Note 50 — STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 25.—“Using ants, gums, and earth as food.”

It was a very prevalent report on the coasts of Cumana, New Barcelona, and Caraccas, visited by the Franciscan monks of Guiana on their return from the missions, that there were men on the banks of the Orinoco who ate earth. When, in returning from the Rio Negro, we descended the Orinoco in thirty-six days, we passed the day of the 6th of June, 1800, in the Mission inhabited by the earth-eating Otomacs. This little village is called La Concepcion de Uruana, and is very picturesquely situated at the foot of a granite rock. I found its geographical position to be 7° 8′ 3″ N. lat., and 67° 18′ W. long. from Greenwich. The earth which the Otomacs eat is a soft unctuous clay; a true potter’s clay, of a yellowish-grey colour due to a little oxide of iron. They seek for it in particular spots on the banks of the Orinoco and the Meta, and select it with care. They distinguish the taste of one kind of earth from that of another, and do not consider all clays as equally agreeable to eat. They knead the earth into balls of about five or six inches diameter, which they burn or roast by a weak fire until the outside assumes a reddish tint. The balls are remoistened when about to be eaten. These Indians are generally wild uncultivated beings, and altogether averse to any kind of tillage. It is a proverb even among the most distant of the nations living on the Orinoco, when speaking of anything very unclean, to say that it is “so dirty, that the Otomacs eat it.”

As long as the waters of the Orinoco and the Meta are low these Indians live on fish and river tortoises. They kill the fish with arrows when at the surface of the water, a pursuit in which we have often admired their great dexterity. During the periodical swelling of the rivers the taking of fish ceases, for it is as difficult to fish in deep river water as in the deep sea. It is in this interval, which is of two or three months’ duration, that the Otomacs swallow great quantities of earth. We have found considerable stores of it in their huts, the clay balls being piled together in pyramidal heaps. The very intelligent monk, Fray Ramon Bueno, a native of Madrid (who lived twelve years among these Indians), assured us that one of them would eat from three quarters of a pound to a pound and a quarter in a day. According to the accounts which the Otomacs themselves give, this earth forms their principal subsistence during the rainy season, though they eat at the same time occasionally, when they can obtain it, a lizard, a small fish, or a fern root. They have such a predilection for the clay, that even in the dry season, when they can obtain plenty of fish, they eat a little earth after their meals every day as a kind of dainty. These men have a dark copper-brown complexion, and unpleasing Tartar features. They are fat, but not large-bellied. The Franciscan monk who lived among them as a missionary, assured us that he could perceive no alteration in their health during the earth-eating season.

The simple facts are therefore as follows:—The Indians eat large quantities of earth without injury to their health; and they themselves regard the earth so eaten as an alimentary substance, i. e. they feel themselves satisfied by eating it, and that for a considerable time; and they attribute this to the earth or clay, and not to the other scanty articles of subsistence which they now and then obtain in addition. If you inquire from an Otomac about his winter provision, (in tropical South America the rainy season is usually called winter), he points to the heap of clay balls stored in his hut. But these simple facts by no means determine the questions, whether the clay be really an alimentary substance? whether earths be capable of assimilation? or whether they merely serve to appease hunger by distending the stomach? I cannot pretend to decide these questions. (Rel. hist. T. ii. p. 618–620.) It is curious that the usually credulous and uncritical Father Gumilla positively denies the earth-eating as such. (Historia del Rio Orinoco, nueva impr. 1791, T. i. p. 179.) He affirms that the balls of clay had maize-meal and crocodile-fat mixed with them. But the missionary, Fray Ramon Bueno, and our friend and travelling companion, the lay brother Fray Juan Gonzalez, who was lost at sea off the Coast of Africa with part of our collections, both assured us that the Otomacs never mix crocodile fat with the clay; and of the meal said to be mixed with it we heard absolutely nothing during our stay in Uruana. The earth which we brought back with us, and which Vauquelin analysed, is thoroughly pure and unmixed. May Gumilla, by a confusion of things wholly distinct, have been alluding to the preparation of bread from the long pod of a kind of Inga, which is previously buried in the earth in order to hasten the commencement of the first stage of decay? That the health of the Otomacs should not suffer from eating so much earth appears to me particularly remarkable. Have they become accustomed to it in the course of several generations?

