VOYAGE ON THE TAPAJOS. 



315 



limb, and decorate themselves moreover in feathers. Without that, they 

 would consider themselves as indecent as a European would be con- 

 sidered who would put on his coat without his shirt. 



" The women may make themselves bracelets and collars of colored 

 beads, of shells, and of tigers' teeth, but they cannot wear feathers. 



" In time of war the chiefs have right of life and death over simple 

 warriors. The Mundrucus never destroy their prisoners ; on the con- 

 trary, they treat them with humanity, tattoo them, and afterwards re- 

 gard them as their children. 



" This Warlike nation, far from being enfeebled as other tribes are, 

 who, since the conquest of Brazil by the Europeans, are nearly annihi- 

 lated, increases, notwithstanding the long wars they every year undertake 

 against the most ferocious savages. 



" Once friends of the whites, they yielded to them the lands they in- 

 habited on the borders of the Amazon, between the rivers Tapajos and 

 Madeira, and fled to live an independent life, which they have never re- 

 nounced, in the deep solitudes of the Tapajos above the cataracts. 



" I visited the old Mundrucu chief, Joaquim, who rendered himself so 

 terrible to the rebels of Para during the disorders of 1835. He is a 

 decrepit old man, almost paralyzed. He received me very well, and 

 appeared flattered that a traveller from a distant country sought to see 

 him. He told me, in bad Portuguese, ' I am the Tachao, Joaquim. I 

 love the whites, and have never betrayed them. I left my friends, my 

 cacoaes, (cocoa plantations,) and my house on the borders of the Madeira 

 to defend them. How many Cabanos (insurgents) have I not killed 

 when I showed my war canoe that never fled V 



" Now I am old and infirm ; but if I remain in the midst of these 

 women, and do not soon leave for the fields to chase away these brigands 

 of Muras, who lay waste my cacoaes, I will be bewitched and die here 

 like a dog. 



" The Mundrucus do not believe that diseases afflict them. When a 

 prey to them, they say it is a spell some unknown enemy has cast over 

 them; and if the Puge, or Magician of the Malocca, interrogated by 

 the family of the dying man, names a guilty person, he whom he names 

 may count upon his death. 



" I have heard afterwards that when he was fighting so generously 

 with his Mundrucus for the cause of the white man, a Brazilian colonel, 

 who commanded the expedition, ordered him to pull manioc roots in a 

 field supposed to be in the power of the rebels. The chief was furious, 

 and, angrily eyeing the Brazilian, said, ' Dost thou believe my canoe 



