Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.2 — Chapter 2.24, Part 6

The mission of Santa Barbara is situated a little to the west of the mouth of the Rio Ventuari, or Venituari, examined in 1800 by Father Francisco Valor.

We found in this small village of one hundred and twenty inhabitants some traces of industry; but the produce of this industry is of little profit to the natives; it is reserved for the monks, or, as they say in these countries, for the church and the convent.

We were assured that a great lamp of massive silver, purchased at the expense of the neophytes, is expected from Madrid.

Let us hope that, after the arrival of this treasure, they will think also of clothing the Indians, of procuring for them some instruments of agriculture, and assembling their children in a school.

Although there are a few oxen in the savannahs round the mission, they are rarely employed in turning the mill (trapiche), to express the juice of the sugar-cane; this is the occupation of the Indians, who work without pay here as they do everywhere when they are understood to work for the church.

The pasturages at the foot of the mountains round Santa Barbara are not so rich as at Esmeralda, but superior to those at San Fernando de Atabapo.

The grass is short and thick, yet the upper stratum of earth furnishes only a dry and parched granitic sand.

The savannahs (far from fertile) of the banks of the Guaviare, the Meta, and the Upper Orinoco, are equally destitute of the mould which abounds in the surrounding forests, and of the thick stratum of clay, which covers the sandstone of the Llanos, or steppes of Venezuela.

The small herbaceous mimosas contribute in this zone to fatten the cattle, but are very rare between the Rio Jao and the mouth of the Guaviare.

During the few hours of our stay at the mission of Santa Barbara, we obtained pretty accurate ideas respecting the Rio Ventuari, which, next to the Guaviare, appeared to me to be the most considerable tributary of the Orinoco.

Its banks, heretofore occupied by the Maypures, are still peopled by a great number of independent nations.

On going up by the mouth of the Ventuari, which forms a delta covered with palm-trees, you find in the east, after three days' journey, the Cumaruita and the Paru, two streams that rise at the foot of the lofty mountains of Cuneva.

Higher up, on the west, lie the Mariata and the Manipiare, inhabited by the Macos and Curacicanas.

The latter nation is remarkable for their active cultivation of cotton.

In a hostile incursion (entrada) a large house was found containing more than thirty or forty hammocks of a very fine texture of spun cotton, cordage, and fishing implements.

The natives had fled; and Father Valor informed us, that the Indians of the mission who accompanied him had set fire to the house before he could save these productions of the industry of the Curacicanas.

The neophytes of Santa Barbara, who think themselves very superior to these supposed savages, appeared to me far less industrious.

The Rio Manipiare, one of the principal branches of the Ventuari, approaches near its source those lofty mountains, the northern ridge of which gives birth to the Cuchivero.

It is a prolongation of the chain of Baraguan; and there Father Gili places the table-land of Siamacu, of which he vaunts the temperate climate.

The upper course of the Rio Ventuari, beyond the confluence of the Asisi, and the Great Raudales, is almost unknown.

I was informed only that the Upper Ventuari bends so much towards the east that the ancient road from Esmeralda to the Rio Caura crosses the bed of the river.

The proximity of the tributary streams of the Carony, the Caura, and the Ventuari, has facilitated for ages the access of the Caribs to the banks of the Upper Orinoco.

Bands of this warlike and trading people went up from the Rio Carony, by the Paragua, to the sources of the Paruspa.

A portage conducted them to the Chavarro, an eastern tributary stream of the Rio Caura; they descended with their canoes first this stream, and then the Caura itself as far as the mouth of the Erevato.

After having gone up this last river south-west, and traversed vast savannahs for three days, they entered by the Manipiare into the great Rio Ventuari.

I trace this road with precision not only because it was that by which the traffic of native slaves was carried on, but also to call the attention of those, who at some future day may rule the destiny of Guiana, to the high importance of this labyrinth of rivers.

