Sometimes these natives wear circlets of parrot and other gay feathers
on their heads, as well as armlets and leg ornaments of the same
materials. Some of these tribes have the horrible custom of baking the
bodies of their dead after they have become decomposed, till only a
black carbonaceous mass is left. This is pounded, and mixed with an
intoxicating liquor, called caxiri, in vats made out of hollow trees.
The relatives having been invited, the whole company drink the mixture,
under the belief that the virtues of the deceased will thus be
transmitted to them. Some of them are cannibals, and make war for the
express purpose of procuring human flesh. They smoke dry what they
cannot at once consume, thus preserving it a long time for food. They
have no definite idea of a God; but they dread an evil spirit, whom they
believe delights in afflicting them, and is the cause of death.
Their houses hold a number of families; sometimes a whole tribe. They
are upwards of 120 feet long, 80 feet broad, and 30 feet high. The plan
is a parallelogram, with a semicircle at the further end. A passage
twenty feet wide leads from one end to the other; while, on the sides,
are partitions, like the stalls in an old-fashioned public room of an
inn, each of which is inhabited by a separate family. The chief, or
tushaua, resides at the semicircular end, where he has a private
entrance. The furniture consists of hammocks, with various pots and
cooking utensils made of clay, as well as baskets. Their canoes are
formed out of a single tree, hollowed and forced open by cross-pieces.
Some are forty feet in length. The dead are nearly always buried in the
houses: a large house having sometimes one hundred graves in it.
From the Rio Negro to the Andes there is a large region, inhabited
entirely by savages of whom little is known, except that they are mostly
cannibals, and kill all their first-born children. On the other side of
the Amazon also is a still larger tract of virgin forest, where not a
single civilised man is to be found.