Men gave up with regret, and not so long ago, and not until they had ransacked all the horizons of geography, the belief that somewhere in the world there is a state of warrior women. They are reluctant to admit, nor have they quite admitted, that there never was such a state; and still they ransack the horizons of history and folk-lore for proof that at one time Amazons were.

Myth has mapped the woman’s commonwealth in western Africa, in Armenia on the Black Sea, in the Caucasus, in Russia along the lower Don, in islands of the Baltic, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, and upon the River of the Amazons. There is report of it in Greek, Turanian, Arab, Negro, and American legend. It figures in the poetry of Arctinus, the history of Herodotus, the mendacities of Maundeville, the narrative of Marco Milioni, the visions of Columbus, the journal of Orellana and the Guiana prospectus of Raleigh.

Unlike other ancient tales, the Amazon story, instead of slowly fading, has grown in definiteness of outline as it approached to-day. The men who discarded utterly the belief that there is a woman state lived not long after the men who thought the state had at last been found.

The Amazons—so runs tradition everywhere substantially the same—were a tribe of women ruled by a queen and subsisting by the chase and by wars of pillage. They fought both on foot and on horseback, using the bow, the spear, the javelin, and the double-headed ax. Their garb consisted of a short tunic clearing the knee and fastened over the left shoulder, leaving the right breast bare. Their outlines were powerful and beautiful. There was a dispute, never composed, between art and etymology, as to their bosoms. The word Amazon, though of barbarian origin, was thought to derive from alpha, privative, and mazos, the Greek for breast. On this derivation the grammarians built up the legend that the right breast of the women militant was either amputated, or seared, or compressed in youth, so as not to interfere with the recoil of the bow string. But the sculptors would not accept this deformation, and statues and bas-reliefs represent the women with bosoms entirely womanly. There are recent etymologies wherein “Amazon” is supposed to mean “full busted,” “moon daughter,” “vestal,” “girdle-bearer,” or “game-eater.”

One feature of the myth shows the working of inference. The woman state must sustain its numbers. There must be children even if there were no men, or the tribe would become extinct. In place of husbands, therefore, there were what Sir Walter Raleigh called “Valentines.” Once a year the women paid a visit to the men of neighbor tribes, or once a year these men called on them. The women retained the girl children born of these excursions. As to the boy children, customs differed. In some cases the mothers nurtured them until they were weaned, and returned them to their fathers when these came back the following year, as always they did. In other cases the mothers put the male infants to death, or maimed them and raised them as slaves of the state.

The Greek treatment of the myth had a certain other-worldliness. The Amazons figured in epic events; their struggles were with demigods. They came to the relief of Troy, and their subjugation was one of the dozen labors of Hercules. With him they fought, and with Achilles, and with Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and with Bellerophon, rider of the winged Pegasus, and with the griffins which guarded Scythia’s fabled gold; and they invaded Attica to attempt another Iliad in revenge for the capture of a queen. Greek sculptures and decorative pottery show the national feeling that these were a people far removed in time and space. The figures are beautiful, but something of barbarian wildness animates the features. Earlier art had represented them as bloodthirsty mænads, raiders of the borders, but the Greek humanizing spirit wrought itself upon the legend until the story the sculptors tell is of men’s regret that they need smite these beautiful savages.

This spirit is in the Æthiopis of Arctinus of Miletus, wherein Amazons appear on the side of beleaguered Troy. Their queen, Penthesilea, spreads death among the large-limbed Argives and overwhelms Achilles with abusive words. The angered hero slays her, but when he removes her helmet the charm of her strikes him to the heart and he grieves over his victim.

