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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He Has Even Credited That Extraordinary Event
Which Led The Caribs To Renounce This Barbarous Custom.
The natives of
a little island devoured a Dominican monk whom they had carried off
from the coast of Porto Rico; they all fell sick, and would never
again eat monk or layman.
If the Caribs of the Orinoco, since the commencement of the sixteenth
century, have differed in their manners from those of the West India
Islands; if they are unjustly accused of anthropophagy; it is
difficult to attribute this difference to any superiority of their
social state. The strangest contrasts are found blended in this
mixture of nations, some of whom live only upon fish, monkeys, and
ants; while others are more or less cultivators of the ground, more or
less occupied in making and painting pottery, or weaving hammocks or
cotton cloth. Several of the latter tribes have preserved inhuman
customs altogether unknown to the former. "You cannot imagine," said
the old missionary of Mandavaca, "the perversity of this Indian race
(familia de Indios). You receive men of a new tribe into the village;
they appear to be mild, good, and laborious; but suffer them to take
part in an incursion (entrada) to bring in the natives, and you can
scarcely prevent them from murdering all they meet, and hiding some
portions of the dead bodies." In reflecting on the manners of these
Indians, we are almost horrified at that combination of sentiments
which seem to exclude each other; that faculty of nations to become
but partially humanized; that preponderance of customs, prejudices,
and traditions, over the natural affections of the heart.
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