Cuapter VII 
METAL WORK, LEATHER, AND BARK 
Gold (85); silver (86); leather (87); bark (88). 
85. Gold was worked on the islands as well as on the Guiana main- 
land; silver was worked in the latter, but only to a comparatively 
small degree. It appears to me, writes Chanca in his narrative of the 
second voyage of Columbus, that these people [Santo Domingo] put 
more value upon copper than gold. They beat the gold they find into 
very thin plates in order to make masks of it, and then set it in a 
cement which they prepare for that purpose. Other ornaments they 
also make of the gold, which they wear on the head and hanging from 
their ears and nostrils; and for this object it is equally required that 
the gold should be in the shape of a thin plate. But it is not the cost- 
liness of the gold that they value in their ornaments; it is its showy 
appearance (DAC, 450-451). The apparent preference by Island 
Carib of copper for gold, especially in the form of caracolis, is con- 
firmed by not a few authors (sec. 751). Such copper ornaments were 
obtained from the Spaniards, the price for one of them being a negro 
(PBR, 247), as well as from among the booty annually plundered 
from the Arawak (RO, 446). So, on the mainland, thin plates of 
gold in the shape of half moons or crescents were worn hanging from 
the ears (sec. 506) and nostrils (sec. 505), and larger ones on the chest 
(sec. 537). Gumilla speaks of Carib in the neighborhood of the 
Orinoco wearing half-moon shaped plates of gold as decorations, 
etc.; and Alex. von Humboldt says that up to 1760 the independent 
Carib had gone to the Pakaraima Ranges (Cerro de Pacaraymo) to 
collect gold dust in their drinking cups and sell it to the Dutch on 
the Essequibo. The Carib of the Essequibo, Caroni, and Cuyuni 
know how to wash it (SR, ur, 432). The natives of the Orinoco had a 
name in their languages for gold—carucuru in Carib, caricuri in 
Tamanac, cavitta in Maypure (AVH, u, 382). In British Guiana we 
find the Arekuna and Makusi using the term caricuru, also caructri 
(App, u, 597). On the islands, the word is recognized again as 
caracoli (sec. 751). The following excerpt is taken from the “Table 
of Rivers, etc., of Guiana, Hakluyt’s Voyages, vol. 3’: “This river 
[the Corentyn], as also most of the others, is not navigable above 
six days’ journey by reason of rocks.... Some images of 
gold, spleen stones, and others, may be gotten on this coast, but 
they do somewhat extraordinarily esteem them, because every- 
where they are current money. They get their moons and other 
pieces of gold by exchange, taking for each one of their greater 
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