[97] Nevertheless these same people were so horrified by the uncanny action of the Spaniards who ate their dead companions that they sought to put them to death. It should be noted that the Attacapan and probably the Karankawan tribes of the Texas coast, to which the people of Malhado Island may have belonged, were reputed to be cannibals.
[98] Tabu of the mother-in-law by a young man is quite common among the Indians, but refusal to see or to speak to the wife's father is very rare.
[99] On their food, compare Oviedo, p. 592.
[100] An areito, or areyto, was a dance ceremony of the Arawak Indians of the West Indies in which their traditions were recounted in chants. Like buhío, previously mentioned, the word was now carried to the continent.
[101] These were evidently the Hans, of whom he speaks later.
[102] See p. 57, note 2.
[103] Spanish moss.
[104] Important as it is in affording evidence of the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, it is not possible, with our present knowledge of the former tribes of the coast region of Texas, to identify with certainty the various Indians mentioned by the narrator. Whether the names given by him are those which the natives applied to themselves or are those given by other tribes is unknown, and as no remnant of this once considerable coast population now exists, the only hope of the ultimate determination of these Indians lies in the historical archives of Texas, Mexico, and Spain. The two languages and stocks represented on the island of Malhado—the Capoque and the Han—would seem to apply to the Karankawan and Attacapan families respectively. The Capoques (called Cahoques on p. 87) are seemingly identical with the Cocos who lived with the Mayayes on the coast between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers in 1778, and with the Cokés, who as late as 1850 are described as a branch of the Koronks (Karankawa). Of the Han people nothing more definite is known than that which is here recorded.
[105] Compare Barcia, Ensayo, 263, 1723, and Gatschet in Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1891, for references to these "weepers."
[106] Diego Dorantes and Pedro de Valdivieso were cousins of Andrés Dorantes. See p. 69.