Books: Equinoctial Regions of America V2

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So near the sources of the Orinoco we heard of nothing in these
mountains but the proximity of El Dorado, the lake Parima, and the
ruins of the great city of Manoa. A man, still known in the country
for his credulity and his love of exaggeration, Don Apollinario Diez
de la Fuente, assumed the pompous title of capitan poblador, and cabo
militar (military commander) of the fort of Cassiquiare. This fort
consisted of a few trunks of trees, joined together by planks; and to
complete the deception, a demand was made at Madrid for the privileges
of a villa for the mission of Esmeralda, which but a hamlet with
twelve or fifteen huts. A colony composed of elements altogether
heterogeneous perished by degrees. The vagabonds of the Llanos had as
little taste for labour as the natives, who were compelled to live
within the sound of the bell. The former found a motive in their pride
to justify their indolence. In the missions, every mulatto who is not
decidedly black as an African, or copper-coloured as an Indian, calls
himself a Spaniard; he belongs to the gente de razon--the race endued
with reason; and that reason (sometimes, it must be admitted, arrogant
and indolent) persuaded the whites, and those who fancy they are so,
that to till the ground is a task fit only for slaves (poitos) and the
native neophytes. The colony of Esmeralda had been founded on the
principles of that of Australia; but it was far from being governed
with the same wisdom. The American colonists, being separated from
their native soil, not by seas, but by forests and savannahs,
dispersed; some taking the road northward, towards the Caura and the
Carony; others proceeding southward to the Portuguese possessions.
Thus the celebrity of this villa, and of the emerald-mines of Duida,
vanished in a few years; and Esmeralda, on account of the immense
number of insects that obscure the air at all seasons of the year, was
regarded by the monks as a place of banishment. The superior of the
missions, when he would make the lay-brothers mindful of their duty,
threatens sometimes to send them to Esmeralda; that is, say the monks,
to be condemned to the mosquitos; to be devoured by those buzzing
flies (zancudos gritones) which God appears to have created for the
torment and chastisement of man.* (* "Estos mosquitos que llaman
zancudos gritones los parece cria la naturaleza para castigo y
tormento de los hombres." "Those mosquitos which are called buzzing
zancudos, Nature seems to have created for the especial punishment and
torture of man." Fray Pedro Simon.) These strange punishments have not
always been confined to the lay-brothers. There happened in 1788 one
of those monastic revolutions, of which it is difficult to form a
conception in Europe, according to the ideas that prevail of the
peaceful state of the Christian settlements in the New World. For a
long period the Franciscan monks settled in Guiana had been desirous
of forming a separate republic, and rendering themselves independent
of the college of Piritu at Nueva Barcelona. Discontented with the
election of Fray Gutierez de Aguilera, chosen by a general chapter,
and confirmed by the king in the important office of president of the
missions, five or six monks of the Upper Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and
the Rio Negro, assembled together at San Fernando de Atabapo; chose
hastily a new superior from their own body; and caused the old one,
who, unfortunately for himself, had come to visit those parts, to be
arrested. They put him in irons, threw him into a boat, and conducted
him to Esmeralda, as to a place of proscription. This great distance
of the coast from the scene of this revolution led the monks to hope
that their crime would remain long unknown beyond the Great Cataracts.
They wished to gain time to intrigue, to negotiate, to frame acts of
accusation, and employ the little artifices by which, in every
country, the invalidity of a first election may be proved. Fray
Gutierez do Aguilera languished in his prison at Esmeralda, and fell
dangerously ill from the double influence of the excessive heat, and
the continual irritation of the mosquitos. Happily for the fallen
power the monks did not remain united. A missionary of the Cassiquiare
conceived serious alarms respecting the issue of this affair; he
dreaded being sent a prisoner to Cadiz, or, as they say in the
colonies, having his name on the list (baxo partido de registro). Fear
overcame his resolution, and he suddenly disappeared. Indians were
placed on the watch at the mouth of the Atabapo, at the Great
Cataracts, and wherever the fugitive was likely to pass on his way to
the Lower Orinoco. Notwithstanding these precautions, he arrived at
Angostura, and then reached the college of the missions of Piritu,
denounced his colleagues, and was appointed, in recompense of this
information, to arrest those with whom he had conspired against the
president of the missions.* (* Two of the missionaries, considered as
the leaders of the insurrection, were embarked at Angostura, in order
to be tried in Spain. The vessel in which they were conveyed became
leaky, and put into Spanish Harbour in the island of Trinidad. The
governor Chacon intereated himself in the fate of the monks; they were
pardoned a violent proceeding somewhat inconsistent with monastic
discipline, and were again employed in the missions. I was acquainted
with them both during my abode in South America.) At Esmeralda, where
the political events that have agitated Europe for thirty years past
have not yet been heard of, lively interest is still felt in an event
which is called the sedition of the monks, (el alboroto de los
frailes.) In this country, as in the East, no conception is formed of
any other revolutions than those that are made by rulers themselves;
and we have just seen that the effects are not very alarming.

