The dominion so long exercised by the Caribs over a great part of the continent, joined to the remembrance of their ancient greatness, has inspired them with a sentiment of dignity and national superiority which is manifest in their manners and their discourse. "We alone are a nation," say they proverbially; "the rest of mankind (oquili) are made to serve us." This contempt of the Caribs for their enemies is so strong that I saw a child of ten years of age foam with rage on being called a Cabre or Cavere; though he had never in his life seen an individual of that unfortunate race of people who gave their name to the town of Cabruta (Cabritu); and who, after long resistance, were almost entirely exterminated by the Caribs. Thus we find among half savage hordes, as in the most civilized part of Europe, those inveterate animosities which have caused the names of hostile nations to pass into their respective languages as insulting appellations.
The missionary of the village of Cari led us into several Indian huts, where extreme neatness and order prevailed. We observed with pain the torments which the Carib mothers inflict on their infants for the purpose not only of enlarging the calf of the leg, but also of raising the flesh in alternate stripes from the ankle to the top of the thigh. Narrow ligatures, consisting of bands of leather, or of woven cotton, are fixed two or three inches apart from each other, and being tightened more and more, the muscles between the bands become swollen. The monks of the missions, though ignorant of the works or even of the name of Rousseau, attempt to oppose this ancient system of physical education: but in vain. Man when just issued from the woods and supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far from being tractable in his ideas of beauty and propriety. I observed, however, with surprise, that the manner in which these poor children are bound, and which seems to obstruct the circulation of the blood, does not operate injuriously on their muscular movements. There is no race of men more robust and swifter in running than the Caribs.
If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their children so as to produce what painters call undulating outlines, they abstain (at least in the Llanos), from flattening the head by compressing it between cushions and planks from the most tender age. This practice, so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than those of the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco. A systematizer would say that the form is such as their intellectual faculties require. We were so much the more struck by this fact as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in Europe, for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other human skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute facial angle. In some osteological collections skulls supposed to be those of Caribs of the island of St. Vincent are in fact skulls shaped by having been pressed between planks. They have belonged to Zambos (black Caribs) who are descended from Negroes and true Caribs.* (* These unfortunate remnants of a nation heretofore powerful were banished in 1795 to the Island of Rattam in the Bay of Honduras because they were accused by the English Government of having connexions with the French. In 1760 an able minister, M. Lescallier, proposed to the Court of Versailles to invite the Red and Black Caribs from St. Vincent to Guiana and to employ them as free men in the cultivation of the land. I doubt whether their number at that period amounted to six thousand, as the island of St. Vincent contained in 1787 not more than fourteen thousand inhabitants of all colours.) The barbarous habit of flattening the forehead is practised by several nations,* of people not of the same race; and it has been observed recently in North America; but nothing is more vague than the conclusion that some degree of conformity in customs and manners proves identity of origin. (* For instance the Tapoyranas of Guiana (Barrere page 239), the Solkeeks of Upper Louisiana (Walckenaer, Cosmos page 583). Los Indios de Cumana, says Gomara (Hist. de Ind.), aprietan a los ninos la cabeca muy blando, pero mucho, entre dos almohadillas de algodon para ensancharlos la cara, que lo tienen por hermosura. Las donzellas traen senogiles muy apretados par debaxo y encima de las rodillas, para que los muslos y pantorillas engorden mucho. [The Indians of Cumana press down the heads of young infants tightly between cushions stuffed with cotton for the purpose of giving width to their faces, which they regard as a beauty. The young girls wear very tight bandages round their knees in order to give thickness to the thighs and calves of the legs.]) On observing the spirit of order and submission which prevails in the Carib missions, the traveller can scarcely persuade himself that he is among cannibals. This American word, of somewhat doubtful signification, is probably derived from the language of Hayti, or that of Porto Rico; and it has passed into the languages of Europe, since the end of the fifteenth century, as synonymous with that of anthropophagi. "These newly discovered man-eaters, so greedy of human flesh, are called Caribes or Cannibals,"* says Anghiera, in the third decade of his Oceanica, dedicated to Pope Leo X. (* Edaces humanarum carnium novi helluones anthropophagi, Caribes alias Canibales appellati.) There can be little doubt that the Caribs of the islands, when a conquering people, exercised cruelties upon the Ygneris, or ancient inhabitants of the West Indies, who were weak and not very warlike; but we must also admit that these cruelties were exaggerated by the early travellers, who heard only the narratives of the old enemies of the Caribs. It is not always the vanquished solely, who are calumniated by their contemporaries; the insolence of the conquerors is punished by the catalogue of their crimes being augmented.
