"

races.

They are conservative in politics and in religion. To the missionary the cry always is, 'My father knew not your book, and my grandfather knew not your book; they were wiser than we. We do not wish to learn anything which they did not know." Naturally indolent, a bountiful country, in which life can be sustained with the least possible exertion, goes far to nurture this weakness. "They will spend hours in their hammocks, picking their teeth, or meditating some new and striking pattern in daubing their faces with arnotto; at other times they may be seen eradicating the hairs of their beards and eyebrows, in room of which some tribes tattoo lines, according to their own ideas of beauty."

The Guanaian Indian is hospitable according to his means; every visitor gets the best he has in his house. In his turn he is fond of paying visits; indeed, a full fourth of the year occupied in gadding about, so that in course of time he gets well acquainted with the country. Time to him is nothing; such a commodity was "made for slaves," or white men; like Falstaff, to the Indian it is "superfluous to demand the time of the day." Yet, though punctuality is with him a virtue so minute as scarcely to be taken count of, yet when he goes off on a journey, and requires to be at home on a certain date, he will leave a kind of calendar with his friends, consisting of a knotted string, each knot representing a day. A knot is untied on the morning of each day he is absent, and if he is well he will arrive on the day the last knot is untied. Theft is unusual among themselves, though each tribe accuses the other of being addicted to pilfering. It is a will-o'-the-wisp kind of peccadillo which flits always ahead of the traveller; it is unknown in the tribe he is in, but obtains in full perfection in the very next one he will come to. They are fond of liberty and independence; slavery has never been brooked by them as by the Africans. They are all addicted to fearful outbursts of drunkenness, though systematic dram-drinking is unknown amongst them. Wild dances of all sorts are very popular with them, while at their great merrymakings and feasts wrestling and trials of strength are popular amusements of the younger men. A favourite feat is for two men to put a kind of shield in front of them, and then to push each with all his might against the other shield, so as to endeavour to overturn his opponent. This is known by the Warau as the game of isahi. Polygamy is common in most of the tribes, and it is very usual for a man to bring up a young girl from childhood to be one of his wives in due course. The first wife by no means approves of this too much marrying, and not unfrequently she rebels, and wins the day, against any rival being introduced into the family lodge. The woman is not a free agent in marriage, and if a man elopes with her, the betrothed or the husband can demand payment from the seducer for the loss of the wife, and even for the loss of the children which may hereafter be born to his rival, an amusing instance of which Mr. Brett gives. Among the Macuni, in the distant interior, Dr. Hancock tells us that "when a man dies his wife and children are at the disposal of his eldest surviving brother, who may sell or kill them at pleasure." Some of the tribes bury their dead in a standing or sitting posture, and if the death of the deceased is supposed to have been brought about by unfair means, his knife is buried with him, in order that he may have an opportunity of avenging his death in the land of spirits; and many tribes bury the dead man's bow and arrows with him, in order that he may be able to ward off malignant fiends in the land of the dead. If a person dies by foul play, the avenger of his death works himself, by fasting and privation to such a state that he supposes himself to be possessed of an evil spirit. He then starts out in search of his victim, approaching him cautiously and

unawares, when the blow-pipe and arrow do their silent but sure work, or he is struck down by a violent blow across the neck. As he lies insensible, the fangs of a poisonous serpent are forced through his tongue; or, according to other accounts, a poison prepared from a plant called urupa, and which the avenger carries in the bone of a pouri concealed in his hair, is forced down the victim's throat. In either case, he dies in great agony. If the relatives of the slain man find him he is buried, but even then the kanaima (avenger), must keep near to discover where he is laid. Knowing this, the friends of the victim bury him in some secret place silently at night, but their vigilance rarely escapes the sharp-witted Indian trailer. He discovers the grave; then follow some horrible ceremonies, about the nature of which authorities,