If the villa of Esmeralda, with a population of twelve or fifteen
families, be at present considered as a frightful place of abode, this
must be attributed to the want of cultivation, the distance from every
other inhabited country, and the excessive quantity of mosquitos. The
site of the mission is highly picturesque; the surrounding country is
lovely, and of great fertility. I never saw plantains of so large a
size as these: and indigo, sugar, and cacao might be produced in
abundance, if any trouble were taken for their cultivation. The Cerro
Duida is surrounded with fine pasturage; and if the Observantins of
the college of Piritu partook a little of the industry of the
Catalonian Capuchins settled on the banks of the Carony, numerous
herds would be seen wandering between the Cunucunumo and the Padamo.
At present, not a cow or a horse is to be found; and the inhabitants,
victims of their own indolence, are often reduced to eat the flesh of
alouate monkeys, and flour made from the bones of fish, of which I
shall have occasion to speak hereafter. A little cassava and a few
plantains only are cultivated; and when the fishery is not abundant,
the natives of a country so favoured by nature are exposed to the most
cruel privations.

The pilots of the small number of boats that go from the Rio Negro to
Angostura by the Cassiquiare are afraid to ascend as far as Esmeralda,
and therefore that mission would have been much better placed at the
point of the bifurcation of the Orinoco. It is probable that this vast
country will not always be doomed to the desertion in which it has
hitherto been left, owing to the errors of monkish administration and
the spirit of monopoly that characterises corporations. We may even
predict on what points of the Orinoco industry and commerce will
become most active. In every zone, population is concentred at the
mouth of tributary streams. The Rio Apure, by which the productions of
the provinces of Varinas and Merida are exported, will give great
importance to the little town of Cabruta, which will then be in
rivalship with San Fernando de Apure, where all commerce has hitherto
centred. Higher up, a new settlement will be formed at the confluence
of the Meta, which communicates with New Grenada by the Llanos of
Casanare. The two missions of the Cataracts will increase, from the
activity to which the transport of boats at those points will give
rise; for an unhealthy and damp climate, and the swarming of
mosquitos, will as little impede the progress of cultivation at the
Orinoco as at the Rio Magdalena, whenever a powerful mercantile
interest shall call new settlers thither. Habitual evils are those
which are least felt; and men born in America do not suffer the same
intensity of pain as Europeans recently arrived. Perhaps, also, the
destruction of forests round the inhabited places, although slow, will
somewhat tend to diminish the torment of the tipulary insects. San
Fernando de Atabapo, Javita, San Carlos, and Esmeralda, appear (from
their situation at the mouth of the Guaviare, the portage between
Tuamini and the Rio Negro, the confluence of the Cassiquiare, and the
point of bifurcation of the Upper Orinoco) to promise a considerable
increase of population and prosperity. The same improvement will take
place in the fertile but uncultivated countries through which flow the
Guallaga, the Amazon, and the Orinoco; as well as at the isthmus of
Panama, the lake of Nicaragua, and the Rio Huasacualco, which furnish
a communication between the two oceans. The imperfection of political
institutions may for ages have converted into deserts places where the
commerce of the world should be found concentred; but the time
approaches when these obstacles shall exist no longer. A vicious
administration cannot always struggle against the united interest of
men; and civilization will be carried insensibly into those countries,
the great destinies of which nature itself proclaims, by the physical
configuration of the soil, the immense windings of the rivers, and the
proximity of two seas, that bathe the shores of Europe and of India.

