6.2.10. The people are very hard-working, and quite fierce, as I described them earlier, making war on the more tranquil Indians. Pedro Margarit, a very reliable Spaniard who went to the east with the admiral, drawn by the desire to see new regions, says that he saw there with his own eyes several Indians skewered on spits being roasted over burning coals as a treat for the gluttonous, while many bodies lay around in piles with their heads removed and their extremities torn off. The Cannibals do not deny this, but openly admit that they eat other humans. They use a very strong bow in battle. They hurl arrows the size of a staff, with points made of bone, ear-shaped so that they cannot easily be removed once they have entered. Those bones are said to be tibiae from the human bodies which have been eaten, so that nothing goes to waste. The people are expert archers, and always hit what they aim at with an unerring hand. Let no one think that this is spoken untruthfully, for we read that there are people living on the shores of Ethiopia, the Nisitae and the Nisicastes: this means men with three and four eyes, not literally, but because of their outstanding concentration in aiming their arrows. The Cannibals are taller than average, having rather large bodies, and go naked. They paddle in large and small vessels which they call canoes. Their many small boats are made by hollowing out a single tree-trunk: Virgin calls them lintres, others monoxylas. The larger boats, with well-joined sides eighty feet long, stand out of the water to a height of five span, and are also five span wide. They use broad planks for oars, like those used by our bakers but a little shorter. Navigating in this manner, they make their way by paddling to nearby islands, which differ markedly from them in customs and character. Sometimes they travel farther, for the sake of plunder, even up to a thousand miles. When they capture male infants, or take boy-slaves, it is their custom to castrate them and fatten them up like capons. They stuff the scrawny ones with food as well as those whose meagerness holds them back, like young lambs: soon when they are fat and delicious they are greedily devoured. They give the women they capture to their wives as servants, or keep them for their own lust. If any of these women happen to give birth, they eat the child as they do the other captured children; this is a truer version of the legend of Saturn, who the poets claim gorged himself on his own children. They are quick-witted, naturally intelligent, and clever, so that they will be able to be brought to our laws and reasonable way of life without much trouble, when they see that our customs are milder and our life more civilized. For this reason, it is hoped that they will quickly set aside their savagery, as our people both teach them and threaten them that, unless they give up eating humans, they will be enslaved and taken back to Spain in chains.