Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.2 — Chapter 2.21, Part 3

"I have a manufacture of pottery in my village," said Father Zea, when accompanying us on a visit to an Indian family, who were occupied in baking, by a fire of brushwood, in the open air, large earthen vessels, two feet and a half high.

This branch of manufacture is peculiar to the various tribes of the great family of Maypures, and they appear to have followed it from time immemorial.

In every part of the forests, far from any human habitation, on digging the earth, fragments of pottery and delf are found.

The taste for this kind of manufacture seems to have been common heretofore to the natives of both North and South America.

To the north of Mexico, on the banks of the Rio Gila, among the ruins of an Aztec city; in the United States, near the tumuli of the Miamis; in Florida, and in every place where any traces of ancient civilization are found, the soil covers fragments of painted pottery; and the extreme resemblance of the ornaments they display is striking.

Savage nations, and those civilized people* (* The Hindoos, the Tibetians, the Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Peruvians; with whom the tendency toward civilization in a body has prevented the free development of the faculties of individuals.

) who are condemned by their political and religious institutions always to imitate themselves, strive, as if by instinct, to perpetuate the same forms, to preserve a peculiar type or style, and to follow the methods and processes which were employed by their ancestors.

In North America, fragments of delf ware have been discovered in places where there exist lines of fortification, and the walls of towns constructed by some unknown nation, now entirely extinct.

The paintings on these fragments have a great similitude to those which are executed in our days on earthenware by the natives of Louisiana and Florida.

Thus too, the Indians of Maypures often painted before our eyes the same ornaments as those we had observed in the cavern of Ataruipe, on the vases containing human bones.

They were grecques, meanders, and figures of crocodiles, of monkeys, and of a large quadruped which I could not recognize, though it had always the same squat form.

I might hazard the hypothesis that it belongs to another country, and that the type had been brought thither in the great migration of the American nations from the north-west to the south and south-east; but I am rather inclined to believe that the figure is intended to represent a tapir, and that the deformed image of a native animal has become by degrees one of the types that has been preserved.

The Maypures execute with the greatest skill grecques, or ornaments formed by straight lines variously combined, similar to those that we find on the vases of Magna Grecia, on the Mexican edifices at Mitla, and in the works of so many nations who, without communication with each other, find alike a sensible pleasure in the symmetric repetition of the same forms.

Arabesques, meanders, and grecques, please our eyes, because the elements of which their series is composed, follow in rhythmic order.

The eye finds in this order, in the periodical return of the same forms, what the ear distinguishes in the cadenced succession of sounds and concords.

Can we then admit a doubt that the feeling of rhythm manifests itself in man at the first dawn of civilization, and in the rudest essays of poetry and song?

Among the natives of Maypures, the making of pottery is an occupation principally confined to the women.

They purify the clay by repeated washings, form it into cylinders, and mould the largest vases with their hands.

The American Indian is unacquainted with the potter's wheel, which was familiar to the nations of the east in the remotest antiquity.

We may be surprised that the missionaries have not introduced this simple and useful machine among the natives of the Orinoco, yet we must recollect that three centuries have not sufficed to make it known among the Indians of the peninsula of Araya, opposite the port of Cumana.

The colours used by the Maypures are the oxides of iron and manganese, and particularly the yellow and red ochres that are found in the hollows of sandstone.

Sometimes the fecula of the Bignonia chica is employed, after the pottery has been exposed to a feeble fire.

This painting is covered with a varnish of algarobo, which is the transparent resin of the Hymenaea courbaril.

The large vessels in which the chiza is preserved are called ciamacu, the smallest bear the name of mucra, from which word the Spaniards of the coast have framed murcura.

Not only the Maypures, but also the Guaypunaves, the Caribs, the Ottomacs, and even the Guamos, are distinguished at the Orinoco as makers of painted pottery, and this manufacture extended formerly towards the banks of the Amazon.

Orellana was struck with the painted ornaments on the ware of the Omaguas, who in his time were a populous commercial nation.

The following facts throw some light on the history of American civilization.

In the United States, west of the Allegheny mountains, particularly between the Ohio and the great lakes of Canada, on digging the earth, fragments of painted pottery, mingled with brass tools, are constantly found.

