they buy wives from their enemies, each one paying the price of the best bow he has and two arrows. If a man does not have a bow, he gives a net up to one fathom wide and another fathom long. They kill their own children and buy the children of strangers. A marriage lasts only as long as they are happy, and for the slightest reason they dissolve the marriage.

Dorantes stayed with these people and fled after a few days. Castillo and Estebanico went inland on the mainland, to the Yguazes. All these people are archers and well built, although not as tall as the ones we left behind. They pierce their nipples and their lips. Their principal food is roots of two or three kinds, for which they search throughout the land. The roots are very bad and cause people who eat them to swell up. It takes two days to roast them and many of them are very bitter. On top of this, they are very difficult to dig. Those people are so hungry that they can not do without them, and go two or three leagues looking for them. Sometimes they kill some deer, and sometimes they catch fish. But this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders, ant eggs, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes and poisonous vipers. They eat dirt and wood and whatever they can get, as well as deer excrement and other things I will not talk about. My observations lead me to believe that they would eat stones if there were any in that land. They keep the bones of the fish, snakes, and other things they eat to grind them into a powder which they eat.

Among these people men carry no loads, nor anything heavy. This is done by women and old people, who are the people they least esteem. They are not as fond of their children as the ones mentioned above. Some of them sin against nature. The women are worked very hard with many tasks, and out of the twenty-four hours in a day, they rest only six. They spend the rest of the night stoking their ovens