Fig. 15—Topography and vegetation from the Tocate pass, 7,100 feet (2,164 m.), between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique. See Fig. 53a. This is in the zone of maximum rainfall. The cumulo-nimbus clouds are typical and change to nimbus in the early afternoon.
Fig. 16—The Expedition’s thirty-foot canoe at the mouth of the Timpia below Pongo de Mainique.
A few weeks later, on returning through the forest, we met their carriers with a few small bundles, the only part of their cargo they had saved from the river. Without a canoe or the means to buy one they had built rafts, which were quickly torn to pieces in the rapids. We, too, should have said “pobres Italianos” if their venture had not been plainly foolish. The rubber territory is difficult enough for men with capital; for men without capital it is impossible. Such men either become affiliated with organized companies or get out of the region when they can. A few, made desperate by risks and losses, cheat and steal their way to rubber. Two years before our trip an Italian had murdered two Frenchmen just below the Pongo and stolen their rubber cargo, whereupon he was shot by Machigangas under the leadership of Domingo, the chief who was with us on a journey from Pongo de Mainique to the mouth of the Timpia. Afterward they brought his skull to the top of a pass along the forest trail and set it up on a cliff at the very edge of Machiganga-land as a warning to others of his kind.
At Mulanquiato we secured five Machigangas and a boy interpreter, and on August 17 made the last and most difficult portion of our journey. We found these Indians much more skilful than our earlier boatmen. Well-trained, alert, powerful, and with excellent team-play, they swept the canoe into this or that thread of the current, and took one after another of the rapids with the greatest confidence. No sooner had we passed the Sintulini rapids, fully a mile long, than we reached the mouth of the Pomareni. This swift tributary comes in almost at right angles to the main river and gives rise to a confusing mass of standing waves and conflicting currents rendered still more difficult by the whirlpool just below the junction. So swift is the circling current of the maëlstrom that the water is hollowed out like a great bowl, a really formidable point and one of our most dangerous passages; a little too far to the right and we should be thrown over against the cliff-face; a little too far to the left and we should be caught in the whirlpool. Once in the swift current the canoe became as helpless as a chip. It was turned this way and that, each turn heading it apparently straight for destruction. But the Indians had judged their position well, and though we seemed each moment in a worse predicament, we at last skimmed the edge of the whirlpool and brought our canoe to shore just beyond its rim.
A little farther on we came to the narrow gateway of the Pongo, where the entire volume of the river flows between cliffs at one point no more than fifty feet apart. Here are concentrated the worst rapids of the lower Urubamba. For nearly fifteen miles the river is an unbroken succession of rapids, and once within its walls the Pongo offers small chance of escape. At some points we were fortunate enough to secure a foothold along the edge of the river and to let our canoe down by ropes. At others we were obliged to take chances with the current, though the great depth of water in most of the Pongo rapids makes them really less formidable in some respects than the shallow rapids up stream. The chief danger here lies in the rotary motion of the water at the sharpest bends. The effect at some places is extraordinary. A floating object is carried across stream like a feather and driven at express-train speed against a solid cliff. In trying to avoid one of these cross-currents our canoe became turned midstream, we were thrown this way and that, and at last shot through three standing waves that half filled the canoe.
Below the worst rapids the Pongo exhibits a swift succession of natural wonders. Fern-clad cliffs border it, a bush resembling the juniper reaches its dainty finger-like stems far out over the river, and the banks are heavily clad with mosses. The great woods, silent, impenetrable, mantle the high slopes and stretch up to the limits of vision. Cascades tumble from the cliff summits or go rippling down the long inclines of the slate beds set almost on edge. Finally appear the white pinnacles of limestone that hem in the narrow lower entrance or outlet of the Pongo. Beyond this passage one suddenly comes out upon the edge of a rolling forest-clad region, the rubber territory, the country of the great woods. Here the Andean realm ends and Amazonia begins.
From the summits of the white cliffs 4,000 feet above the river we were in a few days to have one of the most extensive views in South America. The break between the Andean Cordillera and the hill-dotted plains of the lower Urubamba valley is almost as sharp as a shoreline. The rolling plains are covered with leagues upon leagues of dense, shadowy, fever-haunted jungle. The great river winds through in a series of splendid meanders, and with so broad a channel as to make it visible almost to the horizon. Down river from our lookout one can reach ocean steamers at Iquitos with less than two weeks of travel. It is three weeks to the Pacific via Cuzco and more than a month if one takes the route across the high bleak lava-covered country which we were soon to cross on our way to the coast at Camaná.
THE white limestone cliffs at Pongo de Mainique are a boundary between two great geographic provinces (Fig. 17). Down valley are the vast river plains, drained by broad meandering rivers; up valley are the rugged spurs of the eastern Andes and their encanyoned streams (Fig. 18). There are outliers of the Andes still farther toward the northeast where hangs the inevitable haze of the tropical horizon, but the country beyond them differs in no important respect from that immediately below the Pongo.
Fig. 17—Regional diagram of the Eastern Andes (here the Cordillera Vilcapampa) and the adjacent tropical plains. For an explanation of the method of construction and the symbolism of the diagram see p. 51.
The foot-path to the summit of the cliffs is too narrow and steep for even the most agile mules. It is simply impassable for animals without hands. In places the packs are lowered by ropes over steep ledges and men must scramble down from one projecting root or swinging vine to another. In the breathless jungle it is a wearing task to pack in all supplies for the station below the Pongo and to carry out the season’s rubber. Recently however the ancient track has been replaced by a road that was cut with great labor, and by much blasting, across the mountain barrier, and at last mule transport has taken the place of the Indian.
