The Sun.
London, England, 1864-10-06 00:00:00

The Indians of Darien.

The Atlantic coast of Darien is inhabited by the Tale,
San Bias, or Mandinga Indians, a handsome race, of
low stature, but stoutly built, with the copper-coloured
skin, straight, coarse. black hair, and other characteristics
of Red Indians. They live very peaceably together, are
honest, cleanly, and industrious, occupying themselves in
fishing, hunting, and cultivating plantains, cassava, cocoa
(theobroma cocoa), and a little sugar and tobacco. They
carry on some trade with foreigners in cocoanuts, cocoanut
oil, cocoa, turtle shell, cotton hammocks, grass hammocks,
vegetable ivory, and canoes of ealli-calli, a very durable
timber which they barter for coloured calicoes, shirts,
calico trowsers, looking glasses, beads, cutlasses for cutting
bush, hatchets, guns, powder and shot, tobacco, rum, brandy,
&c. A very prefi'able trade might be carried on with them
in dyewoods. timber, gums, resins, and a fine grass,
which they use for hemp and fi tx, and of which they make
a beautiful and most durable kind of hammock. They will
take no money in exchange for any of their commodities ;
nor will they sell gold dust, it being strictly forbidden by
their law to bring down gold dust to the coact.
The principal occupation is hunting deer, peccaris or
wild hogs, wild turkeys, ite., and fishing for the turtle,
which abound near the Kays. They are expert sailors,
several of them having made voyages to Jamaica and the
United States. They are very independent, never having
been subdued by the Spaniards, to whom they bear great
animosity. They used to make it a point to kill all of that
nation who happened to fall into their hands. Patterson,
in his report to the directors of the Scotch colony of
Darien, of 1698, says of them :—" They expressed a won-
derful hatred and horror for the Spaniards, and seemed
not to understand how we could be at peace
with them." " They pressed us hard," says Mr Rose, one
of the colonists, in his journal, " to come and live by them,
as also jointly to make war with the Spaniards, whom they
would engage, upon the forfeiture of their heads, if we
would but aseist them with 100 men and as many arms,
with 2,000 of their own people, to drive not only out of all
the mines—which are but three days' journey from ua—but
even out of Panama itself." In former times, they were
very friendly to the English buccaneers, whose allies they
were in many incursions against the Spaniards. Their

kindness to the English, however, did not always meet with
a proper return, as is shown by the following despatch from
Sir Charles Wager to Admiral Vernon, written July 9,
1740, in the time of the famous Portobello expedition :
" I am told that the trading ships or privateers have be•
haved in such a manner to the Darien Indians, by abusing
the women, and carrying some of the men to Jamaice,
and selling them for slaves, that we have lost their
friendship, and that they have, for that reason, made peace
with the Spaniards, and will join with them against us
where they have the opportunity; and that we have done
the same to the Mu, quitos. If it be so, it is an abominable
thing, but not unlike that sort of Englishmen. I hope our
troops will behave better." They are at present very
friendly to English and Americans, but, nevertheless, will
not permit them to land on the coast. When a vessel
anchors, it is boarded by the Indians, who bring off their
produce themselves, and do not allow their captain and
crew to land. The trade is carried on by a few sloops and
schooners from Jamaica and Curacoa. Occasionally the
Abingdon, or some other clipper from Baltimore, finds her
way to the coast. The principal foreign traders are the
brothers Abraham, of.Portobello i Captain Raimon Iglesias,
of Carthagena, Ricardo Illhes, or Ellis, of Cure c ), and Juan
Seva. of Carthagena, a native of Malaga, who traded with
them for twenty-six years, and never once lauded on the
coast. I have heard of Lephyrino, Richard Marks, and
Capt. Latham, as traders, and the old Indians often spoke
to me of the late Capt. Shepherd, of San Juan de Nicara-
gua, who used to trade with them in his schooner, the
Mandeville. There is a half Indian son of his at Tarena
called Z Tata, as they pronounce Shepherd.
Their Government is purely patriarchal, the oldest and
most experienced man in each settlement being accounted
chief by general consent, and universally looked up to and
obeyed as such. The present chief of all the Indians is
Calogwa, of Carti, in Ssn Blas Bay, who is nearly 100 years
of ago. They are accustomed to the use of firearms, and are
good marksmen, but their principal weapons are spears and
arrows. They have the woorali or curare, poison which
they say they get from the Indians of Choco, and call few
or corona. The arrows, which are very slender and only a
foot long, have one end smeared with woorali, which has
the consistence and appearance of hard extract of opium.
When about to be used a little cotton or silk
cotton, from th 3 Bombay ceiba, is wrapped round
the other end; the dart, which is of ebony wood,
is then blown through a long tube of bamboo, called boro-
kera. The deadly effect of a mere scratch is almost instan-
taneoue, The Indians of the coast live on the coast, and
the islets and trays off it, and rarely go into the interior.
They wear shirts and trousers on grand occasions, the
shirt always outside of the trousers; but generally go
naked. The ladians of the interior live near the sources of
the rivers which fall into the Pacific, and rarely descend
any cf them, They keep entirely aloof from the Grandians
of the south, whom they dislike very much, and kill any
of them whom they catch ascending any of the rivers
towards the Atlantic. In 1850 they killed four negroes
whom they found fishing in Chiman river, and in 1852
they killed five negroes who had strayed too far towards
the Atlantic. They are very fond of adopting English
names, and have often asked me to give them some, which
I have done, giving the names of Fox, Henderson, Braseey,
Haslewood, Vincent, and Cullen. They have a great
objection to tell their own names. When one
is asked " iki pe pe nut ka (That ' s your
name ?) he invariably replies, " nukkachulii" (I have
no name). They place great faith in the divining powers
of their odes, or priests, who advise them in all important
matters, and pretend to foretell events. They have a great
dread of the smallpox, which is one of their reasons for not
allowing foreigners to enter their country, Another is that
they fear they would take their women; but the principal
reason is their very natural desire for independence, and
their idea that Gbd made the country for them alone.
It is not unusual to meet with albinos among them. At
Perdon Island, off Cape San Bias. I saw three children by
the same father and mother, two of whom were albinos,
with very white skins, white hair and eyelashes, and the
weakness of vision, under which albinos labeur, owing to
the deficiency of the pigment of the iris. A moment's ex-
posure to the sun was sufficient to redden their skins, and
smart them so much as to oblige them to run back into the
rancheria or hut.

