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ADVENTURES IN BOLIVIA
[Illustration: GOLD FIRM’S HEADQUARTERS ON THE TIPUANI]
ADVENTURES
IN BOLIVIA
BY C. H. PRODGERS :: :: ::
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
ILLUSTRATED FROM THE AUTHOR’S
ORIGINAL SKETCHES AND PHOTOGRAPHS
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LTD.
LONDON :: :: :: MCMXXII
_Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis & Son, Trinity Works,
Worcester._
PREFACE
TO RIDERS IN HIGH (AND LOWER) ALTITUDES
This book, that exudes sincerity, just as a pine tree drops its rosin,
serves a double purpose. It reveals a curious personality that might
have stepped straight from the pages of Purchas or of Hakluyt, and at
the same time, all unknown to the writer, helps to dispel some of the
mist of ignorance and prejudice that for so long has hung over the lives
and actions of the Spanish Conquerors.
Judged by an alien Tribunal, brought before the bar of an opinion
adverse to them by religion, race and interest, they have been vilified
before the world with scarce a word raised in their defence. To-day
their exploits are judged upon their merits. The ancient jealousy, that
gave Gondomar the right to brand even the great Sir Walter Raleigh with
the stigma of “Pirata,” has long died down. We know that our own withers
are not quite unerring. Thus, by degrees and in the hard school of
experience, we are learning not to condemn men who acted by the
standards of their age by our own code. Take both codes away, and drop
me an impartial judge down from the moon, he might not find much real
difference between the Spaniards of the age of Charles V and ourselves,
the sons of progress and of light. Still, there are fellows of the baser
sort, your piffling traveller with his bad jokes, contempt of anything
not forged upon his Peckham anvil, or registered so many degrees north,
east or west from the meridian of Balham, with clichés from old books as
if the course of time changed nothing, and no fresh matter ever came to
light, to tell us all the Spanish conquerors were cruel rogues and
thieves. He lets us know that in their thirst for gold and zeal for
their damned Papism, they exterminated all the Indians, leaving not one
alive. He is read, commented on and reviewed by men as ignorant and
prejudiced as he himself, and so the ball rolls on, ever increasing like
a mass of snow set trundling down a slope. To read or listen to such
antiquated bombast one would think that kindly well-disposed and
Christian men meticulous in all their dealings with the Indians, such as
were Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, had never
lived and striven to do good. Of the great Las Casas and the innumerable
Jesuits and Franciscans, who gave their lives so freely for the
conversion of the Indians, it is unnecessary to speak.
This little book comes as an antidote to all this poison gas.
Written in the language that men speak round the camp fire, with rifles
ready to the hand, with ears attuned to catch the slightest rustle in
the grass and eyes always a-watch upon the horses where they feed close
at hand, hobbled or picketed, it lets fresh air in on the question. The
writer tells us, bluntly and in the way a sailor writes his log book,
quite without comment, but with circumstance, that he slept in an
Ancient Inca Temple on some pass or other of an altitude of 17,000 feet
and with a temperature of 8° below. He lifts unwittingly the corner of a
page that Protestant historians have always kept dog’s-eared. He jots
down at haphazard that he bought a llama, some frozen potatoes, or the
carcass of a sheep, from the owner of the hut, who was an Indian. Then
further on he comes upon a band of Indians driving llamas; stops in
another Indian hut, and by degrees it dawns upon us that his whole
journey from the time he left La Paz was amongst Indians. One million
Indians, as he tells us, are settled in the republic on the same lands
that their forefathers owned, under their Inca princes when the Pizarro
brothers burst on their Arcady. Besides this million, that apparently
has fluctuated little since the conquest, still in the forests of the
Tipuani and the Beni, that Beni of whose wonders I had heard so much
from my friend, Colonel Don Pedro Suarez, there still roam, free, naked
and unashamed, for shame was brought into the world under a dispensation
they had no share in, three hundred thousand of these autochthones.
How the author came to set out on the strange, romantic quest, to reach
a lone community of Indians, on the Tipuani, living far from the world,
in curious huts much as I have seen in remote capillas in Paraguay, and
well depicted by the author in a not ineffective, neo-Japanese style of
art, is most curious. Established as he was with a large racing stable,
somewhere in Chile, an occupation as one would suppose as little likely
as any in the world to furnish an explorer, for diplomats and race-horse
trainers are perhaps the men above all others wrapped in conservatism
and bound in prejudice.
