WE WENT BACK TO Colorado eager to discover whether the Indians had reached any decision as to the possibility of holding a ‘for nothing’. The response to our enquiries seemed ominously cautious, and when pressed the Panare put us off with unconvincing excuses. So far no one in Colorado had been prepared to tell us that all such social activities were displeasing to God but we felt the day growing nearer when this would happen. None of us had set eyes on the missionaries, although Henry Corradini had endlessly patrolled the mission area in the hope of a chance confrontation. Henry had been identified by the sect as an agent of Satan; a deceiver, along with a miscellany of members of the World Council of Churches, anthropologists and liberal journalists gathered together under Satan’s, banner in preparation for Armageddon, now perceived as just round the corner.
Finally, after many wasted trips down to the mission, we heard a plane coming in. Before we could get down to the landing strip, it was down. Two missionaries came out of the house with a third brought by the plane, and the three hurried away. Within five minutes they were airborne.
Following this unexpected departure we felt entitled to hope that the situation might have eased so far as we were concerned, that the ban on photography might have been lifted, that we might have been invited to join in the communal meal, and the ‘for nothing’ might have been comfortably arranged. This proved not to be the case, and it was soon evident that a man who had been their first convert, and their only supporter for several years, had been able to assume the missionaries’ authority, and maintain their prohibitions in their absence.
He was a Panare who walked with some difficulty having been lame from birth. Henry Corradini said that his rise to power illustrated a process inevitably following the discovery of a handicapped person in a tribe where the evangelists had established a foothold. Although certain missionaries such as those who had helped in the enslavement of the Achés are prepared to lie in defence of criminal activities, others such as Mr Halterman of La Paz stick to the truth, and can be breathtakingly frank in their discussion of their methods. An NTM missionary in Caracas had described the strategy in selecting any handicapped person found in a tribal resistance. ‘They say that all’s fair in war,’ said the missionary, ‘and for us this is a war for souls.’
‘When we come across a man with some physical defect,’ he went on, ‘let’s say a club foot, or a withered arm, we concentrate our energies on him. We see this man as having a grudge about the way life’s treated him. He’s an outsider who harbours resentment against those who are more fortunate. We know that this is the guy who’s going to let us in if we play this right, and we start off by giving him the best of everything; smart clothes, rides in the plane—maybe we let him fiddle with the transmitter, anything to build him up, make him feel like he’s one of us.’
‘Let’s say there’s some kind of important figure in this community. It could be just the oldest man, or maybe some sort of a witch-doctor who’s been called to witness for the Lord. We can say for certain that it’s only a matter of time before our man takes over. He builds up his own following of guys who see the way things are going and like to be around for the handouts. The next stage is that these people who are working for us and who have grown in the Lord decline to associate with the ones who want to keep going the way they always have. That’s the way it always goes, and it’s natural that it should. Trouble is there aren’t too many guys with withered arms around, but where we see one we know we’re on a winner.’
The man we supposed to be the missionaries’ deputy in Colorado was always in sight about the village. There was no way of knowing how many Panare had accepted the Word, or were on the point of conversion, because with the sole exception of this man, they had refused up to this to be parted from their ceremonial loincloths and their trinkets of blue and white beads. The missionaries’ man wore the kind of trousers which seem inevitably in such surroundings to be grubby, and with them on special occasions a T-shirt, training shoes, dark spectacles and a baseball cap. He never, so far as we knew, took part in the evening communal meal, so presumably lived on canned food from the missionaries’ store.
In Tiro Loco Donald had gone round taking all the photographs he wanted to, and it was galling that in Colorado, presenting as it did such an incomparable panoply of tribal life, photography should have remained a strict taboo. Paul’s suggested remedy for this impasse was to devise some means of enticing the Indians away from Colorado and the lame man’s censorious eye, and thereafter involving them in strenuous activity in such a way that they would be too absorbed in whatever they were doing to notice that photography was going on.
This was the end of the dry season when the rivers of Venezuela everywhere were full of fish of many varieties, some of enormous size. Some years before, Paul had gone on a small-scale trip involving fifteen men when 75 kgs of fish were caught in an hour or two in a knee-deep creek. In the rivers further afield, hundreds of fish became concentrated as the water shrunk in pools where they could be seen circulating just below the surface like trout in a farm. This angler’s paradise continued to exist, because only a few Indians were there to fish. The Creole population ate little but meat, and if they ate fish at all insisted upon the imported frozen kind.
