Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 5, 2025
A full- sized Zarabatana is heavy, and can only be used by an adult Indian who has had great practice. The young lads learn to shoot with smaller and lighter tubes. When Mr. Wallace and I had lessons at Barra in the use of the blow-gun, of Julio, a Juri Indian, then in the employ of Mr. Hauxwell, an English bird- collector, we found it very difficult to hold steadily the long tubes.
The Indian, destitute of firearms, ranges through the forest in chase of the fiercest and largest animals which haunt its shade, armed with a slender tube, and a quiver full of needle-like arrows. The tube, ten or eleven feet long, is the celebrated gravatana, or blow-pipe; called also the zarabatana by the Spaniards.
He brought with him his zarabatana or blow-pipe, his bow, and a quiver full of arrows, as also a basket of farinha, apparently supposing that we might be unable to provide him with food. Seeing the curious umbrella-bird secured to a perch projecting from the wall, I asked him to bring it, as I wanted to show it to Ellen.
Even there the water hissed and roared as it was forced into the narrow channel. As an arrow flies through the zarabatana, so we sped up the igarape. For a few seconds Domingos had to exert himself to steer the canoe in mid-channel, to prevent her being dashed against the roots of the tall trees which projected into it.
It is called by a variety of names by the Spaniards, zarabatana; by some natives, the samouran; by others, the tarbucan; by the Portuguese, the gravatana. The arrows are made from thin strips of the hard rind of the leaf-stalks of palms, and are scraped at the end till they become as sharp as needles.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking