THE LLANOS DEL PAO, OR EASTERN PART OF THE PLAINS OF VENEZUELA. MISSIONS OF THE CARIBS. LAST VISIT TO THE COAST OF NUEVA BARCELONA, CUMANA, AND ARAYA.

Night had set in when we crossed for the last time the bed of the Orinoco. We purposed to rest near the little fort San Rafael, and on the following morning at daybreak to set out on our journey through the plains of Venezuela. Nearly six weeks had elapsed since our arrival at Angostura; and we earnestly wished to reach the coast, with the view of finding, at Cumana, or at Nueva Barcelona, a vessel in which we might embark for the island of Cuba, thence to proceed to Mexico. After the sufferings to which we had been exposed during several months, whilst sailing in small boats on rivers infested by mosquitos, the idea of a sea voyage was not without its charms. We had no idea of ever again returning to South America. Sacrificing the Andes of Peru to the Archipelago of the Philippines (of which so little is known), we adhered to our old plan of remaining a year in New Spain, then proceeding in a galleon from Acapulco to Manila, and returning to Europe by way of Bassora and Aleppo. We imagined that, when we had once left the Spanish possessions in America, the fall of that ministry which had procured for us so many advantages, could not be prejudicial to the execution of our enterprise.

Our mules were in waiting for us on the left bank of the Orinoco. The collection of plants, and the different geological series which we had brought from the Esmeralda and Rio Negro, had greatly augmented our baggage; and, as it would have been dangerous to lose sight of our herbals, we expected to make a very slow journey across the Llanos. The heat was excessive, owing to the reverberation of the soil, which was almost everywhere destitute of vegetation; yet the centigrade thermometer during the day (in the shade) was only from thirty to thirty-four degrees, and during the night, from twenty-seven to twenty-eight degrees. Here, therefore, as almost everywhere within the tropics, it was less the absolute degree of heat than its duration that affected our sensations. We spent thirteen days in crossing the plains, resting a little in the Caribbee (Caraibes) missions and in the little town of Pao. The eastern part of the Llanos through which we passed, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, presents the same wild aspect as the western part, through which we had passed from the valleys of Aragua to San Fernando de Apure. In the season of drought, (which is here called summer,) though the sun is in the southern hemisphere, the breeze is felt with greater force in the Llanos of Cumana, than in those of Caracas; because those vast plains, like the cultivated fields of Lombardy, form an inland basin, open to the east, and closed on the north, south and west by high chains of primitive mountains. Unfortunately, we could not avail ourselves of this refreshing breeze, of which the Llaneros, or the inhabitants of the plains, speak with rapture. It was now the rainy season north of the equator; and though it did not rain in the plains, the change in the declination of the sun had for some time caused the action of the polar currents to cease. In the equatorial regions, where the traveller may direct his course by observing the direction of the clouds, and where the oscillations of the mercury in the barometer indicate the hour almost as well as a clock, everything is subject to a regular and uniform rule. The cessation of the breezes, the setting-in of the rainy season, and the frequency of electric explosions, are phenomena which are found to be connected together by immutable laws.

On entering the Llanos of Nueva Barcelona, we met with a Frenchman, at whose house we passed the first night, and who received us with the kindest hospitality. He was a native of Lyons, and he had left his country at a very early age. He appeared extremely indifferent to all that was passing beyond the Atlantic, or, as they say here, disdainfully enough, when speaking of Europe, on the other side of the great pool (al otro lado del charco). Our host was employed in joining large pieces of wood by means of a kind of glue called guayca. This substance, which is used by the carpenters of Angostura, resembles the best animal glue. It is found perfectly prepared between the bark and the alburnum of a creeper* of the family of the Combretaceae. It probably resembles in its chemical properties birdlime, the vegetable principle obtained from the berries of the mistletoe, and the internal bark of the holly. An astonishing abundance of this glutinous matter issues from the twining branches of the vejuco de guayca when they are cut. Thus we find within the tropics a substance in a state of purity and deposited in peculiar organs, which in the temperate zone can be procured only by artificial means.

[* Combretum guayca.]

We did not arrive until the third day at the Caribbee missions of Cari. We observed that the ground was less cracked by the drought in this country than in the Llanos of Calabozo. Some showers had revived the vegetation. Small gramina and especially those herbaceous sensitive-plants so useful in fattening half-wild cattle, formed a thick turf. At great distances one from another, there arose a few fan-palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas* (chaparro), and malpighias* with coriaceous and glossy leaves. The humid spots are recognized at a distance by groups of mauritia, which are the sago-trees of those countries. Near the coast this palm-tree constitutes the whole wealth of the Guaraon Indians; and it is somewhat remarkable that we also found it one hundred and sixty leagues farther south, in the midst of the forests of the Upper Orinoco, in the savannahs that surround the granitic peak of Duida.* It was loaded at this season with enormous clusters of red fruit, resembling fir-cones. Our monkeys were extremely fond of this fruit, which has the taste of an over-ripe apple. The monkeys were placed with our baggage on the backs of the mules, and they made great efforts to reach the clusters that hung over their heads. The plain was undulating from the effects of the mirage; and when, after travelling for an hour, we reached the trunks of the palm-trees, which appeared like masts in the horizon, we observed with astonishment how many things are connected with the existence of a single plant. The winds, losing their velocity when in contact with the foliage and the branches, accumulate sand around the trunk. The smell of the fruit and the brightness of the verdure attract from afar the birds of passage, which love to perch on the slender, arrow-like branches of the palm-tree. A soft murmuring is heard around; and overpowered by the heat, and accustomed to the melancholy silence of the plains, the traveller imagines he enjoys some degree of coolness on hearing the slightest sound of the foliage. If we examine the soil on the side opposite to the wind, we find it remains humid long after the rainy season. Insects and worms, everywhere else so rare in the Llanos, here assemble and multiply. This one solitary and often stunted tree, which would not claim the notice of the traveller amid the forests of the Orinoco, spreads life around it in the desert.

[* The Proteaceae are not, like the Araucaria, an exclusively southern form. We found the Rhopala complicata and the R. obovata, in 2° 30′, and in 10° of north latitude.]

[* A neighbouring genus, Byrsonima cocollobaefolia, B. laurifolia, near Matagorda, and B. ropalaefolia.]

[* The moriche, like the Sagus Rumphii, is a palm-tree of the marshes, not a palm-tree of the coast, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common cocoa-tree, and the lodoicea.]

On the 13th of July we arrived at the village of Cari, the first of the Caribbee missions that are under the Observantin monks of the college of Piritu. We lodged as usual at the convent, that is, with the clergyman. Our host could scarcely comprehend how natives of the north of Europe could arrive at his dwelling from the frontiers of Brazil by the Rio Negro, and not by way of the coast of Cumana. He behaved to us in the most affable manner, at the same time manifesting that somewhat importunate curiosity which the appearance of a stranger, not a Spaniard, always excites in South America. He expressed his belief that the minerals we had collected must contain gold; and that the plants, dried with so much care, must be medicinal. Here, as in many parts of Europe, the sciences are thought worthy to occupy the mind only so far as they confer some immediate and practical benefit on society.

We found more than five hundred Caribs in the village of Cari; and saw many others in the surrounding missions. It is curious to observe this nomad people, recently attached to the soil, and differing from all the other Indians in their physical and intellectual powers. They are a very tall race of men, their height being from five feet six inches, to five feet ten inches. According to a practice common in America, the women are more sparingly clothed than the men. The former wear only the guajuco, or perizoma, in the form of a band. The men have the lower part of the body wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, so dark as to be almost black. This drapery is so ample that, on the lowering of the temperature towards evening, the Caribs throw it over their shoulders. Their bodies tinged with onoto,* their tall figures, of a reddish copper-colour, and their picturesque drapery, when seen from a distance, relieved against the sky as a background, resemble antique statues of bronze. The men cut their hair in a very peculiar manner, very much in the style of the monks. A part of the forehead is shaved, which makes it appear extremely high, and a circular tuft of hair is left near the crown of the head. This resemblance between the Caribs and the monks is not the result of mission life. It is not caused, as had been erroneously supposed, by the desire of the natives to imitate their masters, the Franciscan monks. The tribes that have preserved their wild independence, between the sources of the Carony and the Rio Branco, are distinguished by the same cerquillo de frailes,* which the early Spanish historians at the time of the discovery of America attributed to the nations of the Carib race. All the men of this race whom we saw either during our voyage on the Lower Orinoco, or in the missions of Piritu, differ from the other Indians not only in the tallness of their stature, but also in the regularity of their features. Their noses are smaller, and less flattened; the cheek-bones are not so high; and their physiognomy has less of the Mongol character. Their eyes, which are darker than those of the other hordes of Guiana, denote intelligence, and it may even be said, the habit of reflection. The Caribs have a gravity of manner, and a certain look of sadness which is observable among most of the primitive inhabitants of the New World. The expression of severity in their features is heightened by the practice of dyeing their eyebrows with the juice of caruto: they also lengthen their eyebrows, thereby giving them the appearance of being joined together; and they often mark their faces all over with black spots to give themselves a more fierce appearance. The Carib women are less robust and good-looking than the men, On them devolves almost the whole burden of domestic work, as well as much of the out-door labour. They asked us eagerly for pins, which they stuck under their lower lip, making the head of the pin penetrate deeply into the skin. The young girls are painted red, and are almost naked. Among the different nations of the old and the new worlds, the idea of nudity is altogether relative. A woman in some parts of Asia is not permitted to show the tips of her fingers; while an Indian of the Carib race is far from considering herself unclothed if she wear round her waist a guajuco two inches broad. Even this band is regarded as less essential than the pigment which covers the skin. To go out of the hut without being painted, would be to transgress all the rules of Carib decency.

[* Rocou, obtained from the Bixa orellana. This paint is called in the Carib tongue, bichet.]

[* Circular tonsure of the friars.]

The Indians of the missions of Piritu especially attracted our attention, because they belong to a nation which, by its daring, its warlike enterprises, and its mercantile spirit has exercised great influence over the vast country extending from the equator towards the northern coast. Everywhere on the Orinoco we beheld traces of the hostile incursions of the Caribs: incursions which heretofore extended from the sources of the Carony and the Erevato as far as the banks of the Ventuari, the Atacavi, and the Rio Negro. The Carib language is consequently the most general in this part of the world; it has even passed (like the language of the Lenni–Lenapes, or Algonkins, and the Natchez or Muskoghees, on the west of the Allegheny mountains) to tribes which have not a common origin.