In previous years at this time the Panare had been accustomed to turn a fishing expedition into a major fiesta. All the village men, women and children accompanied by numerous pets such as tame parrots, dogs, ducks and pigs made the long trek to the Tortuga river, a tributary of the Orinoco, and there on the banks built a makeshift settlement where they stayed a week or two, returning home only when the unrelieved diet offish began to pall. Such great tribal excursions, preceded by the brewing of beer, and accompanied by a great deal of dancing and merry-making had come to an end. The first essential in missionary policy was to settle the Indians permanently in what amounted to a colony under their close control, and such trips, Harry Corradini informed us, were debarred wherever they had established their rule. Without transport it would have been difficult to reach the fishing ground on the Tortuga river, and return in a day, and when Paul offered to take a fishing party in the Land Rover, the opportunity was clearly too good to resist.
Traditionally most Indians poison rivers on such a big-scale fishing expedition. The method is less gruesome than it sounds, for the Indians have mastered the art of conservation. The effect of the poison is confined to a small area, and does not spoil the flesh, and the fish that are not taken recover. Indians never fish or hunt for sport, thus year after year abundance is perpetuated.
For small-scale fishing in which only two or three men work together as a team the Panare use a plant, kayin, produced as a garden crop, but this is too weak in effect for employment in a substantial river. In this case a trip is made into the mountains to collect a liana called by them enerrima which is pounded up and then washed into the water. We had wanted very much to be able to go with them and photograph the collectors of the enerrima at work, but they left without warning at about dawn on the day before our fishing expedition, possibly under the influence of some taboo in the matter.
Next morning we took nine Panare aboard the Land Rover and headed out across the savannah in the direction of the Tortuga river which at its nearest point could have been ten miles away. Once again I was struck by the savannah’s landscaped appearance—that of a park laid out by men. Although no rain had fallen for months it had remained remarkably green and fresh, and the short grass reaching barely halfway to the knee was clear of any scrubby invasions. The ground was level, and there was hardly any limit to the speed at which we could have travelled had it not been for frequent and often sudden encounters with creeks. These, although no more than 12–15 ft in width, and at this season quite shallow, could only easily be crossed at fording points where the bottom was hard, and these were relatively few. This area had seen the beginnings of the first serious quarrel between Panare and criollos, when a small rancher had put a fence across Indian tribal land. So far the only casualty had been a single cow, but the episode warned of the possibility of worse to come. The Indians had kept the upper hand because notwithstanding missionary support, the rancher had been obliged to take down his fence.
We zigzagged at high speed across the low grass on the look-out for safe fording places. The Panare had armed themselves with 6 ft wooden lances with steel barbs, and a couple of bamboo poles were carried in the hope of knocking down a few mangoes if any ripe ones were seen. Once again I was disappointed at the absence of animals. The Panare hunted deer, agoutis, armadillos and tortoises in the savannah, but at the best of times these were only present in the rainy season.
Bird life was spectacular and abundant. The positioning of springs was marked in the savannah by somewhat regular and evenly spaced clumps of trees, most of which were either in flower at this season, or bore fruit. They were visited by vast flocks of birds, among them parrots, toucans and macaws. These the Panare ignored unless they were in search of macaws’ feathers or toucans’ beaks for ceremonial purposes, and never took more than they required for any specific ritual. We stopped near some promising trees and the Indians took their poles and ran from tree to tree beating the branches within reach and picking up the ripe mangoes that showered down. The birds, unaccustomed to humans, would ignore our approach and go on feeding, and then, when an Indian struck at a tree with his pole, it seemed to shatter like glass, exploding hundreds of flashing fragments into the sky. Humming-birds of a half dozen varieties buzzed sullenly in our ears and poised in mid-flight to inspect us within inches of our faces. A few feral pigs grubbing among the fallen mangoes went scuttling away, but these were of no interest to the Panare, and were ignored.
We reached the Tortuga, found it much shrunken with no apparent flow except in the shallows linking the deep pools, where a multitude of fish were trapped. At most it was 40 ft across, low in its bed and bordered by the usual sparse and untidy gallery-forest. A number of fishing eagles perched in the trees to watch the water in which an occasional swirl was produced by some large fish manoeuvring near the surface. The backbones of their catch littered the bank. Bones retaining shreds of flesh had attracted the attention of numerous sulphur-coloured butterflies, as had also the damp earth on the margins of pools left by the receding waters, at which they sucked, twitching their wings.
