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 Passed Some Turbulent Rapids Before We Reached The Mission Of
Mandavaca.
The village, which bears also the name of Quirabuena,
contains only sixty natives.
The state of the Christian settlements is
in general so miserable that, in the whole course of the Cassiquiare,
on a length of fifty leagues, not two hundred inhabitants are found.
The banks of this river were indeed more peopled before the arrival of
the missionaries; the Indians have withdrawn into the woods, toward
the east; for the western plains are almost deserted. The natives
subsist during a part of the year on those large ants of which I have
spoken above. These insects are much esteemed here, as spiders are in
the southern hemisphere, where the savages of Australia deem them
delicious. 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.
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