During the rainy season the swollen Orinoco, like the Amazons and other great streams, frequently undermines the trees on his banks, and carries them along on his turbid waters. These natural floats, covered with a profusion of parasites and climbing plants, form so many swimming islands, pleasing to the eye, but extremely dangerous to navigation; for woe to the pirogue which at night is caught in their intricate network of roots and branches! When the Indians wish to surprise a hostile horde they bind several canoes together and, concealing them under a covering of herbs and foliage, thus imitate the natural floats of the Orinoco.
Lurking, like murderous reptiles, under a canopy of verdure, the current carries them towards the unsuspecting objects of their stratagem, and they send forth the poisoned dart ere the enemy is aware of their approach. How happy might all these nations be if they would but apply to the arts of peace and improvement, the intelligence they waste upon the purposes of war!
Where the hordes are so small and the causes of destruction so great, it cannot be wondered at that whole tribes die away like single families, and come to be numbered among the beings of the past. Thus the Atures, who gave their name to the far-famed cataracts of the Upper Orinoco, are now no more, and, strange to say, the last words of their language were heard from the lips not of the last survivor of their race, but from those of a parrot. The Atures are also interesting from their careful mode of sepulture, in a burial cavern thus described by Humboldt: ‘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 Atariupe opens itself. 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. We soon reckoned in the tomb of a whole extinct tribe nearly six hundred skeletons, well preserved, and so regularly placed that it would have been difficult to make an error in their number. Every skeleton reposes in a sort of basket made of the petioles of the palm tree. These baskets, which the natives call mapurès, have the form of a square bag; their sizes are proportioned to the age of the dead; there are some for infants cut off the moment of their birth: we saw them from ten inches to three feet long, the skeletons in them being bent together. The bones, not one of which is wanting, have been prepared in three different manners, either whitened in the air and the sun, or dyed red with arnatto, or, like real mummies, varnished with odoriferous resins, and enveloped in leaves of the heliconia or plantain tree. The Indians related to us that the fresh corpse is placed in damp ground, in order that the flesh remaining on the bone may be scraped off with sharp stones. Several hordes in Guiana still observe this custom. Earthern vases, half-baked, are found near the mapurès or baskets; they appear to contain the bones of the same family. The largest of the vases, or funeral urns, are three feet high and five feet and a half long. Their colour is greenish-grey, and their oval form is sufficiently pleasing to the eye, The handles are made in the shape of crocodiles or serpents; the edge is ornamented with meanders, labyrinths, and straight lines variously combined.’ When the reverence paid to the dead thus called forth the first germs of art, there surely must have been affectionate feelings of regret and sorrow, which raised the Atures above the level of mere callous savages, and add a melancholy interest to their extinction.
The Indians of the Amazons valley appear to be much superior, both physically and intellectually, to those of South Brazil and of most other parts of South America. Their superb figures generally equal the finest statues in beauty of outline; their broad chests exhibit a splendid series of convex undulations without a hollow in any part of it. The sons of a delicious climate, their bodies, invigorated by exercise, and enjoying from infancy an unconstrained liberty of action, show the perfection to which the human form may attain when circumstances favour its development. Such is the number of their tribes that Mr. Wallace enumerates no less than thirty along the bank of the River Uaupes, one of the tributaries of the Rio Negro, having almost all of them some peculiarities of language and custom, but all going under the general name of Uaupes, and distinguishing themselves as a body from the inhabitants of other rivers.
All these tribes construct their dwellings after one plan, which is peculiar to them. Their houses, formed in the shape of a parallelogram with a semicircle at one end, are the abode of numerous families, sometimes of a whole tribe. The roof is supported on the columnar trunks of palm trees. In the centre a clear opening is left, twenty feet wide, and on the sides are little partitions of palm-leaf thatch, dividing off rooms for the several families. These houses are built with much labour and skill; the main supports, beams, rafters, and other parts, are straight, well-proportioned to the strength required, and bound together with split creepers, in a manner that a sailor would admire. The thatch is of the leaf of some one of the numerous palms so well adapted to the purpose, and is laid on with great compactness and regularity. The walls, which are very low, are formed also of palm-thatch, but so thick and so well bound together that neither arrow nor bullet will penetrate it. At the gable end is a large doorway, from the top of which hangs a palm mat, supported by a pole during the day, and let down at night. A smaller door at the semicircular end is the private entrance of the chief, to whom this part of the house exclusively belongs. The furniture consists principally of hammocks, made of string twisted from the fibres of the leaves of the Mauritia flexuosa, of pots and cooking utensils made of baked clay, and of great quantities of small saucer-shaped baskets.
