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Zitierempfehlung
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-11-neu> [abgerufen am 16.04.2024].
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| Titel | Savages on the Oronoko | ||||||
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| Jahr | 1821 | ||||||
| Ort | Danville, Vermont | ||||||
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Nachweis in: North Star 15:36/766 (27. September 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 Personal Narrative of Baron Humboldt.
“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 renounce every kind of society,*
This scourge is almost unknown on thebanks of
the Oronoko. What depopulatesthe Christian settlements is, the
repug-nance of the Indians for the regulationsof the missions, the insalubrity of a cli-mate
at once hot and damp, bad nourish-ment, want of care in the
diseases of chil-dren, and the guilty practice of mothersof preventing pregnancy by the use of de-leterious herbs. Among the barbarouspeople of Guyana, as well
as those of thehalf-civilized islands of the South Sea,young wives will not become mothers. Ifthey
have children, their offspring are ex-posed, not only to the
dangers of savagelife, but also to the dangers arisingfrom the strongest popular prejudices.When twins are born,
false notions ofpropriety and family honor require, thatone of them should be destroyed. Tobring twins
into the world, is to be expo-sed to public scorn; it is to
resemble rats,opossums, and the vilest animals, whichbring forth a great number of young at atime.’ Nay more: ‘two children born atthe same
time cannot belong to the samefather.’ This is an axiom
of physiologyof the Salivas; and in every zone, and indifferent states of society, when the vul-gar
seize upon an axiom, they adhere toit with more stedfastness
than the betterinformed men, by whom it was first haz-orded. To avoid a disturbance of conju-gal
tranquility, the old female relations ofthe mother, or the mure jappoice-nei [mid-wives] take care,
that one of the twinsshall disappear. If the new-born
infant,though not a twin, have any physical de-formity, the father instantly, puts it todeath.
They will have only robust andwell-made children, for
deformities indi-cate some influence of the evil spirit Io-loquiamo, or the bird Tikitiki, the
enemyof the human race. Sometimes childrenof a feeble constitution undergo the samefate. When the
father is asked, what isbecome of one of his sons, he will
pretendthat he has lost him by a natural death.He will disavow an action, that appearsto him
blameable, but not criminal.“The poor mure†” he will tell you,could not follow us; we must have wait-ed for
him every moment; he has notbeen seen again, he did not come to
sleepwhere we passed the night.’ Such is thecandour and simplicity of manners,
suchthe boasted happiness of man in the stateof nature! He kills his son, to escapethe ridicule of having twins, or to avoidjourneying more slowly; in fact, to avoida little
inconvenience.”“The Indians of
Atures,” [says Mr.H.,] are mild, moderate, and
accustomed,from the effect of their idleness, to thegreatest privations. Formerly, excited tolabour by the Jesuits, they did not wantfor food. The fathers
cultivated maize,French beans, (frisoles) and other Euro-pean vegetables; they even
planted sweetorange and tamarinds round the villages;and they possessed twenty or thirty thou-sand
head of cows and horses, in, the sa-vannahs of Atures and
Garichana. Theyhad at their service a great number ofslaves and servants [peones] to take
careof their herds. Nothing is now cultivat-ed but a little cassava, and a few plantains.The fertility of
the soil however is such,that at Atures I counted on a
singlebranch of musa 108 fruits, 4 or 5 of whichwould almost suffice for the daily nourish-ment
of a man. The culture of maize isentirely neglected, and the
horses andcows have disappeared. Near the rau-dal a part of the village still bears thename of passo del ganado (ford of the
cat-tle) while the descendants of those veryIndians, whom the Jesuits had as-sembled in a mission, speak
of hornedcattle as of animals of a race that is lost.In going up the Oronoko, toward SanCarlos del
Rio Negro, we saw the lastcow at Carichana. The fathers of
theObservance, who now govern these vastcountries, did not immediately succeed|Spaltenumbruch|the Jesuits.
During an interregnum ofeighteen years the missions were
visitedonly from time to time, and by Capuchinmonks. The agents of the secular gov-erument,
under the title of Commissionersof the
King, managed the hatos or farmsof the Jesuits with culpable negligence.They killed the
cattle in order to sell thehides. Many heifers were devoured
bytigers, and a greater number perished inconsequence of wounds made by the batsof the raudales which are much less, butfar
bolder than the bats of the Llanos.At the time of the
expedition of the boun-daries, the horses of Encaramada,
Carich-ana, and Aturos, were conveyed as far asSan Jose of Maravitanos, where, on thebanks of
the Rio Negro, the Portuguezecould only procure them after a
long pas-sage, and of a very inferior quality, by theriver Amazon and grand Para. Sincethe year
1790, the cattle of the Jesuitshave entirely disappeared. There
nowremains in testimony of the ancient culti-vation of these countries, and the indus-trious activity of
the first missionaries, on-ly a few trunks of the orange and
tama-rind in the savannahs, surrounded bywild trees.“The tigers, or jaguars, which are
lessdangerous for the cattle than the bats,come into the village at Atures, and de-vour the pigs of the
poor Indians. Themissionary related to us a striking in-stance of the familiarity of these animals,upon
the whole so ferocious. Somemonths before our arrival, a
jaguar, whichwas thought to be young, though of alarge size, had wounded a child in playingwith
him; I use confidently this expres-sion, which may seem strange,
having onthe spot verified facts which are not with-out interest in the history of the mannersof
animals. Two Indian children, a boyand a girl, about eight and
nine years ofage, were seated on the grass near thevillage of Atures, in the middle of a sa-vannah, which we have often traversed.At two o’clock
in the afternoon, a jaguarissued from the forest, and
approachedthe children, bounding around them;sometimes he hid himself in the highgrass,
sometimes he sprang forward, hisback bent, his head hung down,
