What became of the other giant whose hands were bound? He struggled, too, to break the cords, seeing which, one of the men struck him on the head. He became quiet when he saw that he was helpless, and led the men to the giant's town where the women and children were.
The men concluded to pass the night there, as it was near night and everything there looked harmless and inviting.
But during the night the other giant who had gone to meet the hunters returned with his companions. These saw the bruised head of the giant who had also been bound, and warned the women who began to run. We are told that the youngest "ran faster than the biggest" and that the men "ran faster than horses," at which we can not wonder. The fleeing giant shot one of the men from the ships, and he was buried there on shore. The poor giant in irons who had lamented for his wife probably never saw the giantess again.
The methods of treating sickness in the town of the giants were curious. For an emetic one ran a stick down his throat. For a headache, one cut a gash on the forehead, not unlike the old method of bleeding. The philosophy of this latter treatment was interesting—blood did not remain with pain, and pain departed with blood—quite true; white people have advanced theories as conclusive.
"When one of them dies," says our Knight, "ten devils appear and dance around the dead man." One of the poor giants who was forced to remain on board said he had seen devils with horns, and hair that fell to their feet, who spouted fire. There seems to be the color of the European imagination in this statement.
The giants lived on raw meat, thistles, and sweet root, and one of them drank a "bucket of water" at a time.
The expedition remained at St. Julian five months, and acquired much information about the country from the captive giants with whom they learned to talk by sign language.
They here set up a cross on a mountain and took possession of the country in the name of the King of Spain. They called the signal elevation where they planted the cross the Mount of Christ.
The primitive people of the shores of Brazil and Patagonia delighted in exciting the wonder of their visitors. Many of these people who thought that the Europeans had come down from the sky, where they conceived all life must be wonderful indeed, liked to show them some of the feats that the people of the earth could do. The people who came down from the sky they reasoned had great wisdom in sailing the seas, but they were not giants. They could trail a lantern along the sea in the night air in some unaccountable way, but they did not know how to run with flying feet on the land or how to wing arrows with unerring aim into the sky and sea.
One day there came from a company of the primitive people, a champion in an art of which the Europeans could have never heard. They had seen these people run, leap, and vault with almost magic power, but they had never seen one who could make a tube of himself.