Books: Equinoctial Regions of America V2

A >> Alexander von Humboldt >> Equinoctial Regions of America V2

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47

The cascades of Europe, forming only one fall, or several falls close
to each other, can never produce such variety in the shifting
landscape. This variety is peculiar to rapids, to a succession of
small cataracts several miles in length, to rivers that force their
way across rocky dikes and accumulated blocks of granite. We had the
opportunity of viewing this extraordinary sight longer than we wished.
Our boat was to coast the eastern bank of a narrow island, and to take
us in again after a long circuit. We passed an hour and a half in vain
expectation of it. Night approached, and with it a tremendous storm.
It rained with violence. We began to fear that our frail bark had been
wrecked against the rocks, and that the Indians, conformably to their
habitual indifference for the evils of others, had returned tranquilly
to the mission. There were only three of us: we were completely wet,
and uneasy respecting the fate of our boat: it appeared far from
agreeable to pass, without sleep, a long night of the torrid zone amid
the noise of the Raudales. M. Bonpland proposed to leave me in the
island with Don Nicolas Soto, and to swim across the branches of the
river that are separated by the granitic dikes. He hoped to reach the
forest, and seek assistance at Atures from Father Zea. We dissuaded
him with difficulty from undertaking this hazardous enterprise. He
knew little of the labyrinth of small channels, into which the Orinoco
is divided. Most of them have strong whirlpools, and what passed
before our eyes while we were deliberating on our situation, proved
sufficiently that the natives had deceived us respecting the absence
of crocodiles in the cataracts. The little monkeys which we had
carried along with us for months were deposited on the point of our
island. Wet by the rains and sensible of the least lowering of the
temperature, these delicate animals sent forth plaintive cries, and
attracted to the spot two crocodiles, the size and leaden colour of
which denoted their great age. Their unexpected appearance made us
reflect on the danger we had incurred by bathing, at our first passing
by the mission of Atures, in the middle of the Raudal. After long
waiting, the Indians at length arrived at the close of day. The
natural coffer-dam by which they had endeavoured to descend in order
to make the circuit of the island, had become impassable owing to the
shallowness of the water. The pilot sought long for a more accessible
passage in this labyrinth of rocks and islands. Happily our canoe was
not damaged and in less than half an hour our instruments, provision,
and animals, were embarked.

We pursued our course during a part of the night, to pitch our tent
again in the island of Panumana. We recognized with pleasure the spots
where we had botanized when going up the Orinoco. We examined once
more on the beach of Guachaco that small formation of sandstone, which
reposes directly on granite. Its position is the same as that of the
sandstone which Burckhardt observed at the entrance of Nubia,
superimposed on the granite of Syene. We passed, without visiting it,
the new mission of San Borga, where (as we learned with regret a few
days after) the little colony of Guahibos had fled al monte, from the
chimerical fear that we should carry them off; to sell them as poitos,
or slaves. After having passed the rapids of Tabaje, and the Raudal of
Cariven, near the mouth of the great Rio Meta, we arrived without
accident at Carichana. The missionary received us with that kind
hospitality which he extended to us on our first passage. The sky was
unfavourable for astronomical observations; we had obtained some new
ones in the two Great Cataracts; but thence, as far as the mouth of
the Apure, we were obliged to renounce the attempt. M. Bonpland had
the satisfaction at Carichana of dissecting a manatee more than nine
feet long. It was a female, and the flesh appeared to us not
unsavoury. I have spoken in another place of the manner of catching
this herbivorous cetacea. The Piraoas, some families of whom inhabit
the mission of Carichana, detest this animal to such a degree, that
they hid themselves, to avoid being obliged to touch it, whilst it was
being conveyed to our hut. They said that the people of their tribe
die infallibly when they eat of it. This prejudice is the more
singular, as the neighbours of the Piraoas, the Guamos and the
Ottomacs, are very fond of the flesh of the manatee. The flesh of the
crocodile is also an object of horror to some tribes, and of
predilection to others.

