“In the capital, where one is safe from surprise at all times, or in the country villages, when the rains have become so constant that the valleys will not bear a horse to pass them, or that men cannot venture far from home through fear of being surrounded by sudden showers in the mountains; in a word, when a man can say he is safe at home, and the spear and shield are hung up in the hall, a number of people of the best fashion in the villages, of both sexes, courtiers in the palaces or citizens in the town, meet together to dine between twelve and one o’clock. A long table is set in the middle of a large room, and benches beside it for a number of guests who are invited. Tables and benches the Portuguese introduced amongst them, but bull hides spread upon the ground served them before, as they now do in the camp and country. “A cow or bull, one or more, as the company is numerous, is brought close to the door and its feet strongly tied. The skin that hangs down under its chin and throat is cut only so deep as to arrive at the fat, of which it totally consists, and by the separation of a few small blood-vessels six or seven drops of blood only fall upon the ground. They have no stone bench or altar upon which these cruel assassins lay the animal’s head in this operation. The author, indeed, begs their pardon for calling them assassins, as they are not so merciful as to aim at the life, but, on the contrary, to keep the beast alive till he is nearly eaten up. Having satisfied the Mosaic law, according to their conception, by pouring these six or seven drops upon the ground, two or more of them fall to work. On the back of the beast, and on each side of the spine they cut skin deep; then, putting their fingers between the flesh and the skin, they begin to strip the hide of the animal half-way down his ribs, and so on to the buttock, cutting the skin wherever it hinders them commodiously to strip the poor animal bare. All the flesh on the buttocks is then cut off, and in solid, square pieces, without bones, or much effusion of blood; and the prodigious noise the animal makes is a signal for the company to sit down to table.