The Naturalist on the River Amazons

by Henry Walter Bates

A small creek traversed the forest behind John Aracu’s house, and entered the river a few yards from our anchoring place; I used to cross it twice a day, on going and returning from my hunting ground. One day early in September, I noticed that the water was two or three inches higher in the afternoon than it had been in the morning. This phenomenon was repeated the next day, and in fact daily, until the creek became dry with the continued subsidence of the Cuparí, the time of rising shifting a little from day to day. I pointed out the circumstance to John Aracú, who had not noticed it before (it was only his second year of residence in the locality), but agreed with me that it must be the “maré”; yes, the tide! the throb of the great oceanic pulse felt in this remote corner, 530 miles distant from the place where it first strikes the body of fresh water at the mouth of the Amazons. I hesitated at first at this conclusion, but in reflecting that the tide was known to be perceptible at Obydos, more than 400 miles from the sea, that at high water in the dry season a large flood from the Amazons enters the mouth of the Tapajos, and that there is but a very small difference of level between that point and the Cuparí, a fact shown by the absence of current in the dry season. I could have no doubt that this conclusion was a correct one.

The fact of the tide being felt 530 miles up the Amazons, passing from the main stream to one of its affluents 380 miles from its mouth, and thence to a branch in the third degree, is a proof of the extreme flatness of the land which forms the lower part of the Amazonian valley. This uniformity of level is shown also in the broad lake-like expanses of water formed near their mouths by the principal affluents which cross the valley to join the main river.

August 21st.—John Aracú consented to accompany me to the falls with one of his men to hunt and fish for me. One of my objects was to obtain specimens of the hyacinthine macaw, whose range commences on all the branch rivers of the Amazons which flow from the south through the interior of Brazil, with the first cataracts. We started on the 19th; our direction on that day being generally southwest. On the 20th, our course was southerly and southeasterly. This morning (August 21st) we arrived at the Indian settlement, the first house of which lies about thirty-one miles above the sitio of John Aracú. The river at this place is from sixty to seventy yards wide, and runs in a zigzag course between steep clayey banks, twenty to fifty feet in height. The houses of the Mundurucús, to the number of about thirty, are scattered along the banks for a distance of six or seven miles. The owners appear to have chosen all the most picturesque sites—tracts of level ground at the foot of wooded heights, or little havens with bits of white sandy beach—as if they had an appreciation of natural beauty. Most of the dwellings are conical huts, with walls of framework filled in with mud and thatched with palm leaves, the broad eaves reaching halfway to the ground. Some are quadrangular, and do not differ in structure from those of the semi-civilised settlers in other parts; others are open sheds or ranchos. They seem generally to contain not more than one or two families each.

At the first house, we learnt that all the fighting men had this morning returned from a two days’ pursuit of a wandering horde of savages of the Parárauáte tribe, who had strayed this way from the interior lands and robbed the plantations. A little further on we came to the house of the Tushaúa, or chief, situated on the top of a high bank, which we had to ascend by wooden steps. There were four other houses in the neighbourhood, all filled with people. A fine old fellow, with face, shoulders, and breast tattooed all over in a cross-bar pattern, was the first strange object that caught my eye. Most of the men lay lounging or sleeping in their hammocks. The women were employed in an adjoining shed making farinha, many of them being quite naked, and rushing off to the huts to slip on their petticoats when they caught sight of us. Our entrance aroused the Tushaúa from a nap; after rubbing his eyes he came forward and bade us welcome with the most formal politeness, and in very good Portuguese. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, well-made man, apparently about thirty years of age, with handsome regular features, not tattooed, and a quiet good-humoured expression of countenance. He had been several times to Santarem and once to Pará, learning the Portuguese language during these journeys. He was dressed in shirt and trousers made of blue-checked cotton cloth, and there was not the slightest trace of the savage in his appearance or demeanour. I was told that he had come into the chieftainship by inheritance, and that the Cuparí horde of Mundurucús, over which his fathers had ruled before him, was formerly much more numerous, furnishing 300 bows in time of war. They could now scarcely muster forty; but the horde has no longer a close political connection with the main body of the tribe, which inhabits the banks of the Tapajos, six days’ journey from the Cuparí settlement.

