Page:The Captivity of Hans Stade of Hesse.pdf/180
for their having so well prophesied that I should be captured by them.
This song I heard, and for half an hour none of the men came near me, but only women and children.
Caput XXII.
I knew not then their customs so well as I have since learned them, and I thought "Now they prepare to kill thee." After a little while those who had captured me, named Jeppipo (Yeppipo) Wasu, and his brother Alkindar Miri, came to me and told me how they had, from friondship, presented me to their father's brother Ipperu Wasu,[1]
- ↑ Yperuguassú would mean the great shark, "ism bi'l musammá”—a name suiting the named, as the Arabs say. Southey (i, 196) quotes Harcourt (Harleian Miscellany, 8vo, vol. iii, 184) touching a chief called "Ipero" in the Aracoory country, and subjoins, "Here then is the Tupi language extending into Guiana". He might safely have prolonged it far into the northern continent. The shark is known in the Brazil by two names, Tubarão and Mero.
Tupi race had no other visible object of worship. Cabeça de Vaca found the Maracá in Florida, and according to P. Andrès Perez de Ribas, the Mexicans called it Ayacaztli. Pedro Cieza de Leon tells us that when the people about Anzerma first saw Spaniards, they called them Tamaracas, great idols or superior beings. As the Tapi race seems to have adored thunder and lightning, this implement may have been its symbol.
So universal was the worship of the prophetic rattle, that some authors have net hesitated to ascribe to it the easier adoption of the continental name of America-the land of the Maracá. Its use has survived in the Matraca board-rattle of the modern Brazilian churches, at times when bells may not be rung. In Dahome it becomes simply a musical instrument: the gourd with its bunch of feathers mounted upon a stick, and partly filled with maize, or pebbles, acts castanets.