There is a comfort in the strength of love,
Making that pang endurable, which else
Would overset the brain--or break the heart.
_Wordsworth_.
[Footnote 1: This little tale (written in 1830) is founded on a
striking incident related in Humboldt's narrative. The facts remain
unaltered.]
The monuments which human art has raised to human pride or power may
decay with that power, or survive to mock that pride; but sooner or
later they perish--their place knows them not. In the aspect of a ruin,
however imposing in itself, and however magnificent or dear the
associations connected with it, there is always something sad and
humiliating, reminding us how poor and how frail are the works of man,
how unstable his hopes, and how limited his capacity compared to his
aspirations! But when man has made to himself monuments of the works of
God; when the memory of human affections, human intellect, human power,
is blended with the immutable features of nature, they consecrate each
other, and both endure together to the end. In a state of high
civilization, man trusts to the record of brick and marble--the
pyramid, the column, the temple, the tomb:
"Then the bust
And altar rise--then sink again to dust."
In the earlier stages of society, the isolated rock--the mountain,
cloud-encircled--the river, rolling to its ocean-home--the very stars
themselves--were endued with sympathies, and constituted the first, as
they will be the last, witnesses and records of our human destinies and
feelings. The glories of the Parthenon shall fade into oblivion; but
while the heights of Thermopylæ stand, and while a wave murmurs in the
gulph of Salamis, a voice shall cry aloud to the universe--"Freedom and
glory to those who can dare to die!--woe and everlasting infamy to him
who would enthral the unconquerable spirit!" The Coliseum with its
sanguinary trophies is crumbling to decay; but the islet of Nisida,
where Brutus parted with his Portia--the steep of Leucadia, still
remain fixed as the foundations of the earth; and lasting as the round
world itself shall be the memories that hover over them! As long as the
waters of the Hellespont flow between Sestos and Abydos, the fame of
the love that perished there shall never pass away. A traveller,
pursuing his weary way through the midst of an African desert--a
barren, desolate, and almost boundless solitude--found a gigantic
sculptured head, shattered and half-buried in the sand; and near it the
fragment of a pedestal, on which these words might be with pain
deciphered: "_I am Ozymandias, King of kings; look upon my works, ye
mighty ones, and despair!_" Who was Ozymandias?--where are now his
works?--what bond of thought or feeling, links his past with our
present? The Arab, with his beasts of burthen, tramples unheeding over
these forlorn vestiges of human art and human grandeur. In the wildest
part of the New Continent, hidden amid the depths of interminable
forests, there stands a huge rock, hallowed by a tradition so recent
that the man is not yet gray-headed who was born its contemporary; but
that rock, and the tale which consecrates it, shall carry down to
future ages a deep lesson--a moral interest lasting as itself--however
the aspect of things and the conditions of people change around it.
Henceforth no man shall gaze on it with careless eye; but each shall
whisper to his own bosom--"What is stronger than love in a mother's
heart?--what more fearful than power wielded by ignorance?--or what
more lamentable than the abuse of a beneficent name to purposes of
selfish cruelty?"
Those vast regions which occupy the central part of South America,
stretching from Guinea to the foot of the Andes, overspread with
gigantic and primeval forests, and watered by mighty rivers--those
solitary wilds where man appears unessential in the scale of creation,
and the traces of his power are few and far between--have lately
occupied much of the attention of Europeans; partly from the
extraordinary events and unexpected revolutions; which have convulsed
the nations round them; and partly from the researches of enterprising
travellers who have penetrated into their remotest districts. But till
within the last twenty years these wild regions have been unknown,
except through the means of the Spanish and Portuguese priests, settled
as missionaries along the banks of the Orinoco and the Paraguay. The
men thus devoted to utter banishment from all intercourse with
civilized life, are generally Franciscan or Capuchin friars, born in
the Spanish colonies. Their pious duties are sometimes voluntary, and
sometimes imposed by the superiors of their order; in either case their
destiny appears at first view deplorable, and their self-sacrifice
sublime; yet, when we recollect that these poor monks generally
exchanged the monotonous solitude of the cloister for the magnificent
loneliness of the boundless woods and far-spreading savannahs, the
sacrifice appears less terrible; even where accompanied by suffering,
privation, and occasionally by danger. When these men combine with
their religious zeal some degree of understanding and enlightened
benevolence, they have been enabled to enlarge the sphere of knowledge
and civilization, by exploring the productions and geography of these
unknown regions; and by collecting into villages and humanizing the
manners of the native tribes, who seem strangely to unite the fiercest
and most abhorred traits of savage life, with some of the gentlest
instincts of our common nature. But when it has happened that these
priests have been men of narrow minds and tyrannical tempers, they have
on some occasions fearfully abused the authority entrusted to them; and
being removed many thousand miles from the European settlements and the
restraint of the laws, the power they have exercised has been as far
beyond control as the calamities they have caused have been beyond all
remedy and all relief.