Still, somewhere in his being he must have had the true Elizabethan
spirit that makes a man sell his own land to visit that of other people,
for without preface he informs us that in July 1913 he was engaged by
the Challana and Tongo Rubber Company to go and find out if the Indians
on the Challana river would tap rubber for them. The proposition seemed
a tough one, as he might have said himself. The Indians, knowing that to
allow white people to settle in their territory must be the ruin of
their race, had set strict guards upon the passes of the river.
Twice or three times they had defeated expeditions sent against them,
and were now all well armed, having supplied themselves through the good
offices of a Bolivian officer, one Captain Villarde, who had originally
been sent against them from La Paz. Captain Villarde, and one Sanchez,
had thrown their lot in with the Indians and lived half in the capacity
of traders, half as military advisers, in Paroma, the mysterious Indian
capital, a town that no one single white man had ever seen except
themselves.
Like a good trainer, the first thing was to see about his weight. As he
weighed two hundred and sixty-five pounds (avoirdupois) one might be
pardoned in supposing that as De Quincey said about the Poet Coleridge,
he was a little stout for active virtue. Nothing more false. Had he
weighed twice as much, it would have been the same.
Three weeks of hot baths reduced his weight by thirty pounds, and he was
ready for the road. Every one having advised him against going to
Paroma, telling him as they told Columbus, and have told everybody since
the beginning of the world who wanted to go anywhere, that the journey
was impossible, he thought of what he ought to have hit upon at once,
seeing he was a race-horse trainer. Near to Sorata, a little town close
to Lake Titicaca, there dwelt “un matrimonio” as they would call it in
Bolivia, of the name of Gunther. Next door there lived a lady, one
Señora Villavicencia, sister to the Villardes, who had become, either by
adoption or by grace, a personage amongst the Indians. The writer, most
likely as the old Scottish story goes, either by sophistry or knowledge
of the gospel, got the soft side of her. How many times he must have
slipped the “Tapujo” over the eyes of a wild mule, an operation that,
_experto crede_, has its difficulties, and yet gives one experience with
other animals. This lady, having marked, heard and inwardly digested all
that the writer had to say, was pleased to send a letter, by an Indian
runner, to her brother at Paroma, thus opening an Eden, making this book
possible, and incidentally removing from her sex the slur that Eve cast
on it when she was instrumental in setting up the board in that fair
garden by the Tigris, with “To let” inscribed upon it. Riding a stout
mule, and with his old chestnut hurdle racer to serve as bell mare, and
well supplied with rum and whisky, sterilized milk, two or three horn
lanterns, Liebig’s extract, a nail extractor, and other trifles useful
on the road, though as a liberal minded man he does not dogmatize upon a
traveller’s needs, for in a qualifying clause he says, “anything else
you think you need,” the writer set out towards his Eden in the
wilderness.
Much did he see and much set down, as when he stayed with the headman
of Tiquiripaga, himself an Aymara. This worthy, called Manuel, was
wedlocked to two wives, one of them not bad-looking, who took good care
of the writer during his sojourn in the place.
Little by little, passing along the edge of precipices; swung over
torrents on a rope, and witnessing the wondrous change of fauna, flora,
sky and temperature, that riders from the high Andes see slip beside
them in a day’s ride toward the Tropics, the writer gradually advanced
towards the unknown.
He saw (he tells us so) the Alpine flora slowly give way to palms and
tree-ferns, begonias, white and purple creepers, orchids and parasites
spring from the distorted trunks of Ceibas and of Bongos, and
butterflies, light and dark blue, purple and yellow, flying about in
flocks. Parrots darted high above his head, chattering and shrieking,
and flights of green and red macaws glided like hawks about the
clearings of the woods. All this he saw and must have smelt the dank and
spicy odour rising from the masses of decaying vegetation, seen the
snakes hanging from the trees, and heard the monkeys howling, sights,
sounds and odours that always make me feel as if I was returning home
during such kind of rides. At last he reached the Tipuani and camped
upon its banks, being well received by one Noboa, an ex-slave, and
startled, though he should not have been so, by the apparition of a tall
sun-burned man, stricken with fever, who introduced himself by the name
of Mackenzie, and formed of course a unit of the all conquering legions
that Scotland sends out to subdue the world. Long did he wait in Tipuani
for news from the mysterious Indian capital, for, though he was only a
few days’ journey from it, the frontiers were so strictly guarded that a
wayfaring man, even although endowed with average intelligence, could
just as easily expect to enter heaven without a passport. So in Tipuani
he waited, shooting occasionally a man-eating jaguar, bathing, drinking
new rum, and no doubt mightily refreshed by the conversation of
Mackenzie, the young Spaniard, Perez, who had left the military school
in Madrid on a “paseo” to the Tipuani and had been fever stayed for
years, and the companionship of other waifs and strays, whose talk is
always interesting, as it runs wholly on themselves and things that they
have seen, and in such places as Tipuani these kind of men are sure to
congregate. When the long wished for order to proceed arrived at last,
in three days’ march he reached Paroma, a village set, like some cities
of the Scriptures, high upon a hill. A river ran through it and huts
were scattered here and there, midst clumps of palm trees. The view
extended over miles. Right in the middle stood the Court House, a “long
high shed of poles and palm leaves,” and not far off the church, neat,
swept and garnished, although there was no priest, nor had been for a
long while. Captain Villarde received the writer well, though with
anxiety, for it appeared the Indians thought he was a spy.
