some trouble on their first settlement of the country. About two
leagues from Acoyapo, the site of a small town was pointed out to
me, now covered with low trees and brushwood. Here the Spaniards
were attacked in the night-time by the Rio Mico Indians, and all of
them killed, excepting the young women, who were carried off into
captivity, and the place has ever since lain desolate.

Many extravagant stories have been told of the great statues that
are said to have been seen on the banks of the Mico, much lower
down the river than where we crossed it; but M. Etienne, of
Libertad, who descended it to Blewfields, and some Ulleros of San
Tomas, who had frequently been down it after india-rubber, assured
me that the reported statues were merely rude carvings of faces and
animals on the rocks. They appear to be similar to what are found
on many rivers running into the Caribbean Sea, and to those which
were examined by Schomburgk on the rocks of the Orinoco and
Essequibo. As others like them, of undoubted Carib workmanship,
have been found in the Virgin Islands, it is possible that they are
all the work of that once-powerful race, and not of the settled
agricultural and statue-making Indians of the western part of the
continent.

We started from Esquipula early next morning, and crossed low
thinly-timbered hills and savannahs to Pital, a scattered
settlement of many small thatched houses, close to the borders of
the great forest; on the edge of which were clearings, made for
growing maize, which is cultivated entirely on burnt forest land.
At some parts they had already commenced cutting down trees for
fresh clearings; these would be burnt in April, and the maize sown
the following month, in the usual primitive way, just as it was in