I spent the remainder of the day here, sending Aracú and the men to fish, whilst I amused myself with the Tushaúa and his people. A few words served to explain my errand on the river; he comprehended at once why white men should admire and travel to collect the beautiful birds and animals of his country, and neither he nor his people spoke a single word about trading, or gave us any trouble by coveting the things we had brought. He related to me the events of the preceding three days. The Parárauátes were a tribe of intractable savages, with whom the Mundurucús have been always at war. They had no fixed abode, and of course made no plantations, but passed their lives like the wild beasts, roaming through the forest, guided by the sun; wherever they found themselves at night-time there they slept, slinging their bast hammocks, which are carried by the women, to the trees. They cross the streams which lie in their course in bark canoes, which they make on reaching the water, and cast away after landing on the opposite side. The tribe is very numerous, but the different hordes obey only their own chieftains. The Mundurucús of the upper Tapajos have an expedition on foot against them at the present time, and the Tushaúa supposed that the horde which had just been chased from his maloca were fugitives from that direction. There were about a hundred of them—including men, women, and children. Before they were discovered, the hungry savages had uprooted all the macasheira, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane, which the industrious Mundurucús had planted for the season, on the east side of the river. As soon as they were seen they made off, but the Tashaúa quickly got together all the young men of the settlement, about thirty in number, who armed themselves with guns, bows and arrows, and javelins, and started in pursuit. They tracked them, as before related, for two days through the forest, but lost their traces on the further bank of the Cuparitinga, a branch stream flowing from the northeast. The pursuers thought, at one time, they were close upon them, having found the inextinguished fire of their last encampment. The footmarks of the chief could be distinguished from the rest by their great size and the length of the stride. A small necklace made of scarlet beans was the only trophy of the expedition, and this the Tashaúa gave to me.

I saw very little of the other male Indians, as they were asleep in their huts all the afternoon. There were two other tattooed men lying under an open shed, besides the old man already mentioned. One of them presented a strange appearance, having a semicircular black patch in the middle of his face, covering the bottom of the nose and mouth, crossed lines on his back and breast, and stripes down his arms and legs. It is singular that the graceful curved patterns used by the South Sea Islanders are quite unknown amongst the Brazilian red men; they being all tattooed either in simple lines or patches. The nearest approach to elegance of design which I saw was amongst the Tucunas of the Upper Amazons, some of whom have a scroll-like mark on each cheek, proceeding from the corner of the mouth. The taste, as far as form is concerned, of the American Indian, would seem to be far less refined than that of the Tahitian and New Zealander.

To amuse the Tashaúa, I fetched from the canoe the two volumes of Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature. The engravings quite took his fancy, and he called his wives, of whom, as I afterwards learned from Aracú, he had three or four, to look at them; one of them was a handsome girl, decorated with necklace and bracelets of blue beads. In a short time, others left their work, and I then had a crowd of women and children around me, who all displayed unusual curiosity for Indians. It was no light task to go through the whole of the illustrations, but they would not allow me to miss a page, making me turn back when I tried to skip. The pictures of the elephant, camels, orang-otangs, and tigers, seemed most to astonish them; but they were interested in almost everything, down even to the shells and insects. They recognised the portraits of the most striking birds and mammals which are found in their own country; the jaguar, howling monkeys, parrots, trogons, and toucans. The elephant was settled to be a large kind of Tapir; but they made but few remarks, and those in the Mundurucú language, of which I understood only two or three words. Their way of expressing surprise was a clicking sound made with the teeth, similar to the one we ourselves use, or a subdued exclamation, Hm! hm! Before I finished, from fifty to sixty had assembled; there was no pushing or rudeness, the grown-up women letting the young girls and children stand before them, and all behaved in the most quiet and orderly manner possible.

