THE RUBBER FORESTS
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.
[Illustration: 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 Recently however the ancient track has been replaced by a road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.
[Illustration: FIG. 18--Index map for the nine regional diagrams in the
pages following. A represents Fig. 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!
[Illustration: FIG. 19--Moss-draped trees in the rain forest near Abra
Tocate between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique.]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.