Actual Poisoned Projectiles
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador from 1972-1976. I lived in a small town in a valley floor at 8,500 feet. I went down into the headwaters of the Amazon to help build a school. The volunteer whose project it was lived around the corner from me when we were in high school in South Dakota. Dennis lived in a tiny hamlet populated by the Shaura people.
The Jivaro (savages) as the Spanish called them, defeated attempts by the Inca to invade their territory. In the 1500’s, they soundly trounced several attempts by conquistadors & thousands of native allies who wanted the mythical gold mines believed to be in Shaura territory. Having suffered the almost complete annihilation of their last army, the Spanish called it quits. It was 400 years before tenuous contact was reestablished.
You may not have heard of the Shaura, but you have surely seen examples of their best known cultural artifacts, shrunken heads. It was not something they did at random. Shrinking heads was a profoundly religious practice that involved years of preparation & ceremony’s. The purpose was to capture souls as armor against attacks on the spiritual plain. Outsiders needn’t concern themselves. Edited.
The Shaura hunted with blowguns. A tapir’s tusk made a good rear sight. The tube was a sapling with the pithy center burns out of it. about 5 feet long. The long thin center spine of a palm frond provided the shaft of the dart. A ball of kapok fiber was twisted onto the blunt end. The tip was easily honed down to a needle sharp point. An inch or so behind the point was a notch. That was for the poison,
Currary was nestled into the notch, not the point as you might imagine. It is a perfectly rational safety measure. Who would want to go hunting with a quiver full of poisonous needle sharp darts?
I watched as a Shaura hunter moved like a snake through understory until he had a troop of feeding monkeys in range. We use currary as pain killer. The dart would strike a monkey & it wouldn’t feel a thing. It would pick at the funny white ball that had inexplicably appeared, go to sleep & drop off the limb without alarming the troop. The hunter got three of them before the troop was spooked & hightailed.
The darts were strictly for hunting. Little children hunted hummingbirds & colorful insects while their mother tended her garden.
For killing people they fire hardened chonta palm spear points. The highly toxic excretion of poison arrow frogs was the source. Once again, it was sensibly painted on behind the point. They did not use that poison for hunting… you wouldn’t want to eat anything as highly toxic as that.
They didn’t depend on the poison alone for a successful attack. Not long before I hiked in there, a man was stabbed over 20 times in one of the revenge killings that were common in that culture. He was attacked by what amounted to a pack of Cub Scouts during an initiation rite.
The shaman who taught me how to hunt with a blowgun had taken 7 heads. That was highly unusual. Known for their powerful killing spells, Shaura shamans were rightly feared. In actually, almost all the killings were done by women who put poison into the individual bowls of food they served. Needless to say, I assiduously followed what was considered good manners among those folks. They were very jolly company if you knew how to behave.