Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/384

 344 ON THE ABORIGINES

get a glimpse of these warlike ladies. The Indians must no doubt have been overwhelmed with questions and suggestions about them, and they, thinking that the white men must know best, would transmit to their descendants and families the idea that such a nation did exist in some distant part of the country. Succeeding travellers, finding traces of this idea among the Indians, would take it as a proof of the existence of the Amazons ; instead of being merely the effect of a mistake at the first, which had been unknowingly spread among them by preceding travellers, seeking to obtain some evidence on the subject.

In my communications and inquiries among the Indians on various matters, I have always found the greatest caution necessary, to prevent one's arriving at wrong conclusions. They are always apt to affirm that which they see you wish to believe, and, when they do not at all comprehend your question, will unhesitatingly answer, " Yes." I have often in this manner obtained, as I thought, information, which persons better acquainted with the facts have assured me was quite erroneous. These observations, however, must only be taken to apply to those almost uncivilised nations who do not under- stand, at all clearly, any language in which you can communi- cate with them. I have always been able to rely on what is obtained from Indians speaking Portuguese readily, and I believe that much trustworthy information can be obtained from them. Such, however, is not the case with the wild tribes, who are totally incapable of understanding any con- nected sentence of the language in which they are addressed ; and I fear the story of the Amazons must be placed with those of the wild man-monkeys, which Humboldt mentions and which tradition I also met with, and of the "curupira," or demon of the woods, and " carbunculo," of the Upper Amazon and Peru ; but of which superstitions we have no such satis- factory elucidation as I think has been now given of the warlike Amazons.

To return to our Uaupes Indians and their toilet. We find their daily costume enlivened with a few other ornaments; a circlet of parrots' tail-feathers is generally worn round the head, and the cylindrical white quartz-stone, already described in my Narrative (p. 191), is invariably carried on the breast, suspended from a necklace of black seeds.