The island of Cuba furnishes a fact little known in the history of the
manatee. South of the port of Xagua, several miles from the coast,
there are springs of fresh water in the middle of the sea. They are
supposed to be owing to a hydrostatic pressure existing in
subterraneous channels, communicating with the lofty mountains of
Trinidad. Small vessels sometimes take in water there; and, what is
well worthy of observation, large manatees remain habitually in those
spots. I have already called the attention of naturalists to the
crocodiles which advance from the mouth of rivers far into the sea.
Analogous circumstances may have caused, in the ancient catastrophes
of our planet, that singular mixture of pelagian and fluviatile bones
and petrifactions, which is observed in some rocks of recent
formation.

Our stay at Carichana was very useful in recruiting our strength after
our fatigues. M. Bonpland bore with him the germs of a cruel malady;
he needed repose; but as the delta of the tributary streams included
between the Horeda and Paruasi is covered with a rich vegetation, he
made long herbalizations, and was wet through several times in a day.
We found, fortunately, in the house of the missionary, the most
attentive care; we were supplied with bread made of maize flour, and
even with milk. The cows yield milk plentifully enough in the lower
regions of the torrid zone, wherever good pasturage is found. I call
attention to this fact, because local circumstances have spread
through the Indian Archipelago the prejudice of considering hot
climates as repugnant to the secretion of milk. We may conceive the
indifference of the inhabitants of the New World for a milk diet, the
country having been originally destitute of animals capable of
furnishing it*; (* The reindeer are not domesticated in Greenland as
they are in Lapland; and the Esquimaux care little for their milk. The
bisons taken very young accustom themselves, on the west of the
Alleghenies, to graze with herds of European cows. The females in some
districts of India yield a little milk, but the natives have never
thought of milking them. What is the origin of that fabulous story
related by Gomara (chapter 43 page 36) according to which the first
Spanish navigators saw, on the coast of South Carolina, stags led to
the savannahs by herdsmen? The female bisons, according to Mr.
Buchanan and the philosophical historian of the Indian Archipelago,
Mr. Crawford, yield more milk than common cows.) but how can we avoid
being astonished at this indifference in the immense Chinese
population, living in great part beyond the tropics, and in the same
latitude with the nomad and pastoral tribes of central Asia? If the
Chinese have ever been a pastoral people, how have they lost the
tastes and habits so intimately connected with that state, which
precedes agricultural institutions? These questions are interesting
with respect both to the history of the nations of oriental Asia, and
to the ancient communications that are supposed to have existed
between that part of the world and the north of Mexico.

We went down the Orinoco in two days, from Carichana to the mission of
Uruana, after having again passed the celebrated strait of Baraguan.
We stopped several times to determine the velocity of the river, and
its temperature at the surface, which was 27.4 degrees. The velocity
was found to be two feet in a second (sixty-two toises in 3 minutes 6
seconds) in places where the bed of the Orinoco was more than twelve
thousand feet broad, and from ten to twelve fathoms deep. The slope of
the river is in fact extremely gentle from the Great Cataracts to
Angostura; and, if a barometric measurement were wanting, the
difference of height might be determined by approximation, by
measuring from time to time the velocity of the stream, and the extent
of the section in breadth and depth. We had some observations of the
stars at Uruana. I found the latitude of the mission to be 7 degrees 8
minutes; but the results from different stars left a doubt of more
than 1 minute. The stratum of mosquitos, which hovered over the
ground, was so thick that I could not succeed in rectifying properly
the artificial horizon. I tormented myself in vain; and regretted that
I was not provided with a mercurial horizon. On the 7th of June, good
absolute altitudes of the sun gave me 69 degrees 40 minutes for the
longitude. We had advanced from Esmeralda 1 degree 17 minutes toward
the west, and this chronometric determination merits entire confidence
on account of the double observations, made in going and returning, at
the Great Cataracts, and at the confluence of the Atabapo and of the
Apure.

