[CHAPTER IX]
THE TROPICAL FORESTS: THE AMAZON AND BRAZIL
I. THE AMAZONS[173]
On his second voyage Columbus began to hear of an island inhabited by rich and warlike women, who permitted occasional visits from men, but endured no permanent residence of males among them. The valour of Carib women, who fought resolutely along with their husbands and brothers gave plausibility to this legend; and soon the myth of an island or country of Amazons became accepted truth, a dogma with wonder-tellers and a lure to adventurers. At first the fabulous island seemed near at hand—"Matenino which lies next to Hispañola on the side toward the Indies"; but as island after island was visited and the fabled women not found, their seat was pushed further and further on, till it came to be thought of as a country lying far in the interior of the continent or—for the notion of its insular nature persisted—as an island somewhere in the course of the great river of the Amazons. By the middle of the sixteenth century, explorers from the north, from the south, from the east, from the west, were all on the lookout for the kingdom of women and all hearing and repeating tales about them with such conviction that, as the Padre de Acuña remarks,[174] "it is not credible that a lie could have been spread throughout so many languages, and so many nations, with such appearance of truth."
In 1540-41 Francisco de Orellana sailed down the Amazon to the sea, hearing tales of the women warriors, and, as his cleric companion, Fray Gaspar Carvajal, is credited with saying, on one occasion encountering some of them; for they fought with Indians who defended themselves resolutely "because they were tributaries of the Amazons," and he, and other Spaniards, saw ten or twelve Amazons fighting in front of the Indians, as if they commanded them ... "very tall, robust, fair, with long hair twisted over their heads, skins round their loins, and bows and arrows in their hands, with which they killed seven or eight Spaniards." The description, in the circumstances described, does not inspire unlimited confidence in the friar's certainty of vision, but there is nothing incredible even in Indian women leading their husbands in combat. Pedro de Magelhães de Gandavo gives a very interesting account[175] (still sixteenth century) of certain Indian women who, as he says, take the vow of chastity, facing death rather than its violation. These women follow no occupation of their sex, but imitate the ways of men, as if they had ceased to be women, going to war and to the hunt along with the men. Each of them, he adds, is served and followed by an Indian woman with whom she says she is married, and they live together like spouses. Parallels for this custom, (and for the reverse, in which men assume the costume, labours, and way of life of women) are to be found far and wide in America,—indeed, to the Arctic Zone. Magelhães de Gandavo is authority, too, for the statement that the coastal tribes of Brazil, like the Carib of the north, have a dual speech, differing for the two sexes, at least in some words; but this is no extremely rare phenomenon.
More truly in the mythical vein is the account given in the tale of the adventures of Ulrich Schmidel. Journeying northward from the city of Asuncion, in a company under the command of Hernando de Ribera, Schmidel and his companions heard tales of the Amazons—whose land of gold and silver, the Indians astutely placed at a two months' journey from their own land. "The Amazons have only one breast," says Schmidel, "and they receive visits from men only twice or thrice a year. If a boy is born to them, they send him to the father; if a girl, they raise her, burning the right breast that it may not grow, to the end that they may the more readily draw the bow, for they are very valiant and make war against their enemies. These women dwell in an isle, which can only be reached by canoes." In the same credulous vein, but with quaintly learned embellishments, is Sir Walter Raleigh's account: "I had knowledge of all the rivers between Orenoque and Amazones, and was very desirous to understand the truth of those warlike women, because of some it is believed, of others not. And though I digress from my purpose, yet I will set down that which hath been delivered me for truth of those women, and I spake with a cacique or lord of people, that told me he had been in the river, and beyond it also. The nations of these women are on the south side of the river in the provinces of Topago, and their chiefest strengths and retracts are in the islands situate on the south side of the entrance some sixty leagues within the mouth of the said river. The memories of the like women are very ancient as well in Africa as in Asia: in Africa these had Medusa for queen: others in Scithia near the rivers of Tanais and Thernodon: we find also that Lampedo and Marethesia were queens of the Amazons: in many histories they are verified to have been, and in divers ages and provinces: but they which are not far from Guiana do accompany with men but once in a year, and for the time of one month, which I gather by their relation, to be in April: and that time all kings of the border assemble, and queens of the Amazons; and after the queens have chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valentines. This one month they feast, dance, and drink of their wines in abundance; and the moon being done, they all depart to their own provinces. If they conceive, and be delivered of a son, they return him to the father; if of a daughter, they nourish it, and retain it: and as many as have daughters send unto the begetters a present: all being desirous to increase their sex and kind: but that they cut off the right dug of the breast, I do not find to be true. It was farther told me, that if in these wars they took any prisoners that they used to accompany with these also at what time soever, but in the end for certain they put them to death: for they are said to be very cruel and bloodthirsty, especially to such as offer to invade their territories. These Amazons have likewise great store of these plates of gold which they recover by exchange chiefly for a kind of green stones, which the Spaniards call Piedras hijadas, and we use for spleen stones: and for the disease of the stone we also esteem them. Of these I saw divers in Guiana: and commonly every king or cacique hath one, which their wives for the most part wear; and they esteem them as great jewels."