The Indians, who at all other times had appeared calm and phlegmatic, had suddenly been possessed by excitement at the prospect of the fishing, and scampered up and down the banks in search of the most suitable stretch of water to be poisoned. The impression they gave was of a domination by a group-attitude so engrained that a consensus had to be sought before any action could be undertaken, and that the conceptions of leadership and personal initiative were foreign to this community. Nevertheless, as with the termites, the group could function as an individual when the occasion demanded and decisions were rapidly taken, and without evident dissent. Shortly after our own arrival we were the spectators of the extraordinary scene of some forty Panare pedalling furiously—towards us across the savannah on their missionary bikes, Christ Is Coming painted on each mudguard. Moments later bikes were parked, and they had ranged themselves with the contingent we had brought at equidistant intervals for two or three hundred yards along the water’s edge. There was no apparent discussion. Word came back to Paul that a site had been chosen and the fishing was about to begin, and we hurried to the spot.
The pool chosen was about one hundred yards in length, a bulge of water bottlenecked at each end with sand banks, and shallows through which only a ray could pass. Paul thought that the water in the pool could have been six to eight feet in depth, and that in all probability some hundreds offish could be trapped in it to await the coming of the rains. The wildlife of the locality paid little attention to us. When we arrived kingfishers as big as starlings were splashing into the water, an elegant long-legged eagle went mincing past, and a spectacular flycatcher continued to hawk among the butterflies within a few feet from where we stood, in no way perturbed by our presence.
Three Indians had stationed themselves on some large, water-smothered boulders carrying the baskets with ground-up enerrima, which they now doused in the water and from which a milky whiteness began to spread. I had expected a longish wait until the poison had reached all parts of the pool for it to produce any effect, but this was not the case. Within two minutes of the baskets’ immersion and before the cloudiness they released had even reached the middle of the pool a tremendous subaqueous commotion began, a whirling Catherine-wheel of tin-plate reflections in the depths. This agitation spread instantly to all parts of the water and, impelled as if by centrifugal force, big fish shot outwards, dorsal fins cutting the surface towards the shallows. Occasionally a fish broke surface, hurled itself into the air, to splash back or even thump down on the bank, thereafter propelling itself in a series of leaps for a dozen feet or so across dry land.
The Panare, each one in his place, chattered excitedly, lances upraised, waiting for reasonable targets to present themselves as soon as the fish began to slow down. After their first frantic outwards rush, driven by the need to break out of the confines of the poison, the fish fell into incoherent movement, swimming still at high speed but without direction; spinning in tight circles, zig-zagging, scrawling flashing curlicues just beneath the surface, turning over on their backs, flinging themselves into shallows only inches deep in which they scuttled with gaping mouths and violent oscillations of the tail. Among them went the corpse-white rays, flapping with their wing-like fins, and the smallest of these escaped. The Panare stood in motionless lines along the banks like statues produced in the atelier of a single sculptor. There was no warning of action. They seemed all to throw their lances at the same moment. As far as I could see every lance struck a fish and as the Indians pulled their fish on to the banks I could see why there had been no fight; they were all speared through the head. From the moment when the fish was speared until it was released from the barb and the Indian went into action again it took a maximum of three minutes.
Paul who had stationed himself in the line a few yards away was taking fish with great expertise. He had had several years’ practice with the lance, and although he was a little slower than an Indian and less ambitious with the length of his throw I never saw him miss. An Indian passed a lance to me but in a single attempt I covered myself with ignominy by entangling myself with the line. I noted with interest that in a society almost devoid of a sense of property, each of the Panare was most careful to keep his own catch separate from that of the rest. This although all the results of individual effort were due shortly to be amalgamated with the inclusion of the catch as a whole as part of the community’s food reserves. Paul, who had enjoyed the fishing as sport, would present what he had caught to his fictive Panare mother, but as she would certainly pass this on to the community it was hardly more than a ceremonial gesture.
The fishing went on for about two hours after which the pool had been emptied apart from several exceptionally large fish continuing to twist and turn in its centre. Suddenly, as if by common consent, the Panare seemed to lose interest in these, and all the lance-throwing stopped. I had seen them unerringly spear fish through the head at up to thirty feet. It seemed strange that these monsters only a few feet outside this range should have been spared, and I was inclined to wonder if prestige entered into this restraint, and whether no Panare was inclined to risk public failure.
