In the chronicle of our journey to the Caripe missions I did not wish to insert general considerations concerning the customs, languages and common origins of the different Indian tribes populating New Andalusia. Now, having returned to my starting-point, I will place in one section matters that concern the history of human beings. As we advance further into the interior of the continent this subject will become even more interesting than the phenomena of the physical world.
In the mountainous regions we have just crossed, Indians form half the population of the provinces of Cumaná and New Barcelona. Their number can be calculated at some 60,000, of which some 24,000 live in New Andalusia. The Indians of Cumaná do not all live in the mission villages. Some are dispersed around the cities, along the coasts, attracted by fishing, and some in the small farms on the llanos or plains. Some 15,000 Indians, all belonging to the Chaima tribe, live in the Aragonese Capuchin missions we visited. However, their villages are not as densely populated as in New Barcelona province. Their average population is only 500 to 600, while more to the west, in the Franciscan missions of Piritu, there are Indian villages with up to 3,000 inhabitants. If I calculated the Indian population in the provinces of Cumaná and New Barcelona to be some 60,000 I included only those living on Terra Firma, not the Guaiquerí on Margarita Island, nor the great number of independent Guaraunos living in the Orinoco delta islands. Their number is estimated, perhaps exaggeratedly, at some 6,000 to 8,000. Apart from Guaraunos families seen now and then in the marshes (Los Morichales), which are covered with moriche palms, for the last thirty years there have been no wild Indians living in New Andalusia.
I use the word ‘savage’ grudgingly because it implies a cultural difference between the tamed Indians living in missions and the free ones, which belies the facts. In the South American jungles there are Indian tribes who live peacefully in villages under their chiefs, who cultivate banana trees, cassava and cotton in large areas of land, and weave their hammocks with cotton fibres. They are not more barbarous than the naked Indians of the missions who have learned to make the sign of the cross. In Europe it is a common fallacy to assume that all Indians who are not tamed are nomadic hunters. In Terra Firma agriculture was known long before the arrival of the Europeans, and today is still practised between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in jungle clearings never visited by missionaries. What the missionaries have achieved is to have increased the Indians’ attachment to owning land, their desire for secure dwelling places, and their taste for more peaceful lives. It would be accepting false ideas about the actual condition of South American Indians to assume that ‘Christian’, ‘tamed’ and ‘civilized’ were synonymous with ‘pagan’, ‘savage’ and ‘free’. The tamed Indian is often as little a Christian as the free Indian is an idolater. Both, caught up in the needs of the moment, betray a marked indifference for religious sentiments, and a secret tendency to worship nature and her powers.
If the independent Indians have almost disappeared over the last century in those areas north of the Orinoco, it must not be concluded that fewer Indians exist at present than in the time of the bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomeo de las Casas. I have already proved in my work on Mexico how mistaken it is to assume the destruction and diminution of Indians in the Spanish colonies, as Ulloa has written ‘Es cosa constante irse disminuyendo por todas partes el numero de los Indios’ (There is everywhere a constant decrease in the number of Indians). There are still more than 6 million copper-coloured races in both Americas, and though countless tribes and languages have died out it is beyond discussion that within the Tropics, where civilization arrived with Columbus, the number of Indians has considerably increased.61
As the missionaries struggle to penetrate the jungles and gain the Indian land, so white colonists try, in their turn, to invade missionary land. In this long-drawn-out struggle the secular arm continually tends to take over those Indians tamed by the missions, and missionaries are replaced by priests. Whites and mestizos, favoured by corregidores, have established themselves among the Indians. The missions are transformed into Spanish villages and the Indians soon forget even the memory of their own language. So civilization slowly works its way inland from the coast, sometimes hindered by human passions.
