Their Hair Was Black, Thick, And So Very Long As Nearly To
Trail On The Ground.
They seemed careful industrious housewives,
spending their time at home in fabricating mats and nets of palm leaves,
while the men were occupied abroad in stealing.
Their houses are of
timber, covered with boards and great leaves, and divided within into
several apartments. Their beds are of mats laid above each other, and
they use palm leaves by way of sheets. Their only weapons are clubs, and
long poles headed with bone. Their food consists of cocoa-nuts, bananas,
figs, sugar-canes, fowls, and flying-fishes. Their canoes are oddly
contrived and patched up, yet sail with wonderful rapidity, the sails
being made of broad leaves sewed together. Instead of a rudder they use
a large board, with a staff or pole at one end, and in sailing, either
end of their canoes is indifferently used as head or stern. They paint
their canoes all over, either red, white, or black, as hits their fancy.
These people are so taken with any thing that is new, that when the
Spaniards wounded several of them with their arrows, and even pierced
some quite through, they would pluck out the arrows from their wounds,
and stare at them till they died. Yet would they still continue to
follow after the ships, to gaze upon them as they were going away, so
that at one time they were closely surrounded by at least two hundred
canoes filled with natives, admiring those wonderful contrivances.
The 10th of March, the Spaniards landed on the island of Zamul, about
30 leagues from the Ladrones.[7] Next day they landed on Humuna, an
island not inhabited, yet well deserving of being so, where they found
springs of excellent water, with abundance of fruit-trees, gold, and
white coral. Magellan named this the island of good signs. The natives
from some of the neighbouring islands, a people of much humanity, came
here to them shortly after, very fair and of friendly dispositions, who
seemed well pleased at the arrival of the Spaniards among them, and came
loaded with presents of fish, and wine made from the cocoa-tree,
promising speedily to bring other provisions. This tree somewhat
resembles the date palm, and supplies the natives with bread, oil, wine,
vinegar, and even physic. The wine being drawn from the tree itself, and
all the rest from the fruit or nut. To procure the wine, they eat off
part of a branch, and fasten to the remaining part a large reed or
hollow cane, into which the liquor drops, being like white-wine in
colour, and of a grateful tartish taste. When a good quantity of this is
drawn off, it is put into a vessel, and is their cocoa-wine without
farther preparation.
[Footnote 7: In this voyage the term Ladrones seems confined to the most
southern islands of this group, as there are no other islands for a very
considerable distance in any direction.
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