From the Personal Narrative of Baron Humboldt.

SAVAGES ON THE ORONOKO.

"Among the causes of the depopulation of the Raudales, I have not reckoned the small pox; that malady which, in other parts of America, makes such cruel ravages, that the natives, seized with dismay, burn their huts, kill their children, and renounce every kind of society.

This scourge is almost unknown on the banks of the Oronoko.

What depopulates the Christian settlements is, the repugnance of the Indians for the regulations of the missions, the insalubrity of a climate at once hot and damp, bad nourishment, want of care in the diseases of children, and the guilty practice of mothers of preventing pregnancy by the use of deleterious herbs.

Among the barbarous people of Guyana, as well as those of the half-civilized islands of the South Sea, young wives will not become mothers.

If they have children, their offspring are exposed, not only to the dangers of savage life, but also to the dangers arising from the strongest popular prejudices.

When twins are born, false notions of propriety and family honor require, that one of them should be destroyed.

'To bring twins into the world, is to be exposed to public scorn; it is to resemble rats, opossums, and the vilest animals, which bring forth a great number of young at a time.'

Nay more: 'two children born at the same time cannot belong to the same father.' This is an axiom of physiology of the Salivas; and in every zone, and in different states of society, when the vulgar seize upon an axiom, they adhere to it with more stedfastness than the better informed men, by whom it was first hazarded.

To avoid a disturbance of conjugal tranquillity, the old female relations of the mother, or the mure jappoice-nei [midwives,] take care, that one of the twins shall disappear.

If the new-born infant, though not a twin, have any physical deformity, the father instantly puts it to death.

They will have only rohust and well-made children, for deformities indicate some influece of the evil spirit Ioloquiamo, or the bird Tikitiki, the enemy of the human race.

Sometimes children of a feeble constitution undergo the same fate.

When the father is asked, what is become of one of his sons, he will pretend that he has lost him by a natural death.

He will disavow an action, that appears to him blameable, but not criminal.

As the Mahas in the plains of the Missoury, according to the accounts of the American travellers, Clark and Lewis.

"The poor mure," he will tell you, 'could not follow us; we must have waited for him every moment; he has not been seen again, he did not come to sleep where we passed the night.' Such is the candour and simplicity of manners, such the boasted happiness of man in the state of nature!

He kills his son, to escape the ridicule of having twins, or, to avoid journeying more slowly; in fact, to avoid a little inconvenience."

In Tamanack mure signifies a child; emuru, a son.

"The Indians of Atures," [says Mr. H.,] are mild, moderate, and accustomed, from the effects of their idleness, to the greatest privations.

Formerly, excited to labour by the Jesuits, they did not want for food.

The fathers cultivated maize, French beans, (frisoles) and other European vegetables; they even planted sweet oranges and tamarinds round the villages; and they possessed twenty or thirty thousand head of cows and horses, in the savannahs of Atures and Carichana.

They had at their service a great number of slaves and servants [peones], to take care of their herds.

Nothing is now cultivated but a little cassava, and a few plantains.

The fertility of the soil however is such, that at Atures I counted on a single branch of musa 108 fruits, 4 or 5 of which would almest suffice for the daily nourishment of a man.

The culture of maize is entirely neglected, and the horses and cows have disappeared.

Near the raudal, a part of the village still bears the name of passo del ganado (ford of the cattle) while the descendants of those very Indians, whom the Jesuits had assembled in a mission, speak of horned cattle as of animals of a race that is lost.

In going up the Oronoko, toward San Carlos del Rio Negro, we saw the last cow at Carichana.

The fathers of the Observance, who now govern these vast countries, did not immediately succeed the Jesuits.

During an interregnum of eighteen years the missions were visited only from time to time, and by Capuchin monks.

The agents of the secular government, under the title of Commissioners of the King, managed the hatos or farms of the Jesuits with culpable negligence.

They killed the cattle is order to sell the hides.

Many heifers were devoured by tigers, and a greater number perished in consequence of wounds made by the bats of the raudales, which are much less, but far bolder than the bats of the Llanos.

At the time of the expedition of the boundaries, the horses of Encaramada, Carichana, and Atures, were conveyed as far as San Jose of Maravitanos, where, on the banks of the Rio Negro, the Portugueze could only procure them after a long passage, and of a very inferior quality, by the river Amazon and Grand Para.

Since the year 1795, the cattle of the Jesuits have entirely disappeared.

There now remains in testimony of the ancient cultivation of these countries, and the industrious activity of the first missionaries, only a few trunks of the orange and tamarind in the savannahs, surrounded by wild trees.

"The tigers, or jaguars, which are less dangerous for the cattle than the bats, come into the village at Atures, and devour the pigs of the poor Indians.

The missionary related to us a striking instance of the familiarity of these animals, upon the whole so ferocious.

Some months before our arrival, a jaguar, which was thought to be young, though of a large size, had wounded a child in playing with him; I use confidently this expression, which may seem strange, having on the spot verified facts which are not without interest in the history of the manners of animals.

Two Indian children, a boy and a girl, about eight and nine years of age, were seated on the grass near the village of Atures, in the middle of a savannah, which we have often traversed. At two o'clock in the afternoon, a jaguar issued from the forest, and approached the children, bounding around them; sometimes he hid himself in the high grass, sometimes he sprang forward, his back bent, his head hung down, in the manner of our cats.

The little boy, ignorant of his danger, seemed to be sensible of it only when the jaguar with one of his paws gave him some blows on the head.

These blows, at first slight, became ruder and ruder; the claws of the jaguar wounded the child, and the blood flowed with violence.

