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 Opened, To The Great Concern Of Our Guides, Several Mapires, For
The Purpose Of Examining Attentively The Form Of The Skulls.
They were
all marked by the characteristics of the American race, with the
exception of two or three, which approached indubitably to the
Caucasian.
In the middle of the Cataracts, in the most inaccessible
spots, cases are found strengthened with iron bands, and filled with
European tools, vestiges of clothes, and glass trinkets. These
articles, which have given rise to the most absurd reports of
treasures hidden by the Jesuits, probably belonged to Portuguese
traders who had penetrated into these savage countries. May we suppose
that the skulls of European race, which we saw mingled with the
skeletons of the natives, and preserved with the same care, were the
remains of some Portuguese travellers who had died of sickness, or had
been killed in battle? The aversion evinced by the natives for
whatever is not of their own race renders this hypothesis little
probable. Perhaps fugitive mestizos of the missions of the Meta and
Apure may have come and settled near the Cataracts, marrying women of
the tribe of the Atures. Such mixed marriages sometimes take place in
this zone, though they are more rare than in Canada, and in the whole
of North America, where hunters of European origin unite themselves
with savages, assume their habits, and sometimes acquire great
political influence.
We took several skulls, the skeleton of a child of six or seven years
old, and two of full-grown men of the nation of the Atures, from the
cavern of Ataruipe. All these bones, partly painted red, partly
varnished with odoriferous resins, were placed in the baskets (mapires
or canastos) which we have just described. They made almost the whole
load of a mule; and as we knew the superstitious feelings of the
Indians in reference to the remains of the dead after burial, we
carefully enveloped the canastos in mats recently woven. Unfortunately
for us, the penetration of the Indians, and the extreme quickness of
their sense of smelling, rendered all our precautions useless.
Wherever we stopped, in the missions of the Caribbees, amid the
Llanos, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, the natives assembled
round our mules to admire the monkeys which we had purchased at the
Orinoco. These good people had scarcely touched our baggage, when they
announced the approaching death of the beast of burden that carried
the dead. In vain we told them that they were deceived in their
conjectures; and that the baskets contained the bones of crocodiles
and manatees; they persisted in repeating that they smelt the resin
that surrounded the skeletons, and that they were their old relations.
We were obliged to request that the monks would interpose their
authority, to overcome the aversion of the natives, and procure for us
a change of mules.
One of the skulls, which we took from the cavern of Ataruipe, has
appeared in the fine work published by my old master, Blumenbach, on
the varieties of the human species. The skeletons of the Indians were
lost on the coast of Africa, together with a considerable part of our
collections, in a shipwreck, in which perished our friend and
fellow-traveller, Fray Juan Gonzales, the young monk of the order of
Saint Francis.
We withdrew in silence from the cavern of Ataruipe. It was one of
those calm and serene nights which are so common in the torrid zone.
The stars shone with a mild and planetary light. Their scintillation
was scarcely sensible at the horizon, which seemed illumined by the
great nebulae of the southern hemisphere. An innumerable multitude of
insects spread a reddish light upon the ground, loaded with plants,
and resplendent with these living and moving fires, as if the stars of
the firmament had sunk down on the savannah. On quitting the cavern we
stopped several times to admire the beauty of this singular scene. The
odoriferous vanilla and festoons of bignonia decorated the entrance;
and above, on the summit of the hill, the arrowy branches of the
palm-trees waved murmuring in the air. We descended towards the river,
to take the road to the mission, where we arrived late in the night.
Our imagination was struck by all we had just seen. Occupied
continually by the present, in a country where the traveller is
tempted to regard human society as a new institution, he is more
powerfully interested by remembrances of times past. These
remembrances were not indeed of a distant date; but in all that is
monumental antiquity is a relative idea, and we easily confound what
is ancient with what is obscure and problematic. The Egyptians
considered the historical remembrances of the Greeks as very recent.
If the Chinese, or, as they prefer calling themselves, the inhabitants
of the Celestial Empire, could have communicated with the priests of
Heliopolis, they would have smiled at those pretensions of the
Egyptians to antiquity. Contrasts not less striking are found in the
north of Europe and of Asia, in the New World, and in every region
where the human race has not preserved a long consciousness of itself.
The migration of the Toltecs, the most ancient historical event on the
tableland of Mexico, dates only in the sixth century of our era. The
introduction of a good system of intercalation, and the reform of the
calendars, the indispensable basis of an accurate chronology, took
place in the year 1091. These epochs, which to us appear so modern,
fall on fabulous times, when we reflect on the history of our species
between the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon. We there see symbolic
figures sculptured on the rocks, but no tradition throws light upon
their origin. In the hot part of Guiana we can go back only to the
period when the Castilian and Portuguese conquerors, and more recently
peaceful monks, penetrated amid so many barbarous nations.
It appears that to the north of the Cataracts, in the strait of
Baraguan, there are caverns filled with bones, similar to those I have
just described:
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