Unfortunately for those who were trusted to his charge, Father Gomez
was a missionary of this character. He was a Franciscan friar of the
order of Observance, and he dwelt in the village of San Fernando, near
the source of the Orinoco, whence his authority extended as president
over several missions in the neighborhood of which San Fernando was the
capital. The temper of this man was naturally cruel and despotic; he
was wholly uneducated, and had no idea, no feeling, of the true spirit
of christian benevolence: in this respect, the savages whom he had been
sent to instruct and civilize were in reality less savage and less
ignorant than himself.
Among the passions and vices which Father Gomez had brought from his
cell in the convent of Angostara, to spread contamination and
oppression through his new domain, were pride and avarice; and both
were interested in increasing the number of his converts or rather of
his slaves. In spite of the wise and humane law of Charles the Third,
prohibiting the conversion of the Indian natives by force, Gomez, like
others of his brethren in the more distant missions, often accomplished
his purpose by direct violence. He was accustomed to go, with a party
of his people, and lie in wait near the hordes of unreclaimed Indians:
when the men were absent he would forcibly seize on the women and
children, bind them, and bring them off in triumph to his village.
There, being baptized and taught to make the sign of the cross, they
were _called_ Christians, but in reality were slaves. In general, the
women thus detained pined away and died; but the children became
accustomed to their new mode of life, forgot their woods, and paid to
their Christian master a willing and blind obedience; thus in time they
became the oppressors of their own people.
Father Gomez called these incursions, _la conquista espiritual_--the
conquest of souls.
One day he set off on an expedition of this nature, attended by twelve
armed Indians; and after rowing some leagues up the river Guaviare,
which flows into the Orinoco, they perceived through an opening in the
trees, and at a little distance from the shore, an Indian hut. It is
the custom of these people to live isolated in families; and so strong
is their passion for solitude, that when collected into villages they
frequently build themselves a little cabin at a distance from their
usual residence, and retire to it, at certain seasons, for days
together. The cabin of which I speak was one of these solitary
_villas_--if I may so apply the word. It was constructed with peculiar
neatness, thatched with palm leaves, and over-shadowed with cocoa trees
and laurels; it stood alone in the wilderness, embowered with luxuriant
vegetation, and looked like the chosen abode of simple and quiet
happiness. Within this hut a young Indian woman (whom I shall call
Guahiba, from the name of her tribe) was busied in making cakes of the
cassava root, and preparing the family meal, against the return of her
husband, who was fishing at some distance up the river; her eldest
child, about five or six years old, assisted her; and from time to
time, while thus employed, the mother turned her eyes, beaming with
fond affection, upon the playful gambols of two little infants, who,
being just able to crawl alone, were rolling together on the ground,
laughing and crowing with all their might.
Their food being nearly prepared, the Indian woman looked towards the
river, impatient for the return of her husband. But her bright dark
eyes, swimming with eagerness and affectionate solicitude, became fixed
and glazed with terror when, instead of him she so fondly expected, she
beheld the attendants of Father Gomez, creeping stealthily along the
side of the thicket towards her cabin. Instantly aware of her danger
(for the nature and object of these incursions were the dread of all
the country round) she uttered a piercing shriek, snatched up her
infants in her arms, and, calling on the other to follow, rushed from
the hut towards the forest. As she had considerably the start of her
pursuers, she would probably have escaped, and have hidden herself
effectually in its tangled depths, if her precious burthen had not
impeded her flight; but thus encumbered she was easily overtaken. Her
eldest child, fleet of foot and wily as the young jaguar, escaped to
carry to the wretched father the news of his bereavement, and neither
father nor child were ever more beheld in their former haunts.
