Lionel Wafer
A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America
1699
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NOTE |
(From my book Foundations of Atlantis:) Wafer, a privateer, visited Panama in the spring of 1681 and spent many months with the Kuna people. He wrote about this after he returned to England in 1691. His description of the so-called “white Indians” of Darién (who still live in the region today) makes quite plain that the individuals involved were Native Americans with a genetic condition related to albinism, as twentieth century scientific investigation later showed Nevertheless, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these people became “evidence” of a Caucasian presence in the pre-Columbian Americas. When R. O. Marsh brought two “whites” to America in 1925 and claimed them as “Aryans,” the Association for the Advancement of Science called on the U.S. government to pressure Panama to create a reservation for “white Indians” to preserve them from “destructive infusions of low-caste mixed white and negro blood.” Nazi scientists thought them the descendants of the Teutons or Vikings.
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Of the Indian Inhabitants; their Manners, Customs, &c.
There is one complexion so singular among a sort of people of this country [the Kuna people of Darien, in Panama], that I never saw nor heard of any like them in any part of the world. The account will seem strange, but any privateers who have gone over the Isthmus must have seen them, and can attest the main of what I am going to relate; though few have had the opportunity to of so particular an information about these people as I have had.
They are white, and there are of them of both sexes; yet there are but few of them in comparison of the copper-coloured, possibly, but one to two or three hundred. They differ from the other Indians chiefly in respect of colour, though not in that only, their skins are not of such a white as those of fair people among Europeans, with some tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion; yet neither is it like that of our paler people, but it is rather a milk-white, lighter than the colour of any Europeans, and much like that of a white horse.
For there is this further remarkable in them, that their bodies are beset ail over, more or less, with a fine short milk-white down; yet they are not so thick-set with this down, especially on the cheeks and forehead, but that the skin appears distinct from it. The men would probably have white bristles for beards, did not they prevent them by their custom of plucking the young beard up by the roots continually: But for the down all over their bodies, they never try to get rid of it. Their eye-brows are milk-white also, and so is the hair of their heads, and very fine withal; about the length of six or eight inches, and inclining to a curl.
They are not so big as the other Indians, and what is yet more strange, their eye-lids bend and open in an oblong figure, pointing downward at the corners, and forming an arch or figure of a crescent, with points downwards. From hence, and from their seeing so clearly as they do in a moonshiny night, we used to call them the moon-eyed; for they see not well in the sun, poring in the clearest day; their eyes being but weak, and running with water if the sun shine toward them; so that in the day-time they care not to go abroad, unless it be in a cloudy dark, day: besides, they are a weak people in comparison of the others, and not very fit for hunting, or other laborious exercises; nor do they delight in any such. But, notwithstanding their being thus sluggish and dull in the day time, yet, when the moon-shiny nights come, they are all life and activity, running abroad into the woods, and skipping about like wild bucks, and running as fast by moonlight, even in the gloom and shade of the woods, as the other Indians by day, being as nimble as they though not so strong and lusty.
The copper-coloured Indians seem not to respect them so much as those of their own complexion, looking on them as something monstrous. They are not a distinct race by themselves, but now and then one is bred of a copper-coloured father and mother, and I have seen a child of less than a year old of this sort. Some might be apt to suspect they might be the offspring of some European father; but besides that the Europeans come little here, and have little commerce with the Indian women, when they do come there, white people are as different from the Europeans in some respects, as from the copper-coloured Indians in others. And besides, where an European lies with an Indian woman, the child is always a mostese [= mestizo] or tawny, as is well known to all who have been in the West Indies, where there are mostesa’s, mulattoes, of several gradations, between the white and the black, or copper-coloured, according as the parents arc, even to decompounds, as a mulatto-fina, the child of a mulatto man, and mostesa woman, &c.
But neither is the child of a man and woman of these white Indians white like the parents, but copper-coloured, as their parents were: for so Lacenta [the Kuna Chief] told me, and gave me this as his conjecture how these came to be white, that it was through the force of the mother’s imagination looking on the moon at the time of conception; but this 1 leave others to judge of. He told me withal that they were but short-lived.
They are white, and there are of them of both sexes; yet there are but few of them in comparison of the copper-coloured, possibly, but one to two or three hundred. They differ from the other Indians chiefly in respect of colour, though not in that only, their skins are not of such a white as those of fair people among Europeans, with some tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion; yet neither is it like that of our paler people, but it is rather a milk-white, lighter than the colour of any Europeans, and much like that of a white horse.
For there is this further remarkable in them, that their bodies are beset ail over, more or less, with a fine short milk-white down; yet they are not so thick-set with this down, especially on the cheeks and forehead, but that the skin appears distinct from it. The men would probably have white bristles for beards, did not they prevent them by their custom of plucking the young beard up by the roots continually: But for the down all over their bodies, they never try to get rid of it. Their eye-brows are milk-white also, and so is the hair of their heads, and very fine withal; about the length of six or eight inches, and inclining to a curl.
They are not so big as the other Indians, and what is yet more strange, their eye-lids bend and open in an oblong figure, pointing downward at the corners, and forming an arch or figure of a crescent, with points downwards. From hence, and from their seeing so clearly as they do in a moonshiny night, we used to call them the moon-eyed; for they see not well in the sun, poring in the clearest day; their eyes being but weak, and running with water if the sun shine toward them; so that in the day-time they care not to go abroad, unless it be in a cloudy dark, day: besides, they are a weak people in comparison of the others, and not very fit for hunting, or other laborious exercises; nor do they delight in any such. But, notwithstanding their being thus sluggish and dull in the day time, yet, when the moon-shiny nights come, they are all life and activity, running abroad into the woods, and skipping about like wild bucks, and running as fast by moonlight, even in the gloom and shade of the woods, as the other Indians by day, being as nimble as they though not so strong and lusty.
The copper-coloured Indians seem not to respect them so much as those of their own complexion, looking on them as something monstrous. They are not a distinct race by themselves, but now and then one is bred of a copper-coloured father and mother, and I have seen a child of less than a year old of this sort. Some might be apt to suspect they might be the offspring of some European father; but besides that the Europeans come little here, and have little commerce with the Indian women, when they do come there, white people are as different from the Europeans in some respects, as from the copper-coloured Indians in others. And besides, where an European lies with an Indian woman, the child is always a mostese [= mestizo] or tawny, as is well known to all who have been in the West Indies, where there are mostesa’s, mulattoes, of several gradations, between the white and the black, or copper-coloured, according as the parents arc, even to decompounds, as a mulatto-fina, the child of a mulatto man, and mostesa woman, &c.
But neither is the child of a man and woman of these white Indians white like the parents, but copper-coloured, as their parents were: for so Lacenta [the Kuna Chief] told me, and gave me this as his conjecture how these came to be white, that it was through the force of the mother’s imagination looking on the moon at the time of conception; but this 1 leave others to judge of. He told me withal that they were but short-lived.
Source: Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, ed. George Parker Winship (Cleveland: The Burrows Brothers Company, 1903), 133-136.
