Men gave up with regret, and not so long ago, and not until they had
ransacked all the horizons of geography, the belief that somewhere in
the world there is a state of warrior women. They are reluctant to
admit, nor have they quite admitted, that there never was such a state;
and still they ransack the horizons of history and folk-lore for proof
that at one time Amazons were.
Myth has mapped the woman’s commonwealth in western Africa, in Armenia
on the Black Sea, in the Caucasus, in Russia along the lower Don, in
islands of the Baltic, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, and upon
the River of the Amazons. There is report of it in Greek, Turanian,
Arab, Negro, and American legend. It figures in the poetry of Arctinus,
the history of Herodotus, the mendacities of Maundeville, the narrative
of Marco Milioni, the visions of Columbus, the journal of Orellana and
the Guiana prospectus of Raleigh.
Unlike other ancient tales, the Amazon story, instead of slowly fading,
has grown in definiteness of outline as it approached to-day. The men
who discarded utterly the belief that there is a woman state lived not
long after the men who thought the state had at last been found.
The Amazons--so runs tradition everywhere substantially the same--were
a tribe of women ruled by a queen and subsisting by the chase and by
wars of pillage. They fought both on foot and on horseback, using the
bow, the spear, the javelin, and the double-headed ax. Their garb
consisted of a short tunic clearing the knee and fastened over the left
shoulder, leaving the right breast bare. Their outlines were powerful
and beautiful. There was a dispute, never composed, between art and
etymology, as to their bosoms. The word Amazon, though of barbarian
origin, was thought to derive from _alpha_, privative, and _mazos_,
the Greek for breast. On this derivation the grammarians built up
the legend that the right breast of the women militant was either
amputated, or seared, or compressed in youth, so as not to interfere
with the recoil of the bow string. But the sculptors would not accept
this deformation, and statues and bas-reliefs represent the women
with bosoms entirely womanly. There are recent etymologies wherein
“Amazon” is supposed to mean “full busted,” “moon daughter,” “vestal,”
“girdle-bearer,” or “game-eater.”
One feature of the myth shows the working of inference. The woman
state must sustain its numbers. There must be children even if there
were no men, or the tribe would become extinct. In place of husbands,
therefore, there were what Sir Walter Raleigh called “Valentines.” Once
a year the women paid a visit to the men of neighbor tribes, or once
a year these men called on them. The women retained the girl children
born of these excursions. As to the boy children, customs differed.
In some cases the mothers nurtured them until they were weaned, and
returned them to their fathers when these came back the following year,
as always they did. In other cases the mothers put the male infants to
death, or maimed them and raised them as slaves of the state.
The Greek treatment of the myth had a certain other-worldliness. The
Amazons figured in epic events; their struggles were with demigods.
They came to the relief of Troy, and their subjugation was one of the
dozen labors of Hercules. With him they fought, and with Achilles,
and with Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and with Bellerophon, rider
of the winged Pegasus, and with the griffins which guarded Scythia’s
fabled gold; and they invaded Attica to attempt another _Iliad_ in
revenge for the capture of a queen. Greek sculptures and decorative
pottery show the national feeling that these were a people far removed
in time and space. The figures are beautiful, but something of
barbarian wildness animates the features. Earlier art had represented
them as bloodthirsty mænads, raiders of the borders, but the Greek
humanizing spirit wrought itself upon the legend until the story the
sculptors tell is of men’s regret that they need smite these beautiful
savages.
This spirit is in the _Æthiopis_ of Arctinus of Miletus, wherein
Amazons appear on the side of beleaguered Troy. Their queen,
Penthesilea, spreads death among the large-limbed Argives and
overwhelms Achilles with abusive words. The angered hero slays her, but
when he removes her helmet the charm of her strikes him to the heart
and he grieves over his victim.
