Oregon and Eldorado; or, Romance of the Rivers

by Thomas Bulfinch

MAMELUCOS, OR HALF-BREEDS.

"We landed at one of the cacao-plantations. The house was substantially built; the walls formed of strong, upright posts, lathed across, plastered with mud, and whitewashed; and the roof tiled. The family were Mamelucos, or offspring of the European and the Indian. They seemed to be an average sample of the poorer class of cacao-growers. All were loosely dressed, and barefooted. A broad veranda extended along one side of the house, the floor of which was simply the well-trodden earth; and here hammocks were slung between the bare upright supports, a large rush-mat being spread on the ground, upon which the stout, matron-like mistress, with a tame parrot perched upon her shoulder, sat sewing with two pretty-looking mulatto-girls. The master, coolly clad in shirt and drawers, the former loose about his neck, lay in his hammock, smoking a long gaudily painted wooden pipe. The household utensils—earthenware jars, water-pots, and sauce-pans—lay at one end, near which was a wood-fire, with the ever-ready coffee-pot simmering on the top of a clay tripod. A large shed stood a short distance off, embowered in a grove of banana, papaw, and mango trees; and under it were the troughs, ovens, sieves, and other apparatus, for the preparation of mandioc. The cleared space around the house was only a few yards in extent: beyond it lay the cacao-plantations, which stretched on each side parallel to the banks of the river. There was a path through the forest, which led to the mandioc-fields, and, several miles beyond, to other houses on the banks of an interior channel. We were kindly received, as is always the case when a stranger visits these out-of-the-way habitations; the people being invariably civil and hospitable. We had a long chat, took coffee; and, on departing, one of the daughters sent a basketful of oranges, for our use, down to the canoe."

MÚRA INDIANS.

"On the 9th of January, we arrived at Matari, a miserable little settlement of Múra Indians. Here we again anchored, and went ashore. The place consisted of about twenty slightly built mud-hovels, and had a most forlorn appearance, notwithstanding the luxuriant forest in its rear. The absence of the usual cultivated trees and plants gave the place a naked and poverty-stricken aspect. I entered one of the hovels, where several women were employed cooking a meal. Portions of a large fish were roasting over a fire made in the middle of the low chamber; and the entrails were scattered about the floor, on which the women, with their children, were squatted. These had a timid, distrustful expression of countenance; and their bodies were begrimed with black mud, which is smeared over the skin as a protection against musquitoes. The children were naked: the women wore petticoats of coarse cloth, stained in blotches with murixi, a dye made from the bark of a tree. One of them wore a necklace of monkey's teeth. There were scarcely any household utensils: the place was bare, with the exception of two dirty grass hammocks hung in the corners. I missed the usual mandioc-sheds behind the house, with their surrounding cotton, cacao, coffee, and lemon trees. Two or three young men of the tribe were lounging about the low, open doorway. They were stoutly-built fellows, but less well-proportioned than the semi-civilized Indians of the Lower Amazons generally are. The gloomy savagery, filth, and poverty of the people in this place made me feel quite melancholy; and I was glad to return to the canoe."

MARAUÁ TRIBE.

A pleasanter picture is presented by the Indians of the Marauá tribe. Our traveller thus describes a visit to them:—

"Our longest trip was to some Indian houses, a distance of fifteen or eighteen miles up the Sapó; a journey made with one Indian paddler, and occupying a whole day. The stream is not more than forty or fifty yards broad: its waters are dark in color, and flow, as in all these small rivers, partly under shade, between two lofty walls of forest. We passed, in ascending, seven habitations, most of them hidden in the luxuriant foliage of the banks; their sites being known only by small openings in the compact wall of forest, and the presence of a canoe or two tied up in little shady ports. The inhabitants are chiefly Indians of the Marauá tribe, whose original territory comprises all the by-streams lying between the Jutahí and the Juruá, near the mouths of both these great tributaries. They live in separate families, or small hordes; have no common chief; and are considered as a tribe little disposed to adopt civilized customs, or be friendly with the whites. One of the houses belonged to a Jurí family; and we saw the owner, an erect, noble-looking old fellow, tattooed, as customary with his tribe, in a large patch over the middle of his face, fishing, under the shade of a colossal tree, with hook and line. He saluted us in the usual grave and courteous manner of the better sort of Indians as we passed by.

"We reached the last house, or rather two houses, about ten o'clock, and spent there several hours during the heat of the day. The houses, which stood on a high, clayey bank, were of quadrangular shape, partly open, like sheds, and partly enclosed with rude, mud walls, forming one or two chambers. The inhabitants, a few families of Marauás, received us in a frank, smiling manner. None of them were tattooed: but the men had great holes pierced in their ear-lobes, in which they insert plugs of wood; and their lips were drilled with smaller holes. One of the younger men, a fine, strapping fellow, nearly six feet high, with a large aquiline nose, who seemed to wish to be particularly friendly to me, showed me the use of these lip-holes, by fixing a number of little sticks in them, and then twisting his mouth about, and going through a pantomime to represent defiance in the presence of an enemy.

"We left these friendly people about four o'clock in the afternoon, and, in descending the umbrageous river, stopped, about half-way down, at another house, built in one of the most charming situations I had yet seen in this country. A clean, narrow, sandy pathway led from the shady port to the house, through a tract of forest of indescribable luxuriance. The buildings stood on an eminence in the middle of a level, cleared space; the firm, sandy soil, smooth as a floor, forming a broad terrace round them. The owner was a semi-civilized Indian, named Manoel; a dull, taciturn fellow, who, together with his wife and children, seemed by no means pleased at being intruded on in their solitude. The family must have been very industrious; for the plantations were very extensive, and included a little of almost all kinds of cultivated tropical productions,—fruit-trees, vegetables, and even flowers for ornament. The silent old man had surely a fine appreciation of the beauties of Nature; for the site he had chosen commanded a view of surprising magnificence over the summits of the forest; and, to give a finish to the prospect, he had planted a large number of banana-trees in the foreground, thus concealing the charred and dead stumps which would otherwise have marred the effect of the rolling sea of greenery. The sun set over the tree-tops before we left this little Eden; and the remainder of our journey was made slowly and pleasantly, under the checkered shade of the river banks, by the light of the moon."

THE FOREST.