Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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One Of The
Most Barbarous Nations Of The Orinoco, That Of The Ottomacs, Is
Acquainted With The Use Of Mosquito-Curtains (Mosquiteros) Woven From
The Fibres Of The Moriche Palm-Tree.
At Higuerote, on the coast of
Caracas, the copper-coloured people sleep buried in the sand.
In the
villages of the Rio Magdalena the Indians often invited us to stretch
ourselves as they did on ox-skins, near the church, in the middle of
the plaza grande, where they had assembled all the cows in the
neighbourhood. The proximity of cattle gives some repose to man. The
Indians of the Upper Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, seeing that M.
Bonpland could not prepare his herbal, owing to the continual torment
of the mosquitos, invited him to enter their ovens (hornitos). Thus
they call little chambers, without doors or windows, into which they
creep horizontally through a very low opening. When they have driven
away the insects by means of a fire of wet brushwood, which emits a
great deal of smoke, they close the opening of the oven. The absence
of the mosquitos is purchased dearly enough by the excessive heat of
the stagnated air, and the smoke of a torch of copal, which lights the
oven during your stay in it. M. Bonpland, with courage and patience
well worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, shut up in these
hornitos of the Indians.
These precautions of the Indians sufficiently prove that,
notwithstanding the different organization of the epidermis, the
copper-coloured man, like the white man, suffers from the stings of
insects; but the former seems to feel less pain, and the sting is not
followed by those swellings which, during several weeks, heighten the
irritability of the skin, and throw persons of a delicate constitution
into that feverish state which always accompanies eruptive maladies.
Whites born in equinoctial America, and Europeans who have long
sojourned in the Missions, on the borders of forests and great rivers,
suffer much more than the Indians, but infinitely less than Europeans
newly arrived.
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