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Updated: June 19, 2025
The poison, which must be fresh to kill speedily, is obtained only of the Indians who live beyond the cataracts of the rivers flowing from the north, especially the Rio Negro and the Japura. Its principal ingredient is the wood of the Strychnos toxifera, a tree which does not grow in the humid forests of the river plains.
The upper part consisted of a rim of the red wood of the japura, highly polished; and it was secured over the shoulder by a belt ornamented with coloured fringes and tassels of cotton. We afterwards saw blow-pipes formed in a different way, two stems of small palms being selected, of different sizes, the smaller exactly to fit inside the larger.
On the banks of the Japura, where Major Coutinho has traced them, they are found as far as the Cataract of Cupati. I have followed them along the Rio Negro to its junction with the Rio Branco; and Humboldt not only describes them from a higher point on this same river, but also from the valley of the Orinoco.
It is generally made as a liquid, but the Juri and Miranha tribes on the Japura make it up in the form of a black paste by a mode of preparation I could not learn; it is then called Tucupi-pixuna, or black Tucupi I have seen the Indians on the Tapajos, where fish is scarce, season Tucupi with Sauba ants.
On the banks of the Japura, in the Serra of Cupati, Major Coutinho has found the same beds rising to the same height. It thus appears, by positive evidence, that over an extent of a thousand miles these deposits had a very considerable thickness in the present direction of the valley.
They had been obtained with great difficulty in the forests which cover the lowlands near the principal mouth of the Japura, about thirty miles from Ega. It was the first time I had seen this most curious of all the South American monkeys, and one that appears to have escaped the notice of Spix and Martius.
He had evidently found the forests of the Rio Negro very different from those of the delta lands of the Japura, and preferred captivity to freedom in a place that was so uncongenial to him. The Parauacu Monkey.
On the Putumayo, if a few Yuris are still met with, the Yahuas have abandoned the district to take refuge among some of the distant tributaries, and the Maoos have quitted its banks to wander in their diminished numbers among the forests of Japura. The Tunantins is almost depopulated, and there are only a few families of wandering Indians at the mouth of the Jurua.
Before the Indians can be reclaimed in large numbers, it is most likely they will become extinct as a race; but there is less difficulty with regard to the Mamelucos, who, even when the proportion of white blood is small, sometimes become enterprising and versatile people.Many of the Ega Indians, including all the domestic servants, are savages who have been brought from the neighbouring rivers the Japura, the Issa, and the Solimoens.
Our return route was by the rarely frequented north-easterly channel of the Solimoens, through which flows part of the waters of its great tributary stream, the Japura. We travelled for five hours along the desolate, broken, timber-strewn shore of Baria. The channel is of immense breadth, the opposite coast being visible only as a long, low line of forest.
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