm-tree leaves, not unlike
those of the Venetian gondolas, which kept all underneath so close, that
neither rain nor sea water could penetrate to wet the goods. Under this
awning were the women and children, and all the commodities; and though
there were twenty-five men in the canoe, they had not the courage to
defend themselves against the people in our boats who pursued them. The
canoe being thus taken without any opposition, was brought along side of
the admiral, who blessed GOD for having given him samples of the
commodities of that country, without exposing his men to any danger. He
therefore ordered such things to be taken as he judged most sightly and
valuable; such as quilts, cotton shirts without sleeves, curiously wrought
and dyed of several colours; some small cloths for covering the nudities,
large sheets, in which the women in the canoe wrapped themselves, as the
Moorish women in Granada used to do, long wooden swords, having a channel
on each side where the edge should be, in which many pieces of sharp-edged
flints were fixed by means of thread and a tenacious bituminous matter;
these swords could cut naked men as well as if they had been made of steel;
hatchets for cutting wood made of good copper, and resembling the stone
hatchets usual among the other islanders, also bells and plates of the
same metal, and crucibles for melting it.
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