A little further on, the admiral says of the people of a neighbouring
island, that they were more domestic and tractable than those of San
Salvador, and more intelligent, too, as he saw in their way of reckoning
for the payment of the cotton they brought to the ships. At the mouth of
the Rio de Mares, some of the admiral's men, whom he had sent to
reconnoitre, brought him word that the houses of the natives were the best
they had seen. They were made, he says, like "Alfaneques (pavilions), very
large, and appeared as royal tents without an arrangement of streets,
except one here and there, and within they were very clean, and well
swept, and their furniture very well arranged. All these houses were made
of palm branches, and were very beautiful. Our men found in these houses
many statues of women, and several heads fashioned like masks, and very
well wrought. I do not know, he adds, whether they have these for the love
of the beautiful, or for purposes of worship." The Spaniards found also
excellent nets, fish-hooks, and fishing-tackle. There were tame birds
about the houses, and dogs which did not bark. "Mermaids," too, the
admiral saw on the coasts, but thought them "not so like ladies as they
are painted."

Speaking of the Indians of the coast near the Rio del Sol, he says that
they are "very gentle, without knowing what evil is, neither killing nor
stealing." He describes the frank generosity of the people of Marien, and
the honour they thought it to be asked to give anything, in terms which
may remind his readers of the doctrines maintained by Christians in
respect of giving.

DISCOVERY OF TOBACCO; ITS PECULIAR EFFECTS.

It is interesting to observe the way in which, at this point of the
narrative, a new product is introduced to the notice of the old world, a
product that was hereafter to become, not only an unfailing source of
pleasure to a large section of the male part of mankind, from the highest
to the lowest, but was also to distinguish itself as one of those
commodities for revenue, which are the delight of statesmen, the great
financial resource of modern nations, and which afford a means of indirect
taxation that has, perhaps, nourished many a war, and prevented many a
revolution. Two discoverers, whom the admiral had sent out from the Puerto
de Mares (one of them being a learned Jew, who could speak Hebrew,
Chaldee, and some Arabic, and would have been able to discourse, as
Columbus probably thought