Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.2 — Chapter 2.22, Part 5

The nations of the Upper Orinoco, the Atabapo, and the Inirida, like the ancient Germans and the Persians, have no other worship than that of the powers of nature.

They call the good principle Cachimana; it is the Manitou, the Great Spirit, that regulates the seasons, and favours the harvests.

Along with Cachimana there is an evil principle, Iolokiamo, less powerful, but more artful, and in particular more active.

The Indians of the forest, when they occasionally visit the missions, conceive with difficulty the idea of a temple or an image.

"These good people," said the missionary, "like only processions in the open air.

When I last celebrated the festival of San Antonio, the patron of my village, the Indians of Inirida were present at mass.

'Your God,' said they to me, 'keeps himself shut up in a house, as if he were old and infirm; ours is in the forest, in the fields, and on the mountains of Sipapu, whence the rains come.'

" Among the more numerous, and on this account less barbarous tribes, religious societies of a singular kind are formed.

Some old Indians pretend to be better instructed than others on points regarding divinity; and to them is confided the famous botuto, of which I have spoken, and which is sounded under the palm-trees that they may bear abundance of fruit.

On the banks of the Orinoco there exists no idol, as among all the nations who have remained faithful to the first worship of nature, but the botuto, the sacred trumpet, is an object of veneration.

To be initiated into the mysteries of the botuto, it is requisite to be of pure morals, and to have lived single.

The initiated are subjected to flagellations, fastings, and other painful exercises.

There are but a small number of these sacred trumpets.

The most anciently celebrated is that upon a hill near the confluence of the Tomo and the Guainia.

It is pretended, that it is heard at once on the banks of the Tuamini, and at the mission of San Miguel de Davipe, a distance of ten leagues.

Father Cereso assured us, that the Indians speak of the botuto of Tomo as an object of worship common to many surrounding tribes.

Fruit and intoxicating liquors are placed beside the sacred trumpet.

Sometimes the Great Spirit himself makes the botuto resound; sometimes he is content to manifest his will through him to whom the keeping of the instrument is entrusted.

These juggleries being very ancient (from the fathers of our fathers, say the Indians), we must not be surprised that some unbelievers are already to be found; but they express their disbelief of the mysteries of the botuto only in whispers.

Women are not permitted to see this marvellous instrument; and are excluded from all the ceremonies of this worship.

If a woman have the misfortune to see the trumpet, she is put to death without mercy.

The missionary related to us, that in 1798 he was happy enough to save a young girl, whom a jealous and vindictive lover accused of having followed, from a motive of curiosity, the Indians who sounded the botuto in the plantations.

"They would not have murdered her publicly," said father Cesero, "but how was she to be protected from the fanaticism of the natives, in a country where it is so easy to give poison?

The young girl told me of her fears, and I sent her to one of the missions of the Lower Orinoco."

If the people of Guiana had remained masters of that vast country; if, without having been impeded by Christian settlements, they could follow freely the development of their barbarous institutions; the worship of the botuto would no doubt become of some political importance.

That mysterious society of the initiated, those guardians of the sacred trumpet, would be transformed into a ruling caste of priests, and the oracle of Tomo would gradually form a link between the bordering nations.

In the evening of the 4th of May we were informed, that an Indian, who had assisted in dragging our bark over the portage of Pimichin, had been stung by a viper.

He was a tall strong man, and was brought to the mission in a very alarming state.

He had dropped down senseless;

and nausea, vertigo, and congestions in the head, had succeeded the fainting.

The liana called vejeco de guaco,* which M. Mutis has rendered so celebrated, and which is the most certain remedy for the bite of venomous serpents, is yet unknown in these countries.

(* This is a mikania, which was confounded for some time in Europe with the ayapana.

De Candolle thinks that the guaco may be the Eupatorium satureiaefolium of Lamarck; but this Eupatorium differs by its lineary leaves, while the Mikania guaco has triangular, oval, and very large leaves.

) A number of Indians hastened to the hut of the sick man, and he was cured by an infusion of raiz de mato.