In the New Andalusia and Barcelona provinces, under the name of the Gobierno de Cumaná, there are more than fourteen tribes: in New Andalusia reside the Chaimas, the Guaiquerí, the Pariagotos, the Quaquas, the Araucans, the Caribs and the Guaraunos; in the province of New Barcelona, the Cumanagotos, the Palenques, the Caribs, the Piritus, the Tomuzas, the Topocuares, the Chacopotes and the Guarives. Nine to ten of these tribes consider themselves to be of entirely different races. Of the remaining tribes, the most numerous are the Chaimas in the Caripe mountains, the Caribs in the southern savannahs of New Barcelona, and the Cumanagotos in the Piritu missions. Some Guarauno families live on the left shore of the Orinoco where the delta begins, under missionary discipline. The most common languages are those of the Guaraunos, the Caribs, the Cumanagotos and the Chaimas.
The Indians in the missions dedicate themselves to agriculture, and, apart from those who live in the high mountains, all cultivate the same plants; their huts are arranged in the same manner; their working day, their tasks in the communal conuco, their relationship with the missionaries and elected functionaries, all run along fixed rules. However, we observe in the copper-coloured men a moral inflexibility, a stubbornness concerning habits and customs, which, though modified in each tribe, characterize the whole race from the equator to Hudson’s Bay and the Strait of Magellan.
In the missions there are a few villages where families belong to different tribes, speaking different languages. Societies composed of such heterogeneous elements are difficult to govern. In general, the padres have settled whole tribes, or large parts of them, in villages not far from each other. The Indians see only those of their own tribe, for lack of communication and isolation are the main aims of missionary policy. Among the tamed Chaimas, Caribs and Tamanacs racial characteristics are retained if they are allowed to keep their respective languages. If man’s individuality is reflected in his dialects, then these in their turn influence thoughts and feelings. This intimate link between language, national character and physical constitution ensures the differences and idiosyncrasies of the tribes, which in turn constitutes an unending source of movement and life at the mental level.
Missionaries have managed to rid the Indians of certain customs concerning birth, entering puberty and burying the dead; they have managed to stop them painting their skin or making incisions in their chins, noses and cheeks; they have banished the superstitious ideas that in many families are passed down mysteriously from father to son; but it was far easier to suppress practices and memories than it was to replace the old ideas with new ones. In the missions the Indian has a far more secure life than he had before. He is no longer a victim of the continuous struggle between man and the elements, and he leads a more monotonous and passive life than the wild Indian, but he is also less likely to animate his own spiritual development. His thinking has not increased with his contact with whites; he has remained estranged from the objects with which European civilization has enriched the Americas. All his acts seem dictated exclusively by wants of the moment. He is taciturn, without joy, introverted and, on the outside, serious and mysterious. Someone who has been but a short time in a mission could mistake his laziness and passivity for a meditative frame of mind.
I shall begin with the Chaimas, of whom some 15,000 live in the missions we visited. Their territory stretches over the high mountain range of the Cocollar and the Guácharo, the banks of the Guarapiche, the Colorado river, the Areo and the Caño de Caripe. According to a statistical survey made with great care by a father superior in the Aragonese Capuchin mission of Cumaná, nineteen mission villages, the oldest dating back to 1728, held 1,465 families, and a total of 6,433 people. From 1730 to 1736 the population was diminished by the ravages of smallpox, always more fatal for the copper-skinned Indians than for the whites.
The Chaimas are usually short and thickset, with extremely broad shoulders and flat chests, and their legs are rounded and fleshy. The colour of their skin is the same as that of all American Indians from the cold plateaux of Quito to the burning jungles of the Amazon.
Their facial expression is not hard or wild but rather serious and gloomy. Their foreheads are small and barely salient, which is why in various languages of their territory they say about a beautiful woman that ‘she is fat, with a narrow forehead’; their eyes are black, deep set and very elongated. The Chaimas, and all South American Indians, resemble the Mongols in the shape of their eyes, their high cheek-bones, their straight and smooth hair, and an almost total absence of beard; yet they differ in the form of their noses. These are rather long and broad at the nostril, which opens downwards like a Caucasian nose. Their mouths are wide, with full lips but not fleshy, and frequently show their good nature. Between the nose and mouth are two furrows that diverge from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth. The chin is very small and round; the jaws very strong and wide.