The story, with its fine human touch, recedes into the mists in a tale
which in effect is its epilogue. After his own death and the ruin of
Troy, Achilles reigns over the isle of Leuke, an Avalon of the East
in the Black Sea at the Danube’s mouth. Thither, even to the land of
shades, the rage of the Amazons for the death of their queen follows
him. At their capital on the river Thermodon in Pontus they seize on
ships and compel the sailors to steer them to the enchanted isle. But
as they approach a temple in the grove their horses take fright and
bolt over a cliff into the sea. A terrible storm shatters the fleet and
few of the vengeful women escape.
In classic legend, there were three woman states--the countries of
the Gorgons and Amazons in the west of Libya, and an Amazon state in
the northeast of Asia Minor near the modern Trebizond; the capital
of the latter was the mythical Themiscyra on the banks of the river
Thermodon, now called the Termeh. The African Amazons subjugated the
Gorgons, and under their queen, Myrina, marched in triumph through
Egypt, Arabia, and Asia Minor into Thrace, where they were defeated and
turned back by Mopsus. Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyme, and Myrina claimed them
as their founders. This horde was wiped out by Hercules at the time
when he erected the pillar in Africa, for, says Diodorus Siculus, “it
was a thing intolerable to him, who made it his business to be renowned
all the world over, to suffer any nation to be governed any longer by
women.”
It was the Black Sea Amazons whom the Greeks mainly limned in art
and legend. These women, whose earlier home had been the Caucasus,
raided the coasts of Asia Minor and came to the relief of Troy. The
ninth labor of Hercules was to bring back the girdle of their queen,
Hippolyte, a task equivalent to the subjugation of the state. Theseus
carried off another queen, Antiope, and this led to the Amazonian
invasion of Attica; the fierce women were not halted until they had
penetrated Athens.
This expedition and that of their African sisters were interpreted by
the Greeks as allegories of barbarian menace. In the tread of Amazonian
horse they may have had a presage of the hoofs of Hunnish, Turkish,
and Tartar cavalry that in after ages was to ride across their world.
Literally taken, the tales seemed to Strabo incredible. “For who can
believe,” he asks, “that an army of women, or a city, or a nation,
could ever subsist without men, and even dispatch an expedition across
the sea to Attica? This is as much as to say that the men of those days
were women, and the women men.”
Twice, however, in the field of legend over which Strabo cast an
unbelieving backward glance, the note of reality, or perhaps of
realism, had been sounded. When Alexander the Great was in Parthia,
Thalestris, the Amazon queen, paid him a Sheba-like visit at the head
of a hundred women carrying double-headed axes and the traditional
half-moon shield. He was the bravest of men, said the lady, and she the
bravest of women. They owed a duty to posterity to raise offspring in
whom the two strains should conjoin. The appeal flattered the vanity
of the Macedonian, nor was he averse to meeting its conditions. So
runs a Greek story like unto others with which the Alexander legend
was embroidered. But Arrian explains that the so-called queen and
her followers had been sent as a present by the governor of the next
province--a time-honored Asiatic gift.
There was a battalion of death perhaps three thousand years before
the young women of Russia took the field in the World War, and those
of Poland in the war that followed it. The story is told by Herodotus
in a chapter which begins in myth and seems to pass into history. In
the opening scene three shiploads of Amazons, captured in the Attic
campaign already noted, overpower the Greek sailors and slay them all.
They let the ships drift across the Black Sea and beach on the shores
of the Palus Mæotis (Sea of Azov), where the women seize a herd of
horses. Mounting them, they fall to plundering the land of the free
Scythians. Herodotus continues:
“The Scyths could not tell what to make of the attack upon them--the
dress, the language, the nation itself were alike unknown; whence
the enemy had come, even, was a marvel. Imagining, however, that
they were all men of about the same age, they went out against them
and fought a battle. Some of the bodies of the slain fell into their
hands, whereby they discovered the truth. Hereupon they deliberated,
and made a resolve to kill no more of them, but to send against them a
detachment of their youngest men, as near as they could guess equal to
the women in number, with orders to encamp in their neighbourhood and
do as they saw them do. When the Amazons advanced against them, they
were to retire and avoid a fight. When they halted, the young men were
to approach and pitch their camp near the camp of the enemy. All this
they did on account of their strong desire to obtain children from so
notable a race.”
