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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-09-neu> [abgerufen am 29.03.2024].

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Titel Savages on the Oronoko
Jahr 1821
Ort Concord, New Hampshire
Nachweis
in: New-Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette 3:36/648 (2. September 1821), S. [1].
Sprache Englisch
Typografischer Befund Antiqua; Spaltensatz; Auszeichnung: Kursivierung; Fußnoten mit Asterisken und Kreuzen.
Identifikation
Textnummer Druckausgabe: IV.15
Dateiname: 1821-Personal_Narrative_of-09-neu
Statistiken
Seitenanzahl: 1
Spaltenanzahl: 2
Zeichenanzahl: 13786

Weitere Fassungen
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799–1804. By Alexander de Humboldt, and Aimé Bonpland, &c. &c. London, 1821, 8vo. 2 Vols. pp. 864 (London, 1821, Englisch)
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799–1804. By Alexander de Humboldt, and Aimé Bonpland, &c. &c. London, 1821, 8vo. 2 Vols. pp. 864 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1821, Englisch)
Moschettoes (Musquetoes) of S. America (Washington, District of Columbia, 1821, Englisch)
Savages on the Oronoko (Boston, Massachusetts, 1821, Englisch)
Moschettoes (Musquetoes) of South America (Chillicothe, Ohio, 1821, Englisch)
Moschettoes (Musquetoes) of S. America (Salisbury, North Carolina, 1821, Englisch)
From Humbolt’s Narrative of a Tour on the Oronoko (Amherst, New Hampshire, 1821, Englisch)
Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s Travels (Boston, Massachusetts, 1821, Englisch)
Savages on the Oronoko (Concord, New Hampshire, 1821, Englisch)
Tiger familiarity with infants (Leeds, 1821, Englisch)
Savages on the Oronoko (Danville, Vermont, 1821, Englisch)
Savages on the Oronoko (Woodstock, Vermont, 1821, Englisch)
Savage prejudices (Liverpool, 1821, Englisch)
Musquitos (London, 1821, Englisch)
Opisanie historyczne podróźy Alexandra Humboldta i Emego Bompland do krain międzyzwrótnikowych nowego świata; tomu II, część 2, z cztérma rycinami. Paris chez Maze Libr. 1821 (Vilnius, 1822, Polnisch)
Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Mosquitos (Erfurt; Weimar; Leipzig, 1822, Deutsch)
Innocence (London, 1822, Englisch)
|1| From the Personal Narrative of Baron Humboldt.

SAVAGES ON THE ORONOKO.