aboriginal and foreign, differ. Most probably the truth is, that when he finds the grave, he pushes down into it, and into the body, a long, sharp-pointed stick, that he may taste the victim's blood. After this the evil spirit, with which the avenger is possessed, is allayed, and the kanaima may return home again. If the friends of the murdered man find that, notwithstanding all their care, the grave has been violated, then it is opened, and a red-hot axe placed over the liver. The grave is then closed, and the friends go off satisfied that, as the hot axe burns into the vitals of the dead man, so will the entrails of the murderer be tortured and destroyed, and he, in due course, die. The whole system of revenge, with all its horrible rites of pursuit, &c., is reduced to a perfect system; taught by sire to son, as part of his national education. Their religious beliefs centre in a fear of evil spirits, and a continual desire to allay them, by means of the powers of sorcerers or medicine-men, who obtain their power by fasting

and dreaming, and abstaining from certain kinds of food, especially foods not indigenous to the country. The chief tool of the medicine-man is a red-painted calabash, in which are a few stones, which is regarded with extreme awe by the Indians. Another duty of the sorcerer is to confer names on the children. They believe also in water-fiends, and in addition to their own superstitions, have derived several of African origin from the negroes with whom they have come in contact. Tales-like the loup garrou ones of France-are prevalent

among them; stories of how certain animals are possessed by the spirits of men devoted to cruelty and bloodshed, and their mythology abounds with legendary tales, both of mirth and superstition, while others are "myths of observation," apparently invented to account for natural phenomena. That men were converted into rocks for their evil deeds is among the Guianaians, as among other Indian tribes, a general article of belief, and many rocks are pointed out as having had such an origin. The Haytians-Carib tribes now extinct-believed that their island was the first created land, and that the sun came out from one cave while the men came from another; but the Guianaian tribes acknowledge the work of a Creative

Being. All created things, according to them, came from the branch of a silk-cotton tree, cut down by the Great Creator, but the white men sprung from the chips of a tree, which is notoriously of very little value! All beasts were once endowed with the spirits of men -an apparently widespread belief among the Indian tribes (p. 118). All the different plants on the earth sprung from one tree, on which grew all the different kinds of flowers and fruit. In the centre of this great tree was a huge reservoir of water, in which were the fishes. This water was let loose by the monkey, and drowned the world.

The Macuris believe that the world was peopled by converting stones into men and women, while the Tamancas of the Orinoco declare that the world was, somewhat after the Thessalian tale (p. 129), peopled by the only survivors, a man and a woman, throwing over their heads the stones of the ita (Mauritia) palm, which sprung into human beings. All through this great region, away to the swamps of the Amazon and Orinoco, and even down to La Plata, such tales circulate, though the young people now affect to despise them. It is curious, as Mr. Brett has pointed out, that in many of their traditions, as well as in those of other races of Americans— past and present-there ever figures personages, lawgiving founders of institutions and benefactors of their species, who are said to have disappeared in some mysterious way. Among these we may mention the various Hiawatha traditions (p. 119); Quetzalcoatl, famous among the ancient Aztecs of Mexico; Nemterequeteba, "the Messenger of God," of the Muyscas of New Granada; Amalivaca, once venerated throughout the broad lands drained by the Orinoco, and others.

The occupation of these people we have already sufficiently described-canoe-making, a little agriculture, and a greater deal of hunting and fishing. Cassava bread is their staple farinaceous food. The juice of this plant, when unboiled, is a deadly poison, but when boiled it becomes a deep brown colour, wholesome and nutritious, and is well known as the sauce called casareep, which is the chief ingredient in the famous tropical pepper-pot. Sugar is made by compressing the cane in a primitive but efficient press, of their own manufacture, and canoes are made either by being hollowed out of the solid tree, or like "wood-skins," out of bark, while the paddles are made of the fluted stems of the yaruris-tree. Turtle is shot on the coast with peculiar, heavy-pointed, barbed arrows, the points of which can "unship" from the shaft. So skilful are they at this work, that the arrows are fired in the air in such a manner that they descend in a straight line on the turtle, while if fired straight, they would most likely glance over its horny covering. Turtle eggs are among their peculiar delicacies. The great shell mounds scattered over certain portions of Guiana are not, as has been supposed, remains of a race anterior to the present inhabitants of the country, but are, most probably, only analogous to the kjokken-möddings of the Danish coast, and the shell mounds found on the American and other shores, the refuse-heaps of long generations of aboriginal mollusk-eating inhabitants. Once great nations, the Guianaians, have sunk into comparative insignificance, and will before long become extinct. The cruelties of the French and the Spaniards were the first commencement of their decimation. "Extermination" was their watchword, and on the islands this was coon accomplished. The natives would leap into the sea, preferring death by their own hand to slavery or Spanish bullets, until Dominica and St. Vincent were the last islands retained by them. The cruelties of the conquerors were untold. But the holy friars who accompanied the expedition, to shrive the dying and give their

