The Discoverie as Ethnological Text
[In the following excerpt, Whitehead examines Walter Raleigh's Discoverie as an anthropological work that provides ethnographic information on the native peoples of Guiana, and he analyzes the “symbolic convergence of native and non-native traditions” regarding El Dorado.]
(I) CAPITAYNES, CASSIQUES AND INCAN IMPERIALISTS
Recent work in the anthropology of colonial contact and the texts it generates has emphasised the way in which political, economic and social assumptions are implicit within categories of explanation (see Dirks 1992, Hulme and Whitehead 1992, Schwartz 1994 and Chapter 1 (iii) above). At the same time texts, such as Ralegh's, may be quite overtly concerned to deliver a certain kind of impression of the political, economic and social capacities of the native population, in order to facilitate the colonial enterprise itself. Both features are present in Ralegh's Discoverie, which, as has been mentioned already, breaks with earlier forms of ethnographic reportage by giving a real significance to the forms of native voice presented in the text. This does not mean that the way in which supposed native opinion and feeling is used is straightforward, but it opens the possibility that, in the absence of any other sort of record, the voices of that native past may still be heard.
There are therefore two levels at which the text of the Discoverie works anthropologically—at the level of an overt statement of ethnographic observation or ethnological inference and an implicit level of anthropological assumption and ethnographic recording that requires an informed contextual reading to make explicit. In many ways it is this implicit material which is most interesting since the hand of Ralegh's authorship must necessarily be less evident and the transmission of past practice more direct, even if apparently less intelligible. A good example of this latter issue is Ralegh's [7] recording of the phrase ‘Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana’ which he partially translates correctly as meaning ‘Elizabeth the great princesse or greatest commaunder’. However, quite apart from the way in which Ralegh wishes to imply a mimesis between native and colonial politics, this phrase is actually much more interesting than his overt reporting of it indicates. Ralegh does not translate the word ‘cassipuna’ but its occurrence bears on a critical issue in the historical anthropology of the region—who were the caribes, and what is their relation to the aruacas? This is because the word ‘cassipuna’ is a ethnonym that has been associated exclusively with caribe populations of the Caribbean, but here Ralegh's implicit reportage reveals to us the continental distribution of this ethnonym and so makes possible a better interpretation of caribe and aruaca ethnogenesis. Moreover, without this specific instance, it would be difficult, in the absence of other evidence, to connect the ‘cassipuna’ of Orinoco, with a different occurrence of the ethnonym in the account of the voyage of Jean Mocquet to the Oyapock. Here Mocquet designates all the inhabitants of the coast as ‘Caripou’ when all other sources (reviewed above) indicate only caribes, Palikur and Yao. It might then be inferred that Mocquet's use of the term ‘caripou’ was a garbled attempt to render ‘Palicour’ since the substitution of ‘p’ for ‘b’ and ‘r’ for ‘l’ is common in the European transcription of native American languages. However, thanks to Ralegh's inclusion of the term for quite other reasons we are able to say that Mocquet's ‘Caripou’ are the Yao of the English sources (see above). But even more important than this positive identification of historical native populations is the revelation as to the broader usage of the term ‘cassipuna’ that is contained in the Discoverie. This suggests that there were different levels of auto-denomination with ‘cassipuna’ referring to a wider ethnic, linguistic and cultural base than the more specific and politically charged terms, such as Yao, caribe, aruaca and so forth. This insight vastly improves our ability to analyse the historical emergence of successive identities and so the dynamism of native political structures through the colonial period.
These native political structures in turn reflected the unfolding of colonialism in the region and, as has already been suggested, Ralegh's text refers to a moment of particularly rapid development—the transition from the ancient élite rulerships to new forms of political and military association—represented by caribes and aruacas. In fact the Discoverie is quite notable for its almost complete absence of reference to caribes and aruacas, especially since the lower Orinoco and Guiana coast was the historic site of the emergence of this powerful native political phenomenon. One might take this to be evidence of the limitations of ethnographic coverage in the Discoverie but it actually reflects the highly time-dependent nature of ethnographic observation, as Ralegh was to find out on his return in 1618. This is not to say there are no such references but the political centrality of the caribes and aruacas is not at all evident yet, as Topiawari and Carapana try to cling desperately to the old forms of leadership and power, hoping no doubt that Ralegh will ensure their political continuance if not the rout of the Spaniards.
The particular moment at which Ralegh's text captures native society and polity does not tell us then of certain important developments, but it does tells us what preceded those developments. Many other accounts tend to project these burgeoning native identities on to the sixteenth-century material, much as Columbus used the distinction caribe-guatiao to simplify his own and subsequent Spanish ethnologies. Of course these ideological frameworks were themselves influential in bringing about those changes in native society which they claimed to already be describing. However, Ralegh, by dint of his access to Spanish intelligence on the lower Orinoco, was necessarily directed to the extant leaderships with which the Spanish had been struggling since the 1530s. The tendency of Spanish accounts to elide and simplify native distinctions, as in the prescriptive use of the categories caribe and aruaca, meant that such accounts have not left us with the detailed information that Ralegh's drive to narrativity in the Discoverie requires (see above). In consequence, Ralegh emerges as our most intricate source for understanding the lower Orinoco, notwithstanding the fact that he may have culled much from Spanish informants and published or captured texts. Without the Discoverie it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to reconstruct the polities of Carapana, Morequito/Topiawari and their connections to Trinidad. Similarly, modern ethnography has been aware of the ancient nature of the Warao occupation of the delta and coastlands, but has been unaware of the kinds of political divisions that both Ralegh and Dudley refer to. Such information might be recoverable from Spanish records but it would require a major archival project to know whether this was so or not—if nothing else Ralegh then suggests why such an effort could be productive and what sort of research strategies should be followed.
Precisely because Ralegh's ethnology looks back into the sixteenth century it has an imaginary and fabulous appearance to commentators whose own historical ethnology is formulated via materials of the seventeenth century onwards. This, unfortunately, therefore applies to most anthropologists, especially the archaeologists, who have studied the Caribbean and Amazonia.1 This comes across most clearly in the matter of El Dorado and native gold working, which is why these topics are subject to extended treatment below. But because of this kind of issue in the interpretation of the Discoverie other kinds of evidence for the complexity and scale of native polity on Orinoco have been dismissed out of hand. Ralegh's diplomacy to the ‘king’ of Arromaia, Topiawari, his construction of the event as a courtly encounter and the delineation of the ‘lords’ and ‘captains’ that are subject to such as Carapana, all build the feeling of being in the presence of persons of significance and developed polity. More cynically it might be said that this presentation is no more than an attempt to dress up as ‘imperial discovery’ what was in fact no more than a touristic sojourn of some thirty days among the petty tribal chiefs of Orinoco, enlivened by tales of monstrosity and marvel, and made credible by the lucky happenstance of Berrio's capture and the plagiarism of his sources. This interpretation would work for those unconcerned with the indigenous population except for the fact that, even if derivative, those sources, as well as others, are consistent in their description of native social scale and political complexity.
Another way to view this issue is to notice the mimesis in political forms implied in the analogy between ‘capitaynes’ and ‘cassiques’. Ralegh [6] suggests that native usage had changed under European influence such that the term ‘capitayne’ had become the more common. Native practice then makes licit the inference that the equivalence was perceived only in performance of that role, not in a theoretical and historical understanding of naval leadership in Europe. The latter inference would pertain to a situation where the term ‘capitayne’ is given by the Europeans to those whom native practice designates as ‘cacique’. Indeed, Ralegh even seems to implicitly acknowledge this since he uses the term ‘captaine’ to refer to the rank of his officers, such as Preston, Calfeild and Gifford, reserving ‘capitayne’ as descriptive of native leaders; although his usage is not consistent enough to make this a certain distinction. None the less, if we understand the captaincy of Ralegh and others as a ‘feudalism of the sea’ (Ojer 1966), then the analogy is apt in making accessible to us the feudal dynamics of native leadership as well. Ralegh [4] thus defines ‘cacique’ as a ‘lord of people’ with implicit contrast to ownership of a resource as property (things) or vassals (slaves).
This returns us to a consideration of Ralegh's phrase ‘Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana’—for the element ‘aquerewana’ or ‘acarewana’ [6] has yet to be analysed. It was not an equivalent for ‘cacique’ but implied another level of hierarchy and so was entirely appropriate for a queen or princess, though again, as in the case of ‘capitayne’ it must be seen as a limited analogy from native practice since royal ritual and history was quite different. However, the force of the analogy is such as to reveal to us the existence of paramount chieftaincy, an important theoretical category for political anthropology. Moreover Ralegh himself, as has been pointed out above, even toyed with the idea of becoming an acarewana on his final return in 1617.
However, the colonial cultural and social conquest of indigenous people destroyed the basis for the acarewana, since their large polities were easy targets for successive invasion. Rather colonial conditions of trade and warfare engendered, even as Ralegh's observation confirms, a mimetic elaboration of the role of ‘capitayne’—for it was this political form of leadership that was key to the development of the caribes and aruacas. Colonial authorities right across the region thus promoted their favoured trading partners and allies in war on an individual basis, which over time crystallised out these oppositional identities, even as the same process of colonial conflict engendered the idea of the ‘nation-state’ in Europe.
A close reading of Ralegh's account, in addition to a survey of the toponymic evidence available in other sources, suggests that the basic political and spatial entities of lower Orinoco were constituted in a hierarchical fashion with, at the base, a group of villages sharing a section of river being called a ‘countrey’ by Ralegh, and being indicated by the linguistic element ‘cai’ in the native terms he records. A number of such ‘countreys’ went to form a ‘province’. These political units are also directly indicated in Spanish sources via the name of their principal cacique, which is why Topiawari, for example, is sometimes referred to as ‘Morequite’ in Spanish sources.2 Finally, at the highest level there was a maximal ‘lordship’ (acarewana) which comprised a number of such river systems, as in Topiawari's dominance of the Orinoco south bank as ‘King of Arromaia’, or Carapana's ‘Kingdom of Emeria’. Thus political authority was held at all levels by hereditary chieftains belonging to Topiawari's immediate family (i.e. son or nephews) and so may be considered a truly dynastic form of political organisation. The accuracy of Ralegh's description of native political hierarchy is demonstrated by the fact that the Spanish explicitly followed such rules of succession when attempting to usurp Topiawari's accession as acarewana of the Orinoqueponi, by promoting the candidacy of Topiawari's nephew, Eparacano, having first baptised him as Don Juan. They also, according to what Topiawari told Ralegh [76], ‘apparelled and armed’ Eparacano's son and baptised him as Don Pedro, ‘by whome they seeke to make a partie against mee, in mine owne countrey’, to which end Don Pedro married ‘one Louiana of a strong familie, which are my borderers and neighbours’.
Similar political structures were also directly instituted by the Yao settled at the Oyapock mouth in the early seventeenth century, as was outlined in the discussion of Leonard Ragapo's ‘Signiory’ of Cooshebery. Besides Leonard Ragapo the Yao acarewana, Anacajoury, had four other ‘signiories’ in the region between the Amazon and Oyapock. Since these political arrangements were quite consciously created as part of an act of indigenous colonialism this is perhaps our clearest demonstration of a sophisticated native capacity for political organisation of some complexity and scale. It is also possible to sense the strongly mimetic element that was present in the political performances of Capitayne and Cacique, as such individuals were variously, but in a similar structural manner, displaced from their familiar arenas of political action. In this way both indigenous and colonial leaders were faced with analogous problems of sustaining their authority over their fellows in the face of the unknown and unpredictable conditions of contact and for this reason we can observe the emergence of symbiotic and mimetic social forms (Whitehead 1992, 1996a).
The search for meaningful analogy between native political proclivity and colonial ambition is also expressed in the Discoverie through the idea of an invasion of upland Guiana by the remnants of the Incan royal house. Ralegh [100] suggests that Berrio had confessed to him that, when the Spanish seized the major ‘temples’ in Peru, a series of prophecies were uncovered that included the promise that ‘from Inglatierra those Ingas should be againe in time to come restored, and delivered from the servitude of the said Conquerors’. Of course Ralegh is not unusual in searching for a justification for colonial occupation that proceeds from some supposed desire of the colonised themselves (see Chapter 1 (iv)).