Esmeralda is the most celebrated spot on the Orinoco for the
preparation of that active poison, which is employed in war, in the
chase, and, singularly enough, as a remedy for gastric derangements.
The poison of the ticunas of the Amazon, the upas-tieute of Java, and
the curare of Guiana, are the most deleterious substances that are
known. Raleigh, about the end of the sixteenth century, had heard of
urari* as being a vegetable substance with which arrows were envenomed
(* In Tamanac marana, in Maypure macuri.); yet no fixed notions of
this poison had reached Europe. The missionaries Gumilla and Gili had
not been able to penetrate into the country where the curare is
manufactured. Gumilla asserts that this preparation was enveloped in
great mystery; that its principal ingredient was furnished by a
subterranean plant with a tuberous root, which never puts forth
leaves, and which is called specially the root (raiz de si misma);
that the venomous exhalations which arise from the manufacture are
fatal to the lives of the old women who (being otherwise useless) are
chosen to watch over this operation; finally, that these vegetable
juices are never thought to be sufficiently concentrated till a few
drops produce at a distance a repulsive action on the blood. An Indian
wounds himself slightly; and a dart dipped in the liquid curare is
held near the wound. If it make the blood return to the vessels
without having been brought into contact with them, the poison is
judged to be sufficiently concentrated.

When we arrived at Esmeralda, the greater part of the Indians were
returning from an excursion which they had made to the east, beyond
the Rio Padamo, to gather juvias, or the fruit of the bertholletia,
and the liana which yields the curare. Their return was celebrated by
a festival, which is called in the mission la fiesta de las juvias,
and which resembles our harvest-homes and vintage-feasts. The women
had prepared a quantity of fermented liquor; and during two days the
Indians were in a state of intoxication. Among nations who attach
great importance to the fruit of the palm, and of some other trees
useful for the nourishment of man, the period when these fruits are
gathered is marked by public rejoicings, and time is divided according
to these festivals, which succeed one another in a course invariably
regular. We were fortunate enough to find an old Indian more temperate
than the rest, who was employed in preparing the curare poison from
freshly-gathered plants. He was the chemist of the place. We found at
his dwelling large earthen pots for boiling the vegetable juice,
shallower vessels to favour the evaporation by a larger surface, and
leaves of the plantain-tree rolled up in the shape of our filters, and
used to filtrate the liquids, more or less loaded with fibrous matter.
The greatest order and neatness prevailed in this hut, which was
transformed into a chemical laboratory. The old Indian was known
throughout the mission by the name of the poison-master (amo del
curare). He had that self-sufficient air and tone of pedantry of which
the pharmacopolists of Europe were formerly accused. "I know," said
he, "that the whites have the secret of making soap, and manufacturing
that black powder which has the defect of making a noise when used in
killing animals. The curare, which we prepare from father to son, is
superior to anything you can make down yonder (beyond sea). It is the
juice of an herb which kills silently, without any one knowing whence
the stroke comes."