This mixture may well surprise us in a country where, on the first arrival of Europeans, the natives were ignorant of the use of metals.

In the forests of South America, which extend from the equator as far as the eighth degree of north latitude, from the foot of the Andes to the Atlantic, this painted pottery is discovered in the most desert places, but it is found accompanied by hatchets of jade and other hard stones, skilfully perforated.

No metallic tools or ornaments have ever been discovered; though in the mountains on the shore, and at the back of the Cordilleras, the art of melting gold and copper, and of mixing the latter metal with tin to make cutting instruments, was known.

How can we account for these contrasts between the temperate and the torrid zone?

The Incas of Peru had pushed their conquests and their religious wars as far as the banks of the Napo and the Amazon, where their language extended over a small space of land; but the civilization of the Peruvians, of the inhabitants of Quito, and of the Muyscas of New Grenada, never appears to have had any sensible influence on the moral state of the nations of Guiana.

It must be observed further, that in North America, between the Ohio, Miami, and the Lakes, an unknown people, whom systematic authors would make the descendants of the Toltecs and Aztecs, constructed walls of earth and sometimes of stone without mortar,* from ten to fifteen feet high, and seven or eight thousand feet long.

(* Of siliceous limestone, at Pique, on the Great Miami; of sandstone at Creek Point, ten leagues from Chillakothe, where the wall is fifteen hundred toises long.

) These singular circumvallations sometimes enclosed a hundred and fifty acres of ground.

In the plains of the Orinoco, as in those of Marietta, the Miami, and the Ohio, the centre of an ancient civilization is found in the west on the back of the mountains; but the Orinoco, and the countries lying between that great river and the Amazon, appear never to have been inhabited by nations whose constructions have resisted the ravages of time.

Though symbolical figures are found engraved on the hardest rocks, yet further south than eight degrees of latitude, no tumulus, no circumvallation, no dike of earth similar to those that exist farther north in the plains of Varinas and Canagua, has been found.

Such is the contrast that may be observed between the eastern parts of North and South America, those parts which extend from the table-land of Cundinamarca* (* This is the ancient name of the empire of the Zaques, founded by Bochica or Idacanzas, the high priest of Iraca, in New Grenada.

) and the mountains of Cayenne towards the Atlantic, and those which stretch from the Andes of New Spain towards the Alleghenies.

Nations advanced in civilization, of which we discover traces on the banks of lake Teguyo and in the Casas grandes of the Rio Gila, might have sent some tribes eastward into the open countries of the Missouri and the Ohio, where the climate differs little from that of New Mexico; but in South America, where the great flux of nations has continued from north to south, those who had long enjoyed the mild temperature of the back of the equinoctial Cordilleras no doubt dreaded a descent into burning plains bristled with forests, and inundated by the periodical swellings of rivers.

It is easy to conceive how much the force of vegetation, and the nature of the soil and climate, within the torrid zone, embarrassed the natives in regard to migration in numerous bodies, prevented settlements requiring an extensive space, and perpetuated the misery and barbarism of solitary hordes.

The feeble civilization introduced in our days by the Spanish monks pursues a retrograde course.

Father Gili relates that, at the time of the expedition to the boundaries, agriculture began to make some progress on the banks of the Orinoco; and that cattle, especially goats, had multiplied considerably at Maypures.

We found no goats, either in the mission or in any other village of the Orinoco; they had all been devoured by the tigers.

The black and white breeds of pigs only, the latter of which are called French pigs (puercos franceses), because they are believed to have come from the Caribbee Islands, have resisted the pursuit of wild beasts.

We saw with much pleasure guacamayas, or tame macaws, round the huts of the Indians, and flying to the fields like our pigeons.

This bird is the largest and most majestic species of parrot with naked cheeks that we found in our travels.

It is called in Marativitan, cahuei.

Including the tail, it is two feet three inches long.

We had observed it also on the banks of the Atabapo, the Temi, and the Rio Negro.

The flesh of the cahuei, which is frequently eaten, is black and somewhat tough.

