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In the Amazon Jungle
Adventures in Remote Parts of the
Upper Amazon River, Including a
Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians
By
Algot Lange
Edited in Part by J. Odell Hauser
With an Introduction by Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
To
The Memory of
My Father
When Mr. Algot Lange told me he was going to the headwaters of theAmazon, I was particularly interested because once, years ago, I hadturned my own mind in that direction with considerable longing. I knewhe would encounter many set-backs, but I never would have predictedthe adventures he actually passed through alive.
He started in fine spirits: buoyant, strong, vigorous. When I sawhim again in New York, a year or so later, on his return, he wasan emaciated fever-wreck, placing one foot before the other onlywith much exertion and indeed barely able to hold himself erect. Afew weeks in the hospital, followed by a daily diet of quinine,improved his condition, but after months he had scarcely arrived athis previous excellent physical state.
Many explorers have had experiences similar to those related inthis volume, but, at least so far as the fever and the cannibalsare concerned, they have seldom survived to tell of them. Theirinterviews with cannibals have been generally too painfully confinedto internal affairs to be available in this world for authorship,whereas Mr. Lange, happily, avoided not only a calamitous intimacy,but was even permitted to view the culinary preparations relating tothe absorption of less favoured individuals, and himself could havejoined the feast, had he possessed the stomach for it.
These good friends of his, the Mangeromas, conserved his life whenthey found him almost dying, not, strange as it may appear, forselfish banqueting purposes, but merely that he might return to hisown people. It seems rather paradoxical that they should have lovedone stranger so well as to spare him with suspicious kindness, andlove others to the extent of making them into table delicacies. Theexplanation probably is that these Mangeromas were the reverse ofa certain foreign youth with only a small stock of English, who, onbeing offered in New York a fruit he had never seen before, replied,"Thank you, I eat only my acquaintances"—the Mangeromas eat onlytheir enemies.
Mr. Lange's account of his stay with these people, of their weapons,habits, form of battle, and method of cooking the human captives,etc., forms one of the specially interesting parts of the book, andis at the same time a valuable contribution to the ethnology of thewestern Amazon (or Marañon) region, where dwell numerous similar tribeslittle known to the white man. Particularly notable is his descriptionof the wonderful wourahli (urari) poison, its extraordinary effect,and the modus operandi of its making; a poison used extensivelyby Amazonian tribes but not made by all. He describes also thebows and arrows, the war-clubs, and the very scientific weapon, theblow-gun. He was fortunate in securing a photograph of a Mangeroma inthe act of shooting this gun. Special skill, of course, is necessaryfor the effective use of this simple but terrible arm, and, like th