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Tapajóz, to the east and
west of it ... (Spix and Martius 1823–1831, 3: 1313).

Martius reports that on his return trip he visited the Munduruku in the region of the
mission Novo Monte Carmel do Canomá on the Rio Canomá on the lower Rio Madeira,
in whose vicinity about 1,000 Munduruku were living, and he writes of a “five-day
sojourn” until 25 March 1820. Traveling in advance on a smaller hunting boat (mon-
taria), he was followed by his seriously ill travel companion Spix on a larger vessel:

It was predictable that our heavy craft would only slowly fight its way to Canoma, the
first mission of the Mundrucús; I therefore hastened there in advance in a montaria
manned with four Indians and a hunter, to remain for a longer period of time among
these Indians who are cited as one of the most powerful and peculiar tribes of the
whole province of Rio Negro” (Spix and Martius 1823–1831, 3: 1307).

After the arrival of Spix in the evening of 24 March they proceeded early in the morn-
ing of 25 March. Once again Martius traveled by himself in advance and in the evening
arrived at the Povoacão dos Mauhés where “Mundrucús and Mauhés” were living
“among each other” (Spix and Martius 1823–1831, 3: 1318).

By comparison, the contacts of the Austrian traveler Johann Natterer with the
Munduruku are less well documented. Since his travel diary is missing (having proba-
bly been consumed by fire in 1848), the most important sources are his letters, ship-
ping and accession lists, the catalog of the museum (Inventar 1882), and an itinerary
compiled by the ornithologist August von Pelzeln (1971: I–XX) on the basis of Natter-
er’s zoological collection slips. On 21 December 1823 Natterer had reached the city of
Cuiabá where he remained, seriously ailing, until 1825. In Cuiabá he acquired for the
first time feather ornaments of the Munduruku who were then living “along both banks
of the Rio Tapajoz, then in the so-called Campina, the steppes between this river and
the Rio Canomá, and on the Rio Abacaschi” (Inventar 1882). In a letter to Karl von
Schreibers, dated 18 December 1824, Natterer wrote about the provenance of these
items: “The things of the Mundurucus and Apiacás I have traded in from Cap.[itão Anto-
nio] Peixoto.”1

134 Andreas Schlothauer

1 Johann Natterer to Karl von Schreibers, 18 December 1824 (Weltmuseum Wien, Archive, Natterer,
no shelfmark); Natterer to Schreibers, 18/25 February 1825 (Weltmuseum Wien, Archive, Natterer,
18/1–4); both letters partly published in Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode 115,
24 September 1825, 957–959). These pieces already arrived in Vienna in 1825 (although appar-
ently no shipping list has survived). However, lists are available of those Munduruku items arriving
with the Eighth Shipment in September 1827 and designated as from the Munduruku “on the Rio
Tapajoz” (Natterer 1825, 1827). A third group, dispatched from Borba on 30 May 1830, reached
Vienna on 11 May 1831 (Natterer 1831).

Natterer had first met the Brazilian officer Antonio Peixoto de Azevedo during a stay
on the Paraná in the spring of 1823. “Peixoto was sick and Natterer was able to cure
him by means of his medicines” (Schmutzer 2011: 142–143). In a further letter of
18/25 February 1825 Natterer reported about Peixoto’s trip in 1819 on the Rio Para-
natinga where, i.a., he visited the Munduruku. A second, independent source supplies
evidence that these travels had in fact taken place. In his diary the painter Hercules Flo-
rence noted on 14 April 1828 on the occasion of his visit to a large village of the Api-
aká: “There we saw dogs, two three pigs, some chicken and ducks, which had been
introduced about ten years ago by a Portuguese named Peixoto, an enterprising man
who even brought a beautiful horse into this region and who made the trip several
times” (Florence 1948: 268). Another source, José da Silva Guimarães, mentions in
1818 that

Peixoto had lived for three years with the Apiaká (Šprincin 1950: 86). In con-
nection with several skins now in the ornithological collection of the Natural History
Museum Vienna Natterer refers to encounters with the supplier “Capitain Peixoto” in
Cuiabá in the period between October 1824 and April 1825 (Pelzeln 1871: 135, 202,
255, 260). It can therefore be taken for granted that regular contacts were made in
1824/25. It is probable that even the objects reputedly from the Munduruku “on the
Rio Tapajoz,” which arrived in Vienna in September 1827, had been collected by Peixo-
to since Natterer reached Borba on the Rio Madeira in the vicinity of some aldeias of
the Munduruku only on 24 November 1829, where he stayed until 25 August 1830
(Pelzeln 1871: XII). While he may have visited the Munduruku from Borba and acquired
additional objects on such an occasion, such visits are not listed in the itinerary com-
piled by Pelzeln. It was only a day after his departure from Borba, on 26 August 1830,
that for the first and only time a visit to a Munduruku village is referred to: “at night
landing in Muri’i-muriituba, a malloca of the Mundrucú Indians” (Pelzeln 1871: XIII).