The Scythian youths were sent out. The Amazons saw that no harm was
meditated against them and desisted from further attack; and slowly
the romance unfolded. Day after day the camps were pitched nearer each
other, and both parties, having naught but arms and horses, supported
themselves by the chase. “At last,” says Herodotus, “an incident
brought two of them together. The man easily gained the good graces
of the woman, who bade him by signs to bring a friend the next day,
promising on her part to bring with her another woman. He did so, and
the woman kept her word. When the rest of the youths heard what had
taken place they also sought and gained the favor of the other Amazons.
“The two camps were then joined in one, the Amazons living with the
Scythians as their wives; and the men were unable to learn the tongue
of the women, but the women soon caught the tongue of the men. Then the
Scyths said: ‘We have parents and properties; let us therefore give up
this mode of life, and return to our nation, and live with them; you
shall be our wives there no less than here, and we promise you to have
no others.’”
But the young women would not go home with their husbands to live with
their mothers-in-law. “Of womanly employments we know nothing,” they
said. “To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin, to bestride the horse,
these are our arts. Your women stay at home in their wagons engaged in
womanish tasks and never go out to hunt or to do anything. We should
never agree.” So they bade the bridegrooms go back to their parents,
ask for their inheritances, and return. This the youths did, and
then the Amazons told them they could no more get along with their
fathers than with their mothers. They had stolen horses and wasted the
ancestral lands. “As you like us for wives,” they pleaded, “grant the
request that we leave the country together, and go and dwell beyond the
Tanais” (the river Don).
Again the Scythian youths consented, and all fared to a region three
days’ journey east and three north of the Sea of Azov. Thus was founded
the race of Sarmatians. From that day to this, concludes Herodotus, the
Sarmatian women ride with their husbands in the chase, and in war take
the field with them. Nor does a girl marry until she has killed a man
in battle, so that among them are women of advanced years, celibates
because they have never struck down a foe. Also, the Sarmatians do not
speak the tongue of Scythia correctly, because the Amazons learned it
incorrectly at the first.
At least the topography of the tale has been confirmed. Sarmatia is the
ancient name of Poland and Niebuhr has traced the westward drift of
the tribes from the Don steppes to the great Hungarian plain, whence
they overspread Poland and Russia. One could wish to believe that Maria
Botchkareva, commander of the Battalion of Death that took the field
against Germany when the manhood of Soviet Russia faltered and grounded
arms, is of the high Amazonian strain.
The Indian epic of the _Mahabharata_ has a similar tale, although in
less realistic vein. There was a religious rite known as the Aswamedha,
in which a leader would loose a horse, and follow it for a twelvemonth
into whatever adventures and countries it might go--a quest entailing
wanderings and warrings. Rajah Arjuna of the Gangetic city of Hatusapur
took the pledge, and in the fifth stage of his adventure followed the
ranging horse into the Country of Women. He entered it with heavy
heart, knowing its danger.
These were not like other women, but rakshasis, or goblin women. Their
queen, the Rani Paranunta, was a beautiful young creature, and so were
all her women. But their customs were worse than Circean. When men
entered the land they were kindly entreated and beguiled into remaining
for a month or more; and, indeed, there were guards to prevent their
escape. After thirty days they were killed, and such of the women as
had entertained them, but were not expectant mothers, took their own
lives--the suttee. Thus was it assured that the Country of Women should
always be also the Country of Young Women.
The roving rajah and his train were gloomily pondering these customs
when they saw a troop of Amazons appear, and lead away the Aswamedha
horse to the stables of their queen. These were young girls, all
between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, arrayed in pearls and rich
stuffs, with bows in their hands and quivers at their waists and proud
horses under them. Among them rode their queen on an elephant. And she
bade Arjuna to cease his quest. “Become my slave, drink with me, and
pass your time in pleasure,” said the young Rani.
