OF THE WEDDINGS OF THE ABIPONES.
Whenever an Abipon thinks fit to choose a wife, he must bargain with the
parents of the girl about the price to be payed for her. Four or more
horses, strings of beads made of glass or snail-shells, a woollen
garment of various colours, woven like a Turkish carpet, a spear
furnished with an iron point, and other articles of this kind, are paid
by the bridegroom. It frequently happens that the girl rescinds what had
been settled and agreed upon between the parents and the bridegroom,
obstinately rejecting the very mention of marriage. Many girls, through
fear of being compelled to marry, have concealed themselves in the
recesses of woods or lakes; seeming to dread the assaults of tigers less
than the untried nuptials. Some of them, just before they are to be
brought to the bridegroom's house, fly to the chapel, and there, hidden
behind the altar, elude the threats and the expectation of the unwelcome
bridegroom.
Let us suppose the Abiponian bride to have acquiesced in her parents'
wishes with regard to her marriage; without the observance of other
ceremonies usual elsewhere, she is conducted, not without pomp, to the
tent of her spouse. Eight girls hold up a beautiful garment like a
carpet in their hands, by way of a shade, under which the bride goes,
full of bashfulness, with her eyes fixed upon the ground, preserving a
pensive silence, spectators being scattered around. After having been
received by her spouse, and kindly saluted, she is brought back by her
hordesmen to her fathers house, in the same manner, and with the same
attendants as she left it; whence, in a second and a third journey, she
brings the gourds, pots, pans, and the weaving-machine, under a shade,
to her husband's tent, and after a very short conversation returns to
the house of her parents, where the bridegroom is forced to go to take
his food and pass the night: for the mothers are so careful of their
daughters, that even when they are married they can hardly bear to part
from them, and deliver them immediately into the power of another. After
they have satisfied themselves of the probity of their son-in-law, or
after the birth of a child, they suffer them to live in a separate
house. These are the scanty rites of the Abiponian nuptials, which
however are sometimes gladdened by a compotation on the part of the men.
Sometimes a drum is struck by a boy seated on the top of a tent to
proclaim the nuptials. The bride's being covered with a skreen when she
is conducted to the bridegroom's house, resembles the Roman fashion of
veiling the heads of the women, when they were given to their husbands,
with a yellow or flame-coloured veil, whence the word nuptials.
Gumilla relates, in his History of the river Orinoco, that there is one
nation which marries old men to girls, and old women to youths, that age
may correct the petulance of youth. For, they say, that to join young
persons equal in youth and imprudence in wedlock together, is to join
one fool to another. The marriage of young men with old women is a kind
of apprenticeship, which after they have served for some months, they
are permitted to marry women of their own age.