In both Mexico and Peru there were various suggestions by the Spanish, as well as their native allies, that Cortéz or Pizarro were returning gods.3 The Viracoa of Peruvian myth-cycles, an ancestral creator, bearded and white, left the Andes towards the east promising to return, and so provided an opportunity for the identification of Spanish colonialism with the fulfilment of that prophecy. Along the Orinoco the culture-hero Amalivaca likewise disappears to the east, promising to return at the end of time. He was often noted by the missionaries as an apparent native prefiguring of the coming of Christian religion. In Amazonia and coastal Brazil native Tupi prophets, who led messianic migrations in search of Guayupia (‘The-Land-Without-Evil’), were known as the Carai (Clastres 1995). This term is used to this day to describe ‘whites’, but in its original application would have referred to the extraneous origins, religious proclivities and ‘shining whiteness’ (skin and/or armour) of the Europeans.4 In Orinoco Ralegh's call to fight the Spanish, in the context of increasing Dutch, French and English activity in the region, produced a similar prophetic vision. As mentioned before, in 1597 a Dutch reconnaissance of Orinoco gleaned the remarkable information that a native leader had ‘spoken with the spirit Wattopa’ and thereby prophesied the liberation of the native population by the English and Dutch. Of course the recording of this prophecy was utterly self-serving in the matter of the colonial project, and the British Government in the nineteenth century did not fail to massage even this early account in order to enhance its later claims to influence amongst the people of Orinoco.5 None the less, traditions of prophetic political leadership are deeply ingrained in native practice and this will be relevant to the interpretation of Topiawari's reported interview with Ralegh, where the scale and complexity of native polity are laid out.
According to Ralegh's report, Topiawari told him of a fundamental division in the societies of Guiana. From the Orinoco south as far as Wacarima, that is the beginning of the upland sierras (La Gran Sabana in Venezuela, Rupununi in Guyana), the people were all of the same ‘cast and appellation’. This accords with the distribution of peoples sharing Cariban language which is mutually intelligible amongst many of its modern variants (Pemon, Kapon, Karinya, Macuxi). Schomburgk (1848: 75) thought that Wacarima was a direct reference to the Pakaraima mountains and that Amariocapana was ‘inhabited by the Epuremei’, but this is inconsistent on the part of Schomburgk since Ralegh says [62] that they were ‘in sight’ from Orinoco, and the map to accompany Schomburgk's edition of the Discoverie clearly marks Amariocapana as on the northern flanks of the Sierra Imataca. But Ralegh is also inconsistent as we are told later [84-5] that Wacarima is the name of the ‘mountaine of Christall’, first mentioned earlier [69] when the Orinoqueponi agree to take Ralegh there. According to Ralegh [85] Berrio confirmed the mineral richness of this mountain but was unable to approach it because of the Orinoqueponi's hostility. This confusion suggests either that Ralegh simply misunderstood the referent for Topiawari's name or that Topiawari was referring to the Sierra Imataca with the term Wacarima, which Schomburgk then illicitly assimilated to the modern usage. However, while there is reason to be sceptical of Ralegh's understanding of Topiawari, that the term Wacarima might function as a toponym for both a basket-shaped mountain (see fn. 87) and as the name for a region of mountains displaying such characteristics is undoubtedly a fertile source for the misapprehension of Ralegh and inconsistency of Schomburgk. In either case the issue of the geographical scale and reference in Topiawari's reported description is critical for assessing the accuracy of Ralegh's understanding of Topiawari, and Schomburgk's ambiguousness at this point may well be related to an unspoken scepticism of Ralegh on this issue. However, the continent-wide nature of native political geographies is amply demonstrated by both European report and native oral tradition (Vidal 1993, Whitehead 1997—see also … section (iv) below) and so we can be confident of Topiawari's ability to relate events and locations that were deep into the interior. In which case it is this latter context, until now underappreciated, that should be considered as the context for Topiawari's allusions, if not for Ralegh's interpretations of those allusions. Accordingly the valley of Amariocapana would refer to the Yuruari-Cuyuni river basins, in which case the first ‘civill towne’ of the Empire called Macureguarai would be situated in the Mazaruni river basin, which also accords with the other internal evidence of the Discoverie (see below).
Topiawari, at the time of his meeting with Ralegh [61], was supposedly 110 years old,6 so that his own recall of the invasion into Guiana places the event at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The flight of the Manco-Inca, brother of the reigning Inca, Atahualpa, did not occur until the spring of 1532 so accepting Ralegh's report of Topiawari's recall would seem at best uncertain. In any case modern research has definitively established the direction of Manco-Inca's escape as south of the Amazon, to the region of the fortress city of Vilcabamba. Moreover, Manco-Inca was to the south of the Amazon at the time of his flight, making a north-easterly route of escape very unlikely.7
So if the identification of the Epuremei with the royal Incan house can be dismissed as Ralegh's misunderstanding or misrepresentation of Topiawari's discourse, to what else might Topiawari have been referring? Goeje (1939) was the first to suggest that what Ralegh took to be references to the invasion of Incan orejones, led by a remnant élite, the Epuremei, were in fact poetic allusions on the part of Topiawari to the oriyu and pululima, the spirits of water and rain in the Arawakan and Cariban language-families respectively. This suggestion certainly accords with the practice of anthropology to be alert to native tropes and metaphors that lie behind apparently culturally transparent propositions and, certainly, colonial history is replete with examples of such misconstruals.8 In this case, however, such an interpretation is complicated by the way in which Ralegh works the master-trope of Incan invasion and makes it appear that Topiawari was speaking in more than one language at the same time. Significantly then there is reference to the Epuremei in other sources, both Spanish and English, but not to the Orejones. This suggests that this latter element is evidence of Ralegh's wish to derive ethnographically an Incan connection from the discourse of Topiawari, perhaps to conceal his Spanish sources (see Chapter 1 (iv)). Nevertheless, Topiawari may yet have been accurately telling of a fundamental change in the upland polities in the period since Spanish contact. Recent work by Vidal (1993) on the sacred histories of the Bare, an Arawakan people of the upper Río Negro region in western Amazonia, startlingly amplifies inferences already made from the colonial material (Whitehead 1989: maps a and b, 1993, 1994). Vidal records that the Epuremei appear in Bare history as the Maduacaxes, part of a once extensive Arawakan macro-polity. As indicated on Map II, the political intrusion of the Epuremei from the south, and their construction of a major settlement or province in the Orinoco basin, Macureguarai, is a key context for understanding Ralegh's reportage of Topiawari's analysis. Indeed the very name Macureguarai seems highly apposite for the military outpost which was the source of Topiawari's suffering, since it may be glossed in the Bare language as Maculewawa (Scorpion). Moreover, in so far as the effects of colonial contacts far outrun in time and space the face-to-face encounter of coloniser and colonised we should remember that the advent of European activity in the Amazon valley from the 1540s onwards could also have played into these emergent conflicts among native polities. The oral history of modern groups living in the Pakaraima mountains, the archaeological pattern of military sites and the contrasting cultural ecology of groups living in the upland savannas to those of the forest and low valleys, also indicate that these regions dividing the drainage basins of Amazon and Orinoco form a ‘natural’ frontier (Whitehead 1996d). A socio-economic orientation to either the Amazon or Orinoco would then carry political implications for an involvement in various networks of trade, marriage, and alliance in war, as would the broad cultural-linguistic contrasts between Arawakans and Caribans that this frontier also partly descries.
So there are excellent reasons to think that much of the reportage Ralegh supplies directly reflects the complexity and sophistication of native Guiana polities at the end of the sixteenth century, including their production of gold work and its distribution across the western Amazon-Orinoco river basins. Even the legendary ‘city’ of Manoa and the lake Parime on which it stood may be located as cultural, if not physical, phenomena once Ralegh's descriptions have been contextualised in respect of both native praxis and the history of the European myth-cycle of El Dorado. Such contextualisation necessarily takes us beyond the immediate limits of Ralegh's text by requiring a broad discussion of the nature of past socio-cultural praxis in northern South America. It is worth emphasising now, however, that Ralegh's Incan framework to explain the existence of a large, rich and beautiful empire in the highlands foreshadows the early archaeological interpretation of complexity in Amazonia by deriving the source of this complexity from outside the region itself (see Whitehead 1996b). It was this early paradigm in Amazonian anthropology that led to an almost complete disregard for the documentary record, precisely because texts such as Ralegh's were uninterpretable to those with an ethnology derived from the post-1600 era.
(II) GOLDEN METALS
As was remarked in Chapter 1 (iii), it is plausible to claim that anthropology is hopelessly contaminated by its colonial origins, continually conceptualising others according to a set of categories originally generated by the exigencies of colonial conquest. In consequence the discipline of anthropology is seen as wedded to an exotic presentation of others—for without such culturally unfamiliar behaviours and institutions why would we need anthropology to explain them? Ralegh's Incan version of the El Dorado legend seemed to anthropology's critics a perfect example of this process, and one which neatly accorded anyway with a professional lack of interest on the part of anthropologists in textual materials. ‘Fieldwork’ was the redemptive totem of anthropology's intellectual transgressions as a handmaiden to colonialism. However, the contextualisation of Ralegh's descriptions with native practice undertaken here uses a very different kind of hermeneutic, which stresses similarity over difference, symbiosis over isolation, and coevalness over cultural time, as was suggested above. This is because the standard approaches of culture theory are inadequate for understanding of convergent, mimetic, and negotiated meanings which emerge in the course of colonial encounters (see Whitehead 1996a), and, as we have partly seen, are strongly present in Ralegh's text. If mimesis is simultaneously present and logically connected to the production of difference in the colonial process, this would contradict the anthropological presumption of some theorists and commentators (e.g. Greenblatt 1991, Mason 1990, Pagden 1993, Sahlins 1995, Todorov 1982) who seem to stress only the alterity and the incommensurability of cultural forms. We may wonder then if subtle rhetorics of identity, revealed in mimetic borrowing from native forms, are not themselves as much a product of encounter as the production of difference. If so, then this facet of colonialism is at least as important as the rather obvious analytical discovery of ‘marvellous monstrosity’. As is evident from the Discoverie, colonial interaction engenders a process of mimetic elaboration, and so the putative ‘discovery’ of El Dorado and his Guianan ‘Empyre’ becomes an opportunity for the cultural elaboration of various ideological motifs, by both indigenes and colonials alike.
The negative case confirms this since the relative importance of Sciopodi and Acephali in the European writing on the New World is directly connected to the relative importance of those icons in native thought. The dog-headed people, centaurs, and minotaurs do not appear with the same frequency as other monstrous/marvellous motifs in the colonial records because they were not part of the native repertoire. In any case various monstrosities were already present in native ethnologies prior to European contacts, and so cannot be dealt with as an aspect of European ideological projection, or indigenous acculturation to these projections. This holds true even if any given text cannot be relied upon historiographically or ethnographically, since, as already mentioned, the evidence is also archaeological.
GOLDEN METALS AND COLONIAL DESIRE
The legend or myth of El Dorado refers to a diversity of native cultural practices that are related only by virtue of being grouped together by European compilation, and there is no reason to think that such practices were uniform for native people themselves. Nor should it be forgotten that, whatever the apparent absurdities of European accounts of El Dorado, an ancient tradition of gold working in northern South America is amply attested to in both the archaeological and the historical record. Specifically that record tells of both the production of native gold work, with all the attendant metallurgical knowledge that this implies, and the diverse symbolic and ritual uses to which such golden metals were put. Given the vast metallic wealth extracted by the Europeans from both Central and South America, it is not surprising that the notion of El Dorado should have seemed most credible at the time. For, although the El Dorado motif was not prefigured in European enthologies in the specific way that both ‘Cannibals’ and ‘Amazons’ were, it is none the less the case that there existed a general expectation, partly deriving from the encounter with Africa, that gold was especially engendered as a geophysical property of the ‘torrid zone’, or equatorial latitudes. In Ralegh's case his personal interests in, and connections with, alchemists and mystics, such as John Dee, suggest that he also may have had further reasons to anticipate and seek out a ‘golden king’.
Earlier editions of the Discoverie have tended to focus only on the absurdities and failures of the Spanish quest for the ‘Golden One’ as have commentators on early European expeditions more generally, and so it will not be necessary to supply such a review here.9 Rather, by considering native ritual and symbolic uses for golden metals, not only the ‘rationality’ of the European mystic quest but more particularly the credibility of the reportage in the Discoverie can be better assessed. For this reason a clear distinction must be made between colonial and native understandings of El Dorado.
The European El Dorado myth refers to the existence of a ‘Golden One’—that is a ‘king’ or ‘high chief’—who once a year was anointed by the sprinkling of gold dust on to his body. He was then paddled to the centre of a vast lake where he would deposit votive offerings of gold work. A further subsidiary element in this tale concerns the names of this lake—variously given as Paytiti, Parime or Rupununi—and the great and golden city which stood on its edge, called Manoa. This city was held to lie in an upland area, perhaps recalling locations such as Tenotchticlan and Cuzco, and so it was that in the high sierras of the upper Amazon, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Surinam the El Dorado legend came successively to rest. In trying to uncover the extent to which such reports may have also reflected actual cultural practices, it is therefore important to remember that these variations in the European legends relate as much to the expansion of cultural and geographical knowledge in the sixteenth century as they do to any inherent inconsistency and prejudice in European discourse about the native population. There were plausible reasons for seeking El Dorado in these three regions, and these reasons remain valid whatever the cultural rapacity and geographical ignorance of the early expeditionaries who acted on them.