Arjuna reminded her that this was an invitation to die thirty days
later. To which the Rani replied that really it should make little
difference to him: “If you resist me you fall by my arrows; if you
remain you have to face the light of my eyes.” Already her beauty had
overcome his heart, but his mind made a last appeal. Let her permit him
to fulfill his vow and he would come back to wed her and would find
noble husbands for all her women. The young queen liked the speech and
sped him on his way to other adventures, and the tale itself to its
ultimate happy ending.
In a fortified palace in an iron city of Ceylon--Hiouen Thsang tells
the story--dwelt other goblin women to the number of five hundred.
On their towers flags flew to attract passing ships. When merchants
were sighted, the rakshasis took the form of beautiful maidens holding
flowers and strewing scents, and with music welcomed them to the iron
city. There was a prelude of wanton pleasure and then the strangers
were shut up in an iron prison and devoured at leisure.
Hither came Simhala, prince of the merchants, and five hundred of the
trader-folk, while the lucky signals waved on the towers of the siren
host. Simhala mated with their queen, and each of the men found a
companion, and of each union a son was born. But an evil dream came to
the prince, and he went in the night to the iron stronghold, whence a
captive’s voice told him who the women were and what he might expect.
If he would escape, there was a divine horse on the seaboard that would
carry him away.
The next scene shows the goblin women, each with her child, questing
the air in search of their fugitive husbands and by blandishments
persuading them to return. Simhala alone stands out. But his deserted
queen, hastening before him to his father’s house, wins the elder man
for her husband, and then brings on the demon women for a carnival of
death. In the morning the royal ministers find in the palace hall no
living thing, but only gnawed bones. The remainder of the story tells
of the vengeance of the son in a second expedition to the Isle of Gems.
“Then,” says the narrative, “the rakshasis were driven back, and fled
precipitately to rocky isles of the sea.” There for a while we must
seek the warrior women.
Marco Polo found them “about five hundred miles toward the south in the
ocean” from Sind. Here were two islands thirty miles apart, supposed
by modern geographers to be the Two Sisters lying near Socotra. One,
inhabited solely by men, was called the Island of Males; the other,
inhabited solely by women, was called the Island of Females. In March,
April, and May the men lived with the women, and at the same time sowed
grain in the fields. The rest of the year, because of the climate, the
men lived in their own island, knowing that if they stayed with the
women it would be “at the risk of falling a sacrifice.”
In Siamese folk-lore the Amazon island is farther to the east, in
the Mergui archipelago, where lies the Country of Widows, or See-Saw
Country of Widows--a vanishing city where are women only, and nothing
can float on water. Still farther east, legend--Arabic, mediæval,
and modern--tells of women commonwealths in Engano; in the “Sea of
Malatu,” identified as a bay of North Borneo; and in an island not far
from Samar in the eastern Philippines. Even in the Ladrones and the
Carolines the Jesuits heard of female islands. Pigafetta was told by a
pilot of an island called Acoloro, which lies below Java Major, where
are found no persons but women, and these become pregnant from the
wind. They kill their male offspring and any men who visit their island.
The name of California, borne by an American state, was given by
mediæval legend to an Amazon island “on the right hand of the Indies
very near to the terrestrial paradise.” Although troglodytes, the
pirate women who inhabited it lived luxuriously. Their arms and armor
were of gold and their caves were richly tapestried and adorned with
gems and feather-work, won by plunder of passing ships.
In the _Arabian Nights_ the Amazon legend becomes entangled in other
myths. Hassan el Bassorah loves and weds a strange and beautiful woman,
but she flies away to the farthest of an archipelago of seven islands
ruled by her father. He has an army of twenty-five thousand women,
“smiters with swords and lungers with lances.” The daughter queens it
over the island of Wak-wak. Here there is a forest the trees of which
bear fruit with the faces of the sons of Adam. When the sun arises,
these exclaim, “Wak-wak, Glory to the Creating King,” and when it sets,
“Wak-wak, Glory to God.”
