"The women may make themselves bracelets and collars of colored beads, of shells, and of tigers' teeth, but they cannot wear feathers.
"In time of war the chiefs have right of life and death over simple warriors. The Mundrucus never destroy their prisoners; on the contrary, they treat them with humanity, tattoo them, and afterwards regard them as their children.
"This warlike nation, far from being enfeebled as other tribes are, who, since the conquest of Brazil by the Europeans, are nearly annihilated, increases, notwithstanding the long wars they every year undertake against the most ferocious savages.
"Once friends of the whites, they yielded to them the lands they inhabited on the borders of the Amazon, between the rivers Tapajos and Madeira, and fled to live an independent life, which they have never renounced, in the deep solitudes of the Tapajos above the cataracts.
"I visited the old Mundrucu chief, Joaquim, who rendered himself so terrible to the rebels of Pará during the disorders of 1835. He is a decrepit old man, almost paralyzed. He received me very well, and appeared flattered that a traveller from a distant country sought to see him. He told me, in bad Portuguese, 'I am the Tuchão, Joaquim. I love the whites, and have never betrayed them. I left my friends, my cacoaes, (cocoa plantations,) and my house on the borders of the Madeira to defend them. How many Cabanos (insurgents) have I not killed when I showed my war canoe that never fled?
"Now I am old and infirm; but if I remain in the midst of these women, and do not soon leave for the fields to chase away these brigands of Muras, who lay waste my cacoaes, I will be bewitched and die here like a dog.
"The Mundrucus do not believe that diseases afflict them. When a prey to them, they say it is a spell some unknown enemy has cast over them; and if the Pugé, or Magician of the Malocca, interrogated by the family of the dying man, names a guilty person, he whom he named may count upon his death.
"I have heard afterwards that when he was fighting so generously with his Mundrucus for the cause of the white man, a Brazilian colonel, who commanded the expedition, ordered him to pull manioc roots in a field supposed to be in the power of the rebels. The chief was furious, and, angrily eyeing the Brazilian, said, 'Dost thou believe my canoe is made to carry to the field women and children? It is a war canoe, and not a boat to bring thee farinha.'
"This same colonel revenged himself for this refusal by calumniating to the Emperor the conduct of the brave Mundrucu; and on that representation the court objected to recompense him. He remained poor as an Indian, when, according to the example of the Brazilian officers, he could have amassed wealth. He is old now, and has no heir, because he has only daughters.
"The next day he came to see me, and begged me to cure his nephew, a young Indian of eighteen or twenty years, whom he dearly loved, and whom he would have had inherit his courage and his titles; but the poor devil had nothing of the warrior, and every day, for several hours, had an epileptic attack. I again had recourse to the phial of salts; gave him some for the sick man to smell at the time of the attacks; and also directed that he should drink some drops weakened with water.