It may not be improper here also, to give a succinct detail of the education, manners, religion. etc. of the natives. The Indians are born tolerably white; [and] they take a great deal of pains to darken their complexion by anointing themselves with grease and lying in the sun. Their features are good, especially those of the women. Their limbs clean, straight, and well proportioned, and a crooked and deformed person is a great rarity amongst them.

They are very ingenious in their way, being neither so ignorant nor so innocent as some people imagine: On the contrary, a very understanding generation are they, quick of apprehension, sudden in dispatch, subtle in their dealings, exquisite in their inventions, and in labour assiduous. The world has no better marksmen with guns, or bows and arrows, than the natives, who can kill birds flying, fishes swimming, and wild beasts running; nay, with such prodigious force do they discharge their arrows, that one of them will shoot a man quite through, and nail both his arms to his body with the same arrow.

As to their religion, in order to reconcile the different accounts exhibited by travellers, we must suppose that different tribes may have different notions and different rites: and though I do not think myself capable of determining the case with the precision and accuracy I could wish; yet, with what I have collected from my own observation when among them, and the information of my brother captives [1], who have been longer conversant with the Indians than I was, I shall readily give the public all the satisfaction I can.

Some assures us the Indians worship the images of some inferior deities whose anger they seem to dread; on which account, the generality of our travellers denominate the objects of their devotion devils; though, at the same time, it is allowed, they pray to their inferior deities for success in all their undertakings, for plenty of food, and other necessaries of life. It appears too, that they acknowledge one Supreme Being; but him they adore not, because they believe he is too far exalted above them; and too happy in himself, to be concerned about the trifling affairs of poor mortals.

They seem also to believe in a future state: and that after death, they will be removed to their friends who have gone before them, to an Elysium or Paradise beyond the Western Mountains: others again, allow them either no religion at all, or at most, very faint ideas of a deity: but all agree that they are extravagantly superstitious, and exceedingly afraid of evil spirits. To these demons they make oblations every new moon, for the space of seven days: during which time they cast lots, and sacrifice one of themselves, putting the person devoted to the most exquisite misery they can invent, in order to satisfy the devil for that moon; for they think, if they please but the evil spirit, God will do them no hurt.

Certain, however, it is, that those Indians, whom the French priests have had an opportunity of ministering unto, are induced to believe, "That the son of God came into the world to save all mankind, and destroy all evil spirits that now trouble them; that the English have killed him; and that ever since, the evil spirits are permitted to walk on the earth: that if the English were all destroyed, the Son of the Good Man, who is God, would come again, and banish all evil spirits from their lands, and then they would have nothing to fear or disturb them. Cajoled by these false but artful insinuations of the French Jesuits, the Indians from that time, have endeavoured to massacre all the English, in order that the Son of God might come again on the earth, and rid them from their slavish fears and terrible apprehensions, by exterminating the objects thereof.

1. It seems from the context, that Peter is referring to other captive servants of English plantations, as the tribes he was describing were English allied tribes.