The story, with its fine human touch, recedes into the mists in a tale which in effect is its epilogue. After his own death and the ruin of Troy, Achilles reigns over the isle of Leuke, an Avalon of the East in the Black Sea at the Danube’s mouth. Thither, even to the land of shades, the rage of the Amazons for the death of their queen follows him. At their capital on the river Thermodon in Pontus they seize on ships and compel the sailors to steer them to the enchanted isle. But as they approach a temple in the grove their horses take fright and bolt over a cliff into the sea. A terrible storm shatters the fleet and few of the vengeful women escape.

In classic legend, there were three woman states—the countries of the Gorgons and Amazons in the west of Libya, and an Amazon state in the northeast of Asia Minor near the modern Trebizond; the capital of the latter was the mythical Themiscyra on the banks of the river Thermodon, now called the Termeh. The African Amazons subjugated the Gorgons, and under their queen, Myrina, marched in triumph through Egypt, Arabia, and Asia Minor into Thrace, where they were defeated and turned back by Mopsus. Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyme, and Myrina claimed them as their founders. This horde was wiped out by Hercules at the time when he erected the pillar in Africa, for, says Diodorus Siculus, “it was a thing intolerable to him, who made it his business to be renowned all the world over, to suffer any nation to be governed any longer by women.”

It was the Black Sea Amazons whom the Greeks mainly limned in art and legend. These women, whose earlier home had been the Caucasus, raided the coasts of Asia Minor and came to the relief of Troy. The ninth labor of Hercules was to bring back the girdle of their queen, Hippolyte, a task equivalent to the subjugation of the state. Theseus carried off another queen, Antiope, and this led to the Amazonian invasion of Attica; the fierce women were not halted until they had penetrated Athens.

This expedition and that of their African sisters were interpreted by the Greeks as allegories of barbarian menace. In the tread of Amazonian horse they may have had a presage of the hoofs of Hunnish, Turkish, and Tartar cavalry that in after ages was to ride across their world. Literally taken, the tales seemed to Strabo incredible. “For who can believe,” he asks, “that an army of women, or a city, or a nation, could ever subsist without men, and even dispatch an expedition across the sea to Attica? This is as much as to say that the men of those days were women, and the women men.”

Twice, however, in the field of legend over which Strabo cast an unbelieving backward glance, the note of reality, or perhaps of realism, had been sounded. When Alexander the Great was in Parthia, Thalestris, the Amazon queen, paid him a Sheba-like visit at the head of a hundred women carrying double-headed axes and the traditional half-moon shield. He was the bravest of men, said the lady, and she the bravest of women. They owed a duty to posterity to raise offspring in whom the two strains should conjoin. The appeal flattered the vanity of the Macedonian, nor was he averse to meeting its conditions. So runs a Greek story like unto others with which the Alexander legend was embroidered. But Arrian explains that the so-called queen and her followers had been sent as a present by the governor of the next province—a time-honored Asiatic gift.

There was a battalion of death perhaps three thousand years before the young women of Russia took the field in the World War, and those of Poland in the war that followed it. The story is told by Herodotus in a chapter which begins in myth and seems to pass into history. In the opening scene three shiploads of Amazons, captured in the Attic campaign already noted, overpower the Greek sailors and slay them all. They let the ships drift across the Black Sea and beach on the shores of the Palus Mæotis (Sea of Azov), where the women seize a herd of horses. Mounting them, they fall to plundering the land of the free Scythians. Herodotus continues:

“The Scyths could not tell what to make of the attack upon them—the dress, the language, the nation itself were alike unknown; whence the enemy had come, even, was a marvel. Imagining, however, that they were all men of about the same age, they went out against them and fought a battle. Some of the bodies of the slain fell into their hands, whereby they discovered the truth. Hereupon they deliberated, and made a resolve to kill no more of them, but to send against them a detachment of their youngest men, as near as they could guess equal to the women in number, with orders to encamp in their neighbourhood and do as they saw them do. When the Amazons advanced against them, they were to retire and avoid a fight. When they halted, the young men were to approach and pitch their camp near the camp of the enemy. All this they did on account of their strong desire to obtain children from so notable a race.”