These macaws, whose plumage glows with vivid tints of purple, blue, and yellow, are a great ornament to the Indian farm-yards; they do not yield in beauty to the peacock, the golden pheasant, the pauxi, or the alector.

The practice of rearing parrots, birds of a family so different from the gallinaceous tribes, was remarked by Columbus.

When he discovered America he saw macaws, or large parrots, which served as food to the natives of the Caribbee Islands, instead of fowls.

A majestic tree, more than sixty feet high, which the planters call fruta de burro, grows in the vicinity of the little village of Maypures.

It is a new species of the unona, and has the stateliness of the Uvaria zeylanica of Aublet.

Its branches are straight, and rise in a pyramid, nearly like the poplar of the Mississippi, erroneously called the Lombardy poplar.

The tree is celebrated for its aromatic fruit, the infusion of which is a powerful febrifuge.

The poor missionaries of the Orinoco, who are afflicted with tertian fevers during a great part of the year, seldom travel without a little bag filled with frutas de burro.

I have already observed that between the tropics, the use of aromatics, for instance very strong coffee, the Croton cascarilla, or the pericarp of the Unona xylopioides, is generally preferred to that of the astringent bark of cinchona, or of Bonplandia trifolatia, which is the Angostura bark.

The people of America have the most inveterate prejudice against the employment of different kinds of cinchona; and in the very countries where this valuable remedy grows, they try (to use their own phrase) to cut off the fever, by infusions of Scoparia dulcis, and hot lemonade prepared with sugar and the small wild lime, the rind of which is equally oily and aromatic.

The weather was unfavourable for astronomical observations.

I

obtained, however, on the 20th of April, a good series of corresponding altitudes of the sun, according to which the chronometer gave 70 degrees 37 minutes 33 seconds for the longitude of the mission of Maypures; the latitude was found, by a star observed towards the north, to be 5 degrees 13 minutes 57 seconds; and by a star observed towards the south, 5 degrees 13 minutes 7 seconds.

The error of the most recent maps is half a degree of longitude and half a degree of latitude.

It would be difficult to relate the trouble and torments which these nocturnal observations cost us.

Nowhere is a denser cloud of mosquitos to be found.

It formed, as it were, a particular stratum some feet above the ground, and it thickened as we brought lights to illumine our artificial horizon.

The inhabitants of Maypures, for the most part, quit the village to sleep in the islets amid the cataracts, where the number of insects is less; others make a fire of brushwood in their huts, and suspend their hammocks in the midst of the smoke.

We spent two days and a half in the little village of Maypures, on the banks of the great Upper Cataract, and on the 21st April we embarked in the canoe we had obtained from the missionary of Carichana.

It was much damaged by the shoals it had struck against, and the carelessness of the Indians; but still greater dangers awaited it.

It was to be dragged over land, across an isthmus of thirty-six thousand feet; from the Rio Tuamini to the Rio Negro, to go up by the Cassiquiare to the Orinoco, and to repass the two raudales.

When the traveller has passed the Great Cataracts, he feels as if he were in a new world, and had overstepped the barriers which nature seems to have raised between the civilized countries of the coast and the savage and unknown interior.

Towards the east, in the bluish distance, we saw for the last time the high chain of the Cunavami mountains.

Its long, horizontal ridge reminded us of the Mesa of the Brigantine, near Cumana; but it terminates by a truncated summit.

The Peak of Calitamini (the name given to this summit) glows at sunset as with a reddish fire.

This appearance is every day the same.

No one ever approached this mountain, the height of which does not exceed six hundred toises.

I believe this splendour, commonly reddish but sometimes silvery, to be a reflection produced by large plates of talc, or by gneiss passing into mica-slate.

The whole of this country contains granitic rocks, on which here and there, in little plains, an argillaceous grit-stone immediately reposes, containing fragments of quartz and of brown iron-ore.

In going to the embarcadero, we caught on the trunk of a hevea* (* One of those trees whose milk yields caoutchouc.

) a new species of tree-frog, remarkable for its beautiful colours; it had a yellow belly, the back and head of a fine velvety purple, and a very narrow stripe of white from the point of the nose to the hinder extremities.

