The Putumayo, The Devil's Paradise/Chapter 2

by W.E. Hardenburg

Chapter 2

After the conquest the Inca population of the highlands and coast became Christianized, and at the present time the whole of the vast territory of the Pacific coast and Andine uplands, extending throughout Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia for two thousand miles, is under the regimen of the Romish Church, and every village contains its iglesia and village priest. In very different condition are, on the other hand, the aborigines of the forests, who live neither under civil nor religious authority. But there was probably no fundamental or racial difference between the upland and forestal Indians, and they resemble each other in many respects, with differences due to climate and environment.

Remains of ancient civilisations, in the form of stone ruins and appliances, are found east of the Andes, in the Amazon forest regions, and the Chaco plains, arguing the existence of prehistoric conditions of a superior character. Legends and customs among the forest tribes seem to refer in a dim, vague way to ancient conditions and happenings of other environments; and there can be little doubt that the archaeology and origin of the South American people are far from being fully understood. Further exploration of this little -known region may produce much of interest, and unravel mysteries which the dense forest at present conceals.

One of the principal tributaries of the Amazon is the River Maranon, which flows from the south for a thousand miles between two parallel chains of the Andes, and breaking through a remarkable canon, known as the Pongo de Manseriche, turns suddenly to the east and forms the main Amazon waterway. Above the Pongo, or rapids, the river is navigable only for very small craft, but below it forms the head of steam navigation.

The upper Maranon flows down through a high, difficult territory, with many fertile valleys, and upon its headlands and the adjacent slopes of the mountains are freely scattered the ruins of the Inca and pre-Inca peoples, who inhabited the region in pre-Hispanic times and even contemporaneously with the Spaniards.^[1] From this district, and from the valleys to the west of Cuzco and Titicaca, it was that the Inca influence mainly entered the forest regions of the Peruvian Montana.

It is interesting to note that the "Mongolian" resemblance to the Huitotos Indians of the Putumayo is again observed in Sir Roger Casement's Report. The resemblance between the aboriginals of the Andine and Amazon regions of South America and Asiatic peoples is striking, as indeed it is with the natives in some parts of Mexico.

The present writer has dealt fully with the matter, as bearing upon the possible peopling of America by Tartars in remote times, in a book recently published. The subject is one of great interest^[2] One school of thought denies any imported origin for early American culture, and considers the Aztec and Inca civilizations to have been autochthonous, a natural reaction of man to his environment.; whilst the other points to the great probability, as adduced in archaeological and other matters, of some prehistoric Asiatic influence.

The abuses connected with rubber gathering in the Amazon Valley are not a new or sudden condition. The ill treatment of the Indians in the rubber-bearing regions of Peru were brought to public notice in England and the United States in the book before mentioned, published in 1907, showing that the aborigines were being destroyed, sold into slavery, and murdered by the white rubber-gatherers or merchants several years before the matter culminated in the publication of the Putumayo atrocities. The present writer also wrote to various London periodicals in an endeavour to arouse interest in the subject, but none of the journals specially took the matter up.

The Peruvian Government and the Press of the Republic have long been aware that the Indians of the forest regions were brutally exploited by the rubber merchants and gatherers. Reports and articles have been made and published both by officials and travellers. That Indians were sold at Iquitos and elsewhere as slaves and that there was a constant traffic in Indian women has been known to the authorities ever since rubber-gathering began. In 1906, in Lima, the Director of Public Works, one of the most important of the Government departments, handed the present writer an official publication ^[3] dealing with Eastern Peru, which contained among other matters an account by a Government official of that region of the barbarities committed upon the Indians, a translation of a portion of which is given here. The present writer had undertaken to make a preliminary survey or reconnaisance on behalf of the Government of a route for a railway from the Pacific coast to the Maranon, which would give access to the interior and be of considerable strategic importance.

