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WARLIKE WOMEN 465
we learn from Humboldt that the price of a cylinder
two inches long was from twelve to fifteen dollars in
Spanish Guayana. He obtained a few of them from
the dwellers on the Upper Rio Negro. According
to Condamine they were once common articles on
the site of the modern Santarem.
" C'est chez les
Topayos qu'on trouve aujourd'hui, plus aisement
que partout ailleurs, de ces pierres vertes, connues
sous le nom de Pierres des Amazones, dont on
ignore 1'origine, et qui ont ete fort recherchees
autrefois, a cause des vertus qu'on leur attribuoit de
guerir de la Pierre, de la Colique nephretique et de
1'Epilepsie" (Voyage, p. 137). Even to this day
their origin is doubtful, for it is said that no jade
of the same kind as these stones has been found
anywhere in South Mexico.
America, it although exists in
The notable thins: about them is o
that the
South American Indians in whose hands they have
been seen by Europeans all agreed in asserting them
to be obtained from the women without husbands,
or, on the Orinoco, from the women living alone
( Aikeambenanos in the Tamanac language, according
to F. Gili).
Velasco cites also a conversation he had with a
friar, F. Jose Bahamonte, who had been for forty
years a missionary on the Maranon, to the effect
that, being in 1757 in the village of Pevas, shortly
after the Portuguese garrison of the fort of the Rio
Negro had mutinied against their commandant,
" those deserters, having left the major nearly dead
and pillaged the warehouses and the royal treasury,
fled up the Maranon, and reached Pevas a few at a
time. Some of them remained in the mission ;
With one of those parties
VOL. II 2 H
others went on to Quito.