It is by the four largest tributary streams, which the majestic river of the Orinoco receives on the right (the Carony, the Caura, the Padamo, and the Ventuari), that European civilization will one day penetrate into this region of forests and mountains, which has a surface of ten thousand six hundred square leagues, and which is bounded by the Orinoco on the north, the west, and the south.

The Capuchins of Catalonia and the Observantins of Andalusia and Valencia, have already made settlements in the valleys of the Carony and the Caura.

The tributary streams of the Lower Orinoco, being the nearest to the coast and to the cultivated region of Venezuela, were naturally the first to receive missionaries, and with them some germs of social life.

Corresponding to the Carony and the Caura, which flow toward the north, are two great tributary streams of the Upper Orinoco, that send their waters toward the south; these are the Padamo and the Ventuari.

No village has hitherto risen on their banks, though they offer advantages for agriculture and pasturage, which would be sought in vain in the valley of the immense river to which they are tributary.

In the centre of these wild countries, where there will long be no other road than the rivers, every project of civilization should be founded on an intimate knowledge of the hydraulic features of the country, and the relative importance of the tributary streams.

In the morning of the 26th of May we left the little village of Santa Barbara, where we found several Indians of Esmeralda, who had come reluctantly, by order of the missionary, to construct for him a house of two stories.

During the whole day we enjoyed the view of the fine mountains of Sipapo, which rise at a distance of more than eighteen leagues in the direction of north-north-west.

The vegetation of the banks of the Orinoco is singularly varied in this part of the country;

the aborescent ferns* descend from the mountains, and mingle with the palm-trees of the plain.

(* The geographical distribution of these plants is extremely singular.

Scarcely any are found on the eastern coast of Brazil.

See the interesting work of Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, Reise nach Brasilien volume 1 page 274. ) We rested that night on the island of Minisi; and, after having passed the mouths of the little rivers Quejanuma, Ubua, and Masao, we arrived, on the 27th of May, at San Fernando de Atabapo.

We lodged in the same house which we had occupied a month previously, when going up the Rio Negro.

We then directed our course towards the south, by the Atabapo and the Temi; we were now returning from the west, having made a long circuit by the Cassiquiare and the Upper Orinoco.

We remained only one day at San Fernando de Atabapo, although that village, adorned as it was by the pirijao palm-tree, with fruit like peaches, appeared to us a delicious abode.

Tame pauxis* (* Not the ourax of Cuvier, Crax pauxi Linn.

, but the Crax alector.

) surrounded the Indian huts; in one of which we saw a very rare monkey, which inhabits the banks of the Guaviare.

This monkey is the caparro, which I have made known in my Observations on Zoology and comparative Anatomy; it forms, as Geoffroy believes, a new genus (Lagothrix) between the ateles and the alouates.

The hair of this monkey is grey, like that of the marten, and extremely soft to the touch.

The caparro is distinguished by a round head, and a mild and agreeable expression of countenance.

I believe the missionary Gili is the only author who has made mention before me of this curious animal, around which zoologists begin to group other monkeys of Brazil.

Having quitted San Fernando on the 27th of May, we arrived, by help of the rapid current of the Orinoco, in seven hours, at the mouth of the Rio Mataveni.

We passed the night in the open air, under the granitic rock El Castillito, which rises in the middle of the river, and the form of which reminded us of the ruin called the Mouse-tower (Mausethurm), on the Rhine, opposite Bingen.

Here, as on the banks of the Atabapo, we were struck by the sight of a small species of drosera, having exactly the appearance of the drosera of Europe.

The Orinoco had sensibly swelled during the night; and the current, strongly accelerated, bore us, in ten hours, from the mouth of the Mataveni to the Upper Great Cataract, that of Maypures, or Quituna.

The distance which we passed over was thirteen leagues.

We recalled to mind, with much satisfaction, the scenes where we had reposed in going up the river.

We again found the Indians who had accompanied us in our herborizations; and we visited anew the fine spring that issues from a rock of stratified granite behind the house of the missionary: its temperature was not changed more than 0. 3 degrees.