The following translation of part of a Report in the official publication, dated February, 1905, by a Peruvian engineer in the service of the Government^[4] shows that the abuse of the Indians was a matter of current knowledge:

"Marked changes have been produced among the savage tribes of the Oriental regions of Peru by the industry of collecting the "black gold", as the rubber is termed. Some of them have accepted the "civilization" offered by the rubber merchants, others have been annihilated by them. On the other hand, alcohol, rifle bullets, and smallpox have worked havoc among them in a few years. I take this opportunity of protesting before the civilized world against the abuses and unnecessary destruction of these primitive beings, whom the rapacity of so-called civilised man has placed as mere mercantile products in the Amazon markets, for it is a fact known to every one that the native slaves are quoted there like any other merchandise.

Throughout the forest region under the control of the Governments of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil the natives are exposed to attack without protection of the law by the whites, who hunt and persecute them like animals of the jungle, recognizing as their only value the sum represented by their sale. If protection is not afforded these unhappy beings, the just Judge of the doings of all will condemn the generation which annihilates without cause the indigenous races, the real owners of the soil."

The principal newspaper of Lima, El Comercio, a journal of high standing, has repeatedly drawn attention to the ill-treatment and exploitation of the Indians, not only in the regions of the Putumayo and Iquitos but much farther to the south, as for example, in the district round Port Maldonado. This river port is nearly two thousand miles from the Putumayo region, southward across Peru, reached by launch and canoe upon a different river system, that of the Beni Biver.

The upper courses of this river are known as the Madre de Dios, upon which Port Maldonado is situated, and whose lower course is the enormous Madera Biver, which runs into the Amazon in Brazil in latitude 59°, more than one thousand miles below Iquitos. At Port Maldonado is the confluence of the Tambopata Biver with the Madre de Dios, and farther upstream is the Inambari Biver. The whole of this region is rich in rubber forests, and several companies are engaged in rubber gathering, including British, American, Bolivian, and Peruvian.

The following translation from El Comercio of Lima in an edition of February, 1906, shows that more or less similar methods were employed at points so far apart as Maldonado and the Putumayo:

"In the basin of the Madre de Dios and its affluents, where it is easy to navigate with the help of the "terrible" Chunchos,^[5] who in reality are good and hospitable, exist immense quantities of rubber, rich and abundant rubber forests of easy exploitation. It would appear that the new Commissioner is resolved to put a stop to the barbarous custom of the correrrias f organised by the authorities themselves or by the rubber merchants, who carry on the repugnant business of selling the poor Chunchos. As labor and women are both scarce, and as there is a strong demand for the one and the other, bands of armed men are constantly organised for sudden descents upon groups or communities of the savages, no matter whether they arc friendly or hostile, making them prisoners in the midst of extermination and blood. Urged on by the profit resulting from the sale of boys, robust youths, and young women (frescas mujeres), they, tear children from mothers and wives from husbands without pity, and pass them from hand to hand as slaves. It were well to take the savages from their forests to use their labour and to cultivate their intelligence, but not for business purposes to make them victims of the knife and the lash."

Thus the Press of the country itself shows that these things are done, not only with the connivance of the authorities but are "organized by the authorities themselves". The expected improvements mentioned above took place very slowly, and in some cases not at all. To replace one Commissioner by another is insufficient. All are equally venal or influenced, and King Log does but give place to King Stork. Barbarities committed by the rubber merchants upon the Indians of the Ucayali and Maranon were brought to the knowledge of the Peruvian Government in 1903 and 1906 by Roman Catholic missionaries established there and published by the Minister of Justice.*

After extensive journeys in the interior of Peru, upon returning to the capital, the present writer wrote various articles, which were published in the Press of Lima and Arequipa, drawing attention to the miserable condition of life of the laboring Indian class. Among these evils is abuse by petty authorities and estate owners, who employ the Indians and fail to pay them their agreed wages or pay them in goods of inadequately low value; the extortions of the village priests under the cloak of religious customs and most serious of all, the ravages resulting upon the consumption of aguardiente or fiery sugarcane rum, which is responsible for the ruination and decrease of the working population.

