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CANOE VOYAGING ON THE AMAZON: A NOONDAY REST 96 A TYPICAL RIVER BANK CLEARING 108 A HUITOTO INDIAN RUBBER GATHERER 152 GUAMARES INDIANS, OF THE HUITOTO TRIBE, IN DANCE COSTUME 162 RUBBER-COLLECTING RIVER LAUNCH 176 NATIVE WOMEN AND HUT AT IQUITOS 196 FREE INDIANS OF THE UCAYALI RIVER 208 A SIDE STREET AT IQUITOS 232 RIVER ITAYA, NEAR IQUITOS 250 HUITOTOS AT ENTRE RIOS AND BARBADOS NEGRO OVERSEER 286

   

Reproduced by kind permission of the proprietors of The Times.

THE PUTUMAYO

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

IT is something of a terrible irony of fate that in a land whose people for unknown centuries, and up to only four hundred years ago, lived under social laws “so beneficent as had never been known under any ancient kings of Asia, Africa, or Europe, or under any Christian monarch”—laws recorded by a reliable historian and partly capable of verification by the traveller and student to-day—should, in the twentieth century, have been the scene of the ruination and wholesale torture and murder of tribes of its defenceless and industrious inhabitants. Under the Incas of Peru, as recorded by the Inca-Spanish historian Garcilaso de la Vega[1] and other early writers, human blood was never shed purposely; every inhabitant was provided for and had a place in a well-ordered social economic plan; there was no such condition as beggary or destitution; the people were instructed by statute to help each other co-operatively; injustice and corruption were unknown; and there was a belief in a Supreme Director of the Universe. Under the Peruvian republic and the regimen of absentee capitalism to-day, tribes of useful people of this same land have been defrauded, driven into slavery, ravished, tortured, and destroyed. This has been done, not in single instances at the command of some savage potentate, but in tens of thousands under a republican Government, in a Christianised country, at the behest of the agents of a great joint-stock company with headquarters in London: the “crime” of these unfortunates being that they did not always bring in rubber sufficiently fast—work for which they practically received no payment—to satisfy their taskmasters. In order to obtain rubber so that the luxurious-tyred motor-cars of civilisation might multiply in the cities of Christendom, the dismal forests of the Amazon have echoed with the cries of despairing and tortured Indian aborigines. These are not things of the imagination, but a bare statement of actual occurrence, as set forth by the various witnesses in this volume.

The occurrences in the Amazon Valley which, under the name of the Putumayo[2] Rubber Atrocities of Peru, have startled the public mind and aroused widespread horror and indignation—atrocities worse than those of the Congo—cannot be regarded merely as an isolated phenomenon. Such incidents are the extreme manifestation of a condition which expresses itself in different forms all over the world—the condition of acute and selfish commercialism or industrialism whose exponents, in enriching themselves, deny a just proportion of the fruits of the earth and of their toil to the labourers who produce the wealth. The principle can be seen at work in almost any country, in almost every industry; and although its methods elsewhere are lacking in savage lust and barbarity, they still work untold suffering upon mankind. It is easy to condemn offhand the nation of Peru, under whose nominal control the foul spot of the Putumayo exists, and to whose negligence and cupidity the blame for the occurrences is largely to be laid, but the conscience of world-wide commercialism ought also to be pricked.

Leaving, however, that broader aspect of the subject, it is necessary to understand the local conditions which could have brought about such occurrences. The region of the Amazon Valley—a region nearly as large as the whole of Europe without Russia—was early divided between Spain and Portugal. Brazil to-day occupies the eastern and most extensive portion of the valley; and the various Andine republics, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, cover the upper and western portion. The Amazon is the largest river in the world; the entire fluvial system, with perhaps an aggregate of a hundred thousand miles of navigable rivers and streams, gives access to an enormous territory of forests and plains, which neither road nor railway has yet