Lane, translator of the _Thousand and One Nights_, adds a note that
the island of Wak-wak, familiar to Arab legend, lay near Borneo. A
queen swayed it and her warriors were beautiful women. Even the trees
bore women who hung by their hair from the branches and syllabled,
“Wak-wak”; if their hair was severed, they died. Another editor,
Burton, holds that there were two Wak-waks. One was the peninsula of
Guardafui where the pagan Gallas cried “Wak” as the Moslems cried
“Allah”; the vocal fruit tree was the calabash tree, “a vegetable
elephant,” the gourds of which hang by slender filaments. The other
Wak-wak was an island identified as Madagascar, as Malacca, and as
Sumatra. Sometimes the Cantonese speak of Japan as Wo-kwok, and in
New Guinea birds of paradise, settling on trees, are supposed to cry
out “Wak-wak.” This is also the name of the Falcon-man among the
First People of American myth, and of Philippine sorcerers who could
disconnect their legs and fly about like bats.
The narrative of Maundeville brings legend west again. Beside the Land
of Chaldea is the Land of Amazonia. The woman state emerged when the
king and all his nobles were slain in war. The high-born relicts slew
all the men left, “for they would that all the Women were Widows as
they were.” Thereafter, “they never would suffer Man to dwell amongst
them longer than seven Days and seven Nights,” and when they met their
lovers in neighboring realms they lived with them only “an eight Days
or ten.” These “wise noble and worthy Women” fought valiantly as
mercenary soldiers for neighbor states.
There was an island of women in the Baltic, according to Adam of
Bremen, but he perhaps confused Gwenland, or Fenland, with the land of
gwens--that is to say, the land of women.
That there was an Amazon nation in America the Chinese were first to
report. Buddhist travelers of the sixth century told of a Land of
Women beyond the Pacific in what may have been Mexico. Of this report
the Spaniards knew nothing when they gave the legend a home in the
Caribbean Sea, in islands that were halfway houses in time and space to
its wild but splendid domicile on the mainland of South America.
The maps which Columbus knew had drawn into their contours of the
Orient the outlines of various islands of women. In the Catalan map of
1375 the _regio feminarum_ was placed in Ceylon. The fifteenth-century
Catalan map placed the _insula de bene faminill_ in the west of the
Indian Ocean and off the African coast. A map of 1489 now in the
British Museum had the _insula mulierum_ and the _insula virorum_
not far from Zanzibar. These were islands of the east, and Columbus
thought he was sailing into the east, and he had with him the _Travels_
of Marco Polo with their account of the isles of men and women. It
was confirmation of his hopes that shortly after his landfall in the
Bahamas the natives spoke, or seemed to speak, of the island of women.
Through January and February of 1493 the journal of Columbus has much
to say of the _Isla de Mugeres_, of which many Indians had told him.
Its name was Madanino, the modern island of Montserrat. There was a
companion island of men called Carib, a dozen leagues away. Columbus
wanted to visit both, although the men were cannibals, and to carry
away a few of the Amazons as a present to his sovereigns. But somehow
he never made this expedition.
On the second voyage Columbus unwittingly touched at another island of
women. It was Guadeloupe, where “abundance of women [his son Ferdinand
is the narrator] came out of a wood, with bows and arrows and feathers,
as if they would defend their island.” They were naked, with long hair
falling over their shoulders. The admiral sent two Haytian women
swimming ashore to barter for food. The armed women bade them go to the
north side of the island “where their husbands were.” But a landing
party of Spaniards brought back ten women and three boys--and report of
an adventure. One of the captives, wife of a cacique, had been pursued
by a swift-footed Canaryman, and him she threw down and had nearly
throttled before his companions pulled her off. Although nimble, the
women were excessively fat, “and there were some thicker than a man
could grasp.”
The cacique’s wife told the Spaniards that the island was inhabited
only by women, and that four men they had seen were there by chance
from another island; “for at a certain time in the year they come to
sport with them.” There was another Amazon island called “Matrimonio.”
Having seen the prowess of these women, the admiral readily believed
their stories. He dismissed them with presents, but the Amazonian
wrestler had conceived a passion for a Haytian prince whom he held
captive, and remained with the Spaniards.