Meantime, the Indians seized upon Guahiba--bound her, tied her two
children together, and dragged her down to the river, where Father
Gomez was sitting in his canoe, waiting the issue of the expedition. At
the sight of the captives his eye sparkled with a cruel triumph; he
thanked his patron saint that three more souls were added to his
community; and then, heedless of the tears of the mother, and the cries
of her children, he commanded his followers to row back with all speed
to San Fernando.
There Guahiba and her infants were placed in a hut under the guard of
two Indians; some food was given to her, which she at first refused,
but afterward, as if on reflection, accepted. A young Indian girl was
then sent to her--a captive convert of her own tribe, who had not yet
quite forgotten her native language. She tried to make Guahiba
comprehend that in this village she and her children must remain during
the rest of their lives, in order that they might go to heaven after
they were dead. Guahiba listened, but understood nothing of what was
addressed to her; nor could she be made to conceive for what purpose
she was torn from her husband and her home, nor why she was to dwell
for the remainder of her life among a strange people, and against her
will. During that night she remained tranquil, watching over her
infants as they slumbered by her side; but the moment the dawn
appeared, she took them in her arms and ran off to the woods. She was
immediately brought back; but no sooner were the eyes of her keepers
turned from her than she snatched up her children, and again
fled;--again--and again! At every new attempt she was punished with
more and more severity; she was kept from food, and at length
repeatedly and cruelty beaten. In vain!--apparently she did not even
understand why she was thus treated; and one instinctive idea alone,
the desire of escape, seemed to possess her mind and govern all her
movements. If her oppressors only turned from her, or looked another
way, for an instant, she invariably caught up her children and ran off
towards the forest. Father Gomez was at length wearied by what he
termed her "blind obstinacy;" and, as the only means of securing all
three, he took measures to separate the mother from her children, and
resolved to convey Guahiba to a distant mission, whence she should
never find her way back either to them or to her home.
In pursuance of this plan, poor Guahiba, with her hands tied behind
her, was placed in the bow of a canoe. Father Gomez seated himself at
the helm, and they rowed away.
The few travellers who have visited these regions agree in describing a
phenomenon, the cause of which is still a mystery to geologists, and
which imparts to the lonely depths of these unappropriated and
unviolated shades an effect intensely and indescribably mournful. The
granite rocks which border the river, and extend far into the
contiguous woods, assume strange, fantastic shapes; and are covered
with a black incrustation, or deposit, which contrasted with the
snow-white foam of the waves breaking on them below, and the pale
lichens which spring from their crevices and creep along their surface
above, give these shores an aspect perfectly funereal. Between these
melancholy rocks--so high and so steep that a landing place seldom
occurred for leagues together--the canoe of Father Gomez slowly glided,
though urged against the stream by eight robust Indians.
The unhappy Guahiba sat at first perfectly unmoved, and apparently
amazed and stunned by her situation; she did not comprehend what they
were going to do with her; but after a while she looked up towards the
sun, then down upon the stream; and perceiving, by the direction of the
one and the course of the other, that every stroke of the oar carried
her farther and farther from her beloved and helpless children, her
husband, and her native home, her countenance was seen to change and
assume a fearful expression. As the possibility of escape, in her
present situation, had never once occurred to her captors, she had been
very slightly and carelessly bound. She watched her opportunity, burst
the withes on her arms, with a sudden effort flung herself overboard,
and dived under the waves; but in another moment she rose again at a
considerable distance, and swam to the shore. The current, being rapid
and strong, carried her down to the base of a dark granite rock which
projected into the stream; she climbed it with fearless agility, stood
for an instant on its summit, looking down upon her tyrants, then
plunged into the forest, and was lost to sight.
Father Gomez, beholding his victim thus unexpectedly escape him, sat
mute and thunderstruck for some moments, unable to give utterance to
the extremity of his rage and astonishment. When, at length, he found
voice, he commanded his Indians to pull with all their might to the
shore; then to pursue the poor fugitive, and bring her back to him,
dead or alive.
Guahiba, meantime, while strength remained to break her way through the
tangled wilderness, continued her flight; but soon exhausted and
breathless, with the violence of her exertions, she was obliged to
relax in her efforts, and at length sunk down at the foot of a huge
laurel tree, where she concealed herself, as well as she might, among
the long, interwoven grass. There, crouching and trembling in her lair,
she heard the voices of her persecutors hallooing to each other through
the thicket. She would probably have escaped but for a large mastiff
which the Indians had with them, and which scented her out in her
hiding place. The moment she heard the dreaded animal snuffing in the
air, and tearing his way through the grass, she knew she was lost. The
Indians came up. She attempted no vain resistance; but, with a sullen
passiveness, suffered herself to be seized and dragged to the shore.
