XXVI 
WARLIKE WOMEN 
465 
we learn from Humboldt that the price of a cylinder 
two inches long was from twelve to fifteen dollars in 
Spanish Guayana. He obtained a few of them from 
the dwellers on the Upper Rio Negro. According 
to Condamine they were once common articles on 
the site of the modern Santarem. ''C'est chez les 
Topayos qu'on trouve aujourd'hui, plus aisement 
que partout ailleurs, de ces pierres vertes, connues 
sous le nom de Pierres des Amazones, dont on 
ignore I'origine, et qui ont ete fort recherchees 
autrefois, a cause des vertus qu'on leur attribuoit de 
guerir de la Pierre, de la Colique nephretique et de 
I'Epilepsie " [Voyage, p. 137). Even to this day 
their origin is doubtful, for it is said that no jade 
of the same kind as these stones has been found 
anywhere in South America, although it exists in 
Mexico. The notable thing about them is that the 
South American Indians in whose hands they have 
been seen by Europeans all agreed in asserting them 
to be obtained from the women without husbands, 
or, on the Orinoco, from the women living alone 
( Aikeambenanos in the Tamanac language, according 
to F. Gili). 
Velasco cites also a conversation he had with a 
friar, F. Jose Bahamonte, who had been for forty 
years a missionary on the Maranon, to the effect 
that, being in 1757 in the village of Pevas, shortly 
after the Portuguese garrison of the fort of the Rio 
Negro had mutinied against their commandant, 
"those deserters, having left the major nearly dead 
and pillaged the warehouses and the royal treasury, 
fled up the Maranon, and reached Pevas a few at a 
time. Some of them remained in the mission ; 
others went on to Quito. With one of those parties 
VOL. II 2 H 