All the missionaries of the Carony, the Lower Orinoco and the Llanos del Cari whom we had an opportunity of consulting assured us that the Caribs are perhaps the least anthropophagous nations of the New Continent. They extend this remark even to the independent hordes who wander on the east of the Esmeralda, between the sources of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo. It may be conceived that the fury and despair with which the unhappy Caribs defended themselves against the Spaniards, when in 1504 a royal decree declared them slaves, may have contributed to acquire for them a reputation for ferocity. The first idea of attacking this nation and depriving it of liberty and of its natural rights originated with Christopher Columbus, who was not in all instances so humane as he is represented to have been. Subsequently the licenciado Rodrigo de Figueroa was appointed by the court, in 1520, to determine the tribes of South America, who were to be regarded as of Carib race, or as cannibals; and those who were Guatiaos,* that is, Indians of peace, and friends of the Castilians. (* I had some trouble in discovering the origin of this denomination which has become so important from the fatal decrees of Figueroa. The Spanish historians often employ the word guatiao to designate a branch of nations. To become a guatiao of any one seems to have signified, in the language of Hayti, to conclude a treaty of friendship. In the West India Islands, as well as in the archipelago of the South Sea, names were exchanged in token of alliance. Juan de Esquivel (1502) se hice guatiao del cacique Cotubanama; el qual desde adelante se llamo Juan de Esquivel, porque era liga de perpetua amistad entre los Indios trocarse los nombres: y trocados quedaban guatiaos, que era tanto coma confederados y hermanos en armas. Ponce de Leon se hace guatiao con el poderoso cacique Agueinaha." Herrera dec. 1 pages 129, 159 and 181. [Juan de Esquivel (1502) became the guatiao of the cacique Cotubanama; and thenceforth the latter called himself Juan de Esquivel, for among the Indians the exchange of names was a bond of perpetual friendship. Those who exchanged names became guaitaos, which meant the same as confederates or brethren-in-arms. Ponce de Leon became guatiao with the powerful cacique Agueinaha.] One of the Lucayes Islands, inhabited by a mild and pacific people, was heretofore called Guatao; but we will not insist on the etymology of this word, because the languages of the Lucayes Islands differed from those of Hayti.) The ethnographic document called El Auto de Figueroa is one of the most curious records of the barbarism of the first conquistadores. Without any attention to the analogy of languages, every nation that could be accused of having devoured a prisoner after a battle was arbitrarily declared of Carib race. The inhabitants of Uriapari (on the peninsula of Paria) were named Caribs; the Urinacos (settled on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, or Urinucu), Guatiaos. All the tribes designated by Figueroa as Caribs were condemned to slavery; and might at will be sold, or exterminated by war. In these sanguinary struggles, the Carib women, after the death of their husbands, defended themselves with such desperation that Anghiera says they were taken for tribes of Amazons. But amidst the cruelties exercised on the Caribs, it is consolatory to find, that there existed some courageous men who raised the voice of humanity and justice. Some of the monks embraced an opinion different from that which they had at first adopted. In an age when there could be no hope of founding public liberty on civil institutions, an attempt was at least made to defend individual liberty. "That is a most holy law (ley sanctissima)," says Gomara, in 1551, "by which our emperor has prohibited the reducing of the Indians to slavery. It is just that men, who are all born free, should not become the slaves of one another."
