RoTH] TRADE AND BARTER 635 
are certain friendly villages where these roving traders are sure of 
getting cassava bread on their long journeys. Their expeditions 
sometimes occupy months, sometimes years (BrA, 198). They have 
been called, from their roving propensities, the peddlers and news 
carriers of the northeast coast; and are in constant communication 
with the inhabitants of Venezuela and the Brazils as well as with 
the colonists of Demerara, Surinam, and Cayenne (Br, 143). Of 
course, it is somewhat difficult now to estimate how far these lengthy 
expeditions were limited by the huckstering or by the fighting which 
usually accompanied them. Certain it is in some cases that the 
organized system of traffic has opened up new trade routes in the 
strict sense of the word. Thus, near Waru, at the head of the 
Quitaro River, there is a path which leads to the Taruma Indian 
country on the upper Essequibo which was made by those Indians 
who used to come from these parts to barter with the Wapishana. 
824. Each tribe had its own home products, whether manufactured 
or in the rough—in the latter case anything from dogs to timbers— 
and, in a sense, each had a reputation for the articles it was especially 
accustomed to barter. For example: The Otomac women were noted 
for their clay pots (G, 1, 170); the Arekuna for their cotton and 
blowpipe; the Makusi for their curare poison; the Maiongkong (SR, 
1, 402) and Taruma (BB, 248) for both cassava graters and hunt- 
ing dogs; the Warrau for their corials; the Waiwai for their fiber 
(Cou, 1, 379) of tucum and kuraua; the Guinau for their hammocks, 
cassava graters, aprons, girdles of human hair, and feather decora- 
tions (ScO, 453) ; the Oyapock River natives for their “spleene and 
mateate ” stones (LC, 313). Nothing came amiss, a market being 
always forthcoming sooner or later for everything—even for dried 
turtle with its preserved eggs and extracted oil (FD, 53) ; slaves, dried 
fish, hammocks, and green stones (PBA, 75), smoked and salted fish 
(HiC, 239), sandstone for sharpening knives (SR, 1, 210), even bark 
shirts (SR, 1, 402). In spite of the statement made (IT, 271) of the 
Akawai alone having no special products interchangeable, there is 
evidence of their bartering the kishee-kishee bird (Br, 181), which 
seems to have commanded a high price, a sort of arrow-root (BB, 
19), and the roots of the hai-ari (Lonchocarpus) for fish poisoning 
(BA, 106), articles which do not appear in the commercial stock lists 
recorded of the other nations. As a matter of fact, the hai-ari root 
continued to be bartered by them to the coast tribes for quite a 
century later (Br, 143). 
825. Curare constituted a very important article of trade through- 
out the western Guianas. Gumilla mentions how the Caberre, the 
only nation on the Orinoco who, he says, manufactured it, derived 
a rich income from all the others who bought it from them either 
