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Updated: May 23, 2025
As we advance towards the frontier of the Portuguese province of the Rio Negro the high rocks become more rare and we no longer find the shelves or dykes of gneiss-granite which cause rapids and cataracts in the rivers. The manuscript notes of Don Apollinario also mention the gold of the Rio Uaupes. La Condamine, Voyage a l'Amazone.
This is the Mesopotamia between the Caqueta, the Rio Negro, the Uaupes, and the Yurubesh, of which I have already given a particular account; it is the Dorado of the Omaguas which contains Lake Manoa of Father Acunha, the Laguna de oro of the Guanes and the auriferous land whence Father Fritz received plates of beaten gold in his mission on the Amazon, toward the end of the seventeenth century.
Amongst the Uaupes of Brazil a girl at puberty is secluded in the house for a month, and allowed only a small quantity of bread and water. If she recovers, the operation is repeated four times at intervals of six hours, and it is considered an offence to the parents not to strike hard.
Dyaks in Borneo, or the Indians of the Uaupes in South America, living on the banks of clear streams, clean in their persons and their houses, with abundance of wholesome food, and exhibiting its effect in healthy shins and beauty of form and feature!
This was on the Uaupes river.... They were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing to do with the white men or their ways; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller... original and self-sustaining as the wild animals of the forests, absolutely independent of civilization... living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was discovered.
If any woman of the Uaupes tribe happens to see the masks used in the tribal ceremony she is put to death. Crawley has explained the taboos on the sexes eating together and on the cooking of food by women for men as due to the superstitious belief that food which has come in contact with or under the influence of the female is capable of transmitting her properties.
M. Bonpland and myself, during our long journey, saw nothing in the gneiss granite of Spanish Guiana to confirm the old faith in the metallic wealth of that district; yet it seems certain from several historical notices that there exist two groups of auriferous alluvial land; one between the sources of the Rio Negro, the Uaupes and the Iquiare; the other between the sources of the Essequibo, the Caroni and the Rupunuri.
But "the most unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature with absolute uncontaminated savages!... and the surprise of it was that I did not expect to be at all so surprised.... These true wild Indians of the Uaupés ... had nothing that we call clothes; they had peculiar ornaments, tribal marks, etc.; they all carried tools or weapons of their own manufacture.... But more than all, their whole aspect and manner was different they were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing to do with white men or their ways; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller, and, except the few that were known to my companion, paid no attention whatever to us, mere strangers of an alien race!
Perhaps the most eventful and memorable journey during this period was the exploration of the Uaupés River, of which Wallace wrote nearly sixty years later: "So far as I have heard, no English traveller has to this day ascended the Uaupés River so far as I did, and no collector has stayed at any time at Javita, or has even passed through it."
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