During our abode in the Carib missions, we observed with surprise the facility with which young Indians of eighteen years of age, when appointed to the post of alguazil, would harangue the municipality for whole hours in succession. Their tone of voice, their gravity of deportment, the gestures which accompanied their speech, all denoted an intelligent people capable of a high degree of civilization. A Franciscan monk, who knew enough of the Carib language to preach in it occasionally, pointed out to us that the long and harmonious periods which occur in the discourses of the Indians are never confused or obscure. Particular inflexions of the verb indicate beforehand the nature of the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, singular or plural. Little annexed forms (suffixes) mark the gradations of sentiment; and here, as in every language formed by a free development, clearness is the result of that regulating instinct which characterises human intelligence in the various stages of barbarism and cultivation. On holidays, after the celebration of mass, all the inhabitants of the village assemble in front of the church. The young girls place at the feet of the missionary faggots of wood, bunches of plantains, and other provision of which he stands in need for his household. At the same time the governador, the alguazil, and other municipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, reprimand the idle, and flog the untractable. Strokes of the cane are received with the same insensibility as that with which they are given. It were better if the priest did not impose these corporal punishments at the instant of quitting the altar, and if he were not, in his sacerdotal habits, the spectator of this chastisement of men and women; but this abuse is inherent in the principle on which the strange government of the missions is founded. The most arbitrary civil power is combined with the authority exercised by the priest over the little community; and, although the Caribs are not cannibals, and we would wish to see them treated with mildness and indulgence, it may be conceived that energetic measures are sometimes necessary to maintain tranquillity in this rising society.
The difficulty of fixing the Caribs to the soil is the greater, as they have been for ages in the habit of trading on the rivers. We have already described this active people, at once commercial and warlike, occupied in the traffic of slaves, and carrying merchandize from the coasts of Dutch Guiana to the basin of the Amazon. The travelling Caribs were the Bokharians of equinoctial America. The necessity of counting the objects of their little trade, and transmitting intelligence, led them to extend and improve the use of the quipos, or, as they are called in the missions, the cordoncillos con necos (cords with knots). These quipos or knotted cords are found in Canada, in Mexico (where Boturini procured some from the Tlascaltecs), in Peru, in the plains of Guiana, in central Asia, in China, and in India. As rosaries, they have become objects of devotion in the hands of the Christians of the East; as suampans, they have been employed in the operations of manual arithmetic by the Chinese, the Tartars, and the Russians. The independent Caribs who inhabit the little-known country situated between the sources of the Orinoco and those of the rivers Essequibo, Carony, and Parima, are divided into tribes; and, like the nations of the Missouri, of Chili, and of ancient Germany, form a political confederation. This system is most in accordance with the spirit of liberty prevailing amongst those warlike hordes who see no advantage in the ties of society but for common defence. The pride of the Caribs leads them to withdraw themselves from every other tribe; even from those to whom, by their language, they have some affinity.
They claim the same separation in the missions, which seldom prosper when any attempt is made to associate them with other mixed communities, that is, with villages where every hut is inhabited by a family belonging to another nation and speaking another language. The authority of the chiefs of the independent Caribs is hereditary in the male line only, the children of sisters being excluded from the succession. This law of succession which is founded on a system of mistrust, denoting no great purity of manners, prevails in India; among the Ashantees (in Africa); and among several tribes of the savages of North America.* (* Among the Hurons (Wyandots) and the Natchez the succession to the magistracy is continued by the women: it is not the son who succeeds, but the son of the sister, or of the nearest relation in the female line. This mode of succession is said to be the most certain because the supreme power remains attached to the blood of the last chief; it is a practice that insures legitimacy. Ancient traces of this strange mode of succession, so common in Africa and in the East Indies, exist in the dynasty of the kings of the West India Islands.) The young chiefs and other youths who are desirous of marrying, are subject to the most extraordinary fasts and penances, and are required to take medicines prepared by the marirris or piaches, called in the transalleghenian countries, war-physic. The Carribbee marirris are at once priests, jugglers and physicians; they transmit to their successors their doctrine, their artifices, and the remedies they employ. The latter are accompanied by imposition of hands, and certain gestures and mysterious practices, apparently connected with the most anciently known processes of animal magnetism. Though I had opportunities of seeing many persons who had closely observed the confederated Caribs, I could not learn whether the marirris belong to a particular caste. It is observed in North America that, among the Shawanese,* (* People that came from Florida, or from the south (shawaneu) to the north.) divided into several tribes, the priests, who preside at the sacrifices, must be (as among the Hebrews) of one particular tribe, that of the Mequachakes. Any facts that may hereafter be discovered in America respecting the remains of a sacerdotal caste appears to me calculated to excite great interest, on account of those priest-kings of Peru, who styled themselves the children of the Sun; and of those sun-kings among the Natchez, who recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.