in themanner of our cats. The little boy, ig-norant of his danger, seemed to be sensi-ble of it only when
the jaguar with one ofhis paws gave him some blows on thehead. These blows, at first slight, be-came
ruder and ruder; the claws of thejaguar wounded the child, and
the bloodflowed with violence. The little girl thentook a branch of a tree, struck the animaland
it fled from her. The Indians ran upat the cries of the
children, and saw thejaguar, which retired bounding, withoutthe least show of resistance.“The little boy was brought to us, whoappeared
lively and intelligent. Theclaw of the jaguar had taken away
theskin from the lower part of the forehead,and there was a second scar at the top ofthe
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 ouava-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 sapucina, the si-mia apella, the simia trepida, and the oth-er weeping monkeys hitherto
so confused-ly described.—This little animal is asgentle as is it ugly.—Every day in thecourt-yard of the missionary it seized apig, upon which it
remained from mor-ning till night,
traversing the savannahs.We have also seen
it upon the back of alarge cat, which had been brought up
withit in father Zea’s house.“It was among the cataracts that we be-gan to hear
of the hairy man of the woods,called salvaje, that carries off
women,constructs huts, and sometimes eats hu-man 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 anthropo-morphous monkey, which they
singularlydread. Father Gili gravely relates thehistory of a lady in the town of San Car-los,
who much praised the gentle charac-ter and attentions of the man
of the woods.She lived several years with one in greatdomestic harmony, and only requested|Spaltenumbruch|some
hunters to take her back ‘becauseshe was tired, she and
her children, (a lit-tle hairy also,) of living far from thechurch and the sacraments.’ The sameauthor, notwithstanding his credulity, con-fesses, that he had
not been able to find anIndian who asserted positively that
hehad seen the salvaje with his own
eyes.This fable, which the missionaries, theEuropean planters, and the negroes ofAfrica, have no doubt
embellished withmany features taken from the descrip-tion of the ourang outang, the gibbon,the jocko
or chimpanzee, and the pongo,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 A-merica. We shall first observe, that thereare certain regions
where this belief isparticularly prevalent among the people;such are the banks of the Upper Oronoko,the
valley of Upar near the lake of Mara-caybo, the mountains of
Santa Martha andof Merida, the provinces of Quixos, andthe banks of the Amazon near Tomepen-da. In all
these places, so distant onefrom the other, it is repeated,
that the sal-vaje is easily recognized
by the traces ofhis feet, the toes of which are turned back-ward. But if there exist a monkey of alarge
size in the New Continent, how hasit happened that during three
centuries noman worthy of belief has been able to pro-cure the skin of one? Several hypothe-ses
present themselves to the mind in or-der to explain the source
of so ancient anerror or belief. Has the famous capuchin
monkey of Esmeralda, the canine teeth ofwhich
are, more than six lines and a halflong, the physiognomy much
more likeman’s than that of the ourang, and which,when, irritated, rubs its beard with itshand
given rise to the fable of the salva-je?
It is not so large indeed as the coa-ita (simia paniscus,) but when seen at thetop of a tree,
and the head only visible, itmight easily be taken for a human
being.It may be also (and this opinion appearsto me the most probable) that the man ofthe
woods was one of those large bears,the footsteps of which
resemble those of aman, and which is believed in every coun-try to attack women. The animal killedin my
time at the foot of the mountainsof Merida, and sent by the
name of salva-je to Colonel Ungaro, the
governor of theprovince Varinas, was in fact a bear withblack 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,
forinstance, the Oronoko and the Rio Mag-dalena, can scarcely conceive, how with-out interruption, at
every instant of life,you may be tormented by insects flyingin the air, and how the multitude of theselittle animals may render vast regionswholly uninhabitable.
However accus-tomed you may be to endure pain with-out complaint, however lively an interestyou
may take in the objects of your re-searches, it is impossible
not to be con-stantly disturbed by the moschettoes,
zancudoes, jejens, and tempraneroes, thatcover the face and hands, pierce
the clo-thes with their long suckers in the formof a needle, and, getting into the mouthand nostrils, set you
coughing and sneez-ing whenever you attempt to speak in theopen air. In the missions of the Oro-noko, in
the villages placed on the banksof the river, surrounded by
immense for-ests, the plaga de las
moscas, the plague ofthe flies, affords an
inexhaustible subjectof conversation. When two persons meetin the morning, the first questions theyaddress to each other are, ‘How did youfind the
zancudoes during the night?How are we to-day for the
moschettoes?These questions remind us of a Chineseform of politeness, which indicates theancient
state of the country where it tookbirth. Salutations were made
heretoforein the celestial empire,
in the followingwords, vou-tou-hou,
‘Have you been in-commoded in the night by the
serpents?’We shall soon see, that on the banks
ofthe Tuamini, in the river
Magdalena, andstill more at Choco, the
country of goldand palatina, the Chinese compliment onthe serpents might be added to that of themoschettoes.|Spaltenumbruch|‘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 tolook well at his legs, that we might be a-ble
to tell one day, ‘poor alla (beyondsea,) what the poor
monks suffer in theforests of Cassiquiare.’ Every sting
leav-ing a small darkish brown point, his legswere so speckled, that it was difficult torecognize the whiteness of his skin thro’the spots of
coagulated blood. If theinsects of the simulium genus abound
inthe Cassiquiare, which has white
waters,the culices, or zancudoes, are so much themore rare; you scarcely
find any there,while on the rivers of black
waters, in theAtabapo and the Rio Negro, there aregenerally some zancudoes and no moschet-toes.”
SAVAGES ON THE ORONOKO.
* As the Mahas in the plains of the Missoury, ac-cording to the accounts of the American travellers,Clark and Lewis.† In Tamanack mure signifies a child; emuru, ason.