For example, in the case of Colombia where the native tradition of gold working is well attested to from the archaeological record, the European myth of El Dorado accurately reflected elements of past cultural practices of the Muisca who lived in the highland region. Just outside of Bogotá lies Guatavita, a deep freshwater lake, formed by the impact crater of a meteor. Repeated dredging operations, beginning in the last century, have been carried out at this site and, tunjos (golden votive objects) have been recovered from the lake bottom. More significantly a tunjo recovered from Lake Siecha, also in the Muisca region, depicts El Dorado himself, aboard the raft and surrounded by his retinue, paddled annually to the center of a lake, there to cast in the tunjos, as an offering to divinity. No city has been discovered on the shores of the lake, but the proto-urban scale of the culture of Muisca people, at the heart of whose territories Lake Guatavita and Lake Siecha are situated, is strongly attested to by the historical record (Ramos-Perez 1973, Langebaek 1987, 1990).
So here the El Dorado myth as the Europeans presented it is precisely confirmed by native practice, but it is also significant that this only led to the belief that there would be yet more El Dorados to be encountered—especially as the Muisca store of gold work was quickly plundered by the Spanish. This unwillingness to abandon the idea of an El Dorado shows the irreducibly mythic aspect of the tale in the service of the ideology of colonial expansion. Early encounter with the Muisca, and the other Colombian gold working cultures, could not completely satisfy all the elements or promise of the El Dorado myth, and so only encouraged the search for another location.
Accordingly Manoa, the supposed ‘golden city’ on the shores of a great lake, was transposed to the upper Amazon during the 1530-40s and latterly to the Guiana highlands, during the 1580-90s; these transpositions closely match the chronology of the expansion of European geographical understanding and colonial ambition. As a result, Gonzalo Pizarro, conquistador of Peru, wrote to the Spanish King in 1542 that, following assurances from native leaders as to the wealth of this region, he had led an expedition to La Canela, or the Land of Cinnamon, and the region around the lake of El Dorado, an area known today as the Río Napo, in the upper Amazon. Although Pizarro did not ultimately locate this source of native gold work during his incursion, one of his captains, whom he sent to reconnoitre further downstream, Francisco de Orellana, found it impossible to return upriver to the main party and so became the first Spaniard to descend the full length of the Amazon river. It was following Orellana's encounters on the lower Amazon, which will be discussed below, that the myth of the American Amazons originated—a conjuncture of historical circumstance which also brightly illumines the interplay of myth and reality for the Europeans.
Despite Pizarro's failures in the Land of Cinnamon, the mythic apparatus of the Amazonian El Dorado continued to grow. The lake on which he resided was now said to be called Paytiti and various locations, subject to the annual flooding of the Amazon river, were investigated. Native gold work was also persistently encountered but the identification of a single source repeatedly frustrated. This was undoubtedly partly due to the fact that the key elements of the El Dorado myth had been transposed by the Europeans from the Colombian context, and that gold sources in north-eastern Amazonia are rarely to be found in geological contexts like those in Colombia, but rather are alluvial and dispersed in character. However, the annual formation of ‘lakes’, due to the flooding of the Amazon river, as well as the cultural pattern of the working and wearing of gold as élite activities, meant that any one of the chiefdoms of the Amazon basin could have provided an empirical context for European readings of the El Dorado legend.
The final, and still controversial, location for El Dorado was in the uplands of Guiana and, while we may rule out the possibility of uncovering an urban-scale settlement in this region, its significance as major intra-continental trading crossroads should alert us to the past ritual and political significance of upland peoples. Obviously such a location for the El Dorado legend seems unlikely given an absence of direct archaeological confirmation, but the importance of the flooded savannas of Rupununi in facilitating and inviting communication across the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds, principally via the Río Branco and Essequibo or Río Negro and Casiquiare, certainly validates the emphasis given to the upland region in Ralegh's understanding of native politics. As mentioned above, recent work by Vidal (1993) on Bare oral history has illustrated how the Guiana region was politically and ritually integrated through the encoding of key trade routes and ritual sites in the mythologies of Bare culture heroes, and we may expect that native tales both of the Aikeam-Benano (Amazons) and of élite display of gold (El Dorado) relate to this past integration in a similar way. Moreover, the connection of the Guiana region with the production of gold work can now be better understood in material terms also since, in 1990, a sample of such gold work was recovered from precisely the area that Ralegh [19, 30, 63, 75, 91] records as the site of the ‘first civill towne’ of the Epuremei, the Mazaruni river.
None the less, recent cultural-ecological perspectives in anthropology have held this region to be generally poor or marginal to human settlement in South America with a corresponding scepticism as to the potential of this region for producing complex societies. Accordingly what traces there were of such complexity were thought to derive from the Andean and/or Colombian regions, just as Ralegh's Incan theory represents an early example of this intellectual trend to deny autonomous socio-cultural complexity in Guiana. The Guiana area is relatively little studied anthropologically: this is not just due to the finite resources that are available but also, as mentioned previously (n. 1), due to the negative evaluation of the potential of this region for significant cultural development. Consequently the intellectual projection of an ethnographic record, itself historically constituted from the categories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ethnologies that actually reflected the decimation which colonial occupation had wreaked on native societies, back into the pre-European and early contact periods has seemed to justify the derivation of any advanced archaeological and cultural features in Amazonian societies from outside the region altogether. In turn this has produced a deep, but unwarranted, scepticism of the historical record, in which the problematic aspects of such texts of the Discoverie are held up as exemplars of the general unreliability of colonial documentary evidence. However, with the benefit of modern archaeological techniques and a critical use of the written records, as in this edition of the Discoverie, important features of ancient Amazonian society are at last beginning to emerge.
Just as a proper anthropological understanding of this region has only now begun to develop, so too Guiana was the last place that El Dorado was pursued. This final pursuit began in the 1580-90s and really ended only in the eighteenth century as Europeans finally traversed the upland savannas that connect the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. Moreover, as this was the geographical context for the final version of the El Dorado myth it has also often been taken to stand for all other versions, with the result that the failure to extract significant native gold work from this region was thought to invalidate the El Dorado myth-cycle as a whole—notwithstanding the extensive plunder of gold in Colombia and the upper Amazon. This persistent ideological desire for an El Dorado reveals the functions it served for the Europeans: that is, it acted as a constant stimulus to further colonial conquest and occupation of the continent—just as was the case for Orellana's descent of the Amazon—in a way that abstract appeals for ‘exploration’ or ‘discovery’ could never have been. In turn such an ideological motif could become a constant stimulus to high political ambition as much as for low greed, since the political significance of the power of ‘Indian Golde’ in Europe was explicitly alluded to in contemporary debate, and by Ralegh [To the Reader 3 verso] with regard to Charles V, King of Spain. However, to show the role that European ideas of an El Dorado had in facilitating colonial conquest is not to answer the question—was there ever an El Dorado in the Guiana highlands?
GOLDEN METALS IN NATIVE PRACTICE
The interpretative tradition in history, anthropology and geography to date has been to see the Discoverie as no more than a spurious reworking of the El Dorado legend or an ‘exuberant flight of fancy’ (Hemming 1978: 166). None the less, both Robert Schomburgk (1848: lxii-lxiv) and Paul Rivet (1923) were notable early exceptions to this consensus, as are Warwick Bray (1972) and Adam Nagy (1982) more recently. As Bray (1972: 25) rightly notes in relation to Walter Ralegh's extensive reports on native metallurgy, deriving from his reconnaissances of the lower Orinoco and Guiana coast in 1595, ‘it comes as an anticlimax to learn that no pre-European metal objects of any kind have been preserved from Guyana or the eastern parts of Venezuela’. The discovery of just such an object would therefore clearly require a profound re-examination, not just of Ralegh's account in the Discoverie but also of the many other historical sources, and ambiguous archaeological finds, that testify to a native metallurgical tradition in Guiana.
In 1990 gold-miners brought a golden chest-pendant10 in the form of a two-headed ‘eagle’ which they had dredged from the mid-Mazaruni river bottom, to the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown, Guyana. It would thus appear that the persistent testimony of the historical record as to the existence of a native tradition of gold working and usage, in the region of Macureguarai, should no longer simply be dismissed as the ideological product of the gold-fevered brains of the conquistadores and their English, Dutch and French contemporaries. The more so since the Guyana discovery has been recently paralleled by the find of an example of native gold work from the Antilles (Siegel and Severin 1993). However, there are two key reasons why more extensive archaeological evidence of this tradition is so far absent.
Firstly, there seems a strong likelihood that European trade and plunder had exhausted the native store of gold by the end of the seveteenth century. Some native leaders were perfectly content, notwithstanding the ritual significance of golden objects, to exchange them for the powerful political potentialities inherent in the control of the distribution of European manufactures. In Orinoco both the acarewana, Morequito and Carapana, traded their store of gold work to the Spanish in anticipation of political or commercial advantages. Since, as we have seen, these individuals were also political opponents in a protracted struggle for the favour of the Europeans, one may infer that such exchanges were not considered detrimental to the authority of their leadership. Emphasis on this issue is important because of the supposed secrecy that surrounded the location of gold sources—was this part of a native tradition of élite control that preceded the interest of the Europeans, or was it a response to the Europeans' obsessive interest in gold? In the latter case native ‘secrecy’ cannot be seen as indicative of the actual presence of gold at all, but rather as evidence of native attempts to deal with the violent obsessions of the Europeans. In practice the issue is further complicated by the fact that both motivations are likely to have been present, but until now it was assumed that the latter analysis was sufficient explanation of native practice.
For example, Morequito forbade his people from revealing or trading gold as much because it would (and did) undermine his authority as for reasons of cultural scruple, given its use to adorn sacred caves and the bones of the ancestors (see Berrio in Relaciónes 1964: 237; Ralegh [42]). Moreover, given the ritual and symbolic substitution of native gold by European metals, particularly brass or bronze bells and rattles which mimicked the most desirable features of native forms (smell, brilliance and voice), native production itself may have anyway have fallen into decline, or turned to other less dangerous materials such as silver. In which case it is probable that the native store was quickly exhausted, especially where trade became plunder and ransom. Morequito, according to Ralegh [32], tried to escape execution by the Spanish with the offer of three ‘quintals’ of gold (approximately 300 to 336 lbs), and his mother's brother and designated successor, Topiawari, survived only through the ransom of ‘100 plates of gold and diverse spleenstones [takua]’.
A second reason for the absence of archaeological finds of native gold in Guiana is suggested by the cultural context of the better-known Colombian examples. The bulk of the native gold work that the Spanish and their modern successors have recovered in the territories of such groups as the Sinu, Tairona and Muisca has been looted from élite burials or sites of votive offerings. Neither of these kinds of site has yet been encountered in the region under discussion. However, Ralegh [92-3] suggests that such sites might yet be found.
Accordingly, it will be the purpose of this section to outline and discuss the content of the Discoverie as regards the production of native gold work in the Guiana region, with particular attention to the upper Mazaruni and Caroni rivers, since these are significant within Ralegh's account and in the subsequent commentary on the credibility of Ralegh's claims. This exercise is critically different from the reviews of the El Dorado legend in the editions of the Discoverie by Harlow and Schomburgk since the information is reviewed in the context of indigenous ritual and symbolic uses of golden metals. By these means it is hoped that the symbolic convergence of native and non-native traditions as to El Dorado can be better appreciated and so the general veracity of the accounts in the Discoverie be established.
Not surprisingly the first extensive accounts of the existence of native gold work, often simply called joyas de oro (‘jewels of gold’), come from the Caribbean region during the Spanish occupation of Hispaniola. It is clear from these descriptions that such objects are to be distinguished from the gold alloy (Arawakan guanin, Cariban caracoli) pieces that originated in Guiana. There is no evidence either that naturally occurring gold-copper alloys are present in the Caribbean islands or that the indigenous population at contact had knowledge of the metallurgical techniques to produce such alloys. For such pieces as were produced in the Greater Antilles the technique of beating relatively pure nuggets of gold (called caona or tuob) into thin sheets was the prevalent practice.11 However, the Spaniards often encountered guanin objects as well as simple gold-leaf decoration which indicates that, whatever technical limitations there may have been to gold working in the islands, they were more than offset by the close political and economic connections of the islanders with the southern continent.12 The importance of this relationship was also strongly reflected in the myth and symbolism of the fifteenth-century Antilleans who identified the southern continent with the legendary isla de Guanin, the ancestral source of gold alloys.
The source of the relatively well documented Antillean guanin was, according to native testimony, to the south east and, indeed, it is to the region to south of the Orinoco and east of the Caroni that the early accounts most consistently refer in their discussions of native gold working in Guiana.
On the basis of Ralegh's [22, 24] testimony it appears that two kinds of manufacture, gold ‘plates’ and carved nephrite or takua, which were usually rendered in the form of frog-shaped pendants, had a key role to play in the long-distance exchanges of élite groups from the Antilles to the Amazon. It is therefore significant that the initial establishment of many of the Spanish colonial enclaves mimicked this native political process through the exchanges made between Spanish and native leaders, matching these gold objects against steel tools and ‘European guanin’ in the form of hawk bells, rattles and buckles made of brass.