Tattooing is very little practised by the Uaupes; they all, however, have a row of circular punctures along the arm, and one tribe, the Tucanos, are distinguished from the rest by three vertical blue lines on the chin. They also pierce the lower lip, through which they hang three little threads of white beads. All the tribes bore their ears, and wear in them little pieces of grass ornamented with feathers. The Cobeus alone expand the hole to so large a size that a bottle cork could be inserted. The dead are almost always buried in the houses, but several tribes have the horrid custom of disinterring the corpse about a month after the funeral, and putting it in a great oven over the fire till all the volatile parts are driven off with an intolerable stench. The black carbonaceous mass which remains is then pounded into a fine powder and mixed in several large vats of caxiri, or maize-beer. This is drunk by the assembled company till all is finished, for they imagine that thus the virtues of the deceased will be transmitted to the drinkers.
The belief, which is also common among the Negroes, that death in the prime of life does not proceed from a natural cause, but is owing to the evil practices of some enemy, leads to the same fatal consequences. Some poison given at a festival in a bowl of caxiri is generally used to avenge the dead; this is of course again retaliated—on perhaps the wrong party—and thus a long succession of murders may result from what at first was a mere groundless suspicion.
The Macus, one of the lowest and most uncivilised tribes of Indians in the Amazons district, lead a vagrant life similar to that of the African Bushmen, but with this advantage—that they have greater facility in procuring food, and live in a country abounding in water. They have no fixed place of abode, but sleep at night on a bundle of palm leaves, or stick up a few leaves to make a shed if it rains, or sometimes with bush-ropes construct a rude hammock, which, however, serves only once. They eat all kinds of birds, and fish, roasted or boiled in palm spathes, and all sorts of wild fruits. They have little or no iron, and use the tusks of the wild pig to scrape and form their bows and arrows, which they anoint with poison. As the Bushmen do with their neighbours, they often attack the houses of other Indians, situated in solitary places, and are consequently equally detested by the surrounding tribes.
On the banks of the Purus we find the Purupurus, who are almost all afflicted with a cutaneous disease, consisting in the body being spotted and blotched with white, brown, or nearly black patches of irregular size and shape, and having a very disagreeable appearance. When young their skins are clear, but as they grow up they invariably become more or less spotted. Their houses are of the rudest construction, like those of our gipsies, and so small as to be set up on the sandy beaches and carried away in their canoes whenever they wish to move. These canoes are likewise extremely primitive, having a flat bottom and upright sides—a mere square box, and quite unlike those of all other Indians. But what distinguishes them yet more from their neighbours is that they use neither the blow-pipe nor bow and arrow, but have an instrument called a ‘palheta,’ which is a piece of wood with a projection at the end, to secure the base of the arrow, the middle of which is held with the handle of the palheta in the hand, and thus thrown as from a sling; they have a surprising dexterity in the use of this weapon, and with it readily kill game, birds, and fish. They sleep in their houses, on the sandy beaches, making no hammocks nor clothing of any kind; they make no fire in their houses, which are too small, but are kept warm in the night by the number of persons in them. In the wet season, when the banks of the river are all flooded, they construct rafts of trunks of trees bound together with creepers, and on them erect their huts, and live there till the waters fall again, when they guide their raft to the first sandy beach that appears.
In the country between the Tapajoz and the Madeira, among the labyrinths of lakes and channels of the great island of the Tupinambranos, reside the Mandrucus, the most warlike Indians of the Amazons. These are probably the only perfectly tattooed nation in South America. The markings are extended all over the body; they are produced by pricking with the spines of a palm, and rubbing in the soot from burning pitch, to produce an indelible bluish tinge.