From the Personal Narrative of Baron Humboldt.

SAVAGES ON THE ORONOKO.

"The river Atabapo displays every where a peculiar aspect; you see nothing of its real banks formed by flat lands, eight or ten feet high; they are concealed by a row of palms, and small trees with slender trunks, the roots of which are bathed by the waters.

There are many crocodiles from the point where you quit the Oronoko to the mission of San Fernando, and their presence indicates, as we have said above, that this part of the river belongs to the Rio Guaviare and not to the Atabapo.

In the real bed of the latter river above the mission of San Fernando, there are no longer any crocodiles: we find there are some bavas, a great many fresh-water dolphins, but no manatees.

We also seek in vain on those banks the thick-nosed tapir, the araguates, or great howling monkeys, the zamuro, or vultur aura, and the crested pheasant, known by the name of guacharaca.

Enormous water-snakes, in shape resembling the boa, are unfortunately very numerous, and are dangerous to the Indians who bathe.

We saw them almost from the first day, swimming by the side of the canoe; they were at the most from 12 to 14 feet long.

The jaguars of the banks of the Atahapo and the Temi are large and well fed: they are said, however, to be less daring than the jaguars of the Oronoko."

"Before we reached its confluence, a granitic hummock, that rises on the western bank, near the mouth of the Guasacavi, fixed our attention; it is called the Rock of the Guahiba woman, or the Rock of the Mother, Piedra de la Madre.

We inquired the cause of so singular a denomination.

Father Zea could not satisfy our curiosity; but some weeks after, another missionary, one of the predecessors of this ecclesiastic, whom we found settled at San Fernando as president of the missions; related to us an event, which I recorded in my journal and which excited in our minds the most painful feelings.

If, in these solitary scenes, man scarcely leaves behind him any trace of his existence, it is doubly humiliating for a European to see perpetuated by the name of a rock, by one of those imperishable monuments of nature, the remembrance of the moral degradation of our species, and the contrast between the virtue of a savage, and the barbarism of civilized man!

"In 1797 the missionary of San Fernando had led his Indians to the banks of the Rio Guaviara, on one of those hostile incursions, which are prohibited alike by religion and the Spanish laws.

They found an Indian hut, a Guahiba mother with three children, two of whom were still infants.

They were occupled in preparing the flour of Cassava.

Resistance was impossible; the father was gone to fish, and the mother tried in vain to flee with her children.

Scarcely had she reached the savannah, when she was seized by the Indians of the mission, who go to hunt men, like the whites and the negroes in Africa.

The mother and her children were bound, and dragged to the bank of the river.

The monk, seated in his boat, waited the issue of the expedition, of which be partook not the danger.

Had the mother made too violent a resistance, the Indians would have killed her, for every thing is permitted when they go to the conquest of souls (a la conquista espiritula,) and it is children in particular they seek to capture, in order to treat them, in the mission, as poitos, or slaves of the Christians.

The prisoners were carried to San Fernando in the hope, that the mother would not find her way back to her home, by land.

Far from those children who had accompanied their father on the day in which she had been carried off, this unhappy woman showed signs of the deepest despair.

She attempted to take back to her family the children who had been snatched away by the missionary, and fled with them repeatedly from the village of San Fernando, but the Indians never failed to seize her anew; and the missionary, after having caused her to be mercilessly beaten, look the cruel resolution of separating the mother from the two children, who had been carried off with her.

She was conveyed alone toward the mission of the Rio Negro, going up the Atabapo.

Slightly bound, she was seated at the bow of the boat, ignorant of the fate that awaited her; but she judged, by the direction of the sun, that she was removed farther and farther from her hut and from her native country.

She succeeded in breaking her bonds, threw herself into the water, and swam to the left bank of the Atabapo.

The current carried her to a shelf of rock, which bears her name to this day.

She landed, and took shelter in the woods, but the president of the missions ordered the Indians to row to the shore, and follow the traces of the Guahibi.

In the evening she was brought back.

Stretched upon the rock (la Piedra de la Madre) a cruel punishment was inflicted on her with those straps of manatee leather, which serve for whips in that country, and with which the alcades are always furnished.

This unhappy woman, her hands tied behind her back with strong stalks of mavacure, was then dragged to the mission of Javita.

"She was there thrown into one of the carravanceras that are called Casa del Rey.

It was the rainy season, and the night was profoundly dark.

Forests, till then believed to be impenetrable, separated the mission of Javita from that of San Fernando, which was twentyfive leagues distant in a straight line.

No other part is known than that of the rivers; no man ever attempted to go by land from one village to another, were they only a few leagues apart.

But such difficulties do not stop a mother, who is separated from her children.

Her children are at San Fernando de Atabapo; and she must find them again, she must execute her project of delivering them from the hands of Christians, of bringing them back to their father on the banks of the Guaviare.

The Guahibi was carelessly guarded in the caravansera.

Her arms, being wounded, the Indians of Javita had loosened her bonds, unknown to the missionary and the alcades.

She succeeded by the help of her teeth in breaking them entirely; disappeared during the night; and at the fourth rising sun was seen at the mission of San Fernando, hovering around the hut where her children were confined.

"What that woman performed, added the missionary who gave us this sad narrative, "the most robust Indian would not have ventured to undertake.

She traversed the woods at a season when the sky is constantly covered with clouds, and the sun during whole days appears but for a few minutes.

Did the course of the waters direct her way?

The inundations of the rivers forced her to go far from the banks of the main stream, through the midst of woods where the movement of the waters is almost imperceptible.

How often must she have been stopped by the thorny lianas, that form a net-work around the trunks they entwine?

How often must she have swam across the rivulets that run into the Atabapo!

This unfortunate woman was asked how she had sustained herself during the four days!

She said, that, exhausted with fatigue, she could find no other nourishment than those great black, ants called vachacos, which climb the trees in long bands, to suspend on them their resinous nests."

We pressed the missionary to tell us, whether the Guahibi had peacefully enjoyed the happiness of remaining with her children; and if any repentance had followed this excess of cruelty.

He would not satisfy our curiosity; but at our return from the Rio Negro we learnt, that the Indian mother was not allowed time to cure her wounds, but was again separated from her children, and sent to one of the missions of the Upper Oronoko.

There she died, refusing all kinds of nourishment, as the savages do in great calamities.

"Such is the remembrance annexed to this fatal rock, to Piedra de la Madre."