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Updated: May 6, 2025
They have owed their liberty and their political independence for ages to the quaking and swampy soil, which they pass over in the time of drought, and on which they alone know how to walk in security to their solitude in the delta of the Oroonoco, to their abode on the trees, where religious enthusiasm will probably never lead any American Stylites. . . . The Mauritia palm- tree, the tree of life of the missionaries, not only affords the Guaraons a safe dwelling during the risings of the Oroonoco, but its shelly fruit, its farinaceous pith, its juice, abounding in saccharine matter, and the fibres of its petioles, furnish them with food, wine, and thread proper for making cords and weaving hammocks.
Each of the antagonists is furnished with a shield made of strips of the mauritia, cut into equal lengths, and firmly lashed across a frame three or four feet in height, but somewhat less in width, and slightly bending downwards.
From cassava they make an intoxicating liquor, the cause of many savage murders among them. They depend greatly on the pith of the mauritia, as it serves them for bread. No tree, indeed, is more useful to them. Before unfolding its leaves, its blossoms contain a sago-like meal, which is made into a paste and dried in thin slices. The sap is converted into palm-wine.
Among the most beautiful is the mauritia, or miriti, with pendent clusters of reddish fruit; its enormous, spreading, fan-like leaves cut into ribbons. Contrasted with it appears the manicaria, or the bussu, with stiff entire leaves, some thirty feet in length, almost upright, and very close in their mode of growth, and serrated all along their edges.
They exist, however, in greater numbers on the swampy country bordering the banks of the latter river. Their lands being completely inundated by the overflowing of the rivers for some months in each year, they construct their dwellings above the water, among the mauritia palms, whose crowns of fanlike leaves wave above their heads, and shield them from the rays of the burning sun.
Many solitary cultivated spots already exist in the midst of the pastures where running water and tufts of the mauritia palm have been found. These farms, sown with maize, and planted with cassava, will multiply considerably if trees and shrubs be augmented.
Mungo Park has made known the butter-tree of Bambarra, which M. De Candolle suspects to be of the family of sapotas, as well as our milk-tree. The plantain, the sago-tree, and the mauritia of the Orinoco, are as much bread-trees as the rema of the South Sea.
The fruits of the two palms were scattered over the ground; those of the Ubussu adhere together by twos and threes, and have a rough, brown-coloured shell; the fruit of the Mauritia, on the contrary, is of a bright red hue, and the skin is impressed with deep-crossing lines, which give it a resemblance to a quilted cricket-ball.
On the borders, on the other hand, of the streams, and around the lakes, which in the dry season retain a little brackish water, the traveller meets from time to time, even in the most extreme drought, groves of Mauritia, a species of palm, the leaves of which, spreading out like a fan, preserve amidst the surrounding sterility a brilliant verdure.
No wonder, indeed, that certain tribes look on this tree as sacred, or that the missionaries should have named it the tree of life. 'In the season of inundations these clumps of Mauritia, with their leaves in the form of a fan, have the appearance of a forest rising from the bosom of the waters.
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