The Scythian youths were sent out. The Amazons saw that no harm was meditated against them and desisted from further attack; and slowly the romance unfolded. Day after day the camps were pitched nearer each other, and both parties, having naught but arms and horses, supported themselves by the chase. “At last,” says Herodotus, “an incident brought two of them together. The man easily gained the good graces of the woman, who bade him by signs to bring a friend the next day, promising on her part to bring with her another woman. He did so, and the woman kept her word. When the rest of the youths heard what had taken place they also sought and gained the favor of the other Amazons.

“The two camps were then joined in one, the Amazons living with the Scythians as their wives; and the men were unable to learn the tongue of the women, but the women soon caught the tongue of the men. Then the Scyths said: ‘We have parents and properties; let us therefore give up this mode of life, and return to our nation, and live with them; you shall be our wives there no less than here, and we promise you to have no others.’”

But the young women would not go home with their husbands to live with their mothers-in-law. “Of womanly employments we know nothing,” they said. “To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin, to bestride the horse, these are our arts. Your women stay at home in their wagons engaged in womanish tasks and never go out to hunt or to do anything. We should never agree.” So they bade the bridegrooms go back to their parents, ask for their inheritances, and return. This the youths did, and then the Amazons told them they could no more get along with their fathers than with their mothers. They had stolen horses and wasted the ancestral lands. “As you like us for wives,” they pleaded, “grant the request that we leave the country together, and go and dwell beyond the Tanais” (the river Don).

Again the Scythian youths consented, and all fared to a region three days’ journey east and three north of the Sea of Azov. Thus was founded the race of Sarmatians. From that day to this, concludes Herodotus, the Sarmatian women ride with their husbands in the chase, and in war take the field with them. Nor does a girl marry until she has killed a man in battle, so that among them are women of advanced years, celibates because they have never struck down a foe. Also, the Sarmatians do not speak the tongue of Scythia correctly, because the Amazons learned it incorrectly at the first.

At least the topography of the tale has been confirmed. Sarmatia is the ancient name of Poland and Niebuhr has traced the westward drift of the tribes from the Don steppes to the great Hungarian plain, whence they overspread Poland and Russia. One could wish to believe that Maria Botchkareva, commander of the Battalion of Death that took the field against Germany when the manhood of Soviet Russia faltered and grounded arms, is of the high Amazonian strain.

The Indian epic of the Mahabharata has a similar tale, although in less realistic vein. There was a religious rite known as the Aswamedha, in which a leader would loose a horse, and follow it for a twelvemonth into whatever adventures and countries it might go—a quest entailing wanderings and warrings. Rajah Arjuna of the Gangetic city of Hatusapur took the pledge, and in the fifth stage of his adventure followed the ranging horse into the Country of Women. He entered it with heavy heart, knowing its danger.

These were not like other women, but rakshasis, or goblin women. Their queen, the Rani Paranunta, was a beautiful young creature, and so were all her women. But their customs were worse than Circean. When men entered the land they were kindly entreated and beguiled into remaining for a month or more; and, indeed, there were guards to prevent their escape. After thirty days they were killed, and such of the women as had entertained them, but were not expectant mothers, took their own lives—the suttee. Thus was it assured that the Country of Women should always be also the Country of Young Women.

The roving rajah and his train were gloomily pondering these customs when they saw a troop of Amazons appear, and lead away the Aswamedha horse to the stables of their queen. These were young girls, all between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, arrayed in pearls and rich stuffs, with bows in their hands and quivers at their waists and proud horses under them. Among them rode their queen on an elephant. And she bade Arjuna to cease his quest. “Become my slave, drink with me, and pass your time in pleasure,” said the young Rani.

