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Alexander von Humboldt: „Savages on the Oronoko“, in: ders., Sämtliche Schriften digital, herausgegeben von Oliver Lubrich und Thomas Nehrlich, Universität Bern 2021. URL: <https://humboldt.unibe.ch/text/1821-Personal_Narrative_of-04-neu> [abgerufen am 19.04.2024].
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| Titel | Savages on the Oronoko | ||||||
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| Jahr | 1821 | ||||||
| Ort | Boston, Massachusetts | ||||||
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Nachweis in: Boston Weekly Messenger 2/11:10 (9. August 1821), S. [1].
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| Sprache | Englisch | ||||||
| Typografischer Befund | Antiqua; Spaltensatz; Auszeichnung: Kursivierung; Fußnoten mit Asterisken und Kreuzen. | ||||||
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from the london literary gazette.
From the Personal Narrative of Baron Humboldt.
“Among the causes of the depopulation of theRaudales, I
have not reckoned the small pox;that malady which, in other
parts of America,makes such cruel ravages, that the natives,
seizedwith dismay, burn their huts, kill their children,
andrenounce every kind of society.* This scourge isalmost unknown on the banks of
the Oronoko.—What depopulates the Christian settlements
is,the repugnance of the Indians for the regulationsof the missions, the insalubrity of a climate atonce hot and damp, bad nourishment, want ofcare in the
diseases of children, and the guiltypractice of mothers of
preventing pregnancy bythe use of deleterious herbs. Among the
barba-rous people of Guyana, as well as those of the halfcivilized islands of the South Sea, young wiveswill not become mothers. If they have children,their
offspring are exposed, not only to the dan-gers of savage life,
but also to the dangers arisingfrom the strongest popular
prejudices. Whentwins are born, false notions of propriety and
fam-ily honor require, that one of them should be de-stroyed. ‘To bring twins into the world, is to beexposed to public scorn; it is to resemble rats, opossums, and the vilest animals, which bring fortha great number of young at a time.’ Nay more:‘two children born at the same time cannot belongto the same father.’ This is an axiom of physiol-ogy of the Salivas; and in every zone, and in differ-ent states of society, when the vulgar seize uponan axiom, they adhere to it with more stedfastnessthan the
better informed men, by whom it was firsthazarded. To avoid a
disturbance of conjugaltranquillity, the old female relations
of the mother,or the mure jappoice-nei
(midwives,) take care, thatone of the twins shall disappear. If
the new-borninfant, though not a twin, have any physical
defor-mity, the father instantly puts it to death. Theywill have only robust well-made children, for de-formities indicate some influence of the evil spiritIoloquiamo or the bird Tikitiki, the enemy of thehuman race. Sometimes children of a feeble con-stitution undergo the same fate. When the fatheris asked,
what is become of one of his sons, hewill pretend, that he has
lost him by a natural death.He will disavow an action, that
appears to himblameable, but not criminal. ‘The poor mure,†’he
will tell you, ‘could not follow us; we musthave waited
for him every moment; he has notbeen seen again, he did not
come to sleep wherewe passed the night.’ Such is the
candour andsimplicity of manners, such the boasted happinessof man in the state of nature! He kills
his son, toescape the ridicule of having twins, or to avoidjourneying more slowly; in fact, to avoid a littleinconvenience.’