The situation of the mission of Uruana is extremely picturesque. The
little Indian village stands at the foot of a lofty granitic mountain.
Rocks everywhere appear in the form of pillars above the forest,
rising higher than the tops of the tallest trees. The aspect of the
Orinoco is nowhere more majestic than when viewed from the hut of the
missionary, Fray Ramon Bueno. It is more than two thousand six hundred
toises broad, and it runs without any winding, like a vast canal,
straight toward the east. Two long and narrow islands (Isla de Uruana
and Isla vieja de la Manteca) contribute to give extent to the bed of
the river; the two banks are parallel, and we cannot call it divided
into different branches. The mission is inhabited by the Ottomacs, a
tribe in the rudest state, and presenting one of the most
extraordinary physiological phenomena. They eat earth; that is, they
swallow every day, during several months, very considerable
quantities, to appease hunger, and this practice does not appear to
have any injurious effect on their health. Though we could stay only
one day at Uruana, this short space of time sufficed to make us
acquainted with the preparation of the poya, or balls of earth. I also
found some traces of this vitiated appetite among the Guamos; and
between the confluence of the Meta and the Apure, where everybody
speaks of dirt-eating as of a thing anciently known. I shall here
confine myself to an account of what we ourselves saw or heard from
the missionary, who had been doomed to live for twelve years among the
savage and turbulent tribe of the Ottomacs.

The inhabitants of Uruana belong to those nations of the savannahs
called wandering Indians (Indios andantes) who, more difficult to
civilize than the nations of the forest (Indios del monte), have a
decided aversion to cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively by
hunting and fishing. They are men of very robust constitution; but
ill-looking, savage, vindictive, and passionately fond of fermented
liquors. They are omnivorous animals in the highest degree; and
therefore the other Indians, who consider them as barbarians, have a
common saying, nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will eat
it. While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low,
the Ottomacs subsist on fish and turtles. The former they kill with
surprising dexterity, by shooting them with an arrow when they appear
at the surface of the water. When the rivers swell fishing almost
entirely ceases.* (* In South America, as in Egypt and Nubia, the
swelling of the rivers, which occurs periodically in every part of the
torrid zone, is erroneously attributed to the melting of the snows.)
It is then very difficult to procure fish, which often fails the poor
missionaries, on fast-days as well as flesh-days, though all the young
Indians are under the obligation of fishing for the convent. During
the period of these inundations, which last two or three months, the
Ottomacs swallow a prodigious quantity of earth. We found heaps of
earth-balls in their huts, piled up in pyramids three or four feet
high. These balls were five or six inches in diameter. The earth which
the Ottomacs eat is a very fine and unctuous clay of a yellowish grey
colour; and, when being slightly baked at the fire, the hardened crust
has a tint inclining to red, owing to the oxide of iron which is
mingled with it. We brought away some of this earth, which we took
from the winter-provision of the Indians; and it is a mistake to
suppose that it is steatitic, and that it contains magnesia. Vauquelin
did not discover any traces of that substance in it but he found that
it contained more silex than alumina, and three or four per cent of
lime.

The Ottomacs do not eat every kind of clay indifferently; they choose
the alluvial beds or strata, which contain the most unctuous earth,
and the smoothest to the touch. I inquired of the missionary whether
the moistened clay were made to undergo that peculiar decomposition
which is indicated by a disengagement of carbonic acid and
sulphuretted hydrogen, and which is designated in every language by
the term of putrefaction; but he assured us that the natives neither
cause the clay to rot, nor do they mingle it with flour of maize, oil
of turtle's eggs, or fat of the crocodile. We ourselves examined, both
at the Orinoco and after our return to Paris, the balls of earth which
we brought away with us, and found no trace of the mixture of any
organic substance, whether oily or farinaceous. The savage regards
every thing as nourishing that appeases hunger: when, therefore, you
inquire of an Ottomac on what he subsists during the two months when
the river is at its highest flood he shows you his balls of clayey
earth. This he calls his principal food at the period when he can
seldom procure a lizard, a root of fern, or a dead fish swimming at
the surface of the water. If necessity force the Indians to eat earth
during two months (and from three quarters to five quarters of a pound
in twenty-four hours), he eats it from choice during the rest of the
year. Every day in the season of drought, when fishing is most
abundant, he scrapes his balls of poya, and mingles a little clay with
his other aliment. It is most surprising that the Ottomacs do not
become lean by swallowing such quantities of earth: they are, on the
contrary, extremely robust. The missionary Fray Ramon Bueno asserts
that he never remarked any alteration in the health of the natives at
the period of the great risings of the Orinoco.

