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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When We Returned To
Angostura, In The Midst Of Europeans, These Marks Were Still Visible.)
There Are Some Nations Who Paint Only To Celebrate Festivals; Others
Are Covered With Colour During The Whole Year:
And the latter consider
the use of anato as so indispensable, that both men and women would
perhaps be less ashamed to present themselves without a guayaco* than
destitute of paint.
(* A word of the Caribbean language. The perizoma
of the Indians of the Orinoco is rather a band than an apron.) These
guayucos of the Orinoco are partly bark of trees, and partly
cotton-cloth. Those of the men are broader than those worn by the
women, who, the missionaries say, have in general a less lively
feeling of modesty. A similar observation was made by Christopher
Columbus. May we not attribute this in difference, this want of
delicacy in women belonging to nations of which the manners are not
much depraved, to that rude state of slavery to which the sex is
reduced in South America by male injustice and tyranny?
When we speak in Europe of a native of Guiana, we figure to ourselves
a man whose head and waist are decorated with the fine feathers of the
macaw, the toucan, and the humming-bird. Our painters and sculptors
have long since regarded these ornaments as the characteristic marks
of an American. We were surprised at not finding in the Chayma
Missions, in the encampments of Uruana and of Pararuma (I might almost
say on all the shores of the Orinoco and the Cassiquiare) those fine
plumes, those feathered aprons, which are so often brought by
travellers from Cayenne and Demerara.
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