blessing to the deeds then done, could see little harm in such proceedings. Pere du Têtre relates most conscientiously how a Carib girl was shot by an officer, because two others were contending for her; and how one of their men having been killed, the French "proceeded to set fire to the cottages, and root up the provisions of the savages, &c. &c., and returned in high spirits." Those who have read Las Casas, the "Apostle of the Indies," will remember what he says about the "ground reeking with the blood of the Indians." A Spanish officer was wounded by a spear, but the surgeons-doctors, no doubt, of Salamanca, all of them-being unable to probe the wound, could not be certain whether it had reached a vital point. To ascertain this, the knight's armour was put on an unoffending Indian, the Indian mounted on a horse, and a spear sent into his body with a force about equal to that with which the same weapon had penetrated the Spanish soldier's armour. He was then killed, and, by this rough surgery, the extent of the wound in the officer was presaged.

Such are the Guianaians—in the words of Walter Raleigh—“ a naked people, but valiant as any under the sky." "They appear before us in the sixteenth century; the Caribs and fiercer tribes attacking, and the others flying or defending themselves as well as they were able, while the practice of enslaving each other then generally prevailed. In the course of the next century, we see them chiefly engaged in resisting the encroachments of a fairer and stronger race, which arrived from various countries of Europe with more destructive weapons. In the eighteenth century, while still enslaving each other, we find them frequently engaged by the side of the white man in deadly contest with the black. The middle of the nineteenth saw these various conflicting races united in peace."*

In contact with the Carib area, on the line of the drainage of the Orinoco, are the Maypuris, the Salwa, the Achagua, the Taruma, and Otomaca divisions, all of which are again subdivided into numerous tribes, or subdivisions (see figure on p. 260). † Some of these tribes are now extinct. The familiar story of Humboldt finding a parrot among the Maypuris, which spoke the language of an extinct tribe, the Aturis, and so was intelligible to nobody, ‡ may be quoted as an example of the decay of these races. The same illustrious traveller describes a burial-cavern belonging to a Saliva tribe, which he observed at Atarmpi, near the cataract of the Atures, on the Orinoco. The cavern was a natural excavation, and was filled with nearly 600 prepared bodies, well preserved and regularly arranged, each in a basket made of the leafs-stalks of the palm-tree. These baskets were each in the form of a bag, somewhat less than the size of the body which they enveloped. Accordingly some were only ten inches long, others three feet, according as they held infants or adults. The bones, more or less bent, were so carefully placed inside them that not a rib, or even any of the smaller bones, were wanting. "The first step in the process of preparation was to scrape the flesh from the bones

"The Indian Tribes of Guiana," by the Rev. W. H. Brett, p. 494.

+ Wallace's "Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro," p. 481.

Professor Ernst Curtius has a pretty poem on this anecdote, two of the verses of which, as rendered into English by Mr. Edgar Bowring, we may quote :

"Where are now the youths who bred him

To pronounce their mother-tongue;

Where the gentle maids who fed him,

And who built his nest when young?

"Swift the savage turns his rudder,

When his eyes the bird behold;
None e'er saw without a shudder
The Aturian parrot old."