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 Filtered Water Is The Poisonous
Liquor, But It Acquires Strength Only When Concentrated By
Evaporation, Like Molasses, In A Large Earthen Pot.
The Indian from
time to time invited us to taste the liquid; its taste, more or less
bitter, decides when the concentration by fire has been carried
sufficiently far.
There is no danger in tasting it, the curare being
deleterious only when it comes into immediate contact with the blood.
The vapours, therefore, which are disengaged from the pans are not
hurtful, notwithstanding all that has been asserted on this point by
the missionaries of the Orinoco. Fontana, in his experiments on the
poison of the ticuna of the Amazon, long since proved that the vapours
arising from this poison, when thrown on burning charcoal, may be
inhaled without danger and that the statement of La Condamine, that
Indian women, when condemned to death, have been killed by the vapours
of the poison of the ticuna, is incorrect.
The most concentrated juice of the mavacure is not thick enough to
stick to the darts; and therefore, to give a body to the poison,
another vegetable juice, extremely glutinous, drawn from a tree with
large leaves, called kiracaguero, is poured into the concentrated
infusion. As this tree grows at a great distance from Esmeralda, and
was at that period as destitute of flowers and fruits as the bejuco de
mavacure, we could not determine it botanically. I have several times
mentioned that kind of fatality which withholds the most interesting
plants from the examination of travellers, while thousands of others,
of the chemical properties of which we are ignorant, are found loaded
with flowers and fruits. In travelling rapidly, even within the
tropics, where the flowering of the ligneous plants is of such long
duration, scarcely one-eighth of the trees can be seen furnishing the
essential parts of fructification. The chances of being able to
determine, I do not say the family, but the genus and species, is
consequently as one to eight; and it may be conceived that this
unfavourable chance is felt most powerfully when it deprives us of the
intimate knowledge of objects which afford a higher interest than that
of descriptive botany.
At the instant when the glutinous juice of the kiracaguero-tree is
poured into the venomous liquor well concentrated, and kept in a state
of ebullition, it blackens, and coagulates into a mass of the
consistence of tar, or of a thick syrup. This mass is the curare of
commerce. When we hear the Indians say that the kiracaguero is as
necessary as the bejuco do mavacure in the manufacture of the poison,
we may be led into error by the supposition that the former also
contains some deleterious principle, while it only serves (as the
algarrobo, or any other gummy substance would do) to give more body to
the concentrated juice of the curare. The change of colour which the
mixture undergoes is owing to the decomposition of a hydruret of
carbon; the hydrogen is burned, and the carbon is set free. The curare
is sold in little calabashes; but its preparation being in the hands
of a few families, and the quantity of poison attached to each dart
being extremely small, the best curare, that of Esmeralda and
Mandavaca, is sold at a very high price. This substance, when dried,
resembles opium; but it strongly absorbs moisture when exposed to the
air. Its taste is an agreeable bitter, and M. Bonpland and myself have
often swallowed small portions of it. There is no danger in so doing,
if it be certain that neither lips nor gums bleed. In experiments made
by Mangili on the venom of the viper, one of his assistants swallowed
all the poison that could be extracted from four large vipers of
Italy, without being affected by it. The Indians consider the curare,
taken internally, as an excellent stomachic. The same poison prepared
by the Piraoas and Salives, though it has some celebrity, is not so
much esteemed as that of Esmeralda. The process of this preparation
appears to be everywhere nearly the same; but there is no proof that
the different poisons sold by the same name at the Orinoco and the
Amazon are identical, and derived from the same plants. Orfila,
therefore, in his excellent work On Poisons, has very judiciously
separated the wourali of Dutch Guiana, the curare of the Orinoco, the
ticuna of the Amazon, and all those substances which have been too
vaguely united under the name of American poisons. Possibly at some
future day, one and the same alkaline principle, similar to morphine
and strychnia, will be found in poisonous plants belonging to
different genera.
At the Orinoco the curare de raiz (of the root) is distinguished from
the curare de bejuco (of lianas, or of the bark of branches). We saw
only the latter prepared; the former is weaker, and much less
esteemed. At the river Amazon we learned to distinguish the poisons of
the Ticuna, Yagua, Peva, and Xibaro Indians, which being all obtained
from the same plant, perhaps differ only by a more or less careful
preparation. The Ticuna poison, to which La Condamine has given so
much celebrity in Europe, and which somewhat improperly begins to bear
the name of ticuna, is extracted from a liana which grows in the
island of Mormorote, on the Upper Maranon. This poison is employed
partly by the Ticunas, who remain independent on the Spanish territory
near the sources of the Yacarique; and partly by Indians of the same
tribe, inhabiting the Portuguese mission of Loreto. The poisons we
have just named differ totally from that of La Peca, and from the
poison of Lamas and of Moyobamba. I enter into these details because
the vestiges of plants which we were able to examine, proved to us
(contrary to the common opinion) that the three poisons of the
Ticunas, of La Peca, and of Moyobamba are not obtained from the same
species, probably not even from congeneric plants.
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