So to this day the chief food of all the peoples is cassava.
This story is utterly different from one Spruce heard from more northern tribes at Saō Gabriel. The Barré story has it that a bird discovered to the Indians the use of the mandiocca, then a great and solitary tree. All the tribes came to procure the roots, and when none were left carried off branches; hence the varieties of mandiocca now grown.[380]
Deluge traditions are to be found among practically all the tribes. I repeatedly asked questions on this point, and invariably found, as other travellers had discovered previously elsewhere,[381] that the Indians would tell of a flood that drove their fathers in the long, long ago to seek refuge in canoes, for all the earth was under water. But though Mr. Joyce considers it “strange how this deluge myth not only pervades practically the whole of the Andean region of South America, but extends also to many regions in the northern portion of the Continent,” it must be remembered that inundations are frequent in these regions, and a great one probably occurs every few decades. It would only be strange were there no deluge myths. As Sir Everard im Thurn has so aptly put it, when “the Indian tells in his simple language the tradition of the highest flood which covered all the small world known to him, and tells how the Indians escaped it, it is not difficult to realise that the European hearer, theologically prejudiced in favour of Noah, … is apt to identify the two stories.”[382]
With the possible exception of the Eldorado fable, there is no South American legend that has excited so much interest and speculation as the story of the warrior women who in some mysterious forest fastness dwelt apart from men, cultivated masculine attributes, and destroying the male brought up the female progeny resultant from the yearly exception to their celibate rule,[383] to be women of the same stern pattern as their extraordinary selves. Some writers would make them a seventeenth century edition of the modern suffragette, rebel against the “tyranny” of man—and with certainly better reason for rebellion.[384] The story has been treated as mere Spanish romance,[385] or a mistake on the part of the invaders due to the custom of wearing the hair long among many of the tribes.[386] It has been taken to be a deliberate fabrication on the part of Pizarro to explain his failure, a temptation to which Sir Walter Raleigh himself also fell victim.[387] Be it what it may, the tale was told, the land known as the land of these women warriors, and their name of Amazons bestowed upon the great river. The tale of warrior women is, however, not confined to the forests of the Amazon. One comes therewith to the question of nomenclatory origin. The Baron de Santa-Anna Nery devotes the first ten pages of his Land of the Amazons to this discussion. It seems to be a case of where doctors disagree.[388] But at least the tale, Asiatic, African, or autochthonic, was localised here, and stories of feminine prowess in the field continued to be quoted even in the nineteenth century. Wallace himself mentions “traditions” said to be extant among the Indians themselves, of “women without husbands.”[389] This is no proof of the local existence at any time of celibate women warriors. The tradition may well exist, the only curiosity again would be if it did not. For three centuries at least the invading white man has talked of, and inquired for, a tribe of such warrior women. It takes less than this to start the most robust of folk-tales. A world agape like the Athenians of old for some new thing, some tale to vary the oft-told stories, does not require three centuries to adopt a novel romance. The question “do such things exist?” is not asked long before it ceases to be a question and becomes an assertion. The more positive the assertion the greater will be the wonder of the tale. When the wonder is sufficient it will be established as a current myth. I do not therefore deny that such a tale is told, or at least may be told, but for my own part I never heard mention of it. Spruce speaks of women assisting their men to repulse an attack on tribal head-quarters,[390] but no story of any woman fighting, or having done so at any time, was ever told me. Moreover it should not be forgotten in this connection that all weapons are strictly tabu to women.
A story that is prevalent throughout South America tells of a race of white Indians who sleep in the daytime, and only go abroad at night. This tale was laughed at when repeated at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, but it is certainly in existence among the tribes,[391] and Crevaux states that the Ouayana will not go near one river, “à cause des singuliers habitants qui habiteraient près des sources … des Indiens aux chevaux blonds qui dorment le jour et marchent toute la nuit.”[392]
Of tales as to the reputed origin of any tribe I have no note, though when I cross-questioned a Boro tribe as to why a certain district was almost uninhabited, they told me that the reason was as follows:
Once a large tribe lived there, one of the most powerful of all the tribes, and also one of the most numerous.
But long, long ago a chief, an Abihibya, of this tribe of the Utiguene had a daughter, who was not only ugly but bird rumped. The Chekobe, the medicine-man, gave her the name of Komuine.[393]
When she grew older and was about five feet high,[394] Komuine went into the Bahe, the bush, to pick dio, peppers, and berries, but did not return.
The tribe then said that a wipa, a tiger, must have carried her off. So a tribal hunt was instituted, and the bush searched for the tiger; but with no success, for when they were in the bush they were attacked by a wicked tribe, which fell upon them and killed them in great numbers.