Across Unknown South America

by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

The Mundurucus were mild and gentle, soft-spoken and shy. They had all adopted Brazilian clothes. The hut of the chief was extremely clean and neat inside, the few utensils that were visible being kept in a tidy manner.

João spoke a little Portuguese. From him I was able to buy a quantity of farinha, which came in useful to us, although I had to pay an exorbitant price for it—£4 sterling for each 50 litres or thereabouts—that is to say, about 5½ pecks in English measure. The price of farinha on the coast would be less than four shillings for that quantity.

What interested me most among the Mundurucus was their strange ornamentations. The angular pattern was a great favourite with them, especially angles side by side, and the cross—which I think had been suggested, however, by their contact with Catholic missionaries farther down the river.

The rudimentary figures which they carved—merely lines for the body, legs and arms, and a dot for the head—were extraordinary because they represented the body and limbs covered with hair, done simply by minor parallel lines. I asked the Mundurucus why they represented human beings with hair, whereas they themselves were hairless on the body and face. They said it was because in ancient times all the people were hairy like monkeys.

I was strongly impressed by the difference in type between those Indians and the Bororos, and also by the great difference in their language. When later on I came in contact with the Apiacars, another tribe of Indians living on the Tapajoz River, and closely allied to the Mundurucus, I discovered that their language bore a certain resemblance, curiously enough, to that of the Maya Indians of Yucatan in Central America.

I had been so busy taking notes of all I had seen in the aldeja, that when we started once more down the river I did not at first miss my best dog, Negrino, of whom I had got very fond. We had gone some 4 or 5 kil. down the river when I discovered that my men had given it away to the Indians while I was occupied studying the geological formation of that part of the country. It was impossible to go back all those kilometres against the current to recover the poor dog. Although it gave me a great deal of pain I never for one moment let the men see it, as I knew that it was in order to hurt me that they had disposed of Negrino.

It is never right or useful to take revenge, for if you wait long enough you are always avenged by Providence. That afternoon my men saw some wild chestnuts on a tree, and they insisted on landing to pick them. They knocked down the tree, as usual, to get the chestnuts, although it was fully 3 ft. in diameter. They picked a great many of the wild chestnuts and proceeded to eat them—Alcides, much to my amazement, actually offering me one. I asked them if they knew what they were eating, as I quickly observed when the tree fell down that not a single chestnut had been touched by birds or monkeys.

I have always noticed in equatorial countries that if you never touch fruit that monkeys do not eat you will seldom get poisoned. My men said that they had never seen the fruit before, but as it looked pretty they were going to eat it, and a lot of it. So they stopped some time cracking the nuts and eating them with great delight.

When we got back to the canoe we had only gone a short distance when Filippe the negro was seized with violent pains in his inside. His eyes had become sunken, his lips were quivering, and in a moment he was seized with cramps all over the body—so much so that he collapsed.

We had to halt on a small island of rock, where we took Filippe out and I had him laid flat on his chest, he being just like a corpse. I inserted a leather strap into his throat in order to cause immediate vomiting, then I unpacked some of the castor oil which still remained in my possession—we never seemed to lose the beastly stuff—and gave him a dose powerful enough to kill an ox.