Thomas Whiffen

The Indian homestead—Building—Site and plan of maloka—Furniture—Inhabitants of the house—Fire—Daily life—Insect inhabitants—Pets.

Out of the silence and gloom of the forest the traveller will emerge into the full light of a clearing. Though it is the site of a tribal headquarters there is no village, no cluster of huts, except among some of the tribes on the lower Apaporis. There is but one great house, thatched and ridge-roofed like a gigantic hay-rick, standing four-square in the open. This is the home of some three score Indians.[21]

The immediate signs of their occupancy are but few. There is hardly any litter cumbering the homestead; whatever of refuse there be is cleared more speedily by the ants than it would be by the most up-to-date sanitary authority of London. Back here in the untouched districts, away from the Rubber Belt and the commerce-bearing rivers, there are none of the leavings of civilisation: no broken bottles, no battered tins, no torn and dirty scraps of paper—indeed if bottle or tin ever found its way to these wilds it would be esteemed a most rare and valuable treasure. No village dogs bark their challenge at the stranger’s approach, no domestic fowls clutter away to safety. A naked child or a startled old woman may scurry into the saving murk of the maloka,[22] otherwise the silence and solitude appear little less profound than in the forest.

That is the picture as the artist or camera would reproduce it. The details, the essentials, must be sought within.

First of all characteristics is the fact that nothing makes for permanence. The house and its contents at the best are but for temporary use. The possession of a central tribal house does not presuppose that these Indians remain for any length of time in one locality. After about two or three years the house falls into a state of disrepair, but the tribesmen will not patch and mend it. They will simply discard it like all useless things. The women will be loaded up with the few tribal possessions—not forgetting the inevitable burden of their infants—the house will be burnt, and the whole of this grosse famille departs to seek a new site on which to build another habitation.

Building material is easily come by, and though to clear the land for agricultural purposes from the virgin forest entails considerable hard work, it is periodically a necessary task. However rich it may have been in the first instance successive crops rob the soil of its fertility, as the Indian is only too well aware, and fresh ground must perforce be broken up every few years. Then again, paths converging on the homestead in time are worn through the forest undergrowth, dense though it may be, circuitous though the trail of the Indian is invariably. Secrecy is security. A track-way is as good as an invitation, a sign-post, to the enemy. To move becomes a precautionary measure, even if the food supply be not exhausted—another reason that makes for unsettled conditions in forest life.

The site chosen is never near a river, for these are the highways for a possible enemy, and streams for ordinary purposes abound. Also—but this is an insignificant reason in comparison with the first—insect pests are not so abundant at a distance from the river-bank. With an eye to defence from hostile visitors, the Indian habitation is sedulously hidden, and the paths that lead to it are concealed also in every possible way. The track from the river especially may run more or less directly for, say, a third of a mile; then it is absolutely stopped by a fallen tree. No cleared pathway apparently runs beyond this, but the Indian, creeping through the thicket by devious ways, eventually reaches another comparatively cleared track. This will in turn be stopped in the same fashion, and thence lead more directly housewards. The river-path may be broken twice or even three times in little more than a mile.

At the same time that the ground is cleared on which the house is to be built, a plot immediately in front is also cleared for use as a dancing ground. This is customary, but not invariable, for some tribes are content with the dancing space inside the house. The outside dancing floor once cleared is quickly trodden down, and though no special preparation is attempted will soon be baked comparatively hard in the sun.

The construction of the great house is not complicated, but the workmanship is dexterous, and will bear the closest inspection. Four great poles, 20 to 30 feet high, form the main supports of the roof, which slopes down on either side tentwise almost to the ground from the central ridge-pole. More posts and cross-beams support it, and the whole is most adroitly lashed together. The forest supplies all the needed material. It is there ready to hand, growing where the house is to be erected. The straightest tree-trunks provide the posts and cross-beams; the creeping lianas serve to splice and bind the framework together; Bussu palm-leaves[23] make the thatch, which, as the actual wall is but some three feet in height, is practically roof and wall in one. The bejucos, or lianas, used to tie the beams and poles are first soaked in water to render them supple enough.[24]

To make the thatch the Indians slit bamboos and insert the palm-leaves doubled backwards.[25] The strips are then laid on the framework of the house, one above another, so that the uppermost strips shall hang half over those below. They are piled on to a thickness of from a foot to eighteen inches, and when completed this shingling is absolutely waterproof. When it ceases to be so the house will be abandoned. The leaves are not plaited, or intertwined in any manner, so the roof consists only of loose fronds, row upon row, and these have more the appearance of tobacco plants hung in an open drying-barn than a reed or straw thatch.

All the native houses are made after much the same manner. They vary only in unimportant details. The shape, as a rule, is a rough parallelogram or square with rounded angles, but on the lower Apaporis the houses are circular. On the Napo River also they are hemispherical, but the section of a Witoto or Boro house usually would be a triangle some 30 feet high, with a 60-feet base. Witoto houses sometimes are more circular as to ground-plan, but always have the pointed roof, not a cone (see Fig. 4).

