252 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
musician ; ours was excellent and contrived to 
make everything exceedingly comic. 
Another dance was the Assai (the name of 
their favourite palm-wine). After dancing and 
singing for some time in a ring (which must consist 
of an odd number of persons), at certain words in 
the song the ring breaks up, the dancers whirl 
round, and each catches in his arms some one who 
happens to be near him. Thus all are paired save 
one unlucky wight, who is forthwith shoved into the 
middle of the ring and condemned to sundry pains 
and penalties, while the rest dance and sing round 
him. The ladies were very fond of this dance, 
especially the hugging part of it, and I had often 
some difficulty in extricating myself from their 
embrace. 
In the intervals between the dances we had 
coffee, and sometimes a genuine Indian dance in 
which I felt no inclination to join, though they were 
amusing enough to lookers-on. One of them was 
called Jacamim-cunha. Jacamims are birds of the 
crane kind ; there are several species on these 
rivers, and all have the body more or less dark with 
a white rump, the latter produced, as tradition 
says, by the birds rubbing one against the other. 
Cunha is a woman. The performers dance round 
in a ring, and at certain phases of the tune (for all 
sing, and the men have nearly all some instrument 
— a drum, a tambourine, or a gaita) the men turn 
their backs to their partners and a series of bump- 
ings follows — given with such goodwill that one of 
the bumpers (and as often the man as the woman) 
is driven to the far side of the room ! Another 
similar dance was the Tatu or Armadillo. The 
