Page:The principal navigations, voyages, traffiques and discoveries of the English nation 16.djvu/44

 being in euery canoa 4, 6, or 8 persons all naked and excellent swimmers and diuers.

They are of a tawny colour and marueilous fat, and bigger ordinarily of stature then the most part of our men in England, wearing their haire marueilous long:

yet some of them haue it made vp and tyed with a knot on the crowne, and some with 2 knots, much like vnto their images which wee saw them haue carued in wood, and standing in the head of their boates like vnto the images of the deuill.

Their canoas were as artificially made as any that euer wee had seene: considering they were made and contriued without any edge-toole. They are not aboue halfe a yard in bredth and in length some seuen or eight yardes, and their heades and sternes are both alike, they are made out with raftes of canes and reedes on the starrebordside, with maste and sayle: their sayle is made of mattes of sedges, square or triangle wise:

and they saile as well right against the winde, as before the winde: These Sauages followed vs so long, that we could not be ridde of them: vntil in the end our General commanded some halfe dozen harquebuzes to be made ready; and himselfe strooke one of them and the rest shot at them:

but they were so yare and nimble, that we could not discerne whether they were killed or no, because they could fall backward into the sea, and preuent vs by diuing.

The 14 day of Ianuary lying at hull with our ship all the middle watch, from 12 at night vntil foure in the morning, by the breake of day wee fell with an headland of the isles of the Philippinas, which is called Cabo del Spirito Santo which is of very great bignes and length, high land in the middest of it, and very low land as the Cape lyeth East and West, trending farre into the sea to the westward.

This cape or island is distant from the ile of Guana, one of the Ladrones, 310 leagues. We were in sayling of this course eleuen dayes with skant windes and some foule weather, bearing no sayle two or three nights. This island standeth in 13 degrees, and is a place much peopled with heathen people, and all woodie through the whole land: and it is short of the chiefest island of the Philippinas called Manilla about 60 leagues. Manilla is well planted and