56 



NOTES ON BRAZ IL 



country where assassination is much too common, appeared to me an 

 excellent custom ; it gave the surrounding multitude an opportunity of 

 ascertaining, whether the deceased came to his end by a natural process, 

 or by violence ; unless poison might have been so administered as to 

 excite no suspicion, or a wound might be concealed under the gaudy 

 array. At all events it renders the concealment of murder more 

 difficult than it otherwise would be. In due time the priests receive 

 the body, perform over it the rites of the church, and deliver it to those 

 who are charged with the ultimate ceremonies. By these men 1 saw 

 a body, the dress and ornaments of which were unusually rich, entirely 

 stripped of them ; and the work was done so coolly as to demonstrate 

 that the men either had a right to do so, or had been long accustomed to 

 do ill. In general, the trappings are only cut or torn from the bier, to 

 which they have been fastened in order to keep the corpse from rolling 

 over; it is then tumbled into the grave, which for white people is 

 always within some sacred building ; a quantity of quick lime and the 

 earth are thrown in, and the whole beaten down with huge wooden 

 stampers. This last circumstance appeared to me more inhuman and 

 shocking than any I had ever witnessed at an interment, and I even 

 thought it not many degrees short of canibalism itself 



The poorer people, or at least the blacks, in these ultimate rites are 

 treated with much less ceremony. Soon after death the body is 

 sewed up in a coarse cloth, and intimation sent to one of the two 

 burial-grounds appropriated to their use that a corpse is to be interred. 

 Two men are then sent to the house, who place the body in a sort of 

 hammock, suspend it upon a pole between them, and carry it through 

 the streets in the same manner as they would walk with any common 

 burden. If, in the line of their rout, another or two should be ready for 

 the same dreary home, these are put into the same hammock with the 

 first, and conveyed, at the same time, to the grave-yard. There a long 

 trench is dug across it, six feet wide, and four or five deep ; the 

 bodies are thrown into it without ceremony of any kind, and laid straight 

 across it in tiers, one above another, so that the head of one lies on the 