We cannot indicate with certainty what plant furnishes this antidote; but I am inclined to think, that the raiz de mato is an apocynea, perhaps the Cerbera thevetia, called by the inhabitants of Cumana lingua de mato or contra-culebra, and which they also use against the bite of serpents.

A genus nearly allied to the cerbera* (* Ophioxylon serpentinum.

) is employed in India for the same purpose.

It is common enough to find in the same family of plants vegetable poisons, and antidotes against the venom of reptiles.

Many tonics and narcotics are antidotes more or less active; and we find these in families very different* from each other, in the aristolochiae, the apocyneae, the gentianae, the polygalae, the solaneae, the compositae, the malvaceae, the drymyrhizeae, and, which is still more surprising, even in the palm-trees.

(* I shall mention as examples of these nine families;

Aristolochia anguicida, Cerbera thevetia, Ophoiorhiza mungos, Polygala senega, Nicotiana tabacum, (One of the remedies most used in Spanish America).

Mikanua guaco, Hibiscus abelmoschus (the seeds of which are very active), Lanpujum rumphii, and Kunthia montana (Cana de la Vibora).

) In the hut of the Indian who had been so dangerously bitten by the viper, we found balls two or three inches in diameter, of an earthy and impure salt called chivi, which is prepared with great care by the natives.

At Maypures a conferva is burnt, which is left by the Orinoco on the neighbouring rocks, when, after high swellings, it again enters its bed.

At Javita a salt is fabricated by the incineration of the spadix and fruit of the palm-tree seje or chimu.

This fine palm-tree, which abounds on the banks of the Auvana, near the cataract of Guarinumo, and between Javita and the Cano Pimichin, appears to be a new species of cocoa-tree.

It may be recollected, that the fluid contained in the fruit of the common cocoa-tree is often saline, even when the tree grows far from the sea shore.

At Madagascar salt is extracted from the sap of a palm-tree called ciro.

Besides the spadix and the fruit of the seje palm, the Indians of Javita lixiviate also the ashes of the famous liana called cupana, which is a new species of the genus paullinia, consequently a very different plant from the cupania of Linnaeus.

I may here mention, that a missionary seldom travels without being provided with some prepared seeds of the cupana.

This preparation requires great care.

The Indians scrape the seeds, mix them with flour of cassava, envelope the mass in plantain leaves, and set it to ferment in water, till it acquires a saffron-yellow colour.

This yellow paste dried in the sun, and diluted in water, is taken in the morning as a kind of tea.

The beverage is bitter and stomachic, but it appeared to me to have a very disagreeable taste.

On the banks of the Niger, and in a great part of the interior of Africa, where salt is extremely rare, it is said of a rich man, "he is so fortunate as to eat salt at his meals."

This good fortune is not too common in the interior of Guiana.

The whites only, particularly the soldiers of the little fort of San Carlos, know how to procure pure salt, either from the coast of Caracas, or from Chita* by the Rio Meta.

(* North of Morocote, at the eastern declivity of the Cordillera of New Grenada.

The salt of the coasts, which the Indians call yuquira, costs two piastres the almuda at San Carlos.

) Here, as throughout America, the Indians eat little meat, and consume scarcely any salt.

The chivi of Javita is a mixture of muriate of potash and of soda, of caustic lime, and of several other earthy salts.

The Indians dissolve a few particles in water, fill with this solution a leaf of heliconia folded in a conical form, and let drop a little, as from the extremity of a filter, on their food.

On the 5th of May we set off, to follow on foot our canoe, which had at length arrived, by the portage, at the Cano Pimichin.

We had to ford a great number of streams; and these passages require some caution on account of the vipers with which the marshes abound.

The Indians pointed out to us on the moist clay the traces of the little black bears so common on the banks of the Temi.

They differ at least in size from the Ursus americanus.

The missionaries call them osso carnicero, to distinguish them from the osso palmero or tamanoir (Myrmecophaga jubata), and from the osso hormigero, or anteater (tamandua).

