THE RAPIDS AND CANYONS OF THE URUBAMBA
Among the scientifically unexplored regions of Peru there is no other so
alluring to the geographer as the vast forested realm on the eastern
border of the Andes. Thus it happened that within two weeks of our
arrival at Cuzco we followed the northern trail to the great canyon of
the Urubamba (Fig. 8), the gateway to the eastern valleys and the
lowland plains of the Amazon. It is here that the adventurous river,
reënforced by hundreds of mountain-born tributaries, finally cuts its
defiant way through the last of its great topographic barriers. More
than seventy rapids interrupt its course; one of them, at the mouth of
the Sirialo, is at least a half-mile in length, and long before one
reaches its head he hears its roaring from beyond the forest-clad
mountain spurs.
The great bend of the Urubamba in which the line of rapids occurs is one
of the most curious hydrographic features in Peru. The river suddenly
changes its general northward course and striking south of west flows
nearly fifty miles toward the axis of the mountains, where, turning
almost in a complete circle, it makes a final assault upon the eastern
mountain ranges. Fifty miles farther on it breaks through the long
sharp-crested chain of the Front Range of the Andes in a splendid gorge
more than a half-mile deep, the famous _Pongo de Mainique_ (Fig. 9).
Our chief object in descending the line of rapids was to study the
canyon of the Urubamba below Rosalina and to make a topographic sketch
map of it. We also wished to know what secrets might be gathered in this
hitherto unexplored stretch of country, what people dwelt along its
banks, and if the vague tales of deserted towns and fugitive tribes had
any basis in fact.
[Illustration: FIG. 8--Sketch map showing the route of the Yale-Peruvian
Expedition of 1911 down the Urubamba Valley, together with the area of
the main map and the changes in the delineation of the bend of the
Urubamba resulting from the surveys of the Expedition. Based on the
“Mapa que comprende las ultimas exploraciones y estudios verificados
desde 1900 hasta 1906,” 1:1,000,000, Bol. Soc. Geogr. Lima, Vol. 25, No.
3, 1909. For details of the trail from Rosalina to Pongo de Mainique see
“Plano de las Secciones y Afluentes del Rio Urubamba: 1902-1904,” scale
1:150,000 by Luis M. Robledo in Bol. Soc. Geogr. Lima, Vol. 25, No. 4,
1909. Only the lower slopes of the long mountain spurs can be seen from
the river; hence only in a few places could observations be made on the
topography of distant ranges. Paced distances of a half mile at
irregular intervals were used for the estimation of longer distances.
Directions were taken by compass corrected for magnetic deviation as
determined on the seventy-third meridian (See Appendix A). The position
of Rosalina on Robledo’s map was taken as a base.]
We could gather almost no information as to the nature of the river
except from the report of Major Kerbey, an American, who, in 1897,
descended the last twenty miles of the one hundred we proposed to
navigate. He pronounced the journey more hazardous than Major Powell’s
famous descent of the Grand Canyon in 1867--an obvious exaggeration. He
lost his canoe in a treacherous rapid, was deserted by his Indian
guides, and only after a painful march through an all but impassable
jungle was he finally able to escape on an abandoned raft. Less than a
dozen have ventured down since Major Kerbey’s day. A Peruvian mining
engineer descended the river a few years ago, and four Italian traders a
year later floated down in rafts and canoes, losing almost all of their
cargo. For nearly two months they were marooned upon a sand-bar waiting
for the river to subside. At last they succeeded in reaching
Mulanquiato, an Indian settlement and plantation owned by Pereira, near
the entrance to the last canyon. Their attempted passage of the worst
stretch of rapids resulted in the loss of all their rubber cargo, the
work of a year. Among the half dozen others who have made the
journey--Indians and slave traders from down-river rubber posts--there
is no record of a single descent without the loss of at least one canoe.
