The principal unfermented drinks made by these tribes are prepared from manioc, and from various fruits. The first is made from the grated manioc by merely squeezing out and boiling the water, and is thus a by-product of cassava in the making. This leaves a sweet drink, which is certainly insipid and is not considered to be healthy. The moisture squeezed out of the “squeezer” is boiled and boiled again into a rather thick drink. This is used more as a sauce into which cassava is dipped than as a “clean” drink. It still contains, I believe, a minute percentage of hydrocyanic acid.
Another beverage is prepared from roasted pines. The juice is squeezed out, and this liquid extract is ready to drink without further process. Plantains, bananas, and other fruits, grated and mixed with starch obtained from the manioc tubers, are boiled and flavoured with local spices to make another concoction. A thick yellow liquid prepared from the Patana palm is the national drink of all these Indians, except the Menimehe and Kuretu, who make fermented drinks from pine fruit. The Patana fruit is boiled and broken with the hand in water, so as to mix up the pulp and allow the heavy skins to fall to the bottom of the pot. These and any fleshy remainder are strained away in a sieve, and cassava flour is added to the liquid, which is drunk while warm. This drink is known as patana-yukise in lingoa-geral. There is a vegetable milk that is consumed by the Indians, which I take to be the cow-tree milk mentioned by other travellers.[193] I do not think it is very plentiful in these regions, and for my own part never saw nor tasted it. It is a creamy, sticky fluid, obtained by lacerating the bark, that can be drunk when fresh. I am certain these tribes do not use it for any cooking purposes, and do not think it is ever stored in their houses, but is only drunk in the forest from the tree.
There are intoxicating drinks among the Menimehe and the tribes north of the Japura, but among some of these northern tribes the men drink caapi,[194] which is strongly erotic. I would suggest that caapi is unknown to the tribes south of the Japura, except probably to their medicine-men. It would account for the frenzy of the latter when diagnosing disease, and so forth, which quite corresponds with the descriptions given by Spruce of the effect of caapi.[195]
The plant from which caapi is prepared is grown in plantations by Indians on the Uaupes and Issanna rivers,[196] and by other Rio Negro tribes. The drink is made from the stem, mixed in a mortar by the Uaupes Indians with the roots of the painted caapi.[197] The pounded mass is rubbed through a sieve, and water is then added. Women are not even allowed to touch the vessel that contains the caapi. This intoxicating liquor is unknown to me, but I heard that the Karahone and other tribes had this strong drink. Though known on the Uaupes to all the tribes it is said to have only a confined use on the Rio Negro.
Other drinks that are to be found north of the Japura are prepared from fermented maize, and manioc.[198] Caxiri, or manioc beer, is used by the Menimehe, the Ticano and Kuretu. Tribes on the Napo drink masato, which is also made from manioc that has been partly masticated by the women and then left to ferment.[199] They make another fermented drink from bananas, but pines are principally employed as they contain more sugar for fermenting purposes.
Before a dance the women of the Issa-Japura region prepare great store of kawana, a drink made from the yellow pulp of a pear-shaped fruit,[200] not unlike a mango, with a large black seed in the centre.[201] The liquid is stored in the large vessels made by the primitive process of stripping off a sheet of bark and setting it end up on the hard ground. These are usually to be found at the chief’s end of the tribal house. One of these impromptu vats will hold as much as thirty gallons.
By far the most important of the stimulants taken by these peoples are the preparations made from the leaves of the common coca shrub.[202] Coca is the mescal of the Indian,[203] and possibly a heritance from the Inca invaders of bygone centuries.[204] The use of coca is habitual, not intermittent. An Indian will take as much as two ounces a day.[205] All Indians use it, the Bara in especial being heroic coca-takers.
To prepare coca for use the sage-green leaves are carefully picked and fire-dried. They are then pounded with other ingredients in mortars made from small tree-trunks. The pestle shown in the illustration is made of mahogany. Beside the coca leaf the Indian pounds up lime that is procured by reducing to ashes certain palm leaves,[206] baked clay that is scraped from underneath the fire, and some powdered cassava flour. Whether these leaf-ashes are a form of calcium I do not know. In the Sierra powdered coca is mixed with pulverised unslaked lime, or with the ashes of the Chenopodium Quinoa. As this latter is one of the distinctive Sierra flora, I presume the Indians of the forest have found some substitute in the bush. The drug is carried in a bag, or beaten-bark pouch, that is worn suspended round the neck. The clay and palm-leaf ashes certainly neutralise the bitterness of the pure leaf, and it is possible that in these foreign ingredients the Indians have discovered an antidote, if such there be, to the worst effects of the drug.
The Indian by means of a folded leaf shoots the powder into the cheeks on one or both sides. This when moistened forms a hard ball, and with such a wad stuffed between the cheek and the teeth he can go without sleep, food, or drink, for several days. Coca is not swallowed, but gradually absorbed and passed down with the saliva.[207]
As to cocainism, we know that the Indians are veritable cocaino-maniacs, or rather coca-maniacs. It is a matter of great regret to me that I was unable to make observations—may I say psycho-medical observations—on Indians under the influence of this drug. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that it was not possible to observe one not to some extent under its influence, for it must be remembered that the use of the drug is so continuous that it is difficult—one has hardly the opportunity—to differentiate. Whether coca permanently injures the higher brain centres, as has been suggested,[208] is unknown to me, as unknown as the Indians themselves before they developed the heroic use of the drug. The evidences of its effect are contradictory in the extreme, and vary in individual cases. In my own case hunger and thirst were eliminated, but I was unable to establish a tolerance for the drug, and after many vain attempts gave it up, except when food was scarce and anything was preferable to the pangs of hunger. I was certainly able to make greater efforts without food, but its effects were evanescent in the extreme, and were soon followed by acute vomiting and cramp in the stomach. The nausea may have been due to the foreign substances with which the powdered leaves are mixed and not to the coca, but on that point only a trained opinion could be of value.