From the mouth of the Atabapo as far as that of the Apure we seemed to be travelling as through a country which we had long inhabited.

We were reduced to the same abstinence; we were stung by the same mosquitos; but the certainty of reaching in a few weeks the term of our physical sufferings kept up our spirits.

The passage of the canoe through the Great Cataract obliged us to stop two days at Maypures.

Father Bernardo Zea, missionary at the Raudales, who had accompanied us to the Rio Negro, though ill, insisted on conducting us with his Indians as far as Atures.

One of these Indians, Zerepe, the interpreter, who had been so unmercifully punished at the beach of Pararuma, rivetted our attention by his appearance of deep sorrow.

We learned that his grief was caused by the loss of a young girl to whom he was engaged, and that he had lost her in consequence of false intelligence which had been spread respecting the direction of our journey.

Zerepe, who was a native of Maypures, had been brought up in the woods by his parents, who were of the tribe of the Macos.

He had brought with him to the mission a girl of twelve years of age, whom he intended to marry at our return from the Cataracts.

The Indian girl was little pleased with the life of the missions, and she was told that the whites would go to the country of the Portuguese (Brazil), and would take Zerepe with them.

Disappointed in her hopes, she seized a boat, and with another girl of her own age, crossed the Great Cataract, and fled al monte.

The recital of this courageous adventure was the great news of the place.

The affliction of Zerepe, however, was not of long duration.

Born among the Christians, having travelled as far as the foot of the Rio Negro, understanding Spanish and the language of the Macos, he thought himself superior to the people of his tribe, and he no doubt soon forgot his forest love.

On the 31st of May we passed the rapids of Guahibos and Garcita.

The islands which rise in the middle of the waters of the river were overspread with the purest verdure.

The rains of winter had unfolded the spathes of the vadgiai palm-tree, the leaves of which rise straight toward the sky.

The eye is never wearied of the view of those scenes, where the trees and rocks give the landscape that grand and severe character which we admire in the background of the pictures of Salvator Rosa.

We landed before sunset on the eastern bank of the Orinoco, at the Puerto de la Expedicion, in order to visit the cavern of Ataruipe, which is the place of sepulchre of a whole nation destroyed.

I shall attempt to describe this cavern, so celebrated among the natives.

We climbed with difficulty, and not without some danger, a steep rock of granite, entirely bare.

It would have been almost impossible to fix the foot on its smooth and sloping surface, if large crystals of feldspar, resisting decomposition, did not stand out from the rock, and furnish points of support.

Scarcely had we attained the summit of the mountain when we beheld with astonishment the singular aspect of the surrounding country.

The foamy bed of the waters is filled with an archipelago of islands covered with palm-trees.

Westward, on the left bank of the Orinoco, the wide-stretching savannahs of the Meta and the Casanare resembled a sea of verdure.

The setting sun seemed like a globe of fire suspended over the plain, and the solitary Peak of Uniana, which appeared more lofty from being wrapped in vapours which softened its outline, all contributed to augment the majesty of the scene.

Immediately below us lay a deep valley, enclosed on every side.

Birds of prey and goatsuckers winged their lonely flight in this inaccessible circus.

We found a pleasure in following with the eye their fleeting shadows, as they glided slowly over the flanks of the rock.

A narrow ridge led us to a neighbouring mountain, the rounded summit of which supported immense blocks of granite.

These masses are more than forty or fifty feet in diameter; and their form is so perfectly spherical, that, as they appear to touch the soil only by a small number of points, it might be supposed, at the least shock of an earthquake, they would roll into the abyss.

I do not remember to have seen anywhere else a similar phenomenon, amid the decompositions of granitic soils.

If the balls rested on a rock of a different nature, as in the blocks of Jura, we might suppose that they had been rounded by the action of water, or thrown out by the force of an elastic fluid; but their position on the summit of a hill alike granitic, makes it more probable that they owe their origin to the progressive decomposition of the rock.