Along the Atlantic coast, even into the seventeenth century, golden artefacts were an important medium of exchange in both the surviving native economy and the burgeoning colonial one; suggesting that native willingness to exchange gold work at rates the Europeans perceived as laughably favourable to themselves was less an expression of native commercial naivety and more an indication of alternative economic values, deriving from their contrasting cultural attitudes to metals. In native terms gold alloys were particularly valued for their brilliance and smell—guanin objects being sometimes referred to as taguagua after the odoriferous Caribbean plant of the same name—rather than their absolute gold content. For the same reasons European alloys, especially brass, were valued as much as, or more than, their native equivalents.
As a medium of exchange within the surviving native economy, Ralegh [43] notes that the ancestral Warao exchanged their carpentry for tobacco out of Trinidad and gold work out of Guiana. Lawrence Keymis (1596: 44), also advised that on the Corentyn river
Some images of gold, spleen-stones, and others, may be gotten on this coast, but they do somewhat extraordinarily esteem of them, because everywhere they are current money. They get their Moons, and other pieces of gold by exchange, taking for each one of their greater Canoas, one piece or image of gold, with three heads, and after that rate for their lesser Canoas, they receive pieces of gold of less value. One hatchet is the ordinary price for a Canoa.
[my emphasis]
In the experience of another English traveller, Unton Fisher (Purchas 1906: XVI, 407), Dutch metal tools were considered an even better exchange:
He showed me before his departure from me a piece of metal fashioned like an Eagle, and as I guess, it was about the weight of eight or nine ounces troy weight, it seemed to be gold or at leastwise two parts gold and one copper, I offered him an axe, which he refused; to which I added four knives, but could not get it of him: but I imagine the Dutch at Selinama [Surinam] have bought it of him, for their only coming was for axes, as he said, hearing that the Dutch were at Selinama. I demanded where he had that Eagle, his answer was, he had it of his uncle, who dwelt among the Weearapoyns [?] in the country called Sherumerrimary [Charuma?] near the Cassipagotos country [western Pakaraimas] where is great store of these images. Further he said, that at the head of Selinama and Marwin [Maroni] there were great store of half moons, which he called by the name Unnaton.
Moreover, the native store of gold in the sixteenth century was considerable enough to be used to finance the Spanish conquests in Orinoco, as Ralegh [34] tells us was the case for Berrio. Berrio's Campmaster, Domingo de Vera, was certainly successful in this enterprise, winning financial support from both Philip II and the city of Seville. Vera's own testimony as to the nature of native metallurgy also serves to underline the control exercised by members of the native élite, such as Morequito, over the production of caracoli, as well as its ritual and symbolic functions. Vera (Colleción VI: 562) wrote:
further inland there is an infinite quantity of gold, and in the mines there nothing is taken out licitly except by the caciques and their wives, and they take it with great superstition, fasting first three days;13 but in the rivers, which carry much, it can be taken out by whoever wishes to, with which tribute is given to the lord or cacique of the grains which are as large as those of maize, or larger.
Overall the early descriptions of the region make it clear that gold work, in the form of pectorals and other bodily adornments, was common on the lower Orinoco. Good illustrations of this are the fact that large quantities were used to ransom eminent individuals seized by the Spanish, and the frequency with which it could be traded for, at least before the Spanish occupation of the region. As Vera indicated, there was a degree of control of the production of gold work by the ruling élite, further strengthened by the political constraints of trading gold with the Europeans. As the Treasurer of Cumaná reported to the Spanish King in 1595 (BL Add. MS 36317, No.30), ‘the Indians are very watchful, and always try to conceal and hide it, from the fear and suspicion that they have that the Spaniards may settle there; a practice also mentioned by both Ralegh [36] and Berrio (Relaciónes 1964: 237).
Keymis (1596: 17) explains native political calculation concerning a source on the lower Caroni river in the following manner, and introduces us to the Mazaruni Dragon, esak for gold on that river:
Gilbert, my pilot […] farther told me, that he was with Putijma, at what time Morekito was to be executed by the Spaniards, & that then the chief of Morekito his friends were in consultation, to show this mine unto them, if so they might redeem their Captains life, but upon better advice, supposing them in this case to be implacable, and that this might prove a means to lose not only their king, but their country also: they have to this day concealed it from them, being of all others the richest, and most plentiful. The aged sort, to keep this from common knowledge, have devised a fable of a dangerous Dragon that haunteth this place and devoureth all that come near it. But our Indian, if when we return, we do bring store of strong wine (which they love beyond measure) with it will undertake so to charm this Dragon, that he shall do us no harm.
This latter condition may not have merely been a ruse to induce Keymis to supply alcohol, since Vera also indicated that spirits (esak) required propitiation before gold could be removed. Equally, that Keymis chooses to mention the existence of a ‘dragon’ may have been designed to support further the idea that gold was to be found here, since Ralegh's alchemical circle of supporters would certainly have seen the presence of this dragon as a confirmation of their own mystic quest. In any case, in view of Spanish ruthlessness in the pursuit of gold, the desire to keep secret the sources for gold, while still using finished pieces to trade for European goods, seems plausible enough. Thus Keymis (1596: 23) also reported that the Spanish had killed twenty of the Cywannas (Warao clan) ‘and burnt their houses, because they refused to trade with them for certain images of gold made with many heads, which they had gotten out of Guiana’.
It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the wish to secure a European alliance led to a less guarded attitude as to sources of gold. This was the case for Carapana, who, as we have seen, twisted and turned under pressure of successive English and Spanish overtures for his allegiance, Keymis (1596: 21-3) informs us that an
old man, follower of Carapana, showed me whence most of their gold cometh, that it is formed in so many & diverse fashions: whence their Spleen-stones [takua] and all other sorts are to be had in plenty: where gold is to be gathered in the sands of their rivers: from what parts the Spaniards, both by trade, and otherwise, have returned much gold. This he uttered with Carapana his consent (I doubt not) hoping thereby to induce us to return again. For contrary to their law of secrecy, which in this case they do all generally observe, sharply punishing the breakers thereof, as enemies unto their native country: I found this man no whit scrupulous, but very free and liberal of speech in all things […] I sent a present of Iron to Carapana, and then set sail.
Similarly, Topiawari showed the location of a gold source to Ralegh (BN 18684/18, 1612—in Lorimer 1982), which he was not exploting himself since ‘if it should be discovered and reach the ears of the Spaniards, he would not get away with less than his life, and thus he did not trust even his own son in this case […] the cacique [acted] with great caution, replacing the clod and turf that they had taken out in such a way that it might not be noticed’.
So the issue of ‘secrecy’ bears strongly on our interpretations of reported native knowledge of gold sources and the Europeans became, of course, acutely aware of the difficulties of uncovering such ‘secret’ knowledge.
Once colonies had been established, the Europeans themselves, in a political mimesis of native symbols of power (see above and Chapter 1, n. 20), became suppliers of their versions of both caracoli and takua. This is also good evidence of the continuing vivacity of these native exchange systems well into colonial times, and, from the evidence of the non-Spanish sources, it would also appear that elements of native metallurgical traditions persisted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scott (Bodleian Rawl. 175, f356, c. 1670) informs us that gold, silver and ‘emeralds’ (takua) were still to be had from the sources of the Río Negro in the west, as well as from the northern Amazon tributaries of Curapanema and Genipapo in the east. He relays the account of one Captain Matteson, a Ghentoise, who had also been employed as captain of Pedro Texeira's own vessel in his ascent of the Amazon in 1637. Matteson subsequently led a successful Spanish trade expedition from Santo Tomé to ‘fifty leagues from the head of Dessekeebe’ (possibly the upper Cuyuni or Mazaruni) in 1655, there trading for gold, ‘weapons of silver’ and ‘emeralds’. After leaving the service of the Spanish, Matteson then joined with Aert Groenewegen, first governor of the Essequibo colony, to make a second foray to the upland region in 1661 but they, and their escort of some four hundred Caribs, were stopped on the Essequibo as a result of a quarrel between the Caribs and ‘other Indians they must pass through’.
Writing some hundred years later, the then governor of Essequibo, Storm van's Gravesande (1911: 460-73), noted a continuing disinclination on the part of the native population to allow the whites access to the upper reaches of the Cuyuni and Mazaruni, as well as alluding to the earlier trade in gold dust that was eventually established with the upper Essequibo. The role of the Manoas in so trading gold to the Portuguese and as suppliers for the native economy is an obvious and clear basis for the idea of Manoa as the city of El Dorado. Gravesande also mentions a native source for copper and notes that they still make their own silver ‘collars’. He further writes (1911: 468), echoing Keymis (quoted above) some 150 years earlier, that
We must have no expectations of getting information concerning any mines from the Indians. The common people themselves know nothing of them, and it is only the Chiefs and Elders, who carefully keep the same secret, and make the other Indians believe that the Jawaho or Devil lives in those places, by which they are frightened from approaching those places.
It would thus seem that, while a knowledge of metallurgical tradition may have persisted among the native élite of Guyana into the eighteenth century, it was largely passive and actively expressed only in the production of silver items, rather than gold ones, given the dangers of displaying the latter in front of the Europeans. Some further force is added to the notion that silver replaced gold in the colonial era by the evidence that silver-like nose, lip and ear plugs continued to be produced, though perhaps not from silver ore, into the nineteenth century. Today silver is preferred over gold, owing to its association with ‘spiritual light’ and the association of the gold with the yellow jaundice of disease; perhaps due to an earlier association of epidemics with European contacts and the search for gold.
There are distinct sources of gold in Guiana, it being found, as Ralegh [To the Reader 2 verso] perfectly correctly points out, ‘either in graines separate from the stone (as it is in most of al the rivers in Guiana) or else in a kinde of hard stone, which we call the white Sparre’. Given its physical concentration, the latter type of source may have been more suitable for the exercise of élite control, as Vera and Keymis (quoted above) suggest. Although since Topiawari was able to conceal more dispersed alluvial deposits from both the Spanish and his fellow Orinoqueponi, the manner of gold deposit was probably not the only critical factor. Over a number of years the intensity of tropical rains will alter the situation of alluvial deposits, requiring a thorough and continuous knowledge of local topography if these type of deposits are to be consistently exploited. This consideration seems to have been behind the judgment of Dutch merchants that, without the assistance of the indigenous population, or the actual colonisation of an area, ‘no riches or profits are to be drawn or gained […] from the mines’ (AR Memorial to States General on colonisation of Guiana, 1603, f.3).
The manufacture of the gold ‘plates’ and ‘eagles’ was not primarily on the lower Orinoco itself, although, as both Ralegh [22-3, 25, 47] and Keymis (1596: 14, 23) mention, they were widely distributed here and to the west. Ralegh [75] suggests that it was in the uplands of the Caroni, Cuyuni, and Mazaruni at the location called Macureguarai. Other sources distinguish between the production and manufacture of caracoli in this region and that to the south, in the Branco-Negro area, where Manoa traders were dominant. We are also told, in an account written by a Spanish spy in England (in Lorimer 1982), that gold extraction and refinement, as it was shown to Ralegh in the region of Topiawari's town, did not require alloying techniques, such as in the illustration by de Bry (see Plate IV and section (iv)). Indeed it has already been suggested that this gold working technique was specially inserted by Ralegh into the captured Spanish documents he reproduces (see Chapter 1 (iv)).
A further production centre existed on Trinidad, supplied with ore from the Caroni Mazaruni region. According to Lawrence Keymis (1596: 17) the Mazaruni source was largely alluvial since ‘without digging they gather gold in the sand of a final river, named Macawini’. The existence of the Caroni mines was noted by the Spanish on Trinidad as early as 1570 (BL Add. MS 36314, 22) following the expeditions of Father Francisco de Ayala in the previous decade (Ojer 1966: 173-6), but it was not until the eighteenth century that they produced a systematic definition of these deposits (AGI Mapas y Planos, Venezuela #89) under the governorship of Carlos Sucre. This exercise directly confirms the location of many of the gold deposits mentioned by Ralegh and his contemporaries, as well as the location of a silver-mine [66] that was evidently also exploited by the natives.14 One particular site, at mount Iconuri [93 sic/83] (or Riconeri in Purchas 1906: 408) was explicitly shown to Keymis in 1595, by Putijma, ‘capitayne’ of the town of Orocoa (or Orocotona) in Topiawari's province of Arromaia.
This site seems to have been directly linked to the production of gold work on Trinidad (Keymis 1596: 17), and it is significant to note that this appears to have been primarily due to the presence of a particular skilled individual. From the accounts of Dudley's reconnaissance of Trinidad and the Orinoco in 1594-5 we are given both a general description of the sources of metals and minerals between Trinidad and the Orinoco and an account of attempts to locate this individual. Dudley and his captains were told by the natives of Trinidad of trading sources for ‘tacorah’ (takua) in the Moruca river, of gold (calcurey) in the Orinoco delta region, and gold-copper alloy (arara) and silver (chipperarey) in the mountains of the Paria peninsula (Dudley 1899: 65, 73). He was also informed of
a golden mine in a town of this kingdom [Waliame = Guiana] called Orocoa, in the river […] of Owrinoicke, […] that Armago [= Putijma], Captain of the town of Orocoa […], had a mine of gold, and could refine it, and would trade with me; for token whereof he sent me 3, or 4, croissants or half moons of gold, weighing a noble a piece or more, and two bracelets of silver.
