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1493-01-13

A man points east toward Carib, feared by the other islands

Haitian

… he had his face all blackened with charcoal, although everywhere they are accustomed to dye themselves with various colors. He wore all his hair very long, gathered up and tied behind, and then put into a little net of parrot feathers, and he was as naked as the others. The Admiral judged that he must be one of the Caribs who eat men, and that that gulf he had seen yesterday made a separation of land, and that it would be an island by itself. He asked him about the Caribs, and he pointed him to the east, near there, which, so he says, the Admiral saw yesterday before he entered that bay; and the Indian told him that in it there was very much gold, pointing to the poop of the caravel, which was quite large, and that there were pieces as large as that. He called gold tuob and did not understand it by caona, as they call it in the first part of the island, nor by nozay, as they name it in San Salvador and in the other islands: copper, or a low gold, they call tuob in the Española. …

Source  ·  p. p. 282 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Diario del primer viaje (Las Casas’s abstract of Columbus’s log), in Navarrete, Colección de los viages y descubrimientos, t. I (1825), p. p. 282