Other explorers after Columbus mistook for Amazons various island women
who fought them when their husbands were away. The conquistadors even
imagined that the convents of Mexican virgins, who followed the austere
rule of Quetzalcoatl, were Amazon barracks in which, at seasons, men
were made welcome. Thus by a succession of reports the stage was
prepared for the revelation made by Orellana, when in 1542 he slipped
away with a party of men from the spice-hunter, Gonzalo Pizarro, who
was encamped near the headwaters of the great river--from that time
forth called the River of the Amazons--and descended its broadening
bosom to the sea.
At the mouth of its affluent, the Rio Negro, Orellana had a spirited
fight with a band led by a number of women. An Indian captured farther
downstream told him that this was a district of women. Their five
Houses of the Sun were plated with gold, their dwellings were of
gold, and strong walls encompassed their cities; and their country
was neighbor to El Dorado. This story, brought back to Europe with
much corroborative detail, inflamed it, and Spain gave its author a
commission to conquer and colonize the lands he had skirted afloat. But
he died on his outward passage, and these lands, falling within the
territories of Portugal, Spain had no profit of them.
Thenceforth the legend of the American Amazons followed its curious
course for three centuries, while the credulity and cupidity of men
wove for it a background bizarre in its colors and stiff with fabled
gold.
Raleigh’s is the best account--such a recital as must interest his
sovereign, the Virgin Queen. The nations of these warlike women, he
said, were on the south side of a northern affluent of the Amazon in
the province of Topago, “and their chiefest strengths and retracts are
in the Islands situated on the South side of the entrance some sixty
leagues within the mouth of the sayd river. They accompany with men
but once in a yere, and for the time of one moneth, which I gather by
their relation to be in April; and that time all kings of the borders
assemble, and queenes of the Amazones; and after the queenes have
chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valentines. This one moneth, they
feed, dance, and drinke of their wines in abundance; and the Moone
being done, they all depart to their owne provinces.
“It was farther tolde me, that if in the warres they took any
prisoners, that they used to accompany with those also at what time
soever, but in the end for certeine they put them to death; for they
are sayd to be very cruell and bloodthirsty, especially to such as
offer to invade their territories. These Amazones have likewise great
store of these plates of golde, which they recover by exchange chiefly
for a kinde of greene stones which the Spaniards call Piedras hijades,
and we use for spleene stones.”
Even without the imported wealth of Old World legend--the tales of
pygmies and vampires and headless folk with which adventurers decorated
their narrative--it was a singular backdrop of tradition before which
the female warriors of America were paraded. Through its colors ran the
primitive lusts of men--for gold and women. The English sought gold,
the Indians sought women, and the Spaniards, so Raleigh said, sought
both gold and women. The natives were fighting over women a succession
of Trojan wars, in which copper-hued Helens passed back and forth as
the booty of the victors. Indian nobles with a dozen wives envied the
polity of other tribes where the caciques had half a hundred apiece.
When Raleigh asked Topiawara’s people what he should wrest from the
Epuremi, they replied “their women for us, and their gold for you.”
Of such a world anything might be true, and Amazon proof kept coming.
The soldiers of de Agira, as Lopez Vaz records, “did finde that to be
true which Orellana had reported, that there were Amazons, but these
women fight to aide their husbands.” Father de Acunha, who went with
Teixera on his great journey of exploration, asserted (1698) that
the large ladies of fable had “treasures enough to enrich the entire
world.” Their realm was the summits of the Cordilleras of Guiana. The
males of the neighboring Guacaris were “the happy tribe which enjoys
the favor of the valiant Amazons,” and these dwelt well up the sides
of the mountains where the women throned it. When the men made their
yearly call, their hostesses met them on the frontier with arms in
their hands, which, however, they soon put aside. Each Amazon chose a
hammock at random from the canoes of the men, and its owner followed
her to her lodge.
Brazilian folk-lore fitted into the legend. The devil-mask of the
Jurupary is supposed to represent the mythical hero who came from the
Antilles and overthrew the Amazons. All along their great river bands
of women attacked him, but, like another Hercules, he destroyed them
utterly. The cuirass of the conqueror became a sacred mask, and it was
said that Indian women would hide in the forests rather than look upon
it, so poignant was its reminder of their overthrow.
