MURA INDIANS 



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They brought their empty bottles with them and pro- 

 mised fish and turtle, if we would only trust them first 

 with the coveted aguardente, or cau-im, as they called 

 it. Penna was inexorable : he ordered the crew to weigh 

 anchor, and the disappointed savages remained hooting 

 after us with all their might from the top of the bank as- 

 we glided away. 



The Muras have a bad reputation all over this part 

 of the Amazons, the semi-civilized Indians being quite 

 as severe upon them as the white settlers. Every one 

 spoke of them as lazy, thievish, untrustworthy, and cruel. 

 They have a greater repugnance than any other class of 

 Indians to settled habits, regular labour, and the service 

 of the whites ; their distaste, in fact, to any approxima- 

 tion towards civilized life is invincible. Yet most of these 

 faults are only an exaggeration of the fundamental de- 

 fects of character in the Brazilian red man. There is 

 nothing, I think, to show that the Muras had a different 

 origin from the nobler agricultural tribes belonging to 

 the Tupi nation, to some of whom they are close neigh- 

 bours, although the very striking contrast in their char- 

 acters and habits would suggest the conclusion that they 

 had, in the same way as the Semangs of Malacca, for 

 instance, with regard to the Malays. They are merely 

 an offshoot from them, a number of segregated hordes 

 becoming degraded by a residence most likely of very 

 many centuries in Ygapo lands, confined to a fish diet, 

 and obliged to wander constantly in search of food. 

 Those tribes which are supposed to be more nearly re- 

 lated to the Tupis are distinguished by their settled 

 agricultural habits, their living in well-constructed houses, 

 their practice of many arts, such as the manufacture of 

 painted earthenware, weaving, and their general custom 

 of tattooing, social organization, obedience to chiefs, and 

 so forth. The Muras have become a nation of nomad 

 fishermen, ignorant of agriculture and all other arts prac- 

 tised by their neighbours. They do not build substantial 

 and fixed dwellings, but live in separate families or small 

 hordes, wandering from place to place along the margins 

 of those rivers and lakes which most abound in fish and 

 turtle. At each resting-place they construct temporary 

 huts at the edge of the stream, shifting them higher or 

 lower on the banks, as the waters advance or recede. 

 Their canoes originally were made simply of the thick 