Early next morning the tryst was set within the Court House, and on
raised seats sat Captain Villarde, the two Fernandez, Portugol, and “old
man Jones,” who had lived forty years amongst the Indians, and forgotten
English. Three hundred Indians thronged the Court House, and the
situation was so critical that Villarde advised the author to get up and
speak to them. He did so for two stricken hours in the most choice
Castilian that he had at his command. The result was magical, for,
curious to say, the speech convinced his hearers, a thing that possibly
has never happened in a Christian parliament.
All was plain sailing and, his business finished in Paroma, nothing
remained for him but to get upon his mule and strike the homeward trail.
Well, well, he had a glorious journey, and one that in the days when
joints grow stiff and mules impossible to mount will still console him
for all he underwent.
I, having read the book, am glad of his success; but hope when he is
asked about Paroma that he will have forgotten both its longitude and
latitude, and treat it as a dream. Long may it flourish, just as an
unknown orchid flourishes in Colombian everglades, or a fine
undiscovered jewel in a mine, quite uncontaminated by the thing that we
call progress, and pride ourselves upon, as justly as a man might pride
himself upon an ulcer in his leg, a fine harelip, or any other
malformation.
I hope the chief will not forget, when the false dawn streaks all the
sky with red, to rise up from sleep, and taking down a calabash fill it
with chicha, then, winding his poncho round his neck, will make his way
through the wet grass, leaving a trail, with his short inturned feet as
of a plantigrade, in the white dew. Then in the middle of the square,
whilst the God of his forefathers is born again into the world, that he
will pour the chicha on the grass, praying, as the Incas prayed in that
great temple that they raised in Cuzco, to the sun.
Let him pray on; for prayer is to the soul what most divine tobacco is
to the senses, deadening and comforting. For after all it is but giving
up oneself unto oneself, and waiting dumbly for something that may come
from nothing, or again may never come; but as he prays the sun will rise
for all that, just as it rose in Atahualpa’s time, and will continue
rising.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE CHALLANA RUBBER CONCESSION 1
II AREQUIPA AND THE JURA BATHS 6
III LAKE TITICACA, LA PAZ AND SORATA 19
IV THE PEAK OF SORATA AND TIQUIRIPAGA 37
V OVER THE QUILLAPATUNI PASS TO TIPUANI 53
VI FROM TIPUANI TO PAROMA 78
VII THE CABALLO CUNCO TREASURE: FIRST ATTEMPT 142
VIII THE SECOND ATTEMPT 179
IX THE THIRD ATTEMPT 194
X A NOTE ON BOLIVIA AND HOW TO TRAVEL IN THOSE PARTS 221
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GOLD FIRM’S HEADQUARTERS ON THE TIPUANI _Frontis._
FACING PAGE
A LLAMA 30
THE PEAK OF SORATA 38
SOME NATIVE TYPES SEEN IN THE INTERIOR OF BOLIVIA 42
NATIVES IN THE INTERIOR OF BOLIVIA 58
AN INDIAN WOMAN OF THE BOLIVIAN INTERIOR 72
JAGUAR AND PUMA SKINS, BOWS AND ARROWS
AND WOODEN SPEARS BROUGHT BACK BY ME FROM BOLIVIA 90
MY CHILDREN IN INDIAN HEADGEAR, WITH
JAGUAR SKINS AND INDIAN WEAPONS
BROUGHT BACK BY ME FROM BOLIVIA 94
PAROMA VILLAGE, SHOWING THE CHURCH,
THE CHIEFS’ HOUSES AND COCA PLANTATION 124
YUNGAS POTTERY RECENTLY DISCOVERED IN
BOLIVIA, SAID TO BE 6,000 YEARS OLD 138
LLAMAS OUTSIDE THE TOWN OF CAXAMALCA 152
THE CAMP AT SACAMBAJA AND THE CABALLO CUNCO HILL 170
ADVENTURES IN BOLIVIA
CHAPTER I
THE CHALLANA RUBBER CONCESSION
In July, 1903, I was engaged by the Challana and Tongo Rubber Company to
go and find out the conditions on which the Indians of Challana would
tap rubber for them. It was freely given out at the time that no white
man had been to Paroma, their capital, and returned safely since 1845;
and my plan was to go to Paroma and see the chief of the Indians and his
head men, and hear what they had to say.
