IDNO

N.26818.WHI

Description

Portrait of large group of Captain Whiffen’s “carriers”, standing outdoors. The carriers are men, mainly South American Indians. Some are wearing loin-cloths, others are wearing “European” style trousers, shirts and caps. They are holding rifles. The men at the far left, right and foreground are wearing “European” style clothing with animal-teeth necklaces, the larger of which are probably jaguar. [TC 09/06/1999]

Place

S America; Colombia; North West Amazon

Cultural Affliation

South American Indian; ?European

Named Person

Photographer

Whiffen, Thomas William

Collector / Expedition

Date

1908 - 1909

Collection Name

Whiffen Collection

Source

Format

Glass Negative Halfplate

Primary Documentation

Other Information

The glass negatives in the Whiffen Collection were previously stored in two wooden trays numbered “Trays 105” on Shelf 3. Some of the glass negatives were found by the cataloguer in one of these trays, which was numbered C59/ by the cataloguer. The others were loose in piles on the shelf. An address label found in C59/ is addressed to a member of the Whiffen family and dated 1960. The label is now in the UCMAA archive, reference number W19/1/1. Each glass negative was stored, with duplicate glass negatives if any, in a museum archival bag. The bags containing images for which there is a corresponding mounted print in the Haddon Collection were marked with the original number of that print. A note by Gwil Owen which distinguished the printed and unprinted piles of glass negatives is now in the UCMAA archive, reference number W19/1/2. For full details see the Whiffen Collection record.

Related Image: A duplicate print is at the RAI, reference 36173, and annotated by Whiffen in pencil on the reverse as: "Some of my escort and carriers."
Photocopies of Whiffen prints at the RAI are in the UCMAA archive, reference W19/1/3. See Whiffen Collection record for further details on RAI collection. [TC 09/06/1999, updated JD 02/10/2019]

See also records for associated print and lantern slide for additional sources of information about this image.

Publication: Reproduced in Whiffen, T. W., 1915 as PL. VIII with the caption “
“Some of my carriers”.
Whiffen, T. W., 1915 (pp. 2-4) describes his “carriers”. He explains that at the beginning of his expedition he “collected eight Indian carriers, two half-castes, and eight “rationales”, or semi-civilised Indians, armed with Winchesters, together with three Indian women, wives of three of the rationales” (ibid: 3).

Context: Whiffen explains that "the men wear little or nothing but what the Witoto call a moh-hen, that is, a strip of beaten bark-cloth carried from front to rear between the legs and tucked in at either end over a string or strap of bark-cloth bound about the waist" (Whiffen, T. W., 1915: 72). He informs us that "the Amazonian boy is first provided with a breech-cloth when he is five years old. His earliest lesson is in its manufacture, for every Indian fashions his own clothing" (ibid: 73). He then describes how the loin-cloth is manufactured and notes that it is never removed "in the sight of man or woman" and is buried with a man when he dies (ibid: 74). Steward notes that boys and men "wear a bark-cloth breech-clout after the age of five or six years (1963: 753). [TC 01/06/1999]