This People Are Connected By Their Language With The Great Branch Of The Maypure Nations.

They are more industrious, we might also say more civilized, than the other nations of the Upper Orinoco. The missionaries relate, that the Guaypunaves, at the time of their sway in those countries, were generally clothed, and had considerable villages.

After the death of Macapu, the command devolved on another warrior, Cuseru, called by the Spaniards El capitan Cusero. He established lines of defence on the banks of the Inirida, with a kind of little fort, constructed of earth and timber. The piles were more than sixteen feet high, and surrounded both the house of the apoto and a magazine of bows and arrows. These structures, remarkable in a country in other respects so wild, have been described by Father Forneri.

The Marepizanas and the Manitivitanos were the preponderant nations on the banks of the Rio Negro. The former had for its chiefs, about the year 1750, two warriors called Imu and Cajamu. The king of the Manitivitanos was Cocuy, famous for his cruelty. The chiefs of the Guaypunaves and the Manitivitanos fought with small bodies of two or three hundred men; but in their protracted struggles they destroyed the missions, in some of which the poor monks had only fifteen or twenty Spanish soldiers at their disposal. When the expedition of Iturriaga and Solano arrived at the Orinoco, the missions had no longer to fear the incursions of the Caribs. Cuseru, the chief of the Guaypunaves, had fixed his dwelling behind the granitic mountains of Sipapo. He was the friend of the Jesuits; but other nations of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, led by Imu, Cajamu, and Cocuy, penetrated from time to time to the north of the Great Cataracts. They had other motives for fighting than that of hatred; they hunted men, as was formerly the custom of the Caribs, and is still the practice in Africa. Sometimes they furnished slaves (poitos) to the Dutch (in their language, Paranaquiri - inhabitants of the sea); sometimes they sold them to the Portuguese (Iaranavi - sons of musicians).* (* The savage tribes designate every commercial nation of Europe by surnames, the origin of which appears altogether accidental. The Spaniards were called clothed men, Pongheme or Uavemi, by way of distinction.) In America, as in Africa, the cupidity of the Europeans has produced the same evils, by exciting the natives to make war, in order to procure slaves. Everywhere the contact of nations, widely different from each other in the scale of civilization, leads to the abuse of physical strength, and of intellectual preponderance. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians formerly sought slaves in Europe. Europe now presses in her turn both on the countries whence she gathered the first germs of science, and on those where she now almost involuntarily spreads them by carrying thither the produce of her industry.

I have faithfully recorded what I could collect on the state of these countries, where the vanquished nations have become gradually extinct, leaving no other signs of their existence than a few words of their language, mixed with that of the conquerors.

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