The weapons with which the Mincopie men threatened the strangers are really formidable, and before very long the exploring party learned to hold them in great respect. The bows are sometimes six feet long and enormously powerful,--so powerful in fact that the strongest sailors tried in vain to bend the weapons which the pigmy Mincopies handled with such skilful ease. The shape of the bow is very peculiar. Instead of being nearly cylindrical, largest in the middle and tapering regularly to each end, it is nearly flat except at the handle, on either side of which it becomes very broad. In fact, a good idea of it may be taken from a flattened hour-glass, the channel in the middle being the handle. The force and accuracy with which these tiny men can shoot are really wonderful. They very seldom fail to hit their mark at any reasonable distance, and can make tolerably sure of a man at sixty or seventy yards, so that the Mincopie bow is really a far better weapon than the old “Brown Bess” musket ever was. One arrow that was shot at a boat’s crew at a distance of sixty yards struck a hickory oar, and knocked off a piece of wood as large as a man’s hand. These arrows are very neatly made. They are about three feet in length, and are made of a reed by way of shaft, to the end of which is fastened a piece of hard wood in order to give weight. Upon this tip is fixed the head, which is usually the barbed tail bone of the sting-ray, and sometimes, though not always, poisoned. Should this terrible weapon enter the body, it cannot be removed without a severe operation, the sharp brittle barbs being apt to snap off and remain in the wound if any force be used in extracting the arrow. Their consummate skill in the use of the bow is obtained by constant practice from earliest infancy. As is the assagai to the Kaffir, the boomerang to the Australian, and the lasso to the Gaucho, so is the bow to the Andamaner. The first plaything that a Mincopie boy sees is a miniature bow made for him by his father, and, as he advances in age, bows of progressive strength are placed in his hands. Consequently, he is so familiarized with the weapon that, by the time he is of full age, the pigmy Andamaner draws with graceful ease a bow which seems made for a giant. Numbers of the toy bows and arrows may be seen scattered about an encampment if the natives are forced to leave it in a hurry, and their various sizes show the ages of the children to whom they belonged. The education of the Mincopie archer is in fact almost precisely like that of the old English bowmen, who, from constant practice in the art, and being trained from childhood in the use of the bow, obtained such a mastery of the weapon as made them the terror of Europe.