The Challana Tongo Concession was originally bought from the Bolivian
Government by the father of Colonel Nuñez del Prado, who paid them a sum
of money in cash, and a yearly rental. When he died, he left the
concession to his son, who turned it over to a Company in return for a
sum down, and a rental of £1,000 a year.
The last expedition into the interior by this Company to pick rubber
had turned out a complete failure. Of the three white men in charge, two
were murdered by the Indians; the manager, Filippo Barbari, an Italian,
had had his hands and feet cut off, and was then thrown into the river,
and Rodriguez, the storekeeper, had his head cut off. The third,
Donovan, the book-keeper, got away by hiding in the day-time, and
following up the river at night, till he got out of the Indian
territory; he was the only one who came back to tell the tale. All the
rubber and stores were stolen.
The Government at La Paz then thought it necessary to despatch an
expedition of 200 soldiers under Captain Cusicanque, with orders to
punish the Indians, and also to find out what had happened to Captain
Lorenzo Villarde and his lieutenant, Macedonia Villavicencia, who had
been sent back as an escort with the Cacique of Challana, after his
visit to the authorities at La Paz. Some of the soldiers fell sick with
the puna or siroctre (mountain sickness), and others were attacked in
the forest by terciana (malarial fever), after crossing the Ylliapo
range; however, the rest arrived safely with their captain at the
Challana River, which the natives regard as their boundary. To their
great surprise, they were met there by Indians armed with rifles, and
ready to resist them, under the leadership of Villarde, the very man
they had come to rescue. Cusicanque gave the order to fire, but the
soldiers refused to obey him, saying that they could not fire on their
old captain; most of them actually abandoned Cusicanque, and he was
compelled to return to La Paz with 50 men, without their arms. Plans
were made to send another expedition at the expense of the Challana
Rubber Company, and the Bolivian Government promised to lend 200
soldiers; but it was found that the expense would be too heavy, and it
was finally decided to get some one to go in and find out the facts
personally, and try to discover what kind of a bargain could be made
with the Indians for tapping the rubber.
The Company then made preliminary arrangements to sell the concession to
an American Company for £100,000, to be paid half in cash, half in
shares, but they stipulated that before anything could be done it would
be necessary to send in some reliable man to see what terms could be
made between the Indians of Challana and the Government of Bolivia. They
realized from the first that to secure such a man a good offer would
have to be made, and they promised expenses and £6,000 commission, if
the concession was taken over within two years.
The first person to undertake the job was a Mr. Staedlier, the
Vice-Consul for Belgium in Bolivia. His mother, who was living with him
in La Paz, went to considerable expense to supplement his equipment for
the trip.
Accordingly, he started off on his perilous journey. When he got to the
boundary, he was met by an Indian with a letter of warning for him on a
stick, telling him that his party would not be permitted to cross the
River Challana--that they must return at once, and that they must leave
behind them all their tents, gear, goods, their diving apparatus, and
pipes for gold-washing and their two Kodak cameras, also all their
clothes, coats and other garments, with the exception of a shirt and a
pair of pants each. They were given till midday the next day to move.
That night they were surrounded by many fires, and when Staedlier saw
that he was encompassed by so many armed Indians he thought it only
prudent to return. When he got back to Sorata, he had to send a boy back
to his mother, asking her to send him some clothes for his journey back
to La Paz.
I was told all about this by Mr. Leguia, then Minister of Hacienda, and
afterwards President of Peru, and when he asked me if I would care to
undertake the trip I accepted at once. An agreement was drawn up whereby
I was to be paid all expenses, and a sum of £10,000, if the U.S.A. or
any other government took over the concession within two years of my
return.
I had several reasons for undertaking this journey. Firstly, I was
anxious to visit Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world,
and I wanted very much to get up close to one of the highest mountains
in the world, the Peak of Sorata. Then there was the long and
interesting march through the tropical forest to Paroma, the capital of
Challana, and getting back again, a thing which no white man had done
since 1845. Last, but not quite least, there was the £10,000.