In the dry season it is a fair and delightful country—that on the border of the mountains. In the wet season the traveler is either actually marooned or he must slosh through rivers of mud and water that deluge the trails and break the hearts of his beasts (Fig. 14). Here and there a large shallow-rooted tree has come crashing down across the trail and with its four feet of circumference and ten feet of plank buttress it is as difficult to move as a house. A new trail must be cut around it. A little farther on, where the valley wall steepens and one may look down a thousand feet of slope to the bed of a mountain torrent, a patch of trail has become soaked with water and the mules pick their way, trembling, across it. Two days from Yavero one of our mules went over the trail, and though she was finally recovered she died of her injuries the following night. After a month’s work in the forest a mule must run free for two months to recover. The packers count on losing one beast out of five for every journey into the forest. It is not solely a matter of work, though this is terrific; it is quite largely a matter of forage. In spite of its profusion of life (Fig. 13) and its really vast wealth of species, the tropical forest is all but barren of grass. Sugar cane is a fair substitute, but there are only a few cultivated spots. The more tender leaves of the trees, the young shoots of cane in the carrizo swamps, and the grass-like foliage of the low bamboo are the chief substitutes for pasture. But they lead to various disorders, besides requiring considerable labor on the part of the dejected peons who must gather them after a day’s heavy work with the packs.
Overcoming these enormous difficulties is expensive and some one must pay the bill. As is usual in a pioneer region, the native laborer pays a large part of it in unrequited toil; the rest is paid by the rubber consumer. For this is one of the cases where a direct road connects the civilized consumer and the barbarous producer. What a story it could tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubber on a New York dock were endowed with speech—of the wet jungle path, of enslaved peons, of vile abuses by immoral agents, of all the toil and sickness that make the tropical lowland a reproach!
Fig. 19—Moss-draped trees in the rain forest near Abra Tocate between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique.
Fig. 20—Yavero, a rubber station on the Yavero (Paucartambo) River, a tributary of the Urubamba. Elevation 1,600 feet (490 m.).
In the United States the specter of slavery haunted the national conscience almost from the beginning of national life, and the ghost was laid only at the cost of one of the bloodiest wars in history. In other countries, as in sugar-producing Brazil, the freeing of the slaves meant not a war but the verge of financial ruin besides a fundamental change in the social order and problems as complex and wearisome as any that war can bring. Everywhere abolition was secured at frightful cost.
Fig. 21—Clearing in the tropical forest between Rosalina and Pabellon. This represents the border region where the forest-dwelling Machiganga Indians and the mountain Indians meet. The clearings are occupied by Machigangas whose chief crops are yuca and corn; in the extreme upper left-hand corner are grassy slopes occupied by Quechua herdsmen and farmers who grow potatoes and corn.
The spirit that upheld the new founders of the western republics in driving out slavery was admirable, but as much cannot be said of their work of reconstruction. We like to pass over those dark days in our own history. In South America there has lingered from the old slave-holding days down to the present, a labor system more insidious than slavery, yet no less revolting in its details, and infinitely more difficult to stamp out. It is called peonage; it should be called slavery. In Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil it flourishes now as it ever did in the fruitful soil of the interior provinces where law and order are bywords and where the scarcity of workmen will long impel men to enslave labor when they cannot employ it. Peonage is slavery, though as in all slave systems there are many forms under which the system is worked out. We commonly think that the typical slave is one who is made to work hard, given but little food, and at the slightest provocation is tied to a post and brutally whipped. This is indeed the fate of many slaves or “peons” so-called, in the Amazon forests; but it is no more the rule than it was in the South before the war, for a peon is a valuable piece of property and if a slave raider travel five hundred miles through forest and jungle-swamp to capture an Indian you may depend upon it that he will not beat him to death merely for the fun of it.
That unjust and frightfully cruel floggings are inflicted at times and in some places is of course a result of the lack of official restraint that drunken owners far from the arm of the law sometimes enjoy. When a man obtains a rubber concession from the government he buys a kingdom. Many of the rubber territories are so remote from the cities that officials can with great difficulty be secured to stay at the customs ports. High salaries must be paid, heavy taxes collected, and grafting of the most flagrant kind winked at. Often the concessionaire himself is chief magistrate of his kingdom by law. Under such a system, remote from all civilizing influences, the rubber producer himself oftentimes a lawless border character or a downright criminal, no system of government would be adequate, least of all one like peonage that permits or ignores flagrant wrongs because it is so expensive to enforce justice.
The peonage system continues by reason of that extraordinary difficulty in the development of the tropical lowland of South America—the lack of a labor supply. The population of Amazonia now numbers less than one person to the square mile. The people are distributed in small groups of a dozen to twenty each in scattered villages along the river banks or in concealed clearings reached by trails known only to the Indians. Nearly all of them still live in the same primitive state in which they lived at the time of the Discovery. In the Urubamba region a single cotton shirt is worn by the married men and women, while the girls and boys in many cases go entirely naked except for a loincloth or a necklace of nuts or monkeys’ teeth (Fig. 23). A cane hut with a thatch to keep out the heavy rains is their shelter and their food is the yuca, sugar cane, Indian corn, bananas of many kinds, and fish. A patch of yuca once planted will need but the most trifling attention for years. The small spider monkey is their greatest delicacy and to procure it they will often abandon every other project and return at their own sweet and belated will.
Fig. 22—Trading with Machiganga Indians in a reed swamp at Santao Anato, Urubamba Valley, before Rosalina. Just outside the picture on the right is a platform on which corn is stored for protection against rodents and mildew. On the left is the corner of a grass-thatched cane hut.
In the midst of this natural life of the forest-dwelling Indian appears the rubber man, who, to gather rubber, must have rubber “pickers.” If he lives on the edge of the great Andean Cordillera, laborers may be secured from some of the lower valleys, but they must be paid well for even a temporary stay in the hot and unhealthful lowlands. Farther out in the great forest country the plateau Indians will not go and only the scattered tribes remain from which to recruit laborers. For the nature-life of the Indian what has the rubber gatherer to offer? Money? The Indian uses it for ornament only. When I once tried with money to pay an Indian for a week’s services he refused it. In exchange for his severe labor he wanted nothing more than a fish-hook and a ring, the two costing not more than a penny apiece! When his love for ornament has once been gratified the Indian ceases to work. His food and shelter and clothing are of the most primitive kind, but they are the best in the world for him because they are the only kind he has known. So where money and finery fail the lash comes in. The rubber man says that the Indian is lazy and must be made to work; that there is a great deal of work to be done and the Indian is the only laborer who can be found; that if rubber and chocolate are produced the Indian must be made to produce them; and that if he will not produce them for pay he must be enslaved.