The Amazon stone, or piedra de la hijada, came to be immensely valued in Europe for wonderful medicinal effects,—a veritable panacea. Such stones were found treasured by the tribes of northern and north-central South America, passing by barter from people to people. "The form given to them most frequently," wrote Humboldt,[176] "is that of the Babylonian cylinders, longitudinally perforated, and loaded with inscriptions and figures. But this is not the work of the Indians of our day.... The Amazon stones, like the perforated and sculptured emeralds, found in the Cordilleras of New Grenada and Quito, are vestiges of anterior civilization." Later writers and investigators have identified the Amazon stones as green jade, probably the chalchihuitl which formed the esteemed jewel of the Aztecs; and it has been supposed that the centre from which spread the veneration for greenish and bluish stones—chiefly jade and turquoise—was somewhere in Mayan or Nahuatlan territory. Certainly it was widespread, extending from the Pueblos of New Mexico to the land of the Incas, and eastward into Brazil and the Antilles. That the South American tribes should have ascribed the origin of these treasures (at any rate, when questioned) to the Amazons, the treasure women, is altogether plausible. Nearly a century and a half after Raleigh's day, de la Condamine found the green jade stones still employed by the Indians to cure colic and epilepsy,—heirlooms, they said, from their fathers who had received them from the husbandless women. That the Indians themselves have names for the Amazons is not strange—names with such meanings as the Women-Living-Alone, the Husbandless-Women, the Masterful-Women,—for the Europeans have been inquiring about such women ever since their coming; it is, however, worthy of note that Orellana, to whom is credited the first use of "Amazon" as a name for the great river, also heard a native name for the fabulous women; for Aparia, a native chief, after listening to Orellana's discourse on the law of God and the grandeur of the Castillean monarch, asked, as it were in rebuttal, whether Orellana had seen the Amazons, "whom in his language they call Coniapuyara, meaning Great Lord."
Modern investigators ascribe the myth of the Amazons, undeniably widespread at an early date, to various causes. The warlike character of many Indian women, already observed in the first encounters with Carib tribes by Columbus, is still attested by Spruce (1855): "I have myself seen that Indian women can fight ... the women pile up heaps of stones to serve as missiles for the men. If, as sometimes happens, the men are driven back to and beyond their piles of stones, the women defend the latter obstinately, and generally hold them until the men are able to rally to the combat." Another factor in the myth is supposed to have been rumours of the golden splendour of the Incaic empire, with perhaps vague tales of the Vestals of the Sun; and still another is the occurrence of anomalous social and sexual relationships of women, easily exaggerated in passing from tribe to tribe.
A special group of myths of the latter type is of pertinent interest. Ramon Pane and Peter Martyr give an example in the tale of Guagugiana enticing the women away to Matenino. A somewhat similar story is reported by Barboza Rodriguez from the Rio Jamunda: the women, led away by an elder or chief, were accustomed to destroy their male children; but one mother spared her boy, casting him into the water where he lived as a fish by day, returning to visit her at night in human form; and the other women, discovering this, seduced the youth, who was finally disposed of by the jealous old man, whereupon the angry women fled, leaving the chief womanless. A like story is reported by Ehrenreich from Amazonas: The women gather beside the waters, where they make familiar with a water-monster, crocodilean in form, which is slain by the jealous men; then, the women rise in revolt, slay the men through deceit, and fare away on the stream. From Guiana Brett reports a myth on the same theme, the lover being, however, in jaguar form. Very likely the story of Maconaura and Anuanaïtu belongs to the same cycle; and it is of more than passing interest to observe that the story extends, along with the veneration of green and blue stones, to the Navaho and Pueblo tribes of North America, in the cosmogonies of which appears the tale of the revolt of the women, their unnatural relations with a water-monster, and their eventual return to the men.[177]