Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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When we saw the Chaymas return in
the evening from their gardens, the man carried nothing but the
knife
Or hatchet (machete), with which he clears his way among the
underwood; whilst the woman, bending under a great load of
plantains, carried one child in her arms, and sometimes two other
children placed upon the load. Notwithstanding this inequality of
condition, the wives of the Indians of South America appear to be
in general happier than those of the savages of the North. Between
the Alleghany mountains and the Mississippi, wherever the natives
do not live chiefly on the produce of the chase, the women
cultivate maize, beans, and gourds; and the men take no share in
the labours of the field. In the torrid zone, hunting tribes are
not numerous, and in the Missions, the men work in the fields as
well as the women.
Nothing can exceed the difficulty experienced by the Indians in
learning Spanish, to which language they have an absolute aversion.
Whilst living separate from the whites, they have no ambition to be
called educated Indians, or, to borrow the phrase employed in the
Missions, 'latinized Indians' (Indios muy latinos). Not only among
the Chaymas, but in all the very remote Missions which I afterwards
visited, I observed that the Indians experience vast difficulty in
arranging and expressing the most simple ideas in Spanish, even
when they perfectly understand the meaning of the words and the
turn of the phrases. When a European questions them concerning
objects which have surrounded them from their cradles, they seem to
manifest an imbecility exceeding that of infancy. The missionaries
assert that this embarrassment is neither the effect of timidity
nor of natural stupidity, but that it arises from the impediments
they meet with in the structure of a language so different from
their native tongue. In proportion as man is remote from
cultivation, the greater is his mental inaptitude. It is not,
therefore, surprising that the isolated Indians in the Missions
should experience in the acquisition of the Spanish language, less
facility than Indians who live among mestizoes, mulattoes, and
whites, in the neighbourhood of towns. Nevertheless, I have often
wondered at the volubility with which, at Caripe, the native
alcalde, the governador, and the sergento mayor, will harangue for
whole hours the Indians assembled before the church; regulating the
labours of the week, reprimanding the idle, or threatening the
disobedient. Those chiefs who are also of the Chayma race, and who
transmit the orders of the missionary, speak all together in a loud
voice, with marked emphasis, but almost without action. Their
features remain motionless; but their look is imperious and severe.
These same men, who manifest quickness of intellect, and who were
tolerably well acquainted with the Spanish, were unable to connect
their ideas, when, in our excursions in the country around the
convent, we put questions to them through the intervention of the
monks. They were made to affirm or deny whatever the monks pleased:
and that wily civility, to which the least cultivated Indian is no
stranger, induced them sometimes to give to their answers the turn
that seemed to be suggested by our questions.
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