Fig. 23—Ornaments and fabrics of the Machiganga Indians at Yavero. The nuts are made up into strings, pendants, and heavy necklaces. To the left of the center is one that contains feathers and four drumsticks of a bird about the size of a small wild turkey—probably the so-called turkey inhabiting the eastern mountain valleys and the adjacent border of the plains, and hunted as an important source of food. The cord in the upper right-hand corner is used most commonly for heel supports in climbing trees. The openwork sack is convenient for carrying game, fish, and fruit; the finely woven sacks are used for carrying red ochre for ornamenting or daubing faces and arms. They are also used for carrying corn, trinkets, and game.
It is a law of the rubber country that when an Indian falls into debt to a white man he must work for the latter until the debt is discharged. If he runs away before the debt is canceled or if he refuses to work or does too little work he may be flogged. Under special conditions such laws are wise. In the hands of the rubber men they are the basis of slavery. For, once the rubber interests begin to suffer, the promoters look around for a chance to capture free Indians. An expedition is fitted out that spends weeks exploring this river or that in getting on the track of unattached Indians. When a settlement is found the men are enslaved and taken long distances from home finally to reach a rubber property. There they are given a corner of a hut to sleep in, a few cheap clothes, a rubber-picking outfit, and a name. In return for these articles the unwilling Indian is charged any fanciful price that comes into the mind of his “owner,” and he must thereupon work at a per diem wage also fixed by the owner. Since his obligations increase with time, the Indian may die over two thousand dollars in debt!
Peonage has left frightful scars upon the country. In some places the Indians are fugitives, cultivating little farms in secreted places but visiting them only at night or after carefully reconnoitering the spot. They change their camps frequently and make their way from place to place by secret trails, now spending a night or two under the shelter of a few palm leaves on a sandbar, again concealing themselves in almost impenetrable jungle. If the hunter sometimes discovers a beaten track he follows it only to find it ending on a cliff face or on the edge of a lagoon where concealment is perfect. There are tribes that shoot the white man at sight and regard him as their bitterest enemy. Experience has led them to believe that only a dead white is a good white, reversing our saying about the North American Indian; and that even when he comes among them on peaceful errands he is likely to leave behind him a trail of syphilis and other venereal diseases scarcely less deadly than his bullets.
However, the peonage system is not hideous everywhere and in all its aspects. There are white owners who realize that in the long run the friendship of the Indians is an asset far greater than unwilling service and deadly hatred. Some of them have indeed intermarried with the Indians and live among them in a state but little above savagery. In the Mamoré country are a few owners of original princely concessions who have grown enormously wealthy and yet who continue to live a primitive life among their scores of illegitimate descendants. The Indians look upon them as benefactors, as indeed many of them are, defending the Indians from ill treatment by other whites, giving them clothing and ornaments, and exacting from them only a moderate amount of labor. In some cases indeed the whites have gained more than simple gratitude for their humane treatment of the Indians, some of whom serve their masters with real devotion.
When the “rubber barons” wish to discourage investigation of their system they invite the traveler to leave and he is given a canoe and oarsmen with which to make his way out of the district. Refusal to accept an offer of canoes and men is a declaration of war. An agent of one of the London companies accepted such a challenge and was promptly told that he would not leave the territory alive. The threat would have held true in the case of a less skilful man. Though Indians slept in the canoes to prevent their seizure, he slipped past the guards in the night, swam to the opposite shore, and there secured a canoe within which he made a difficult journey down river to the nearest post where food and an outfit could be secured.
A few companies operating on or near the border of the Cordillera have adopted a normal labor system, dependent chiefly upon people from the plateau and upon the thoroughly willing assistance of well-paid forest Indians. The Compañia Gomera de Mainique at Puerto Mainique just below the Pongo is one of these and its development of the region without violation of native rights is in the highest degree praiseworthy. In fact the whole conduct of this company is interesting to a geographer, as it reflects at every point the physical nature of the country.
The government is eager to secure foreign capital, but in eastern Peru can offer practically nothing more than virgin wealth, that is, land and the natural resources of the land. There are no roads, virtually no trails, no telegraph lines, and in most cases no labor. Since the old Spanish grants ran at right angles to the river so as to give the owners a cross-section of varied resources, the up-river plantations do not extend down into the rubber country. Hence the more heavily forested lower valleys and plains are the property of the state. A man can buy a piece of land down there, but from any tract within ordinary means only a primitive living can be obtained. The pioneers therefore are the rubber men who produce a precious substance that can stand the enormous tax on production and transportation. They do not want the land—only the exclusive right to tap the rubber trees upon it. Thus there has arisen the concession plan whereby a large tract is obtained under conditions of money payment or of improvements that will attract settlers or of a tax on the export.
The “caucho” or poorer rubber of the Urubamba Valley begins at 3,000 feet (915 m.) and the “hevea” or better class is a lower-valley and plains product. The rubber trees thereabouts produce 60 grams (2 ozs.) of dry rubber each week for eight months. After yielding rubber for this length of time a tree is allowed to rest four or five years. “Caucho” is produced from trees that are cut down and ringed with machetes, but it is from fifty to sixty cents cheaper owing to the impurities that get into it. The wood, not the nut, of the Palma carmona is used for smoking or “curing” the rubber. The government had long been urged to build a road into the region in place of the miserable track—absolutely impassable in the wet season—that heretofore constituted the sole means of exit. About ten years ago Señor Robledo at last built a government trail from Rosalina to Yavero about 100 miles long. While it is a wretched trail it is better than the old one, for it is more direct and it is better drained. In the wet season parts of it are turned into rivers and lakes, but it is probably the best that could be done with the small grant of twenty thousand dollars.
