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The only weapon used by the Caishanas is the blow-gun, and this is employed only in shooting animals for food. They are not a warlike people, like most of the neighbouring tribes on the Japura and Issa. The whole tribe of Caishanas does not exceed 400 souls in number.
Our destination was a point on this coast situated about twenty miles below Shimuni, and a short distance from the mouth of the Anana, one of the channels just alluded to as connected with the Japura.
Hordes of the same tribe living on the same branch rivers, speak mutually unintelligible languages; this happens with the Miranhas on the Japura, and with the Collinas on the Jurua; whilst Tupi is spoken with little corruption along the banks of the main Amazons for a distance Of 2500 miles.
He is neither a professor nor a lawyer, this reader and writer!" "You are right!" "Still watch him, Mr. Fragoso!" "I will watch him always, Miss Lina," replied Fragoso. On the morrow, the 27th of July, at daybreak, Benito gave the pilot the signal to start. Away between the islands, in the Bay of Arenapo, the mouth of the Japura, six thousand six hundred feet wide, was seen for an instant.
On passing the lower end of Shimuni, a long reach of the river was before us, undivided by islands a magnificent expanse of water stretching away to the southeast. The country on the left bank is not, however, terra firma, but a portion of the alluvial land which forms the extensive and complex delta region of the Japura.
That great geographer was entirely ignorant of the existence of the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo; and he makes the Orinoco or Rio Paragua, the Japura, and the Putumayo, take their rise from three branchings of the Caqueta. The expedition of the boundaries, commanded by Iturriaga and Solano, corrected these errors.
They might have taken the Ahuaty Parana, a sort of natural canal, which goes off a little below the mouth of the Tunantins, and re-enters the principal stream a hundred an twenty miles further on by the Rio Japura; but if the larger portion of this measures a hundred and fifty feet across, the narrowest is only sixty feet, and the raft would there have met with a difficulty.
Indeed, they are not limited to the main bed of the Amazons; they have been followed along the banks of its tributaries to the south and north as far as these have been ascended. They occur on the margins of the Huallaga and the Ucayall, on those of the Iça, the Jutahy, the Jurua, the Japura, and the Purus.
The commandante was Senor Macedo, the Indian blacksmith of Ega before mentioned, who maintained excellent order during the fourteen days the process of excavation and oil manufacture lasted. There were also many primitive Indians here from the neighbouring rivers, among them a family of Shumanas, good-tempered, harmless people from the Lower Japura.
Leaving these agreeable new acquaintances to finish their breakfast, we next called on the Director of the Indians of the Japura, Senor Jose Chrysostomo Monteiro, a thin wiry Mameluco, the most enterprising person in the settlement. Each of the neighbouring rivers with its numerous wild tribes is under the control of a Director, who is nominated by the Imperial Government.
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