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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In The Countries We Had Just Passed Through, Between The Meta, The
Arauca, And The Apure, There Were Found, At The Time Of The First
Expeditions To The Orinoco, In 1535, Those Mute Dogs, Called By The
Natives Maios, And Auries.
This fact is curious in many points of
view.
We cannot doubt that the dog, whatever Father Gili may assert,
is indigenous in South America. The different Indian languages furnish
words to designate this animal, which are scarcely derived from any
European tongue. To this day the word auri, mentioned three hundred
years ago by Alonzo de Herrera, is found in the Maypure. The dogs we
saw at the Orinoco may perhaps have descended from those that the
Spaniards carried to the coast of Caracas; but it is not less certain
that there existed a race of dogs before the conquest, in Peru, in New
Granada, and in Guiana, resembling our shepherds' dogs. The allco of
the natives of Peru, and in general all the dogs that we found in the
wildest countries of South America, bark frequently. The first
historians, however, all speak of mute dogs (perros mudos). They still
exist in Canada; and, what appears to me worthy of attention, it was
this dumb variety that was eaten in preference in Mexico,* and at the
Orinoco. (* See on the Mexican techichi and on the numerous
difficulties that occur in the history of mute dogs and dogs destitute
of hair the Views of Nature Bohn's edition page 85.) A very well
informed traveller, M. Giesecke, who resided six years in Greenland,
assured me that the dogs of the Esquimaux, which pass their lives in
the open air and bury themselves in winter beneath the snow, do not
bark, but howl like wolves.* (* They sit down in a circle, one of them
begins to howl alone and the others follow in the same tone. The
groups of alouate monkeys howl in the same manner, and among them the
Indians distinguish the leader of the band. It was the practice at
Mexico to castrate the mute dogs in order to fatten them. This
operation must have contributed to alter the organ of the voice.)
The practice of eating the flesh of dogs is now entirely unknown on
the banks of the Orinoco; but as it is a Tartar custom spread through
all the eastern part of Asia, it appears to me highly interesting for
the history of nations to have ascertained that it existed heretofore
in the hot regions of Guiana and on the table-lands of Mexico. I must
observe, also, that on the confines of the province of Durango, at the
northern extremity of New Spain, the Comanches have preserved the
habit of loading the backs of the great dogs that accompany them in
their migrations with their tents of buffalo-leather. It is well known
that employing dogs as beasts of burthen and of draught is equally
common near the Slave Lake and in Siberia. I dwell on these features
of conformity in the manners of nations, which become of some weight
when they are not solitary, and are connected with the analogies
furnished by the structure of languages, the division of time, and
religious creeds and institutions.
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