Arjuna reminded her that this was an invitation to die thirty days later. To which the Rani replied that really it should make little difference to him: “If you resist me you fall by my arrows; if you remain you have to face the light of my eyes.” Already her beauty had overcome his heart, but his mind made a last appeal. Let her permit him to fulfill his vow and he would come back to wed her and would find noble husbands for all her women. The young queen liked the speech and sped him on his way to other adventures, and the tale itself to its ultimate happy ending.

In a fortified palace in an iron city of Ceylon—Hiouen Thsang tells the story—dwelt other goblin women to the number of five hundred. On their towers flags flew to attract passing ships. When merchants were sighted, the rakshasis took the form of beautiful maidens holding flowers and strewing scents, and with music welcomed them to the iron city. There was a prelude of wanton pleasure and then the strangers were shut up in an iron prison and devoured at leisure.

Hither came Simhala, prince of the merchants, and five hundred of the trader-folk, while the lucky signals waved on the towers of the siren host. Simhala mated with their queen, and each of the men found a companion, and of each union a son was born. But an evil dream came to the prince, and he went in the night to the iron stronghold, whence a captive’s voice told him who the women were and what he might expect. If he would escape, there was a divine horse on the seaboard that would carry him away.

The next scene shows the goblin women, each with her child, questing the air in search of their fugitive husbands and by blandishments persuading them to return. Simhala alone stands out. But his deserted queen, hastening before him to his father’s house, wins the elder man for her husband, and then brings on the demon women for a carnival of death. In the morning the royal ministers find in the palace hall no living thing, but only gnawed bones. The remainder of the story tells of the vengeance of the son in a second expedition to the Isle of Gems.

“Then,” says the narrative, “the rakshasis were driven back, and fled precipitately to rocky isles of the sea.” There for a while we must seek the warrior women.

Marco Polo found them “about five hundred miles toward the south in the ocean” from Sind. Here were two islands thirty miles apart, supposed by modern geographers to be the Two Sisters lying near Socotra. One, inhabited solely by men, was called the Island of Males; the other, inhabited solely by women, was called the Island of Females. In March, April, and May the men lived with the women, and at the same time sowed grain in the fields. The rest of the year, because of the climate, the men lived in their own island, knowing that if they stayed with the women it would be “at the risk of falling a sacrifice.”

In Siamese folk-lore the Amazon island is farther to the east, in the Mergui archipelago, where lies the Country of Widows, or See-Saw Country of Widows—a vanishing city where are women only, and nothing can float on water. Still farther east, legend—Arabic, mediæval, and modern—tells of women commonwealths in Engano; in the “Sea of Malatu,” identified as a bay of North Borneo; and in an island not far from Samar in the eastern Philippines. Even in the Ladrones and the Carolines the Jesuits heard of female islands. Pigafetta was told by a pilot of an island called Acoloro, which lies below Java Major, where are found no persons but women, and these become pregnant from the wind. They kill their male offspring and any men who visit their island.

The name of California, borne by an American state, was given by mediæval legend to an Amazon island “on the right hand of the Indies very near to the terrestrial paradise.” Although troglodytes, the pirate women who inhabited it lived luxuriously. Their arms and armor were of gold and their caves were richly tapestried and adorned with gems and feather-work, won by plunder of passing ships.

In the Arabian Nights the Amazon legend becomes entangled in other myths. Hassan el Bassorah loves and weds a strange and beautiful woman, but she flies away to the farthest of an archipelago of seven islands ruled by her father. He has an army of twenty-five thousand women, “smiters with swords and lungers with lances.” The daughter queens it over the island of Wak-wak. Here there is a forest the trees of which bear fruit with the faces of the sons of Adam. When the sun arises, these exclaim, “Wak-wak, Glory to the Creating King,” and when it sets, “Wak-wak, Glory to God.”

