242 VOYAGE UP THE TAPAJOS. Cuap, IX. 
supposed that the horde which had just been chased from his maloca 
were fugitives from that direction. There were about a hundred of them 
—including men, women, and children. Before they were discovered 
the hungry savages had uprooted all the macasheira, sweet potatoes, and 
sugar-cane, which the industrious Munduructs had planted for the 
season, on the east side of the river. As soon as they were seen they 
made off, but the Tushatia quickly got together all the young men of 
the settlement, about thirty in number, who armed themselves with 
guns, bows and arrows, and javelins, and started in pursuit. They 
tracked them, as before related, for two days through the forest, but lost 
their traces on the further bank of the Cuparitinga, a branch stream 
flowing from the north-east. The pursuers thought, at one time, they 
were close upon them, having found the inextinguished fire of their last 
encampment. The footmarks of the chief could be distinguished from 
the rest by their great size and the length of the stride. A small neck- 
lace made of scarlet beans was the only trophy of the expedition, and 
this the Tushatia gave to me. 
I saw very little of the other male Indians, as they were asleep in 
their huts all the afternoon. There were two other tattooed men lying 
under an open shed, besides the old man already mentioned. One of 
them presented a strange appearance, having a semicircular black patch 
in the middle of his face, covering the bottom of the nose and mouth ; 
crossed lines on his back and breast, and stripes down his arms and legs. 
It is singular that the graceful curved patterns used by the South Sea 
Islanders are quite unknown among the Brazilian red men; they being 
all tattooed either in simple lines or patches. The nearest approach to 
elegance of design which I saw, was amongst the Tuctinas of the Upper 
Amazons, some of whom have a scroll-like mark on each cheek proceed- 
ing from the corner of the mouth. The taste, as far as form is concerned, 
of the American Indian, would seem to be far less refined than that of 
the Tahitian and New Zealander. 
To amuse the Tushata, I fetched from the canoe the two volumes of 
Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature. The engravings quite 
took his fancy, and he called his wives, of whom, as I afterwards learnt 
from Aract, he had three or four, to look at them ; one of them was a 
handsome girl, decorated with necklace and bracelets of blue beads. 
In a short time others left their work, and I then had a crowd of women 
and children around me, who all displayed unusual curiosity for Indians. 
It was no light task to go through the whole of the illustrations, but 
they would not allow me to miss a page, making me turn back when I 
tried to skip. The pictures of the elephant, camels, orang-otangs, and 
tigers, seemed most to astonish them ; but they were interested in almost 
everything, down even to the shells and insects. They recognised the 
portraits of the most striking birds and mammals which are found in 
their own country ; the jaguar, howling monkeys, parrots, trogons, and 
toucans. The elephant was settled to be a large kind of tapir ; but they 
made but few remarks, and those in the Munduruct language, of which 
I understood only two or three words. Their way of expressing 
surprise was a clicking sound made with the teeth, similar to the one 
we ourselves use, or a subdued exclamation, Hm! hm! Before I 