The Mundurucús are perhaps the most numerous and formidable tribe of Indians now surviving in the Amazons region. They inhabit the shores of the Tapajos (chiefly the right bank), from 3° to 7° south latitude, and the interior of the country between that part of the river and the Madeira. On the Tapajos alone they can muster, I was told, 2000 fighting men; the total population of the tribe may be about 20,000. They were not heard of until about ninety years ago, when they made war on the Portuguese settlements, their hosts crossing the interior of the country eastward of the Tapajos, and attacking the establishments of the whites in the province of Maranham. The Portuguese made peace with them in the beginning of the present century, the event being brought about by the common cause of quarrel entertained by the two peoples against the hated Múras. They have ever since been firm friends of the whites. It is remarkable how faithfully this friendly feeling has been handed down amongst the Mundurucús, and spread to the remotest of the scattered hordes. Wherever a white man meets a family, or even an individual of the tribe, he is almost sure to be reminded of this alliance. They are the most warlike of the Brazilian tribes, and are considered also the most settled and industrious; they are not, however, superior in this latter respect to the Jurís and Passés on the Upper Amazons, or the Uapés Indians near the headwaters of the Rio Negro. They make very large plantations of mandioca, and sell the surplus produce, which amounts to, on the Tapajos, from 3000 to 5000 baskets (60 lbs. each) annually, to traders who ascend the river from Santarem between the months of August and January. They also gather large quantities of sarsaparilla, India-rubber, and Tonka beans, in the forests. The traders, on their arrival at the Campinas (the scantily wooded region inhabited by the main body of Mundurucús beyond the cataracts) have first to distribute their wares—cheap cotton cloths, iron hatchets, cutlery, small wares, and cashaça—amongst the minor chiefs, and then wait three or four months for repayment in produce.

A rapid change is taking place in the habits of these Indians through frequent intercourse with the whites, and those who dwell on the banks of the Tapajos now seldom tattoo their children. The principal Tashaúa of the whole tribe or nation, named Joaquim, was rewarded with a commission in the Brazilian army, in acknowledgment of the assistance he gave to the legal authorities during the rebellion of 1835-6. It would be a misnomer to call the Mundurucús of the Cuparí and many parts of the Tapajos savages; their regular mode of life, agricultural habits, loyalty to their chiefs, fidelity to treaties, and gentleness of demeanour, give them a right to a better title. Yet they show no aptitude for the civilised life of towns, and, like the rest of the Brazilian tribes, seem incapable of any further advance in culture. In their former wars they exterminated two of the neighbouring peoples, the Júmas and the Jacarés, and make now an annual expedition against the Parárauátes, and one or two other similar wild tribes who inhabit the interior of the land. Additionally they are sometimes driven by hunger towards the banks of the great rivers to rob the plantations of the agricultural Indians. These campaigns begin in July, and last throughout the dry months; the women generally accompanying the warriors to carry their arrows and javelins. They had the diabolical custom, in former days, of cutting off the heads of their slain enemies, and preserving them as trophies around their houses. I believe this, together with other savage practices, has been relinquished in those parts where they have had long intercourse with the Brazilians, for I could neither see nor hear anything of these preserved heads. They used to sever the head with knives made of broad bamboo, and then, after taking out the brain and fleshy parts, soak it in bitter vegetable oil (andiroba), and expose it for several days over the smoke of a fire or in the sun. In the tract of country between the Tapajos and the Madeira, a deadly war has been for many years carried on between the Mundurucús and the Aráras. I was told by a Frenchman at Santarem, who had visited that part, that all the settlements there have a military organisation. A separate shed is built outside each village, where the fighting men sleep at night, sentinels being stationed to give the alarm with blasts of the Turé on the approach of the Aráras, who choose the night for their onslaughts.

Each horde of Mundurucús has its pajé or medicine man, who is the priest and doctor; he fixes upon the time most propitious for attacking the enemy; exorcises evil spirits, and professes to cure the sick. All illness whose origin is not very apparent is supposed to be caused by a worm in the part affected. This the pajé pretends to extract; he blows on the seat of pain the smoke from a large cigar, made with an air of great mystery by rolling tobacco in folds of Tauarí, and then sucks the place, drawing from his mouth, when he has finished, what he pretends to be the worm. It is a piece of very clumsy conjuring. One of these pajés was sent for by a woman in John Aracu’s family, to operate on a child who suffered much from pains in the head. Senhor John contrived to get possession of the supposed worm after the trick was performed in our presence, and it turned out to be a long white air-root of some plant. The pajé was with difficulty persuaded to operate whilst Senhor John and I were present. I cannot help thinking that he, as well as all others of the same profession, are conscious impostors, handing down the shallow secret of their divinations and tricks from generation to generation. The institution seems to be common to all tribes of Indians, and to be held to more tenaciously than any other.