When The Missionaries Send On Their Own Account Small Cargoes Of Cacao, Tobacco, And Chiquichiqui* (* Ropes Made With The Petioles Of A Palm-Tree With Pinnate Leaves.) From The Rio Negro To Angostura, They Always Add Some Cakes Of Chica, As Being Articles Of Merchandise In Great Request.

The custom of painting is not equally ancient among all the tribes of the Orinoco.

It has increased since the time when the powerful nation of the Caribs made frequent incursions into those countries. The victors and the vanquished were alike naked; and to please the conqueror it was necessary to paint like him, and to assume his colour. The influence of the Caribs has now ceased, and they remain circumscribed between the rivers Carony, Cuyuni, and Paraguamuzi; but the Caribbean fashion of painting the whole body is still preserved. The custom has survived the conquest.

Does the use of the anato and chica derive its origin from the desire of pleasing, and the taste for ornament, so common among the most savage nations? or must we suppose it to be founded on the observation, that these colouring and oily matters with which the skin is plastered, preserve it from the sting of the mosquitos? I have often heard this question discussed in Europe; but in the Missions of the Orinoco, and wherever, within the tropics, the air is filled with venomous insects, the inquiry would appear absurd. The Carib and the Salive, who are painted red, are not less cruelly tormented by the mosquitos and the zancudos, than the Indians whose bodies are plastered with no colour. The sting of the insect causes no swelling in either; and scarcely ever produces those little pustules which occasion such smarting and itching to Europeans recently arrived. But the native and the White suffer equally from the sting, till the insect has withdrawn its sucker from the skin. After a thousand useless essays, M. Bonpland and myself tried the expedient of rubbing our hands and arms with the fat of the crocodile, and the oil of turtle-eggs, but we never felt the least relief, and were stung as before. I know that the Laplanders boast of oil and fat as the most useful preservatives; but the insects of Scandinavia are not of the same species as those of the Orinoco. The smoke of tobacco drives away our gnats, while it is employed in vain against the zancudos. If the application of fat and astringent* substances preserved the inhabitants of these countries from the torment of insects, as Father Gumilla alleges, why has not the custom of painting the skin become general on these shores? (* The pulp of the anato, and even the chica, are astringent and slightly purgative.) Why do so many naked natives paint only the face, though living in the neighbourhood of those who paint the whole body?* (* The Caribs, the Salives, the Tamanacs, and the Maypures.)

We are struck with the observation, that the Indians of the Orinoco, like the natives of North America, prefer the substances that yield a red colour to every other. Is this predilection founded on the facility with which the savage procures ochreous earths, or the colouring fecula of anato and of chica? I doubt this much. Indigo grows wild in a great part of equinoctial America. This plant, like so many other leguminous plants, would have furnished the natives abundantly with pigments to colour themselves blue like the ancient Britons.* (* The half-clad nations of the temperate zone often paint their skin of the same colour as that with which their clothes are dyed.) Yet we see no American tribe painted with indigo. It appears to me probable, as I have already hinted above, that the preference given by the Americans to the red colour is generally founded on the tendency which nations feel to attribute the idea of beauty to whatever characterises their national physiognomy. Men whose skin is naturally of a brownish red, love a red colour. If they be born with a forehead little raised, and the head flat, they endeavour to depress the foreheads of their children. If they be distinguished from other nations by a thin beard, they try to eradicate the few hairs that nature has given them. They think themselves embellished in proportion as they heighten the characteristic marks of their race, or of their national conformation.

We were surprised to see, that, in the camp of Pararuma, the women far advanced in years were more occupied with their ornaments than the youngest women. We saw an Indian female of the nation of the Ottomacs employing two of her daughters in the operation of rubbing her hair with the oil of turtles' eggs, and painting her back with anato and caruto. The ornament consisted of a sort of lattice-work formed of black lines crossing each other on a red ground. Each little square had a black dot in the centre. It was a work of incredible patience. We returned from a very long herborization, and the painting was not half finished. This research of ornament seems the more singular when we reflect that the figures and marks are not produced by the process of tattooing, but that paintings executed with so much care are effaced,* if the Indian exposes himself imprudently to a heavy shower. (* The black and caustic pigment of the caruto (Genipa americana) however, resists a long time the action of water, as we found with regret, having one day, in sport with the Indians, caused our faces to be marked with spots and strokes of caruto. When we returned to Angostura, in the midst of Europeans, these marks were still visible.) There are some nations who paint only to celebrate festivals; others are covered with colour during the whole year: and the latter consider the use of anato as so indispensable, that both men and women would perhaps be less ashamed to present themselves without a guayaco* than destitute of paint. (* A word of the Caribbean language.

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