The house is not always roofed and thatched to the ground, the last two or three feet occasionally being made of a closely set palisade, lined with matting or thatch. This is even more noticeable in a Nonuya house, and a Makuna house is invariably so fortified and is lighter than a Boro dwelling. As a general rule it may be noted that the Issa-Japura houses are not strengthened in this way. Wallace gives the dimensions of a house at JauritÉ as 115 feet long, by 75 broad, and 30 high.[26] A Witoto or a Boro house is usually about 60 to 70 feet in diameter. In both cases the size depends on the numbers of the tribe.

These houses have no windows, and the entrance is merely an opening in the palm-thatch eaves of some three feet by two. This most frequently is closed with a removable section of the thatch, which must be lifted out when any one enters, and replaced behind them; or it may be, as among the Orahone and Nonuya, covered by a curtain of thatch, which is hung on a cross-piece of the eaves by a strip of liana, and simply is pushed aside and swung back into place. In a Nonuya house the door is marked outside by bundles of rods neatly tied and set against the side posts.[27] Whatever the “door” may be, the opening is invariably kept closed, and it is the duty of any persons coming in to fasten up the entrance as soon as they have entered.[28] The consequence of this absence of any opening is that the interiors of the malokas are nearly as dark by day as by night. But this deep gloom keeps out insects—no small consideration in a land so infested with them.

The interior with its pointed roof resembles, as Robuchon remarked, a circus at a country fair. The central space is usually kept clear, and is used by the children as a playing-ground what time it is not required for more serious tribal business, such as dancing or a tobacco palaver. The far end of the house—where there is usually another small entrance—is the portion reserved for the chief and his family. As a rule it is open, but I have seen it matted off in some Witoto houses. Neither the Boro nor the Witoto indulge in the cubicles of palm-leaf thatch mentioned by Wallace in Uaupes houses,[29] nor are their habitations divided into two, with a small chamber at the end, as described by Koch-GrÜnberg in Tuyuka houses.[30] Each family has its own fire, but that is the only distinction, though on the lower Apaporis mats of beaten palm-leaf are used to form a sort of booth for each family. Such mats, duriei as the Witoto call them, are also employed in some houses for the protective purpose of securing the entrance.

The Apaporis Indians also make shelves or platforms on which they sleep, but all the other Issa-Japura tribes use the hammock slung about 2½ feet from the ground. One is hung for every man adjacent to his family fire—almost over it in fact. A second, placed rather less advantageously, in local opinion, belongs to his wife; while a third may be set between the two, close under the sloping thatch, for the children, when they are not asleep on the rough floor of uncovered earth. The family possessions are stored in places on the rafters overhead along with the hammocks, cooking-pots, and baskets with dried fish or smoked meat, the cassava-squeezer and personal treasures.

The chief has no other house, but any tribesman with a wish for one can build a small house for himself and his family in the bush, though he still retains his right to a corner in the common dwelling of the tribe. A temporary shelter is easily contrived by lashing poles to four trees, some seven or eight feet above the ground. On this frame-work branches for rafters and palm-leaves for thatch are quickly adjustable. This is the ordinary way of preparing a sleeping-place in the forest, and is known among the rubber-gatherers as a rancho, but the Indians’ private houses are constructed more securely, and more like miniature editions of the central tribal house, although in this case no wall whatever supports the sloping roof as a rule. These may be called their country homes, and they may be perhaps as much as two days’ journey from the great house of assembly.

At ordinary times there will be possibly from fifty to sixty people in the tribal house, but on the occasion of any festivity as many as two hundred will crowd in, all as by right entitled. What the atmosphere is like on those occasions may better be imagined than described. I invariably slept in native houses, and never found them other than very dark, very hot at night, and full of smoke, for which there is no outlet, chimneys being unknown luxuries with most of the tribes. Some of the Indians on the Apaporis contrive an arrangement that permits the smoke to disappear, and the Kuretu make what is almost a chimney-cowl by means of an overhanging portion of the topmost thatch above a small opening;[31] but in the ordinary Boro or Witoto house there is nothing to disperse the smoke from the wood fires that, it must be remembered, are never extinguished. These tribes have no means of making fire. It is therefore a matter of vital importance that it should never be permitted to die out. Did such an untoward accident occur the household would be fireless till live embers were obtained from some friendly neighbour.

Fire-making is unknown to the tribes on the south of the Japura, but on the north of that river fire is obtained by friction in a groove.[32] I never saw it done, but was told that ants’ nests were often used for tinder. On one occasion I made a fire by firing cartridges into a mass of leaves and wood chips, having first extracted the bullets and replaced them with cotton wool. The leaves flamed up after fourteen rounds. Matches are sheer magic in the Indian’s eyes, and a box is a most valuable gift. He may blaze one, just to be certain that the white man has passed on some of his own magical powers along with the wonderful little box of sticks, but never more than one is sacrificed at a time.

