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TOPOGRAPHIC SHEETS Camaná Quadrangle 114 Aplao            " 120 Coropuna      " 188 Cotahuasi      " 192 La Cumbre    " 202 Antabamba    " 282 Lambrama     " 304

PART I

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

THE REGIONS OF PERU

LET four Peruvians begin this book by telling what manner of country they live in. Their ideas are provincial and they have a fondness for exaggerated description: but, for all that, they will reveal much that is true because they will at least reveal themselves. Their opinions reflect both the spirit of the toiler on the land and the outlook of the merchant in the town in relation to geography and national problems. Their names do not matter; let them stand for the four human regions of Peru, for they are in many respects typical men.

The Forest Dweller

One of them I met at a rubber station on the lower Urubamba River.[1] He helped secure my canoe, escorted me hospitably to his hut, set food and drink before me, and talked of the tropical forest, the rubber business, the Indians, the rivers, and the trails. In his opinion Peru was a land of great forest resources. Moreover, the fertile plains along the river margins might become the sites of rich plantations. The rivers had many fish and his garden needed only a little cultivation to produce an abundance of food. Fruit trees grew on every hand. He had recently married the daughter of an Indian chief.

Formerly he had been a missionary at a rubber station on the Madre de Dios, where the life was hard and narrow, and he doubted if there were any real converts. Himself the son of an Englishman and a Chilean woman, he found, so he said, that a missionary’s life in the rubber forest was intolerable for more than a few years. Yet he had no fault to find with the religious system of which he had once formed a part; in fact he had still a certain curious mixed loyalty to it. Before I left he gave me a photograph of himself and said with little pride and more sadness that perhaps I would remember him as a man that had done some good in the world along with much that might have been better.

We shall understand our interpreter better if we know who his associates were. He lived with a Frenchman who had spent several years in Africa as a soldier in the “Foreign Legion.” If you do not know what that means, you have yet all the pleasure of an interesting discovery. The Frenchman had reached the station the year before quite destitute and clad only in a shirt and a pair of trousers. A day’s journey north lived a young half-breed—son of a drunken father and a Machiganga woman, who cheated me so badly when I engaged Indian paddlers that I should almost have preferred that he had robbed me. Yet in a sense he had my life in his hands and I submitted. A German and a native Peruvian ran a rubber station on a tributary two days’ journey from the first. It will be observed that the company was mixed. They were all Peruvians, but of a sort not found in such relative abundance elsewhere. The defeated and the outcast, as well as the pioneer, go down eventually to the hot forested lands where men are forgotten.

While he saw gold in every square mile of his forested region, my clerical friend saw misery also. The brutal treatment of the Indians by the whites of the Madre de Dios country he could speak of only as a man reviving a painful memory. The Indians at the station loved him devotedly. There was only justice and kindness in all his dealings. Because he had large interests to look after, he knew all the members of the tribe, and his word was law in no hackneyed sense. A kindlier man never lived in the rubber forest. His influence as a high-souled man of business was vastly greater than as a missionary in this frontier society. He could daily illustrate by practical example what he had formerly been able only to preach.