Their language is very sweet and euphonous, abounjing
in vowels, as a few examples will show :—Whence did your
friends come? Peyamala Piya Kartanigi ? The tide is
falling. Timureti arreogali. When will the "canoe. come
from down the river ? Ulo Ghana ulnonigi diba to yala-
kari ? My brother is in the bush hunting. Angmechati
wirchanati. Loose the sail. Wur nola parmite—West
wind. Chagri puruaga. The word. Tule, which is the
name of the tribe, signifies people.
The women wear gold nose-rings so large that they hang
down below their mouths, and must be raised up when they
eat. They drag down the septum of the nose considerably.
They are diamond shaped, cut at one ef the angles to admit
of their being put in and taken out, and weigh about a
quarter of an ounce, being very thick, and made of gold,
22 carats fine. Their necks, wrists, ankles, knees, and
hips are adorned with glass beads, strings of coral, gold
trinkets, tigers', sharks', and alligators' teeth, pieces of
money, and a variety of miscellaneous articles. They
prizzd very highly a lot of gilt buttons which I cut off an
Armenian jacket that I bought at Constantinople in 1848.
During my intercourse with this interesting tribe I was
invariably treated with the greatest kindness and hospi-
tality, although the old men were strongly opposed to my
project for cutting a canal across the Isthmus, notwith-
standing that I represented to them that the line which I
proposed would not interfere with any of their settlements,
as it would traverse a country entirely uninhabited. I take
this opportunity of eunestly urging the justice and policy
of dealing with this fine race, in all future transactions, in a
spirit of conciliation and friendship, and with the strictest
integrity and honour.

1 do not believe the Indian population of the whole
Isthmus of Darien amounts to 3,000 souls. In 1747
Governor Joaquin Valcarcel de Miranda estimated it at
5,000 faMilies. If his calculation was correct, there has
been a lamentable falling off in the last century. The
Indians live entirely on the Atlantic coast, and the islets
and keys off it, and at the sources of the rivers which rise
in the Pacific slope of the Cordillera. As the Cordillera
runs parallel to the Atlantic, and is only from three to six
miles distant from it, the whole Indian population of Darien
may be considered to reside within 10 miles of the Atlantic.
Further south, the only inhabitants of the Isthmus are
about 1,100 negroes, citizens of the Republic of New
Grenada, who speak Spanish, and reside in the
villages of Chapigana, Real de Santa Maria, and
Molineca, on the Tuyra; Yavisa, on the Chuquanaqua ;
and Tucuti and Camoganti, on the La Marea ; and about
200 civilised Indians, whose ancestors were domesticated
by the Jesuit missionaries, and who live in Pinogana, on
the Tuyra. Thus, strange to say, 4,300 people, mostly
favages, occupy a country 180 miles in length, with an
average breadth of 60 miles, having a soil of amazing fertility,
capable of yielding the most valuable products, and occu-
pying the most commanding position for commerce, situated
as it is between the Atlantic and PaciEo, with magnificent
harbours on each, and at only eight days' steaming from
New York and eighteen from England. It seems still more
strange, when we reflect, that the narrowest part between
the two oceans is there, and that there, also, the first settle-
Fment was made after the di,covery of America—Santa
Maria 'de el Antigua del Darien, near the mouth of the
Atrato, having been the first town built on the American
continent. Nevertheless, there is now neither path, track,
trail, nor line of transit of any kind across the Jsthmus of
Darien, nor even across the Isthmus of Panama, except
from Chagres and Aspinwall, Navy Bay, to Panama,—The
isthmus of Darien, by Dr. Cullen.

POISONING BY [OBACCO.—A very curious case of
poisoning by the absorption of tobacco through the
skin was mentioned, at a recent meeting of the Academie
des Sciences, by M. Cl. Bernard, who received the infor-
mation from a 111. Namias. A smuggler had placed a quan
tity cf unmanufactured tobacco next his skin, and the heat
aid perspiration produced by walking caused the poisonous
properties of the tobacco to enter the system, the come-
qttences of which were very serious,—Once a W.