When the merciless priest beheld her, he determined to inflict on her
such discipline as he thought would banish her children from her
memory, and cure her forever of her passion for escaping. He ordered
her to be stretched upon that granite rock where she had landed from
the canoe, on the summit of which she had stood, as if exulting in her
flight,--THE ROCK OF THE MOTHER, as it has ever since been
denominated--and there flogged till she could scarcely move or speak.
She was then bound more securely, placed in the canoe, and carried to
Javita, the seat of a mission far up the river.
It was near sunset when they arrived at this village, and the
inhabitants were preparing to go to rest. Guahiba was deposited for the
night in a large barn-like building, which served as a place of
worship, a public magazine, and, occasionally, as a barrack. Father
Gomez ordered two or three Indians of Javita to keep guard over her
alternately, relieving each other through the night; and then went to
repose himself after the fatigues of his voyage. As the wretched
captive neither resisted nor complained, Father Gomez flattered himself
that she was now reduced to submission. Little could he fathom the
bosom of this fond mother! He mistook for stupor, or resignation, the
calmness of a fixed resolve. In absence, in bonds, and in torture, her
heart throbbed with but one feeling; one thought alone possessed her
whole soul:--her children--her children--and still her children!
Among the Indians appointed to watch her was a youth about eighteen or
nineteen years of age, who, perceiving that her arms were miserably
bruised by the stripes she had received, and that she suffered the most
acute agony from the savage tightness with which the cords were drawn,
let fall an exclamation of pity in the language of her tribe. Quick she
seized the moment of feeling, and addressed him as one of her people.
"Guahibo," she said, in a whispered tone, "thou speakest my language,
and doubtless thou art my brother! Wilt thou see me perish without
pity, O son of my people? Ah, cut these bonds which enter into my
flesh! I faint with pain! I die!"
The young man heard, and, as if terrified, removed a few paces from her
and kept silence. Afterward, when his companions were out of sight, and
he was left alone to watch, he approached, and said, "Guahiba!--our
fathers were the same, and I may not see thee die; but if I cut these
bonds, white man will flog me:--wilt thou be content if I loosen them,
and give thee ease?" And as he spoke, he stooped and loosened the
thongs on her wrists and arms; she smiled upon him languidly, and
appeared satisfied.
Night was now coming on. Guahiba dropped her head on her bosom, and
closed her eyes, as if exhausted by weariness. The young Indian
believing that she slept, after some hesitation laid himself down on
his mat. His companions were already slumbering in the porch of the
building, and all was still.
Then Guahiba raised her head. It was night--dark night--without moon or
star. There was no sound, except the breathing of the sleepers around
her, and the humming of the moschetos. She listened for some time with
her whole soul; but all was silence. She then gnawed the loosened
thongs asunder with her teeth. Her hands once free, she released her
feet: and when the morning came she had disappeared. Search was made
for her in every direction, but in vain; and Father Gomez, baffled and
wrathful, returned to his village.
The distance between Javita and San Fernando, where Guahiba had left
her infants, is twenty-five leagues in a straight line. A fearful
wilderness of gigantic forest trees, and intermingling underwood,
separated these two missions;--a savage and awful solitude, which,
probably, since the beginning of the world, had never been trodden by
human foot. All communication was carried on by the river; and there
lived not a man, whether Indian or European, bold enough to have
attempted the route along the shore. It was the commencement of the
rainy season. The sky, obscured by clouds, seldom revealed the sun by
day; and neither moon nor gleam of twinkling star by night. The rivers
had overflowed, and the lowlands were inundated. There was no visible
object to direct the traveller; no shelter, no defence, no aid, no
guide. Was it Providence--was it the strong instinct of maternal love,
which led this courageous woman through the depths of the pathless
woods--where rivulets, swollen to torrents by the rains, intercepted
her at every step; where the thorny lianas, twining from tree to tree,
opposed an almost impenetrable barrier; where the moschetos hung in
clouds upon her path; where the jaguar and the alligator lurked to
devour her; where the rattle-snake and the water-serpent lay coiled up
in the damp grass, ready to spring at her; where she had no food to
support her exhausted frame, but a few berries, and the large black
ants which build their nests on the trees? How directed--how
sustained--cannot be told: the poor woman herself could not tell. All
that can be known with any certainty is, that the fourth rising sun
beheld her at San Fernando; a wild, and wasted, and fearful object; her
feet swelled and bleeding--her hands torn--her body covered with
wounds, and emaciated with famine and fatigue;--but once more near her
children!
