no fear as the eight-oared barge drew in, but offered to traffic in such commodities as they possessed. As the adventurers stopped there for a while at the mouth of a little creek which came from the Indian village into the river, Ferdinando the pilot, who came with them originally, and his brother, must needs go to the village to drink the wine of the place, and upon him the chief men of the village fell, threatening to punish them with death for having thus brought white strangers into their midst. But Ferdinando, "being quick and of a disposed body," escaped to the woods, and his brother raced back to the barge, where he cried out panting that the Indians had slain Ferdinando. Ralegh immediately laid hands on a very old man, who was with him to serve as hostage, and if Ferdinando were indeed dead, to take his place as pilot. Meanwhile the Indians were pursuing Ferdinando with deer-dogs, and the woods sounded with their shouts; nor could the old man stay them, though he called out as loudly as he could the sad consequences in which they would involve him. At last Ferdinando reached a part of the shore and climbed a tall tree which hung over the river, and the barge happening to pass by, he plunged into the water and swam to it, half dead with fear. "But our good hap was that we kept the other old Indian, which we hand-fasted to redeem our pilot withal, for being natural of those rivers we assured ourselves he knew the way better than any stranger could; and, indeed, but for this chance, I think we had never found the way either to Guiana or back to our ships; for Ferdinando, after a few days, knew nothing at all nor which way to turn, yea and many times the old man himself was in great doubt which river to take." They rowed on through the maze of rivers and islands, which were inhabited by the Ciawani and the Waraweete, goodly people, carpenters for the most part of canoes, who dwell in little houses in the summer, and, when the river rises (and it rises thirty feet, amazingly, as Ralegh discovered), in the tops of trees. He relates their customs; how some beat the bones of their chiefs into powder and the wives and friends drink it all, that the bones may have a kindly resting-place; how others take up the buried corpse of a dead chieftain, when the flesh has departed from the bones, and hang the skeleton in his own house, decking the skull with feathers and fitting his gold plates about the bones of his arms and thighs and legs. On the third day the gallego "came on ground and stuck so fast as we thought that even there our discovery had ended and that we must have left sixty of our men to have inhabited like rooks upon trees with those nations; but the next morning, after we had cast out all her ballast, with tugging and hauling to and fro we got her afloat."