With at least an improvement in the trail it became possible for a rubber company to induce cargadores or packers to transport merchandise and rubber and to have a fair chance of success. Whereupon a rubber company was organized which obtained a concession of 28,000 hectares (69,188 acres) of land on condition that the company finish a road one and one-half meters wide to the Pongo, connecting with the road which the government had extended to Yavero. The land given in payment was not continuous but was selected in lots by the company in such a way as to secure the best rubber trees over an area several times the size of the concession. The road was finished by William Tell after four years’ work at a cost of about seventy-five thousand dollars. The last part of it was blasted out of slate and limestone and in 1912 the first pack train entered Puerto Mainique.
The first rubber was taken out in November, 1910, and productive possibilities proved by the collection of 9,000 kilos (19,841 pounds) in eight months.
If a main road were the chief problem of the rubber company the business would soon be on a paying basis, but for every mile of road there must be cut several miles of narrow trail (Fig. 14), as the rubber trees grow scattered about—a clump of a half dozen here and five hundred feet farther on another clump and only scattered individuals between. Furthermore, about twenty-five years ago rubber men from the Ucayali came up here in launches and canoes and cut down large numbers of trees within reach of the water courses and by ringing the trunks every few feet with machetes “bled” them rapidly and thus covered a large territory in a short time, and made huge sums of money when the price of rubber was high. Only a few of the small trees that were left are now mature. These, the mature trees that were overlooked, and the virgin stands farther from the rivers are the present sources of rubber.
In addition to the trails small cabins must be built to shelter the hired laborers from the plateau, many of whom bring along their women folk to cook for them. The combined expense to a company of these necessary improvements before production can begin is exceedingly heavy. There is only one alternative for the prospective exploiter: to become a vagrant rubber gatherer. With tents, guns, machetes, cloth, baubles for trading, tinned food for emergencies, and with pockets full of English gold parties have started out to seek fortunes in the rubber forests. If the friendship of a party of Indians can be secured by adequate gifts large amounts of rubber can be gathered in a short time, for the Indians know where the rubber trees grow. On the other hand, many fortunes have been lost in the rubber country. Some of the tribes have been badly treated by other adventurers and attack the newcomers from ambush or gather rubber for a while only to overturn the canoe in a rapid and let the river relieve them of selfish friends.
The Compañia Gomera de Mainique started out by securing the good-will of the forest Indians, the Machigangas. They come and go in friendly visits to the port at Yavero. If one of them is sick he can secure free medicine from the agent. If he wishes goods on credit he has only to ask for them, for the agent knows that the Indian’s sense of fairness will bring him back to work for the company. Without previous notice a group of Indians appears:
“We owe,” they announce.
“Good,” says the agent, “build me a house.”
They select the trees. Before they cut them down they address them solemnly. The trees must not hold their destruction against the Indians and they must not try to resist the sharp machetes. Then the Indians set to work. They fell a tree, bind it with light ropes woven from the wild cotton, and haul it to its place. That is all for the day. They play in the sun, do a little hunting, or look over the agent’s house, touching everything, talking little, exclaiming much. They dip their wet fingers in the sugar bowl and taste, turn salt out upon their hands, hold colored solutions from the medicine chest up to the light, and pull out and push in the corks of the bottles. At the end of a month or two the house is done. Then they gather their women and babies together and say:
“Now we go,” without asking if the work corresponds with the cost of the articles they had bought. Their judgment is good however. Their work is almost always more valuable than the articles. Then they shake hands all around.
“We will come again,” they say, and in a moment have disappeared in the jungle that overhangs the trail.
With such labor the Compañia Gomera de Mainique can do something, but it is not much. The regular seasonal tasks of road-building and rubber-picking must be done by imported labor. This is secured chiefly at Abancay, where live groups of plateau Indians that have become accustomed to the warm climate of the Abancay basin. They are employed for eight or ten months at an average rate of fifty cents gold per day, and receive in addition only the simplest articles of food.
At the end of the season the gang leaders are paid a gratificación, or bonus, the size of which depends upon the amount of rubber collected, and this in turn depends upon the size of the gang and the degree of willingness to work. In the books of the company I saw a record of gratificaciónes running as high as $600 in gold for a season’s work.
Some of the laborers become sick and are cared for by the agent until they recover or can be sent back to their homes. Most of them have fever before they return.
The rubber costs the company two soles ($1.00) produced at Yavero. The two weeks’ transportation to Cuzco costs three and a half soles ($1.75) per twenty-five pounds. The exported rubber, known to the trade as Mollendo rubber, in contrast to the finer “Pará” rubber from the lower Amazon, is shipped to Hamburg. The cost for transportation from port to port is $24.00 per English ton (1,016 kilos). There is a Peruvian tax of 8 per cent of the net value in Europe, and a territorial tax of two soles ($1.00) per hundred pounds. All supplies except the few vegetables grown on the spot cost tremendously. Even dynamite, hoes, clothing, rice—to mention only a few necessities—must pay the heavy cost of transportation after imposts, railroad and ocean freight, storage and agents’ percentages are added. The effect of a disturbed market is extreme. When, in 1911, the price of rubber fell to $1.50 a kilo at Hamburg the company ceased exporting. When it dropped still lower in 1912 production also stopped, and it is still doubtful, in view of the growing competition of the East-Indian plantations with their cheap labor, whether operations will ever be resumed. Within three years no less than a dozen large companies in eastern Peru and Bolivia have ceased operations. In one concession on the Madre de Dios the withdrawal of the agents and laborers from the posts turned at last into flight, as the forest Indians, on learning the company’s policy, rapidly ascended the river in force, committing numerous depredations. The great war has also added to the difficulties of production.
