Niopo among the Otomac in Humboldt and Bonpland's Personal Narrative

Source: Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, translated by Helen Maria Williams, vol. 5, part 2 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), pp. 662-665. This transcript follows the public-domain English edition with line breaks normalized.

Niopo among the Otomac

The Otomacs eat the earth; that is, they swallow every day during several months a very considerable quantity of earth, to appease the cravings of hunger, and to fill the stomach. But they do not eat clay as the people of other nations eat chalk, or magnesia, or cinders. The Otomacs choose a very fine unctuous clay, of a yellowish grey colour; and, after having slightly baked it, they moisten it with water and make balls of it, three or four inches in diameter. They preserve these balls in little pyramidal heaps in their huts. When they are about to eat, they set them to soak in water.

The unwholesome bread of the Otomacs is composed of little else than clay and some flour of maize or cassava. They are not, however, contented with these aliments, which appear to us so extraordinary, and with cassava and maize, and with palm wine, but they throw themselves into a peculiar state of intoxication, we might almost say of madness, by the use of the powder of niopo. They gather the long pods of a mimosacea, which we have made known by the name of acacia niopo, cut them into pieces, moisten them, and cause them to ferment. When the softened seeds begin to grow black, they are kneaded like a paste, mixed with some flour of cassava and lime procured from the shell of a helix, and the whole mass is exposed to a very brisk fire, on a grate of hard wood. The hardened paste takes the form of small cakes.

When it is to be used, it is reduced to a fine powder, and placed on a dish five or six inches wide. The Otomac holds this dish, which has a handle, in his right hand, while he inhales the niopo by the nose, through a forked bone of a bird, the two extremities of which are applied to the nostrils. This bone, without which the Otomac believes that he could not take this kind of snuff, is seven inches long: it appeared to me to be the leg bone of a large sort of plover. I sent the niopo, and all this singular apparatus, to Mr. de Fourcroy at Paris.

The niopo is so stimulating, that the smallest portions of it produce a violent sneezing in those who are not accustomed to its use. Father Gumilla says, "This diabolical powder of the Otomacs, furnished by an arborescent tobacco-plant, intoxicates them by the nostrils (emboracha por las narices), deprives them of reason for some hours, and renders them furious in battle."

However varied may be the family of the leguminous plants in the chemical and medical properties of their seeds, juices, and roots, we cannot believe, from what we know hitherto of the group of mimosaceae, that it is principally the pod of the acacia niopo that imparts the stimulant power to the snuff of the Otomacs. This power is owing, no doubt, to the lime freshly calcined. We have shown above that the mountaineers of the Andes of Popayan, and the Guajiroes who wander between the lake of Maracaybo and the Rio la Hacha, are also fond of swallowing lime as a stimulant, to augment the secretion of the spittle and the gastric juice.

In sending to Europe the complicated apparatus, which the Otomacs employ in order to inhale the powder of niopo, I directed the attention of the learned to an analogous custom, which Mr. de la Condamine observed among the natives of the Upper Maragnon. The Omaguas, whose name is rendered celebrated by the expeditions attempted in search of Dorado, have the same dish, and the same hollow bone of a bird, by which they convey to their nostrils their powder of curupa. The seed that yields this powder is no doubt also a mimosacea; for the Otomacs, according to Father Gili, denote even now, at the distance of one hundred and sixty leagues from the Amazon, the acacia niopo by the name of curupa.

Since the geographical researches, which I have recently made on the theatre of the exploits of Philip von Huten, and on the real situation of the province of Papamene, or of the Omaguas, the probability of an ancient communication between the Otomacs of the Oroonoko and the Omaguas of the Maragnon has become more interesting and more probable. The former came from the Meta, perhaps from the country between the Meta and the Guaviare; the latter assert that they descended in great numbers to the Maragnon by the Rio Japura, coming from the eastern declivity of the Andes of New Grenada.