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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I Shall Not Here Enter Into Any Detail On The Physiological Properties
Of Those Poisons Of The New World Which
Kill with the same promptitude
as the strychneae of Asia,* (* The nux vomica, the upas tieute, and
the bean of
St. Ignatius, Strychnos Ignatia.) but without producing
vomiting when they are received into the stomach, and without denoting
the approach of death by the violent excitement of the spinal marrow.
Scarcely a fowl is eaten on the banks of the Orinoco which has not
been killed with a poisoned arrow; and the missionaries allege that
the flesh of animals is never so good as when this method is employed.
Father Zea, who accompanied us, though ill of a tertian fever, every
morning had the live fowls allotted for our food brought to his
hammock together with an arrow, and he killed them himself; for he
would not confide this operation, to which he attached great
importance, to any other person. Large birds, a guan (pava de monte)
for instance, or a curassao (alector), when wounded in the thigh, die
in two or three minutes; but it is often ten or twelve minutes before
life is extinct in a pig or a peccary. M. Bonpland found that the same
poison, bought in different villages, varied much. We had procured at
the river Amazon some real Ticuna poison which was less potent than
any of the varieties of the curare of the Orinoco. Travellers, on
arriving in the missions, frequently testify their apprehension on
learning that the fowls, monkeys, guanas, and even the fish which they
eat, have been killed with poisoned arrows.
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