Facts like these are vital in the consideration of the future of the Amazon basin and especially its habitability. It was the dream of Humboldt that great cities should arise in the midst of the tropical forests of the Amazon and that the whole lowland plain of that river basin should become the home of happy millions. Humboldt’s vision may have been correct, though a hundred years have brought us but little nearer its realization. Now, as in the past four centuries, man finds his hands too feeble to control the great elemental forces which have shaped history. The most he can hope for in the next hundred years at least is the ability to dodge Nature a little more successfully, and here and there by studies in tropical hygiene and medicine, by the substitution of water-power for human energy, to carry a few of the outposts and prepare the way for a final assault in the war against the hard conditions of climate and relief. We hear of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, 200 miles long, in the heart of a tropical forest and of the commercial revolution it will bring. Do we realize that the forest which overhangs the rails is as big as the whole plain between the Rockies and the Appalachians, and that the proposed line would extend only as far as from St. Louis to Kansas City, or from Galveston to New Orleans?
Even if twenty whites were eager to go where now there is but one reluctant pioneer, we should still have but a halting development on account of the scarcity of labor. When, three hundred years ago, the Isthmus of Panama stood in his way, Gomara wrote to his king: “There are mountains, but there are also hands,” as if men could be conjured up from the tropical jungle. From that day to this the scarcity of labor has been the chief difficulty in the lowland regions of tropical South America. Even when medicine shall have been advanced to the point where residence in the tropics can be made safe, the Amazon basin will lack an adequate supply of workmen. Where Humboldt saw thriving cities, the population is still less than one to the square mile in an area as large as fifteen of our Mississippi Valley states. We hear much about a rich soil and little about intolerable insects; the climate favors a good growth of vegetation, but a man can starve in a tropical forest as easily as in a desert; certain tributaries of the Negro are bordered by rich rubber forests, yet not a single Indian hut may be found along their banks. Will men of the white race dig up the rank vegetation, sleep in grass hammocks, live in the hot and humid air, or will they stay in the cooler regions of the north and south? Will they rear children in the temperate zones, or bury them in the tropics?
What Gorgas did for Panama was done for intelligent people. Can it be duplicated in the case of ignorant and stupid laborers? Shall the white man with wits fight it out with Nature in a tropical forest, or fight it out with his equals under better skies?
The tropics must be won by strong hands of the lowlier classes who are ignorant or careless of hygiene, and not by the khaki-clad robust young men like those who work at Panama. Tropical medicine can do something for these folk, but it cannot do much. And we cannot surround every laborer’s cottage with expensive screens, oiled ditches, and well-kept lawns. There is a practical optimism and a sentimental optimism. The one is based on facts; the other on assumptions. It is pleasant to think that the tropical forest may be conquered. It is nonsense to say that we are now conquering it in any comprehensive and permanent way. That sort of conquest is still a dream, as when Humboldt wrote over a hundred years ago.
THE people of a tropical forest live under conditions not unlike those of the desert. The Sahara contains 2,000,000 persons within its borders, a density of one-half to the square mile. This is almost precisely the density of population of a tract of equivalent size in the lowland forests of South America. Like the oases groups in the desert of aridity are the scattered groups along the river margins of the forest. The desert trails run from spring to spring or along a valley floor where there is seepage or an intermittent stream; the rivers are the highways of the forest, the flowing roads, and away from them one is lost in as true a sense as one may be lost in the desert.
A man may easily starve in the tropical forest. Before starting on even a short journey of two or three days a forest Indian stocks his canoe with sugar cane and yuca and a little parched corn. He knows the settlements as well as his desert brother knows the springs. The Pahute Indian of Utah lives in the irrigated valleys and makes annual excursions across the desert to the distant mountains to gather the seeds of the nut pine. The Machiganga lives in the hills above the Urubamba and annually comes down through the forest to the river to fish during the dry season.
The Machigangas are one of the important tribes of the Amazon basin. Though they are dispersed to some extent upon the plains their chief groups are scattered through the heads of a large number of valleys near the eastern border of the Andes. Chief among the valleys they occupy are the Pilcopata, Tono, Piñi-piñi, Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea, Timpia, and Camisea (Fig. 203). In their distribution, in their relations with each other, in their manner of life, and to some extent in their personal traits, they display characteristics strikingly like those seen in desert peoples. Though the forest that surrounds them suggests plenty and the rivers the possibility of free movement with easy intercourse, the struggle of life, as in the desert, is against useless things. Travel in the desert is a conflict with heat and aridity; but travel in the tropic forest is a struggle against space, heat, and a superabundant and all but useless vegetation.
The Machigangas are one of the subtribes of the Campas Indians, one of the most numerous groups in the Amazon Valley. It is estimated that there are in all about 14,000 to 16,000 of them. Each subtribe numbers from one to four thousand, and the territory they occupy extends from the limits of the last plantations—for example, Rosalina in the Urubamba Valley—downstream beyond the edge of the plains. Among them three subtribes are still hostile to the whites: the Cashibos, the Chonta Campas, and the Campas Bravos.
In certain cases the Cashibos are said to be anthropophagous, in the belief that they will assume the strength and intellect of those they eat. This group is also continuously at war with its neighbors, goes naked, uses stone hatchets, as in ages past, because of its isolation and unfriendliness, and defends the entrances to the tribal huts with dart and traps. The Cashibos are diminishing in numbers and are now scattered through the valley of the Gran Pajonal, the left bank of the Pachitea, and the Pampa del Sacramento.[2]
The friendliest tribes live in the higher valley heads, where they have constant communication with the whites. The use of the bow and arrow has not, however, been discontinued among them, in spite of the wide introduction of the old-fashioned muzzle-loading shotgun, which they prize much more highly than the latest rifle or breech-loading shotgun because of its simplicity and cheapness. Accidents are frequent among them owing to the careless use of fire-arms. On our last day’s journey on the Urubamba above the mouth of the Timpia one of our Indian boys dropped his canoe pole on the hammer of a loaded shotgun, and not only shot his own fingers to pieces, but gravely wounded his father (Fig. 2). In spite of his suffering the old chief directed our work at the canoe and even was able to tell us the location of the most favorable channel. Though the night that followed was as black as ink, with even the stars obscured by a rising storm, his directions never failed. We poled our way up five long rapids without special difficulties, now working into the lee of a rock whose location he knew within a few yards, now paddling furiously across the channel to catch the upstream current of an eddy.