The Chaimas have attractive white teeth like all who lead a very simple life, but not as strong as negro teeth. The early explorers noted their custom of blacking their teeth with plant juices and quicklime; today this custom has disappeared. I doubt whether the custom of blacking their teeth had anything to do with odd ideas about beauty or a remedy against toothache. It could be said that Indians do not know toothache, and Spaniards who live in the Tropics do not suffer from this pain either.
Like all the Indian tribes that I know the Chaimas have small, slender hands. Contrary to this, their feet are large, and their toes remain extremely mobile. All the Chaimas resemble each other, as if they were all related, and this is all the more evident because between twenty and fifty years old, age is not indicated by wrinkling skin, white hair or body decrepitude. When you enter a hut it is hard to differentiate a father from a son, one generation from another. I think that this family resemblance has two different causes: the local position of the Indian villages, and the lack of intellectual culture. Indian nations are subdivided into an infinity of tribes, all hating each other, and never allied even if speaking the same language or living on the same river or nearby hill. This characteristic is preserved in the missions where marriages are made only within tribes. This blood link that unites a whole tribe is naively illustrated by those Spanish-speaking Indians who designate members of the same tribe as mis parientes (my relatives).
The Indians of the missions, remote from all civilization, are influenced solely by physical needs, which they satisfy very easily in their favourable climate, and therefore tend to lead dull, monotonous lives, which are reflected in their facial expressions.
The Chaimas, like all semi-wild people in hot climates, show a great aversion to clothes. In the torrid zone the Indians are ashamed – so they say – to wear clothes, and if they are forced to do so too soon they rush off into the jungle in order to remain naked. Despite the efforts of the monks the Chaima men and women walk around naked in their houses. When they go into villages they put on a kind of cotton shirt, which hardly reaches to their knees. Sometimes we met Indians outside the mission grounds, during a rainstorm, who had taken their clothes off and rolled them under their arms. They prefer to let the rain fall on their naked bodies than letting it wet their clothes. The older women hid behind trees and burst into loud fits of laughter when they saw us pass by fully dressed.
Chaima women are not pretty according to our ideas of beauty; however, the girls have a sweet, melancholic look, which softens their often hard and wild mouths. They wear their hair in two plaits and do not paint their skin; in their extreme poverty they use no ornaments apart from shell, bird-bone and seed necklaces and bracelets. Both women and men are very muscular, though plump and round. I saw no Indian with any natural deformity. In the wild state, which is a state of equality, nothing can induce a man to marry a deformed or ill woman. Such a woman, if she survives the accidents of life, dies childless.
The Chaimas hardly have any hair on their chins, like the Tongouses and other Mongolic races. They pluck out the few hairs that grow. In general it is erroneous to say that they cannot grow beards, because they pluck them out – though even without that custom, they would be mostly smooth-faced.
The Chaimas lead an extremely monotonous life. They go to bed regularly at half past seven in the evening, and get up long before dawn, at about half past four. Every Indian has a fire next to his hammock. Women suffer the cold greatly; I have even seen a woman shiver at church when the temperature was above 18 °C. Their huts are very clean. Their hammocks and reed mats, their pots full of cassava or fermented maize, their bow and arrows, all are kept in perfect order. Men and women wash every day, and as they walk around naked do not get as dirty as people who wear clothes. Apart from their village hut they also have in the conuco, next to a spring or at the entrance to a small valley, a hut roofed with palm- or banana-tree leaves. Though life is less comfortable in the conuco they prefer living there as much as possible. I have already alluded to their irresistible drive to flee and return to the jungle. Even young children flee from their parents to spend four or five days in the jungle, feeding off wild fruit, palm hearts and roots. When travelling through the missions it is not rare to find them empty as everyone is either in their garden or in the jungle, al monte. Similar feelings account for civilized people’s passion for hunting: the charm of solitude, the innate desire for freedom, and the deep impressions felt whenever man is alone in contact with nature.
Among the Chaimas, as among all semi-barbarous people, the state of women is one of privation and suffering. The hardest work falls to them. In the evening when we saw the Chaimas return from their gardens the men carried only their machetes to cut their way through the undergrowth. The women walk loaded with bananas, a child in their arms and two others sometimes perched on top of their load. Despite this social inequality South American Indian women seem, in general, happier than North American ones. In the missions men work in the fields as much as women.
