Читать книгу The Andes of Southern Peru - Isaiah Bowman - Страница 13

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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 Recently however the ancient track has been replaced by a road that was cut with great labor, and by much blasting, across the mountain barrier, and at last mule transport has taken the place of the Indian.

Fig. 18—Index map for the nine regional diagrams in the pages following. A represents 17 ; B, 42; C, 36; D, 32; E, 34; F, 25; G, 26; and H, 65.

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.