roTH] WEAPONS: HUNTING AND FIGHTING 169 
were accustomed to encourage their children in the art by making 
them shoot for any food they wanted (G, m, 89). Bernau makes 
the following statement about the Essequibo Indians: ... They 
practice patiently until they attain some degree of dexterity. <A flat 
piece of wood, or of the bark of a tree, is placed on the sand; they 
measure a certain distance, say 40 yards, and try again and again 
till they have found the proper angle of elevation; and hav- 
ing once hit the mark they seldom miss it afterwards. They then 
change the distance to more or less, till at last they become quite 
expert in the game (BE, 169). Certain it is that some of their 
games (sec. 609) also encouraged proficiency. I do not know of 
any scientific tests that have been made of their accuracy of marks- 
manship, but the following are certainly examples worth recording: 
Standing in a corial in motion, an Indian could shoot an arrow into 
a woodpecker’s nest (WER, v1, sec. 277). Even when the river 
current often carried Schomburgk and his crew with the greatest 
swiftness, his Caribs seldom missed their aim with bow and arrow 
at the iguanas feeding upon the trees (ScG, 273). The swiftest 
bird in its flight, provided it has the magnitude of a crow, seldom 
escapes them (St, 1, 401). The Indian stood up in the canoe with 
his bow ready bent, and as we drifted past the place, says Waterton, 
he sent his arrow into the cayman’s eye and killed it (W, 215). 
The Amazon Indian can shoot an arrow into the air so as to fall 
vertically onto, and thus pierce, the hard carapace of the turtle 
(ARW, 324); and there are records of the practice in the Guiana 
folklore (WER, vr). [Note: I have often watched the North Queens- 
land native shooting turtle in this manner.] In the times of the 
conquest Ojeda, at the Gulf of Darien, says that the savages could 
transfix a man with their arrows even when covered with armor 
(WI, 652). 
147. Gumilla many times mentions spears (lanzas) from the 
Orinoco, but unfortunately without detailed description; e. g., they 
trim and polish sticks as strong as steel in order to make spears of 
them (G, 11, 89); wooden spears so hard that they can rival with 
the sharpest bayonet points (G, 1, 98) ; young men armed with bow, 
arrow, and spear (G, 1, 253). But more than a century previously 
Harcourt had recorded spears as “ long staves sharpened at the point 
and with fire hardened” (HR, 373). The Carib Islanders had 
azagayes (assegais), a kind of small sharpened lance, made of the 
wood of the latanier palm, which they darted with the hand at their 
enemies (RO, 81). 
C. D. Dance in his“ Recollections of Four years in Venezuela” 
(London, 1876, p. 154) gives an interesting reference to this weapon 
at the time of the revolution, the heterogeneous cavalry with its 
60160°—24——_12 
