The San Blas are decidedly a town-dwelling tribe. They seem to hate solitude and even today, in their comparatively reduced state, build villages of a size that make understandable Balboa’s records of the size and state of the chief with whom he first fought, and then made friends. At Narganá are two large islands, fairly covered with spacious houses about 150 feet long by 50 broad. The ridge pole of the palm-thatched roof is 30 to 40 feet from the ground. A long corridor runs through the house longitudinally, and on either side the space is divided by upright posts into square compartments, each of which is supposed to house an entire family. The side walls are made of wattled reeds caked with clay. One of these houses holds from sixteen to twenty families, and the edifices are packed so closely together as to leave scarce room between for a razor-back hog to browse. The people within must be packed about as closely and the precise parental relationship sustained to each other by the various members of the family would be an interesting study.
Photo by H. Pittier
Courtesy National Geographic Magazine
GUAYMI INDIAN MAN
Note the tattoed marking of face and the negroid lips
The Choco Indians are one of the smaller and least known tribes of the Darien. Prof. Pittier—who may without disrespect be described as the most seasoned “tropical tramp” of all Central America—described them so vividly that extracts from his article in the National Geographic Magazine will be of interest:
“Never, in our twenty-five years of tropical experience, have we met with such a sun-loving, bright and trusting people, living nearest to nature and ignoring the most elementary wiles of so-called civilization. They are several hundred in number and their dwellings are scattered along the meandrous Sambu and its main reaches, always at short distance, but never near enough to each other to form real villages. Like their houses, their small plantations are close to the river, but mostly far enough to escape the eye of the casual passer-by.
“Dugouts drawn up on the beach and a narrow trail breaking the reed wall at the edge of the bank are the only visible signs of human presence, except at the morning hours and near sunset, when a crowd of women and children will be seen playing in the water, and the men, armed with their bows and long harpooned arrows, scrutinizing the deeper places for fish or looking for iguanas and crabs hidden in the holes of the banks.
“Physically the Chocoes are a fine and healthy race. They are tall, as compared with the Cuna-Cuna, well proportioned, and with a graceful bearing. The men have wiry limbs and faces that are at once kind and energetic, while as a rule the girls are plump, fat, and full of mischief. The grown women preserve their good looks and attractiveness much longer than is generally the case in primitive peoples, in which their sex bears the heaviest share of every day’s work.
“Both males and females have unusually fine white teeth, which they sometimes dye black by chewing the shoots of one of the numerous wild peppers growing in the forests. The skin is of a rich olive-brown color and, as usual, a little lighter in women and children. Though all go almost naked, they look fairer than the San Blas Cunas, and some of the women would compare advantageously in this respect with certain Mediterranean types of the white race.