To make mention of the several beasts, birds, fishes, fruits, flowers, gums, sweet woods, and of their several religions and customs, would for the first require as many volumes as those of Gesnerus, and for the next another bundle of Decades.  The religion of the Epuremei is the same which the Ingas, emperors of Peru, used, which may be read in Cieza and other Spanish stories; how they believe the immortality of the soul, worship the sun, and bury with them alive their best beloved wives and treasure, as they likewise do in Pegu in the East Indies, and other places.  The Orenoqueponi bury not their wives with them, but their jewels, hoping to enjoy them again.  The Arwacas dry the bones of their lords, and their wives and friends drink them in powder.  In the graves of the Peruvians the Spaniards found their greatest abundance of treasure.  The like, also, is to be found among these people in every province.  They have all many wives, and the lords five-fold to the common sort.  Their wives never eat with their husbands, nor among the men, but serve their husbands at meals and afterwards feed by themselves.  Those that are past their younger years make all their bread and drink, and work their cotton-beds, and do all else of service and labour; for the men do nothing but hunt, fish, play, and drink, when they are out of the wars.

I will enter no further into discourse of their manners, laws, and customs.  And because I have not myself seen the cities of Inga I cannot avow on my credit what I have heard, although it be very likely that the emperor Inga hath built and erected as magnificent palaces in Guiana as his ancestors did in Peru; which were for their riches and rareness most marvellous, and exceeding all in Europe, and, I think, of the world, China excepted, which also the Spaniards, which I had, assured me to be true, as also the nations of the borderers, who, being but savages to those of the inland, do cause much treasure to be buried with them.  For I was informed of one of the caciques of the valley of Amariocapana which had buried with him a little before our arrival a chair of gold most curiously wrought, which was made either in Macureguarai adjoining or in Manoa.  But if we should have grieved them in their religion at the first, before they had been taught better, and have digged up their graves, we had lost them all.  And therefore I held my first resolution, that her Majesty should either accept or refuse the enterprise ere anything should be done that might in any sort hinder the same.  And if Peru had so many heaps of gold, whereof those Ingas were princes, and that they delighted so much therein, no doubt but this which now liveth and reigneth in Manoa hath the same humour, and, I am assured, hath more abundance of gold within his territory than all Peru and the West Indies.