Lane, translator of the Thousand and One Nights, adds a note that the island of Wak-wak, familiar to Arab legend, lay near Borneo. A queen swayed it and her warriors were beautiful women. Even the trees bore women who hung by their hair from the branches and syllabled, “Wak-wak”; if their hair was severed, they died. Another editor, Burton, holds that there were two Wak-waks. One was the peninsula of Guardafui where the pagan Gallas cried “Wak” as the Moslems cried “Allah”; the vocal fruit tree was the calabash tree, “a vegetable elephant,” the gourds of which hang by slender filaments. The other Wak-wak was an island identified as Madagascar, as Malacca, and as Sumatra. Sometimes the Cantonese speak of Japan as Wo-kwok, and in New Guinea birds of paradise, settling on trees, are supposed to cry out “Wak-wak.” This is also the name of the Falcon-man among the First People of American myth, and of Philippine sorcerers who could disconnect their legs and fly about like bats.

The narrative of Maundeville brings legend west again. Beside the Land of Chaldea is the Land of Amazonia. The woman state emerged when the king and all his nobles were slain in war. The high-born relicts slew all the men left, “for they would that all the Women were Widows as they were.” Thereafter, “they never would suffer Man to dwell amongst them longer than seven Days and seven Nights,” and when they met their lovers in neighboring realms they lived with them only “an eight Days or ten.” These “wise noble and worthy Women” fought valiantly as mercenary soldiers for neighbor states.

There was an island of women in the Baltic, according to Adam of Bremen, but he perhaps confused Gwenland, or Fenland, with the land of gwens—that is to say, the land of women.

That there was an Amazon nation in America the Chinese were first to report. Buddhist travelers of the sixth century told of a Land of Women beyond the Pacific in what may have been Mexico. Of this report the Spaniards knew nothing when they gave the legend a home in the Caribbean Sea, in islands that were halfway houses in time and space to its wild but splendid domicile on the mainland of South America.

The maps which Columbus knew had drawn into their contours of the Orient the outlines of various islands of women. In the Catalan map of 1375 the regio feminarum was placed in Ceylon. The fifteenth-century Catalan map placed the insula de bene faminill in the west of the Indian Ocean and off the African coast. A map of 1489 now in the British Museum had the insula mulierum and the insula virorum not far from Zanzibar. These were islands of the east, and Columbus thought he was sailing into the east, and he had with him the Travels of Marco Polo with their account of the isles of men and women. It was confirmation of his hopes that shortly after his landfall in the Bahamas the natives spoke, or seemed to speak, of the island of women.

Through January and February of 1493 the journal of Columbus has much to say of the Isla de Mugeres, of which many Indians had told him. Its name was Madanino, the modern island of Montserrat. There was a companion island of men called Carib, a dozen leagues away. Columbus wanted to visit both, although the men were cannibals, and to carry away a few of the Amazons as a present to his sovereigns. But somehow he never made this expedition.

On the second voyage Columbus unwittingly touched at another island of women. It was Guadeloupe, where “abundance of women [his son Ferdinand is the narrator] came out of a wood, with bows and arrows and feathers, as if they would defend their island.” They were naked, with long hair falling over their shoulders. The admiral sent two Haytian women swimming ashore to barter for food. The armed women bade them go to the north side of the island “where their husbands were.” But a landing party of Spaniards brought back ten women and three boys—and report of an adventure. One of the captives, wife of a cacique, had been pursued by a swift-footed Canaryman, and him she threw down and had nearly throttled before his companions pulled her off. Although nimble, the women were excessively fat, “and there were some thicker than a man could grasp.”

The cacique’s wife told the Spaniards that the island was inhabited only by women, and that four men they had seen were there by chance from another island; “for at a certain time in the year they come to sport with them.” There was another Amazon island called “Matrimonio.” Having seen the prowess of these women, the admiral readily believed their stories. He dismissed them with presents, but the Amazonian wrestler had conceived a passion for a Haytian prince whom he held captive, and remained with the Spaniards.