[my emphasis]
Although Dudley actually confuses the name of the captain of Orocoa, Putijma, with the name of the province in which the mine was situated, Arromaia (‘Armago’), it is important to note that Putijma could refine the ore (or have it refined). Attempts were also made on Trinidad to locate another native metal worker, named Braio, following the information given by the ‘7 or 8 of the chief Indians of Trinidad’ (Dudley 1899: 44-6).
Overall what appears to emerge from these accounts is that in the region of the lower Orinoco there were a number of possible manufacturing sites, linked to the presence of skilled individuals, like Putijma and Braio, who were ‘very expert in the melting of […] ore […] into […] calcurie’. They were supplied by specific mines under the control of the local ruling élite, yet serviced a widespread use of golden objects in the north-eastern part of Guiana which were also traded out of this zone, west towards the mid-Orinoco, north to the Antilles and south to the lower Amazon.
The existence of upland sites of manufacture, also indicated by the historical sources reviewed above, could be reflected in the find by Williams (1981: 84) of a pottery vessel at Muri mountain, on the Brazil-Guyana border, that may have functioned as a crucible for melting metals (see n. 11). A further step in giving a native context for Ralegh's information is to suggest that it is the Taruma (Saluma or Xurumal/Charuma), for whom this is an area of long ancestral occupation, are (like the Maduacaxi mentioned above) another key referent for Topiawari's Epuremei. They are also referred to as the Piriamuy by Berrio (Ramos-Perez 1973: 658) and the Epeuremei/Yeanderpuremei after Unton Fisher (in Purchas 1906: 407-8, quoted above), who may actually be more clearly alluding to the Taruma in the name of the country from which he was told gold ‘eagles’ were said to come—Sherumerrimary. Goeje's (1939: 118) suggestion as to the poetic nature of the political information Topiawari relayed to Ralegh may now be better understood. If the Epuremei and orejones mentioned by Ralegh were figuratively expressed referents to pululima and oriyu (the spirits of water and rain), then the metaphorical association between water and the Epuremei would be symbolically apposite for the supposed controllers of the upland lake or sea of Parime, on which the city of Manoa was supposed to be located, and whose fish pools and fish stocks are curiously prominent in some accounts. Association of this symbolism with the Taruma is then most appropriate in view of their native image as a people who live in caverns under the water, more like amphibians than people. Other names given to the Taruma include the tunayana (water people) or okoimoyana (people who formerly slept under the water). European travellers (see Whitehead 1990a) also reported that they reputedly slept under water in pools surrounded by fences and they were the greatest fish-eaters of all, with extensive fish ponds. Study of the petroglyphic repertoire of this region adds further force to this line of interpretation since it has revealed a high concentration of the ‘fish-trap’ type petroglyph in the ancestral Taruma zone of southern Guyana. These rock carvings were used in the regulation of fish stocks in the riverine pools of the area, to which varying species migrate annually to spawn. As Williams (1985) remarks, ‘the variety of fish traps and baiting procedures exhibited in the Kassikaityu assemblage indicates wide knowledge of the habits and haunts of various fish species and their food preferences’. It is just this kind of ecological knowledge, with its wider significance for the native regional economy, in which control of fish stocks and the production of dried fish flour for external trade was of great significance (see Whitehead 1993), that suggests the inference that the managers of such a system, that is the ‘water-Indians’ (Epuremei or Taruma), would have appeared as a powerful force to the down-river groups, such as the Orenoqueponi.15
The fact that the Epuremei were represented to both the Spanish and English as invasive strangers to the northern Pakaraima region, albeit allied to or having conquered groups indigenous to the area, may therefore genuinely reflect a radical change in inter-group relations in upland Guiana in the sixteenth century—possibly provoked by an undocumented migration away from contact with the Europeans in the Amazon-Negro basin, much as was documented for the Yao, Manoa and Wapishiana in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see above and Vidal 1993). Although it is not possible at this point to resolve whether the Maduacaxi or Taruma were exclusive referents in Topiawari's usage of the term ‘Epuremei’, it is noteworthy that the Taruma spoke an ‘isolated’ language, while incorporating Arawakan and Cariban words to some degree amongst western and eastern groups.16 Thus, in either case, Ralegh's report of Topiawari's discourse on regional politics was not an act of imagination designed to underwrite English invasion ideologically, but rather the attempt to understand indigenous political practice in this light. This is a subtle but important difference since it allows us to appreciate that Ralegh's misrepresentation of this political history, as being linked to that of the Inca, at least partly stemmed from a necessary ignorance of the ethnological context as much as from a likely desire to bolster English colonial ambition. By the same token it is not necessary to posit a mass migration to account for what may have been an event more in line with the penetration of Incan mindaeles (itinerant traders) or the Muisca merchants who likewise maintained colonial outposts in the territories with which they traded. In this way one might interpret the tale of Incan invasion as deriving from a situation in which extant trade links were utilised as a prelude to the more permanent occupation of a region by a relatively small group, perhaps a segmentary lineage,17 who were displaced or whose trade was disrupted by the European conquests to the west in the early sixteenth century.
Although it is not possible to resolve these issues of identification at present, the extensive researches of Edmundson (1906) should also be mentioned since they do suggest another context for the interpretation of the identity of the Epuremei, and the sources of the gold work that was coming from the uplands to the Orinoco, as being entirely extraneous to Guiana. Edmundson shows there is reason to believe that there was also an important zone of production to the south-west of Guiana, in the Vaupés, with which the Manoas of the Río Negro are strongly associated as traders in historical times. He also prefers to identify the peoples of the Apurima (Ucayali river), such as the Cocama and Shipibo, with the Epuremei of Ralegh's account, situating a further source of native gold work in the ‘islands of the Omaguas’ (Oniguayal), between the Solimoes and Japura rivers; as did the famous Jesuit missionary of the Orinoco, José Gumilla, from his own knowledge of the upper Orinoco and its connection to the Amazon basin through the Casiquiare. Once again the Manoas acted as traders of these items along the Amazon and up the Branco, connecting with the Dutch merchants of the Atlantic coast, who deployed uitleggers (itinerant traders) to these locations in the early seventeenth century; just as the Inca and Muisca did in other areas, and perhaps even in the Vaupés and Río Negro.18 These trade routes linking the Amazon, Orinoco, and Atlantic coast are encoded in the sacred and political geographies of the Arawakan Lokono and Bare as the paths of eminent ancestors and mythic heroes, such as Kuwai, Purunaminali (Vidal 1993) or Kororomanna (Roth 1915).
An argument therefore can be made for the existence of three non-Peruvian areas of gold working and trading in northern South America directly servicing the Guiana native élite, the Negro/Vaupés = Manoa, the Japura/Solimoes = Oniguayal and Orinoco/Mazaruni = Parima. The development of the European El Dorado legend also becomes more intelligible, for, in short, all versions are correct. The location of El Dorado's city of Manoa on the shores of Lake Parime does not move according to the whim of the native informant, bent on deceiving the white man and moving him out of his village, but according to the literal physical standpoint of the interrogator; for example, whether he is in Amazon or Orinoco. Since the searchers for El Dorado, as well as latter-day commentators on their efforts, have the ideé fixe of a single, urban-scale situation for the production and distribution of the wide range of native artefacts made in gold or silver, there was no possibility that it would be found. This was simply because the native use of gold was widespread and its symbolic significance far broader than the chiefly rituals that were observed from Colombian native custom and projected into the cultures of Amazonia. Indeed, Ralegh [Epistle Dedicatorie A3] implicitly tells us as much when he notes that while the Spaniards seek El Dorado (a person), the ‘naturals’ call the source of gold work Manoa (a location or group). Thus Ralegh [104] also tells us how one Martines, a Spaniard, gave the name ‘El Dorado’ to Manoa and so this ‘Nuevo Dorado’ in Guiana should not be conflated with other ‘El Dorados’, such as in Colombia.
GOLDEN METALS AS SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
It will be apparent that, whatever the other ritual and symbolic uses of golden objects within native societies may have been, they certainly circulated as items in an élite long-distance trade with other native leaders, and as items for trade or ransom with the Europeans. The use of exotic artefacts, such as guanin and caracoli, or even polished black-wood carvings, in the development of élite political structures is already well known to the anthropology of the region but the myth-cycles of both the Amazons and El Dorado are key to the interpretation of the archaeological and historical evidence, especially that concerning the production and exchange of takua and guanin or caracoli as élite activities in the Guiana region. Goeje (1931) has interpreted the symbolic themes of such exchanges by suggesting that the takua are representative of the water, nature and woman, and the caracoli are representative of the sun, culture and man. This symbolic opposition is also strongly evinced in the gender polarity of the Arawak languages, and most notoriously so for the Antillean caribes, or caraïbe. Moreover, caracoli pectorals and nose-plates were evidently at one time symbols of chiefly authority or élite lineage in a way that the curative greenstones were not; Ralegh [24] also tells us that the takua were owned by ‘every king or Casique’ but that they were usually worn by their wives. However, over time, and given the clear dangers of displaying gold, the takua became more generally worn as tokens of spiritual power or understanding. So too, native leadership itself became less dynastically based as the old élite genealogical structures were swept away by colonial conquest, and the takua rather than caracoli became associated with chiefly authority. This association was probably always present in the use of takua south of the Amazon, among the Tupian peoples, who called them murayataka.
Our understanding of this ritual and symbolic context of the exchange of gold work is deepened by analysis of the native use of gold on the Caribbean islands, especially through the sixteenth-century writings of Father Raymond Pané (1987). His account of native conceptions on the larger islands tells us that in the origin myth of Antillean society Guahayona, culture-hero and source of ancestral authority for the native élite, took all the women from the islands to Matinino and then travelled on to the island of Guanin, ‘origin’ of metals, i.e. caona (pure gold) and guanin (gold alloy). In this way a close connection between the ancestors and golden metals is immediately established and was the reason for the noted link between the honorific titles of the élite and the names of metals. Ralegh [43] notes a similar association of chiefly authority and golden metals in the treatment of the skeleton of a Tivitive (Warao) chief.
Among the chieftains of Hispaniola we can recognise Caona-bo meaning ‘he who is like gold’, and his wife Ana-caona; also Turei-ga Hobin, the honorific of the cacique Bohechio, meaning ‘king as dazzling and heavenly as guanin’. On Puerto Rico among the names of the native provinces, often treated as equivalent to the personal names of caciques by the Spanish (as noted above) we find Guaynia, Guaynabo, Guayama, and Guayaney, all containing the radical for guanin and the ancestor Guahayona. The ‘name’ (title) of the acarewana of the Yao, Anacajoury, reflects both the name of the ancestor who accompanied Guayahona to the isle of guanin, Anacacuya, and the meaning of that name as ‘brilliance that guides’. Given the interchangeability of the personal titles and names of leaders with the names of places, there is also a link to toponyms (see Chapter 1, n. 27 and Chapter 2, n. 2). The Arawakan word for gold, caona, and the Cariban word in the orthographic version carocori, also form linguistic radicals for the place names associated with gold working on Trinidad and in Orinoco recorded by both Dudley and Ralegh; for example, Carowa, Paracow, Caroni, Caura, and Carricurina. So Ralegh's identification of these places, implying the occurrence of gold, was not suggestive for the reason that we might assume (i.e. there was a connection between naming of place and its geological features), but rather it was suggestive because the toponyms were derived from the native association of political authority with the use of guanin.
Despite the scepticism which has generally gone along with the evaluations of the written records, it has to be emphasised that in fact, as well as in mythology, the Europeans were directed by the caciques of Cuba and Hispaniola towards the lesser Antilles (Matinino) and Guiana (isle of Guanin) as the source of gold, also indicating that in this direction lived the canibales. In the political ideologies of these island chieftains the first ancestor, Guayahona, when he left Hispaniola for Matinino and persuaded the women to accompany him, also forced them to abandon their husbands but bring their children, as well as a cargo of the narcotic snuff digo with them. They travelled to Matinino where they were entranced by the sight of beautiful sea-shells (cobo) which, following the example of Guayahona's brother-in-law, they descended into the sea to admire. Here the women were left by Guayahona who returned to Hispaniola with the first guanin and cibas (magic stones, i.e. takua). In other versions of this myth-cycle the fate of the children varies—either they are simply abandoned in a ditch at Matinino or they become frogs. In this latter version there are strong thematic connections to both the takua and the Amazons of the continent.