“Among the causes of the depopulationof the Raudales, I have not reckoned thesmall pox; that malady which, in otherparts of America, makes such cruel rava-ges, that the natives, seized with dismay,burn their huts, kill their children, and re-nounce every kind of society.* Thisscourge is almost unknown on the banks ofthe Oronoko. What depopulates the Chris-tian settlements is, the repugnance of theIndians for the regulations of the missions,the insalubrity of a climate at once hot anddamp, bad nourishment, want of care in thediseases of children, and the guilty prac-tice of mothers of preventing pregnancyby the use of deleterious herbs. Amongthe barbarous people of Guyana, as well asthose of the half-civilized islands of theSouth Sea, young wives will not becomemothers. If they have children, their off-spring are exposed, not only to the dangersof savage life, but also to the dangers ari-sing from the strongest popular prejudices.When twins are born, false notions of pro-priety and family honor require, that one ofthem should be destroyed. ‘To bring twinsinto the world, is to be exposed to publicscorn; it is to resemble rats, opossums, andthe vilest animals, which bring forth a greatnumber of young at a time.’ Nay more:‘two children born at the same time cannotbelong to the same father.’ This is an ax-iom of physiology of the Salivas; and in ev-ery zone, and in different states of society,when the vulgar seize upon an axiom, theyadhere to it with more stedfastness than thebetter informed men, by whom it was firsthazarded. To avoid a disturbance of conju-gal tranquillity, the old female relations ofthe mother, or the mure jappoice-nei [mid-wives,] take care, that one of the twins shalldisappear. If the new-born infant, thoughnot a twin, have any physical deformity, thefather instantly puts it to death. They willhave only rohust and well-made children,for deformities indicate some influece of theevil spirit Ioloquiamo, or the bird Tikitiki,the enemy of the human race. Sometimeschildren of a feeble constitution undergothe same fate. When the father is asked,what is become of one of his sons, he willpretend that he has lost him by a naturaldeath. He will disavow an action, that ap-pears to him blameable, but not criminal. “The poor mure,” he will tell you, ‘couldnot follow us; we must have waited for himevery moment; he has not been seen again,he did not come to sleep where we passedthe night.’ Such is the candour and simpli-city of manners, such the boasted happinessof man in the state of nature! He kills hisson, to escape the ridicule of having twins,or, to avoid journeying more slowly; in fact,to avoid a little inconvenience.” “The Indians of Atures,” [says Mr. H.,]are mild, moderate, and accustomed, fromthe effects of their idleness, to the greatestprivations. Formerly, excited to labour bythe Jesuits, they did not want for food. Thefathers cultivated maize, French beans, (fri-soles) and other European vegetables; theyeven planted sweet oranges and tamarindsround the villages; and they possessed twen-ty or thirty thousand head of cows and hor-ses, in the savannahs of Atures and Carich-ana. They had at their service a greatnumber of slaves and servants [peones], totake care of their herds. Nothing is nowcultivated but a little cassava, and a fewplantains. The fertility of the soil howeveris such, that at Atures I counted on a singlebranch of musa 108 fruits, 4 or 5 of whichwould almest suffice for the daily nourish-ment of a man. The culture of maize isentirely neglected, and the horses and cowshave disappeared. Near the raudal, a partof the village still bears the name of passodel ganado (ford of the cattle) while the de-scendants of those very Indians, whom theJesuits had assembled in a mission, speak ofhorned cattle as of animals of a race that islost. In going up the Oronoko, toward SanCarlos del Rio Negro, we saw the last cowat Carichana. The fathers of the Obser-vance, who now govern these vast coun-tries, did not immediately succeed theJesuits. During an interregnum of eigh-teen years the missions were visited onlyfrom time to time, and by Capuchin monks.The agents of the secular government, un-der the title of Commissioners of the King,managed the hatos or farms of the Jesuitswith culpable negligence. They killed thecattle is order to sell the hides. Manyheifers were devoured by tigers, and agreater number perished in consequence ofwounds made by the bats of the raudales,which are much less, but far bolder thanthe bats of the Llanos. At the time of theexpedition of the boundaries, the horses ofEncaramada, Carichana, and Atures, wereconveyed as far as San Jose of Maravita-nos, where, on the banks of the Rio Negro,the Portugueze could only procure them af-ter a long passage, and of a very inferiorquality, by the river Amazon and GrandPara. Since the year 1795, the cattle ofthe Jesuits have entirely disappeared.There now remains in testimony of the an-cient cultivation of these countries, and theindustrious activity of the first missionaries,only a few trunks of the orange and tama-rind in the savannahs, surrounded by wildtrees. “The tigers, or jaguars, which are lessdangerous for the cattle than the bats,come into the village at Atures, and devourthe pigs of the poor Indians. The mission-ary related to us a striking instance of thefamiliarity of these animals, upon the wholeso ferocious. Some months before our ar-rival, a jaguar, which was thought to beyoung, though of a large size, had woundeda child in playing with him; I use confi-dently this expression, which may seemstrange, having on the spot verified factswhich are not without interest in the his-tory of the manners of animals. Two In-dian children, a boy and a girl, about eightand nine years of age, were seated on thegrass near the village of Atures, in the mid-|Spaltenumbruch|dle of a savannah, which we have oftentraversed. At two o’clock in the afternoon,a jaguar issued from the forest, and ap-proached the children, bounding aroundthem; sometimes he hid himself in the highgrass, sometimes he sprang forward, hisback bent, his head hung down, in the man-ner of our cats. The little boy, ignorantof his danger, seemed to be sensible of itonly when the jaguar with one of his pawsgave him some blows on the head. Theseblows, at first slight, became ruder andruder; the claws of the jaguar woundedthe child, and the blood flowed with vio-lence. The little girl then took a branchof a tree, struck the animal, and it fledfrom her. The Indians ran up at the criesof the children, and saw the jaguar, whichretired bounding, without the least show ofresistance. “The little boy was brought to us, whoappeared lively and intelligent. The clawof the jaguar had taken away the skin fromthe lower part of the forehead, and therewas a second scar at the top of the head.” “Among the monkies,” the author con-tinues, “which we saw at the mission ofthe Atures, we found one new species, ofthe tribe of sais and sajous, which the Cre-oles vulgarly call machis. It is the ouara-pavi with grey hair and a bluish face. Ithas the orbits of the eyes and forehead aswhite as snow, which at first sight distin-guishes it from the simia capucina, the simiaapella, the simia trepida, and the otherweeping monkeys hitherto so confusedlydescribed.