This chemical operation, to which the old man attached so much
importance, appeared to us extremely simple. The liana (bejuco) used
at Esmeralda for the preparation of the poison, bears the same name as
in the forests of Javita. It is the bejuco de Mavacure, which is
gathered in abundance east of the mission, on the left bank of the
Orinoco, beyond the Rio Amaguaca, in the mountainous and rocky tracts
of Guanaya and Yumariquin. Although the bundles of bejuco which we
found in the hut of the Indian were entirely bare of leaves, we had no
doubt of their being produced by the same plant of the strychnos
family (nearly allied to the rouhamon of Aublet) which we had examined
in the forest of Pimichin.* (* I may here insert the description of
the curare or bejuco de Mavacure, taken from a manuscript, yet
unpublished, of my learned fellow-labourer M. Kunth, corresponding
member of the Institute. "Ramuli lignosi, oppositi, ramulo altero
abortivo, teretiusculi, fuscescenti-tomentosi, inter petiolos lineola
pilosa notati, gemmula aut processu filiformi (pedunculo?) terminati.
FOLIA opposita, bereviter petiolata, ovato-oblonga, acuminata,
intergerrima, reticulato-triplinervia, nervo medio subtus prominente,
membranacea, ciliata, utrinque glabra, nervo medio
fuscescente-tomentoso, lacte viridia, subtus pallidiora, 1 1/2 to 2
1/2 pollices longa, 8 to 9 lineas lata. PETIOLI lineam longi,
tomentosi, inarticulati.") The mavacure is employed fresh or dried
indifferently during several weeks. The juice of the liana, when it
has been recently gathered, is not regarded as poisonous; possibly it
is so only when strongly concentrated. It is the bark and a part of
the alburnum which contain this terrible poison. Branches of the
mavacure four or five lines in diameter are scraped with a knife, and
the bark that comes off is bruised, and reduced into very thin
filaments on the stone employed for grinding cassava. The venomous
juice being yellow, the whole fibrous mass takes that colour. It is
thrown into a funnel nine inches high, with an opening four inches
wide. This funnel was of all the instruments of the Indian laboratory
that of which the poison-master seemed to be most proud. He asked us
repeatedly if, por alla (out yonder, meaning in Europe) we had ever
seen anything to be compared to this funnel (embudo). It was a leaf of
the plantain-tree rolled up in the form of a cone, and placed within
another stronger cone made of the leaves of the palm-tree. The whole
of this apparatus was supported by slight frame-work made of the
petioles and ribs of palm-leaves. A cold infusion is first prepared by
pouring water on the fibrous matter which is the ground bark of the
mavacure. A yellowish water filters during several hours, drop by
drop, through the leafy funnel. This filtered water is the poisonous
liquor, but it acquires strength only when concentrated by
evaporation, like molasses, in a large earthen pot. The Indian from
time to time invited us to taste the liquid; its taste, more or less
bitter, decides when the concentration by fire has been carried
sufficiently far. There is no danger in tasting it, the curare being
deleterious only when it comes into immediate contact with the blood.
The vapours, therefore, which are disengaged from the pans are not
hurtful, notwithstanding all that has been asserted on this point by
the missionaries of the Orinoco. Fontana, in his experiments on the
poison of the ticuna of the Amazon, long since proved that the vapours
arising from this poison, when thrown on burning charcoal, may be
inhaled without danger and that the statement of La Condamine, that
Indian women, when condemned to death, have been killed by the vapours
of the poison of the ticuna, is incorrect.

The most concentrated juice of the mavacure is not thick enough to
stick to the darts; and therefore, to give a body to the poison,
another vegetable juice, extremely glutinous, drawn from a tree with
large leaves, called kiracaguero, is poured into the concentrated
infusion. As this tree grows at a great distance from Esmeralda, and
was at that period as destitute of flowers and fruits as the bejuco de
mavacure, we could not determine it botanically. I have several times
mentioned that kind of fatality which withholds the most interesting
plants from the examination of travellers, while thousands of others,
of the chemical properties of which we are ignorant, are found loaded
with flowers and fruits. In travelling rapidly, even within the
tropics, where the flowering of the ligneous plants is of such long
duration, scarcely one-eighth of the trees can be seen furnishing the
essential parts of fructification. The chances of being able to
determine, I do not say the family, but the genus and species, is
consequently as one to eight; and it may be conceived that this
unfavourable chance is felt most powerfully when it deprives us of the
intimate knowledge of objects which afford a higher interest than that
of descriptive botany.

