Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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We Found At Mandavaca The Good Old Missionary, Who Had
Already Spent Twenty Years Of Mosquitos In The Bosques Del
Cassiquiare, And Whose Legs Were So Spotted By The Stings Of Insects,
That The Colour Of The Skin Could Scarcely Be Perceived.
He talked to
us of his solitude, and of the sad necessity which often compelled him
to leave the most atrocious crimes unpunished in the two missions of
Mandavaca and Vasiva.
In the latter place, an Indian alcalde had, a
few years before, eaten one of his wives, after having taken her to
his conuco,* (* A hut surrounded with cultivated ground; a sort of
country-house, which the natives prefer to residing in the missions.)
and fattened her by good feeding. The cannibalism of the nations of
Guiana is never caused by the want of subsistence, or by the
superstitions of their religion, as in the islands of the South Sea;
but is generally the effect of the vengeance of a conqueror, and (as
the missionaries say) "of a vitiated appetite." Victory over a hostile
tribe is celebrated by a repast, in which some parts of the body of a
prisoner are devoured. Sometimes a defenceless family is surprised in
the night; or an enemy, who is met with by chance in the woods, is
killed by a poisoned arrow. The body is cut to pieces, and carried as
a trophy to the hut. It is civilization only, that has made man feel
the unity of the human race; which has revealed to him, as we may say,
the ties of consanguinity, by which he is linked to beings to whose
language and manners he is a stranger. Savages know only their own
family; and a tribe appears to them but a more numerous assemblage of
relations. When those who inhabit the missions see Indians of the
forest, who are unknown to them, arrive, they make use of an
expression, which has struck us by its simple candour: they are, no
doubt, my relations; I understand them when they speak to me. But
these very savages detest all who are not of their family, or their
tribe; and hunt the Indians of a neighbouring tribe, who live at war
with their own, as we hunt game. They know the duties of family ties
and of relationship, but not those of humanity, which require the
feeling of a common tie with beings framed like ourselves. No emotion
of pity prompts them to spare the wives or children of a hostile race;
and the latter are devoured in preference, at the repast given at the
conclusion of a battle or warlike incursion.
The hatred which savages for the most part feel for men who speak
another idiom, and appear to them to be of an inferior race, is
sometimes rekindled in the missions, after having long slumbered. A
short time before our arrival at Esmeralda, an Indian, born in the
forest* behind the Duida, travelled alone with another Indian, who,
after having been made prisoner by the Spaniards on the banks of the
Ventuario, lived peaceably in the village, or, as it is expressed
here, within the sound of the bell (debaxo de la campana.) (* En el
monte. The Indians born in the missions are distinguished from those
born in the woods. The word monte signifies more frequently, in the
colonies, a forest (bosque) than a mountain, and this circumstance has
led to great errors in our maps, on which chains of mountains
(sierras) are figured, where there are only thick forests, (monte
espeso.)) The latter could only walk slowly, because he was suffering
from one of those fevers to which the natives are subject, when they
arrive in the missions, and abruptly change their diet. Wearied by his
delay, his fellow-traveller killed him, and hid the body behind a
copse of thick trees, near Esmeralda. This crime, like many others
among the Indians, would have remained unknown, if the murderer had
not made preparations for a feast on the following day. He tried to
induce his children, born in the mission and become Christians, to go
with him for some parts of the dead body. They had much difficulty in
persuading him to desist from his purpose; and the soldier who was
posted at Esmeralda, learned from the domestic squabble caused by this
event, what the Indians would have concealed from his knowledge.
It is known that cannibalism and the practice of human sacrifices,
with which it is often connected, are found to exist in all parts of
the globe, and among people of very different races;* but what strikes
us more in the study of history is to see human sacrifices retained in
a state of civilization somewhat advanced; and that the nations who
hold it a point of honour to devour their prisoners are not always the
rudest and most ferocious. (* Some casual instances of children
carried off by the negroes in the island of Cuba have led to the
belief, in the Spanish colonies, that there are tribes of cannibals in
Africa. This opinion, though supported by some travellers, is not
borne out by the researches of Mr. Barrow on the interior of that
country. Superstitious practices may have given rise to imputations
perhaps as unjust as those of which Jewish families were the victims
in the ages of intolerance and persecution.) The painful facts have
not escaped the observation of those missionaries who are sufficiently
enlightened to reflect on the manners of the surrounding tribes. The
Cabres, the Guipunaves, and the Caribs, have always been more powerful
and more civilized than the other hordes of the Orinoco; and yet the
two former are as much addicted to anthropophagy as the latter are
repugnant to it. We must carefully distinguish the different branches
into which the great family of the Caribbee nations is divided. These
branches are as numerous as those of the Mongols, and the western
Tartars, or Turcomans. The Caribs of the continent, those who inhabit
the plains between the Lower Orinoco, the Rio Branco, the Essequibo,
and the sources of the Oyapoc, hold in horror the practice of
devouring their enemies.
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