The Indians of the North Western District. 333 
Employers of labour who have tried Warraus say that they are the 
best and most constant workers and require less supervision than others. 
They seldom attempt original thinking with its usual disastrous results, 
for with the tropical labourer one has to be content with mere obedience, 
if it can be got; and if he understands what he is wanted to do, the 
Warrau ean be relied upon to do no more thinking than W. S$. Gilbert’s 
exemplary party politician, 
The origins and early history of the Warrau must be sought else- 
where, for his oldest legends are of high mountains and eaves and rabbits 
all far from the delta. But the fact that he has named the whole swamp 
and part of the hill country near Morawhanna as Wauno (the Crane) 
and Mabaruma (my grater) shows that he has been a visitor at least for 
a considerable period, probably about as long as the Spaniard, as 
Embostero and Tronconal and Sangetal are names evidently given by 
Spanish sloop captains who have been visiting and getting into difficulties 
on the coast for about three centuries. 
The Chaima-Arawak.—The so-called Spanish Arawaks of Santa Rosa 
and the Morucea have migrated in considerable numbers from their 
savannahs and islands since the Indian Reservation was erected there. 
The expulsion of the half-breeds led to their discovery of the great 
North West and the existence of less grandmotherly restrictions on the 
part of the Government and the total absence of his old enemies, the 
Carib and the Akawoi, from the lowlands. The half-breed married the 
Indian and the Powers, like Kipling’s wise sergeant, ‘“ Arst no questions 
but winked the other eye” and their three-quarter breed offspring 
went “back in the aboriginal army again,” and the evil effects of 
misguided zeal were neutralized, for the man on the spot was wiser in his 
generation than the man on the office stool. But the full-blooded 
mothers and brothers and sisters of the half-breed were penned up in the 
Reservation where there was no employer of labour, no purchaser of 
products of the forest or industry, and were left to starve in times of 
searcity. They heard of the district where such times could be tided 
over by employment on grants, where a weekly steamer caused a 
weekly market for hammocks, cassareeps, starch, skins and_ baskets, 
where the sea was of easy access and fish and crabs were to be had in 
due season, of hills and hill farms and springs of fresh water, of employers 
who paid regularly and respected their wives and daughters, of resident 
surgeons and efficient and a centrally-situated hospital ; and so they came 
little by little. At first the men came singly and married Warraus, or 
even the married ones settled with their families amongst Warraus and 
their children grew up speaking neither Arawak nor Spanish but only 
Warrau. 
Still the influx continues and yarious causes amongst which the 
failure in England of the more mismanaged rubber companies led to a 
centralization of the Chaima-Arawak on the Government Experimental 
Rubber Station called by the Department, Isorora, and by the Warraus, 
