Instead of beef, therefore, he contents himself with fish, and occasionally a steak from the great tapir, or a griskin of manati. Birds, too, furnish him with an occasional meal; but the staple article of his flesh diet is obtained from the quadrumana,—the numerous species of monkeys with which his forests abound. These he obtains by shooting them down from the trees with his bow and arrows, and also by various other hunting devices.
His mode of cooking them is sufficiently peculiar to be described. A large log fire is first kindled and permitted to burn until a sufficient quantity of red cinders are produced. Over these cinders a grating is erected with green saplings of wood, laid parallel to each other like the bars of a gridiron, and upon this the “joint” is laid.
Nothing is done to the monkey before its being placed on the gridiron. Its skin is not removed, and even the intestines are not always taken out. The fire will singe off the hair sufficiently to content a Mundrucu stomach, and the hide is broiled and eaten with the flesh. It is thus literally “carne con cuero.”
It may be observed that this forest gridiron, or “barbecue,” as it is properly termed, is not an idea exclusively confined to South America. It is in use among the Indians of the north, and various uncivilized tribes in other parts of the world.
Sometimes the Mundrucu does not take the trouble to construct the gridiron. When on the march in some warlike expedition that will not allow time for being particular about the mode of cooking, the joint is broiled upon a spit over the common fire. The spit is simply a stick, sharpened at both ends, one of which impales the monkey, and the other is stuck into the ground. The stick is then set with a lean towards the fire, so as to bring the carcass over the blaze. While on the spit the monkey appears in a sitting position, with its head upward, and its long tail hanging along the sapling,—just as if it were still living, and in one of its most natural attitudes, clinging to the branch of a tree! The sight is sufficiently comical; but sometimes a painful spectacle has been witnessed,—painful to any one but a savage: when the young of the monkey has been captured along with its dam, and still recognizing the form of its parent,—even when all the hair has been singed off, and the skin has become calcined by the fire,—is seen rushing forward into the very flames, and with plaintive cry inviting the maternal embrace! Such an affecting incident has been often witnessed amid the forests of Amazonia.
We conclude our sketch of the Mundrucus, by stating that their form of government is despotic, though not to an extreme degree. The “tushao,” or chief, has considerable power, though it is not absolute, and does not extend to the taking of life,—unless the object of his displeasure be a slave, and many of these are held in abject bondage among the Mundrucus.
The Mundrucu religion resembles that of many other tribes both in North and South America. It consists in absurd ceremonies, and appeals to the good and evil spirits of the other world, and is mixed up with a vast deal of quackery in relation to the ills that afflict the Mundrucu in this life. In other words, it is a combination of the priest and doctor united in one, that arch-charlatan known to the North-American Indians as the “Medicine-man,” and among the Mundrucus as the “Puge.”
THE CENTAURS OF THE “GRAN CHACO.”
I have elsewhere stated that a broad band of independent Indian territory—that is, territory never really subdued or possessed by the Spaniards—traverses the interior of South America, extending longitudinally throughout the whole continent. Beginning at Cape Horn, it ends in the peninsula of the free Goajiros, which projects into the Caribbean Sea,—in other words, it is nearly 5,000 miles in length. In breadth it varies much. In Patagonia and a portion of the Pampas country it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and it is of still wider extent on the latitude of the Amazon river, where the whole country, from the Atlantic to the Peruvian Andes,—with the exception of some thinly-placed Brazilian settlements,—is occupied by tribes of independent Indians. At either point this territory will appear—upon maps—to be interrupted by tracts of country possessing civilized settlements. The names of towns and villages are set as thickly as if the country were well peopled; and numerous roads are traced, forming a labyrinthine network upon the paper. A broad belt of this kind extends from the Lower Parana (La Plata) to the Andes of Chili, constituting the upper provinces of the “Argentine Confederation;” another apparently joins the settlements of Bolivia and Brazil and again in the north, the provinces of Venezuela appear to be united to those of New Granada.