For several hours she hovered round the hut in which she had left them,
gazing on it from a distance with longing eyes and a sick heart,
without daring to advance: at length she perceived that all the
inhabitants had quitted their cottages to attend vespers; then she
stole from the thicket, and approached, with faint and timid steps, the
spot which contained her heart's treasures. She entered, and found her
infants left alone, and playing together on a mat: they screamed at her
appearance, so changed was she by suffering; but when she called them
by name, they knew her tender voice, and stretched out their little
arms towards her. In that moment the mother forgot all she had
endured--all her anguish, all her fears, every thing on earth but the
objects which blessed her eyes. She sat down between her children--she
took them on her knees--she clasped them in an agony of fondness to her
bosom--she covered them with kisses--she shed torrents of tears on
their little heads, as she hugged them to her. Suddenly she remembered
where she was, and why she was there: new terrors seized her; she rose
up hastily, and, with her babies in her arms, she staggered out of the
cabin--fainting, stumbling, and almost blind with loss of blood and
inanition. She tried to reach the woods, but too feeble to sustain her
burthen, which yet she would not relinquish, her limbs trembled, and
sank beneath her. At this moment an Indian, who was watching the public
oven, perceived her. He gave the alarm by ringing a bell, and the
people rushed forth, gathering round Guahiba with fright and
astonishment. They gazed upon her as if upon an apparition, till her
sobs, and imploring looks, and trembling and wounded limbs, convinced
them that she yet lived, though apparently nigh to death. They looked
upon her in silence, and then at each other; their savage bosoms were
touched with commiseration for her sad plight, and with admiration, and
even awe, at this unexampled heroism of maternal love.
While they hesitated, and none seemed willing to seize her, or to take
her children from her, Father Gomez, who had just landed on his return
from Javita, approached in haste, and commanded them to be separated.
Guahiba clasped her children closer to her breast, and the Indians
shrunk back.
"What!" thundered the monk: "will ye suffer the woman to steal two
precious souls from heaven? two members from our community? See ye not,
that while she is suffered to approach them, there is no salvation for
either mother or children? part them, and instantly!"
The Indians, accustomed to his ascendancy, and terrified at his voice,
tore the children of Guahiba once more from her feeble arms: she
uttered nor word nor cry, but sunk in a swoon upon the earth.
While in this state, Father Gomez, with a cruel mercy, ordered her
wounds to be carefully dressed: her arms and legs were swathed with
cotton bandages; she was then placed in a canoe, and conveyed to a
mission, far, far off, on the river Esmeralda, beyond the Upper
Orinoco. She continued in a state of exhaustion and torpor during the
voyage; but after being taken out of the boat and carried inland,
restoratives brought her back to life, and to a sense of her situation.
When she perceived, as reason and consciousness returned, that she was
in a strange place, unknowing how she was brought there--among a tribe
who spoke a language different from any she had ever heard before, and
from whom, therefore, according to Indian prejudices, she could hope
nor aid nor pity;--when she recollected that she was far from her
beloved children;--when she saw no means of discovering the bearing or
the distance of their abode--no clue to guide her back to it:--_then_,
and only then, did the mother's heart yield to utter despair; and
thence forward refusing to speak or to move, and obstinately rejecting
all nourishment, thus she died.
The boatman, on the river Atabapo, suspends his oar with a sigh as he
passes the ROCK OF THE MOTHER. He points it out to the traveller, and
weeps as he relates the tale of her sufferings and her fate. Ages
hence, when these solitary regions have become the seats of
civilization, of power, and intelligence; when the pathless wilds which
poor Guahiba traversed in her anguish, are replaced by populous cities,
and smiling gardens, and pastures, and waving harvests,--still that
dark rock shall stand, frowning o'er the stream; tradition and history
shall preserve its name and fame; and when even the pyramids, those
vast, vain monuments to human pride, have passed away, it shall endure,
to carry down to the end of the world the memory of the Indian Mother.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.