At the instant when the glutinous juice of the kiracaguero-tree is
poured into the venomous liquor well concentrated, and kept in a state
of ebullition, it blackens, and coagulates into a mass of the
consistence of tar, or of a thick syrup. This mass is the curare of
commerce. When we hear the Indians say that the kiracaguero is as
necessary as the bejuco do mavacure in the manufacture of the poison,
we may be led into error by the supposition that the former also
contains some deleterious principle, while it only serves (as the
algarrobo, or any other gummy substance would do) to give more body to
the concentrated juice of the curare. The change of colour which the
mixture undergoes is owing to the decomposition of a hydruret of
carbon; the hydrogen is burned, and the carbon is set free. The curare
is sold in little calabashes; but its preparation being in the hands
of a few families, and the quantity of poison attached to each dart
being extremely small, the best curare, that of Esmeralda and
Mandavaca, is sold at a very high price. This substance, when dried,
resembles opium; but it strongly absorbs moisture when exposed to the
air. Its taste is an agreeable bitter, and M. Bonpland and myself have
often swallowed small portions of it. There is no danger in so doing,
if it be certain that neither lips nor gums bleed. In experiments made
by Mangili on the venom of the viper, one of his assistants swallowed
all the poison that could be extracted from four large vipers of
Italy, without being affected by it. The Indians consider the curare,
taken internally, as an excellent stomachic. The same poison prepared
by the Piraoas and Salives, though it has some celebrity, is not so
much esteemed as that of Esmeralda. The process of this preparation
appears to be everywhere nearly the same; but there is no proof that
the different poisons sold by the same name at the Orinoco and the
Amazon are identical, and derived from the same plants. Orfila,
therefore, in his excellent work On Poisons, has very judiciously
separated the wourali of Dutch Guiana, the curare of the Orinoco, the
ticuna of the Amazon, and all those substances which have been too
vaguely united under the name of American poisons. Possibly at some
future day, one and the same alkaline principle, similar to morphine
and strychnia, will be found in poisonous plants belonging to
different genera.

At the Orinoco the curare de raiz (of the root) is distinguished from
the curare de bejuco (of lianas, or of the bark of branches). We saw
only the latter prepared; the former is weaker, and much less
esteemed. At the river Amazon we learned to distinguish the poisons of
the Ticuna, Yagua, Peva, and Xibaro Indians, which being all obtained
from the same plant, perhaps differ only by a more or less careful
preparation. The Ticuna poison, to which La Condamine has given so
much celebrity in Europe, and which somewhat improperly begins to bear
the name of ticuna, is extracted from a liana which grows in the
island of Mormorote, on the Upper Maranon. This poison is employed
partly by the Ticunas, who remain independent on the Spanish territory
near the sources of the Yacarique; and partly by Indians of the same
tribe, inhabiting the Portuguese mission of Loreto. The poisons we
have just named differ totally from that of La Peca, and from the
poison of Lamas and of Moyobamba. I enter into these details because
the vestiges of plants which we were able to examine, proved to us
(contrary to the common opinion) that the three poisons of the
Ticunas, of La Peca, and of Moyobamba are not obtained from the same
species, probably not even from congeneric plants. In proportion as
the preparation of the curare is simple, that of the poison of
Moyobamba is a long and complicated process. With the juice of the
bejuco de ambihuasca, which is the principal ingredient, are mixed
pimento, tobacco, barbasco (Jacquinia armillaris), sanango (Tabernae
montana), and the milk of some other apocyneae. The fresh juice of the
ambihuasca has a deleterious action when in contact with the blood;
the juice of the mavacure is a mortal poison only when it is
concentrated by fire; and ebullition deprives the juice of the root of
Jatropha manihot (the manioc) of all its baneful qualities. In rubbing
a long time between my fingers the liana which yields the potent
poison of La Peca, when the weather was excessively hot, my hands were
benumbed; and a person who was employed with me felt the same effects
from this rapid absorption by the uninjured integuments.

