ch the natives weave their tents. Their houses, instead
of the ordinary round forms which had been hitherto met with in the West
Indies, were square; and in one of them the Spaniards found the arm of a
man roasting at a fire upon a spit. While the bread was making, the
admiral dispatched forty men into the country to examine into its nature
and productions, who returned next day with ten women and three boys all
the rest of the natives having fled into the woods. One of these women was
the wife of a cacique, who was exceedingly nimble and had been taken with
very great difficulty by a man of the Canaries: She might even have got
from him, but observing him to be alone she thought to have taken him, and
closed with him for that purpose, and even got him down and had almost
stifled him, had not some others of the Christians come to his aid. The
less of these women are swathed with cotton cloth from the ancle to the
knee, which gives them a very thick appearance; and they gird these
ornaments, which they call _Coiro_, and consider as very genteel, so
tightly that the leg appears very thin when they happen to slip off[8].
The same swaths are used both by men and women in Jamaica upon the smaller
parts of their arms up to the armpits, similar to the old-fashioned
sleeves in Spain.

The women of this island were excessively fat, insomuch that some were
thicker than a man could grasp round; they all wear their hair long and
loose upon their shoulders, nor do they cover any part of their bodies
except as before mentioned. As soon as their children can use their limbs,
they give them bows and arrows that they may learn to shoot. The woman who
made so much resistance said that the island was only inhabited by women,
and that those who made demonstrations of hindering the landing of our men
were all women, except four men who had come there accidentally from
another island; for at certain times of the year the men come from the
other islands to sport and cohabit with the women of this. The same
customs were followed by the women in another island, called Matrimonio or
the Island of Matrimony, and this woman gave an account of these islanders
similar to what we read concerning the Amazons; and the admiral believed
it because of the strength and courage of these women[9]. It is also said
that these women seemed to have clearer understandings than those of the
other islands; for in the other islands they only reckon the day by the
sun