184 ARTS AND CRAFTS OF GUIANA INDIANS [BTH, ANN. 38 
169. The manati, lamentin, sea cow, river cow, or pege buey (fish 
cow), etc., can be caught either with harpoon, fish arrow, or net. 
The Amazon harpoon thus employed was made of shell (AC, 61). 
Gumilla gives the following very graphic account of a manati hunt 
on the Orinoco. The wife paddles, while her husband stands at the 
bow watching for the animal to come to the surface to breathe. 
Paddling quietly along, directly the creature appears, the man will 
strike it with a double-barbed harpoon held by a rope (made of 
manati leather), the distal end of which is tied to the front of the 
craft. As the manati feels himself wounded, he darts off lke lght- 
ning, for a league or more, dragging behind him the canoe wherein 
the man and woman are supporting themselves at considerable risk. 
Directly the manati stops, the Indian pulls on the rope little by 
little, until the victim, recognizing the canoe, starts away a second 
time. The.rope is again pulled at, and so for a third time, when 
the animal invariably rises to the surface exhausted. They then 
haul him close to the canoe, open his belly, and so he dies. Now, 
although the river may be a league wide, and with nothing to afford 
them foothold, these two people, by themselves alone, will succeed 
in getting the creature, weighing between 600 and 700 pounds, into 
their boat as follows: They both jump into the water, and holding 
onto the sides of the canoe, tilt it over so as to get it almost full of 
water. They then easily push the vessel under the creature, and 
by means of a bailer (vasija) called tuttima (a calabash) which, 
for the occasion, is carried on the head like a cap, they start bailing 
out the water. As the water empties, so the canoe gradually rises 
with its load, which leaves just enough room to navigate it with. 
The Indian now climbs in and sits on the creature’s head, while his 
wife takes up her position on the tail, and thus they steer the vessel 
to port, where their relatives and others are waiting for them, and 
among whom it is shared with great liberality (G, 1, 285-287). The 
means adopted for getting the huge creature into the corial, by sink- 
ing the vessel beneath it and then bailing it out, is also recorded by 
Wallace on the Rio Negro (A RW, 319-320). The Corentyn Arawak 
used the sarapa or three-prong fish arrow to shoot the manati. .. . 
They generally go by moonlight, or very early in the morning, when 
the animal comes to graze on the foliage of the riverside, pad- 
dling their canoes quietly until they get within reach, and then 
letting fly their arrows. The animal immediately dives beneath 
the water, but soon appears again on the surface.... The 
hunter then discharges another arrow, and blows upon a shell 
having a small hole cut in it. The sound is reechoed by the woods, 
and alarms the animal so much that it again dashes off, followed 
by the canoe. The Indian can see the direction which it takes by 