The most remote part of the valley is covered by a thick forest.

In this shady and solitary spot, on the declivity of a steep mountain, the cavern of Ataruipe opens to the view.

It is less a cavern than a jutting rock in which the waters have scooped a vast hollow when, in the ancient revolutions of our planet, they attained that height.

* (* I saw no vein, no hole (four) filled with crystals.

The decomposition of granitic rocks, and their separation into large masses, dispersed in the plains and valleys in the form of blocks and balls with concentric layers, appear to favour the enlarging of these natural excavations, which resemble real caverns.

) In this tomb of a whole extinct tribe we soon counted nearly six hundred skeletons well preserved, and regularly placed.

Every skeleton reposes in a sort of basket made of the petioles of the palm-tree.

These baskets, which the natives call mapires, have the form of a square bag.

Their size is proportioned to the age of the dead; there are some for infants cut off at the moment of their birth.

We saw them from ten inches to three feet four inches long, the skeletons in them being bent together.

They are all ranged near each other, and are so entire that not a rib or a phalanx is wanting.

The bones have been prepared in three different manners, either whitened in the air and the sun, dyed red with anoto, or, like mummies, varnished with odoriferous resins, and enveloped in leaves of the heliconia or of the plantain-tree.

The Indians informed us that the fresh corpse is placed in damp ground, that the flesh may be consumed by degrees; some months afterwards it is taken out, and the flesh remaining on the bones is scraped off with sharp stones.

Several hordes in Guiana still observe this custom.

Earthen vases half-baked are found near the mapires or baskets.

They appear to contain the bones of the same family.

The largest of these vases, or funeral urns, are five feet high, and three feet three inches long.

Their colour is greenish-grey, and their oval form is pleasing to the eye.

The handles are made in the shape of crocodiles or serpents; the edges are bordered with painted meanders, labyrinths, and grecques, in rows variously combined.

Such designs are found in every zone among nations the farthest removed from each other, either with respect to their respective positions on the globe, or to the degree of civilization which they have attained.

They still adorn the common pottery made by the inhabitants of the little mission of Maypures;

they ornament the bucklers of the Otaheitans, the fishing-implements of the Esquimaux, the walls of the Mexican palace of Mitla, and the vases of ancient Greece.

We could not acquire any precise idea of the period to which the origin of the mapires and the painted vases, contained in the bone-cavern of Ataruipe, can be traced.

The greater part seemed not to be more than a century old; but it may be supposed that, sheltered from all humidity under the influence of a uniform temperature, the preservation of these articles would be no less perfect if their origin dated from a period far more remote.

A tradition circulates among the Guahibos, that the warlike Atures, pursued by the Caribs, escaped to the rocks that rise in the middle of the Great Cataracts;

and there that nation, heretofore so numerous, became gradually extinct, as well as its language.

The last families of the Atures still existed in 1767, in the time of the missionary Gili.

At the period of our voyage an old parrot was shown at Maypures, of which the inhabitants said, and the fact is worthy of observation, that they did not understand what it said, because it spoke the language of the Atures.

We opened, to the great concern of our guides, several mapires, for the purpose of examining attentively the form of the skulls.

They were all marked by the characteristics of the American race, with the exception of two or three, which approached indubitably to the Caucasian.

In the middle of the Cataracts, in the most inaccessible spots, cases are found strengthened with iron bands, and filled with European tools, vestiges of clothes, and glass trinkets.

These articles, which have given rise to the most absurd reports of treasures hidden by the Jesuits, probably belonged to Portuguese traders who had penetrated into these savage countries.

May we suppose that the skulls of European race, which we saw mingled with the skeletons of the natives, and preserved with the same care, were the remains of some Portuguese travellers who had died of sickness, or had been killed in battle?

The aversion evinced by the natives for whatever is not of their own race renders this hypothesis little probable.