The flesh of these animals is good to eat; the first two defend themselves by rising on their hind feet.

The tamanoir of Buffon is called uaraca by the Indians; it is irascible and courageous, which is extraordinary in an animal without teeth.

We found, as we advanced, some vistas in the forest, which appeared to us the richer, as it became more accessible.

We here gathered some new species of coffee (the American tribe, with flowers in panicles, forms probably a particular genus); the Galega piscatorum, of which the Indians make use, as they do of jacquinia, and of a composite plant of the Rio Temi, as a kind of barbasco, to intoxicate fish; and finally, the liana, known in those countries by the name of vejuco de mavacure, which yields the famous curare poison.

It is neither a phyllanthus, nor a coriaria, as M. Willdenouw conjectured, but, as M. Kunth's researches show, very probably a strychnos.

We shall have occasion, farther on, to speak of this venomous substance, which is an important object of trade among the savages.

The trees of the forest of Pimichin have the gigantic height of from eighty to a hundred and twenty feet.

In these burning climates the laurineae and amyris* (* The great white and red cedars of these countries are not the Cedrela odorata, but the Amyris altissima, which is an icica of Aublet.

) furnish that fine timber for building, which, on the north-west coast of America, on mountains where the thermometer falls in winter to 20 degrees centigrade below zero, we find in the family of the coniferae.

Such, in every zone, and in all the families of American plants, is the prodigious force of vegetation, that, in the latitude of fifty-seven degrees north, on the same isothermal line with St. Petersburgh and the Orkneys, the Pinus canadensis displays trunks one hundred and fifty feet high, and six feet in diameter.

* (* Langsdorf informs us that the inhabitants of Norfolk Sound make boats of a single trunk, fifty feet long, four feet and a half broad, and three high at the sides.

They contain thirty persons.

These boats remind us of the canoes of the Rio Chagres in the isthmus of Panama, in the torrid zone.

The Populus balsamifera also attains an immense height, on the mountains that border Norfolk Sound.

) Towards night we arrived at a small farm, in the puerto or landing place of Pimichin.

We were shown a cross near the road, which marked the spot where a poor capuchin missionary had been killed by wasps.

I state this on the authority of the monks of Javita and the Indians.

They talk much in these countries of wasps and venomous ants, but we saw neither one nor the other of these insects.

It is well known that in the torrid zone slight stings often cause fits of fever almost as violent as those that with us accompany severe organic injuries.

The death of this poor monk was probably the effect of fatigue and damp, rather than of the venom contained in the stings of wasps, which the Indians dread extremely.

We must not confound the wasps of Javita with the melipones bees, called by the Spaniards angelitos (little angels) which covered our faces and hands on the summit of the Silla de Caracas.

The landing place of Pimichin is surrounded by a small plantation of cacao-trees; they are very vigorous, and here, as on the banks of the Atabapo and the Guainia, they are loaded with flowers and fruits at all seasons.

They begin to bear from the fourth year; on the coast of Caracas they do not bear till the sixth or eighth year.

The soil of these countries is sandy, wherever it is not marshy; but the light lands of the Tuamini and Pimichin are extremely productive.

* (* At Javita, an extent of fifty feet square, planted with Jatropha manihot (yucca) yields in two years, in the worst soil, a harvest of six tortas of cassava: the same extent on a middling soil yields in fourteen months a produce of nine tortas.

In an excellent soil, around clumps of mauritia, there is every year from fifty feet square a produce of thirteen or fourteen tortas.

A torta weighs three quarters of a pound, and three tortas cost generally in the province of Caracas one silver rial, or one-eighth of a piastre.

These statements appear to me to be of some importance, when we wish to compare the nutritive matter which man can obtain from the same extent of soil, by covering it, in different climates, with bread-trees, plantains, jatropha, maize, potatoes, rice, and corn.

The tardiness of the harvest of jatropha has, I believe, a beneficial influence on the manners of the natives, by fixing them to the soil, and compelling them to sojourn long on the same spot.

