Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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On Holidays, After The Celebration Of Mass, All The
Inhabitants Of The Village Assemble In Front Of The Church.
The young
girls place at the feet of the missionary faggots of wood, bunches of
plantains, and other provision of which he stands in need for his
household.
At the same time the governador, the alguazil, and other
municipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to
labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, reprimand the
idle, and flog the untractable. Strokes of the cane are received with
the same insensibility as that with which they are given. It were
better if the priest did not impose these corporal punishments at the
instant of quitting the altar, and if he were not, in his sacerdotal
habits, the spectator of this chastisement of men and women; but this
abuse is inherent in the principle on which the strange government of
the missions is founded. The most arbitrary civil power is combined
with the authority exercised by the priest over the little community;
and, although the Caribs are not cannibals, and we would wish to see
them treated with mildness and indulgence, it may be conceived that
energetic measures are sometimes necessary to maintain tranquillity in
this rising society.
The difficulty of fixing the Caribs to the soil is the greater, as
they have been for ages in the habit of trading on the rivers. We have
already described this active people, at once commercial and warlike,
occupied in the traffic of slaves, and carrying merchandize from the
coasts of Dutch Guiana to the basin of the Amazon. The travelling
Caribs were the Bokharians of equinoctial America. The necessity of
counting the objects of their little trade, and transmitting
intelligence, led them to extend and improve the use of the quipos,
or, as they are called in the missions, the cordoncillos con necos
(cords with knots). These quipos or knotted cords are found in Canada,
in Mexico (where Boturini procured some from the Tlascaltecs), in
Peru, in the plains of Guiana, in central Asia, in China, and in
India. As rosaries, they have become objects of devotion in the hands
of the Christians of the East; as suampans, they have been employed in
the operations of manual arithmetic by the Chinese, the Tartars, and
the Russians. The independent Caribs who inhabit the little-known
country situated between the sources of the Orinoco and those of the
rivers Essequibo, Carony, and Parima, are divided into tribes; and,
like the nations of the Missouri, of Chili, and of ancient Germany,
form a political confederation. This system is most in accordance with
the spirit of liberty prevailing amongst those warlike hordes who see
no advantage in the ties of society but for common defence. The pride
of the Caribs leads them to withdraw themselves from every other
tribe; even from those to whom, by their language, they have some
affinity.
They claim the same separation in the missions, which seldom prosper
when any attempt is made to associate them with other mixed
communities, that is, with villages where every hut is inhabited by a
family belonging to another nation and speaking another language.
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