When we survey that multitude of nations spread over North and South America, eastward of the Cordilleras of the Andes, we fix our attention particularly on those who, having long held dominion over their neighbours, have acted an important part on the stage of the world. It is the business of the historian to group facts, to distinguish masses, to ascend to the common sources of many migrations and popular movements. Great empires, the regular organization of a sacerdotal hierarchy, and the culture which that organization favours in the first ages of society, have existed only on the high mountains of the western world. In Mexico we see a vast monarchy enclosing small republics; at Cundinamarca and Peru we find pure theocracies. Fortified towns, highways and large edifices of stone, an extraordinary development of the feudal system, the separation of castes, convents of men and women, religious congregations regulated by discipline more or less severe, complicated divisions of time connected with the calendars, the zodiacs, and the astrology of the enlightened nations of Asia — all these phenomena in America belong to one region only, the long and narrow Alpine band extending from the thirtieth degree of north latitude to the twenty-fifth degree of south. The migration of nations in the ancient world was from east to west; the Basques or Iberians, the Celts, the Germans and the Pelasgi, appeared in succession. In the New World similar migrations flowed from north to south. Among the nations that inhabit the two hemispheres, the direction of this movement followed that of the mountains; but in the torrid zone the temperate table-lands of the Cordilleras had greater influence on the destiny of mankind, than the mountains of Asia and central Europe. As, properly speaking, only civilized nations have a history, the history of the Americans is necessarily no more than that of a small portion of the inhabitants of the mountains. Profound obscurity envelops the vast country which stretches from the eastern slope of the Cordilleras towards the Atlantic; and for this very reason, whatever in that country relates to the preponderance of one nation over others, to distant migrations, to the physiognomical features which denote a foreign race, excite our deepest interest.

Amidst the plains of North America, some powerful nation, which has disappeared, constructed circular, square, and octagonal fortifications; walls six thousand toises in length; tumuli from seven to eight hundred feet in diameter, and one hundred and forty feet in height, sometimes round, sometimes with several stories and containing thousands of skeletons. These skeletons are the remains of men less slender and more squat than the present inhabitants of those countries. Other bones wrapped in fabrics resembling those of the Sandwich and Feejee Islands are found in the natural grottoes of Kentucky. What is become of those nations of Louisiana anterior to the Lenni–Lenapes, the Shawanese, and perhaps even to the Sioux (Nadowesses, Nahcotas) of the Missouri, who are strongly mongolised; and who, it is believed, according to their own traditions, came from the coast of Asia? In the plains of South America we find only a very few hillocks of that kind called cerros hechos a mano;* and nowhere any works of fortification analogous to those of the Ohio. However, on a vast space of ground, at the Lower Orinoco, as well as on the banks of the Cassiquiare and between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, there are rocks of granite covered with symbolic figures. These sculptures denote that the extinct generations belonged to nations different from those which now inhabit the same regions. There seems to be no connection between the history of Mexico and that of Cundinamarca and of Peru; but in the plains of the east a warlike and long-dominant nation betrays in its features and its physical constitution traces of a foreign origin. The Caribs preserve traditions that seem to indicate ancient communications between North and South America. Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races, remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants have been driven from one hemisphere to the other.

[* Hills made by the hand, or artificial hills.]

That fine race of people, the Caribs, now occupy only a small part of the country which they inhabited at the time of the discovery of America. The cruelties exercised by Europeans have entirely exterminated them from the West Indian Islands and the coasts of Darien; while under the government of the missions they have formed populous villages in the provinces of New Barcelona and Spanish Guiana. The Caribs who inhabit the Llanos of Piritu and the banks of the Carony and the Cuyuni may be estimated at more than thirty-five thousand. If we add to this number the independent Caribs who live westward of the mountains of Cayenne and Pacaraymo, between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, we shall no doubt obtain a total of forty thousand individuals of pure race, unmixed with any other tribes of natives. Prior to my travels, the Caribs were mentioned in many geographical works as an extinct race. Writers unacquainted with the interior of the Spanish colonies of the continent supposed that the small islands of Dominica, Guadaloupe, and St. Vincent had been the principal abodes of that nation of which the only vestiges now remaining throughout the whole of the eastern West India Islands are skeletons petrified, or rather enveloped in a limestone containing madrepores.*

[* These skeletons were discovered in 1805 by M. Cortez. They are encased in a formation of madrepore breccia, which the negroes call God’s masonry, and which, like the travertin of Italy, envelops fragments of vases and other objects created by human skill. M. Dauxion Lavaysse and Dr. Koenig first made known in Europe this phenomenon which has greatly interested geologists.]