To reach the head of canoe navigation we made a two weeks’ muleback
journey north of Cuzco through the steep-walled granite Canyon of
Torontoy, and to the sugar and cacao plantations of the middle Urubamba,
or Santa Ana Valley, where we outfitted. At Echarati, thirty miles
farther on, where the heat becomes more intense and the first patches of
real tropical forest begin, we were obliged to exchange our beasts for
ten fresh animals accustomed to forest work and its privations. Three
days later we pitched our tent on the river bank at Rosalina, the last
outpost of the valley settlements. As we dropped down the steep mountain
slope before striking the river flood plain, we passed two half-naked
Machiganga Indians perched on the limbs of a tree beside the trail, our
first sight of members of a tribe whose territory we had now entered.
Later in the day they crossed the river in a dugout, landed on the
sand-bar above us, and gathered brush for the nightly fire, around which
they lie wrapped in a single shirt woven from the fiber of the wild
cotton.
[Illustration: FIG. 9--The upper entrance to the Pongo de Mainique,
where the Urubamba crosses the Front Range of the Andes in a splendid
gateway 4,000 feet deep. The river is broken by an almost continuous
line of rapids.]
[Illustration: FIG. 10--The lower half of a two-thousand-foot cliff,
granite Canyon of Torontoy, Urubamba Valley. The wall is developed
almost entirely along joint planes. It is here that the Urubamba River
crosses the granite axis of the Cordillera Vilcapampa, the easternmost
system of the Andes of southern Peru. Compare also Figs. 144 and 145.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11--A temporary shelter-hut on a sand-bar near the
great bend of the Urubamba (see map, Fig. 8). The Machiganga Indians use
these cane shelters during the fishing season, when the river is low.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12--Thirty-foot canoe in a rapid above Pongo de
Mainique.]
Rosalina is hardly more than a name on the map and a camp site on the
river bank. Some distance back from the left bank of the river is a
sugar plantation, whose owner lives in the cooler mountains, a day’s
journey away; on the right bank is a small clearing planted to sugar
cane and yuca, and on the edge of it is a reed hut sheltering three
inhabitants, the total population of Rosalina. The owner asked our
destination, and to our reply that we should start in a few days for
Pongo de Mainique he offered two serious objections. No one thought of
arranging so difficult a journey in less than a month, for canoe and
Indians were difficult to find, and the river trip was dangerous.
Clearly, to start without the loss of precious time would require
unusual exertion. We immediately despatched an Indian messenger to the
owner of the small hacienda across the river while one of our peons
carried a second note to a priest of great influence among the forest
Indians, Padre Mendoza, then at his other home in the distant mountains.
The answer of Señor Morales was his appearance in person to offer the
hospitality of his home and to assist us in securing canoe and oarsmen.
To our note the Padre, from his hill-top, sent a polite answer and the
offer of his large canoe if we would but guarantee its return. His
temporary illness prevented a visit to which we had looked forward with
great interest.
The morning after our arrival I started out on foot in company with our
_arriero_ in search of the Machigangas, who fish and hunt along the
river bank during the dry season and retire to their hill camps when the
heavy rains begin. We soon left the well-beaten trail and, following a
faint woodland path, came to the river bank about a half day’s journey
below Rosalina. There we found a canoe hidden in an overhanging arch of
vines, and crossing the river met an Indian family who gave us further
directions. Their vague signs were but dimly understood and we soon
found ourselves in the midst of a _carrizo_ (reed) swamp filled with
tall bamboo and cane and crossed by a network of interlacing streams. We
followed a faint path only to find ourselves climbing the adjacent
mountain slopes away from our destination. Once again in the swamp we
had literally to cut our way through the thick cane, wade the numberless
brooks, and follow wild animal trails until, late in the day, famished
and thirsty, we came upon a little clearing on a sand-bar, the hut of La
Sama, who knew the Machigangas and their villages.
After our long day’s work we had fish and yuca, and water to which had
been added a little raw cane sugar. Late at night La Sama returned from
a trip to the Indian villages down river. He brought with him a
half-dozen Machiganga Indians, boys and men, and around the camp fire
that night gave us a dramatic account of his former trip down river. At
one point he leaped to his feet, and with an imaginary pole shifted the
canoe in a swift rapid, turned it aside from imminent wreck, and
shouting at the top of his voice over the roar of the water finally
succeeded in evading what he had made seem certain death in a whirlpool.