Perhaps fugitive mestizos of the missions of the Meta and Apure may have come and settled near the Cataracts, marrying women of the tribe of the Atures.

Such mixed marriages sometimes take place in this zone, though they are more rare than in Canada, and in the whole of North America, where hunters of European origin unite themselves with savages, assume their habits, and sometimes acquire great political influence.

We took several skulls, the skeleton of a child of six or seven years old, and two of full-grown men of the nation of the Atures, from the cavern of Ataruipe.

All these bones, partly painted red, partly varnished with odoriferous resins, were placed in the baskets (mapires or canastos) which we have just described.

They made almost the whole load of a mule; and as we knew the superstitious feelings of the Indians in reference to the remains of the dead after burial, we carefully enveloped the canastos in mats recently woven.

Unfortunately for us, the penetration of the Indians, and the extreme quickness of their sense of smelling, rendered all our precautions useless.

Wherever we stopped, in the missions of the Caribbees, amid the Llanos, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, the natives assembled round our mules to admire the monkeys which we had purchased at the Orinoco.

These good people had scarcely touched our baggage, when they announced the approaching death of the beast of burden that carried the dead.

In vain we told them that they were deceived in their conjectures; and that the baskets contained the bones of crocodiles and manatees; they persisted in repeating that they smelt the resin that surrounded the skeletons, and that they were their old relations.

We were obliged to request that the monks would interpose their authority, to overcome the aversion of the natives, and procure for us a change of mules.

One of the skulls, which we took from the cavern of Ataruipe, has appeared in the fine work published by my old master, Blumenbach, on the varieties of the human species.

The skeletons of the Indians were lost on the coast of Africa, together with a considerable part of our collections, in a shipwreck, in which perished our friend and fellow-traveller, Fray Juan Gonzales, the young monk of the order of Saint Francis.

We withdrew in silence from the cavern of Ataruipe.

It was one of those calm and serene nights which are so common in the torrid zone.

The stars shone with a mild and planetary light.

Their scintillation was scarcely sensible at the horizon, which seemed illumined by the great nebulae of the southern hemisphere.

An innumerable multitude of insects spread a reddish light upon the ground, loaded with plants, and resplendent with these living and moving fires, as if the stars of the firmament had sunk down on the savannah.

On quitting the cavern we stopped several times to admire the beauty of this singular scene.

The odoriferous vanilla and festoons of bignonia decorated the entrance;

and above, on the summit of the hill, the arrowy branches of the palm-trees waved murmuring in the air.

We descended towards the river, to take the road to the mission, where we arrived late in the night.

Our imagination was struck by all we had just seen.

Occupied continually by the present, in a country where the traveller is tempted to regard human society as a new institution, he is more powerfully interested by remembrances of times past.

These remembrances were not indeed of a distant date; but in all that is monumental antiquity is a relative idea, and we easily confound what is ancient with what is obscure and problematic.

The Egyptians considered the historical remembrances of the Greeks as very recent.

If the Chinese, or, as they prefer calling themselves, the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, could have communicated with the priests of Heliopolis, they would have smiled at those pretensions of the Egyptians to antiquity.

Contrasts not less striking are found in the north of Europe and of Asia, in the New World, and in every region where the human race has not preserved a long consciousness of itself.

The migration of the Toltecs, the most ancient historical event on the tableland of Mexico, dates only in the sixth century of our era.

The introduction of a good system of intercalation, and the reform of the calendars, the indispensable basis of an accurate chronology, took place in the year 1091. These epochs, which to us appear so modern, fall on fabulous times, when we reflect on the history of our species between the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon.

We there see symbolic figures sculptured on the rocks, but no tradition throws light upon their origin.

In the hot part of Guiana we can go back only to the period when the Castilian and Portuguese conquerors, and more recently peaceful monks, penetrated amid so many barbarous nations.

It appears that to the north of the Cataracts, in the strait of Baraguan, there are caverns filled with bones, similar to those I have just described: but I was informed of this fact only after my return;

our Indian pilots did not mention it when we landed at the strait.

