Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Charm Of
Solitude, The Innate Desire Of Independence, The Deep Impression
Made By Nature, Whenever Man Finds Himself In Contact With Her In
Solitude.
The condition of the women among the Chaymas, like that in all
semi-barbarous nations, is a state of privation and suffering.
The
hardest labour devolves on them. When we saw the Chaymas return in
the evening from their gardens, the man carried nothing but the
knife or hatchet (machete), with which he clears his way among the
underwood; whilst the woman, bending under a great load of
plantains, carried one child in her arms, and sometimes two other
children placed upon the load. Notwithstanding this inequality of
condition, the wives of the Indians of South America appear to be
in general happier than those of the savages of the North. Between
the Alleghany mountains and the Mississippi, wherever the natives
do not live chiefly on the produce of the chase, the women
cultivate maize, beans, and gourds; and the men take no share in
the labours of the field. In the torrid zone, hunting tribes are
not numerous, and in the Missions, the men work in the fields as
well as the women.
Nothing can exceed the difficulty experienced by the Indians in
learning Spanish, to which language they have an absolute aversion.
Whilst living separate from the whites, they have no ambition to be
called educated Indians, or, to borrow the phrase employed in the
Missions, 'latinized Indians' (Indios muy latinos). Not only among
the Chaymas, but in all the very remote Missions which I afterwards
visited, I observed that the Indians experience vast difficulty in
arranging and expressing the most simple ideas in Spanish, even
when they perfectly understand the meaning of the words and the
turn of the phrases.
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