The Ottomacs during some months eat daily three-quarters of a pound of
clay slightly hardened by fire, but which they moisten before
swallowing it. It has not been possible to verify hitherto with
precision how much nutritious vegetable or animal matter they take in
a week at the same time; but they attribute the sensation of satiety
which they feel to the clay, and not to the wretched aliments which
they take with it occasionally.

No physiological phenomenon being entirely insulated, it may be
interesting to examine several analogous phenomena, which I have been
able to collect. I observed everywhere within the torrid zone, in a
great number of individuals, children, women, and sometimes even
full-grown men, an inordinate and almost irresistible desire of
swallowing earth; not an alkaline or calcareous earth to neutralize
(as it is said) acid juices, but a fat clay, unctuous, and exhaling a
strong smell. It is often found necessary to tie the children's hands
or to confine them to prevent them eating earth when the rain ceases
to fall. At the village of Banco, on the bank of the river Magdalena,
I saw the Indian women who make pottery continually swallowing great
pieces of clay. These women were not in a state of pregnancy; and they
affirmed that earth is an aliment which they do not find hurtful. In
other American tribes, people soon fall sick, and waste away, when
they yield too much to this mania of eating earth. We found at the
mission of San Borja an Indian child of the Guahiba nation, who was as
thin as a skeleton. The mother informed us that the little girl was
reduced to this lamentable state of atrophy in consequence of a
disordered appetite, she having refused during four months to take
almost any other food than clay. Yet San Borja is only twenty-five
leagues distant from the mission of Uruana, inhabited by that tribe of
the Ottomacs, who, from the effect no doubt of a habit progressively
acquired, swallow the poya without experiencing any pernicious
effects. Father Gumilla asserts that the Ottomacs take as an aperient,
oil, or rather the melted fat of the crocodile, when they feel any
gastric obstructions; but the missionary whom we found among them was
little disposed to confirm this assertion. It may be asked, why the
mania of eating earth is much more rare in the frigid and temperate
than in the torrid zones; and why in Europe it is found only among
women in a state of pregnancy, and sickly children. This difference
between hot and temperate climates arises perhaps only from the inert
state of the functions of the stomach caused by strong cutaneous
perspiration. It has been supposed to be observed that the inordinate
taste for eating earth augments among the African slaves, and becomes
more pernicious when they are restricted to a regimen purely vegetable
and deprived of spirituous liquors.

The negroes on the coast of Guinea delight in eating a yellowish
earth, which they call caouac. The slaves who are taken to America
endeavour to indulge in this habit; but it proves detrimental to their
health. They say that the earth of the West Indies is not so easy of
digestion as that of their country. Thibaut de Chanvalon, in his
Voyage to Martinico, expresses himself very judiciously on this
pathological phenomenon. "Another cause," he says, "of this pain in
the stomach is that several of the negroes, who come from the coast of
Guinea, eat earth; not from a depraved taste, or in consequence of
disease, but from a habit contracted at home in Africa, where they
eat, they say, a particular earth, the taste of which they find
agreeable, without suffering any inconvenience. They seek in our
islands for the earth most similar to this, and prefer a yellowish red
volcanic tufa. It is sold secretly in our public markets; but this is
an abuse which the police ought to correct. The negroes who have this
habit are so fond of caouac, that no chastisement will prevent their
eating it."

