Primitive Games. 293 



The absence of drinking may, perhaps, be explained 

 in this way. The usual fermented liquor used in the 

 Indian games of Guiana is either paiwarie or casiri, both 

 of which are the ordinary everyday drink, one might 

 almost say meat and drink, of all the Indians of Guiana 

 except the Warraus. The latter — of course I speak of 

 them now in their natural state, in which they are now 

 only found, in British Guiana, near the mouths of the 

 Barima and Amakooroo rivers — have never risen to the 

 level, if I may so speak, of a good drink ; they live, appar- 

 ently, curiously uncomfortable lives, hidden away be- 

 tween the mud and the gloom, in dense aeta palm swamps 

 at the edge of the sea. The ground there is nowhere 

 dry enough for the growth of cassava ; agriculture, even 

 in the simple form practised by the other tribes, is un- 

 attempted and is indeed impossible ; and consequently 

 the great food-supply which the other tribes use, in the 

 form of cassava bread and paiwarie, is unattainable and 

 unused by the Warraus. They seem indeed, in their 

 purely natural state, which is perhaps no longer exhibited 

 anywhere, unless on some of the more remote and intri- 

 cate windings of the mouths of the Orinoco, to have 

 been in little more enviable a state than the Digger 

 Indians of California or the Fuegians, generally accounted 

 the most miserable of human beings. Even game is very 

 scarce in the sea adjacent swamps where live the Warraus, 

 who use instead fish and crabs. But one food supply 

 they have, of a marvellously all-sufficient, if unsatisfac- 

 tory, character, the a_'ta palm (Mauritia flexnosa) ; 

 and on this, if we except the fish and crabs, they 

 live exclusively. The pith of the aeta palm and the 

 pulp round the fruits of the same tree serve them as 