The name of Caribs, which I find for the first time in a letter of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera is derived from Calina and Caripuna, the l and p being transferred into r and b. It is very remarkable that this name, which Columbus heard pronounced by the people of Hayti, was known to exist at the same time among the Caribs of the islands and those of the continent. From the word Carina, or Calina, has been formed Galibi (Caribi). This is the distinctive denomination of a tribe in French Guiana,* who are of much more diminutive stature than the inhabitants of Cari, but speaking one of the numerous dialects of the Carib tongue. The inhabitants of the islands are called Calinago in the language of the men; and in that of the women, Callipinan. The difference in the language of the two sexes is more striking among the people of the Carib race than among other American nations (the Omaguas, the Guaranis, and the Chiquitos) where it applies only to a limited number of ideas; for instance, the words mother and child. It may be conceived that women, from their separate way of life, frame particular terms which men do not adopt. Cicero observes* that old forms of language are best preserved by women because by their position in society they are less exposed to those vicissitudes of life, changes of place and occupation which tend to corrupt the primitive purity of language among men. But in the Carib nations the contrast between the dialect of the two sexes is so great that to explain it satisfactorily we must refer to another cause; and this may perhaps be found in the barbarous custom, practised by those nations, of killing their male prisoners, and carrying the wives of the vanquished into captivity. When the Caribs made an irruption into the archipelago of the West India Islands, they arrived there as a band of warriors, not as colonists accompanied by their families. The language of the female sex was formed by degrees, as the conquerors contracted alliances with the foreign women; it was composed of new elements, words distinct from the Carib words,* which in the interior of the gynaeceums were transmitted from generation to generation, but on which the structure, the combinations, the grammatical forms of the language of the men exercised an influence. There was then manifested in a small community the peculiarity which we now find in the whole group of the nations of the New Continent. The American languages, from Hudson’s Bay to the Straits of Magellan, are in general characterized by a total disparity of words combined with a great analogy in their structure. They are like different substances invested with analogous forms. If we recollect that this phenomenon extends over one-half of our planet, almost from pole to pole; if we consider the shades in the grammatical forms (the genders applied to the three persons of the verb, the reduplications, the frequentatives, the duals); it appears highly astonishing to find a uniform tendency in the development of intelligence and language among so considerable a portion of the human race.

[* The Galibis (Calibitis), the Palicours, and the Acoquouas, also cut their hair in the style of the monks; and apply bandages to the legs of their children for the purpose of swelling the muscles. They have the same predilection for green stones (saussurite) which we observed among the Carib nations of the Orinoco. There exist, besides, in French Guiana, twenty Indian tribes which are distinguished from the Galibis though their language proves that they have a common origin.]

[* Cicero, de Orat. lib. 3 cap. 12 paragraph 45 ed. Verburg. Facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod multorum sermonis expertes ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt.]

[* The following are examples of the difference between the language of the men (m), and the women (w); isle, oubao (m), acaera (w); man, ouekelli (m), eyeri (w); but, irhen (m), atica (w).]

We have just seen that the dialect of the Carib women in the West India Islands contains the vestiges of a language that was extinct. Some writers have imagined that this extinct language might be that of the Ygneris, or primitive inhabitants of the Caribbee Islands; others have traced in it some resemblance to the ancient idiom of Cuba, or to those of the Arowaks, and the Apalachites in Florida: but these hypotheses are all founded on a very imperfect knowledge of the idioms which it has been attempted to compare one with another.

The Spanish writers of the sixteenth century inform us that the Carib nations then extended over eighteen or nineteen degrees of latitude, from the Virgin Islands east of Porto Rico, to the mouths of the Amazon. Another prolongation toward the west, along the coast-chain of Santa Marta and Venezuela, appears less certain. Gomara, however, and the most ancient historians, give the name of Caribana, not, as it has since been applied, to the country between the sources of the Orinoco and the mountains of French Guiana,* but to the marshy plains between the mouths of the Rio Atrato and the Rio Sinu. I have visited those coasts in going from the Havannah to Porto Bello; and I there learned that the cape which bounds the gulf of Darien or Uraba on the east, still bears the name of Punta Caribana. An opinion heretofore prevailed pretty generally that the Caribs of the West India Islands derived their origin, and even their name, from these warlike people of Darien. “From the eastern shore springs Cape Uraba, which the natives call Caribana, whence the Caribs of the island are said to have received their present name.”* Thus Anghiera expresses himself in his Oceanica. He had been told by a nephew of Amerigo Vespucci that thence, as far as the snowy mountains of St. Marta, all the natives were e genere Caribium, vel Canibalium. I do not deny that Caribs may have had a settlement near the gulf of Darien, and that they may have been driven thither by the easterly currents; but it also may have happened that the Spanish navigators, little attentive to languages, gave the names Carib and Cannibal to every race of people of tall stature and ferocious character. Still it is by no means probable that the Caribs of the islands and of Parima took to themselves the name of the region which they had originally inhabited. On the east of the Andes and wherever civilization has not yet penetrated, it is the people who have given names to the places where they have settled.* The words Caribs and Cannibals appear significant; they are epithets referring to valour, strength and even superior intelligence.* It is worthy of remark that, at the arrival of the Portuguese, the Brazilians gave to their magicians the name of caraibes. We know that the Caribs of Parima were the most wandering people of America; possibly some wily individuals of that nation played the same part as the Chaldeans of the ancient continent. The names of nations readily become affixed to particular professions; and when, in the time of the Caesars, the superstitions of the East were introduced into Italy, the Chaldeans no more came from the banks of the Euphrates than our Gypsies (Egyptians or Bohemians) came from the banks of the Nile or the Elbe.

[* This name is found in the map of Hondius, of 1599, which accompanies the Latin edition of the narrative of Raleigh’s voyage. In the Dutch edition Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, the Llanos of Caracas, between the mountains of Merida and the Rio Pao, bear the name of Caribana. We may remark here, what we observe so often in the history of geography, that the same denomination has spread by degrees from west to east.]

[* Inde Vrabam ab orientali prehendit ora, quam appellant indigenae Caribana, unde Caribes insulares originem habere nomenque retinere dicuntur.]

[* These names of places can be perpetuated only where the nations succeed immediately to each other, and where the tradition is interrupted. Thus in the province of Quito many of the summits of the Andes bear names which belong neither to the Quichua (the language of Inca) nor to the ancient language of the Paruays, governed by the Conchocando of Lican.]

[* Vespucci says: Charaibi magnae sapientiae viri.]

