Real All-Female Societies Reported in Brazil in 1954

Real All-Female Societies

Excerpted from Donald Yates’s forthcoming book The Countercurrents of Prehistory: What Rare Genes Have to Tell Us about Early Human Migrations, Chapter 8, “Amazons and Cannibals”

Amazon village as seen by Eduardo Barros Prado and his exploration team in early 1954.

Are Amazons real?

They used to be, real enough for the world’s largest river and a province in Brazil to be named for them. In 1539 the brother of the conqueror of Peru, Gonzalo Pizarro, left Quito with a large force in search of plunder. After trekking through the jungles and mountains to the east looking in vain for El Dorado, he split up and sent his lieutenant Francisco de Orellano to go ahead with fifty men and a priest, Gaspari de Carvajal. Orellano was to search for game and other food, as this “city on a march” had been reduced to extreme privation. At first food was abundant, but in passing the swollen Coca and Napa rivers, going back by boat became impossible. The expedition pushed on. Orellano crossed the Maranon and discovered the Rio Negro. This is now known to be the largest northern tributary of the Amazon, and it meets the main river at present-day Manaus. Orellano named it the Rio Negro because of its black waters.

According to Carvajal’s diary, on the afternoon of  June 3, 1542, the party went ashore, leaving the two boats.

Suddenly the men found themselves attacked and, on making their way with difficulty back to the boats, were astonished to see a horde of women warriors swarming over them. Orellana and his men, being subject to continual attack, were powerless to prevent the loss of their boats and the survivors made their way back on foot to the main army. It was from this encounter and the embellished stories to which it gave rise that the river was given its name of the Amazon….[1]

The river was supposed to be named after Orellana.

Carvajal reported that the Spaniards came across settlements on both sides of the river and “signs of sovereign territory.” The signs depicted a city surrounded by walls. The local residents gave the Spanish to know that the signs of sovereignty were the emblems of their Mistress. To her they paid tribute, bringing colorful parrot feathers to her temple. The Mistress ruled over the vast Land of the Amazons, which lay north of the great river.

Further downriver, the Spaniards sighted many more settlements with these sovereignty signs; but the inhabitants were not always friends, and the first conflicts arose. On  June 24, 1542, not far from the mouth of the Rio Negro [at present-day Manaus], they had a memorable encounter with the Amazons themselves when riverbank dwellers called upon their queen to help them fight the invaders. Ten or twelve large canoes full of warriors approached the Spanish boats, and at the prow of each canoe was an Amazon commander. These women fought so unrelentingly that none of their people dared to retreat, and if one of them crouched for cover, the Amazon commander would attack him with a stick, right before the Spaniards’ eyes. They entered into perilous combat: the Spanish boats were in such difficulty that “they looked like porcupines, with arrows sticking out of them all over” (Carvajal). These Amazons were described as being tall and white-skinned (probably painted white), with long, black hair braided around ther heads. Muscular and completely nude, they shot arrows from their bows with great strength, and Carvajal asserts that any one of them fought as bravely as ten men. The Spaniards stuttered out short prayers; clearly they needed courage from their Lord to fight against the Amazons. In the end, they managed to escape from this perilous situation.[2]

A prisoner reported that the entire region around the river belonged to Lord Couoynco, who was subject to the Amazons. Their queen was called Conori. They lived entirely without men. Their capital lay seven days’ journey north. There were 70 Amazon settlements, which the prisoner individually named into the record. The Amazon settlements were built of stone, with gates and streets. How did the Amazons have children?

…he answered that from time to time, when they got the urge, the Amazons declared war on a neighboring people and after they won, took the men back to their own lands and kept them there until pregnancies resulted. Then they sent the men back home with presents. When boys were born, they killed them or sent them back to their fathers; but when they bore daughters they raised them with great ceremony, and taught them the arts of war.

All the neighboring territories were subject to the Amazons. The Amazon realm must have included the entire northern half of modern Brazil, from the mouth of the river to the headwaters of the Orinoco and the Guianas in the north, down some of the southern tributaries, west to Ecuador, Peru and the Andes. Some of the women’s sometime spouses traveled from 1400 miles away half way down the river to visit them.

And so it was that the greatest river basin and largest rainforest in the world has been called the Amazon, named for a female warrior society the Spanish called “Amazons.” Carvajal was not believed in his day, however, regarding a “queendom” of Amazons. His manuscript was not published until 1894.

….

Finally in the 1950s—in our own day and age—the Brazilian Eduardo Barros Prado, a businessman in Manaus, picked up the trail of the Amazons. He asked around but no one could confirm anything. In Obidos, in the middle-to-lower reaches of the river, he asked an old Mundurucu Indian by the name of Kunite about the Amazons. The latter had caught a fleeting look at them years ago searching for manatees in a part of the river called Faro. The Amazon party consisted of five canoes with women paddlers and a sixth in the rear with nineteen to twenty children, under the supervision of a tall, white woman. All the paddlers had blue tattooing and red paint and were otherwise completely naked.