) Around the conucos of Pimichin grows, in its wild state, the igua, a tree resembling the Caryocar nuciferum which is cultivated in Dutch and French Guiana, and which, with the almendron of Mariquita (Caryocar amygdaliferum), the juvia of the Esmeralda (Bertholletia excelsa), and the Geoffroea of the Amazon, yields the finest almonds of all South America.

No commercial advantage is here made of the igua; but I saw vessels arrive on the coast of Terra Firma, that came from Demerara laden with the fruit of the Caryocar tomentosum, which is the Pekea tuberculosa of Aublet.

These trees reach a hundred feet in height, and present, by the beauty of their corolla, and the multitude of their stamens, a magnificent appearance.

I should weary the reader by continuing the enumeration of the vegetable wonders which these vast forests contain.

Their variety depends on the coexistence of such a great number of families in a small space of ground, on the stimulating power of light and heat, and on the perfect elaboration of the juices that circulate in these gigantic plants.

We passed the night in a hut lately abandoned by an Indian family, who had left behind them their fishing-tackle, pottery, nets made of the petioles of palm-trees; in short, all that composes the household furniture of that careless race of men, little attached to property.

A

great store of mani (a mixture of the resin of the moronoboea and the Amyris carana) was accumulated round the house.

This is used by the Indians here, as at Cayenne, to pitch their canoes, and fix the bony spines of the ray at the points of their arrows.

We found in the same place jars filled with a vegetable milk, which serves as a varnish, and is celebrated in the missions by the name of leche para pintar (milk for painting).

They coat with this viscous juice those articles of furniture to which they wish to give a fine white colour.

It thickens by the contact of the air, without growing yellow, and it appears singularly glossy.

We have already mentioned that the caoutchouc is the oily part, the butter of all vegetable milk.

It is, no doubt, a particular modification of caoutchouc that forms this coagulum, this white and glossy skin, that seems as if covered with copal varnish.

If different colours could be given to this milky varnish, a very expeditious method would be found of painting and varnishing our carriages by one process.

The more we study vegetable chemistry in the torrid zone, the more we shall discover, in remote spots, and half-prepared in the organs of plants, products which we believe belong only to the animal kingdom, or which we obtain by processes which are often tedious and difficult.

Already we have found the wax that coats the palm-tree of the Andes of Quindiu, the silk of the palm-tree of Mocoa, the nourishing milk of the palo de vaca, the butter-tree of Africa, and the caseous substances obtained from the almost animalized sap of the Carica papaya.

These discoveries will be multiplied, when, as the political state of the world seems now to indicate, European civilization shall flow in a great measure toward the equinoctial regions of the New Continent.

The marshy tract between Javita and the embarcadero of Pimichin is infested with great numbers of vipers.

Before we took possession of the deserted hut, the Indians killed two great mapanare serpents.

* (* This name is given in the Spanish colonies to very different species.

The Coluber mapanare of the province of Caracas has one hundred and forty-two ventral plates, and thirty-eight double caudal scales.

The Coluber mapanare of the Rio Magdalena has two hundred and eight ventral plates, and sixty-four double caudal scales.

) These grow to four or five feet long.

They appeared to me to be the same species as those I saw in the Rio Magdalena.

This serpent is a beautiful animal, but extremely venomous, white on the belly, and spotted with brown and red on the back.

As the inside of the hut was filled with grass, and we were lying on the ground, there being no means of suspending our hammocks, we were not without inquietude during the night.

In the morning a large viper was found on lifting the jaguar-skin upon which one of our domestics had slept.

The Indians say that these reptiles, slow in their movements when they are not pursued, creep near a man because they are fond of heat.

In fact, on the banks of the Magdalena a serpent entered the bed of one of our fellow-travellers, and remained there a part of the night, without injuring him.

Without wishing to take up the defence of vipers and rattlesnakes, I believe it may be affirmed that, if these venomous animals had such a disposition for offence as is supposed, the human species would certainly not have withstood their numbers in some parts of America;

for instance, on the banks of the Orinoco and the humid mountains of Choco.

