These had a timid, distrustful expression of countenance, and their bodies were begrimed with black mud, which is smeared over the skin as a protection against mosquitoes.The children were naked, the women wore petticoats of coarse cloth, ragged round the edges, and stained in blotches with murixi, a dye made from the bark of a tree.One of them wore a necklace of monkey's teeth.There were scarcely any household utensils; the place was bare with the exception of two dirty grass hammocks hung in the corners.I missed the usual mandioca sheds behind the house, with their surrounding cotton, cacao, coffee, and lemon trees.Two or three young men of the tribe were lounging about the low open doorway.They were stoutly-built fellows, but less well-proportioned than the semi-civilised Indians of the Lower Amazons generally are.Their breadth of chest was remarkable, and their arms were wonderfully thick and muscular.The legs appeared short in proportion to the trunk; the expression of their countenances was unmistakably more sullen and brutal, and the skin of a darker hue than is common in the Brazilian red man.Before we left the hut, an old couple came in; the husband carrying his paddle, bow, arrows, and harpoon, the woman bent beneath the weight of a large basket filled with palm fruits.The man was of low stature and had a wild appearance from the long coarse hair which hung over his forehead.Both his lips were pierced with holes, as is usual with the older Muras seen on the river.They used formerly to wear tusks of the wild hog in these holes whenever they went out to encounter strangers or their enemies in war.The gloomy savagery, filth, and poverty of the people in this place made me feel quite melancholy, and I was glad to return to the canoe.
They offered us no civilities; they did not even pass the ordinary salutes, which all the semi-civilised and many savage Indians proffer on a first meeting.The men persecuted Penna for cashaca, which they seemed to consider the only good thing the white man brings with him.As they had nothing whatever to give in exchange, Penna declined to supply them.They followed us as we descended to the port, becoming very troublesome when about a dozen had collected together.They brought their empty bottles with them and promised fish and turtle, if we would only trust them first with the coveted aguardente, or cau-im, as they called it.Penna was inexorable; he ordered the crew to weigh anchor, and the disappointed savages remained hooting after us with all their might from the top of the bank as we glided away.
The Muras have a bad reputation all over this part of the Amazons, the semi-civilised Indians being quite as severe upon them as the white settlers.Everyone spoke of them as lazy, thievish, untrustworthy, and cruel.They have a greater repugnance than any other class of Indians to settled habits, regular labour, and the service of the whites; their distaste, in fact, to any approximation towards civilised life is invincible.
Yet most of these faults are only an exaggeration of the fundamental defects of character in the Brazilian red man.There is nothing, I think, to show that the Muras had a different origin from the nobler agricultural tribes belonging to the Tupi nation, to some of whom they are close neighbours, although the very striking contrast in their characters and habits would suggest the conclusion that their origin had been different, in the same way as the Semangs of Malacca, for instance, with regard to the Malays.They are merely an offshoot from them, a number of segregated hordes becoming degraded by a residence most likely of very many centuries in Ygapo lands, confined to a fish diet, and obliged to wander constantly in search of food.Those tribes which are supposed to be more nearly related to the Tupis are distinguished by their settled agricultural habits, their living in well-constructed houses, their practice of many arts, such as the manufacture of painted earthenware, weaving, and their general custom of tattooing, social organisation, obedience to chiefs, and so forth.The Muras have become a nation of nomade fishermen, ignorant of agriculture and all other arts practised by their neighbours.They do not build substantial and fixed dwellings, but live in separate families or small hordes, wandering from place to place along the margins of those rivers and lakes which most abound in fish and turtle.At each resting-place they construct temporary huts at the edge of the stream, shifting them higher or lower on the banks, as the waters advance or recede.Their canoes originally were made simply of the thick bark of trees, bound up into a semi-cylindrical shape by means of woody lianas; these are now rarely seen, as most families possess montarias, which they have contrived to steal from the settlers from time to time.Their food is chiefly fish and turtle, which they are very expert in capturing.It is said by their neighbours that they dive after turtles, and succeed in catching them by the legs, which I believe is true in the shallow lakes where turtles are imprisoned in the dry season.They shoot fish with bow and arrow, and have no notion of any other method of cooking it than by roasting.
