Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

Speaking of the Indians who inhabited the llanos and the banks of such rivers as the Casanare and the Meta, he declares they were as numerous as the sands of the seashore and the stars of heaven. During more than three weeks spent in the valley of the Meta, we saw but one small encampment of wild Indians—Indios bravos—about midway between Cariben and Orocué. They greeted us in a friendly manner and seemed to be a very harmless people. They were Guahibos, those merciless savages who, we were assured, would be lying in ambush awaiting our arrival, prepared to assail us with a shower of poisoned arrows, preparatory to serving us up at one of their cannibalistic feasts.

As to the monkeys, skipping from tree to tree along the Meta, and exciting the admiration of the traveler by their antics and grimaces, he avers that their number is an embarrassment to the arrows directed against them. Yet, although we were daily on the lookout for these interesting animals, as well as for others popularly supposed to exist in countless numbers along the rivers and in the forests of Venezuela and Colombia, we never got a glimpse of even a single specimen of any of the quadrumanous tribes.[9]

Padre Rivero was probably the first to give an account of that curious custom—the Couvade—which prevailed among the Indian tribes with whom he was acquainted. As is known, this extraordinary custom has, at one time or another, obtained in all quarters of the globe—in Asia, Africa, in Europe as well as in North and South America. Marco Polo found evidence of it during his travels in the Orient. It is, however, in South America that it is most prevalent and where the prescriptions connected with it are most scrupulously observed. And it was the early missionaries who have furnished us with the most interesting data regarding this widespread custom, and which, according to recent travelers, is still as prevalent in certain parts of South America as it was generations ago.

“It is a ridiculous thing,” says Rivero, “of which I am about to speak, but it is nevertheless a reality. It is this. When a woman gives birth to a child, it is the husband that is to receive the care and attention given on such occasions and not the miserable woman. Scarcely is the child born, when the husband, with the behavior of one who has escaped from a grave mischance, goes to bed complaining as if he were ill. The wife then bestows on him the most tender care, as if on this the welfare of the home depended. As a reason for these superstitious practices and ridiculous ceremonies, they assert that, if during this time they should go walking, they would trample on the head of the infant; if they should chop wood, they would cleave the child’s head; if they should shoot birds in the mountain, they would infallibly shoot the newly born. And so is it with other foolish things of a similar character which they firmly believe.”[10]

The time during which the father must keep to his bed, or hammock, varies from a few days to several weeks. In some tribes it is longer than in others. During this season and even for months afterwards some articles of food are quite tabooed. He must then abstain from certain kinds of birds or fish, “firmly believing that this would injure the child’s stomach, and that it would participate in the natural faults of the animals on which the father had fed. If, for example, the father ate turtle, the child would be deaf and have no brains, like this animal; if he ate manatee, the child would have little round eyes like this creature.” Again, if he eats the flesh of a waterhaas—Capybara—a large rodent with very protruding teeth—the teeth of the child will grow like those of this animal; or if he eats the flesh of the spotted labba, the child’s skin will become spotted. Among some tribes the father is forbidden to bathe, to smoke, or to use snuff, or even to scratch himself with his finger nails. In their place he must employ “for this purpose a splinter, specially provided, from the mid-rib of a cokerite palm.”

Dobrizhoffer, a noted missionary in Paraguay, in his very interesting History of the Abipones, is even more explicit about this superstitious practice. “No sooner,” he says, “do you hear that the wife has borne a child, than you will see the Abipone husband lying in bed, huddled up with mats and skins, lest some rude breath of air should touch him, fasting, kept in private, and for a number of days abstaining religiously from certain viands. You would swear it was he who had had the child.... They are fully persuaded that the sobriety and quiet of the father is effectual for the well-being of the new-born offspring and even necessary.... And they believe, too, that the father’s carelessness influences the new-born offspring, from a natural bond and sympathy between both. Hence if the child comes to a premature end, its death is attributed by the women to the father’s intemperance, this or that cause being assigned. Among these would be that he did not abstain from meat, that he had loaded his stomach with waterhog, that he had swum across the river when the air was chilly, that he had neglected to shave off his long eye-brows, that he had devoured underground honey, stamping on the bees with his feet, that he had ridden till he was tired and sweated. With ravings like this the crowd of women accuse the father with impunity of causing the child’s death and are accustomed to pour curses on the unoffending husband.”[11]

The whole subject of the couvade opens up many interesting questions for the ethnologist, and its careful study may be productive of much valuable information regarding the early races of mankind. For the student of linguistics and folklore, there is still among the little known tribes of Eastern Colombia a broad and rich field for research concerning the languages, customs and traditions of these people, and the works of the early missionaries are replete with the most precious data respecting them.[12]

As we quietly sailed up the broad forest-clad Meta, we could not help harking back to the distant past, when, ever and anon, along its banks were to be seen the smiling homes and villages of happy Indians under the watchful eye and protecting arm of their “father priest,” and comparing it with the present desolate and deserted land that for days at a time does not exhibit the slightest trace of a human habitation.

Then, in the beautiful language of Colombia’s great lyric poet, D. José Joaquin Ortíz, “One clime and one region was not sufficient for the ardor that inflamed the breasts of the holy disciples of Christ. They will go to enkindle the pure flame of love in the breast of the savage, at the same time teaching him the arts of peace in the immense solitudes which are fertilized by the Arauca, and the Meta and the Casanare and the torrential Upia. They will scale the ever-precipitous throne of the deafening storm, and will finally hear the canticle sounding in praise of the redeeming cross, in as many tongues and by as many tribes as people my native land from the West to the East.”

And then, too, was to be seen one of those charming gatherings so beautifully pictured by our own Longfellow in “The Children of the Lord’s Supper”—“Thus all the children of the Mission hasten, at the sound of the bell, to gather about the cross, which is raised on high, and to approach near the venerable man who with his silver locks towers above so many infantile heads. Oh, neither Plato nor Socrates, famous in the annals of knowledge, after long years of continuous vigils, ever knew what these poor, ingenuous children learnt from the tremulous lips of the old man at the foot of a tree-trunk in the forest.”[13]