This frog was two inches long, and allied to the Rana tinctoria, the blood of which, it is asserted, introduced into the skin of a parrot, in places where the feathers have been plucked out, occasions the growth of frizzled feathers of a yellow or red colour.

The Indians showed us on the way, what is no doubt very curious in that country, traces of cartwheels in the rock.

They spoke, as of an unknown animal, of those beasts with large horns, which, at the time of the expedition to the boundaries, drew the boats through the valley of Keri, from the Rio Toparo to the Rio Cameji, to avoid the cataracts, and save the trouble of unloading the merchandize.

I believe these poor inhabitants of Maypures would now be as much astonished at the sight of an ox of the Spanish breed, as the Romans were at the sight of the Lucanian oxen, as they called the elephants of the army of Pyrrhus.

We embarked at Puerto de Arriba, and passed the Raudal de Cameji with some difficulty.

This passage is reputed to be dangerous when the water is very high; but we found the surface of the river beyond the raudal as smooth as glass.

We passed the night in a rocky island called Piedra Raton, which is three-quarters of a league long, and displays that singular aspect of rising vegetation, those clusters of shrubs, scattered over a bare and rocky soil, of which we have often spoken.

On the 22nd of April we departed an hour and a half before sunrise.

The morning was humid but delicious; not a breath of wind was felt;

for south of Atures and Maypures a perpetual calm prevails.

On the banks of the Rio Negro and the Cassiquiare, at the foot of Cerro Duida, and at the mission of Santa Barbara, we never heard that rustling of the leaves which has such a peculiar charm in very hot climates.

The windings of rivers, the shelter of mountains, the thickness of the forests, and the almost continual rains, at one or two degrees of latitude north of the equator, contribute no doubt to this phenomenon, which is peculiar to the missions of the Orinoco.

In that part of the valley of the Amazon which is south of the equator, but at the same distance from it, as the places just mentioned, a strong wind always rises two hours after mid-day.

This wind blows constantly against the stream, and is felt only in the bed of the river.

Below San Borja it is an easterly wind; at Tomependa I found it between north and north-north-east; it is still the same breeze, the wind of the rotation of the globe, but modified by slight local circumstances.

By favour of this general breeze you may go up the Amazon under sail, from Grand Para as far as Tefe, a distance of seven hundred and fifty leagues.

In the province of Jaen de Bracamoros, at the foot of the western declivity of the Cordilleras, this Atlantic breeze rises sometimes to a tempest.

It is highly probable that the great salubrity of the Amazon is owing to this constant breeze.

In the stagnant air of the Upper Orinoco the chemical affinities act more powerfully, and more deleterious miasmata are formed.

The insalubrity of the climate would be the same on the woody banks of the Amazon, if that river, running like the Niger from west to east, did not follow in its immense length the same direction, which is that of the trade-winds.

The valley of the Amazon is closed only at its western extremity, where it approaches the Cordilleras of the Andes.

Towards the east, where the sea-breeze strikes the New Continent, the shore is raised but a few feet above the level of the Atlantic.

The Upper Orinoco first runs from east to west, and then from north to south.

Where its course is nearly parallel to that of the Amazon, a very hilly country (the group of the mountains of Parima and of Dutch and French Guiana) separates it from the Atlantic, and prevents the wind of rotation from reaching Esmeralda.

This wind begins to be powerfully felt only from the confluence of the Apure, where the Lower Orinoco runs from west to east in a vast plain open towards the Atlantic, and therefore the climate of this part of the river is less noxious than that of the Upper Orinoco.

In order to add a third point of comparison, I may mention the valley of the Rio Magdalena, which, like the Amazon, has one direction only, but unfortunately, instead of being that of the breeze, it is from south to north.

Situated in the region of the trade-winds, the Rio Magdalena has the stagnant air of the Upper Orinoco.

From the canal of Mahates as far as Honda, particularly south of the town of Mompox, we never felt the wind blow but at the approach of the evening storms.

When, on the contrary, you proceed up the river beyond Honda, you find the atmosphere often agitated.

The strong winds that are ingulfed in the valley of Neiva are noted for their excessive heat.

