Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v1.djvu/215

 over, always a market in Pará, twenty miles distant, for their surplus produce, and a ready communication with it by water.

Their poverty seemed to be owing chiefly to two causes. The first is, the prevalence amongst them of a kind of communistic mode of regarding property. The Indian and mameluco country people have a fixed notion that their neighbours have no right to be better off than themselves. If any of them have no food, canoe, or weapons, they beg or borrow without scruple of those who are better provided, and it is the custom not to refuse the gift or the loan. There is no inducement, therefore, for one family to strive or attempt to raise itself above the others. There is always a number of lazy people who prefer to live at the cost of their too good-natured neighbours. The other cause is, the entire dependence of the settlers on the precarious yields of hunting and fishing for their supply of animal food; which is here, as already mentioned, as indispensable an article of diet as in cold climates. The young and strong who are able and willing to hunt and fish, are few. Raimundo, like all other hard-working men in these parts, had to neglect his regular labour every four or five days, and devote a day and a night to hunting or fishing. It does not seem to occur to these people, that they could secure a constant supply of meat by keeping cattle, sheep, or hogs, and feeding them with the produce of their plantations. This touches, however, on a fundamental defect of character which has been inherited from their Indian ancestors. The Brazilian aborigines had no notion of domesticating animals for use; and such is the inflexibility