—This little animal is as gentleas it is ugly.—Every day in the court-yardof the missionary it seized a pig, upon whichit remained from morning till night, tra-versing the savannahs. We have also seenit upon the back of a large cat, which hadbeen brought up with it in father Zea’shouse. “It was among the cataracts that webegan to hear of the hairy man of thewoods, called salvaje, that carries off wo-men, constructs huts, and sometimes eatshuman flesh. The Tamanacks call it achi,and the Maypures vasitri, or great devil. The natives and the missionaries have nodoubt of the existence of this anthropomor-phous monkey, which they singularly dread.Father Gili gravely relates the history of alady in the town of San Carlos, who muchpraised the gentle character and attentionsof the man of the woods. She lived severalyears with one in great domestic harmony,and only requested some hunters to takeher back ‘because she was tired, she andher children, (a little hairy also,) of livingfar from the church and the sacraments.’The same author, notwithstanding his cre-dulity, confesses, that he had not been ableto find an Indian who asserted positivelythat he had seen the salvaje with his owneyes. This fable, which the missionaries,the European planters, and the negroes ofAfrica, have no doubt embellished with ma-ny features taken from the description ofthe manners of the ourang outang, the gib-bon, the jocko or chimpanzee, and the pon-go, pursued us during five years from thenorthern to the southern hemisphere; andwe were every where blamed, in the mostcultivated class of society, for being theonly persons to doubt the existence of thegreat anthropomorphous monkey of Ameri-ca. We shall first observe, that there arecertain regions where this belief is particu-larly prevalent among the people; such arethe banks of the Upper Oronoko, the val-ley of Upar near the lake of Maracaybo,the mountains of Santa Martha and of Me-rida, the provinces of Quixos, and the banksof the Amazon near Tomependa. In allthese places, so distant one from the other,it is repeated, that the salvaje is easily re-cognized by the traces of his feet, the toesof which are turned backward. But ifthere exist a monkey of a large size in theNew Continent, how has it happened thatduring three centuries no man worthy ofbelief has been able to procure the skin ofone? Several hypotheses present them-selves to the mind in order to explain thesource of so ancient an error or belief. Hasthe famous capuchin monkey of Esmeralda,the canine teeth of which are more thansix lines and a half long, the physiognomymuch more like man’s than that of the ou-rang outang, and which, when irritated,rubs its beard with its hand, given rise tothe fable of the salvaje? It is not so largeindeed as the coaita (simia paniscus,) butwhen seen at the top of a tree, and thehead only visible, it might easily be takenfor a human being. It may be also (andthis opinion appears to me the most proba-ble) that the man of the woods was one ofthose large bears, the footsteps of whichresemble those of a man, and which is be-lieved in every country to attack women.The animal killed in my time at the foot ofthe mountains of Merida, and sent by thename of salvaje to Colonel Ungaro, thegovernor of the province Varinas, was infact a bear, with black and smooth fur.” These extraordinary accounts are suc-ceeded by a detailed history of the Mos-chettoes of this region; perhaps the mostremarkable of all its animal phenomena. “Persons who have not navigated thegreat rivers of equinoctial America, for in-stance, the Oronoko and the Rio Magdale-na, can scarcely conceive, how without in-terruption, at every instant of life, you maybe tormented by insects flying in the air,and how the multitude of these little an-imals may render vast regions wholly unin-habitable. However accustomed you maybe to endure pain without complaint, how-ever lively an interest you may take in theobjects of your researches, it is impossiblenot to be constantly disturbed by the mos-chettoes, zancudoes, jejens, and tempraner-oes, that cover the face and hands, piercethe clothes with their long suckers in theform of a needle, and, getting into themouth and nostrils, set you coughing andsneezing whenever you attempt to speak inthe open air. In the missions of the Oro-noko, in the villages placed on the banks ofthe river, surrounded by immense forests,the plaga de las moscas, the plague of theflies, affords an inexhaustible subject ofconversation. When two persons meet inthe morning, the first questions they addressto each other are, ‘How did you find thezancudoes during the night? How are we|Spaltenumbruch|to-day for the moschettoes?’ These ques-tions remind us of a Chinese form of polite-ness, which indicates the ancient state ofthe country where it took birth. Salutationswere made heretofore in the celestial empire,in the following words, vou-tou-hou, ‘Haveyou been incommoded in the night by theserpents?’ We shall soon see, that on thebanks of the Tuamini, in the river Magda-lena, and still more at Choco, the countryof gold and platina, the Chinese complimenton the serpents might be added to that ofthe moschettoes. “At Mandavaca we found an old Mis-sionary, who told us with an air of sadness,that he had spent his twenty years of mos-chettoes in America. He desired us to lookwell at his legs, that we might be able to tellone day, ‘poor alla (beyond sea,) what thepoor monks suffer in the forests of Cassiqui-are.’ Every sting leaving a small darkishbrown point, his legs were so speckled, thatit was difficult to recognize the whitenessof his skin through the spots of coagulatedblood. If the insects of the simulium ge-nus abound in the Cassiquiare, which haswhite waters, the culices, or zancudoes, areso much the more rare; you scarcely findany there, while on the rivers of black wa-lers, in the Atabapo and the Rio Negro,there are generally some zancudoes and no moschettoes.

* As the Mahas in the plains of the Missoury, accordingto the accounts of the American travellers, Clark andLewis. In Tamanack mure signifies a child; emuru, a son.