In another story, found upon the middle Amazon, the Indian women
abandoned their lords and retired to the hills, taking one old man with
them. The oldster became the father of all children born to them, and
only girl babies were reared. One mother, however, had a crippled son,
and in pity she secreted and reared him, and cured his deformity. When
his retreat was discovered there began, says Rothery, a long and tender
persecution from the women, though the boy remained unmoved. To escape
this he agreed that his mother should throw him into a lake, where he
became a fish. Whenever the mother called him he swam ashore, changed
to his beautiful human form and took food from her hands. This secret,
also, was discovered, and the other women would imitate the call and
inveigle the deceived youth into their arms. The old man, sole tribal
husband of record, noted the neglect of the women, divined the reason,
and went fishing. Other nets failed to hold his prey, but a net of
woman’s hair caught the boy-fish, and youth was no longer served; the
old man killed him.
Navaho myth tells a related story of the secession of the women, their
cohabitation with a water-monster, and their return to their natural
mates. Fragmentary tales of the woman state come also from Colombia,
Nicaragua, Sinaloa, and the two Californias.
The Amazon exodus is related in a third story of Brazil, told by
Barboza Rodriguez. When the women abandoned their husbands, flood and
fell barred the way of the pursuers and the very monkeys pelted them
from the trees. After a while the female republic relented so far as
to admit the men once a year. At length it disappeared into the land
of shadows, the women going down into a hole in the earth, led by an
armadillo.
La Condamine, the French geographer and mathematician, went to Peru
in 1735 to determine the length of a degree of the meridian at the
equator, and on his homeward journey made the first scientific
exploration of the river Amazon. He returned with one certainty and
two doubts. He was sure there had been a woman state, but he did not
know whether there still was, nor where it could then be found, for the
Amazons were nomads who shifted their camps.
The distinguished scientist arrays his evidence: testimony of an Indian
whose grandfather had seen an Amazon band pass by at the entrance of
the Cuchura River and spoken with four of them; like testimony from
other natives; statement of the Topayos that the green stones called
Amazon stones which they wore were inherited from forefathers who had
them from a tribe of women; statement of an old soldier that he had
seen necklaces of Amazon stones among a tribe of long-eared Indians
and learned they had procured them from the women without husbands,
whose territories were seven marches west; native name of these women,
Cougnantainsecouima, meaning “the independent women who receive men
into their society only in the month of April”; offer of a native of
Mortigua to guide La Condamine up the river Irijo which flows hard by
the woman state; passages in the Jesuit _Relations_ of 1726 and reports
of two Spanish governors of Venezuela, Don Diego Portales and Don
Francisco Torralva.
Where are the Amazons now? asks La Condamine. He notes that while
different accounts designate the point of their retreat, some toward
the east, others the north, and others again the west, these several
routes converge in one common center, the mountains in the midst of
Guiana. But without further proof he will not credit the existence of
the woman state there in his time. The tribe may have moved again. “Or,
what to me appears a more probable event than any other, it will have
forsaken its ancient habits, either in consequence of being overpowered
by some other nation, or of the maidens’ having at length lost the
aversion of their mothers to the company of men. Thus, though no
remaining vestige should be found of this feminine republic, this would
not yet prove that none such had ever existed.”
The majority of the natives of South America, La Condamine declares,
are liars, credulous, and prone to the marvelous. But none of them, he
urges, could have heard of the Amazons of Diodorus Siculus, and Justin
previous to the arrival of the Spaniards; yet even then Amazons were
spoken of as existing in the center of the country, and later reports
come from tribes that never had held commerce with Europeans.
If ever there was such a nation, concludes La Condamine, it must have
been in America. The Indians were constantly wandering. Their wives
often went with them to war. They had plenty of chances to get away
from the men, and provocation enough in the hard estate of slavery in
which they were held. Why could not these aboriginal women do what
even imported slaves had done? Negroes in Latin America had fled from
their taskmasters into the tropical forests, and there had reared a
dozen Cimarron republics. Thus, weighing evidence, common report and
probabilities, La Condamine casts the weight of his name in favor of
the Amazons.
