eeds adapted to that purpose. These
receptacles are filled with dried and salted grasshoppers, crabs,
crayfish, and locusts, which destroy the harvests. When asked the
purpose of these provisions, the natives replied they were destined
to be sold to the people inland, and in exchange for these precious
insects and dried fish they procure the foreign products they require.
The natives live in scattered fashion, their houses not being built
together. This land, inhabited by the people of Caramaira, is an
Elysian country, well cultivated, fertile, exposed neither to the
rigours of winter nor the great heats of summer. Day and night are of
about equal length.

[Note 6: A variety of iron pyrites.]

After driving off the barbarians, the Spaniards entered a valley two
leagues in breadth and three long, which extended to the grassy and
wooded slopes of the mountains. Two other valleys, each watered by a
river, also open to the right and left at the foot of these mountains.
One is the Gaira, and the other has not yet received a name. There
are, in these valleys, cultivated gardens, and fields watered by
ingeniously planned ditches. Our Milanese and Tuscans cultivate and
water their fields in precisely the same manner.

The ordinary food of these natives is the same as the others--agoes,
yucca, maize, potatoes, fruits, and fish. They rarely eat human flesh,
for they do not often capture strangers. Sometimes they arm themselves
and go hunting in neighbouring regions, but they do not eat one
another. There is, however, one fact sad to hear. These filthy eaters
of men are reported to have killed myriads of their kind to satisfy
their passion. Our compatriots have discovered a thousand islands as
fair as Paradise, a thousand Elysian regions, which these brigands
have depopulated. Charming and blessed as they are, they are
nevertheless deserted. From this sole instance Your Holiness may judge
of the perversity of this brutal race. We have already said that
the island of San Juan lies near to Hispaniola and is called by the
natives Burichena. Now it is related that within our own time more
than five thousand islanders have been carried off from Burichena for
food, and were eaten by the inhabitants of these neighbouring islands
which are now called Santa Cruz, Hayhay, Guadaloupe, and Queraqueira.
But enough has been said about the appetites of these filthy
creatures.

Let us now speak a little of the roots destined to become the fo