The principal groups of Machigangas live in the middle Urubamba and its tributaries, the Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea, Timpia, Pachitea, and others. There is a marked difference in the use of the land and the mode of life among the different groups of this subtribe. Those who live in the lower plains and river “playas,” as the patches of flood plain are called, have a single permanent dwelling and alternately fish and hunt. Those that live on hill farms have temporary reed huts on the nearest sandbars and spend the best months of the dry season—April to October—in fishing and drying fish to be carried to their mountain homes (Fig. 21). Some families even duplicate chacras or farms at the river bank and grow yuca and sugar cane. In latter years smallpox, malaria, and the rubber hunters have destroyed many of the river villages and driven the Indians to permanent residence in the hills or, where raids occur, along secret trails to hidden camps.
Their system of agriculture is strikingly adapted to some important features of tropical soil. The thin hillside soils of the region are but poorly stocked with humus, even in their virgin condition. Fallen trees and foliage decay so quickly that the layer of forest mold is exceedingly thin and the little that is incorporated in the soil is confined to a shallow surface layer. To meet these special conditions the Indian makes new clearings by girdling and burning the trees. When the soil becomes worn out and the crops diminish, the old clearing is abandoned and allowed to revert to natural growth and a new farm is planted to corn and yuca. The population is so scattered and thin that the land assignment system current among the plateau Indians is not practised among the Machigangas. Several families commonly live together and may be separated from their nearest neighbors by many miles of forested mountains. The land is free for all, and, though some heavy labor is necessary to clear it, once a small patch is cleared it is easy to extend the tract by limited annual cuttings. Local tracts of naturally unforested land are rarely planted, chiefly because the absence of shade has allowed the sun to burn out the limited humus supply and to prevent more from accumulating. The best soil of the mountain slopes is found where there is the heaviest growth of timber, the deepest shade, the most humus, and good natural drainage. It is the same on the playas along the river; the recent additions to the flood plain are easy to cultivate, but they lack humus and a fine matrix which retains moisture and prevents drought or at least physiologic dryness. Here, too, the timbered areas or the cane swamps are always selected for planting.
The traditions of the Machigangas go back to the time of the Inca conquest, when the forest Indians, the “Antis,” were subjugated and compelled to pay tribute.[3] When the Inca family itself fled from Cuzco after the Spanish Conquest and sought refuge in the wilderness it was to the Machiganga country that they came by way of the Vilcabamba and Pampaconas Valleys. Afterward came the Spaniards and though they did not exercise governmental authority over the forest Indians they had close relations with them. Land grants were made to white pioneers for special services or through sale and with the land often went the right to exploit the people on it. Some of the concessions were owned by people who for generations knew nothing save by hearsay of the Indians who dwelt in the great forests of the valleys. In later years they have been exploring their lands and establishing so-called relations whereby the savage “buys” a dollar’s worth of powder or knives for whatever number of dollars’ worth of rubber the owner may care to extract from him.
The forest Indian is still master of his lands throughout most of the Machiganga country. He is cruelly enslaved at the rubber posts, held by the loose bonds of a desultory trade at others, and in a few places, as at Pongo do Mainique, gives service for both love and profit, but in many places it is impossible to establish control or influence. The lowland Indian never falls into the abject condition of his Quechua brother on the plateau. He is self-reliant, proud, and independent. He neither cringes before a white nor looks up to him as a superior being. I was greatly impressed by the bearing of the first of the forest tribes I met in August, 1911, at Santo Anato. I had built a brisk fire and was enjoying its comfort when La Sama returned with some Indians whom he had secured to clear his playa. The tallest of the lot, wearing a colored band of deer skin around his thick hair and a gaudy bunch of yellow feathers down his back, came up, looked me squarely in the eye, and asked
“Tatiry payta?” (What is your name?)
When I replied he quietly sat down by the fire, helping himself to the roasted corn I had prepared in the hot ashes. A few days later when we came to the head of a rapid I was busy sketching-in my topographic map and did not hear his twice repeated request to leave the boat while the party reconnoitered the rapid. Watching his opportunity he came alongside from the rear—he was steersman—and, turning just as he was leaving the boat, gave me a whack in the forehead with his open palm. La Sama saw the motion and protested. The surly answer was:
“I twice asked him to get out and he didn’t move. What does he think we run the canoe to the bank for?”
To him the making of a map was inexplicable; I was merely a stupid white person who didn’t know enough to get out of a canoe when told!
The plateau Indian has been kicked about so long that all his independence has been destroyed. His goods have been stolen, his services demanded without recompense, in many places he has no right to land, and his few real rights are abused beyond belief. The difference between him and the forest Indian is due quite largely to differences of environment. The plateau Indian is agricultural, the forest Indian nomadic and in a hunting stage of development; the unforested plateau offers no means for concealment of person or property, the forest offers hidden and difficult paths, easy means for concealment, for ambush, and for wide dispersal of an afflicted tribe. The brutal white of the plateau follows altogether different methods when he finds himself in the Indian country, far from military assistance, surrounded by fearless savages. He may cheat but he does not steal, and his brutality is always carefully suited to both time and place.
The Machigangas are now confined to the forest, but the limits of their territory were once farther upstream, where they were in frequent conflict with the plateau Indians. As late as 1835, according to General Miller,[4] they occupied the land as far upstream as the “Encuentro” (junction) of the Urubamba and the Yanatili (Fig. 53). Miller likewise notes that the Chuntaguirus, “a superior race of Indians” who lived “toward the Marañon,” came up the river “200 leagues” to barter with the people thereabouts.