For the islanders the important feature of the myth is that it provides the ideological grounds for taking Guayahona to be not only the originator of political authority but also the first to base this authority partly in exchanges with outsiders, the caribe canibales. In this light the myth-cycle as a whole may be said to represent the ideological underpinning of an élite trade in which drugs (digo), shell money (cobo, quiriquiripa) and persons (women and children) were exchanged for guanin and takua, the latter significantly being carved mostly in the form of frogs. In this context Matinino, the ‘island of women-without-men’, represents the site of these exchanges, just as the land of the Amazons is the source for the ‘spleen-stones’ of Ralegh's account, and the caribe canibales emerge as economic or marital, but not gastronomic, consumers of persons. One might also note the further connection of Matinino with the Amazon myth-cycle in the manner of origin of the ciba, i.e. from female water spirits. The continental takua also were said to be made by the ‘water-mama’, who to this day still supplies the stones for smoothing pottery among native potters.19
The Caribbean region was therefore linked by trade and exchange, in both marriage and warfare, to the Orinoco. More distant connections were also present with the Meta, down which Berrio had travelled in his first searches for El Dorado [Ralegh 25-6]. At the headwaters of the Meta the Muisca offered gold for mojas; that is, young boys who were used as singers and functionaries for ritual events, later being sacrificed at puberty (Langebaek 1990). The Antillean cacique Caonoba was, like the cacique of the Muisica mines at Dabeiba, called a canibale, and, like the Muiscas and caribes-canibales of the islands, was a controller of gold sources or finished gold work. We can complete this interpretation by suggesting that the exchange of persons for gold was a common aspect of the élite exchanges that underlay forms of chiefly authority not just in the Caribbean, but also across the whole of northern South America. In this context the suggestion of an invasive and aggressive Epuremei, who were ‘consuming’ the political authority and marriage exchanges of the Guianians and Orinoqueponi through their control of worked gold, appear as the caribes do in the political discourse of the Antillean élite. Such a framework of native belief and practice also allows us to suggest that Ralegh's description of an Incan invasion, derived from the interview with Topiawari, was embedded in a native cultural trope of cannibalistic conquest and possession which was all but impenetrable to initial observers (see Whitehead 1996a). However, the suggestion here is that Ralegh was not simply projecting the Incan story but also recording elements of native practice in the Guiana region and attaching to it a more ‘plausible’ and accessible interpretation—that is one that would accord with other known events within native polities. It should not be forgotten that the allusions to the Epuremei, in both Spanish and English records, are hardly adequately dealt with just by showing that there was no Incan invasion, or that Ralegh did not completely understand what Topiawari told him.
The evidence reviewed here suggests that golden metals had a critical role to play in the validation of political and social authority, particularly where this involved the exchange of persons, whether by marriage or by some other form of contractual relationship. This need not imply that gold-items were exchanged directly for persons, in the manner of later European slave-trading, but the belief systems that supported the valorisation of golden objects also signalled the appropriateness of persons as items in a wider cycle of exchange. This is very evident from the fact that ‘exchanges’ were both commercial and military in form, the distinction between trading and raiding being, as ever, a fine one. While there is no evidence to hand that the wearing of golden objects was explicitly reserved for the élite only, ornamentation with golden objects was none the less a symbol of an exalted status and the accumulation of such objects was unlikely to have been achieved by those who were not to the fore in either the external relations of trade and war, or the internal relations of leadership. The various native beliefs that have been conflated into the European myth of El Dorado clearly testify to this and, although the ritual parameters that went along with such beliefs are unlikely to have been identical in the Colombian and Guianan contexts, as the Europeans assumed, the likelihood of sustained, if indirect, interaction between the élites of these regions is also amply demonstrated by the antiquity and wide dispersion of culturally related archaeological materials from the lower Orinoco to the western Venezuelan llanos. It was these native realities that Ralegh's Discoverie of the ‘Empyre of Guiana’ reflected.
(III) AMAZONS, ACEPHALI AND CANNIBALS
If Ralegh transpires to be an imperfect ethnographer of Guianan metallurgical lore and ritual, rather than a mere fabricator of mythic empires of gold, it none the less remains that the Discoverie refers to other marvels and wonders of native practice and custom which seem scarcely more credible: men-with-heads-in-their-chests, women-without-men and man-eaters. However, once again, if those elements of European anticipation and projection are carefully delineated then it can be seen that Ralegh records novel elements and additional information derived from observation or interrogation of native people in Orinoco, by himself or others. Moreover, Ralegh engages in the collection of reports of these marvels with a firm scepticism as to their literal existence but a definite appreciation of the importance of establishing the bounds of the possible.
Ralegh [69] says that living ‘on that braunch which is called Caora are a nation of people, whose heades appeare not aboue their shoulders’. These Ewaipanoma were also reported to Ralegh [70] as having ‘their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, & that a long train of haire groweth backward betwen their shoulders’.
As Schomburgk stressed in his edition of the Discoverie, just as Ralegh does in original text, Acephali had long been present in European mythic tradition. However, both Ralegh and Schomburgk also stress that an analogous tale was told by the indigenous population, being recorded in subsequent centuries and still being elicited in modern times. For example, the Patamona of the Guyana highlands refer to the Totopu, a dwarfish and strangely misshapen race of beings whose original presence in the mountains connects them to a mythic-historical ‘first time’. The disappearance of the Totopu in this century is understood as judgment on the cultural authenticity of the Patamona, with whom they once came to dance and feast (Whitehead 1996d). References to such monstrous, originary beings can readily be found from other times as well, and one of the most striking reports is an eyewitness account of the capture, torture and execution of an Acephali, as witnessed by the shipwrecked Dutch sailor Lourens Lourenszoon among the Arocouros of the Amapá coast (between the Amazon and Oyapock rivers) in 1623, five years into his captivity. In his deposition before the Directors of the West-Indische Compagnie, made after his rescue in 1625 we are told that Lourens joined a war-party sent against the Acephali:
They [Arocouros] came in the afternoon to this country [. …] Shortly afterwards Lourens found out that they had told the truth. He saw, at a great distance, more than one hundred of them [Acephali] on the beach, busy with fishing […] they found one standing on a pole behind a rock. Approaching him from behind he saw no other way to escape and went in the water. The whole company went after him. They had great difficulty to get him. Continuously he moved like a porpoise and was so powerful, that they could hardly catch him. Finally, tired of the long struggle, he was caught. With hands and feet bound, he was thrown into the canoe and carefully taken away […] A great commotion, as never before, started right away when they arrived there [the Arocouro village]; each and everyone being afraid of, and wondering about, this monster. He was short of height, thick, corpulent and fat of body. On top, where every human has neck, he has a long lock of black hair. In the middle of his chest, he has a nose. The eyes were a hands-width from each other. The ears close behind the armpit. His small passagien [?] could hardly be seen, so everything looked horrible. When they arrived in the evening, they got busy making a forked-gallows. It was planted in the ground and they hung him, his feet at the two branches of the gallows. When they were doing this he ranted, raved and screamed so much it sounded awful. Then they started hitting him, with sticks, on the chest at the place in front of the heart, and against the legs. So he screamed louder and louder. Finally they killed him with great difficulty. When they hit him in the sides, he started bleeding out of his nose and mouth, his tongue hanging outside, so that he passed away. They left him hanging that way […] Lourens had to believe this, which he never could have understood, and will only be believed by a few, unless another one is seen.20
These continuing indigenous and colonial expressions of the existence of ‘headless men’ support the idea that Ralegh's analysis is correct to stress the collective cultural meaning of such ideas, to go beyond a mere positivist discussion of possible referents for a literal existence of such ‘monstrous’ individuals. As in the case of the El Dorado legend, the conflation of many different native expressions under the organising idiom of European expectation produces a false impression of cultural uniformity to native ideas and practice. No one El Dorado existed but many, all of which conformed imperfectly with the golden empire of European anticipation. Similarly, a trope of the monstrous, used to express alterity, was already present in native thought before the European arrival, as is shown by the archaeological evidence of Sciopodi in ceramic representation. Equally, the ‘men-with-heads-in-their-chests’ have a number of analogues within native idioms, just as there are a range of monstrosities related to this general idea of acephalism that have been conflated by later commentators. For example, Keymis (1596: 13-14) reports on ‘headlesse men, and that their mouthes in their breasts are exceeding wide’, called ‘Chiparemei’ by the Charibes and ‘Ewaipanomas’ by the Guianians. But Keymis also sounds a note of caution: ‘What I haue heard of a sorte of people more monstrous, I omit to mention, because it is no matter of difficultie to get one of them, and the report will otherwise appear fabulous’ (1596: 14, my emphasis). In fact Harcourt and others also collected such tales in the region of Oyapock but they subtly introduce a new element that illustrates for us how a variety of native metaphors became constricted by the categories of European expectation. Harcourt (1613: 41) thus mentions ‘Charibes hauing great eares of an extraordinary bignes’, quite consistent with Tupian and Incan practices of massively distending the ear cartilage. Likewise the Spanish reports partially reproduced by Ralegh [105-10], though significantly not this particular passage, refer to the ‘ypurugota’ speaking people as having ‘shoulders so high that they are almost the same height as their heads’ (in Ramos-Perez 1973: 659). Ralegh appears to have transposed this information to the Caura river, since he does note just before giving the description of the appearance of the Ewaipanoma that ‘on that braunch which is called Caora are a nation of people, whose heades appeare not above their shoulders’ [69]. In just this way the native trope of monstrosity is made to conform to European expectation, generated not just by a knowledge of the Classical canon but also, as in this case, by knowledge of other ethnological information. The account given to Ralegh by Topiawari should therefore be read in this light and so situated in the native politics of the region at the end of the sixteenth century, as follows. The Caura river chieftains, to whom the trope of acephalism is applied, were in latent conflict with Topiawari and his ruling family, over access to the Orinoco and trade routes to the upland regions.21 Moreover, we may be justly sceptical of the precision of translation and understanding involved in the collection of these tales since, with but a change of preposition in the English gloss on these native concepts, we are able to see that both the native and European tropes of acephalism resonate more fully than this. ‘Men with heads on their chests’ were, and still are, an icon of fierceness, appearing as motifs on golden pectorals, body-paint designs, and ceramics (Roosevelt 1991: 81); just as the Sciopodi were part of the ceramic repertoire of the Tapajoso culture of the central Amazon (Guapindaia 1993).
Paradoxically then, it is Ralegh's overt, comparative ethnographic allusion to Mandeville's account of the Acephali that distorts rather than clarifies his implicit ethnographic observation of a native trope of ‘acephalism’. Notably, Schomburgk uses the same argument when trying to explain this observation, thereby prefiguring much of the modern literature on the ‘monstrous races’ and their supposed transposition to America (see Friedman 1981, Kappler 1980).
Similar analytical considerations also apply to the tale of the Amazons who enter Ralegh's [23] account earlier on. Once again Ralegh explicitly acknowledges the way in which earlier writers had discussed them and it is important to note that key elements of the Classical accounts are utterly absent in the American version, particularly the idea of removing the breast to facilitate military performance.22 However, if European anticipation is distinguished from the native practice that occasioned the speculation, as to the identity of the Classical Amazons with the eminent females encountered by Ralegh and others, then once again we see that the text of the Discoverie contains important information on the structure and functioning of native polity.
Ralegh locates the Amazons, also producers of the takua, in the vicinity of the Tapajos river. Ruling out any simple identification with the Amazons of antiquity, Ralegh suggests that, alongside their active trade for gold work, once a year there was a great assembly of ‘all the Kings of the borders, and the Queenes of the Amazones’. Whether or not the ritual practices involved in this assembly included sexual intercourse and the eventual conserving of female offspring cannot be determined. But the takua, as Ralegh says, were exchanged for gold work from the Orinoco basin and it was in upland Guiana that the markets servicing this trade were probably located—undoubtedly reinforcing the notion that El Dorado was also to be encountered here.
In other sources the ‘Queen’ of the Amazons was called Cuna Ataere or Conori, but unlike El Dorado, whose golden empire was subject to successive relocation, the geographical referents for the tale of the Amazons were far more consistent. She was said to rule over seven settlements in the Guiana highlands and, indeed, was there visited by one Irish adventurer who travelled to the headwaters of the Trombetas river for that very purpose (Lorimer 1989). A system of roads, guarded by her warriors, connected these villages. In her capital city stood five large temples, or caranain, dedicated to the worship of the sun, whose interiors were lined with painted wooden carvings and featherwork, as well as containing idols of gold and silver in the form of women. Most versions of this myth, deriving from the South American context, were inspired by the account of Gaspar de Carvajal (1934), a cleric who accompanied Orellana on his reluctant descent of the Amazon in 1542. However, ‘women-without-men’ were already prefigured in European minds by the tales of the Amazon, or warrior-women, such tales having come down from the Greeks via the Romans (see n. 22) and, as Ralegh's allusion indicates, had become popularised through various medieval texts such as Mandeville's Travels.
