The Central American cane knife that became a Connecticut brand name
Across Latin America a good machete was once simply called un collin, after a company in Collinsville, Connecticut. Founded in 1826 to make axes, Collins and Company sold its first machetes in 1845, and they became so trusted in cane fields and forests that the maker's name turned into the word for the tool itself.
The machete is a broad, thin blade that grew up in Central America, usually 30 to 66 centimetres long and less than 3 millimetres thick. Its Spanish name may be a diminutive of macho, an old word for a sledgehammer, or may trace back to machaera, the Greek and Roman name for a curved sword. English once borrowed it as matchet, a form now rarely heard, and in much of the English-speaking Caribbean the everyday cutting tool is called a cutlass instead.
Its real life is agricultural and domestic. In tropical and subtropical countries it hacks through rainforest undergrowth and cuts sugar cane, and in Latin American homes it works like a cleaver on large foods, splits coconuts, clears brush and roughs out wooden handles for other tools. In many hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming communities, children begin learning to handle sharp tools, machetes included, before they turn one. Today Colombia exports more machetes than any other country, while Robert Mole and Sons of Birmingham was long regarded as the finest maker of agricultural cutlasses for the Caribbean.
Farm work has even shaped dance. In the Jalisco region of Mexico, farm workers created Los Machetes, a folk dance that tells the story of the sugar cane harvest and is traditionally performed with real blades. In the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, dancers in the dança dos facões strike their machetes against surfaces in a mock battle, and the Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art maculelê, which began in Santo Amaro in Bahia, can use them too.
Relatives appear worldwide. East and Southern Africa use the panga, whose blade widens toward the back. Malaysia and Indonesia have the parang and golok, shorter and thicker and better on woody growth, and Armenians clear land with the tsakat. The Philippine bolo is often mislabelled a machete, but it is a separate, pre-colonial blade.
Source: Machete
