Blowgun
A silent tube weapon firing poison darts
The blowgun (or blowpipe) is a projectile weapon: a long, narrow tube, roughly 100–300 cm, through which a dart is launched by the breath. With no powder or bowstring, it sends only a light dart by lung power, so the weapon itself does little harm — the plant poison smeared on the dart tip is the real killing agent. Its great strength is silence: the shot makes almost no sound and has no recoil, letting a hunter hit the mark before the quarry takes alarm. Its effective range is short, about 10–30 m, but its accuracy is high. The hunting peoples of the tropics — the Amazon, the Dayak of Borneo, the practitioners of the Japanese fukiya — each developed it independently as the archetypal silent, poison-tipped hunting tool.
Origin
The blowgun is not the invention of any single civilization but a tool that arose independently wherever dense forest demanded that small game in the treetops be taken silently. In the Amazon basin, blowpipes (cerbatana) up to 3–4 m long were used with curare-tipped darts; the Dayak of Borneo wielded the sumpitan, often fitted with a spear blade at the muzzle so it served for both hunting and war. In Japan the fukiya acquired the popular image of a ninja's concealed weapon, while the Cherokee of North America made river-cane blowguns shooting unpoisoned thistledown darts at small game. Whether poison was used, and how long the tube ran, varied with the region's quarry and plant life.
Features
- Long, narrow tube about 100–300 cm, fired by breath
- No powder or string — near-recoilless and near-silent, lung-powered
- Plant poison (curare and the like) on the dart tip is the real lethal means
- Effective range about 10–30 m, short but accurate
- The Bornean sumpitan doubled as a spear with a blade at the muzzle
- Dart tips were sometimes scored to break off inside the wound
Stories
Its chief purpose was hunting, not battle. In the rainforest a hunter aimed at monkeys, birds, and small mammals in the canopy and shot silently, so the quarry felt nothing until the poison spread. Curare paralyzes the breathing muscles, so a struck animal soon drops from the tree. In Borneo the sumpitan served in inter-tribal warfare as well as the hunt, combining spear and blowgun in one shaft. Its silence and portability suited ambush and surprise, and unlike a bow it could be aimed from within tight undergrowth without a broad drawing stance.
Weakness
Without poison, the light dart can scarcely kill even a bird or small animal, and it pierces neither armor nor thick leather clothing. The range is short and the dart so light that wind tosses it badly; in rain or a strong breeze the weapon is all but useless. Each shot must be reloaded and the breath composed anew, so the rate of fire is slow, and because the poison takes time to spread it was ill-suited to dropping large beasts or many foes at once.
Cultural Significance
The blowgun is emblematic of the hunting cultures of the Amazon and Borneo — more than a mere weapon, it distills deep botanical knowledge of poisons and the craft of precision hunting. The curare smeared on its darts left a great mark on modern medicine: brought to Europe by 19th-century explorers and studied for its muscle-paralyzing action, its purified component (tubocurarine) came into use in the 1940s as a muscle relaxant for surgery under general anesthesia. In Japan, meanwhile, the fukiya hardened into the popular image of a ninja's stealth weapon, and today it is also enjoyed as a target sport using a standardized 120 cm tube.
In Popular Culture
The blowgun recurs in fiction as a sign of poison, status ailments, and assassination. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, Tonga, a native of the Andaman Islands, kills with a blowpipe and poisoned darts; Agatha Christie's Death in the Clouds turns on a poisoned dart used in the sealed cabin of an airliner; and Hergé's Tintin adventure The Broken Ear features Amazonian curare darts. In games, the blowgun appears in the Dungeons & Dragons weapon list alongside poison needles, and it serves as a status-inflicting weapon in ninja-action titles such as Tenchu and in many JRPGs.
Trivia
- Curare works only when it enters the bloodstream and is nearly harmless if swallowed, so Amazonian hunters could safely eat the meat of game killed with curare-tipped darts — a property that later became the clue to its medical use.
- The curare component (tubocurarine) that began as an Amazonian arrow-and-dart poison was introduced in the 1940s as a muscle relaxant in general anesthesia, a rare case of a hunting poison entering the modern operating room.
- The Cherokee blowgun of North America uses no poison: river-cane tubes shooting thistledown darts to take rabbits and squirrels, a tradition still kept alive today as both craft and competitive sport.