Nothing matches the difficulty that Indians have in learning Spanish. As long as they are distanced from white men they have an aversion to be called civilized Indians or, as the missions call them, indios muy latinos. But what struck me most, not only among the Chaimas, but among all the isolated missions that I later visited, was the extreme difficulty they have in co-ordinating and expressing the simplest ideas in Spanish, even if they know the meaning of the single words and sentences.
You would think their mental stupidity greater than that of children when a white asks them questions about objects that have surrounded them since birth. Missionaries assured us that this is not due to timidity, and that among the missionary Indians in charge of public works this is not an innate stupidity but a block they have concerning the mechanisms of a language so different to their mother tongue. The Indians affirmed or denied whatever pleased the monks, and laziness, accompanied by that cunning courtesy common to all Indians, made them sometimes give the answers suggested by the questions. Travellers cannot be wary enough of this over-obliging approbation when they want to find out what Indians think. To test an Indian alcalde I asked him ‘if he did not think that the Caripe river that comes from the Guacharo caves might not return there by some unknown entrance after climbing up the hill’. He looked as if he gave it serious thought for a while and answered in support of my theory: ‘If it did not do this how else is there always water in the river?’
The Chaimas have extreme difficulty in coping with numerical relationships. I did not meet one who could tell me whether he was eighteen or sixty years old. The Chaima language has words to express high numbers, but few Indians know how to use them. As they need to count the more intelligent ones count in Spanish up to thirty or forty, and even that seems a great mental strain. In their own language they cannot count up to six. Since European savants have dedicated themselves to the study of the structure of American languages we cannot attribute the imperfection of a language to what appears to be the stupidity of a people. We recognize that everywhere languages offer greater richnesses and more nuances than can be supposed from the lack of culture of the people speaking them.
The American languages have a structure so different from Latin that the Jesuits, who look carefully to anything that might favour a quick establishing of missions, introduced the richer Indian languages, especially Quechua and Guarani, instead of Spanish, to their converts because these languages were systematic and already widespread. They tried to substitute these poorer, coarser dialects with irregular constructions. They found this substitution easy; Indians from different tribes docilely learned them, and these languages became a medium of communication between missionary and Indian. Through these languages the Jesuits found it easier to link the various tribes until then separated from each other by language.
In America, from the Eskimos to the Orinoco banks, from the burning plains to the icy Strait of Magellan, mother tongues, quite different in terms of their roots, share the same physiognomy. We recognize striking analogies in grammatical structure, not only in the more learned languages like that of the Incas, the Aymara, the Guaranu, Cora and Mexican, but also in the more primitive ones. It is thanks to this structural analogy rather than words in common that the mission Indian learns another American language more easily than a metropolitan one. In the Orinoco jungle I have met the dullest Indians who speak two or three languages.
If the Jesuit system had been followed, languages that cover a large amount of the continent would have become almost general. In Terra Firma and on the Orinoco, Carib and Tamanaco alone would be spoken, and in the south and south-west, Quechua, Guarani, Omagua and Araucan. By appropriating these languages with regular grammatical forms, the missionaries would have had a more intimate contact with their Indians. The numberless difficulties arising from missions with a dozen different tribes would have vanished with the confusions of their languages, and the Indian, by preserving an American language, would have retained individuality and national identity.
At the Capuchin hospice in Caripe I collected, with Bonpland’s help, a small list of Chaima words. The three languages most common in this province are Chaima, Cumanagoto and Carib. Here they have been seen as separate languages and a dictionary of each has been compiled for mission use. The few grammars printed in the seventeenth century passed into the missions and have been lost in the jungle. Damp air and voracious insects (termites known as comején) make preserving books in these hot lands almost impossible, and they are soon destroyed.
On the right bank of the Orinoco, south-east of the Encaramada mission, 100 leagues from the Chaimas, live the Tamanacos. Despite the distance and numerous local obstacles it is clear that Chaima is a branch of Tamanaco. I discovered the link between these languages years after my return to Europe when I compared data collected in a grammar book of an old missionary on the Orinoco, printed in Italy.62