Other explorers after Columbus mistook for Amazons various island women who fought them when their husbands were away. The conquistadors even imagined that the convents of Mexican virgins, who followed the austere rule of Quetzalcoatl, were Amazon barracks in which, at seasons, men were made welcome. Thus by a succession of reports the stage was prepared for the revelation made by Orellana, when in 1542 he slipped away with a party of men from the spice-hunter, Gonzalo Pizarro, who was encamped near the headwaters of the great river—from that time forth called the River of the Amazons—and descended its broadening bosom to the sea.

At the mouth of its affluent, the Rio Negro, Orellana had a spirited fight with a band led by a number of women. An Indian captured farther downstream told him that this was a district of women. Their five Houses of the Sun were plated with gold, their dwellings were of gold, and strong walls encompassed their cities; and their country was neighbor to El Dorado. This story, brought back to Europe with much corroborative detail, inflamed it, and Spain gave its author a commission to conquer and colonize the lands he had skirted afloat. But he died on his outward passage, and these lands, falling within the territories of Portugal, Spain had no profit of them.

Thenceforth the legend of the American Amazons followed its curious course for three centuries, while the credulity and cupidity of men wove for it a background bizarre in its colors and stiff with fabled gold.

Raleigh’s is the best account—such a recital as must interest his sovereign, the Virgin Queen. The nations of these warlike women, he said, were on the south side of a northern affluent of the Amazon in the province of Topago, “and their chiefest strengths and retracts are in the Islands situated on the South side of the entrance some sixty leagues within the mouth of the sayd river. They accompany with men but once in a yere, and for the time of one moneth, which I gather by their relation to be in April; and that time all kings of the borders assemble, and queenes of the Amazones; and after the queenes have chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valentines. This one moneth, they feed, dance, and drinke of their wines in abundance; and the Moone being done, they all depart to their owne provinces.

“It was farther tolde me, that if in the warres they took any prisoners, that they used to accompany with those also at what time soever, but in the end for certeine they put them to death; for they are sayd to be very cruell and bloodthirsty, especially to such as offer to invade their territories. These Amazones have likewise great store of these plates of golde, which they recover by exchange chiefly for a kinde of greene stones which the Spaniards call Piedras hijades, and we use for spleene stones.”

Even without the imported wealth of Old World legend—the tales of pygmies and vampires and headless folk with which adventurers decorated their narrative—it was a singular backdrop of tradition before which the female warriors of America were paraded. Through its colors ran the primitive lusts of men—for gold and women. The English sought gold, the Indians sought women, and the Spaniards, so Raleigh said, sought both gold and women. The natives were fighting over women a succession of Trojan wars, in which copper-hued Helens passed back and forth as the booty of the victors. Indian nobles with a dozen wives envied the polity of other tribes where the caciques had half a hundred apiece. When Raleigh asked Topiawara’s people what he should wrest from the Epuremi, they replied “their women for us, and their gold for you.”

Of such a world anything might be true, and Amazon proof kept coming. The soldiers of de Agira, as Lopez Vaz records, “did finde that to be true which Orellana had reported, that there were Amazons, but these women fight to aide their husbands.” Father de Acunha, who went with Teixera on his great journey of exploration, asserted (1698) that the large ladies of fable had “treasures enough to enrich the entire world.” Their realm was the summits of the Cordilleras of Guiana. The males of the neighboring Guacaris were “the happy tribe which enjoys the favor of the valiant Amazons,” and these dwelt well up the sides of the mountains where the women throned it. When the men made their yearly call, their hostesses met them on the frontier with arms in their hands, which, however, they soon put aside. Each Amazon chose a hammock at random from the canoes of the men, and its owner followed her to her lodge.

Brazilian folk-lore fitted into the legend. The devil-mask of the Jurupary is supposed to represent the mythical hero who came from the Antilles and overthrew the Amazons. All along their great river bands of women attacked him, but, like another Hercules, he destroyed them utterly. The cuirass of the conqueror became a sacred mask, and it was said that Indian women would hide in the forests rather than look upon it, so poignant was its reminder of their overthrow.

