“These people go entirely naked and wear not a particle of clothing. They are of a medium size and very well proportioned. Their skin is reddish like the color of a lion’s skin.... They do not allow any hair to grow on their eyelids and eyebrows, nor on any part of their bodies; only on their heads, for they think it very unbecoming. The men and women are exceedingly quick in their movements, and are unconstrained in their deportment. They walk and run rapidly. The women do not think it a difficult thing to run a league or two.... These people are excellent swimmers. The women surpass the men, for we have observed them many times swimming unaided, fully two leagues out from land. “The weapons of these people are bows and arrows. These are curiously made. They have no iron or any other hard metal on them. They use instead the teeth of animals or fish.... They are expert bowmen, and hit with their arrows whatever they shoot at. The women in some parts of the country handle the bow with considerable skill. Their other weapons are lances and clubs with elaborately carved heads. When they go to make war their wives accompany them, not to fight, but to carry provision on their backs. Sometimes a woman will convey a burden in this manner thirty or forty leagues, which the strongest men there cannot do as we have frequently observed.... “These people, although they appear ignorant as talkers, are very sagacious and crafty in any matter in which they are interested. They do not talk much, and when they do, it is in a low tone.... Their languages differ so much that we found people living within the space of a hundred leagues who could not understand one another’s speech.... They do not partake of food at appointed times nor in such quantities to satisfy them during equal intervals. Whenever their appetites demand food, whether in the middle of the night or day, it does not matter to them, they appease their hunger.... They take their food from earthen basins made by them, or from gourds cut in half. “They sleep in certain nets made of cotton, very large, suspended in the air.... These people are clean and neat in their persons, for they are continually bathing.... They live together in common, and make their houses like cottages, which are very strongly built with the largest trees and covered with palm leaves.... We found one which contained six hundred persons, and we saw the occupants of thirteen houses, who must have numbered four thousand souls. New sites for these houses are selected every seven or eight years. When we asked why they changed the location of their dwellings, they said it was because the intense heat of the sun caused painful diseases to spread among them when the ground about their houses became permeated and foul with filth; which explanation seemed quite reasonable to us.