These canoes or pituches, which, as a rule, measure from six to ten metres in length, are made from a single log of wood, hollowed out by the adze, or, as with some Indians, by fire. Cedar[40] is the favourite wood, for it is light, easily worked, and very durable. When this cannot be obtained, however, various other kinds of trees are employed, such as caoba or aguano,[41] palo-rosa or lauro-rosa,[42] palo-maria,[43] catagua or assacú,[44] and itauba.[45] But none of these woods are equal to cedar, for either they do not resist the action of the water so well, or else are so heavy that they make the canoe cumbersome and dangerous to navigation.
We next bought a couple of paddles from the Indians, and our naval equipment was then complete. The paddles in use in this region by both whites and Indians are generally only about a metre and a half in length, with wide, rounded blades, which facilitate rowing in shallow water. Oars such as are used in oar-locks would be quite useless here on account of the numerous stumps and logs in the rivers and along their banks and chiefly the cargo, which often takes up nearly all the inside of the canoe. Many of these paddles are constructed of fine wood, well finished and painted and varnished to a degree.
The only other building at Puerto Guineo, in addition to the convent, is an old, dilapidated church, both of which stand on the bank of the river in a small clearing sowed with plantain-trees. As already stated, the priests of Mocoa often come down to Guineo for a few days at a time to preach to the aborigines, and the convent and church were built by the Indians, partly for the convenience of the padres and partly as a sort of monument to their own importance. Like the convent, the church is of bamboo with an earthen floor and a thatched roof, upon which some vegetation was beginning to present itself. Inside were a few crude pictures of saints, and behind the altar stood a cross with a ghastly figure of the Crucifixion upon it. A few cheap altar-cloths and the remains of several used-up candles completed the outfit, the whole of which was entirely covered and wound up with numerous cobwebs.
In the midst of the dense forest, surrounding these neglected relics of civilisation, live a tribe of Indians who call themselves Cionis and speak a language of the same name. They are quite distinct from the Incas, and occupy the whole region of the Upper Putumayo, living in small villages of from ten to fifty families along its banks. In all, they do not number over a thousand. But they all speak more or less Spanish, with the peculiarity that the only form of the verb they use is the gerund.
These Indians are short, broad, and strong, but generally lazy and shiftless. Like the Mocoa branch of the Incas, nearly all of them suffer from carate. The ugly and unusual custom of pulling out the eyebrows, eye-lashes, &c., and cutting the hair short is observed by both sexes. The women are, if possible, uglier than the men, which is saying a good deal, but the latter endeavour to compensate for this by painting their faces blue and pink. The ordinary designs used for this purpose are geometrical figures and branches of trees, &c.
Another very common custom is that of piercing the ears and the dividing wall of the nose with small bamboo tubes coloured a bright shining black, and frequently from ten to fifteen centimetres in length and nearly one centimetre in thickness. They also generally wear upon each arm, just between the shoulder and the elbow, a sort of bracelet, made of fibres from the leaf of the chambira[46] palm, the loose ends of which reach almost to the wrist—this is supposed to ward off attacks of rheumatism and other similar complaints.