Note 1 — CHAP. XV.

The employments of the men are, as I have stated, but very few, and, indeed, may be comprized in two words, hunting and fishing: at both of these exercises they are indisputably more expert than any other nation whatever. For the first they are provided with bows and arrows of their own manufacturing, the arrows being of different kinds for different purposes. The Indian bows are all made of the hardest and toughest kind of wood, about five or six feet in length, and wonderfully well polished; and this is effected by means of a stone. In the middle they are wound round with cotton, and strung with chords made of silk-grass. The arrows are generally about four feet long, made of a very straight and strong kind of reed, to the end of which is fixed a thin twig about one foot long, to balance them; this is armed with a point made of steel or of fish-bone, generally barbed. Some of the Indian arrows are pointed like a lance, others are doubly and trebly barbed, and so contrived as to stick in the wound when the reedy part is pulled back. These are used mostly for game and fish; for though they be not mortal, they encumber the first, and being buoyant bring the latter to the surface, till both are taken. These arrows, like all others, are stuck with feathers six or seven inches long. Some arrows have blunted heads instead of points, about the size of a large chesnut, like what our ancestors called bolts; with these they do not kill, but stun the macaws, parrots, and small monkeys, so that they can take them with their hands, soon after which they recover, and are sent alive to Paramaribo. Some of the arrows for killing fish have the appearance of a trident, three and sometimes five barbed sticks being fixed to the reed instead of one, which enables them to shoot fish even at random. A few of the above arrows are frequently dipped in the woorara poison1, which is instantaneously fatal: but when intent on certain destruction, this people make use of another kind of arrow that is not above ten or twelve inches long, extremely thin, and made of the hard splinters of the palm-tree bark, having, instead of feathers, one end wound round with a tuft of raw cotton, so as to fill up a hollow tube made of reed near six feet in length, through which they blow them with their breath. These little implements of death will carry to the distance of forty paces, and with so much certainty, that the intended victims never escape, the points being dipped in the woorara poison. As an instance of the dreadful effects of this poison, I shall only mention a negro woman, who, during the late rebellion in Berbicè, being slightly wounded by a poisoned arrow, not only almost instantly expired, but her sucking infant, though not touched by the arrow, lost its life by tasting her milk.