The children go perfectly naked; indeed, so do the people generally, except those who come into the settled districts. The women wear their masses of black hair almost covering their heads and shoulders. They dress in a short skirt, with a scarf over the shoulders. “The old women,” observed Captain Kennedy, “are terrible to behold, they having all the hard work to do. They even paddle the canoes, while the men and young women sit looking on.”
Their villages consist of rows of wretched hovels. They
appear to have no superstitious ideas, but they believe in an evil spirit, against whom they try to guard by charms and incantations. They are under a chief cacique; and after the other chiefs in conclave have determined on war, or rather, on a plundering expedition, and it is concluded, they separate into their original tribes, each taking opposite directions with their share of the plunder, to escape the risk of being captured. A considerable portion of the almost unexplored district—the Gran Chaco—which they inhabit is a dreary waste of lagoons and marshes, traversed by rapid, muddy, and tortuous rivers.
Jesuit Missions.
The missions established by the Jesuits show the impotence of their system for the civilisation of the wild man. The territory where they carried on their chief labours exists on the eastern bank of the Parana, to the north of Uruguay and Corrientes, bordering on the Brazilian territory. After three hundred years of labour, they left these savages utterly incapable of self-government.
“The Indian mind, indeed,” observes Captain Page—an American—“laying aside its atrocities, has never emerged from the intellectual development of childhood. These savages showed the imitative faculties of the animal. When taught, they delved and ploughed, planted cotton and sugar-cane, and executed work in carpentry and wove fabrics, and performed other manual operations; yet their reason and intelligence has not advanced, even pari passu in any degree with the progress of European civilisation; nor have the natures of their female population become modified with the slightest trait of the humanities and tendernesses which are the brightest attributes of the women of the present century.”
“Among the Jesuit missions in the Gran Chaco,” observes another writer, “are found no remaining evidence of better knowledge, than that the Indians now prefer horse-flesh to any other kind of meat.”
The same writer gives us the derivation of the names of several of the rivers:—Parana, resembling the sea; Paraguay, from the Payaguas, a tribe of Indians who were met with by the discoverers navigating the river; and Uruguay, from a bird—the uru—which is found on the banks of that stream.