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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Before We Reached Its Confluence, A Granitic Eminence On The
Western Bank, Near The Mouth Of The Guasacavi, Fixed Our Attention:
It
is called Piedra de la Guahiba (Rock of the Guahiba woman), or the
Piedra de la Madre (Mother's Rock.) We inquired the cause of so
singular a denomination.
Father Zea could not satisfy our curiosity;
but some weeks after, another missionary, one of the predecessors of
that ecclesiastic, whom we found settled at San Fernando as president
of the missions, related to us an event which excited in our minds the
most painful feelings. If, in these solitary scenes, man scarcely
leaves behind him any trace of his existence, it is doubly humiliating
for a European to see perpetuated by so imperishable a monument of
nature as a rock, the remembrance of the moral degradation of our
species, and the contrast between the virtue of a savage, and the
barbarism of civilized man!
In 1797 the missionary of San Fernando had led his Indians to the
banks of the Rio Guaviare, on one of those hostile incursions which
are prohibited alike by religion and the Spanish laws. They found in
an Indian hut a Guahiba woman with her three children (two of whom
were still infants), occupied in preparing the flour of cassava.
Resistance was impossible; the father was gone to fish, and the mother
tried in vain to flee with her children. Scarcely had she reached the
savannah when she was seized by the Indians of the mission, who hunt
human beings, like the Whites and the Negroes in Africa.
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