OF THE DIVISION OF THE ABIPONIAN NATION, OF THEIR
PAUCITY, AND OF THE CHIEF CAUSES THEREOF.
To look for policy in savages will appear to you like seeking a knot in
a bulrush, or expecting water from a flint. The Abipones, a nation
obstinately attached to their ancient liberty, lived at their own
pleasure, impatient of all controul. Their own will was their sole law.
Nevertheless, as bees, ants, and every kind of animal, by natural
instinct, observe certain peculiarities of their species, in like manner
the most ferocious Indians pertinaciously retain, even to this day,
certain customs, the ordinances of their nation, handed down to them by
their ancestors, and regarded by them as laws. I shall proceed to treat
of the political, economical, and military regulations of the Abipones,
of their customs and magistrates.
The whole nation of the Abipones is divided into three classes: the
Riikahès, who inhabit extensive plains; the Nakaigetergehes, who love
the lurking-holes of the woods; and lastly, the Yaaucanigas, who were
formerly a distinct nation, and used a separate language. In the last
century, the Spaniards, whom they had gone out to slaughter, surprized
them by the way, and almost destroyed them all. A few who survived the
massacre, with the widows and children of the slain, joined the
neighbouring Abipones, and both nations, by inter-marriages, coalesced
into one; the old language of the Yaaucanigas falling into disuse. The
Abiponian tribes pursue the same manner of life, and their customs and
language, with the exception of a few words, are alike. Wondrous
unanimity, and a constant alliance in arms, reigned amongst them as long
as they had to deal with the Spaniards, against whom, as against a
mutual foe, they bear an innate hatred, and whose servitude they resist
with united strength. But though bound by the ties of consanguinity and
friendship, impatient of the smallest injury, they eagerly seize on any
occasion of war, and frequently weaken each other with mutual slaughter.
Like the other American savages, some of the Abipones practise polygamy
and divorce. Yet they are by no means numerous; the whole nation
consisting of no more than five thousand people. Intestine skirmishes,
excursions against the enemy, the deadly contagion of the measles and
small-pox, and the cruelty of the mothers towards their offspring, have
combined to render their number so small. Now learn the cause of this
inhumanity in the women. The mothers suckle their children for three
years, during which time they have no conjugal intercourse with their
husbands, who, tired of this long delay, often marry another wife. The
women, therefore, kill their unborn babes through fear of repudiation,
sometimes getting rid of them by violent arts, without waiting for their
birth. Afraid of being widows in the life-time of their husbands, they
blush not to become more savage than tigresses. Mothers spare their
female offspring more frequently than the males, because the sons, when
grown up, are obliged to purchase a wife, whereas daughters, at an age
to be married, may be sold to the bridegroom at almost any price.
From all this you may easily guess that the Abiponian nations abound
more in women than in men, both because female infants are seldomer
killed by their mothers, because the women never fall in battle as is
the case with the men, and because women are naturally longer lived than
men. Many writers make the mistake of attributing the present scanty
population of America to the cruelty of the Spaniards, when they should
rather accuse that of the infanticide mothers. We, who have grown old
amongst the Abipones, should pronounce her a singularly good woman who
brings up two or three sons. But the whole Abiponian nation contains so
few such mothers, that their names might all be inscribed on a ring. I
have known some who killed all the children they bore, no one either
preventing or avenging these murders. Such is the impunity with which
crimes are committed when they become common, as if custom could excuse
their impiety. The mothers bewail their children, who die of a disease,
with sincere tears; yet they dash their new-born babes against the
ground, or destroy them in some other way, with calm countenances.
Europeans will scarce believe that such affection for their dead
children can co-exist with such cruelty towards them while they are
alive, but to us it is certain and indubitable. After our instructions,
however, had engrafted a reverence for the divine law in the minds of
the Abipones, the barbarity of the mothers gradually disappeared, and
husbands, with joyful eyes, beheld their hands no longer stained with
the blood of their offspring, but their arms laden with those dear
pledges. These are the fruits and the triumphs of religion, which fills
not only Heaven but earth with inhabitants. When polygamy and divorce,
the iniquitous murdering of infants, and the liberty of spontaneous
abortion were at length, by means of Christian discipline, abolished,
the nation of the Abipones, within a few years, rejoiced to see itself
enriched with incredible accessions of both sexes.