“The Indians of Atures,” (says Mr. H.,) aremild,
moderate, and accustomed, from the effectsof their idleness, to
the greatest privations. For-merly, excited to labour by the
Jesuits, they didnot want for food. The fathers cultivated
maize,French beans, (frisoles) and
other European veg-etables; they even planted sweet oranges
andtamarinds round the villages; and they possessedtwenty or thirty thousand head of cows and horses,in the savannahs of Atures and Carichana. Theyhad at their service a great number of slaves andservants
(peones), to take care of their herds.—Nothing is now cultivated but a little cassava, anda few plantains. The fertility of the soil howeveris such, that at Atures I counted on a single branchof musa 108 fruits, 4 or 5 of which would almostsuffice for the daily nourishment of a man. Theculture of
maize is entirely neglected, and thehorses and cows have
disappeared. Near theraudal, a part of
the village still bears the name ofPasso del
ganado (ford of the cattle,) while the de-scendants of
those very Indians, whom the Jesuitshad assembled in a mission,
speak of horned cattleas of animals of a race that is lost. In
going up theOronoko, toward San Carlos del Rio Negro, wesaw the last cow at Carichana. The fathers ofthe Observance, who now govern these vast coun-tries, did not
immediately succeed the Jesuits.—During an interregnum
of eighteen years the mis-sions were visited only from time to
time, and byCapuchin monks. The agents of the secular gov-ernment, under the title of Commissioners of
theKing, managed the hatos
or farms of the Jesuitswith culpable negligence. They killed
the cattlein order to sell the hides. Many heifers were de-voured by tigers, and a greater number perishedin consequence of wounds made by the bats of theraudales, which are much less, but far bolder thanthe bats of the Llanos. At the time of the expedi-tion of the boundaries, the horses of Encaramada,Carichana, and Atures, were conveyed as far as SanJose of
Maravitanos, where, on the banks of theRio Negro, the
Portuguese could only procurethem after a long passage, and of
a very inferiorquality, by the river Amazon and Grand
Para.—Since the year 1795, the cattle of the Jesuits
haveentirely disappeared. There now remains in tes-timony of the ancient cultivation of these countriesand the industrious activity of the first missionaries,only a few trunks of the orange and tamarind inthe savannahs, surrounded by wild trees.
“The tigers, or jaguars, which are less danger-ous for the cattle than the bats, come into the vil-lage at Atures, and devour the pigs of the poor In-dians. The missionary related to us a striking in-stance of the familiarity of these animals, upon thewhole so ferocious. Some months before our ar-rival, a jaguar, which was thought to be young,though of a large size, had wounded a child inplaying with him; I use confidently this expression,which may seem strange, having on the spot veri-fied facts which are not without interest in thehistory of the manners of animals. Two Indianchildren, a boy and a girl, about eight and nineyears of age, were seated on the grass near thevillage of Atures, in the middle of a savannah,which we have often traversed. At two o’clock inthe afternoon, a jaguar issued from the forest, andapproached the children, bounding around them;sometimes he hid himself in the high grass, some-times he sprang forward, his back bent, his headhung down, in the manner of our cats. The littleboy, ignorant of his danger, seemed to be sensibleof it only when the jaguar with one of his pawsgave him some blows on the head. These blows,at first slight, became ruder and ruder; the clawsof the jaguar wounded the child, and the bloodflowed with violence. The little girl then took abranch of a tree, struck the animal, and it fledfrom her. The Indians ran up at the cries of thechildren, and saw the jaguar, which retired bound-ing, without the least show of resistance.
“The little boy was brought to us, who appearedlively and intelligent. The claw of the jaguar hadtaken away the skin from the lower part of theforehead, and there was a second scar at the topof the head.”
“Among the monkies,” the author continues,“which we saw at the mission of the Atures, wefound
one new species, of the tribe of sais andsajous, which the Creoles vulgarly call machis. Itis the ouavapavi with grey hair and a bluish face.It has the
orbits of the eyes and forehead as whiteas snow, which at first
sight distinguishes it fromthe simia
capucina, the simia apella, the simia trepi-da, and the other weeping
monkeys hitherto soconfusedly described.—This little animal is asgentle as it is
ugly. Every day in the court-yardof the missionary it seized a
pig, upon which it re-mained from morning till night, traversing
the sa-vannahs. We have also seen it upon the back of alarge cat, which had been brought up with it infather Zea’s house.