Kunite told Eduardo these women were known as Icomiabas, women without husbands.[1] Periodically they descended the Nhamunda in search of game. Other men ridiculed his stories, and Eduardo was the first white man he had told it to. Writes Prado:

It is now known that a matriarchy, composed of well-built women, had gone up the Nhamunda, in South America, and, crossing the Trombetas, had settled in the mountains near the source of the Jary, on an abutment of the Tumuc-Humac range, near French Guiana. Every year the Macuxis of the Alto Oyapoc and of the Uraricuera zone, in the region of the Branco river, near to the present frontier with Venezuela, visited the tribe for the procreation of children. They had to make a long and difficult journey, crossing the Cachorro, Mapeura and Cumina rivers, besides facing danger of attack from the Emerillon, not to speak of the risk of shortage of provisions. The women were also visited by the Parintintins, another powerful tribe (p. 103).

At length, Prado manages to persuade a reluctant acquaintance of his, Yauaperi, go up the Nhamunda River in search of the Icomiabas Tribe. They would then be able to “tell the world the truth on matters which had been debated so long” (p. 105). In addition to Yauperi as a guide, he engages an Emerillon Indian from Faro, named Krakaraan, and takes his trusty pilot, Wilson, along with Silvino Santos, “one of the best cameramen in Brazil.” The expedition left from Obidos in several canoes with strong paddlers, the airplane accompanying them overhead.  It was early in 1954.

On the 20^th day, the group arrived in the proximity of the Amazon villages. It was, said Krakaraan, one of the women’s “honeymoon periods,” and they were expecting suitors from the Macuxis and Parintintins in the distant Roraina Mountains. As was the custom, Prado’s party went within calling distance and sent forth into the night “the melodious trilling of the uyrapuru, or love bird” (p.106). Bonfires immediately lighted up and they heard drums and flutes.

Not being certain of their welcome, Prado had the pilot take him on a preliminary reconnaissance by fly-over.

The main building was a very large hut, a kind of rectangular dormitory, with a broad oval mount at the end which sloped gently towards the level of the waters of the great Nhamunda River…. From one end of the same village three narrow paths went out, spreading like a fan, towards the north. They terminated at a wide lake with calm and extremely blue waters, from which rose two mountains…. There was no room for doubt. This was the Yacicura or Yacura, the genuine home of the Amazons” (p.. 109).

 

Six paths from the lake lead to six other villages. “These had been laid out in a symmetric patter which could have been the work of an architect with a flare for geometric design.” Two broad streams ran through the territory and emptied into the Nhamunda. The ground showed signs of having been worked for some years. “Bananas, mandioc, maize, and other produce were under cultivation in this tidy-minded community” (p. 110).

When they landed, a crowd of chattering, smiling young girls met them and conducted them singing to the main village. Prado briefly describes their appearances, hair and tattoos.

 

They marched with an air of pride which appeared to me to be slightly exaggerated and, here and there, one of them moved with a sort of swinging gait, which was reminiscent of enthusiastic dancers of the rumba in civilized dancing halls” (p. 111).

 

Prado explains why the chapter is titled, “Why the Amazon Women Laughed.” He met three counselors of the chieftainess at the entrance of the longhouse, was offered a gourd full of a coffee-colored love potion, unthinkingly drank it all down and spent the next day in delirium in his bed.

The following day, “a descendant of Queen Canory,” Kuyta, the Chieftainness, invites him to observe an alligator hunt (which he describes). Three young huntresses bring in a “fine jaguar” they killed with their lances. The villagers are most hospitable and well-mannered.

 

The elders would not hear of us using our own supplies and produced an abundance of fish, game, fruits, eggs, nuts, flour, pheasants and various drinks. Our life with them was a succession of banquets, the younger women, or girls, carrying out the hunting and foraging expeditions while the older women made the preparations” (p, 117).

 

One afternoon, Kuyta invited him to accompany her and she took him to a nearby village of children. There were about 70 boys, none of them over the age of eight, in the care of a tall blonde elderly woman named Natibo, “a white Cayabi” (p. 117).

Meanwhile, the suitors were more than 30 miles away, awaiting the full moon, after paddling some 900 miles from their homes in Madeira. On the first Friday in February 1954, their arrival was announced by drums. Then about a hundred adolescent girls were washed by the three counselors and tattooed by two priestesses. With the permission of the Chieftainness, the photographer  photographed them and “later in Buenos Aires I compared the designs with those used by the Tianhuanaco people in the area of Lake Titicaca and by the Agmaraes of Altiplano” (p. 119). Prado writes that he found the designs “almost identical” and similar to the Mayas, Aztecs, Incase and “those used in the days of the Pharaohs” (p. 120). He speculates they came from “Atlantis.”

When darkness falls, the Parintintin Indians enter the village in formation and perform the Dance of the Wounded Men, replete with leaps, whirls round and brandishing of bows and arrows.

 

Suddenly, by an invisible signal, they stopped, carefully deposited their arms in the centre of the arena and formed a large circle. The dance which followed took the form of a gymnastic display, enabling the suitors to demonstrate their physique before the assembly of critical young ladies, who were choosing their bridegrooms in advance” (p. 121).

After this, the white men discretely took their departure but returned after two weeks to witness the goodbyes of the Amazon women to their “swains.” “Near the inlet, where the canoes were loaded, the Amazons stood in two lines singing haunting songs of farewell to the accompaniment of their drums, until their lovers and husbands passed out of sight on their nine hundred mile journey” (122).

[1] Many scholars believe the true meaning of Amazons is “women without husbands” rather than the popular etymology “women who cut off one breast.”

[1] Eduardo Barros Prado, The Lure of the Amazon (London: Souvenir, 1959), p. 102.

[2] Goettner-Abendroth, p. 223-24.