308 
The Last of the Amaripas. 
741. The uews of the arrival of Parauaghieris was quickly spread, 
uud already ou the day after our arrival a number of Indians from other 
settlements had gathered round us. Amongst them, bringing his two 
daugliters, eame a second Negro who had also escaped slavery by flight 
and had been received by the Wapisianas: an extraordinary variation 
from the hatred against the Negro which is otherwise met with amongst 
all remaining Indian tribes. Our visitor was a highly intelligent and 
able man who, in spite of his many years' intercourse with the Indians, 
still spoke Portuguese quite fluently, and at the same time proved to be 
an old aequaiutance of my brother, whom he had visited at Pirara in 
company wilh Iiis elder daughter, then a robust young maiden, but now 
a sickly witheied woman. On asking her father the cause of the 
change my brother was told that it was owing to the revenge of a Macusi. 
His daughter, at the time of that particular visit to Pirara, possessed 
an expensive bead ornament which aroused the envy and desires of the 
Macusi. A^-ho had l)eggt'd lier to give him the necklace or to exchange it 
for something (dsc : the girl i-efused liotli proposals but soon began to 
feel that he had bitterly retaliated by giving her a slow-acting poison. 
Since that tinu' she liad fallen away more and more, and her sickness 
was daily getting Avorse. Tlie Wapisianas consider the Macusis to be 
the most daugerons ])oison-componnders and kanaimas: every sickness, 
every feeling of indisposition is ascribed to their villainy. Besides the 
Negro and his daughter, another Avho especially attracted our attention 
among the Indians flocking around was an aged woman, ''the last of her 
face." a striking ])icture of human fi-ailty and decay. Miaha greeted 
none of her tribesmen of a morning, related no heroic deeds about their 
parents to her listening grandchildren, because father and child had 
already preceded her into the grave : deer had grazed for long over the 
sepulchral mounds of the Amaripas. while the trembling voice and 
tottering steps of Miaha betrayed that one would soon have to say of this 
once mighty tribe. "Past and gone." 
742. Considering the distance from the coast where this tribe lived, 
and the infrequency Avith which it came into contact with Europeans, 
its extinction must appear all tlie more extraordiiiaiw and one might 
almost assume that all these people as a race, are ordained by Providence 
only to live upon the earth for a limited period. The limit of their time 
would seem to be within rapid reach both in the Northern and Southern 
continents of this vast portion of the world, for in a few hundred years 
the white man and the Negro, who will find in it a new Fatherland, will 
occupy it alone and uncontested. That fearful plague smallpox will 
curtail the period a good deal more^ 
743. Miaha seemed to be about 60 years of age. Neither the grief 
over her tribesmen who had gone before, nor the succession of years that 
had ])assed over her had been able to bleach her long haii- : with the same 
fulness as in her youth it still covered the now more gaunt nape and 
fleshless shoulders while it lent a peculiar expression to the hoary and 
venerable face with its markedly curved aquiline nose. The Amaripas 
were a fellow tribe of tin' Wapisianas and Atorais which the whole shape 
of face and skull, like that of the .Jewish type, plainly indicated: they 