When a continent and its adjacent islands are peopled by one and the same race, we may choose between two hypotheses; supposing the emigration to have taken place either from the islands to the continent, or from the continent to the islands. The Iberians (Basques) who were settled at the same time in Spain and in the islands of the Mediterranean, afford an instance of this problem; as do also the Malays who appear to be indigenous in the peninsula of Malacca, and in the district of Menangkabao in the island of Sumatra.* The archipelago of the large and small West India Islands forms a narrow and broken neck of land, parallel with the isthmus of Panama, and supposed by some geographers to join the peninsula of Florida to the north-east extremity of South America. It is the eastern shore of an inland sea which may be considered as a basin with several outlets. This peculiar configuration of the land has served to support the different systems of migration, by which it has been attempted to explain the settlement of the nations of the Carib race in the islands and on the neighbouring continent. The Caribs of the continent admit that the small West India Islands were anciently inhabited by the Arowaks,* a warlike nation, the great mass of which still inhabit the insalubrious shores of Surinam and Berbice. They assert that the Arowaks, with the exception of the women, were all exterminated by Caribs, who came from the mouths of the Orinoco. In support of this tradition they refer to the traces of analogy existing between the language of the Arowaks and that of the Carib women; but it must be recollected that the Arowaks, though the enemies of the Caribs, belonged to the same branch of people; and that the same analogy exists between the Arowak and Carib languages as between the Greek and the Persian, the German and the Sanscrit. According to another tradition, the Caribs of the islands came from the south, not as conquerors, but because they were expelled from Guiana by the Arowaks, who originally ruled over all the neighbouring nations. Finally, a third tradition, much more general and more probable, represents the Caribs as having come from Florida, in North America. Mr. Bristock, a traveller who has collected every particular relating to these migrations from north to south, asserts that a tribe of Confachites (Confachiqui*) had long waged war against the Apalachites; that the latter, having yielded to that tribe the fertile district of Amana, called their new confederates Caribes (that is, valiant strangers); but that, owing to a dispute respecting their religious rites, the Confachite–Caribs were driven from Florida. They went first to the Yucayas or Lucayes Islands (to Cigateo and the neighbouring islands); thence to Ayay (Hayhay, now Santa Cruz), and to the lesser Caribbee Islands; and lastly to the continent of South America.* It is supposed that this event took place toward the year 1100 of our era. In the course of this long migration the Caribs had not touched at the larger islands; the inhabitants of which however also believed that they came originally from Florida. The islanders of Cuba, Hayti, and Boriken (Porto Rico) were, according to the uniform testimony of the first conquistadores, entirely different from the Caribs; and at the period of the discovery of America, the latter had already abandoned the group of the lesser Lucayes Islands; an archipelago in which there prevailed that variety of languages always found in lands peopled by shipwrecked men and fugitives.*

[* Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago volume 2 page 371. I make use of the word indigenous (autocthoni) not to indicate a fact of creation, which does not belong to history, but simply to denote that we are ignorant of the autocthoni having been preceded by any other people.]

[* Arouaques. The missionary Quandt (Nachricht von Surinam, 1807 page 47) calls them Arawackes.]

[* The province of Confachiqui, which in 1541 became subject to a woman, is celebrated by the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida. Among the nations of the Huron tongue, and the Attakapas, the supreme authority was also often exercised by women.]

[* Rochefort, Hist. des Antilles volume 1 pages 326 to 353; Garcia page 322; Robertson book 3 note 69. The conjecture of Father Gili that the Caribs of the continent may have come from the islands at the time of the first conquest of the Spaniards (Saggio volume 3 page 204), is at variance with all the statements of the early historians.]

[* La gente de las islas Yucayas era (1492) mas blanca y de major policia que la de Cuba y Haiti. Havia mucha diversidad de lenguas. [The people of the Lucayes were (1492) of fairer complexion and of more civilized manners than those of Cuba and Hayti. They had a great diversity of languages.] Gomara, Hist. de Ind. fol. 22.]

The dominion so long exercised by the Caribs over a great part of the continent, joined to the remembrance of their ancient greatness, has inspired them with a sentiment of dignity and national superiority which is manifest in their manners and their discourse. “We alone are a nation,” say they proverbially; “the rest of mankind (oquili) are made to serve us.” This contempt of the Caribs for their enemies is so strong that I saw a child of ten years of age foam with rage on being called a Cabre or Cavere; though he had never in his life seen an individual of that unfortunate race of people who gave their name to the town of Cabruta (Cabritu); and who, after long resistance, were almost entirely exterminated by the Caribs. Thus we find among half savage hordes, as in the most civilized part of Europe, those inveterate animosities which have caused the names of hostile nations to pass into their respective languages as insulting appellations.

The missionary of the village of Cari led us into several Indian huts, where extreme neatness and order prevailed. We observed with pain the torments which the Carib mothers inflict on their infants for the purpose not only of enlarging the calf of the leg, but also of raising the flesh in alternate stripes from the ankle to the top of the thigh. Narrow ligatures, consisting of bands of leather, or of woven cotton, are fixed two or three inches apart from each other, and being tightened more and more, the muscles between the bands become swollen. The monks of the missions, though ignorant of the works or even of the name of Rousseau, attempt to oppose this ancient system of physical education: but in vain. Man when just issued from the woods and supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far from being tractable in his ideas of beauty and propriety. I observed, however, with surprise, that the manner in which these poor children are bound, and which seems to obstruct the circulation of the blood, does not operate injuriously on their muscular movements. There is no race of men more robust and swifter in running than the Caribs.