In another story, found upon the middle Amazon, the Indian women abandoned their lords and retired to the hills, taking one old man with them. The oldster became the father of all children born to them, and only girl babies were reared. One mother, however, had a crippled son, and in pity she secreted and reared him, and cured his deformity. When his retreat was discovered there began, says Rothery, a long and tender persecution from the women, though the boy remained unmoved. To escape this he agreed that his mother should throw him into a lake, where he became a fish. Whenever the mother called him he swam ashore, changed to his beautiful human form and took food from her hands. This secret, also, was discovered, and the other women would imitate the call and inveigle the deceived youth into their arms. The old man, sole tribal husband of record, noted the neglect of the women, divined the reason, and went fishing. Other nets failed to hold his prey, but a net of woman’s hair caught the boy-fish, and youth was no longer served; the old man killed him.

Navaho myth tells a related story of the secession of the women, their cohabitation with a water-monster, and their return to their natural mates. Fragmentary tales of the woman state come also from Colombia, Nicaragua, Sinaloa, and the two Californias.

The Amazon exodus is related in a third story of Brazil, told by Barboza Rodriguez. When the women abandoned their husbands, flood and fell barred the way of the pursuers and the very monkeys pelted them from the trees. After a while the female republic relented so far as to admit the men once a year. At length it disappeared into the land of shadows, the women going down into a hole in the earth, led by an armadillo.

La Condamine, the French geographer and mathematician, went to Peru in 1735 to determine the length of a degree of the meridian at the equator, and on his homeward journey made the first scientific exploration of the river Amazon. He returned with one certainty and two doubts. He was sure there had been a woman state, but he did not know whether there still was, nor where it could then be found, for the Amazons were nomads who shifted their camps.

The distinguished scientist arrays his evidence: testimony of an Indian whose grandfather had seen an Amazon band pass by at the entrance of the Cuchura River and spoken with four of them; like testimony from other natives; statement of the Topayos that the green stones called Amazon stones which they wore were inherited from forefathers who had them from a tribe of women; statement of an old soldier that he had seen necklaces of Amazon stones among a tribe of long-eared Indians and learned they had procured them from the women without husbands, whose territories were seven marches west; native name of these women, Cougnantainsecouima, meaning “the independent women who receive men into their society only in the month of April”; offer of a native of Mortigua to guide La Condamine up the river Irijo which flows hard by the woman state; passages in the Jesuit Relations of 1726 and reports of two Spanish governors of Venezuela, Don Diego Portales and Don Francisco Torralva.

Where are the Amazons now? asks La Condamine. He notes that while different accounts designate the point of their retreat, some toward the east, others the north, and others again the west, these several routes converge in one common center, the mountains in the midst of Guiana. But without further proof he will not credit the existence of the woman state there in his time. The tribe may have moved again. “Or, what to me appears a more probable event than any other, it will have forsaken its ancient habits, either in consequence of being overpowered by some other nation, or of the maidens’ having at length lost the aversion of their mothers to the company of men. Thus, though no remaining vestige should be found of this feminine republic, this would not yet prove that none such had ever existed.”

The majority of the natives of South America, La Condamine declares, are liars, credulous, and prone to the marvelous. But none of them, he urges, could have heard of the Amazons of Diodorus Siculus, and Justin previous to the arrival of the Spaniards; yet even then Amazons were spoken of as existing in the center of the country, and later reports come from tribes that never had held commerce with Europeans.

If ever there was such a nation, concludes La Condamine, it must have been in America. The Indians were constantly wandering. Their wives often went with them to war. They had plenty of chances to get away from the men, and provocation enough in the hard estate of slavery in which they were held. Why could not these aboriginal women do what even imported slaves had done? Negroes in Latin America had fled from their taskmasters into the tropical forests, and there had reared a dozen Cimarron republics. Thus, weighing evidence, common report and probabilities, La Condamine casts the weight of his name in favor of the Amazons.