“It was among the cataracts that we began tohear of the
hairy man of the woods, called salvaje,that carries off women,
constructs huts, and some-|Spaltenumbruch|times eats human flesh. The
Tamanacks call it
achi, and the Maypures vasitri,
or great devil.—The natives and
the missionaries have no doubt ofthe existence of this
anthropomorphous monkey,which they singularly dread. Father
Gili gravelyrelates the history of a lady in the town of SanCarlos, who much praised the gentle character andattentions of the man of the woods. She livedseveral years with one in great domestic harmony,and only
requested some hunters to take her back‘because she was
tired, she and her children, (alittle hairy also,) of living
far from the church andthe sacraments.’ The same author,
notwithstand-ing his credulity, confesses, that he had not
beenable to find an Indian who asserted positively thathe had seen the salvaje with his own
eyes. Thisfable, which the missionaries, the European plan-ters, and the negroes of Africa, have no doubtembellished with many features taken from the de-scription of
the manners of the ourang outang, thegibbon, the jacko or
chimpanzee, and the pongo,pursued us during five years from the
northern tothe southern hemisphere; and we were everywhere blamed, in the most cultivated class of so-ciety, for being the only persons to doubt the exist-ence of
the great anthropomorphous monkey ofAmerica. We shall first
observe, that there arecertain regions in which this belief is
particularlyprevalent among the people; such are the
banksof the Upper Oronoko, the valley of Upar near thelake of Maracaybo, the mountains of Santa Mar-tha and of Merida, the provinces of Quixos, andthe banks of
the Amazon near Tomependa. In allthese places, so distant one
from the other, it isrepeated, that the salvaje is easily recognized bythe traces of his
feet, the toes of which are turnedbackward. But if there exist
a monkey of a largesize in the New Continent, how has it
happenedthat during three centuries no man worthy of be-lief has been able to procure the skin of one?—Several hypotheses present themselves to the mindin order to explain the source of so ancient an er-ror or belief. Has the famous capuchin
monkeyof Esmeralda, the canine teeth of which are morethan six lines and a half long, the physiognomymuch more like man’s than that of the ourangoutang,
and which, when irritated, rubs its beardwith its hand, given
rise to the fable of the salvaje?
It is not so large indeed as the coaita (simia panis-cus,) but when seen at the top of a tree,
and thehead only visible, it might easily be taken for a hu-man being. It may be also (and this opinion ap-pears to me the most probable) that the man ofthe woods was
one of those large bears, the foot-steps of which resemble those
of a man, and whichis believed in every country to attack
women.—The animal killed in my time at the foot of
themountains of Merida, and sent by the name ofsalvaje to Colonel Ungaro, the governor
of theprovince Varinas, was in fact a bear, with blackand smooth fur.”
These extraordinary accounts are succeeded bya detailed history of the Moschettoes of this re-gion; perhaps the most remarkable of all its ani-mal phenomena.
“Persons who have not navigated the great riv-ers of
equinoctial America, for instance, the Oro-noko and the Rio
Magdalena, can scarcely con-ceive, how without interruntion, at
every instant oflife, you may be tormented by insects flying in
theair, and how the multitude of these little animalsmay render vast regions wholly uninhabitable.—However accustomed you may be to endure painwithout complaint, however lively an interest youmay take in
the objects of your researches, it isimpossible not to be
constantly disturbed by themoschettoes, zancudoes, jejens and tempraneroes,that cover the face and hands, pierce the clotheswith their long sucker in the form of a needle,and, getting into the mouth and nostrils, set youcoughing and
sneezing whenever you attempt tospeak in the open air. In the
missions of the Oro-noko, in the villages placed on the banks of
theriver, surrounded by immense forests, the plaga delas moscas, the plague of the
flies, affords an inex-haustible subject of conversation. When
twopersons meet in the morning, the first questionsthey address to each other are, ‘How did you findthe zancudoes during the night? How are we to-day for the moschettoes?’ These questions remindus of
a Chinese form of politeness, which indi-cates the ancient state
of the country where ittook birth. Salutations were made
heretofore inthe celestial empire, in
the following words, vou-tou-hou,
‘Have you been incommoded in the night bythe
serpents?’ We shall soon see, that on thebanks of the
Tuamini, in the river Magdalena, andstill more at Choco, the
country of gold and plati-na, the Chinese compliment on the
serpents mightbe added to that of the moschettoes.”
“At Mandavaca we found an old Missionary,who told us with an air of sadness, that he hadspent his twenty years of moschettoes in America.—He desired us to look well at his legs, that wemight be able to tell one day, ‘poor alla (beyondsea,) what the poor monks suffer in the forests ofCassiquiare.’ Every sting leaving a small darkishbrown point, his legs were so speckled, that it wasdifficult to recognize the whiteness of his skinthrough the spots of coagulated blood. If the in-sects of the simulium genus abound in the Cassi-quiare, which has white waters, the culices, or zan-cudoes, are so much the more rare; you scarcelyfind any there, while on the rivers of black waters,in the Atavapo and the Rio Negro, there are gen-erally some zancudoes and no moschettoes.”
SAVAGES ON THE ORONOKO.
* As the Mahas in the plains of the Missouri,according to the accounts of the American trav-ellers, Clark and Lewis.† In Tamanack mure signifies a child; omura ason.