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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This Flesh Was Prepared In Different
Ways, And The Practice Being Once Introduced, Spread Into The
Provinces, So That Instances
Of it were found in every part of Egypt.
It then no longer caused any surprise; the horror it had
At first
inspired vanished; and it was mentioned as an indifferent and ordinary
thing. This mania of devouring one another became so common among the
poor, that the greater part perished in this manner. These wretches
employed all sorts of artifices, to seize men by surprise, or decoy
them into their houses under false pretences. This happened to three
physicians among those who visited me; and a bookseller who sold me
books, an old and very corpulent man, fell into their snares, and
escaped with great difficulty. All the facts which we relate as
eye-witnesses fell under our observation accidentally, for we
generally avoided witnessing spectacles which inspired us with so much
horror." Account of Egypt by Abd-allatif, physician of Bagdad,
translated into French by De Sacy pages 360 to 374.)
Although the Indians of the Cassiquiare readily return to their
barbarous habits, they evince, whilst in the missions, intelligence,
some love of labour, and, in particular, a great facility in learning
the Spanish language. The villages being, for the most part, inhabited
by three or four tribes, who do not understand each other, a foreign
idiom, which is at the same time that of the civil power, the language
of the missionary, affords the advantage of more general means of
communication. I heard a Poinave Indian conversing in Spanish with a
Guahibo, though both had come from their forests within three months.
They uttered a phrase every quarter of an hour, prepared with
difficulty, and in which the gerund of the verb, no doubt according to
the grammatical turn of their own languages, was constantly employed.
"When I seeing Padre, Padre to me saying;"* (* "Quando io mirando
Padre, Padre me diciendo.") instead of, "when I saw the missionary, he
said to me." I have mentioned in another place, how wise it appeared
to me in the Jesuits to generalize one of the languages of civilized
America, for instance that of the Peruvians,* (* The Quichua or Inca
language, Lengua del Inga.) and instruct the Indians in an idiom which
is foreign to them in its roots, but not in its structure and
grammatical forms. This was following the system which the Incas, or
king-priests of Peru had employed for ages, in order to humanize the
barbarous nations of the Upper Maranon, and maintain them under their
domination; a system somewhat more reasonable than that of making the
natives of America speak Latin, as was gravely proposed in a
provincial concilio at Mexico.
We were told that the Indians of the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro are
preferred on the Lower Orinoco, and especially at Angostura, to the
inhabitants of the other missions, on account of their intelligence
and activity. Those of Mandavaca are celebrated among the tribes of
their own race for the preparation of the curare poison, which does
not yield in strength to the curare of Esmeralda. Unhappily the
natives devote themselves to this employment more than to agriculture.
Yet the soil on the banks of the Cassiquiare is excellent. We find
there a granitic sand, of a blackish-brown colour, which is covered in
the forests with thick layers of rich earth, and on the banks of the
river with clay almost impermeable to water. The soil of the
Cassiquiare appears more fertile than that of the valley of the Rio
Negro, where maize does not prosper. Rice, beans, cotton, sugar, and
indigo yield rich harvests, wherever their cultivation has been
tried.* (* M. Bonpland found at Mandavaca, in the huts of the natives,
a plant with tuberous roots, exactly like cassava (yucca). It is
called cumapana, and is cooked by being baked on the ashes. It grows
spontaneously on the banks of the Cassiquiare.) We saw wild indigo
around the missions of San Miguel de Davipe, San Carlos, and
Mandavaca. No doubt can exist that several nations of America,
particularly the Mexicans, long before the conquest, employed real
indigo in their hieroglyphic paintings; and that small cakes of this
substance were sold at the great market of Tenochtitlan. But a
colouring matter, chemically identical, may be extracted from plants
belonging to neighbouring genera; and I should not at present venture
to affirm that the native indigoferae of America do not furnish some
generic difference from the Indigofera anil, and the Indigofera
argentea of the Old World. In the coffee-trees of both hemispheres
this difference has been observed.
Here, as at the Rio Negro, the humidity of the air, and the consequent
abundance of insects, are obstacles almost invincible to new
cultivation. Everywhere you meet with those large ants that march in
close bands, and direct their attacks the more readily on cultivated
plants, because they are herbaceous and succulent, whilst the forests
of these countries afford only plants with woody stalks. If a
missionary wishes to cultivate salad, or any culinary plant of Europe,
he is compelled as it were to suspend his garden in the air. He fills
an old boat with good mould, and, having sown the seed, suspends it
four feet above the ground with cords of the chiquichiqui palm-tree;
but most frequently places it on a slight scaffolding. This protects
the young plants from weeds, worms, and those ants which pursue their
migration in a right line, and, not knowing what vegetates above them,
seldom turn from their course to climb up stakes that are stripped of
their bark. I mention this circumstance to prove how difficult, within
the tropics, on the banks of great rivers, are the first attempts of
man to appropriate to himself a little spot of earth in that vast
domain of nature, invaded by animals, and covered by spontaneous
plants.
During the night of the 13th of May, I obtained some observations of
the stars, unfortunately the last at the Cassiquiare.
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