In a diluted form the wourali poison merely benumbs or stuns the faculties without killing, and is thus made use of by the Indians when they wish to catch an old monkey alive, and tame him for sale. On his falling down senseless, they immediately suck the wound, and wrapping him up in a strait jacket of palm leaves, dose him for a few days with sugar-cane juice or a strong solution of saltpetre. This method generally answers the purpose, but should his stubborn temper not yet be subdued, they hang him up in smoke. Then, after a short time, his useless rage gives way, and his wild eye, assuming a plaintive expression, humbly sues for deliverance. His bonds are now loosened, and even the most unmanageable monkey seems to forget that he ever roamed at liberty in the boundless woods.
It is chiefly on the Camuku mountains in Guiana that the formidable Urari plant is found, whose sombre-coloured, brown-haired leaves and rind seem by their sinister appearance to betray its deadly qualities.
The savage tribes of the South American woods know how to poison their arrows with the juices of various other plants, but none equals this in virulence and certainty of execution, and yearly the Indians of the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, and even of the Amazons, wander to the Camuku mountains to purchase by barter the renowned Urari or Wourali poison of the Macusis. Nature has vouchsafed to these sons of the wilderness an inestimable gift in these venomous juices, which she has instilled in various plants of the forest, for by no other means would they be able to kill the birds and monkeys on whose flesh they chiefly subsist. How, or at what time, they made the discovery of their powers is unknown; at all events the combination of so many means for the attainment of the end in view—the preparation of the poison, the blow-pipe, and the arrows—denotes a high degree of ingenuity.
The tropical Indians are generally as free from the incumbrance of dress as it is possible to conceive, paint seeming to be looked upon as a sufficient clothing. Red, furnished by the pulp of the fruits of the Arnatto, or by the leaves of the Bignonia Chica, is the favourite colour, with which some tribes only besmear their faces, while others, who command a greater abundance of the material, not only paint their whole bodies, but even their canoes, their stools, and other articles of furniture. Red, yellow, and black are sometimes disposed in stripes, or in regular patterns, which it requires much time and patience to draw. The labour bestowed upon these paintings is the more to be wondered at, as a strong rain suffices to efface them. Some nations only paint when they are about to celebrate a festival, others are thus decorated the whole year round, and would be as ashamed to be seen unpainted as a European to appear unclothed.
The use of ornaments and trinkets of various kinds is almost confined to the men. A circlet of parrot and other gaudily-coloured feathers is worn round the head, but generally only on festive occasions. Tattooing is not so general or so elaborate as among the nations of the Malayan race, or the wild aboriginals of Australia.
The religion of the American Indians, if such it may be called, is of the lowest description. Some tribes, indeed, acknowledge a good principle, called Cachimana, who rules the seasons and causes the fruits of the earth to ripen; but, thankless for the benefits they enjoy, they pay far greater reverence to the evil principle, Tolokiamo, who, though not so powerful, is more cunning and active. The forest-Indians can hardly understand church and image worship. ‘Your God,’ they say to the Catholic missionaries, ‘shuts himself up in a house as if he were old and infirm; ours is in the forest, in the fields, in the mountains whence comes the rain.’
The moon is universally considered as the abode of the blessed, as the land of abundance. The Esquimo, for whom a plank thrown by the current on his treeless shore is a treasure, sees in the moon extensive plains covered with forests, while the Indian of the Orinoco perceives in its shining orb grassy savannahs, exempt from all insect plagues. ‘How pleasant it must be to live in the moon,’ said a Salina-Indian to Father Gumilla; ‘she is so beautiful and bright that surely no mosquitos can be there.’ Thus man is always disposed to transfer to some distant spot the seat of a felicity denied to him on earth.
On the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazons no idols are worshipped, but the Botuto, the holy trumpet, is the great object of veneration. The Piaches, priests or medicine-men who have taken it under their care, and who, to be initiated in its mysteries are obliged to submit to fasts, scourging, and other painful or self-denying religious practices, carry it under the palm trees where, as they pretend, its sound ensures a rich harvest for the following year. Sometimes the great spirit Cachimana blows the trumpet himself, at others he makes known his will through the guardians of the sacred instrument. No woman is allowed to see it on pain of death, but hurries away when the sound of it is heard approaching through the woods, and remains invisible till after the ceremony is over, when the instrument is taken away to its hiding-place, and the women come out of their concealment. Some of these Botutos are particularly renowned and venerated by more than one tribe. Sometimes offerings of fruits and palm-wine are deposited near them, and prove, no doubt, very acceptable to the Piaches.
The wild Indians who people the vast forests and llanos of Brazil and Guaiana generally live in small hordes, separated from each other by mutual distrust, and often by open war. Their enmity is aggravated by the circumstance that even the neighbouring tribes speak totally different languages. Though when they first settled along the river-banks of tropical America they probably spoke one tongue; yet, lost in interminable woods, where sometimes a single mountain or a few miles of forest are an almost impervious barrier between hordes which, to communicate with each other, would require a few days’ navigation through a labyrinth of streams, mere dialects in process of time became separate languages, which from their dissimilarity perpetuate discord and hatred. The Indians avoid each other because they do not understand each other, and a mutual distrust and fear is the cause of their mutual animosity. Some of the Orinoco tribes, as for instance the Ottomacas and the Yaruras, are nomadic savages, the outcasts of humanity; others, like the Maquiritani and the Macos, are of milder manners, and live in fixed settlements, on the products of the soil.
The Ottomacas, of whom it is said by other Indians, ‘that there is nothing so disgusting that they will not eat,’ live the greater part of the year on fishes and turtles; but when the Orinoco and its tributaries swell during the periodical rains and render fishing next to impossible, they become ‘dirt-eaters’ and assuage their hunger with an unctuous clay. Such is their predilection for this strange aliment, in which chemistry detects no trace of organic matter, that even in times of abundance they mix some of it with their more nutritious food. The most remarkable fact is that during the two months of the year when they daily devour about three-quarters of a pound of clay, and are restricted to a meagre supply of vegetable or animal provisions, such as lizards, ants, and gum, the Ottomacas still remain healthy and strong, and never complain of indigestion. These barbarians are ugly, wild, vindictive; and besides being passionately fond of palm-wine and maize-spirit, use the powdered pods of a leguminous plant, the Acacia Niopo, as a means of intoxication. The hollow bone of a bird serves as a kind of pipe, through which they sniff up the powder, which is so irritating that a small quantity produces a strong fit of sneezing in those who are not accustomed to it. The effect of the Niopo is to deprive them for a couple of hours of their senses, and to render them furious in battle. Such is their malignant ingenuity that they poison their sharpened thumb-nails with the Wourali, so as to be able to inflict a death-wound with the slightest scratch, and such their tiger-like ferocity that they suck with fiendish delight the blood of their slain enemies. The country these wretches inhabit is described as romantically beautiful, a mournful contrast to a state of society where man is eternally armed against man. Such is the miserable state of insecurity of the weaker tribes that, when they approach a river’s bank, they carefully destroy with their hands the vestiges of their timid footsteps.