These tombs no doubt have given rise to a fable of the Ottomacs, according to which the granitic and solitary rocks of Baraguan, the forms of which are very singular, are regarded as the grandfathers, the ancient chiefs of the tribe.

The custom of separating the flesh from the bones, very anciently practised by the Massagetes, is still known among several hordes of the Orinoco.

It is even asserted, and with some probability, that the Guaraons plunge their dead bodies under water enveloped in nets; and that the small caribe-fishes, of which we saw everywhere an innumerable quantity, devour in a few days the muscular flesh, and thus prepare the skeleton.

It may be supposed that this operation can be practised only in places where crocodiles are not common.

Some tribes, for instance the Tamanacs, are accustomed to lay waste the fields of a deceased relative, and cut down the trees which he has planted.

They say that the sight of objects which belonged to their relation makes them melancholy.

They like better to efface than to preserve remembrances.

These effects of Indian sensibility are very detrimental to agriculture, and the monks oppose with energy these superstitious practices, to which the natives converted to Christianity still adhere in the missions.

The tombs of the Indians of the Orinoco have not been very closely examined, because they do not contain valuable articles like those of Peru; and even on the spot no faith is now lent to the chimerical ideas, which were heretofore formed of the wealth of the ancient inhabitants of El Dorado.

The thirst of gold everywhere precedes the desire of instruction, and a taste for researches into antiquity; in all the mountainous part of South America, from Merida and Santa Martha to the table-lands of Quito and Upper Peru, the labours of absolute mining have been undertaken to discover tombs, or, as the Creoles say, employing a word altered from the Inca language, guacas.

When in Peru, at Mancichi, I went into the guaca from which, in the sixteenth century, masses of gold of great value were extracted.

No trace of the precious metals has been found in the caverns which have served the natives of Guiana for ages as sepulchres.

This circumstance proves that even at the period when the Caribs, and other travelling nations, made incursions to the south-west, gold had flowed in very small quantities from the mountains of Peru towards the eastern plains.

Wherever the granitic rocks do not present any of those large cavities caused by their decomposition, or by an accumulation of their blocks, the Indians deposit their dead in the earth.

The hammock (chinchorro), a kind of net in which the deceased had reposed during his life, serves for a coffin.

This net is fastened tight round the body, a hole is dug in the hut, and there the body is laid.

This is the most usual method, according to the account of the missionary Gili, and it accords with what I myself learned from Father Zea.

I do not believe that there exists one tumulus in Guiana, not even in the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Essequibo.

Some, however, are to be met with in the savannahs of Varinas, as in Canada, to the west of the Alleghenies.

* (* Mummies and skeletons contained in baskets were recently discovered in a cavern in the United States.

It is believed they belong to a race of men analogous to that of the Sandwich Islands.

The description of these tombs has some similitude with that of the tombs of Ataruipe.

) It seems remarkable enough that, notwithstanding the extreme abundance of wood in those countries, the natives of the Orinoco were as little accustomed as the ancient Scythians to burn the dead.

Sometimes they formed funeral piles for that purpose; but only after a battle, when the number of the dead was considerable.

In 1748, the Parecas burned not only the bodies of their enemies, the Tamanacs, but also those of their own people who fell on the field of battle.

The Indians of South America, like all nations in a state of nature, are strongly attached to the spots where the bones of their fathers repose.

This feeling, which a great writer has beautifully painted in the episode of Atala, is cherished in all its primitive ardour by the Chinese.

These people among whom everything is the produce of art, or rather of the most ancient civilization, do not change their dwelling without carrying along with them the bones of their ancestors.

Coffins are seen deposited on the banks of great rivers, to be transported, with the furniture of the family, to a remote province.

These removals of bones, heretofore more common among the savages of North America, are not practised among the tribes of Guiana; but these are not nomad, like nations who live exclusively by hunting.