Charrua Indians
Immediately to the north of the Rio dela Plata, between the rivers Paraguay and Uruguay, and the western ocean, there were several tribes of savages who had a strong mutual resemblance, and differ in many respects from the other nations of South America. The Charrua were the principal of these.
This nation, at the era of the Spanish conquest wandered on the coast of the Plata and Uruguay, and reached about thirty leagues to the northward. On the northern side, the Charrua were separated by deserts from the nearest hamlets of the Guarani.
In the early sixteenth century, Spanish seamen searched for the strait linking the Adantic and the Pacific oceans. Juan Diaz de Solis entered the Rio de la Plata by mistake in 1516 and thus discovered the region. Charrua Indians allegedly attacked the ship as soon as it arrived and killed everyone in the party except for one boy (who was rescued a dozen years later by Sebastian Cabot, an Englishman in the service of Spain). Although historians currently believe that Diaz de Solis was actually killed by the Guarani, the "Charrua legend" has survived, and Uruguay has found in it a mythical past of bravery and rebellion in the face of oppression. The fierce Charrua would plague the Spanish settlers for the next 300 years.
The Charrua were a very warlike people, and firmly resisted the first colonists who settled at Monte Video. Azzara said that though they had never been in great number, they cost the Spaniards more blood than all the armies of Montezuma and the Incas. They were, in many respects, a very peculiar people, both in moral and physical characters. Azzara drew a striking portrait of the moral character of this people, displaying in a high degree that stern fortitude and constitutional apathy for which the nations of the New World are remarkable.
"They are active, upright, and well-proportioned. They have a straight head, an open forehead and countenance, expressive of pride, and even ferocity. Their features are regular, though their noses appear rather narrow and sunkbetween the eyes. Their eyes are bright, always black, and never quite open, but their sight is doubly more distant and perfect than ours. Their sense of hearing is also superior. Their teeth are regular, very white, and never fail, even in advanced age. Their eyebrows are very scanty; they have no beard, and very little hair on other parts of their bodies. The hair of their heads is thick, very long, large, shining, black, and never light. They never lose their hair, which becomes only partially grey when they have attained the age of eighty years. Their hands and feet are smaller and better made than those of Europeans, and the necks of females not so full as among other Indian nations."
References to the Charrua Indians of the Rio de la Plata, their physical character and their manners and customs, are found as early as 1527 in the letters of Diego García, and in 1528 in those of Luis Ramirez. Further information on these Indians, who at that time occupied the territories now corresponding to the Republic of Uruguay and the Argentine province of Entre-Rios, was furnished by the anonymous author of the "Diario da Navegacao (1530 a 1532)" of Pero Lopes de Sousa.
In this classic description of the natives found by the Portuguese explorers on the shores of Uruguay between the "Rio do Begua" and the "Cerro de Sao Joao" (the conical peak near Montevideo), it is stated that these Indians did not understand the language of the Tupí interpreter, "... and he [the interpreter] spoke again to him [the Chanaa-Beguaa Indian, or Charrua], yet he did not understand. . ."
These Indians were described as a handsome people, of large stature, and as excellent swimmers and fishers; they used fishing seines and had large boats; their clothing was made of the skins of tigers and other animals. The author gives also a detailed description of the "tearful greeting" practised by them.
Among the writers of the eighteenth century, the foremost place unquestionably belongs to the German Jesuit missionaries Father Anton Bohm and Father Anton Sepp, whose remarkable account of the manners and customs of the Jacros Indians of Entre-Rios and Corrientes, strange to say, was never taken into consideration by South American scholars engaged in the study of the difficult Charrua problem.
It would lead too far to particularize the extensive literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerning the origin and the ethnic and linguistic position of the Charrua among the native tribes of the Rio de la Plata. It is sufficient to mention D'Orbigny's account,' because his theory as to the ethnic affiliation of these Indians was accepted by most South American students. D'Orbigny's false theory, was as well known, based exclusively on physical and moral characteristics. But of all these authors, none made any positive statement in regard to the language spoken by the Charrua.
Hervas, a former Jesuit, who was in close relation with all the Jesuit missionaries expelled after 1766 from the Spanish and Portuguese dominions in South America, and who naturally had access to the secret archives of the Order, nevertheless confined himself to saying that the Charrua idiom is a dialect of Güenoa, of which, according to the same author, the Jesuit missionary Father Jose Sanchez Labrador, compiled a grammar. The manuscript of this grammar is lost forever, unless still hidden in some of the Jesuit archives of Italy.
The Guaycuru origin of the Charrua is corroborated by the description of their cultural conditions as noted by various travelers and Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among other things the fishing-net is an important ethnologic factor which constitutes a distinctive division between the Huarpe and the Pampa-het, and between these tribes and the Charrua.
During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Charrua learned the art of horsemanship from the Spaniards in adjacent areas, strengthening their ability to resist subjugation. The Indians were eventually subdued by the large influx of Argentines and Brazilians pursuing the herds of cattle and horses. Never exceeding 10,000 in number in eighteenth-century Uruguay, the Indians also lacked any economic significance to the Europeans because they usually did not produce for trade. As a result of genocide, imported disease, and even intermarriage, the number of Indians rapidly diminished, and by 1850 the pure-blooded Indian had virtually ceased to exist.
The real Charruas of Uruguay, like those of Corrientes and the Minuanes of Entre Rios in Argentina, the Bohanes, Yaros, etc., were all extinct, according to Araujo and other authorities, although Deniker (Races of Man, 1900, p. 572) stated that the hybrid descendants of the Chanases, Querandies, etc., known as the Talhuet, "were still fairly numerous in i860 between Buenos Aires and Rio Negro," and in this remnant the old Charruas may have had some share. In the terrible wars of extermination waged against the aborigines of Uruguay in 1830-1832 few of the Charruas escaped capture or death. The "last of the Charruas" (two men and two women) were exhibited in Paris in 1830 as "wild men," dying there some time afterwards. Uruguay has become what Araujo calls "an American country without Indians."
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