“They bring parrots and other birds, monkeys, cotton robes white and painted, wax balsams, feet of the gran bestia, feather ornaments for the head, and tiger and other skins, which they exchange for hatchets, knives, scissors, needles, buttons, and any sort of glittering bauble.”
On their yearly excursions they traveled in a band numbering from 200 to 300, since at the mouth of the Paucartambo (Yavero) they were generally set upon by the Pucapacures. The journey upstream required three months; with the current they returned home in fifteen days.
Their place of meeting at the mouth of the Yanatili was a response to a long strip of grassland that extends down the deep and dry Urubamba Valley, as shown in Figs. 53-B and 55. The wet forests, in which the Machigangas live, cover the hills back of the valley plantations; the belt of dry grassland terminates far within the general limits of the red man’s domain and only 2,000 feet above the sea. It is in this strip of low grassland that on the one hand the highland and valley dwellers, and on the other the Indians of the hot forested valleys and the adjacent lowland found a convenient place for barter. The same physiographic features are repeated in adjacent valleys of large size that drain the eastern aspect of the Peruvian Andes, and in each case they have given rise to the periodic excursions of the trader.
These annual journeys are no longer made. The planters have crept down valley. The two best playas below Rosalina are now being cleared. Only a little space remains between the lowest valley plantations and the highest rubber stations. Furthermore, the Indians have been enslaved by the rubber men from the Ucayali. The Machigangas, many of whom are runaway peons, will no longer take cargoes down valley for fear of recapture. They have the cautious spirit of fugitives except in their remote valleys. There they are secure and now and then reassert their old spirit when a lawless trader tries to browbeat them into an unprofitable trade. Also, they are yielding to the alluring call of the planter. At Santo Anato they are clearing a playa in exchange for ammunition, machetes, brandy, and baubles. They no longer make annual excursions to get these things. They have only to call at the nearest plantation. There is always a wolf before the door of the planter—the lack of labor. Yet, as on every frontier, he turns wolf himself when the lambs come, and without shame takes a week’s work for a penny mirror, or, worse still, supplies them with firewater, for that will surely bring them back to him. Since this is expensive they return to their tribal haunts with nothing except a debauched spirit and an appetite from which they cannot run away as they did from their task masters in the rubber forest. Hence the vicious circle: more brandy, more labor; more labor, more cleared land; more cleared land, more brandy; more brandy, less Indian. But by that time the planter has a large sugar estate. Then he can begin to buy the more expensive plateau labor, and in turn debauch it.
Nature as well as man works against the scattered tribes of Machigangas and their forest kinsmen. Their country is exceedingly broken by ramifying mountain spurs and valleys overhung with cliffs or bordered by bold, wet, fern-clad slopes. It is useless to try to cut your way by a direct route from one point to another. The country is mantled with heavy forest. You must follow the valleys, the ancient trails of the people. The larger valleys offer smooth sand-bars along the border of which canoes may be towed upstream, and there are little cultivated places for camps. But only a few of the tribes live along them, for they are also more accessible to the rubbermen. The smaller valleys, difficult of access, are more secure and there the tribal remnants live today. While the broken country thus offers a refuge to fugitive bands it is the broken country and its forest cover that combine to break up the population into small groups and keep them in an isolated and quarrelsome state. Chronic quarreling is not only the product of mere lack of contact. It is due to many causes, among which is a union of the habit of migration and divergent tribal speech. Every tribe has its own peculiar words in addition to those common to the group of tribes to which it belongs. Moreover each group of a tribe has its distinctive words. I have seen and used carefully prepared vocabularies—no two of which are alike throughout. They serve for communication with only a limited number of families. These peculiarities increase as experiences vary and new situations call for additions to or changes in their vocabularies, and when migrating tribes meet their speech may be so unlike as to make communication difficult. Thus arise suspicion, misunderstanding, plunder, and chronic war. Had they been a united people their defense of their rough country might have been successful. The tribes have been divided and now and again, to get firearms and ammunition with which to raid a neighbor, a tribe has joined its fortunes to those of vagrant rubber pickers only to find in time that its women were debased, its members decimated by strange and deadly diseases, and its old morality undermined by an insatiable desire for strong drink.[5] The Indian loses whether with the white or against him.
The forest Indian is held by his environment no less strongly than the plateau Indian. We hear much about the restriction of the plateau dweller to the cool zone in which the llama may live. As a matter of fact he lives far below the cool zone, where he no longer depends upon the llama but rather upon the mule for transport. The limits of his range correspond to the limits of the grasslands in the dry valley pockets already described (p. 42), or on the drier mountain slopes below the zone of heaviest rainfall (Fig. 54). It is this distribution that brought him into such intimate contact with the forest Indian. The old and dilapidated coca terraces of the Quechuas above the Yanatili almost overlook the forest patches where the Machigangas for centuries built their rude huts. A good deal has been written about the attempts of the Incas to extend their rule into this forest zone and about the failure of these attempts on account of the tropical climate. But the forest Indian was held by bonds equally secure. The cold climate of the plateau repelled him as it does today. His haunts are the hot valleys where he need wear only a wild-cotton shirt or where he may go naked altogether. That he raided the lands of the plateau Indian is certain, but he could never displace him. Only along the common borders of their domains, where the climates of two zones merged into each other, could the forest Indian and the plateau Indian seriously dispute each other’s claims to the land. Here was endless conflict but only feeble trade and only the most minute exchanges of cultural elements.