We kept a fire going all night long for we slept upon the ground without
a covering, and, strange as it may appear, the cold seemed intense,
though the minimum thermometer registered 59° F. The next morning the
whole party of ten sunned themselves for nearly an hour until the flies
and heat once more drove them to shelter.
Returning to camp next day by a different route was an experience of
great interest, because of the light it threw on hidden trails known
only to the Indian and his friends. Slave raiders in former years
devastated the native villages and forced the Indian to conceal his
special trails of refuge. At one point we traversed a cliff seventy-five
feet above the river, walking on a narrow ledge no wider than a man’s
foot. At another point the dim trail apparently disappeared, but when we
had climbed hand over hand up the face of the cliff, by hanging vines
and tree roots, we came upon it again. Crossing the river in the canoe
we had used the day before, we shortened the return by wading the swift
Chirumbia waist-deep, and by crawling along a cliff face for nearly an
eighth of a mile. At the steepest point the river had so under-cut the
face that there was no trail at all, and we swung fully fifteen feet
from one ledge to another, on a hanging vine high above the river.
After two days’ delay we left Rosalina late in the afternoon of August
7. My party included several Machiganga Indians, La Sama, and Dr. W. G.
Erving, surgeon of the expedition. Mr. P. B. Lanius, Moscoso (the
_arriero_), and two peons were to take the pack train as far as possible
toward the rubber station at Pongo de Mainique where preparations were
to be made for our arrival. At the first rapid we learned the method of
our Indian boatmen. It was to run the heavy boat head on into shallow
water at one side of a rapid and in this way “brake” it down stream.
Heavily loaded with six men, 200 pounds of baggage, a dog, and supplies
of yuca and sugar cane our twenty-five foot dugout canoe was as rigid as
a steamer, and we dropped safely down rapid after rapid until long after
dark, and by the light of a glorious tropical moon we beached our craft
in front of La Sama’s hut at the edge of the cane swamp.
Here for five days we endured a most exasperating delay. La Sama had
promised Indian boatmen and now said none had yet been secured. Each day
Indians were about to arrive, but by nightfall the promise was broken
only to be repeated the following morning. To save our food supply--we
had taken but six days’ provisions--we ate yuca soup and fish and some
parched corn, adding to this only a little from our limited stores. At
last we could wait no longer, even if the map had to be sacrificed to
the work of navigating the canoe. Our determination to leave stirred La
Sama to final action. He secured an assistant named Wilson and embarked
with us, planning to get Indians farther down river or make the journey
himself.
On August 12, at 4.30 P.M., we entered upon the second stage of the
journey. As we shot down the first long rapid and rounded a wooded bend
the view down river opened up and gave us our first clear notion of the
region we had set out to explore. From mountain summits in the clouds
long trailing spurs descend to the river bank. In general the slopes are
smooth-contoured and forest-clad from summit to base; only in a few
places do high cliffs diversify the scenery. The river vista everywhere
includes a rapid and small patches of _playa_ or flood plain on the
inside of the river curves. Although a true canyon hems in the river at
two celebrated passes farther down, the upper part of the river flows
in a somewhat open valley of moderate relief, with here and there a
sentinel-like peak next the river.
A light shower fell at sunset, a typical late-afternoon downpour so
characteristic of the tropics. We landed at a small encampment of
Machigangas, built a fire against the scarred trunk of a big palm, and
made up our beds in the open, covering them with our rubber ponchos. Our
Indian neighbors gave us yuca and corn, but their neighborliness went no
further, for when our boatmen attempted to sleep under their roofs they
drove them out and fastened as securely as possible the shaky door of
their hut.
All our efforts to obtain Indians, both here and elsewhere, proved
fruitless. One excuse after another was overcome; they plainly coveted
the trinkets, knives, machetes, muskets, and ammunition that we offered
them; and they appeared to be friendly enough. Only after repeated
assurances of our friendship could we learn the real reason for their
refusal. Some of them were escaped rubber pickers that had been captured
by white raiders several years before, and for them a return to the
rubber country meant enslavement, heavy floggings, and separation from
their numerous wives. The hardships they had endured, their final
escape, the cruelty of the rubber men, and the difficult passage of the
rapids below were a set of circumstances that nothing in our list of
gifts could overcome. My first request a week before had so sharpened
their memory that one of them related the story of his wrongs, a recital
intensely dramatic to the whole circle of his listeners, including
myself. Though I did not understand the details of his story, his tones
and gesticulations were so effective that they held me as well as his
kinsmen of the woods spellbound for over an hour.
