[85] Parabor. In Barcia’s Spanish translation this word thus written by Schmidt was changed into tembetá, which was the one used by the Tapijs (Tupis). Both are Guaraní words, and they represent the same thing; but parabog, or rather paraog, is more picturesque and accurate. It means a cover in various colours.
This people, men and women, young and old, go completely naked as God created them. Among these Indians, the father sells his daughter, the husband his wife if she does not please him, and the brother sells or exchanges his sister. A woman costs a shirt or a bread knife, or a small hoe, or some other thing of that kind.
These Carios also eat man’s flesh if they can get it. For when they make prisoners in war, male or female, they fatten them as we do swine in Germany. But if the woman be somewhat young and good-looking, they keep her for a year or so, and if during that time she does not live after their desires, they put her to death and eat her, making a solemn banquet[86] of it, and oftentimes this is combined with a marriage. Only old persons are put to work until they die.
[86] In orig.: “Pancket.”
These Carios undertake longer journeys than any nation in the country of the Riodellaplata. They are wonderful warriors on land. Their villages or towns are situate on hills upon the river Paraboe[87]; formerly their city was called Lambere.[88]
[87] Paraguai.
[88] Lambaré.
Their town is made with two wooden palisades, each piece of timber being the thickness of a man. And one palisade is separated from the other by a space of twelve feet; the posts are driven down into the earth, six feet deep, and are above the earth nearly as high as one may reach with a sword.
They have also their forts. And at a distance of fifteen feet from this town wall they made pits as deep as the height of three men, one over the other, and put into them (but not above ground) lances of hard wood, with points like that of a needle; and they covered these pits with straw and small gravel, strewing a little earth and grass between, to the intent that when we Christians pursued them, or assaulted their town, we should have fallen blindly into these pitfalls. But at length they digged so many pits that they themselves fell into them.