In Amazonia, the meaning of native names for such ‘Amazons’ was critically different, being given as Aikeam-Benano (women-who-live-alone) north of the Amazon river, or Cougnantaisecouima23 (women-without-men) to the south of the Amazon. Secluded ‘women-without-men’ appear also on Matinino in the Caribbean, and at Calamahala (n. 19) on the mid-Orinoco; locations which were shown above to have been intimately involved in the patterns of élite exchange across the whole northern part of the continent. While aspects of the European myth are clearly transferred to these novel American contexts, different elements also emerge and old motifs are absent or suppressed, suggesting that in America the interplay between European preconception as to Amazon women and actual experience of native culture developed in a distinct way. This in turn implies that the Aikeam-Benano were not simply a recapitulation or retelling of the European Amazon tale in an American context. Such a conjecture is also reinforced by a careful reading of Carvajal's original text, as well as other secondary materials, such as the account in Thevet's (1577-8) description of southern Brazil. This suggests that the category ‘Amazon’ is used as a figurative device to make observation intelligible, rather than to advance the claim that the Amazons of antiquity had been finally discovered in South America. The fifteenth-century descriptions of Columbus and Chanca concerning the secluded or ‘captive’ women on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique (in Hulme and Whitehead 1992), as well as further such encounters in the territories of the Colombian Muisca and in Orinoco, also suggest that the military element in the medieval European versions was not an invariant element of the encounter with native Amazonian cultural forms. However, Thevet's later reports of women warriors in Brazil, as well as Carvajal's own observation of women war-captains driving on the male warriors as they attacked the Spanish brigantines along the banks of the Amazon, clearly echo themes from the European versions.
Even so, if the American Amazons were not military specialists they were certainly represented as politically dominant women, as certainly occurred in some indigenous societies of the sixteenth century (Sued-Badillo 1979). In regard of the Amazons, Carvajal was told that many of the towns along the banks of the Amazon river were vassals to the Queen Conori and that the presence of her captains in the ranks of warriors was to exhort them to the defence of these boundary regions of her domain. One of Caravajal's informants also claimed to have been responsible for carrying the yearly tribute to the city of Conori herself—this tribute consisting of the feathers of macaws and parrots for the decoration of their temples.24
The American Amazons thus conformed only in part to European expectations. It also seems undeniable that both European and American males shared anxieties about women that led to a mutual interest in the possibility of an exclusive or secluded female society, and a convergence of symbolic and mythic motifs in its representation. In these terms we appear to be dealing with a cultural convergence in regard of gender relations. However, since there are also clear indications that women did on occasion enjoy higher status within native societies before the European conquest, it may be possible to suggest the elements of native cultural practice from which these mythic motifs arose and to which the European versions ineptly allude. Certainly, archaeological (Roosevelt 1991) and historical (Whitehead 1994) data gathered from the lower Amazon, particularly from Marajó island in the river's mouth, strongly suggest that women also enjoyed élite status, and a social pattern of female eminence could well have occurred in many other locations since, in Marajó iconography, the prevalence of the female form it is thought to derive from the structural centrality of females in the matrifocal, uxorilocal contexts which are common within Amazonian social organisation. Female eminence on Marajó was also economically underwritten by the specialist role women played in providing faunal protein through fishing. Given the importance of fishing in the interpretation of the El Dorado story, and the identification of the Epuremei with the Taruma, then the location of the Amazon Queen, Conori, at the headwaters of the Trombetas, and so physically proximate to the Epuremei, suggests that the annual gathering of ‘Kings’ and ‘Queens’ was an aspect of élite ritual and political relationships.25 The universality of gender antagonism then provides the basis for a mimetic elaboration of the Amazon theme by both natives and colonials. The Discoverie, of course, negotiates a particular connection to European traditions of gender polarity, through the constant sub-textual presence of that Amazon Queen par excellence—Elizabeth I.
The Discoverie is undoubtedly a flawed lens through which to view the past, but the text clearly does refract something of native cultural praxis in 1595; not least the existence of native tropes of physical and social monstrosity involving acephalism, physical hybridity and ‘free’ women. That such motifs were already present before European contact indicates that the symbolic convergences involved in recording these native metaphors confused not only observers but also subsequent interpreters of those textual recordings. So, although the native idioms are initially unfamiliar to us, and to Ralegh, the text of the Discoverie implicitly, as well as overtly, portrays the political relations among the indigenous inhabitants of the Guiana region, especially the lower Orinoco, with accuracy. However, other commentators have simply avoided analysis of the commensurability of colonial and indigenous cultural forms through a failure to understand these kinds of symbolic convergence, mimetically elaborated. They incorrectly assume that Ralegh was poorly served by his interpreters or unable to effectively communicate with them or any other indigenous people. Yet, as Humboldt (1907: II, 317) observed,
In every zone intolerance accompanies credulity; and it might be said that the fictions of the ancient geographers had passed from one hemisphere to the other, did we not know that the most fantastic productions of the imagination, like the works of nature, furnish everywhere a certain analogy of aspect and form.
Certainly Ralegh seems to have been at least as concerned with the logical status of his statements as he was with keeping his readership enraptured by authenticating detail and the apparatus of probability—textual and performative forms which Classical theory judged to be powerful factors in inducing belief in otherwise ‘fictional’ statements (Feeney 1993). However, Ralegh's claims appear only as fictions while they are abstracted from the native practices from which they were derived; other sources, both documentary and archeological, supply a context for the interpretation of those practices. None the less, whatever the nature of native cultural practice, the European myth of the Amazons had a role to play in the ideology of colonial occupation by emphasising the exoticism, inversion and femininity of native America, thereby rendering it a fit object for domestication, conversion and invasion. However, the European Amazon myth had neither the endurance of the El Dorado legend nor the direct, pragmatic political purpose of the discovery of cannibalism.
Ralegh's treatment of anthropophagy, or ‘cannibalism’, is, in view of the popular assumption that this practice was a convenient invention of colonial ideology, very ambiguous. Although the Canibals are alluded to several times [22, 29, 33, 37, 43, 47, 51, 71, 90-1], they are treated as unfortunate exceptions to more typical native cultural practices. But this strongly suggests that Cannibals could not have simply functioned as a projection to legitimise European predatory intentions as has been suggested by other commentators (Arens 1979, Montrose 1993), even if this is part of an explanation of the European interest in the phenomenon. Rather, as we have found to be characteristic of Ralegh's text generally, the ethnological observations he records about Canibals are well attested to in contemporary and subsequent native practice. In which case our attention is necessarily directed towards the mimetic nature of the claim, which requires a more sophisticated understanding of the ideological role of ‘cannibalism’ for native and European alike. It therefore needs to be emphasised that for Ralegh and the other English colonisers of this period, unlike their Spanish counterparts, the native population were potential allies, not potential rebels or enemy collaborators. The relative discursive absence of Canibals in the Discoverie may then be linked to the differing outlooks and colonial policies of the English and the Spanish with regard to the native population, notwithstanding shared predatory intentions.
In Ralegh's text the ‘Cannibals’ in fact are never linked overtly to anthropophagy but rather to the selling of the ‘sonnes and daughters’ of their own ‘brethren and sisters, and for somewhat more even their own daughters’ [33]. Ironically, in view of the way in which Spanish colonial ideology politically and legally distinguished the savage caribe from the tractable aruaca, Ralegh informs us that this slave-market of the ‘Caribas or Canibals’ existed primarily to service the export of native bodies to the Antilles by both the Arwacas and the Spaniards. The discursive failure to reproduce this Spanish ideological dualism in the Discoverie may then be taken as testimony to the real impact that Ralegh's active engagement with indigenous people of the Orinoco had had on any cultural anticipations he might have arrived with.
Ralegh [51] also tells us the following:
This Arwacan Pilot with the rest, feared that we would have eaten them, or otherwise have put them to some cruell death, for the Spaniards to the end that none of the people in the passage towards Guiana or in Guiana it selfe might come to speech with us, perswaded all the nations, that we were men eaters, and Canibals: but when the poore men & women had seen us, and that we gave them meate, and to everie one some thing or other, which was rare and strange to them, they began to conceive the deceit and purpose of the Spaniards.
Ralegh [7] also says that the Spanish planted native allies on Trinidad in order to ‘eat out’ the local population and so neatly reverses the Spanish accusation, as in the presentation of ‘meat’ to the alarmed natives—a ‘marvel’ in counterpoint to Spanish monstrosity. The issue here is that neither colonial nor indigene was previously unfamiliar with the trope of cannibalism. It therefore worked as a mutually intelligible political idiom and, because of its multiple referents, one which could also serve to obscure, in Ralegh's presentation, the identity of Spanish and English interests in the consumption of the Guianians and their land. But this was more than a textual device on Ralegh's part since his action was both felicitous and appropriate in indigenous terms. The gift of meat, not just for the semiotic reasons already outlined but also for political reasons, was an important performance of a claim to authority for native observers. In this way Ralegh established both an implicit critique of Spanish actions and a demonstration of his political potency by means of such an act—a veritable acarewana. Similarly, Ralegh's [81] distribution of Elizabethan gold coinage would have been replete with similar meanings for Topiawari and his followers.
In sum, although European accounts of America were strongly prefigured by ideas that had existed since Classical times, there yet remains a residual element in European description that can be taken only to refer to some new reality that was encountered, and this is precisely the case for the text of the Discoverie. At times there also appears to have been a convergence between native and European ideas, which certainly confuses the process of interpretation but does not invalidate it. The tales of the Amazons and Canibals seem to be good examples of this process of symbolic convergence, since native cosmologies were no less concerned with issues of the proper status of women, or the profanity of eating human flesh, than were European ones. It can hardly then be a surprise if the first Europeans in America perceived only themselves in others. This mimetic quality to the relationship of coloniser and colonised is particularly evident in the broad symbolic category of ‘cannibalism’ (Whitehead 1996a) and works well as an analytical principle for understanding colonial relationships. Moreover, it also accords well with the both the notion of a sociopolitical ‘tribal zone’ and the cultural arena of the ‘contact zone’ (discussed in Chapter 1 (iii)). Ralegh himself appears as a particular adept in the matter of such colonial mimesis of the native and this may help explain the persistent resonance of his name in native consciousness, even to the end of the seventeenth century.26 This mimesis, perhaps appearing as humanistic scepticism to Eurocentric observation, occurs in a number of ways; his adoption of smoking, the experimentation with biotropic drugs served as ‘cordial’, the presence of freely captive indigenes with him in the Tower or his possible role as the shaman (‘conjuror’) in a school of occult, or pagan, ‘religion’, in which Thomas Hariot, John Dee and the ‘Wizard Earl’ (i.e. Northumberland) also participated (Lacey 1973: 125-6). Such spiritual interests also accord with Ralegh's [43] textual appreciation of Warao tobacco-shamanism (see also Chapter 1, n. 15, 16, 17, 20).
At the least, this is certainly the profile of a man who would be ‘King of the Indians’, just as he is captain of his Destiny in the feudalism of the sea, paying homage to his Amazon Queen—Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana—as cacique of her guard. Even unto death he carried totemic objects from Guiana—a ‘stob’ of gold (possibly that given him by Topiawari), a Guiana idol of gold, a ‘plott’ of the river Orinoco—as if possession of these images were to possess Guiana itself.27 The extent of this mimetic performance of ‘Indian-ness’ is therefore suggested by both Ralegh's contemporaries, through their rejection of him as a dangerous nonconformer, and ultimately by himself in that greatest performance of all—the snuffing out of his own life.
Notes
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However, recent research has begun to change this and as a result is uncovering a very different picture of the native world that preceded European colonial settlement to that given in the standard compendium of ethnology The Handbook of South American Indians (Edited by Julian Steward for the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington 1945, 7 vols). See Whitehead (1996b) for a review of recent archaeological research in Amazonia, Roosevelt (1994) for an edited collection of essays presenting new perspectives in Amazonian anthropology, and Whitehead (1995a) for a presentation of new research on the native Caribbean.
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See Harlow (1928: 120) for an example of this transposition of names. However, a number of scholars have wondered at the sequence of events leading up to the death of Morequito, and seeming inconsistencies between Ralegh's and Spanish accounts of Morequito being still alive after his execution (Ramos-Perez 1973: 568-9, n. 142). These inconsistencies are resolved once this transposition in the names of places and their rulers is appreciated—see Chapter 1, n. 27.
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This was the case in the apparent ‘apotheosis’ of Captain Cook by the Hawaiian islanders—although this sudden divinity worked to the ultimate detriment of Cook since he was then supposedly killed for violating the terms of his own godhead. The problems in reading others through space and time that the interpretation of the textual evidence of this event has engendered in current anthropology (see Obeyesekere 1992, Sahlins 1995) parallels many of the issues discussed here with regard to Ralegh, or Columbus. One might note here that the attempts by both protagonists to establish whether or not the natives ‘really believed’ in Cook's identity as Lono, Hawaiian culture hero in the mould of Amalivaca or the Viracoa, seem misplaced given the cultural specificity of the notion of ‘belief’, as Needham (1972: 146) remarks: ‘It [belief] is not a necessary concept, and it is not a distinct capacity or inner state; other languages make no recognition of a mode of consciousness of the kind and other peoples order their lives without reference to such a capacity’. And so, as is the case here, it is necessary to consider a range of cultural meanings that might be found in specific actions in order to reveal the complexity of motivation that is present in a given situation. At this point it may, or may not, be possible to suggest that one or other of those cultural meanings was so dominant or prevalent amongst the historical actors that it fulfils our idea of being their motivation.