It is appalling to what extent this great region has been depopulated by
the slave raiders and those arch enemies of the savage, smallpox and
malaria. At Rosalina, over sixty Indians died of malaria in one year;
and only twenty years ago seventy of them, the entire population of the
Pongo, were swept away by smallpox. For a week we passed former camps
near small abandoned clearings, once the home of little groups of
Machigangas. Even the summer shelter huts on the sand-bars, where the
Indians formerly gathered from their hill homes to fish, are now almost
entirely abandoned. Though our men carefully reconnoitered each one for
fear of ambush, the precaution was needless. Below the Coribeni the
Urubamba is a great silent valley. It is fitted by Nature to support
numerous villages, but its vast solitudes are unbroken except at night,
when a few families that live in the hills slip down to the river to
gather yuca and cane.
By noon of the second day’s journey we reached the head of the great
rapid at the mouth of the Sirialo. We had already run the long Coribeni
rapid, visited the Indian huts at the junction of the big Coribeni
tributary, exchanged our canoe for a larger and steadier one, and were
now to run one of the ugliest rapids of the upper river. The rapid is
formed by the gravel masses that the Sirialo brings down from the
distant Cordillera Vilcapampa. They trail along for at least a
half-mile, split the river into two main currents and nearly choke the
mouth of the tributary. For almost a mile above this great barrier the
main river is ponded and almost as quiet as a lake.
We let our craft down this rapid by ropes, and in the last difficult
passage were so roughly handled by our almost unmanageable canoe as to
suffer from several bad accidents. All of the party were injured in one
way or another, while I suffered a fracture sprain of the left foot that
made painful work of the rest of the river trip.
At two points below Rosalina the Urubamba is shut in by steep mountain
slopes and vertical cliffs. Canoe navigation below the Sirialo and
Coribeni rapids is no more hazardous than on the rapids of our northern
rivers, except at the two “pongos” or narrow passages. The first occurs
at the sharpest point of the abrupt curve shown on the map; the second
is the celebrated Pongo de Mainique. In these narrow passages in time of
high water there is no landing for long stretches. The bow paddler
stands well forward and tries for depth and current; the stern paddler
keeps the canoe steady in its course. When paddlers are in agreement
even a heavy canoe can be directed into the most favorable channels.
Our canoemen were always in disagreement, however, and as often as not
we shot down rapids at a speed of twenty miles an hour, broadside on,
with an occasional bump on projecting rocks or boulders whose warning
ordinary boatmen would not let go unheeded.
The scenery at the great bend is unusually beautiful. The tropical
forest crowds the river bank, great cliffs rise sheer from the water’s
edge, their faces overhung with a trailing drapery of vines, and in the
longer river vistas one may sometimes see the distant heights of the
Cordillera Vilcapampa. We shot the long succession of rapids in the
first canyon without mishap, and at night pitched our tent on the edge
of the river near the mouth of the Manugali.
From the sharp peak opposite our camp we saw for the first time the
phenomenon of cloud-banners. A light breeze was blowing from the western
mountains and its vapor was condensed into clouds that floated down the
wind and dissolved, while they were constantly forming afresh at the
summit. In the night a thunderstorm arose and swept with a roar through
the vast forest above us. The solid canopy of the tropical forest fairly
resounded with the impact of the heavy raindrops. The next morning all
the brooks from the farther side of the river were in flood and the
river discolored. When we broke camp the last mist wraiths of the storm
were still trailing through the tree-tops and wrapped about the peak
opposite our camp, only parting now and then to give us delightful
glimpses of a forest-clad summit riding high above the clouds.