Even had they been as brothers they would have had little incentive to borrow cultural elements from each other. The forest dweller requires bow and arrow; the plateau dweller requires a hoe. There are fish in the warm river shallows of the forested zone; llamas, vicuña, vizcachas, etc., are a partial source of food supply on the plateau. Coca and potatoes are the chief products of the grassy mountain slopes; yuca, corn, bananas, are the chief vegetable foods grown on the tiny cultivated patches in the forest. The plateau dweller builds a thick-walled hut; the valley dweller a cane shack. So unlike are the two environments that it would be strange if there had been a mixture of racial types and cultures. The slight exchanges that were made seem little more than accidental. Even today the Machigangas who live on the highest slopes own a few pigs obtained from Quechuas, but they never eat their flesh; they keep them for pets merely. I saw not a single woolen article among the Indians along the Urubamba whereas Quechuas with woolen clothing were going back and forth regularly. Their baubles were of foreign make; likewise their few hoes, likewise their guns.
They clear the forest about a mid-cotton tree and spin and weave the cotton fiber into sacks, cords for climbing trees when they wish to chase a monkey, ropes for hauling their canoes, shirts for the married men and women, colored head-bands, and fish nets. The slender strong bamboo is gathered for arrows. The chunta palm, like bone for hardness, supplies them with bows and arrow heads. The brilliant red and yellow feathers of forest birds, also monkey bones and teeth, are their natural ornaments. Their life is absolutely distinct from that of their Quechua neighbors. Little wonder that for centuries forest and plateau Indians have been enemies and that their cultures are so distinct, for their environment everywhere calls for unlike modes of existence and distinct cultural development.
THE lofty mountain zones of Peru, the high bordering valleys, and the belts of rolling plateau between are occupied by tribes of shepherds. In that cold, inhospitable region at the top of the country are the highest permanent habitations in the world—17,100 feet (5,210 m.)—the loftiest pastures, the greatest degree of adaptation to combined altitude and frost. It is here only a step from Greenland to Arcady. Nevertheless it is Greenland that has the people. Why do they shun Arcady? To the traveler from the highlands the fertile valleys between 5,000 and 8,000 feet (1,500 to 2,500 m.) seem like the abode of friendly spirits to whose charm the highland dweller must yield. Every pack-train from valley to highland carries luxury in the form of fruit, coca, cacao, and sugar. One would think that every importation of valley products would be followed by a wave of migration from highland to valley. On the contrary the highland people have clung to their lofty pastures for unnumbered centuries. Until the Conquest the last outposts of the Incas toward the east were the grassy ridges that terminate a few thousand feet below the timber line.
In this natural grouping of the people where does choice or blind prejudice or instinct leave off? Where does necessity begin? There are answers to most of these questions to be found in the broad field of geographic comparison. But before we begin comparisons we must study the individual facts upon which they rest. These facts are of almost every conceivable variety. They range in importance from a humble shepherd’s stone corral on a mountain slope to a thickly settled mountain basin. Their interpretation is to be sought now in the soil of rich playa lands, now in the fixed climatic zones and rugged relief of deeply dissected, lofty highlands in the tropics. Some of the controlling factors are historical, others economic; still other factors have exerted their influence through obscure psychologic channels almost impossible to trace. The why of man’s distribution over the earth is one of the most complicated problems in natural science, and the solution of it is the chief problem of the modern geographer.
At first sight the mountain people of the Peruvian Andes seem to be uniform in character and in mode of life. The traveler’s first impression is that the same stone-walled, straw-thatched type of hut is to be found everywhere, the same semi-nomadic life, the same degrees of poverty and filth. Yet after a little study the diversity of their lives is seen to be, if not a dominating fact, at least one of surprising importance. Side by side with this diversity there runs a corresponding diversity of relations to their physical environment. Nowhere else on the earth are greater physical contrasts compressed within such small spaces. If, therefore, we accept the fundamental theory of geography that there is a general, necessary, varied, and complex relation between man and the earth, that theory ought here to find a really vast number of illustrations. A glance at the accompanying figures discloses the wide range of relief in the Peruvian Andes. The corresponding range in climate and in life therefore furnishes an ample field for the application of the laws of human distribution.
In analyzing the facts of distribution we shall do well to begin with the causes and effects of migration. Primitive man is in no small degree a wanderer. His small resources often require him to explore large tracts. As population increases the food quest becomes more intense, and thus there come about repeated emigrations which increase the food supply, extend its variety, and draw the pioneers at last into contact with neighboring groups. The farther back we go in the history of the race the clearer it becomes that migrations lie at the root of much of human development. The raid for plunder, women, food, beasts, is a persistent feature of the life of those primitive men who live on the border of unlike regions.
The shepherd of the highland and the forest hunter of the plains perforce range over vast tracts, and each brings back to the home group news that confirms the tribal choice of habitation or sets it in motion toward a more desirable place. Superstitions may lead to flight akin to migration. Epidemics may be interpreted as the work of a malignant spirit from which men must flee. War may drive a defeated group into the fastnesses of a mountain forest where pursuit by stream or trail weakens the pursuer and confines his action, thereby limiting his power. Floods may come and destroy the cultivated spots. Want or mere desire in a hundred forms may lead to movement.
Even among forest tribes long stationary the facile canoe and the light household necessities may easily enable trivial causes to develop the spirit of restlessness. Pressure of population is a powerful but not a general cause of movement. It may affect the settled groups of the desert oases, or the dense population of fertile plains that is rooted in the soil. On the other hand mere whims may start a nomadic group toward a new goal. Often the goal is elusive and the tribe turns back to the old haunts or perishes in the shock of unexpected conflict.
In the case of both primitive societies and those of a higher order the causes and the results of migration are often contradictory. These will depend on the state of civilization and the extremes of circumstance. When the desert blooms the farmer of the Piura Valley in northwestern Peru turns shepherd and drives his flocks of sheep and goats out into the short-lived pastures of the great pampa on the west. In dry years he sends them eastward into the mountains. The forest Indian of the lower Urubamba is a fisherman while the river is low and lives in a reed hut beside his cultivated patch of cane and yuca. When the floods come he is driven to the higher ground in the hills where he has another cultivated patch of land and a rude shelter. To be sure, these are seasonal migrations, yet through them the country becomes better known to each new generation of men. And each generation supplies its pioneers, who drift into the remoter places where population is scarce or altogether wanting.