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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They Say That The Sight Of Objects Which
Belonged To Their Relation Makes Them Melancholy.
They like better to
efface than to preserve remembrances.
These effects of Indian
sensibility are very detrimental to agriculture, and the monks oppose
with energy these superstitious practices, to which the natives
converted to Christianity still adhere in the missions.
The tombs of the Indians of the Orinoco have not been very closely
examined, because they do not contain valuable articles like those of
Peru; and even on the spot no faith is now lent to the chimerical
ideas, which were heretofore formed of the wealth of the ancient
inhabitants of El Dorado. The thirst of gold everywhere precedes the
desire of instruction, and a taste for researches into antiquity; in
all the mountainous part of South America, from Merida and Santa
Martha to the table-lands of Quito and Upper Peru, the labours of
absolute mining have been undertaken to discover tombs, or, as the
Creoles say, employing a word altered from the Inca language, guacas.
When in Peru, at Mancichi, I went into the guaca from which, in the
sixteenth century, masses of gold of great value were extracted. No
trace of the precious metals has been found in the caverns which have
served the natives of Guiana for ages as sepulchres. This circumstance
proves that even at the period when the Caribs, and other travelling
nations, made incursions to the south-west, gold had flowed in very
small quantities from the mountains of Peru towards the eastern
plains.
Wherever the granitic rocks do not present any of those large cavities
caused by their decomposition, or by an accumulation of their blocks,
the Indians deposit their dead in the earth. The hammock (chinchorro),
a kind of net in which the deceased had reposed during his life,
serves for a coffin. This net is fastened tight round the body, a hole
is dug in the hut, and there the body is laid. This is the most usual
method, according to the account of the missionary Gili, and it
accords with what I myself learned from Father Zea. I do not believe
that there exists one tumulus in Guiana, not even in the plains of the
Cassiquiare and the Essequibo. Some, however, are to be met with in
the savannahs of Varinas, as in Canada, to the west of the
Alleghenies.* (* Mummies and skeletons contained in baskets were
recently discovered in a cavern in the United States. It is believed
they belong to a race of men analogous to that of the Sandwich
Islands. The description of these tombs has some similitude with that
of the tombs of Ataruipe.) It seems remarkable enough that,
notwithstanding the extreme abundance of wood in those countries, the
natives of the Orinoco were as little accustomed as the ancient
Scythians to burn the dead. Sometimes they formed funeral piles for
that purpose; but only after a battle, when the number of the dead was
considerable. In 1748, the Parecas burned not only the bodies of their
enemies, the Tamanacs, but also those of their own people who fell on
the field of battle.
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