MENTAL TRAITS OF INDIANS 343 



a thick steel thimble and a stock of needles and thread of 

 his own. Vicente made for me a set of blue-check cotton 

 shirts during the passage. 



The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others 

 amongst whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the 

 absence of active bad qualities, than in the possession of 

 good ones ; in other words, it was negative rather than 

 positive. Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament ; 

 coldness of desire and deadness of feeling ; want of 

 curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian 

 Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere. Their 

 imagination is of a dull, gloomy quality, and they seem 

 never to be stirred by the emotions : — love, pity, ad- 

 miration, fear, wonder, joy, enthusiasm. These are 

 characteristics of the whole race. The good fellowship 

 of our Cucamas seemed to arise, not from warm sympathy, 

 but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small 

 matters. On the morning when the favourable wind 

 sprung up, one of the crew, a lad of about seventeen years 

 of age, was absent ashore at the time of starting, having 

 gone alone in one of the montarias to gather wild fruit. 

 The sails were spread and we travelled for several hours 

 at great speed, leaving the poor fellow to paddle after us 

 against the strong current. Vicente, who might have 

 waited a few minutes at starting, and the others, only 

 laughed when the hardship of their companion was al- 

 luded to. He overtook us at night, having worked his 

 way with frightful labour the whole day without a morsel 

 of food. He grinned when he came on board, and not a 

 dozen words were said on either side. 



Their want of curiosity is extreme. One day we had 

 an unusually sharp thunder-storm. The crew were lying 

 about the deck, and after each explosion all set up a loud 

 laugh ; the wag of the party exclaiming * There's my old 

 uncle hunting again ! an expression showing the utter 

 emptiness of mind of the spokesman. I asked Vicente 

 what he thought was the cause of lightning and thunder ? 

 He said * Timaa ichoqua ' (* I don't know '). He had 

 never given the subject a moment's thought ! It was the 

 same with other things. I asked him who made the sun, 

 the stars, the trees ? He didn't know, and had never 

 heard the subject mentioned amongst his tribe. The Tupi 

 language, at least as taught by the old Jesuits, has a 

 word, Tupana, signifying God. Vicente sometimes used 



