The women are extraordinarily modest in their behaviour. Their eyes rarely leave the ground in the presence of a stranger. I had one woman in my party who never spoke to me, or even looked in my direction, the whole time we were together. After much dancing, I have seen the women, succumbing to dance stimulation, show their preference for certain men in the dancing party by placing their hands on their shoulders, an act in obedience to the impulse of the moment. In fact after dancing for a length of time they become comparatively boisterous and irresponsible. But even at the height of excitement there is nothing markedly rude in the dance, when one allows for the fact that sexual suggestion is not to be included in that category in Indian ethics. Even on this point they have their limitations, for Koch-Grünberg relates that when talking to some Desana Indians on sexual subjects, the conversation was stopped by them till the women were sent away. After their departure the men talked freely and broadly. This I did not remark among the Indians I visited, in fact sexual matters appeared to be discussed freely and lewdly by both sexes, and even by young children.
The Indians under the range of discussion most certainly possess the greatest racial antipathy towards the white man. This is noticeable among the women especially, for they will never admit to their own people if they have ever had any dealing or connection whatsoever with the white man.
Gratitude among Indians is unknown—at least to me. Take this example: I had Indians who had been slaves, who had elected to come with me, or at least had evinced no repugnance at the idea, with whom I had shared all the food at my disposal, stinting myself often to ensure their gratitude—as I thought—caring for them, doctoring and curing them when sick, till eventually I became fond of them. But on the main river at the first opportunity they ran, apparently at the suggestion of one of their own tribe, the Peon of a rubber-gatherer. What arguments were used I know not—perhaps that I was a devil, that my real motive was to fatten them for culinary purposes. The fact remains they left me, to all appearances, willingly.
This stealing of Indians is a well-recognised source of amusement on the Amazon river, and the victims of such loss—who of course perpetrate the same sort of outrage on others directly opportunity permits—are so indolent, so lethargic, that they will not cross a river to recover the stolen. The custom is the more prevalent on account of the character of the Indian. He will always leave one white man to go to another. He is always on the alert to run, to go elsewhere. This is true of Indians enslaved by other Indians, to a limited extent. Unless they are well treated and identified with the tribe they will run, only to be again enslaved by others, or put to death. The matter is hard to explain. It simply is in the blood. It is Pia, as Brown remarked. It is their custom. They do it “just for so.”
Another point about the Indian is that he must always be kept up to the work in hand. The women toil unceasingly, but the men are only too ready to seize any excuse to cry off a job. They spend their time mainly in mooning around. Obtaining food is their chief occupation. But when an Indian is kept up to his work he works hard and well.
Though the Indian attitude at first is invariably stoical they are not lacking in inquisitiveness. Their curiosity was enormously aroused by many of my possessions. It is hard to say what will evoke their wonder. I have seen an Indian evince no interest in a steam-boat, but show the most extraordinary interest in my jackboots, and be greatly occupied with the problem of how I got into them. A walking-stick was an unanswerable conundrum to them, it never occurred to their minds that I could use it as an assistance in walking. My eyeglass, my camera, were mysterious devils that could read into their hearts and filch their souls, as I have already noted. My watch, with an alarm to it, struck consternation to their simple minds. My phonograph, that reproduced records of dancing which were repeated on reversal, raised shouts of wonder. An Indian in a down-river town saw nothing to excite him in a tram, and took a ride thereon quite unconcernedly, but the women’s hats were exciting, and at the sight of a man on a bicycle his astonishment was unbounded: it was “man on spider-web!” Horses are unknown in these regions, and there is no possibility of the majority of the Indians seeing any one on horseback. I could only get a mule as far as the first big river, but beyond the bush became too dense. Otherwise I fancy their amazement would equal that of the Australian natives when they saw the beast come in two on the man dismounting.[409]
Decadent the Indian may be, and thanks mainly to his inveterate cocainism he undoubtedly is, but that he is the degraded descendant of a higher race is a theory that I beg leave to doubt entirely. According to von Martius the standard of ethics rises or falls with the increase or decrease of a tribe. He based his theory on the fact that the most corrupt Coeruna and Nainuma were nearly extinct. It is possible to argue that they were dying out because they were corrupt,[410] rather than they were corrupt because they were dying out. Sir Roger Casement appears to have accepted the theory expounded in Vergangenheit und Zukunft der amerikanischen Menschheit. But Tylor remarks, “I cannot but think that Dr. Martius’ deduction is the absolute reverse of the truth.” Certainly the theory of the Indians’ regression is, I consider, entirely erroneous. I see nothing to suggest it. On the contrary it appeared to me that in spite of the awful handicap of their environment, these tribes were slowly evolving a higher standard of culture. There is no evidence of their having reverted from a higher culture. A people who once knew how to produce fire by friction do not easily forget that method to rely on the clumsy processes of fire-carrying. Men who have smoked tobacco are not very likely to content themselves, nor would their offspring be contented, with merely sucking it. People who knew the simple method of preparing yarn with a spindle would only revert in exceptional cases to the slow and even painful process of rolling fibre on the naked thigh, and that in a land where cotton is abundantly to hand on every side. The tedious method of plaiting and tying by hand would hardly, one imagines, be substituted for weaving. A race that has once worked metal and relapsed to the use of stone without even more exceptional and definite reasons for that relapse, is no more likely in fact than it is recorded—so far as I am aware—in history.
Examples are known of peoples who have forgotten one useful art, for material and utilitarian, or social, or magico-religious reasons; but a people who have allowed some half dozen to disappear is unknown to me. Yet these Indians carry fire, lick tobacco, roll fibre on the thigh, and though they make use of an embryo loom—the two posts between which their hammocks are plaited—have not appreciated its potentialities. Some of the Amazon tribes,[411] though surrounded by canoe-building peoples, can only make rafts; the secret of the dug-out, if ever known to them,[412] has been forgotten. But it is possible that an isolated section of the original canoe-builders—as we have seen these tribes today are all isolated sections—may for some reason have had no need to construct a canoe for such lengths of time that the method of fire-heating and burning, especially of forcing the hot trunk open, had through disuse been at least partially forgotten.[413] Presume that they failed in their attempt to build one for some reason,[414] and it was found that a raft would do momentarily in its place, the original skill and knowledge might easily die out in a generation. Therefore the absence of canoes alone would be no convincing argument. Nor must it be forgotten, as Dr. Rivers has pointed out,[415] that other causes besides defective memory and lack of practice may result in the entire disappearance of even useful arts. But I repeat hardly of so many among all these tribes in common.
Everything points to the conclusion that these tribes found their way to the forest in a very primitive condition. The forest has arrested, it has stunted their growth, but it has not plunged them back from later cultures to the Stone Age. The stones themselves deny it, for stone is not the natural substitute for iron in these regions.[416] Whence the tribes came hither, and when, in whatsoever far back age of our earth’s story, they were a Neolithic people—hardly that, a people emerging from the unsettled conditions of the Paleolithic hunter, agricultural but not yet pastoral, and such they have remained throughout the centuries.