Note 84 — Chapter II

It is certain that the Guaranís, like many other Indians, were polygamists, and Xarque, in his ‘Vida Apostolica del P. Joseph Cataldino’, thus explains the matter: ‘El tener tanto numero de concubinas, no solamente lo ocasiona su natural lascivo, sino tambien, el vicio de la embriaguez, pues teniendo tantas criadas tenian con mas abundancia su cerveza y vino.’ Thus Xarque seems to agree with the late Miss Mary Kingsley, who in one of her books (though she says nothing about the ‘natural lascivo’ of the negroes of the West Coast of Africa) seems to attribute the polygamy of the negroes to the difficulty a man experiences, in the countries in which she travelled, in getting his food prepared by one wife.