Two generations later the woman state received the allegiance of
Alexander von Humboldt, founder of the science of physical geography
and largest name among the savants of the nineteenth century. He had
spent five years in tropical America at the opening of the century,
and in his _Personal Narrative_ of travel there he records affirmative
answer to the question: Did he accept the conclusions of La Condamine?
There was exaggeration, he thinks, in the stories of Raleigh and
Oviedo; but nevertheless he cannot entirely reject “a tradition which
is spread among various nations having no communication with each
other.”
Ribeiro, the Portuguese astronomer who had traversed the Amazon basin,
entering it a disbeliever of the story, had found the same traditions
of the woman state among the Indians, and confirmed all that La
Condamine reported a generation before, Humboldt notes. He is impressed
with the contemporary testimony of Father Gili. The friar had asked a
Quaqua Indian what tribes inhabited the Rio Cuchiviro and the Indian
named three, one of them the Aikeambenanos. The missionary knew the
Tamanac tongue, and in that tongue the word signified “women living
alone.” The Indian confirmed his translation, and explained that these
were a community of women who made blow-tubes and other weapons of war.
After the familiar Amazon custom they had seasonal amatory relations
with the neighboring nation of Vokearos and sent their men visitors
back with presents, but killed their male offspring. This tale, says
Humboldt, seems framed on the traditions which are rife among the
Indians of the Maranon and among the Caribs; yet the Quaqua who told it
knew no Castilian, had never before talked to a white man and certainly
did not know that below the Orinoco was the river of the Amazons.
“What must we conclude?” asks Humboldt. “Not that there are Amazons
on the banks of the Cuchivero, but that women in different parts of
America, wearied of the state of slavery in which they were held by the
men, united themselves together; that the desire of preserving their
independence rendered them warriors; and that they received visits
from a neighboring and friendly horde. This society of women may have
acquired some power in one part of Guiana. The Caribs of the continent
held intercourse with those of the islands; and no doubt in this way
the traditions of the Maranon and the Orinoco were propagated toward
the north,” so that Columbus and other navigators who followed him
heard of them repeatedly before reaching the mainland of America.
A generation later the woman state is spoken of by Schomburgk, who
traversed Guiana in 1835-43. Everywhere the Caribs told him of the
Woruisamocos, a tribe of warlike women who lived near the sources of
the Corentyne in a district where no white man had been. They shot
with the bow and arrow and used the blow-pipe. Their own fields they
cultivated, and men came thither only as their lovers, and but once a
year. Schomburgk pushed on to the district where the women should have
been; they were not there.
In the remote regions of the River Amazon’s northern affluents, says a
recent geographer, the women warriors are still vainly sought.
Thus this world-wide, world-old story has been followed through perhaps
thirty centuries of tradition on four continents and in five seas; and
the end is a doubt. Men have fought with parties of armed women, but
none has found the City of Women. Stories of male and female islands
may have arisen from the custom of naming companion islets “brother”
isles and “sister” isles, like North Brother and South Brother islands
in New York’s East River. It is contended that Orellana concocted his
tale to divert attention from his desertion of Pizarro; that Spaniards
mistook young Indian braves, with topknots and berry-bracelets on their
arms, for women; and that the prose behind the poetry of the American
Amazons is the tribe of Naupes, which still wears green stones for
amulets. It is even suggested that the New World legend grew out of the
coast Indian word, _Amazuni_, to denote a tidal bore upon the great
waterway of Brazil.
It has happened that the vivid imagination of the conquistadors
projected stories among the Indians which came back later with such
a wealth of detail as to seem native stuff. Is the New World Amazon
tradition merely Book III, Chapter XXXIV of the _Travels of Marco
Polo_, writ large upon the wax-like minds of savages by the curiosity
of Columbus and his great companions?
Before answering, it will be well to turn from stories of a woman state
to authentic records of women who were less than the Amazons of fable,
but more, or rather other, than women of the hearth. Perhaps the answer
is there.