If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their children so as to produce what painters call undulating outlines, they abstain (at least in the Llanos), from flattening the head by compressing it between cushions and planks from the most tender age. This practice, so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than those of the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco. A systematizer would say that the form is such as their intellectual faculties require. We were so much the more struck by this fact as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in Europe, for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other human skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute facial angle. In some osteological collections skulls supposed to be those of Caribs of the island of St. Vincent are in fact skulls shaped by having been pressed between planks. They have belonged to Zambos (black Caribs) who are descended from Negroes and true Caribs.* The barbarous habit of flattening the forehead is practised by several nations,* of people not of the same race; and it has been observed recently in North America; but nothing is more vague than the conclusion that some degree of conformity in customs and manners proves identity of origin. On observing the spirit of order and submission which prevails in the Carib missions, the traveller can scarcely persuade himself that he is among cannibals. This American word, of somewhat doubtful signification, is probably derived from the language of Hayti, or that of Porto Rico; and it has passed into the languages of Europe, since the end of the fifteenth century, as synonymous with that of anthropophagi. “These newly discovered man-eaters, so greedy of human flesh, are called Caribes or Cannibals,”* says Anghiera, in the third decade of his Oceanica, dedicated to Pope Leo X. There can be little doubt that the Caribs of the islands, when a conquering people, exercised cruelties upon the Ygneris, or ancient inhabitants of the West Indies, who were weak and not very warlike; but we must also admit that these cruelties were exaggerated by the early travellers, who heard only the narratives of the old enemies of the Caribs. It is not always the vanquished solely, who are calumniated by their contemporaries; the insolence of the conquerors is punished by the catalogue of their crimes being augmented.

[* These unfortunate remnants of a nation heretofore powerful were banished in 1795 to the Island of Rattam in the Bay of Honduras because they were accused by the English Government of having connexions with the French. In 1760 an able minister, M. Lescallier, proposed to the Court of Versailles to invite the Red and Black Caribs from St. Vincent to Guiana and to employ them as free men in the cultivation of the land. I doubt whether their number at that period amounted to six thousand, as the island of St. Vincent contained in 1787 not more than fourteen thousand inhabitants of all colours.]

[* For instance the Tapoyranas of Guiana (Barrere page 239), the Solkeeks of Upper Louisiana (Walckenaer, Cosmos page 583). Los Indios de Cumana, says Gomara (Hist. de Ind.), aprietan a los ninos la cabeca muy blando, pero mucho, entre dos almohadillas de algodon para ensancharlos la cara, que lo tienen por hermosura. Las donzellas traen senogiles muy apretados par debaxo y encima de las rodillas, para que los muslos y pantorillas engorden mucho. [The Indians of Cumana press down the heads of young infants tightly between cushions stuffed with cotton for the purpose of giving width to their faces, which they regard as a beauty. The young girls wear very tight bandages round their knees in order to give thickness to the thighs and calves of the legs.]]

[* Edaces humanarum carnium novi helluones anthropophagi, Caribes alias Canibales appellati.]

All the missionaries of the Carony, the Lower Orinoco and the Llanos del Cari whom we had an opportunity of consulting assured us that the Caribs are perhaps the least anthropophagous nations of the New Continent. They extend this remark even to the independent hordes who wander on the east of the Esmeralda, between the sources of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo. It may be conceived that the fury and despair with which the unhappy Caribs defended themselves against the Spaniards, when in 1504 a royal decree declared them slaves, may have contributed to acquire for them a reputation for ferocity. The first idea of attacking this nation and depriving it of liberty and of its natural rights originated with Christopher Columbus, who was not in all instances so humane as he is represented to have been. Subsequently the licenciado Rodrigo de Figueroa was appointed by the court, in 1520, to determine the tribes of South America, who were to be regarded as of Carib race, or as cannibals; and those who were Guatiaos,* that is, Indians of peace, and friends of the Castilians. The ethnographic document called El Auto de Figueroa is one of the most curious records of the barbarism of the first conquistadores. Without any attention to the analogy of languages, every nation that could be accused of having devoured a prisoner after a battle was arbitrarily declared of Carib race. The inhabitants of Uriapari (on the peninsula of Paria) were named Caribs; the Urinacos (settled on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, or Urinucu), Guatiaos. All the tribes designated by Figueroa as Caribs were condemned to slavery; and might at will be sold, or exterminated by war. In these sanguinary struggles, the Carib women, after the death of their husbands, defended themselves with such desperation that Anghiera says they were taken for tribes of Amazons. But amidst the cruelties exercised on the Caribs, it is consolatory to find, that there existed some courageous men who raised the voice of humanity and justice. Some of the monks embraced an opinion different from that which they had at first adopted. In an age when there could be no hope of founding public liberty on civil institutions, an attempt was at least made to defend individual liberty. “That is a most holy law (ley sanctissima),” says Gomara, in 1551, “by which our emperor has prohibited the reducing of the Indians to slavery. It is just that men, who are all born free, should not become the slaves of one another.”

