The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 28, July 1924 - April, 1925 Page: 71

The Expedition of Pdnfilo de Narvaez

other they keep at a distance, lowering their heads. But the
bride can speak to everyone. When one of them dies, for three
months they do not look for food, even if they starve. Their
houses are covered with matting and floored with oyster shells.
The physicians cure by blowing, and cut the patients flesh where
there is a pain, and suck around the wound, and also apply a fire
cautery. They blow again and again, because they think that
by doing that they can suppress the pain. To pay the physician
they give him all they have.
In the Island called Mal Hado by Cabeza de Vaca there are,
he says two kinds of Indians. The Capoques are one kind; and
the other Han.8 When they visit each other they cry for half
an hour, and the one visited gives the visitor all he has. The
other accepts it, and leaves, sometimes saying not a word.
Elsewhere he says that the Governor dismissed his lieutenant,
Pantoja,9 who treated the few survivors harshly. Then another
gentleman named Sotomayor rebelled against him and killed
him with a club; and that those who died were kept in salt and
eaten by the survivors. The last to die was that Sotomayor,
whom a certain Esquivel, who in his turn was killed by Indians,
cured, and fed on him for some days. This Esquivel is the one
who told how the Governor was carried out to sea in his boat
with a page and another man. He told Figueroa about this.10
Esquivel was killed" because of the dream of an Indian
woman, for they believe in dreams, and sometimes kill their own
children because of dreams. Many of them feed their female
children to their dogs as soon as they are born, because, they say,
they do not like to marry them to relatives nor give them to
their enemies to multiply. Those they marry are bought for a
bow and two arrows, and a net about a fathom in length and the
same in breadth.12
They eat spiders, and eggs, worms and lizards, serpents, vipers,
and also earth and wood and deer dung, and almost everything.
They are great thieves and great liars. They run from morn-
BBandelier, p. 72.
*"The Governor revoked the powers he had given to the purser
[Alonso Enriquez] as his lieutenant, giving the office to a captain that
was with him called Pantoja." (Bandelier, p. 84.)
"Bandelier, pp. 85-86.
uBy the Mariames. (Bandelier, pp. 86-87.)
"~The Mariames. (Bandelier, pp. 88-93.)