On quitting the mission of Cari, we had some difficulties to settle with our Indian muleteers. They had discovered that we had brought skeletons with us from the cavern of Ataruipe; and they were fully persuaded that the beasts of burden which carried the bodies of their old relations would perish on the journey.* (* See volume 2.24.) Every precaution we had taken was useless; nothing escapes a Carib's penetration and keen sense of smell, and it required all the authority of the missionary to forward our passage. We had to cross the Rio Cari in a boat, and the Rio de agua clara, by fording, or, it may almost be said, by swimming. The quicksands of the bed of this river render the passage very difficult at the season when the waters are high. The strength of the current seems surprising in so flat a country; but the rivers of the plains are precipitated, to quote a correct observation of Pliny the younger,* "less by the declivity of their course than by their abundance, and as it were by their own weight." (* Epist. lib. 8 ep. 8. Clitumnus non loci devexitate, sed ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere impellitur.) We had two bad stations, one at Matagorda and the other at Los Riecetos, before we reached the little town of Pao. We beheld everywhere the same objects; small huts constructed of reeds, and roofed with leather; men on horseback armed with lances, guarding the herds; herds of cattle half wild, remarkable for their uniform colour, and disputing the pasturage with horses and mules. No sheep or goats are found on these immense plains. Sheep do not thrive well in equinoctial America, except on table-lands above a thousand toises high, where their fleece is long and sometimes very fine. In the burning climate of the plains, where the wolves give place to jaguars, these small ruminating animals, destitute of means of defence, and slow in their movements, cannot be preserved in any considerable numbers.
We arrived on the 15th of July at the Fundacion, or Villa, del Pao, founded in 1744, and situated very favourably for a commercial station between Nueva Barcelona and Angostura. Its real name is El Concepcion del Pao. Alcedo, La Cruz, Olmedilla, and many other geographers, have mistaken the situation of this small town of the Llanos of Barcelona, confounding it either with San Juan Bauptisto del Pao of the Llanos of Caracas, or with El Valle del Pao de Zarate. Though the weather was cloudy I succeeded in obtaining some heights of alpha Centauri, serving to determine the latitude of the place; which is 8 degrees 37 minutes 57 seconds. Some altitudes of the sun gave me 67 degrees 8 minutes 12 seconds for the longitude, supposing Angostura to be 66 degrees 15 minutes 21 seconds. The astronomical determinations of Calabozo and Concepcion del Pao are very important to the geography of this country, where, in the midst of savannahs, fixed points are altogether wanting. Some fruit-trees grow in the vicinity of Pao: they are rarely seen in the Llanos. We even found some cocoa-trees, which appeared very vigorous, notwithstanding the great distance of the sea. I was the more struck with this fact because doubts have recently been started respecting the veracity of travellers, who assert that they have seen the cocoa-tree, which is a palm of the shore, at Timbuctoo, in the centre of Africa. We several times saw cocoa-trees amid the cultivated spots on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, more than a hundred leagues from the coast.
Five days, which to us appeared very tedious, brought us from Villa del Pao to the port of Nueva Barcelona. As we advanced the sky became more serene, the soil more dusty, and the atmosphere more hot. The heat from which we suffered is not entirely owing to the temperature of the air, but is produced by the fine sand mingled with it; this sand strikes against the face of the traveller, as it does against the ball of the thermometer. I never observed the mercury rise in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45.8 degrees centigrade. Captain Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think that the temperature of fifty-two degrees, so often felt in Fezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and the village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of the little table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana. This table-land forms a point of partition between the Orinoco, the Guarapiche, and the coast of New Andalusia. Its height is so inconsiderable that it would scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this part of the Llanos. The Rio Mano however, which flows into the Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and which D'Anville (I know not on what authority) has marked in the first edition of his great map as issuing from the lake of Valencia, and receiving the waters of the Guayra, could never have served as a natural canal between two basins of rivers. No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano. A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche. The incursions of Don Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of the province of Cumana, occasioned a general migration of independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Orinoco in 1720.