In the Indian Archipelago, at the island of Java, Labillardiere saw,
between Surabaya and Samarang, little square and reddish cakes exposed
for sale. These cakes called tanaampo, were cakes of clay, slightly
baked, which the natives eat with relish. The attention of
physiologists, since my return from the Orinoco, having been
powerfully directed to these phenomena of geophagy, M. Leschenault
(one of the naturalists of the expedition to the Antarctic regions
under the command of captain Baudin) has published some curious
details on the tanaampo, or ampo, of the Javanese. "The reddish and
somewhat ferruginous clay," he says "which the inhabitants of Java are
fond of eating occasionally, is spread on a plate of iron, and baked,
after having been rolled into little cylinders in the form of the bark
of cinnamon. In this state it takes the name of ampo, and is sold in
the public markets. This clay has a peculiar taste, which is owing to
the baking: it is very absorbent, and adheres to the tongue, which it
dries. In general it is only the Javanese women who eat the ampo,
either in the time of pregnancy, or in order to grow thin; the absence
of plumpness being there regarded as a kind of beauty. The use of this
earth is fatal to health; the women lose their appetite imperceptibly,
and take only with relish a very small quantity of food; but the
desire of becoming thin, and of preserving a slender shape, induces
them to brave these dangers, and maintains the credit of the ampo."
The savage inhabitants of New Caledonia also, to appease their hunger
in times of scarcity, eat great pieces of a friable Lapis ollaris.
Vauquelin analysed this stone, and found in it, beside magnesia and
silex in equal portions, a small quantity of oxide of copper. M.
Goldberry had seen the negroes in Africa, in the islands of Bunck and
Los Idolos, eat an earth of which he had himself eaten, without being
incommoded by it, and which also was a white and friable steatite.
These examples of earth-eating in the torrid zone appear very strange.
We are struck by the anomaly of finding a taste, which might seem to
belong only to the inhabitants of the most sterile regions, prevailing
among races of rude and indolent men, who live in the finest and most
fertile countries on the globe. We saw at Popayan, and in several
mountainous parts of Peru, lime reduced to a very fine powder, sold in
the public markets to the natives among other articles of food. This
powder, when eaten, is mingled with coca, that is, with the leaves of
the Erythroxylon peruvianum. It is well known that Indian messengers
take no other aliment for whole days than lime and coca: both excite
the secretion of saliva, and of the gastric juice; they take away the
appetite, without affording any nourishment to the body. In other
parts of South America, on the coast of Rio de la Hacha, the Guajiros
swallow lime alone, without adding any vegetable matter to it. They
carry with them a little box filled with lime, as we do snuff-boxes,
and as in Asia people carry a betel-box. This American custom excited
the curiosity of the first Spanish navigators. Lime blackens the
teeth; and in the Indian Archipelago, as among several American
hordes, to blacken the teeth is to beautify them. In the cold regions
of the kingdom of Quito, the natives of Tigua eat habitually from
choice, and without any injurious consequences, a very fine clay,
mixed with quartzose sand. This clay, suspended in water, renders it
milky. We find in their huts large vessels filled with this water,
which serves as a beverage, and which the Indians call agua or leche
de llanka.* (* Water or milk of clay. Llanka is a word of the general
language of the Incas, signifying fine clay.)

When we reflect on these facts, we perceive that the appetite for
clayey, magnesian, and calcareous earth is most common among the
people of the torrid zone; that it is not always a cause of disease;
and that some tribes eat earth from choice, whilst others (as the
Ottomacs in America, and the inhabitants of New Caledonia in the
Pacific) eat it from want and to appease hunger. A great number of
physiological phenomena prove that a temporary cessation of hunger may
be produced though the substances that are submitted to the organs of
digestion may not be, properly speaking, nutritive. The earth of the
Ottomacs, composed of alumine and silex, furnishes probably nothing,
or almost nothing, to the composition of the organs of man. These
organs contain lime and magnesia in the bones, in the lymph of the
thoracic duct, in the colouring matter of the blood, and in white
hairs; they afford very small quantities of silex in black hair; and,
according to Vauquelin, but a few atoms of alumine in the bones,
though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those
vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment. It is not the
same with man as with animated beings placed lower in the scale of
organization. In the former, assimilation is exerted only on those
substances that enter essentially into the composition of the bones,
the muscles, and the medullary matter of the nerves and the brain.
Plants, on the contrary, draw from the soil the salts that are found
accidentally mixed in it; and their fibrous texture varies according
to the nature of the earths that predominate in the spots which they
inhabit. An object well worthy of research, and which has long fixed
my attention, is the small number of simple substances (earthy and
metallic) that enter into the composition of animated beings, and
which alone appear fitted to maintain what we may call the chemical
movement of vitality.

