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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Escape From The Dominion Of The Caribs, The Salives Willingly Joined
The First Missions Of The Jesuits.
Accordingly these fathers
everywhere in their writings praise the docility and intelligence of
that people.
The Salives have a great taste for music: in the most
remote times they had trumpets of baked earth, four or five feet long,
with several large globular cavities communicating with one another by
narrow pipes. These trumpets send forth most dismal sounds. The
Jesuits have cultivated with success the natural taste of the Salives
for instrumental music; and even since the destruction of the society,
the missionaries of Rio Meta have continued at San Miguel de Macuco a
fine church choir, and musical instruction for the Indian youth. Very
lately a traveller was surprised to see the natives playing on the
violin, the violoncello, the triangle, the guitar, and the flute.
We found among these Salive Indians, at Carichana, a white woman, the
sister of a Jesuit of New Grenada. It is difficult to define the
satisfaction that is felt when, in the midst of nations of whose
language we are ignorant, we meet with a being with whom we can
converse without an interpreter. Every mission has at least two
interpreters (lenguarazes). They are Indians, a little less stupid
than the rest, through whose medium the missionaries of the Orinoco,
who now very rarely give themselves the trouble of studying the idioms
of the country, communicate with the neophytes. These interpreters
attended us in all our herborizations; but they rather understand than
speak Castilian.
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