WARLIKE WOMEN 465 



we learn from Humboldt that the price of a cylinder 

 two inches long was from twelve to fifteen dollars in 

 Spanish Guayana. He obtained a few of them from 

 the dwellers on the Upper Rio Negro. According 

 to Condamine they were once common articles on 

 the site of the modern Santarem. " C'est chez les 

 Topayos qu'on trouve aujourd'hui, plus aisement 

 que partout ailleurs, de ces pierres vertes, connues 

 sous le nom de Pierres des Amazones, dont on 

 ignore 1'origine, et qui ont ete fort recherchees 

 autrefois, a cause des vertus qu'on leur attribuoit de 

 guerir de la Pierre, de la Colique nephretique et de 

 1'Epilepsie" (Voyage, p. 137). Even to this day 

 their origin is doubtful, for it is said that no jade 

 of the same kind as these stones has been found 

 anywhere in South America, although it exists in 

 Mexico. The notable thins: about them is that the 



o 



South American Indians in whose hands they have 

 been seen by Europeans all agreed in asserting them 

 to be obtained from the women without husbands, 

 or, on the Orinoco, from the women living alone 

 ( Aikeambenanos in the Tamanac language, according 

 to F. Gili). 



Velasco cites also a conversation he had with a 

 friar, F. Jose Bahamonte, who had been for forty 

 years a missionary on the Maranon, to the effect 

 that, being in 1757 in the village of Pevas, shortly 

 after the Portuguese garrison of the fort of the Rio 

 Negro had mutinied against their commandant, 

 " those deserters, having left the major nearly dead 

 and pillaged the warehouses and the royal treasury, 

 fled up the Maranon, and reached Pevas a few at a 

 time. Some of them remained in the mission ; 

 others went on to Quito. With one of those parties 



VOL. II 2 H 