Several hundred fish had been taken, among them several 25-pounders, and the total catch could have been in the neighbourhood of a ton. The Panare said that the fish they had left would recover in about four hours, and that as soon as the rains started there would be as many as ever in the pool, although thereafter they would have to be caught by line. As the Indians set about cleaning their fish on the spot, the eagles dropped around us like parachutists from the trees, and began to clear up. I was sorry to be unable to recognize any of the fish, and that no examples of the legendary piranha had been present.
The expedition had been a phenomenal—success—by far and away, Paul said, the most exciting he had accompanied. Don had secured an outstanding and perhaps unique photographic record of a sensationally productive Stone Age operation, and no Panare had shown the slightest sign of disquiet. The Panare had stocked themselves and now they congratulated each other in their soft, clicking language. As originally planned the fishing would have been On a smaller scale, and therefore less satisfactory in its impact on the Colorado economy. It seemed both ironic and extraordinary that the bicycles bought through the mission should have contributed to this success.
The fact remained that everything had turned out well for all concerned, and at this moment of general satisfaction a Panare, who had arrived on a bicycle but not taken part in the fishing, pushed to the front. This was a convert, but unlike the missionaries’ deputy, he was well formed and athletic in appearance, but marked down for what he was by the fact that he wore a shirt. Taking a tract from the folds of his loincloth he thrust it towards us. It was printed in English. The heading asked, ‘Has life nothing better to offer than this?’
Perhaps the great success of the fishing had made the Panare a little reckless, or perhaps as they saw it, with missionary disapproval to be faced, they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and that night we were invited to join in the evening meal. It was prepared just in the way Thomas Harriot, official historian of the first English colony of Roanoke in Virginia, had seen the Indians of the island smoke their catch offish in 1585. ‘They stick four stakes of equal length into the ground with a number of posts across them. The fish are laid upon the platform, and a fire built beneath it.’ And—exactly as the Panare did: ‘after the platform is full of fish and will hold no more, the rest of the catch is hung at the sides, or on sticks close to the fire.’ This would have been a familiar scene, too, to the engraver De Bry who illustrated Harriot’s book, for so much of the scene at Roanoke must have resembled our surroundings at Colorado: the face painting, the hair cut into a fringe, the armlets, the bead necklaces, the g-strings worn by the young girls.
The 25-year-old Harriot, an intimate friend of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, spent a year at Roanoke, and with the colony’s collapse he returned to England with the first samples of the potato and the tobacco plant, together with material collected for Raleigh’s History of the New World. He was enchanted with the Indians of Roanoke Island. In the book he wrote describing his experiences and he gives an account of their methods of catching fish. He says of them,
It is a pleasing picture to see these people wading and sailing in their shallow rivers. They are untroubled by the desire to pile up riches for their children, and live in perfect contentment with their present state, in friendship with each other, sharing all those things with which God has so bountifully provided them.
Certainly Harriot would have spoken with equal enthusiasm of the engaging and pacific Panare.
This was our last evening with the Indians. We sat with them on fallen tree trunks to form a hollow square round the hideous enamelled bowls we had brought and in which the food was served. A dozen or so adult males were present, most of them accompanied by young children who were exceedingly well behaved and rather grave. The women busied themselves with the cooking and serving of the fish, and they, with their babies and adolescent children, formed a separate group to eat their meal. There were no shirt-wearing members of the community to be seen.
We ate enormously, urged continually by our Panare hosts who groped among the bowlfuls offish in search of particularly succulent morsels, which they passed to us. ‘When they have feasted together to their contentment,’ Harriot said of his Indians, ‘they are wont to dance, an exercise in which they take constant delight.’ There would be no dancing on this occasion, and it seemed likely to us that for the Panare the dancing days had come to an end. Nevertheless, whatever the rules had been against photography, it was clear that they had been suspended, and not even the children showed the slightest signs of shyness when the camera was pointed in their direction.
Soon we saw lights bobbing in the bushes nearby and heard soft childish voices, sounding a little like the clucking of contented hens. The older boys and girls having finished their meal had arrived with their torches, or their hands full of fireflies, and were waiting by the path leading up to our house, to which they would accompany us and renew their rummaging among our possessions in search of the exciting bric-a-brac of the West.