The island is much in need of people to punish the caciques, who refuse to
allow their dependants to be instructed in the faith.
Some are easily
instructed that there is but One God who made heaven and earth, while with
others force and ingenuity must be used; for some begin well and have a
better end, while others begin well and then fall off, with whom there is
need of force and punishment I know a principal cacique named
Mahuviativire who has continued three years in his good purpose, desiring
to be a Christian, and to have but one wife; whereas many have two or
three, and the principal caciques twenty or thirty. May it please God, if
my endeavours turn to his good service, to enable me to persevere; and if
it must fall out otherwise to deprive me of understanding.
Here ends the work of the poor Anchorite, Roman Pane.
SECTION VIII.
The Admiral returns to Spain, from his Second Voyage.
Having reduced the island to peace and order, and having completed the
town of Isabella, and built three forts in different places to protect the
Christians, the admiral resolved to return into Spain to acquaint their
Catholic majesties with several matters which he considered to be
important: but especially because he had learnt that many malicious and
envious persons had given false information at court respecting the
affairs of the Indies, to the great prejudice and dishonour of him and his
brothers. For these reasons he embarked on Thursday the tenth of March
1496, with 225 Spaniards and thirty Indians in two caravels, the Santa
Cruz and the Nina, and sailed from Isabella about day-break. Holding his
course eastwards along the coast, he lost sight of the eastern point of
Hispaniola on Tuesday the twenty-second of March, keeping an easterly
direction as far as the wind would permit; but the wind for the most part
continuing from the east, and provisions falling short, by which the men
were much discouraged, he deviated southwards towards the Caribbee islands,
and anchored at Marigalante on Saturday the ninth of April. Although it
was not his custom to set sail from any port of a Sunday, yet as his men
muttered, saying that when in want of food it was not necessary to keep so
strictly to the observation of particular days, he therefore set sail next
day.
He next anchored at the island of Guadaloupe and sent the boats on shore
well armed. These were opposed by a great number of women, who came out of
a wood armed with bows and arrows and decorated with feathers; seeing whom
the people in the boats kept aloof, and sent two women of Hispaniola on
shore by swimming to parley with the natives; who, understanding that the
Christians only desired to have provisions in exchange for such
commodities as they had to barter, desired them to go with their ships to
the north side of the island where their husbands then were, who would
furnish them with what they wanted. The ships did accordingly, and sailing
close to the shore saw abundance of people, who came down to the sea-side
and discharged their arrows in vain against our people, setting up loud
cries, but their weapons all fell short. When our boats well armed and
full of men drew near the shore, the Indians retired into an ambush,
whence they sallied forth to hinder our people from landing; but terrified
by some discharges of cannon from the ships, they fled into the woods,
abandoning their houses and goods, when the Christians took and destroyed
all they found. Being acquainted with the Indian method of making bread,
they fell to work and made enough to supply their want, as they found
abundance of materials[5].
Among other things which they found in the Indian houses on this island,
were parrots, honey, wax, and iron, of which last they had hatchets[6]:
and they likewise found looms like those used in Europe for weaving
tapestry[7], in which the natives weave their tents. Their houses, instead
of the ordinary round forms which had been hitherto met with in the West
Indies, were square; and in one of them the Spaniards found the arm of a
man roasting at a fire upon a spit. While the bread was making, the
admiral dispatched forty men into the country to examine into its nature
and productions, who returned next day with ten women and three boys all
the rest of the natives having fled into the woods. 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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