Columbus describes Samaná bows, cotton, mastic and ají, and no metal

… After they had traded it all, there came, so he says, four young men to the caravel, and they seemed to the Admiral to give so good an account of all those islands that lay toward the east on the same course the Admiral was to take, that he resolved to bring them to Castile with him. There, so he says, they had no iron nor any other metal that had been seen, although in a few days one cannot learn much about a land, as much because of the difficulty of the language, which the Admiral did not understand except by guesswork, as because they do not know in a few days what he was after. The bows of that people, so he says, were as large as those of France and England: the arrows are just like the darts of the other peoples he had seen up to then, which are made of the shoots of the canes when they go to seed, which are very straight and a vara and a half long, and two, and then at the end they put a piece of sharp wood a span and a half long, and on top of this little stick some insert a fish tooth, and some, and most, put poison there; …