I shall not here enter into any detail on the physiological properties
of those poisons of the New World which kill with the same promptitude
as the strychneae of Asia,* (* The nux vomica, the upas tieute, and
the bean of St. Ignatius, Strychnos Ignatia.) but without producing
vomiting when they are received into the stomach, and without denoting
the approach of death by the violent excitement of the spinal marrow.
Scarcely a fowl is eaten on the banks of the Orinoco which has not
been killed with a poisoned arrow; and the missionaries allege that
the flesh of animals is never so good as when this method is employed.
Father Zea, who accompanied us, though ill of a tertian fever, every
morning had the live fowls allotted for our food brought to his
hammock together with an arrow, and he killed them himself; for he
would not confide this operation, to which he attached great
importance, to any other person. Large birds, a guan (pava de monte)
for instance, or a curassao (alector), when wounded in the thigh, die
in two or three minutes; but it is often ten or twelve minutes before
life is extinct in a pig or a peccary. M. Bonpland found that the same
poison, bought in different villages, varied much. We had procured at
the river Amazon some real Ticuna poison which was less potent than
any of the varieties of the curare of the Orinoco. Travellers, on
arriving in the missions, frequently testify their apprehension on
learning that the fowls, monkeys, guanas, and even the fish which they
eat, have been killed with poisoned arrows. But these fears are
groundless. Majendie has proved by his ingenious experiments on
transfusion, that the blood of animals on which the bitter strychnos
of India has produced a deleterious effect, has no fatal action on
other animals. A dog received a considerable quantity of poisoned
blood into his veins without any trace of irritation being perceived
in the spinal marrow.

I placed the most active curare in contact with the crural nerves of a
frog, without perceiving any sensible change in measuring the degree
of irritability of the organs, by means of an arc formed of
heterogeneous metals. Galvanic experiments succeeded upon birds, some
minutes after I had killed them with a poisoned arrow. These
observations are not uninteresting, when we recollect that a solution
of the upas-poison poured upon the sciatic nerve, or insinuated into
the texture of the nerve, produces also a sensible effect on the
irritability of the organs by immediate contact with the medullary
substance. The danger of the curare, as of most of the other
strychneae (for we continue to believe that the mavacure belongs to a
neighbouring family), results only from the action of the poison on
the vascular system. At Maypures, a zambo descended from an Indian and
a negro, prepared for M. Bonpland some of those poisoned arrows, that
are shot from blowing-tubes to kill small monkeys or birds. He was a
man of remarkable muscular strength. Having had the imprudence to rub
the curare between his fingers after being slightly wounded, he fell
on the ground seized with a vertigo, that lasted nearly half an hour.
Happily the poison was of that diluted kind which is used for very
small animals, that is, for those which it is believed can be recalled
to life by putting muriate of soda into the wound. During our passage
in returning from Esmeralda to Atures, I myself narrowly escaped an
imminent danger. The curare, having imbibed the humidity of the air,
had become fluid, and was spilt from an imperfectly closed jar upon
our linen. The person who washed the linen had neglected to examine
the inside of a stocking, which was filled with curare; and it was
only on touching this glutinous matter with my hand, that I was warned
not to draw on the poisoned stocking. The danger was so much the
greater, as my feet at that time were bleeding from the wounds made by
chegoes (Pulex penetrans), which had not been well extirpated. This
circumstance may warn travellers of the caution requisite in the
conveyance of poisons.