r satisfaction, they retire to some
distance, and the combat begins, and is continued for some time with
fury on both sides; but as soon as one or two men are killed, the party
which has lost these, owns itself beaten and the battle ceases. If it is
the people of the village attacked who are worsted, the others do not
retire without receiving presents. When the conflict is postponed till
the next day (for they never fight but in open daylight, as if to render
nature witness of their exploits), they keep up frightful cries all
night long, and, when they are sufficiently near to understand each
other, defy one another by menaces, railleries, and sarcasms, like the
heroes of Homer and Virgil. The women and children are always removed
from the village before the action.

Their combats are almost all maritime: for they fight ordinarily in
their pirogues, which they take care to careen, so as to present the
broadside to the enemy, and half lying down, avoid the greater part of
the arrows let fly at them.

But the chief reason of the bloodlessness of their combats is the
inefficiency of their offensive weapons, and the excellence of their
defensive armor. Their offensive arms are merely a bow and arrow, and a
kind of double-edged sabre, about two and a half feet long, and six
inches wide in the blade: they rarely come to sufficiently close
quarters to make use of the last. For defensive armor they wear a
cassock or tunic of elk-skin double, descending to the ankles, with
holes for the arms. It is impenetrable by their arrows, which can not
pierce two thicknesses of leather; and as their heads are also covered
with a sort of helmet, the neck is almost the only part in which they
can be wounded. They have another kind of corslet, made like the corsets
of our ladies, of splinters of hard wood interlaced with nettle twine.
The warrior who wears this cuirass does not use the tunic of elk-skin;
he is consequently less protected, but a great deal more free; the said
tunic being very heavy and very stiff.

It is almost useless to observe that, in their military expeditions,
they have their bodies and faces daubed with different paints, often of
the most extravagant designs. I remember to have seen a war-chief, with
one exact half of his face painted white and the other half black.

Their marriages are conducted with a good deal of ceremony. When a young
man seeks a girl in marriage, his parents make the proposals to those of
the i