which nature without labour bringeth forth.  They use the tops of palmitos for bread, and kill deer, fish, and porks for the rest of their sustenance.  They have also many sorts of fruits that grow in the woods, and great variety of birds and fowls; and if to speak of them were not tedious and vulgar, surely we saw in those passages of very rare colours and forms not elsewhere to be found, for as much as I have either seen or read.

Of these people those that dwell upon the branches of Orenoque, called Capuri, and Macureo, are for the most part carpenters of canoas; for they make the most and fairest canoas; and sell them into Guiana for gold and into Trinidad for tabacco, in the excessive taking whereof they exceed all nations.  And notwithstanding the moistness of the air in which they live, the hardness of their diet, and the great labours they suffer to hunt, fish, and fowl for their living, in all my life, either in the Indies or in Europe, did I never behold a more goodly or better-favoured people or a more manly.  They were wont to make war upon all nations, and especially on the Cannibals, so as none durst without a good strength trade by those rivers; but of late they are at peace with their neighbours, all holding the Spaniards for a common enemy.  When their commanders die they use great lamentation; and when they think the flesh of their bodies is putrified and fallen from their bones, then they take up the carcase again and hang it in the cacique’s house that died, and deck his skull with feathers of all colours, and hang all his gold plates about the bones of this arms, thighs, and legs.  Those nations which are called Arwacas, which dwell on the south of Orenoque, of which place and nation our Indian pilot was, are dispersed in many other places, and do use to beat the bones of their lords into powder, and their wives and friends drink it all in their several sorts of drinks.

After we departed from the port of these Ciawani we passed up the river with the flood and anchored the ebb, and in this sort we went onward.  The third day that we entered the river, our galley came on ground; and stuck so fast as we thought that even there our discovery had ended, and that we must have left four-score and ten of our men to have inhabited, like rooks upon trees, with those nations.  But the next morning, after we had cast out all her ballast, with tugging and hauling to and fro we got her afloat and went on.  At four days’ end we fell into as goodly a river as ever I beheld, which was called the great Amana, which ran more directly without windings and turnings than the other.  But soon after the flood of the sea left us; and, being enforced either by main strength to row against a violent current, or to return as wise as we went out, we had then no shift but to persuade the companies that it was but two or three days’ work, and therefore desired them to take pains, every gentleman and others taking their turns to row, and to spell one the other at the hour’s