We may be at first surprised to perceive that the calm ceases as we approach the lofty mountains in the upper course of the river, but this astonishment ends when we recollect that the dry and burning winds of the Llanos de Neiva are the effect of descending currents.

The columns of cold air rush from the top of the Nevados of Quindiu and of Guanacas into the valley, driving before them the lower strata of the atmosphere.

Everywhere the unequal heating of the soil, and the proximity of mountains covered with perpetual snow, cause partial currents within the tropics, as well as in the temperate zone.

The violent winds of Neiva are not the effect of a repercussion of the trade-winds; they rise where those winds cannot penetrate; and if the mountains of the Upper Orinoco, the tops of which are generally crowned with trees, were more elevated, they would produce the same impetuous movements in the atmosphere as we observe in the Cordilleras of Peru, of Abyssinia, and of Thibet.

The intimate connection that exists between the direction of rivers, the height and disposition of the adjacent mountains, the movements of the atmosphere, and the salubrity of the climate, are subjects well worthy of attention.

The study of the surface and the inequalities of the soil would indeed be irksome and useless were it not connected with more general considerations.

At the distance of six miles from the island of Piedra Raton we passed, first, on the east, the mouth of the Rio Sipapo, called Tipapu by the Indians; and then, on the west, the mouth of the Rio Vichada.

Near the latter are some rocks covered by the water, that form a small cascade or raudalito.

The Rio Sipapo, which Father Gili went up in 1757, and which he says is twice as broad as the Tiber, comes from a considerable chain of mountains, which in its southern part bears the name of the river, and joins the group of Calitamini and of Cunavami.

Next to the Peak of Duida, which rises above the mission of Esmeralda, the Cerros of Sipapo appeared to me the most lofty of the whole Cordillera of Parima.

They form an immense wall of rocks, shooting up abruptly from the plain, its craggy ridge of running from south-south-east to north-north-west.

I believe these crags, these indentations, which equally occur in the sandstone of Montserrat in Catalonia,* (* From them the name of Montserrat is derived, Monte Serrato signifying a mountain ridged or jagged like a saw.

) are owing to blocks of granite heaped together.

The Cerros de Sipapo wear a different aspect every hour of the day.

At sunrise the thick vegetation with which these mountains are clothed is tinged with that dark green inclining to brown, which is peculiar to a region where trees with coriaceous leaves prevail.

Broad and strong shadows are projected on the neighbouring plain, and form a contrast with the vivid light diffused over the ground, in the air, and on the surface of the waters.

But towards noon, when the sun reaches its zenith, these strong shadows gradually disappear, and the whole group is veiled by an aerial vapour of a much deeper azure than that of the lower regions of the celestial vault.

These vapours, circulating around the rocky ridge, soften its outline, temper the effects of the light, and give the landscape that aspect of calmness and repose which in nature, as in the works of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, arises from the harmony of forms and colours.

Cruzero, the powerful chief of the Guaypunaves, long resided behind the mountains of Sipapo, after having quitted with his warlike horde the plains between the Rio Inirida and the Chamochiquini.

The Indians told us that the forests which cover the Sipapo abound in the climbing plant called vehuco de maimure.

This species of liana is celebrated among the Indians, and serves for making baskets and weaving mats.

The forests of Sipapo are altogether unknown, and there the missionaries place the nation of the Rayas,* whose mouths are believed to be in their navels.

(* Rays, on account of the pretended analogy with the fish of this name, the mouth of which seems as if forced downwards below the body.

This singular legend has been spread far and wide over the earth.

Shakespeare has described Othello as recounting marvellous tales: "of cannibals that do each other eat: Of Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders."

) An old Indian, whom we met at Carichana, and who boasted of having often eaten human flesh, had seen these acephali "with his own eyes."

These absurd fables are spread as far as the Llanos, where you are not always permitted to doubt the existence of the Raya Indians.

In every zone intolerance accompanies credulity; and it might be said that the fictions of ancient geographers had passed from one hemisphere to the other, did we not know that the most fantastic productions of the imagination, like the works of nature, furnish everywhere a certain analogy of aspect and of form.