During Natterer’s second sojourn in Cuiabá in the fall of 1827 an encounter took
place with the Russian expedition led by the German explorer Georg Heinrich von Langs-
dorff. Its members had already been in the city since January 1827, when Natterer
arrived on 26 October 1827. Three members of the expedition, Langsdorff, Florence, and
the cartographer Rubzov departed from Cuiabá on 5 December 1827 to reach the Ama-
zon by way of the Rio Preto, Rio Arinos, Rio Juruena, and Rio Tapajós. The Russian expe-
dition encountered Mundurukus for the first time on the upper Rio Tapajós in June 1828.
By then Langsdorff was already so seriously ill that he was unable to produce any writ-
ten record (Berthels et al. 1979: 254; Šprincin 1950: 95). Only the painter Hercules Flo-
rence still kept his diary and made drawings. In his chronicle, first published in 1875,
he notes several encounters with groups of the Munduruku and describes, e.g., their tat-
toos, ear studs, and hairdo, but not their feather ornaments (Florence 1948: 304). The
sojourn of the Langsdorff expedition in the territory of the Apiaká dates from April
1828; on 11 April the expedition arrived in the first aldeia of the Apiaká on the lower Rio
Arinos, on 26 April the explorers left the last settlement of the Rio Juruena. Evidence for
these encounters is found in the diaries of Florence and Langsdorff (the latter only part-
ly published by Šprincin), and by the outstanding drawings by Florence. Otherwise the
Apiaká of the nineteenth century have not been described in greater detail; only José da
Silva Guimarães supplies some information on their customs and their language in con-
nection with the visit of 14 Apiakás in Cuiabá in 1818 (Šprincin 1950: 86).

Several explorers of the second half of the nineteenth century reported on their
encounters with Mundurukus. The English naturalist Henry Walter Bates, e.g., wit-
nessed a parade of about 100 Mundurukus in Santarem, and he also visited a Mun-
duruku village on the upper Tapajós in August 1852 (Bates 1962: 209). In 1861 the
English engineer William Chandless traveled on the Rio Tapajós and Rio Arinos on
behalf of the Royal Geographical Society, and stayed there also in villages of the Mun-
duruku (Chandless 1862: 276–277, 1870: 424) and Apiaká (Chandless 1862: 273);

Munduruku and Apiaká Featherwork in the Johann Natterer Collection 135

finally, in December 1865, the Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz encountered
some Mundurukus on the Rio Maué-Assú (Agassiz 1869: 308ff). He was accompanied
by the Canadian geologist Charles Frederic Hartt, who in 1870/71 stayed for a second
time on the Rio Tapajós (Hartt 1885: 131). In 1870 the Italian Capuchins Frei Pelino de
Castrovalva and Frei Antonio de Albano established

132

Fig. 1 Hood with neck feathers (akeri kaha), Munduruku, Rio Tapajós, Weltmuseum Wien 1255 (Johann
Natterer coll.).

Today most of the about 10.900 Munduruku or Wuy jugu, as they call themselves, live
on officially demarcated reservations (terras indigenas) in the Brazilian state of Pará in
the region of the Rio Tapajós (FUNASA 2009; Enciclopedia n.d.: povo/munduruku).
Their language is considered to be part of the Munduruku branch of the Tupi language
stock (Campbell 1997: 201). In the first half of the nineteenth century the Munduruku
were among the peoples of the Brazilian lowlands best known in Europe. They were
not only admired for their capabilities as warriors, but first of all for the beauty of
their featherwork, their artistic tattoos, and their mummified head trophies. The terri-
tory inhabited by them was larger then at present. They lived on both banks of the
upper Rio Tapajós as well as between the Tapajós and the right-hand tributaries of the
Rio Madeira, in the region of the Rio Canomá and Rio Abacaxi. The knowledge relat-
ing to the manufacture and use of their traditional feather ornaments has disappeared
among the Munduruku of today for more than one hundred years

The language of the Apiaká is grouped together with those of the Kaiabi, Juma,
and Kawahib-Parintintin into the Kawahib group of the Tupi language stock of the
Tupi-Guarani language family (Campbell 1997: 200–201). In the middle of the nine-
teenth century there are said to have lived about 2,700 Apiaká in the vicinity of the
Rio Arinos, Juruena, and Teles Pires, by the middle of the twentieth century their num-
ber had declined to 32 persons (Nimuendajú 1948). The Apiaká of today, numbering
either 167 (CIMI 2004) or 450–1,000 (Tempesta 2009), live in various terras indige-
nas, no longer speak their language, and have lost all knowledge relating to their tra-
ditional feather ornaments (Enciclopedia o.J.: povo/apiaka).

The Munduruku and Apiaká in Reports of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

In his travel account of 1768 José Monteiro Noronha, the Vicar General of what was
then the Rio Negro district, was the first one to take notice of a tribe called “Mantu-
rucu” on the Rio Mauhés. Toward the end of the eighteenth century armed conflicts
unfolded between the Munduruku and the neo-Brazilian population on the lower Rio
Tapajós, as the latter repeatedly pushed forward into Munduruku territory. At that time
Mundurukus also settled on the eastern bank of the Rio Madeira, where in 1788 they

Archiv für Völkerkunde 63–64 (2013–2014): 132–161 133

Munduruku and Apiaká Featherwork
in the Johann Natterer Collection
Andreas Schlothauer

Andreas Schlothauer

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attacked the members of a Portuguese expedition led by the naturalist Alexandre
Rodrigues Ferreira who, however, makes no reference to further contacts with them.
The peace between the neo-Brazilians and the Munduruku, which followed the warlike
encounters, was a process lasting for many years that came to an end at the latest in
1803 with the establishment of the first missionary aldeia, Santa Cruz on the Rio
Tapajós, seven days of travel above the city of Santarém, other missionary settle-
ments, and of permanent trade relations.

To a broader European public the Munduruku became known in the 1820s through
the travel account of the Bavarian expedition of the botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp
Martius and the zoologist Johann Baptist Spix. According to their report, the
Munduruku were hardly known in Brazil even by name prior to 1770, when they
emerged in numerous bands from along the Rio Tapajós, destroyed the neo-Brazilian set-
tlements, and made themselves so formidable that troops had to be sent against them
whom they resisted with great intrepidity (Spix und Martius 1823–1831, 3: 1338).

They are living in great numbers – I heard the strength of the tribe reported as
eighteen, and even fourty thousand heads – along the Rio