It Is, Therefore
Superfluous For Me To Add That They Are Now Correspondingly
Demoralized.
It is a most humiliating fact that just in proportion as
the paleface advances into lands hitherto given up to the Indian so
those races sink.
This degeneration showed itself strikingly among
the Guatos in their inordinate desire for cachaca, or "firewater."
Although extremely cautious and wary in their exchanges to us,
refusing to barter a bow and arrows for a shirt, yet, for a bottle of
cachaca, they would gladly have given even one of their canoes. These
ketchiveyos, twenty or twenty-five feet long by about twenty inches
wide, they hollow from the trunk of the cedar, or lapacho tree.
This is done with great labor and skill; yet, as I have said, they
were boisterously eager to exchange this week's work for that which
they knew would lead them to fight and kill one another.
As a mark of special favor, the chief invited me to their little
village, a few miles distant. Stepping into one of their canoes - a
large, very narrow boat, made of one tree-trunk hollowed out by fire -
I was quickly paddled by three naked Indians up a narrow creek,
which was almost covered with lotus. The savages, standing in the
canoe, worked the paddles with a grace and elegance which the
civilized man would fail to acquire, and the narrow craft shot
through the water at great speed. The chief sat in silence at the
stern. I occupied a palm-fibre mat spread for me amidships.
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