NATURE 



305 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 1S84 



THE INDIANS OF GUIANA 

 Among the Indians of Guiana: being Sketches chiefly 

 Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana. 

 By i.verard F. Im Thurn, M.A. Oxon. (London : 

 Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1883.) 



GENERALLY speaking, the books of travel on which 

 anthropologists have to depend for information as 

 to the less cultured tribes of mankind are descriptions of 

 a country and its exploration, with a chapter or two on 

 the natives. Here the plan is reversed, the main book 

 being a treatise on Caribs and Arawaks, to which is pre- 

 faced a short but lively description of the forests and 

 savannahs of Guiana, with their plants and animals, 

 forming as it were a frame in which to set the human 

 picture. When Mr. Im Thurn first went to Guiana in 

 ;877, he spent much of his two years' stay in wanderings 

 among the Indians, and before the end of 1S81 went back 

 to the colony, where he is now Resident Magistrate of 

 the Pomeroon District. Such appointments are much to 

 be commended, on the one hand as putting the indigenous 

 tribes under the control and protection of an official 

 thoroughly conversant with native character and custom, 

 on the other hand as placing a scientific man in intimate 

 relations with the fast disappearing culture of the lower 

 races. 



The question to what races these native tribes of 

 Guiana belong has occupied Mr. Im Thurn, with results 

 which are not only interesting in themselves but have a 

 bearing on larger problems of anthropology. We too 

 readily take it for granted that the lower barbarians have 

 no history beyond two or three generations of old men's 

 memory. In the present district, however, something far 

 beyond this seems to be made out. The native tribes of 

 Guiana fall into two divisions. One group is made up of 

 the Arawaks, Warraus, and Wapianas ; and these, though 

 unintelligible and hostile to one another, are united by a 

 common feeling of aversion to the Caribs, who, native 

 tradition says, came from the West India Islands. These 

 Caribs, who form the other group of tribes of Guiana, are 

 in appearance, language, and customs similar to those 

 of the West Indies, so that we have here a case of 

 native tradition asserting that certain tribes of a coun- 

 try w^ere invaders from another region, though the 

 Carib immigration thus remembered took place per- 

 haps three to five hundred years ago. The present 

 author is so convinced of the reality of this event that he 

 calls the Caribs in Guiana " stranger " tribes to dis- 

 tinguish them from the "native" tribes. Long ago as 

 the invasion happened, Mr. Im Thurn points out that the 

 industrial arts of the two races have not yet become 

 blended. The Arawaks and other native tribes continue 

 to make their hammocks of palm fibre, not taking to the 

 use of cotton thread for hammock-weaving, although the 

 Caribs brought this art so long ago with them from their 

 islands, and have practised it in Guiana ever since. What 

 is still more curious is that the rude method of making 

 thread by rolling palm or grass fibre into a twist with the 

 palm of the hand on the thigh, may be commonly seen in 

 Guiana, although the use of the spindle for spinning 

 Vol. XXIX.— No. 744 



cotton is also usual. The explanation of this coexistence 

 of a savage and a more civilised art is no doubt that the 

 old native tribes were "thigh-twisters," but the new- 

 stranger tribes were spinners, and the descendants of 

 both have more or less kept up their hereditary methods 

 (pp. 171, 287). 



Among matters bearing on the history of civilisation 

 which struck Mr. Im Thurn was the custom of building 

 houses on piles. This may be seen in its primary form 

 among the Warraus (p. 203) ; although quiet times and 

 security from enemies make it no longer worth their while 

 to build actually out in the waters, they still build many 

 pile-huts in the swamps. These miserable huts have been 

 described as standing on a platform of interlaced stems of 

 the manicole palm, supported on tree trunks five or six 

 feet high, with a notched trunk serving as a ladder, to 

 which, when the waters were high, the canoe was made 

 fast. The motive of building in such a situation is 

 intelligible enough as a means of safety from enemies 

 but next we come to an extension of the practice requiring 

 explanation : — 



" A most remarkable fact is that houses on piles are 

 not unfrequently built, for no apparent reason, on the 

 savannah ; and this is done not by any special tribe, but 

 occasionally by Arecunas, Macusis, and by other Carib 

 tribes. They stand not in swamps but on dry ground, 

 sometimes on top of a hill. Except that they are much 

 larger, they are exactly like the Warrau houses already 

 described ; and it is a noteworthy fact that the platform 

 on which the house stands is, as in the case of the 

 Warrau houses, made of the stems of manicole palms 

 {Euterpe oleracea), though this moisture-loving palm is 

 very locally distributed in the savannah region, and the 

 Indians fetch it from long distances, although other 

 apparently equally suitable material is at hand. It is 

 probable that these savannah pile-builders revert to a 

 form of house which they saw — and perhaps used — on 

 the coast land, when they first reached the mainland from 

 the islands." 



This explanation of pile-houses on land as due to sur- 

 vival of the once purposeful habit of building them in the 

 water is the more interesting from its correspondence 

 with a theory based on similar facts on the other side 

 of the globe. Prof. Moseley, describing New Guinea 

 (" Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger" p. 396) points 

 out that the pile-dwellings must have been first built in 

 the water for protection and afterwards were continued on 

 land. Pushing the argument further, he suggests that the 

 pile-house on dry ground was converted into a two-story 

 dwelling by filling in the spaces between the poles with 

 leaves or mats, so that the lower part might serve as a 

 storehouse or cowhouse. In this way Prof. Moseley 

 accounts for the Swiss peasant's chalet as derived from 

 the watery home of the ancient lake-dweller, the present 

 balcony representing the old platform to which the lake- 

 men climbed up from their canoes. When the present 

 remarks find their way into Mr. Im Thurn's hands, it is 

 to be hoped that he will test this ingenious view by the 

 evidence within his reach. 



Mr. Im Thurn's researches into the religious ideas of 

 the Guiana tribes disclose a remarkable theological con- 

 dition. To so acute a student of the theory of religion it 

 must have been an exciting occupation to live in daily 

 mental contact with Animistic conceptions at once so 

 primitive and so vivid. In any future discussion of 