We must not confound the sensations of hunger with that vague feeling
of debility which is produced by want of nutrition, and by other
pathologic causes. The sensation of hunger ceases long before
digestion takes place, or the chyme is converted into chyle. It ceases
either by a nervous and tonic impression exerted by the aliments on
the coats of the stomach; or, because the digestive apparatus is
filled with substances that excite the mucous membranes to an abundant
secretion of the gastric juice. To this tonic impression on the nerves
of the stomach the prompt and salutary effects of what are called
nutritive medicaments may be attributed, such as chocolate, and every
substance that gently stimulates and nourishes at the same time. It is
the absence of a nervous stimulant that renders the solitary use of a
nutritive substance (as starch, gum, or sugar) less favourable to
assimilation, and to the reparation of the losses which the human body
undergoes. Opium, which is not nutritive, is employed with success in
Asia, in times of great scarcity; it acts as a tonic. But when the
matter which fills the stomach can be regarded neither as an aliment,
that is, as proper to be assimilated, nor as a tonic stimulating the
nerves, the cessation of hunger is probably owing only to the
secretion of the gastric juice. We here touch upon a problem of
physiology which has not been sufficiently investigated. Hunger is
appeased, the painful feeling of inanition ceases, when the stomach is
filled. It is said that this viscus stands in need of ballast; and
every language furnishes figurative expressions which convey the idea
that a mechanical distension of the stomach causes an agreeable
sensation. Recent works of physiology still speak of the painful
contraction which the stomach experiences during hunger, the friction
of its sides against one another, and the action of the gastric juice
on the texture of the digestive apparatus. The observations of Bichat,
and more particularly the fine experiments of Majendie, are in
contradiction to these superannuated hypotheses. After twenty-four,
forty-eight, or even sixty hours of abstinence, no contraction of the
stomach is observed; it is only on the fourth or fifth day that this
organ appears to change in a small degree its dimensions. The quantity
of the gastric juice diminishes with the duration of abstinence. It is
probable that this juice, far from accumulating, is digested as an
alimentary substance. If a cat or dog be made to swallow a substance
which is not susceptible of being digested, a pebble for instance, a
mucous and acid liquid is formed abundantly in the cavity of the
stomach, somewhat resembling in its composition the gastric juice of
the human body. It appears to me very probable, that when the want of
aliments compels the Ottomacs and the inhabitants of New Caledonia to
swallow clay and steatite during a part of the year, these earths
occasion a powerful secretion of the gastric and pancreatic juices in
the digestive apparatus of these people. The observations which I made
on the banks of the Orinoco, have been recently confirmed by the
direct experiments of two distinguished young physiologists, MM.
Cloquet and Breschet. After long fasting they ate as much as five
ounces of a silvery green and very flexible laminar talc. Their hunger
was completely satisfied, and they felt no inconvenience from a kind
of food to which their organs were unaccustomed. It is known that
great use is still made in the East of the bolar and sigillated earths
of Lemnos, which are clay mingled with oxide of iron. In Germany the
workmen employed in the quarries of sandstone worked at the mountain
of Kiffhauser spread a very fine clay upon their bread, instead of
butter, which they call steinbutter* (stone-butter). (* This
steinbutter must not be confounded with the mountain butter
(bergbutter) which is a saline substance, produced by a decomposition
of aluminous schists.)