[* I had some trouble in discovering the origin of this denomination which has become so important from the fatal decrees of Figueroa. The Spanish historians often employ the word guatiao to designate a branch of nations. To become a guatiao of any one seems to have signified, in the language of Hayti, to conclude a treaty of friendship. In the West India Islands, as well as in the archipelago of the South Sea, names were exchanged in token of alliance. Juan de Esquivel (1502) se hice guatiao del cacique Cotubanama; el qual desde adelante se llamo Juan de Esquivel, porque era liga de perpetua amistad entre los Indios trocarse los nombres: y trocados quedaban guatiaos, que era tanto coma confederados y hermanos en armas. Ponce de Leon se hace guatiao con el poderoso cacique Agueinaha.” Herrera dec. 1 pages 129, 159 and 181. [Juan de Esquivel (1502) became the guatiao of the cacique Cotubanama; and thenceforth the latter called himself Juan de Esquivel, for among the Indians the exchange of names was a bond of perpetual friendship. Those who exchanged names became guaitaos, which meant the same as confederates or brethren-inarms. Ponce de Leon became guatiao with the powerful cacique Agueinaha.] One of the Lucayes Islands, inhabited by a mild and pacific people, was heretofore called Guatao; but we will not insist on the etymology of this word, because the languages of the Lucayes Islands differed from those of Hayti.]

During our abode in the Carib missions, we observed with surprise the facility with which young Indians of eighteen years of age, when appointed to the post of alguazil, would harangue the municipality for whole hours in succession. Their tone of voice, their gravity of deportment, the gestures which accompanied their speech, all denoted an intelligent people capable of a high degree of civilization. A Franciscan monk, who knew enough of the Carib language to preach in it occasionally, pointed out to us that the long and harmonious periods which occur in the discourses of the Indians are never confused or obscure. Particular inflexions of the verb indicate beforehand the nature of the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, singular or plural. Little annexed forms (suffixes) mark the gradations of sentiment; and here, as in every language formed by a free development, clearness is the result of that regulating instinct which characterises human intelligence in the various stages of barbarism and cultivation. 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. The authority of the chiefs of the independent Caribs is hereditary in the male line only, the children of sisters being excluded from the succession. This law of succession which is founded on a system of mistrust, denoting no great purity of manners, prevails in India; among the Ashantees (in Africa); and among several tribes of the savages of North America.* The young chiefs and other youths who are desirous of marrying, are subject to the most extraordinary fasts and penances, and are required to take medicines prepared by the marirris or piaches, called in the transalleghenian countries, war-physic. The Carribbee marirris are at once priests, jugglers and physicians; they transmit to their successors their doctrine, their artifices, and the remedies they employ. The latter are accompanied by imposition of hands, and certain gestures and mysterious practices, apparently connected with the most anciently known processes of animal magnetism. Though I had opportunities of seeing many persons who had closely observed the confederated Caribs, I could not learn whether the marirris belong to a particular caste. It is observed in North America that, among the Shawanese,* divided into several tribes, the priests, who preside at the sacrifices, must be (as among the Hebrews) of one particular tribe, that of the Mequachakes. Any facts that may hereafter be discovered in America respecting the remains of a sacerdotal caste appears to me calculated to excite great interest, on account of those priest-kings of Peru, who styled themselves the children of the Sun; and of those sun-kings among the Natchez, who recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.

[* Among the Hurons (Wyandots) and the Natchez the succession to the magistracy is continued by the women: it is not the son who succeeds, but the son of the sister, or of the nearest relation in the female line. This mode of succession is said to be the most certain because the supreme power remains attached to the blood of the last chief; it is a practice that insures legitimacy. Ancient traces of this strange mode of succession, so common in Africa and in the East Indies, exist in the dynasty of the kings of the West India Islands.]

[* People that came from Florida, or from the south (shawaneu) to the north.]

On quitting the mission of Cari, we had some difficulties to settle with our Indian muleteers. They had discovered that we had brought skeletons with us from the cavern of Ataruipe; and they were fully persuaded that the beasts of burden which carried the bodies of their old relations would perish on the journey.* Every precaution we had taken was useless; nothing escapes a Carib’s penetration and keen sense of smell, and it required all the authority of the missionary to forward our passage. We had to cross the Rio Cari in a boat, and the Rio de agua clara, by fording, or, it may almost be said, by swimming. The quicksands of the bed of this river render the passage very difficult at the season when the waters are high. The strength of the current seems surprising in so flat a country; but the rivers of the plains are precipitated, to quote a correct observation of Pliny the younger,* “less by the declivity of their course than by their abundance, and as it were by their own weight.” We had two bad stations, one at Matagorda and the other at Los Riecetos, before we reached the little town of Pao. We beheld everywhere the same objects; small huts constructed of reeds, and roofed with leather; men on horseback armed with lances, guarding the herds; herds of cattle half wild, remarkable for their uniform colour, and disputing the pasturage with horses and mules. No sheep or goats are found on these immense plains. Sheep do not thrive well in equinoctial America, except on table-lands above a thousand toises high, where their fleece is long and sometimes very fine. In the burning climate of the plains, where the wolves give place to jaguars, these small ruminating animals, destitute of means of defence, and slow in their movements, cannot be preserved in any considerable numbers.

[* See volume 2.24.]

[* Epist. lib. 8 ep. 8. Clitumnus non loci devexitate, sed ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere impellitur.]

