Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

The other tribes around Lake Nicaragua were wild. The Woolwas on the north, and the Huatusos along the Rio Frio to the east, depended on hunting and fishing for a livelihood. So also did most of the tribes of Honduras, Vera Paz and the Isthmus. The only nation which distinguished itself in the arts were the Cuevas, in and around Chiriqui Bay. They were adroit in the treatment of gold. The early writers describe them as prominent in general culture and certain technical arts. To them we attribute the gold figures disinterred from the mounds of Chiriqui and its neighborhood. They are manufactured by two methods, the one by soldering gold wires drawn out into the finest thread upon thin hammered plates of the same metal, the wire forming the design; the other by casting hollow figures.[192] The skill displayed often excites the astonishment of the jewellers of our own day.

6. The South Atlantic Group.

The interminable forests of Brazil and the endless plains of the Pampas were at the discovery thickly peopled by bands of roving nations, dependent chiefly on the products of woods and streams for their support. None of them had sedentary dwellings, none knew the art of building with brick or stone, and none laid much stress on agriculture. Some of them had, however, considerable technical skill in various directions, and few if any of them could be assigned to as low a status as the Australians, for example.

The ruling people on the northern coast and the Lesser Antilles at that time were the Caribs. They possessed much of the coast line from the Isthmus of Panama to the mouth of the Orinoco, and many of the smaller southern islands of the West Indian archipelago. They had established a colony on Hayti, but probably not on Cuba, and their expeditions, so far as we know, never reached Florida. According to their own statements, all the island Caribs came from the mainland at no long period before the Discovery. Recent researches have shown that the original home of the stock was south of the Amazon, and probably in the highlands at the head of the Tapajoz River. A tribe, the Bakairi, is still resident there, whose language is a pure and archaic form of the Carib tongue.[193]

They were a finely formed set of men, the skull long but variable, their color dark, large narrow nose, prominent cheek bones, wide mouth, and thin lips.

Their language is rich in vowels and pleasant to the ear. In some districts that spoken by the women varied in some degree from that in use among the men. This is not without other examples among the American race, and appears to have arisen partly from the custom of capturing women from other tribes for wives, partly from a tendency to easy dialectic variation in the languages themselves.

The Arawaks occupied on the continent the area of the modern Guiana, between the Corentyn and the Pomeroon rivers, and at one time all the West Indian Islands. From some of them they were early driven by the Caribs, and within forty year of the date of Columbus’ first voyage the Spanish had exterminated nearly all on the islands. Their course of migration had been from the interior of Brazil northward; their distant relations are still to be found between the headwaters of the Paraguay and Schingu rivers.

The extensive slope which is watered by the Amazon and its tributaries is peopled by numerous tribes whose affinities are obscure. Those on the plains near the coast belonged to the Tupi-Guarani stock. This extended along the Atlantic from Rio de la Plata to the Amazon, embracing in the north the Tupis or Tupinambas, and on the south the Guaranis. Scattered tribes of the stock extended westward to the Paraguay and Madeira rivers, reaching to the foot hills of Andes. Though positive data are lacking about their early migrations, the evidence at hand tends to show that these were from south to north, and that the Tupis displaced an earlier people of a different physical type and a lower grade of culture.

This is the result derived both from a comparison of existing dialects and from explorations in the artificial shell-heaps, or sambaquis, which are found along the coast. Many of them are of great size and very ancient. They contain skulls of an inferior type, with low foreheads, prominent and strong jaws, and short skulls (brachycephalic), while the Tupi skull is more fully developed and long (dolichocephalic). Similar shell-heaps, proving an equally rude people, are found along the coast of Guinea, and both among the Arawaks of that locality, and still more among the Goajiros of the peninsula of that name on the coast of Venezuela, who are distantly related to the Arawaks, do we find the brachycephalic skull and strong jaws of the builders of the “sambaquis.” We may suppose, therefore, that the Tupis drove these earlier residents to the shores of the northern ocean.[194]

In frequent contiguity with the Tupis was another stock, also widely dispersed through Brazil, called the Tapuyas, of whom the Botocudos in eastern Brazil are the most prominent tribe. To them also belong the Ges nations, south of the lower Amazon, and others. They are on a low grade of culture, going quite naked, not cultivating the soil, ignorant of pottery, and with poorly made canoes. They are dolichocephalic, and must have inhabited the country for a long time, as the skulls found in the caves at Lagoa Santa, in connection with the bones of extinct animals, are identical in form with those of the Botocudos, and probably belonged to their ancestors.