In all tropical countries, human beings shew an extraordinary and almost irresistible desire to swallow earth; and not alkaline earths, which they might be supposed to crave to neutralize acid, but unctuous and strong-smelling clays. It is often necessary to confine children to prevent them from running out to eat earth immediately after a fall of rain. I have observed with astonishment the Indian women in the village of Banco on the Magdalena River, whilst engaged in shaping earthen vessels on the potter’s wheel, put great lumps of clay into their mouths. The same thing was remarked at an earlier period by Gili. (Saggio di Storia Americana, T. ii. p. 311.) Wolves also eat earth, and especially clay, in winter. It would be important to examine carefully the excrements of animals and men that eat earth. With the exception of the Otomacs, individuals of all other races who indulge for any length of time the strange desire of earth-eating have their health injured by it. At the mission of San Borja, we saw the child of an Indian woman, who, his mother said, would hardly eat anything but earth. He was, however, wasted nearly to a skeleton.

Why is it that in the temperate and cold zones this morbid craving for eating earth is so much more rare, and is almost entirely confined, when it is met with, to children and pregnant women; while in the tropics it would appear to be indigenous in all quarters of the globe? In Guinea the negroes eat a yellowish earth, which they call Caouac. When brought as slaves to the West Indies, they try to obtain a similar earth, and affirm that in their own country the habit never did them any harm. In the American Islands they were made ill by it, and it was forbidden in consequence; but a kind of earth (un tuf rouge jaunâtre) was, in 1751, sold secretly in the market in Martinique. “Les negres de Guinée disent que dans leur pays ils mangent habituellement une certaine terre, dont le goût leur plait, sans en être incommodés. Ceux qui sont dans l’abus de manger du Caouac en sont si friands qu’il n’y a pas de châtiment qui puisse les empêcher de dévorer de la terre.” (Thibault de Chanvalon, Voyage à la Martinique, p. 85.) In the Island of Java, between Sarabaya and Samarang, Labillardière saw small square reddish-coloured cakes exposed for sale in the villages. The natives called them tana ampo (tanah, in Malay and Javanese, signifies earth). On examination and enquiry he found that the cakes consisted of reddish clay, and that they were eaten. (Voyage à la Récherche de la Pérouse, T. ii. p. 322.) The edible clay of Samarang has recently been sent to Berlin by Mohnike, in 1847, in the shape of rolled tubes, like cinnamon, and has been examined by Ehrenberg. It is a fresh-water formation deposited on limestone, and consisting of microscopic Polygastrica, Gaillonella, Naviculas, and Phytolitharia. (Bericht über die Verhandl. der Akad. d. Wiss. zu Berlin, aus dem J. 1848, S. 222–225.) The inhabitants of New Caledonia, to appease their hunger, eat pieces as big as the fist of friable steatite, which Vauquelin found to contain in addition no inconsiderable quantity of copper. (Voyage à la Récherche de la Pérouse, T. ii. p. 205.) In Popayan, and several parts of Peru, calcareous earth is sold in the streets as an eatable for the Indians; it is used with Coca (the leaves of the Erythroxylon peruvianum.) Thus we find the practice of eating earth diffused throughout the torrid zone, among indolent races inhabiting the finest and most fertile parts of the globe. But accounts have also come from the North, through Berzelius and Retzius, according to which, hundreds of cartloads of earth containing Infusoria are said to be annually consumed by the country people, in the most remote parts of Sweden, as breadmeal, and even more from fancy (like the smoking of tobacco) than from necessity! In Finland this kind of earth is occasionally mixed with the bread. It consists of empty shells of animalculæ, so small and soft that they do not crunch perceptibly between the teeth; it fills the stomach, but gives no real nourishment. In periods of war, chronicles and documents preserved in archives often give intimation of earths containing infusoria having been eaten; speaking of them under the vague and general name of “mountain meal.” It was thus during the Thirty Years’ War in Pomerania (at Camin); in the Lausitz (at Muskau); and in the territory of Dessau (at Klieken); and subsequently in 1719 and 1733 at the fortress of Wittenberg. (See Ehrenberg über das unsichtbar wirkende organische Leben, 1842, S. 41.)