The little girl then took a branch of a tree, struck the animal, and it fled from her.

The Indians ran up at the cries of the children, and saw the jaguar, which retired bounding, without the least show of resistance.

"The little boy was brought to us, who appeared lively and intelligent.

The claw of the jaguar had taken away the skin from the lower part of the forehead, and there was a second scar at the top of the head."

"Among the monkies," the author continues, "which we saw at the mission of the Atures, we found one new species, of the tribe of sais and sajous, which the Creoles vulgarly call machis.

It is the ouarapavi with grey hair and a bluish face.

It has the orbits of the eyes and forehead as white as snow, which at first sight distinguishes it from the simia capucina, the simia apella, the simia trepida, and the other weeping monkeys hitherto so confusedly described.--This little animal is as gentle as it is ugly.--Every day in the court-yard of the missionary it seized a pig, upon which it remained from morning till night, traversing the savannahs.

We have also seen it upon the back of a large cat, which had been brought up with it in father Zea's house.

"It was among the cataracts that we began to hear of the hairy man of the woods, called salvaje, that carries off women, constructs huts, and sometimes eats human flesh.

The Tamanacks call it achi, and the Maypures vasitri, or great devil.

The natives and the missionaries have no doubt of the existence of this anthropomorphous monkey, which they singularly dread.

Father Gili gravely relates the history of a lady in the town of San Carlos, who much praised the gentle character and attentions of the man of the woods.

She lived several years with one in great domestic harmony, and only requested some hunters to take her back 'because she was tired, she and her children, (a little hairy also,) of living far from the church and the sacraments.' The same author, notwithstanding his credulity, confesses, that he had not been able to find an Indian who asserted positively that he had seen the salvaje with his own eyes.

This fable, which the missionaries, the European planters, and the negroes of Africa, have no doubt embellished with many features taken from the description of the manners of the ourang outang, the gibbon, the jocko or chimpanzee, and the pongo, pursued us during five years from the northern to the southern hemisphere; and we were every where blamed, in the most cultivated class of society, for being the only persons to doubt the existence of the great anthropomorphous monkey of America.

We shall first observe, that there are certain regions where this belief is particularly prevalent among the people; such are the banks of the Upper Oronoko, the valley of Upar near the lake of Maracaybo, the mountains of Santa Martha and of Merida, the provinces of Quixos, and the banks of the Amazon near Tomependa.

In all these places, so distant one from the other, it is repeated, that the salvaje is easily recognized by the traces of his feet, the toes of which are turned backward.

But if there exist a monkey of a large size in the New Continent, how has it happened that during three centuries no man worthy of belief has been able to procure the skin of one?

Several hypotheses present themselves to the mind in order to explain the source of so ancient an error or belief.

Has the famous capuchin monkey of Esmeralda, the canine teeth of which are more than six lines and a half long, the physiognomy much more like man's than that of the ourang outang, and which, when irritated, rubs its beard with its hand, given rise to the fable of the salvaje?

It is not so large indeed as the coaita (simia paniscus,) but when seen at the top of a tree, and the head only visible, it might easily be taken for a human being.

It may be also (and this opinion appears to me the most probable) that the man of the woods was one of those large bears, the footsteps of which resemble those of a man, and which is believed in every country to attack women.

The animal killed in my time at the foot of the mountains of Merida, and sent by the name of salvaje to Colonel Ungaro, the governor of the province Varinas, was in fact a bear, with black and smooth fur."

These extraordinary accounts are succeeded by a detailed history of the Moschettoes of this region; perhaps the most remarkable of all its animal phenomena.

"Persons who have not navigated the great rivers of equinoctial America, for instance, the Oronoko and the Rio Magdalena, can scarcely conceive, how without interruption, at every instant of life, you may be tormented by insects flying in the air, and how the multitude of these little animals may render vast regions wholly uninhabitable.

However accustomed you may be to endure pain without complaint, however lively an interest you may take in the objects of your researches, it is impossible not to be constantly disturbed by the moschettoes, zancudoes, jejens, and tempraneroes, that cover the face and hands, pierce the clothes with their long suckers in the form of a needle, and, getting into the mouth and nostrils, set you coughing and sneezing whenever you attempt to speak in the open air.

In the missions of the Oronoko, in the villages placed on the banks of the river, surrounded by immense forests, the plaga de las moscas, the plague of the flies, affords an inexhaustible subject of conversation.

When two persons meet in the morning, the first questions they address to each other are, 'How did you find the zancudoes during the night?

How are we to-day for the moschettoes?' These questions remind us of a Chinese form of politeness, which indicates the ancient state of the country where it took birth.

Salutations were made heretofore in the celestial empire, in the following words, vou-tou-hou, 'Have you been incommoded in the night by the serpents?' We shall soon see, that on the banks of the Tuamini, in the river Magdalena, and still more at Choco, the country of gold and platina, the Chinese compliment on the serpents might be added to that of the moschettoes.

"At Mandavaca we found an old Missionary, who told us with an air of sadness, that he had spent his twenty years of moschettoes in America. He desired us to look well at his legs, that we might be able to tell one day, 'poor alla (beyond sea,) what the poor monks suffer in the forests of Cassiquiare.' Every sting leaving a small darkish brown point, his legs were so speckled, that it was difficult to recognize the whiteness of his skin through the spots of coagulated blood.

If the insects of the simulium genus abound in the Cassiquiare, which has white waters, the culices, or zancudoes, are so much the more rare; you scarcely find any there, while on the rivers of black walers, in the Atabapo and the Rio Negro, there are generally some zancudoes and no moschettoes."