TRADITION OF THE AMAZONS. 



Amazon and the Orinoco from the Mexican table-land ; 

 although history records no fact that connects the savage 

 nations of Guiana with the civilized nations of Anahuac, the 

 monk Bernard de Sahagun, at the beginning of the conquest, 

 found preserved as relics at Cholula, certain green stonea 

 which had belonged to Quetzalcohuatl. This mysterious per- 

 sonage is the Mexican Buddha ; he appeared in the time or the 

 Toltecs, founded the first religious associations, and estab- 

 lished a government similar to that of Meroe and of Japan. 



The history of the jade, or the green stones of Gruiana, ia 

 intimately connected with that of the warlike women whom 

 the travellers of the sixteenth century named the Amazons 

 of the New World. La Condamine has produced many 

 testimonies in favour of this tradition. Since my return 

 from the Orinoco and the river Amazon, I have often been 

 asked, at Paris, whether I embraced the opinion of that 

 learned man, or beb'eved, like several of his contemporaries, 

 that he undertook the defence of the Cougncmtainsecouima, 

 (the independent women who received men into their society 

 only in the month of April), merely to fix, in a public 

 sitting of the Academy, the attention of an audience some- 

 what eager for novelties. I may take this opportunity of 

 expressing my opinion on a tradition which has so romantic 

 an appearance ; and I am farther led to do this as La Conda- 

 mine asserts that the Amazons of the Kio Cayame* crossed 



* Orellana, arriving at the Marafion by the Rio Coca and the Napo, 

 fought with the Amazons, as it appears, between the mouth of the Rio 

 Negro and that of the Xingu. La Condamine asserts, that in the 

 seventeenth century they passed the Maraflon between Tefe and the 

 mouth of the Rio Puruz, near the Caflo Cuchivara, which is a western 

 branch of the Puruz. These women therefore came from the banks of 

 the Rio Cayame, or Cayambe, consequently from the unknown country 

 which extends south of the Maraflon, between the Ucayale and the 

 Madeira. Raleigh also places them on the south of the Marafion, but in 

 the province of Topayos, and on the river of the same name. He says 

 they were " rich in golden vessels, which they had acquired in exchange 

 for the famous green stones, or piedras hijadas." (Raleigh means, no 

 doubt, piedras del higado, stones that cure diseases of the liver.) It is 

 remarkable enough, that, one hundred and forty-eight years after, La 

 Condamine still found those green stones (divine stones}, which differ 

 neither in colour nor in hardness from oriental jade, in greater numbers 

 among the Indians who live near the mouth of the Rio Topayos, than 

 elsewhere. The Indians said that they inherited these stones, which curt 



