394 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



In describing the idols of the islanders Pane gives the following 

 account : 



Those of wood are made In this fashion : When someone is going along on a 

 journey he says he sees a tree wliich is moving its roots ; and the man in a great 

 friglit stops and asks: " Wlio is it?" And he replies: "My name is Buhuitihu, 

 and it will indicate who I am." And the man goes to the physician and tells 

 him what he has seen, and the enchanter or wizard runs immediately to see 

 the tree which the man has told him of and sits down by it, and he makes cogioba 

 as we have described [above in the story of the four]. And when the cogioba 

 is made he stands up on his feet and gives it all its titles as if it were some 

 great lord, and he asks it : " Tell me who you are, and what you are doing here, 

 and what you want of me, and why you have had me called. Tell me if you 

 want me to cut you or if you want to come with me, and how you want me to 

 carry you, and I will build you a cabin and add a property to it." Then that 

 tree or cemi, become. an idol or devil, replies to him, telling him the shape in 

 which it wants to be made. And he cuts and makes it in the shape it has di- 

 rected ; builds its house for it, and gives the property, and many times in the 

 year makes cogioba for it. This cogioba is to pray to it and to please it and to 

 ask and to learn some things from the cemi, either evil or good, and in addition 

 to ask it for wealth. And when they want to know if they will be victorious 

 over their enemies they go into a cabin into which no one else goes except the 

 principal men, and their chief is the first who begins to make cogioba and to 

 make a noise ; and while he is making cogioba no one of them who is in the com- 

 pany says anything till the chief has finished ; but when he has finished his 

 prayer he stands a while with his head inclined and his arms on his knees ; 

 then he lifts his head up and looks toward the sky and speaks. Then they all 

 answer him with a loud voice, and when they have all spoken, giving thanks, 

 he tells the vision that he has seen, intoxicated with the cogioba which he has 

 inhaled through his nose, which goes up into his head. And he says that he 

 has talked with the cemi and that they are to have a victory ; or that his enemies 

 will fly ; or that there shall be a great loss of life, or wars, or famine, or some 

 other such things which occur to him who is intoxicated to say. Consider 

 what a state their brains are in, because they say the cabins seem to them to be 

 turned upside down and that men are walking with their feet in the air. And 

 this cogioba they make for cemis of stone and of wood as well as for the dead, 

 as we have described above.^ 



Peter Martyr's account of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, in his 

 De Orbe Novo, is simply a paraphrase of Fra Ramon's paper, in 

 Latin. It adds nothing to his description of cohoba, but on the 

 other hand it is misleading, since it refers to it as " an herb which 

 they pound up and drink"; and though it states that the natives 

 " absorb the intoxicating herb called cohobba, which is the same as 

 that used by the bovites to excite their frenzy," it fails to specify 

 that they breathed it through their nostrils by means of a forked 

 tube. Nothing is said of the apparatus by which the snuff is taken, 

 and indeed Ramon Pane himself neglects to give a description of 

 it. Fernando Colombo, however, in his Historic (1571) states that 

 for holding the snuff the natives had a finely wrought table of a 



1 Ramon Pane (149G), in appendix to Fernando Colombo's Ilistorie, cap. XIX, p. 137a, 

 1571. 