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The term caraïbe, often occurring in the French sources, shows some form of link to the term caribe (Whitehead 1995v: 93). Although there have been many suggestions as to the derivation of the term, another semantic resonance in the term caribe may be as ‘people of prophecy’ (carai-iba), that is announcing a new vision of native destiny, as with the oracle of the fire-spirit Wattopa, also mentioned by Harcourt (1613: 377).
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The translation made of this document by the British government (British Guiana Boundary Arbitration, Appendix to the British Case (I: 21), London: HMSO, 1896) interpolates ‘and by the Dutch’ into the crucial phrase that reports this prophecy of liberation by the English. This may be an innocent error but it would also enhance British claims to a continuity of administration with the prior Dutch colony of Essequibo. Since it was also claimed that the Essequibo Dutch outpost predated Spanish settlement this becomes a significant legal point in sustaining the British boundary claim against Venezuela.
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However, since Carapana was also reputed by Ralegh [29] to have been over a hundred years old we might consider that these reported numerical ages refer less to individual chronology than to Ralegh's desire to represent these native leaders as sagacious and credible. It could also be that the discovery of Macrobi (long-lived or gigantic beings) aids in the textual task of establishing a convincing alterity, as was the case for other of the European marvels of encounter with America.
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Although Ralegh's suggestion as to the presence of Incas in Guiana violates our professional anthropological and historical expectations, the notion that the last free Incas were in this region has remained persistent up to the present day, being evidenced by travellers' tales (see a report of such an encounter with ‘De Laatste Vrije Incas?’ in West Indische-Gids 7: 31-4) and eighteenth-century documentary evidence from the Spanish authorities in Peru. While investigating the shipwreck of the San Pedro de Alcantara off the coast of Portugal in 1786, Professor Jean-Yves Blot (personal communication) became aware that among the passengers were seventeen native prisoners associated with the rebellion of the ‘false’ Inca, José Gabriel Tupac Amaru (see also Brown and Fernandez 1991). While researching the background on these prisoners Professor Blot uncovered evidence that the Spanish authorities in Peru were in communication with the Dutch authorities in Surinam concerning the rumours that several of Tupac Amaru's chief lieutenants had managed to reach Surinam and were living among the local population. The Spanish authorities wanted the Dutch to investigate the possible influence they had over the indigenous population.
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The historian Clendinnen (1987: vi) quotes the following passage by Antonio de Ciudad Real (1588) describing the Spanish arrival on the coast of Mexico: ‘When the Spaniards discovered this island, their leader asked the Indians how it was called; as they did not understand him, they said uic athan, which means what do you say or speak, that we do not understand you. And the Spaniard ordered it set down that it be called Yucatan’. However, although this neatly illustrates a point that many commentators wish to make about the cultural impenetrability of native Americans by colonising Europeans, the extended and intimate contacts that are evident from this discussion of Ralegh's Discoverie suggest that such misconstruals may well be ironical but were not typical. As already discussed, the moments of first contact on the beach-heads of an expansive Europe are a very limited context from which to derive theories of cultural communication.
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Among the more useful works in English, apart from Harlow's essay in the 1928 edition of the Discoverie, is John Hemming's The Search for El Dorado (1978). However, although this volume is bibliographically very thorough there is a persistently negative presentation as to possible native meanings for El Dorado, and as to the nature of native society itself. The Spanish-language sources are more scholarly and include Ramos-Perez's El mito del Dorado, which is discussed frequently in this text, as well as Juan Gil's Mitos y utopias del descubrimiento. An interesting discussion of Ralegh's mystical alchemy occurs in Nicholl (1995).
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The words ‘golden’, ‘gold’ and ‘gold work’ are used here, unless otherwise indicated, in a very general sense. This is because the precise amount of gold in native objects varied somewhat, the absolute purity in terms of gold content not being a primary consideration for the native metalsmith. However, a comparison of two to three parts gold to one part copper with silver traces varying up to twenty-five percent of the whole, could be considered typical. The Mazaruni pectoral was assayed as 12 carats, precisely agreeing with the ‘triall of an Image of copper’ made by Ralegh [To the Reader 2] in Guiana in 1595. The melting point is much lower and the malleability much greater for such alloys and, as Vega (1980: 492) points out, the modern jewellery business has now accepted such native wisdom, predominantly using 18 carat alloys, as a result of which ‘the whole world adorns itself with guanin’.
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However, there are some indications that the islanders may at one time have used annealing techniques to permit further working of their relatively pure gold, since the so-called ‘Troumassé cylinders’, distributed from Martinique to the north coast of Venezuela, and currently thought to be a form of incense burner, could have been used to heat metals, as could the vessel found at Muri mountain, on the Guyana-Brazil border—for further discussion see Whitehead 1990a.
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Such connections were still very evident even in the seventeenth century, as the remnant native populations of the Lesser Antilles, such as the caribes (Karipuna or ‘Island Carib’), continued to raid the aruacas (Lokono) for golden objects, chiefly in the form of ‘plates’, ‘croissants’ or ‘half-moons’—see Whitehead 1990a.
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This practice, called jeruma (Cariban Kapon), is still prevalent among the native peoples of the Guiana uplands, and the Pemon still believe that there is a spirit-master, esak, for diamonds, as they do for all species and natural resources; though the name of the esak for gold is currently unrecorded. However, a reference to the spirit-master of gold occurs in the quotation from Keymis (see below), where he appears as a ‘dragon’, possibly alluding to a type of snake or lizard which haunts the kinds of rocks and soils which bear gold (Colson 1956 and personal communication).
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The native use of silver is not dealt with here, but it was significant. Putijma, controller of Topiawari's Orocoa mine, showed Dudley's men some ‘bracelets of silver’ (see text) and the name of one of his villages, Chiparepare [93 sic/83], is orthographically equivalent to the native word for silver given by Dudley, Chipperarey (1899: 65) who also reported native silver-mines on the Paria peninsula. However, the corruption, by the natives, of the Spanish term plata into perota was widespread, leading modern commentators to argue incorrectly that no native term existed (Roth 1924: 128, Schomburgk 1848: 100 n. 2). Further south, Carvajal (1934: 223) mentions that the ‘great overlord’ of the lower Amazon north bank, Arripuna (Carepuna in Ralegh [22]), who controlled a silver mine and was not ‘familiar’ with gold.
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However, it would be unwise to try and sustain this interpretation solely through the possible orthographic equivalence of the terms ‘epuremei’ and ‘taruma’. Consistent with current native naming practices, the Epuremei could also be understood as simply ‘those of Parima’. Spanish sources use the term Piriamuy, which seems to support this view of the term.
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Although the Taruma were widely held to have become extinct by the beginning of this century, a recent filmed encounter between FUNAI (Brazilian Indian Bureau) agents and two individuals claiming to be Taruma (Auasé), as well as Wai-Wai reports of contacts with them (George Mentore, personal communication), suggests that this is not so. Although the film is brief it is apparent that their language is not Cariban or Arawakan and that their appearance, especially their wearing of headgear or hats, conforms in at least one critical way with the Epuremei's distinctiveness from the Guianians, as Ralegh [63] describes it. References to head shape or position, as with the Acephali, may also have meaning in the context of observed Taruma practices of cranial deformation. This practice in itself marks them off from the rest of the Guiana peoples and links them to the Omagua of the upper Amazon. Again we have the possibility then of substituting the idea of a specifically Incan invasion for this link with another powerful polity to the west.
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Fox (1987) has shown exactly this to be the case for the formation of successive political kingships in the Mayan region, and it was a key aspect of the emergence of Norman power, at about the same time in Europe—see Douglas (1969).
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It is thus interesting to note that Sampaio (quoted in Edmundson 1906: 245) found the Arequenas of the upper Vaupés/Icana rivers using the quipu for writing ‘after the manner of the […] ancient Peruvians’, and it was also reported that llamas were being kept amongst Río Negro groups. Indeed Edmundson (1906) plausibly argues that the Arequenas were in contact with Dutch traders by the early seventeenth century, again reinforcing the notion that native and European knowledge of the interior at this time was far better than the professional geographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have allowed.
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There are also further connections between the ‘Amazons’ of that river and Calamahala to the ‘south of Orinoco’, which, like Matinino, was a site for the exchange of women, body-paints and probably guanin and takua. Sparry (in Purchas 1906: XVI, 307) writes of his visit to this place: ‘In this Faire, which is called Calamahala […] I bought eight young Women […] away to certaine Salvages which were my friends, at the request of Warituc, the Kings Daughter of Murrequito.’ This may also have been the market from which the trading party that Ralegh [47] encountered was returning.
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For references to a wide variety of monstrous beings see Humboldt 1907: II, 318, Penard and Penard 1907, Roth 1915: 170-2, 363-6. The account given by Lourens Lourenszoon is in Nicholas Wassenaer, Twaelfde deel of ‘t vervolgh van het Historisch Verhael aller gedenckwaerdiger geschiedeniss die in Europa […] America […] voorgevallen zijn. (Amsterdam, 1627). Clearly this text needs a longer exercise in interpretation than can be carried out here, but thanks are due to Steffen Baetsen for his assistance in making this translation.
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This political tension is alluded to by Berrio (AGI Consejo—Escriviania de Camera Pleitos, años 1597 à 1599, Legajo 1011 1 January 1593, BL Add. MS 36315, f. 186) who travelled from Amapaia, where he had stayed with the Anebas (also Discoverie 25-6), downstream to the Caroni in the company of caribes from the Barima river who told him of their uneasy peace with the Guayanos (Orinoqueponi) and of wider conflicts with other caribes, as in the Caura river—see Whitehead 1988.
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Recent archaeological research by Janine Kimble in the Russian steppes also demonstrates that there were empirical referents for the original Greek tale as well. Investigation of the ancient Saramacian culture indicates the presence of female warriors who were interred in full battle regalia. The presence of bone traumas in these remains consistent with combat, such as an arrow-point lodged in the skull, are persuasive indications that this was not a purely symbolic role. Herodotus reported women warriors in this region and historical ethnography suggests that the epata or ‘man-killers’, were a cohort of young women who could marry only after success in battle. References to breast-mutilation may therefore be a mistranslation of Herodotus's term ‘amazon’, since it may refer to the fact they did not, yet, breast-feed infants, rather than to a physical deformation of the breast. In the hands of the patriarchical Roman Strabo (1917-33: Book II), the tale Herodotus (1942) originally told of such ‘masculinised’ women became so distorted that it then appeared fantastical. Similar cultural processes were at work in the colonial rendering of native practices in America.
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It is important to note that Tupian women played a very active role in the ritual cannibalism of captured men, marrying them and even bearing their children for a period before their sacrifice. The women were also very prominent in the anthropophagic ceremony itself (see Combès 1992, Viveiros de Castro 1992). Ralegh's [24] observation seems to support this as a native element in Amazon practice.
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Gaspar de Carvajal (1934: 25) describes one of the altars where this was done as being: ‘a hewn tree trunk ten feet in girth, there being represented and carved in relief a walled city with its enclosure and with a gate. At this gate were two towers, very tall and having windows, and each tower had a door, the two facing each other, and at each door were two columns, and this entire structure that I am telling about rested upon two very fierce lions, which turned their glances backwards as though suspicious of each other, holding between their forepaws and claws the entire structure, in the middle of which there was a round open space […] through which they offered […] chicha [maize libation] for the Sun.’
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An apparent decline in the vitality of the Marajó culture, just prior to the encounter with the Europeans, may coincide with the ‘retreat’ of these women from the Amazon mouth and their ‘seclusion’ on the Trombetas, This was possibly under pressure from the male-orientated warrior and shamanic cults of the Tupinamba, who may have begun their occupation of the Amazon river in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century (Metraux 1948).
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However, his status as a colonial icon of British imperialism in South America, although briefly seen in the seventeenth century, does not really emerge until the nineteenth century, in a curious, but most relevant conjunction with that of other empire heroes, such as Captain Cook.
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Schomburgk's edition of the Discoverie reprints the following list (1848: 228) extracted from a letter from Thomas Naunton, Secretary of State, to Thomas Wilson being an ‘inventory of such things as were found on the body of Sir Walter Rawleigh, Knight, the 15th day of August 1618’, which was made after his arrest on the Thames as he attempted to flee to France, just prior to his execution:
A Guiana idol of Gold.
A Spleenstone (left with him for his own use).
One wedge of fine gold at 22 carratts.
Another stob of coarser gold.
Item one plott of Guiana and Nova (R—) and another of the river of Orenoque.
The description of the river Orenoque.
A tryal of Guianan ore with a description thereof.
[my emphasis]
Such a choice of items must indicate that Ralegh remained a doradista to the last.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations used in citation of manuscript materials
AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla
AN: Archive Nationale, Paris
AR: Algemeen Rijksarchief, Den Haag
BL: British Library, London
Bodleian: Bodleian Library, Oxford
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