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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The Number Of These Is
Generally Reckoned At Six Or Eight Thousand; But This Estimate
Appears To Me To Be Exaggerated.
Except a few families of Guaraunos
who roam occasionally in the marshy grounds, called Los Morichales,
and between the Cano de Manamo and the Rio Guarapiche,
consequently, on the continent itself, there have not been for
these thirty years, any Indian savages in New Andalusia.
I use with regret the word savage, because it implies a difference
of cultivation between the reduced Indian, living in the Missions,
and the free or independent Indian; a difference which is often
belied by fact. In the forests of South America there are tribes of
natives, peacefully united in villages, and who render obedience to
chiefs.* (* These chiefs bear the designations of Pecannati, Apoto,
or Sibierne.) They cultivate the plantain-tree, cassava, and
cotton, on a tolerably extensive tract of ground, and they employ
the cotton for weaving hammocks. These people are scarcely more
barbarous than the naked Indians of the Missions, who have been
taught to make the sign of the cross. It is a common error in
Europe, to look on all natives not reduced to a state of
subjection, as wanderers and hunters. Agriculture was practised on
the American continent long before the arrival of Europeans. It is
still practised between the Orinoco and the river Amazon, in lands
cleared amidst the forests, places to which the missionaries have
never penetrated. It would be to imbibe false ideas respecting the
actual condition of the nations of South America, to consider as
synonymous the denominations of 'Christian,' 'reduced,' and
'civilized;' and those of 'pagan,' 'savage,' and 'independent.' The
reduced Indian is often as little of a Christian as the independent
Indian is of an idolater.
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