Two generations later the woman state received the allegiance of Alexander von Humboldt, founder of the science of physical geography and largest name among the savants of the nineteenth century. He had spent five years in tropical America at the opening of the century, and in his Personal Narrative of travel there he records affirmative answer to the question: Did he accept the conclusions of La Condamine? There was exaggeration, he thinks, in the stories of Raleigh and Oviedo; but nevertheless he cannot entirely reject “a tradition which is spread among various nations having no communication with each other.”

Ribeiro, the Portuguese astronomer who had traversed the Amazon basin, entering it a disbeliever of the story, had found the same traditions of the woman state among the Indians, and confirmed all that La Condamine reported a generation before, Humboldt notes. He is impressed with the contemporary testimony of Father Gili. The friar had asked a Quaqua Indian what tribes inhabited the Rio Cuchiviro and the Indian named three, one of them the Aikeambenanos. The missionary knew the Tamanac tongue, and in that tongue the word signified “women living alone.” The Indian confirmed his translation, and explained that these were a community of women who made blow-tubes and other weapons of war. After the familiar Amazon custom they had seasonal amatory relations with the neighboring nation of Vokearos and sent their men visitors back with presents, but killed their male offspring. This tale, says Humboldt, seems framed on the traditions which are rife among the Indians of the Maranon and among the Caribs; yet the Quaqua who told it knew no Castilian, had never before talked to a white man and certainly did not know that below the Orinoco was the river of the Amazons.

“What must we conclude?” asks Humboldt. “Not that there are Amazons on the banks of the Cuchivero, but that women in different parts of America, wearied of the state of slavery in which they were held by the men, united themselves together; that the desire of preserving their independence rendered them warriors; and that they received visits from a neighboring and friendly horde. This society of women may have acquired some power in one part of Guiana. The Caribs of the continent held intercourse with those of the islands; and no doubt in this way the traditions of the Maranon and the Orinoco were propagated toward the north,” so that Columbus and other navigators who followed him heard of them repeatedly before reaching the mainland of America.

A generation later the woman state is spoken of by Schomburgk, who traversed Guiana in 1835-43. Everywhere the Caribs told him of the Woruisamocos, a tribe of warlike women who lived near the sources of the Corentyne in a district where no white man had been. They shot with the bow and arrow and used the blow-pipe. Their own fields they cultivated, and men came thither only as their lovers, and but once a year. Schomburgk pushed on to the district where the women should have been; they were not there.

In the remote regions of the River Amazon’s northern affluents, says a recent geographer, the women warriors are still vainly sought.

Thus this world-wide, world-old story has been followed through perhaps thirty centuries of tradition on four continents and in five seas; and the end is a doubt. Men have fought with parties of armed women, but none has found the City of Women. Stories of male and female islands may have arisen from the custom of naming companion islets “brother” isles and “sister” isles, like North Brother and South Brother islands in New York’s East River. It is contended that Orellana concocted his tale to divert attention from his desertion of Pizarro; that Spaniards mistook young Indian braves, with topknots and berry-bracelets on their arms, for women; and that the prose behind the poetry of the American Amazons is the tribe of Naupes, which still wears green stones for amulets. It is even suggested that the New World legend grew out of the coast Indian word, Amazuni, to denote a tidal bore upon the great waterway of Brazil.

It has happened that the vivid imagination of the conquistadors projected stories among the Indians which came back later with such a wealth of detail as to seem native stuff. Is the New World Amazon tradition merely Book III, Chapter XXXIV of the Travels of Marco Polo, writ large upon the wax-like minds of savages by the curiosity of Columbus and his great companions?

Before answering, it will be well to turn from stories of a woman state to authentic records of women who were less than the Amazons of fable, but more, or rather other, than women of the hearth. Perhaps the answer is there.