Talk:The Ogre (Friel)

Information about this edition
Edition:	Extracted from Adventure magazine, 1926 Oct 23, pp. 94–118.
Source:	https://archive.org/details/AdventureV060N0219261023
Contributor(s):	ragpicker
Level of progress:
Notes:	Accompanying illustrations may be omitted
Proofreaders:	ragcleaner

From the Camp-Fire section of the magazine, p. 202

SOMETHING from Arthur O. Friel in connection with his story in this issue. If, perhaps, the ogre of his tale seems overdrawn, read the chapter on Tomas Funes, the bandit of real life, in Mr. Friel’s “The River of Seven Stars” (Harper & Brothers), the account of his own single-handed exploration of the Orinoco and its tributary the Ventuari in 1922.

THERE is a queer bit of country off to the east of the hamlet of Atures, halfway up the Orinoco; mountains where live Indians virtually unknown, as well as the Piaroas, some of whom used to come down to the pueblo now and then to trade for salt and fishhooks and such stuff. After the habitual killing by the Funes gang had gotten well under way, though, the back-bush folk ceased making such visits, for most excellent reasons. Only the aborigines still unaware of what was going on at the settlement came down after that; and they either went back in haste or wished they had. I am letting Sixto Scott spin you the yarn of one young couple who did come down, and of what happened afterward.

KNOWING that some of you may feel inclined to arise and dispute Sixto’s assertion that white men have eaten Indians down there—even when they didn’t have to—I quote you the following excerpt from the authoritative book “Venezuela,” by Leonard V. Dalton, F.R.G.S., etc.:

“Making a permanent camp in the country to the west of the Lake of Maracaibo, after founding the city of that name in 1529, he (Ambrosius Alfinger, first governor of the country which is now Venezuela) sent a party of Spaniards and Germans to Coro for fresh supplies and reinforcements. The party lost themselves in the forest-clad mountains at the south end of the lake, and in their privations some of the members turned cannibals, killing and eating their Indian servants. Apparently the taste for human flesh, once acquired, was not easily overcome, for the survivors, when given food by some Indians on the banks of the Chama, fell upon their benefactors and devoured them! The few that reached Coro found that Alfinger had been killed in his camp in 1531, and his expedition had accomplished nothing beyond outraging the Indians.”

So that’s that. And again, later in the same volume:

“The members of these tribes (about thirty Carib tribes named by the author) were those who, like the Goajiros, fought most stoutly for their independence when they saw it menaced by the Conquistadores. These patriots, superior in many respects to their foes, were characterised by the European invaders as cannibals, vicious and degraded.... In reality they were then what they still are, where unspoilt by ‘civilization,’ a fine race physically, brave and intelligent, possessing, no doubt, the vices of savagery, but also its virtues. The charges of cannibalism brought by the European exploiters of the New World—who had the vices of civilization and barbarism combined, without the virtues of either—were either entirely baseless or due to the ignorance which mistook the limbs of monkeys, which the Indians were always accustomed to eat, for those of men.”

All of which may tend to corroborate the statements of Sixto Scott and Arthur Friel, both of whom have had some experience with the “wild” Venezuelan Indian and found him a very decent hombre when treated right.

A WORD about the drug used by Matá. Although I make no attempt to identify this in the story, I believe it to be the same concoction used for the same purpose in the Napo region of the upper Amazon, where it is called floripondio. Concerning this stuff I can best quote the following scientific note by Prof. James Orton, who, some sixty years ago, conducted an expedition through Ecuador for the Smithsonian Institution and who later lost his life at Lake Titicaca in Peru:

“Some of these feminines ... render their husbands idiotic by giving them an infusion of floripondio, and then choose another consort. We saw a sad example of this near Riobamba, and heard of one husband who, after being thus treated, unconsciously served his wife and her new man like a slave. Floripondio is the seed of the Datura sanguinea, which' is allied to the poisonous stramonium used by the priests of Apollo at Delphi to produce their frantic ravings.”

Whether or not the drug used farther north is the same, the effect is identical. I have repeatedly heard of its use by women in Venezuela, Colombia and the Guianas. While knocking about among the Antilles, too, I have been warned by residents of certain islands not to drink anything whatever, even water, offered me by a native woman. Thereabouts the dope makes a man not merely idiotic but downright insane. I myself saw a white man, soon after Boarding ship at one of the islands, suddenly lose his reason and throw himself overboard. He was rescued, confined until the next port was reached, and there taken ashore by the harbor police and kept in a madhouse for three weeks. Some time later I unexpectedly met him, perfectly normal once more, on his own island, and had to tell him all about his actions aboard ship. He remembered nothing of his seizure or the subsequent events. But he did remember, and kept repeating, “They gave me something to drink.” Who “they” were he wouldn’t say, but I judged it to be a “she.”

Personally I’m pretty wary about both my drinks and my eats when traveling down South—and wary of women almost anywhere—A. O. F.