We embarked on the 8th of May at sunrise, after having carefully examined the bottom of our canoe.

It had become thinner, but had received no crack in the portage.

We reckoned that it would still bear the voyage of three hundred leagues, which we had yet to perform, in going down the Rio Negro, ascending the Cassiquiare, and redescending the Orinoco as far as Angostura.

The Pimichin, which is called a rivulet (cano) is tolerably broad; but small trees that love the water narrow the bed so much that there remains open a channel of only fifteen or twenty toises.

Next to the Rio Chagres this river is one of the most celebrated in America for the number of its windings: it is said to have eighty-five, which greatly lengthen it.

They often form right angles, and occur every two or three leagues.

To determine the difference of longitude between the landing-place and the point where we were to enter the Rio Negro, I took by the compass the course of the Cano Pimichin, and noted the time during which we followed the same direction.

The velocity of the current was only 2. 4 feet in a second; but our canoe made by rowing 4. 6 feet.

The embarcadero of the Pimichin appeared to me to be eleven thousand toises west of its mouth, and 0 degrees 2 minutes west of the mission of Javita.

This Cano is navigable during the whole year, and has but one raudal, which is somewhat difficult to go up; its banks are low, but rocky.

After having followed the windings of the Pimichin for four hours and a half we at length entered the Rio Negro.

The morning was cool and beautiful.

We had now been confined thirty-six days in a narrow boat, so unsteady that it would have been overset by any person rising imprudently from his seat, without warning the rowers.

We had suffered severely from the sting of insects, but we had withstood the insalubrity of the climate; we had passed without accident the great number of waterfalls and bars, which impede the navigation of the rivers, and often render it more dangerous than long voyages by sea.

After all we had endured, it may be conceived that we felt no little satisfaction in having reached the tributary streams of the Amazon, having passed the isthmus that separates two great systems of rivers, and in being sure of having fulfilled the most important object of our journey, namely, to determine astronomically the course of that arm of the Orinoco which falls into the Rio Negro, and of which the existence has been alternately proved and denied during half a century.

In proportion as we draw near to an object we have long had in view, its interest seems to augment.

The uninhabited banks of the Cassiquiare, covered with forests, without memorials of times past, then occupied my imagination, as do now the banks of the Euphrates, or the Oxus, celebrated in the annals of civilized nations.

In that interior part of the New Continent one may almost accustom oneself to regard men as not being essential to the order of nature.

The earth is loaded with plants, and nothing impedes their free development.

An immense layer of mould manifests the uninterrupted action of organic powers.

Crocodiles and boas are masters of the river; the jaguar, the peccary, the dante, and the monkeys traverse the forest without fear and without danger; there they dwell as in an ancient inheritance.

This aspect of animated nature, in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad.

To this we reconcile ourselves with difficulty on the ocean, and amid the sands of Africa; though in scenes where nothing recalls to mind our fields, our woods, and our streams, we are less astonished at the vast solitude through which we pass.

Here, in a fertile country, adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain the traces of the power of man; we seem to be transported into a world different from that which gave us birth.

These impressions are the more powerful in proportion as they are of long duration.

A soldier, who had spent his whole life in the missions of the Upper Orinoco, slept with us on the bank of the river.

He was an intelligent man, who, during a calm and serene night, pressed me with questions on the magnitude of the stars, on the inhabitants of the moon, on a thousand subjects of which I was as ignorant as himself.

Being unable by my answers to satisfy his curiosity, he said to me in a firm tone of the most positive conviction: "with respect to men, I believe there are no more up there than you would have found if you had gone by land from Javita to Cassiquiare.

I think I see in the stars, as here, a plain covered with grass, and a forest (mucho monte) traversed by a river."

In citing these words I paint the impression produced by the monotonous aspect of those solitary regions.

May this monotony not be found to extend to the journal of our navigation, and weary the reader accustomed to the description of the scenes and historical memorials of the old continent!

CHAPTER 2.

23.