We arrived on the 15th of July at the Fundacion, or Villa, del Pao, founded in 1744, and situated very favourably for a commercial station between Nueva Barcelona and Angostura. Its real name is El Concepcion del Pao. Alcedo, La Cruz, Olmedilla, and many other geographers, have mistaken the situation of this small town of the Llanos of Barcelona, confounding it either with San Juan Bauptisto del Pao of the Llanos of Caracas, or with El Valle del Pao de Zarate. Though the weather was cloudy I succeeded in obtaining some heights of alpha Centauri, serving to determine the latitude of the place; which is 8° 37′ 57″. Some altitudes of the sun gave me 67° 8′ 12″ for the longitude, supposing Angostura to be 66° 15′ 21″. The astronomical determinations of Calabozo and Concepcion del Pao are very important to the geography of this country, where, in the midst of savannahs, fixed points are altogether wanting. Some fruit-trees grow in the vicinity of Pao: they are rarely seen in the Llanos. We even found some cocoa-trees, which appeared very vigorous, notwithstanding the great distance of the sea. I was the more struck with this fact because doubts have recently been started respecting the veracity of travellers, who assert that they have seen the cocoa-tree, which is a palm of the shore, at Timbuctoo, in the centre of Africa. We several times saw cocoa-trees amid the cultivated spots on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, more than a hundred leagues from the coast.

Five days, which to us appeared very tedious, brought us from Villa del Pao to the port of Nueva Barcelona. As we advanced the sky became more serene, the soil more dusty, and the atmosphere more hot. The heat from which we suffered is not entirely owing to the temperature of the air, but is produced by the fine sand mingled with it; this sand strikes against the face of the traveller, as it does against the ball of the thermometer. I never observed the mercury rise in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45.8° centigrade. Captain Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think that the temperature of fifty-two degrees, so often felt in Fezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and the village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of the little table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana. This table-land forms a point of partition between the Orinoco, the Guarapiche, and the coast of New Andalusia. Its height is so inconsiderable that it would scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this part of the Llanos. The Rio Mano however, which flows into the Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and which D’Anville (I know not on what authority) has marked in the first edition of his great map as issuing from the lake of Valencia, and receiving the waters of the Guayra, could never have served as a natural canal between two basins of rivers. No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano. A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche. The incursions of Don Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of the province of Cumana, occasioned a general migration of independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Orinoco in 1720.

The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary formations which to the southward rest immediately on the granitic mountains of the Orinoco. On the north-west they are separated by a narrow band of transition-rocks from the primitive mountains of the shore of Caracas. This abundance of secondary rocks, covering without interruption a space of more than seven thousand square leagues,* is a phenomenon the more remarkable in that region of the globe, because in the whole of the Sierra da la Parima, between the right bank of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, there is, as in Scandinavia, a total absence of secondary formations. The red sandstone, containing some vestiges of fossil wood (of the family of monocotyledons) is seen everywhere in the plains of Calabozo: farther east it is overlaid by calcareous and gypseous rocks which conceal it from the research of the geologist. The marly gypsum, of which we collected specimens near the Carib mission of Cachipo, appeared to me to belong to the same formation as the gypsum of Ortiz. To class it according to the type of European formations I would range it among the gypsums, often muriatiferous, that cover the Alpine limestone or zechstein. Farther north, in the direction of the mission of San Josef de Curataquiche, M. Bonpland picked up in the plain some fine pieces of riband jasper, or Egyptian pebbles. We did not see them in their native place enchased in the rock, and cannot determine whether they belong to a very recent conglomerate or to that limestone which we saw at the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, and which is not transition limestone though it contains beds of schistose jasper (kieselschiefer).

[* Reckoning only that part of the Llanos which is bounded by the Rio Apure on the south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Parima de las Rosas on the west.]

We rested on the night of the 16th of July in the Indian village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo. This mission, founded in 1749 by several Carib families who inhabited the inundated and unhealthy banks of the Lagunetas de Auache, is opposite the confluence of the Zir Puruay with the Orinoco. We lodged at the house of the missionary, Fray Jose de las Piedras; and, on examining the registers of the parish, we saw how rapidly the prosperity of the community has been advanced by his zeal and intelligence. Since we had reached the middle of the plains, the heat had increased to such a degree that we should have preferred travelling no more during the day; but we were without arms and the Llanos were then infested by large numbers of robbers who attacked and murdered the whites who fell into their hands. Nothing can be worse than the administration of justice in these colonies. We everywhere found the prisons filled with malefactors on whom sentence is not passed till after the lapse of seven or eight years. Nearly a third of the prisoners succeed in making their escape; and the unpeopled plains, filled with herds, furnish them with booty. They commit their depredations on horseback in the manner of the Bedouins. The insalubrity of the prisons would be attended with fatal results but that these receptacles are cleared from time to time by the flight of the prisoners. It also frequently happens that sentences of death, tardily pronounced by the Audiencia of Caracas, cannot be executed for want of a hangman. In these cases the barbarous custom is observed of pardoning one criminal on condition of his hanging the others. Our guides related to us that, a short time before our arrival on the coast of Cumana, a Zambo, known for the great ferocity of his manners, determined to screen himself from punishment by turning executioner. The preparations for the execution however, shook his resolution; he felt a horror of himself, and preferring death to the disgrace of thus saving his life, he called again for his irons which had been struck off. He did not long remain in prison, and he underwent his sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that he himself deserved.

If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos were the refuge of malefactors who had committed crimes in the missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by discord during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast regions! Our European wastes and heaths are but a feeble image of the savannahs of the New Continent which for the space of eight or ten thousand square leagues are smooth as the surface of the sea. The immensity of their extent insures impunity to robbers, who conceal themselves more effectually in the savannahs than in our mountains and forests; and it is easy to conceive that even a European police would not be very effective in regions where there are travellers and no roads, herds and no herdsmen, and farms so solitary that notwithstanding the powerful actio............