The alternation of deeps and shallows at this point in the river and the
well-developed canyon meanders are among the most celebrated of their
kind in the world. Though shut in by high cliffs and bordered by
mountains the river exhibits a succession of curves so regular that one
might almost imagine the country a plain from the pattern of the
meanders. The succession of smooth curves for a long distance across
existing mountains points to a time when a lowland plain with moderate
slopes drained by strongly meandering rivers was developed here. Uplift
afforded a chance for renewed down-cutting on the part of all the
streams, and the incision of the meanders. The present meanders are, of
course, not the identical ones that were formed on the lowland plain;
they are rather their descendants. Though they still retain their
strongly curved quality, and in places have almost cut through the
narrow spurs between meander loops, they are not smooth like the
meanders of the Mississippi. Here and there are sharp irregular turns
that mar the symmetry of the larger curves. The alternating bands of
hard and soft rock have had a large part in making the course more
irregular. The meanders have responded to the rock structure. Though
regular in their broader features they are irregular and deformed in
detail.
Deeps and shallows are known in every vigorous river, but it is seldom
that they are so prominently developed as in these great canyons. At one
point in the upper canyon the river has been broadened into a lake two
or three times the average width of the channel and with a scarcely
perceptible current; above and below the “laguna,” as the boatmen call
it, are big rapids with beds so shallow that rocks project in many
places. In the Pongo de Mainique the river is at one place only fifty
feet wide, yet so deep that there is little current. It is on the banks
of the quiet stretches that the red forest deer grazes under leafy
arcades. Here, too, are the boa-constrictor trails several feet wide and
bare like a roadway. At night the great serpents come trailing down to
the river’s edge, where the red deer and the wildcat, or so-called
“tiger,” are their easy prey.
It is in such quiet stretches that one also finds the vast colonies of
water skippers. They dance continuously in the sun with an incessant
motion from right to left and back again. Occasionally one dances about
in circles, then suddenly darts through the entire mass, though without
striking his equally erratic neighbors. An up-and-down motion still
further complicates the effect. It is positively bewildering to look
intently at the whirling multitude and try to follow their complicated
motions. Every slight breath of wind brings a shock to the organization
of the dance. For though they dance only in the sun, their favorite
places are the sunny spots in the shade near the bank, as beneath an
overhanging tree. When the wind shakes the foliage the mottled pattern
of shade and sunlight is confused, the dance slows down, and the dancers
become bewildered. In a storm they seek shelter in the jungle. The hot,
quiet, sunlit days bring out literally millions of these tiny creatures.
One of the longest deeps in the whole Urubamba lies just above the Pongo
at Mulanquiato. We drifted down with a gentle current just after sunset.
Shrill whistles, like those of a steam launch, sounded from either bank,
the strange piercing notes of the lowland cicada, _cicada tibicen_. Long
decorated canoes, better than any we had yet seen, were drawn up in the
quiet coves. Soon we came upon the first settlement. The owner, Señor
Pereira, has gathered about him a group of Machigangas, and by marrying
into the tribe has attained a position of great influence among the
Indians. Upon our arrival a gun was fired to announce to his people that
strangers had come, upon which the Machigangas strolled along in twos
and threes from their huts, helped us ashore with the baggage, and
prepared the evening meal. Here we sat down with five Italians, who had
ventured into the rubber fields with golden ideas as to profits. After
having lost the larger part of their merchandise, chiefly cinchona, in
the rapids the year before, they had established themselves here with
the idea of picking rubber. Without capital, they followed the ways of
the itinerant rubber picker and had gathered “caucho,” the poorer of the
two kinds of rubber. No capital is required; the picker simply cuts down
the likeliest trees, gathers the coagulated sap, and floats it
down-stream to market. After a year of this life they had grown restless
and were venturing on other schemes for the great down-river rubber
country.
[Illustration: FIG. 13--Composition of tropical vegetation in the rain
forest above Pongo de Mainique, elevation 2,500 feet (760 m.). Scores of
species occur within the limits of a single photograph.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14--The mule trail in the rain forest between
Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique. Each pool is from one and a half to two
feet deep. Even in the dry season these holes are full of water, for the
sunlight penetrates the foliage at a few places only.]
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.