Each man brings back as his trophy the head of the enemy he has killed, and sets it up at the entrance to his dwelling. After they have treated their prisoners well for a long time with all hospitality, each man who has a prisoner calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the prisoner’s arms,by the end of which he holds him, and gives his dearest friend the other arm to hold in the same way; and these two, in the presence of the whole assembly kill him with their swords. This done, they roast him and eat him in common and send some pieces to their absent friends. This is not, as people think, for nourishment; it is to betoken an extreme revenge. And the proof of this came when they saw the Portuguese inflict a different kind of death on them when they took them prisoner…. [The Indians adopted the Portuguese style of execution.]  I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating them after he is dead….

So we may call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity….The worth and value of a man is in his heart and his will; there lies his real honor. Valor is the strength, not of his legs and arms, but of his heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.