Venezuela

by Leonard V. Dalton

A powerful tribe occupy the mountains and forests along the Colombian frontier, and these are generally known as the Goajiros. Some of their villages are on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, as at Sinamaica, and are of the pile-dwelling type which first gave rise to the name of the country; most of the tribe, however, live as an independent nation within recognised boundaries.

Both men and women may be seen in Maracaibo on market days, clothed then in the white or blue garments which all keep for contact with civilisation. In their own villages they wear a less elaborate costume. The men are well built, light and agile, with keen and intelligent faces, but the women have the amorphous figures and dull, heavy faces which come of centuries of slavery and drudgery for their menkind. Apparently they are ethnologically a branch of the great Carib group of which we shall have more to say later. As might be surmised from the fact of their independence, the Goajiros are vigorous and warlike, and incidentally excellent horsemen.

Their territory extends from Rio Hacha, in Colombia, down into the Goajira peninsula, and across the Venezuelan border to within eight or ten miles of Sinamaica. The boundary is guarded by military pickets, and most of their trading is done on the frontier, merchants travelling to this point from all sides.

They live in small villages made up of round thatched houses, which at a distance look like so many ant-hills; the floor inside is strewn with grass, and on this the women and children work and sleep; the men spend much of their time in hammocks slung from the rafters. They are more fond of fighting than of working, but in civilised regions they are peaceable, and make excellent boatmen, while from their secluded homes they go out hunting and fishing, and are famous for the horses and mules which they breed. Their fields are tended by the womenfolk or by the slaves taken from neighbouring tribes in battle, and are of exceptionally large size, sown with yuca or manioc, potatoes and maize; they have banana plantations, but apparently have never cultivated cocoa or coffee.

In their homes the less wealthy members of the tribe wear the guayuco, or small apron, of different patterns, common to all the Venezuelan Indians, but some have good cloth clothing, trousers and jacket, with embroidered white shawls or blankets for the men and long mantles or knee-high tunics for the women. Nearly all the men carry firearms of modern patterns.

Each village has its cacique or headman, but they acknowledge the suzerainty of a temporal chief or king living in Tunja, and a supreme spiritual prince or pope in Iraca. Like the ancient Incas, who possibly influenced them and helped to make them what they are, they worship the sun, but little is known of their modes of worship or religious festivals.

If one of the tribe dies at home his body is buried in his cattle-pen, or where he may have been most frequently found in his lifetime, his clothing and weapons being interred with him for use in the happy hunting grounds to which he is shortly to depart. Their belief is, however, that for about twenty-four hours after death the spirit remains near its dwelling, and therefore they keep up a kind of lyke-wake all day, not to mourn for the departed but to wish him good hunting and to speed him on his way to the next world. At sunset his spirit departs, no more to return.

Along with their sun-worship is a belief in a good and evil principle in Nature, residing in the spirits of the wood, streams, rain, thunder, and so forth. Probably this represents the original animism of the nation before their contact with the Incas. From this animism arises the custom of exorcising evil spirits from the bodies of the sick. The sufferer is shielded by a curtain from the rest of the hut, and the medicine-man, clothed in a long white mantle or blanket, first massages the patient till both perspire freely, then flagellates himself till the blood flows, and finally, casting a powder into the fire, which sends up clouds of blue smoke, dances himself into convulsions, until from sheer exhaustion he sinks to the ground, covered with the white mantle; the fire is allowed to die down, and the sick man and his doctor are left alone in the darkness and silence.

As we have said, these Goajiros appear to be a family of the Carib group, but while they remain where they were at the time of the conquest, their relations eastward have been driven southwards or absorbed by the white races, just as they themselves at an earlier date drove back the aborigines, who now, with them, people the forests of Guayana.