What with the heavy dews and the incessant rain the bush is always in a condition of reeking damp, so bush fires are impossible. Therefore, when they cannot make fire, the Indians must keep the family fire burning night and day, and its preservation is the very serious business of every member of the tribe. Not only do they depend on it for warmth and cooking, but the fitful glow of the smouldering fires is on ordinary occasions the only light in the Indian house. Torches of resinous wood are used at dances and such-like festivals only. When the tribesmen go into the bush they always carry fire over their shoulders. This is done by means of a strip of some resinous bark, about two feet long, which they hold in their hands. The bark smoulders slowly, and can at any time be blown into a flame.

The fire is always arranged after a definite pattern. Three young trees are placed together on the ground endways, in the form of a triskeles. The fire is kindled in the centre, and once alight it will last for as long as a week at a time. All day when people pass, even the little children, they will give a kick to a log to keep the fire together, and during the night it is fed continually in the same fashion.

The natives sleep with no more covering than they have worn in the daytime. The hammocks of the father, the mother, and the children are slung, as has been said, in a triangle, with the fire between them. As the fire dies down one or other will rise and push the wood more closely together, blow a little at the hot embers, and then return to rest, till about the hour before sunrise, when it is coldest. Then every one gets up, and when the fire has been blown into a blaze they wait for dawn.

Dawn is the signal for all to repair to the river for the first bath of the day. The girls come back with big jars full of water on their heads, held in position by their uplifted hands. The women go to work in the plantations, the men may hunt and fish. As day advances into evening the women return again from the plantation, the mothers, naked and shining from the evening bath, with their children seated astride their left hips; while those not encumbered carry up the pine-apples, the plantains, and the manioc, packed in baskets that are slung from their foreheads. Those who have sought provision in the forest bring back lizards and snakes—it may be a frog, for nothing seems amiss for the hot-pot of the Indian. The hunters come in from the bush with a capybara, a curassow, or a monkey; the men who preferred the river bring fish. Soon there is a savoury smell from the cooking of cassava cakes, the boiling of meat, and the pungent odour of yarakue. There is not much talk, and none of the homely clatter of dishes, for leaves serve as plates and napkins, fingers for eating utensils. The naked women crouch on their heels about the fires; the men stretch languidly in their hammocks; and so the Indian day passes by imperceptible degrees again to night.

So much for the human inhabitants of the tribal household. There are others of less pleasing character. Spiders are there, some of an extraordinary size, not forgetting the deadly tarantula. One day I placed my hand carelessly on one of the posts in an Indian house, and only just withdrew it in time, for it had been within an inch or two of a large mygale. Scorpions also lurk in crannies of the thatch, but they never bothered me in the least, and although the swelling was considerable in the one or two cases of bite I noted, there were no after-consequences.

The Menimehe, whose houses are more open, make hives of hollow trees for bees to swarm in, and these are placed in their maloka, so that a store of honey and wax is always at hand.

The smoke and darkness keep off the pium and mosquito, but outside the dwelling ants abound, though their value as scavengers does in a measure detract from their general undesirability; for it is thanks mainly to them that there are no bad smells in the vicinity of a Witoto home, as cleanliness is not a virtue of the Witoto. The daily rain, also, prevents any accumulation of filth, for everything of that description is continually washed away.

Jiggers are found in Indian houses, though never in the bush. There need be no trouble with these tiresome creatures if prompt attention be paid to the part affected. It is a common practice among the Indians for the women to examine the men’s feet directly they come in, to see that they are all right, and if a jigger is detected to dig it out with a palm-spine, care being taken that a non-poisonous spine is selected.[33] A very much more serious injury is inflicted by the blood-sucking bat. Not only the forest but the dark and lofty roof of the native house will often harbour bats of several kinds, and occasionally some of the Phyllostoma. Vampires, however, are more frequently met with on the main river than on the Issa or Japura.[34] They undoubtedly attack sleepers, and the subsequent loss of blood may be serious, especially in the case of a child. The point made for is always the big toe, and the wound is so slight that the victim does not waken, or if awake is hardly conscious of the hurt. It is possible that the loss of blood induces a comatose state. I never actually saw a case, though I have talked to persons who had been bitten. But the vampire is rare in these districts, whereas other bats are common enough in the forest.

As a general rule the Indians have no pets; but on one occasion, near a Boro settlement on the north of the Japura, I saw some children of the Menimehe tribes with tame monkeys. These were the only Indians I ever met who kept any pet. Animal food is too scarce in the forest. Bates asserts that “the Indians are very fond of them [monkeys] as pets, and the women often suckle them when young at their breasts.”[35] I never heard of such a case as this, but certainly the monkey must be caught extremely young to be tamable at all; and, I repeat, food is scarce.