This cane spirit is manufactured largely by the sugar estate owners, and is often a more profitable product than the sugar, whose output is sacrificed thereto but as the large estate owners are often influential personages or politicians and members of the Legislature, the prohibition of the profitable sale of alcohol among the Indians is not likely to be brought about. The leading newspaper of Lima, El Comerclo, in a leading article, of which the following is a partial translation, said:

"It is not rare, unfortunately, in the Republic that the authorities of all kinds raise up abuses as a supreme law against the villages of the interior. For the Indians of the mountains and the uplands there often exists neither the Constitution nor positive rights. It would be useless to seek in the indigenous race beings really free and masters of their acts and persons. It looks as though independence had only been saved for the dwellers of the coast. From the moment that the traveler's gaze ceases to observe the ocean and is directed over the interminable chain of the Andes it ceases also to observe free men, the citizens of an independent republic. To this condition, which is not abnormal because it has always existed, the ignorance of the Indian contributes, but also the abuses of the authorities, who, with rare exceptions, make of them objects of odious spoliation. Such depredations are aggravated when its victims are unfortunate and unhappy beings, towards whom there is every obligation to protect, and not to exploit."

The most remarkable fact about the maltreatment of the South American Indians is that, admitted and specially alluded to in the Peruvian Press, as the foregoing extracts show, abuses are carried out often by the petty authorities themselves. It is painful for a foreigner, one, moreover, who has enjoyed hospitality both from the authorities and from the village priests in the interior of Peru, to record these matters, but it is manifestly a duty.

Moreover, it is a service to the country itself to draw attention to the evil. The extinction of the indigenous labour of the Andine highlands and of the rubber forests will render impossible for a long period the internal development of the country. No foreign or imported race can perform the work of the Peruvian miner or rubber gatherer. Due to the peculiar conditions of climate, the great altitude in the one case and the humidity in the other, no European or Asiatic people could take the place of these people, whose work can only be accomplished by those who have paid Nature the homage of being born upon the soil and inured to its conditions throughout many generations. It might have been supposed that from economic reasons alone the exploiters of native labour would have endeavoured to foster and preserve it, even if it were simply on the principle of feeding and stabling a horse in order to use its powers to the utmost. But this is not the case.

The economic principle of conserving the efficiency of human labour by its employer, remarkable as it may seem, has never been recognized even in the most enlightened communities, or only very recently and in a very few instances. It is not necessary to go to the tropics to seek instances; they are evident no farther afield than among the ill-paid mining, dock, manufacturing, and other labor in Great Britain and the United States. The very abundance of labour has been its own undoing. The supply has seemed exhaustless and the tendency has been to squander it. The question is one of degree rather than of principle in any community or industry and at any time in history. But in the persecuted districts of Latin America native labour is practically being hounded off the face of the earth.

The Putumayo atrocities were first brought to public notice by an American engineer and his companion, Messrs. Hardenburg and Perkins, and the interesting narrative by the former of their travels upon the Putumayo River forms a large part of the subject of this book. Mr. Hardenburg and his companion suffered great hardships and imprisonment at the hands of the Peruvian agents of the rubber company on the Putumayo, and barely escaped with their lives. For these outrages some time afterwards they were awarded the sum of £500 damages by the Peruvian Government, due to the action of the United States.

Mr. Hardenburg came to London from Iquitos in financial straits, but only with considerable difficulty was able to draw public attention to the occurrences on the Putumayo. Messrs. Hardenburg and Perkins's account and indictment of the methods employed by the company's agents on the Putumayo, under the name of "The Devil's Paradise" was a terrible one. It was averred that the peaceful Indians were put to work at rubber gathering without payment, without food, in nakedness; that their women were stolen, ravished, and murdered; that the Indians were flogged until their bones were laid bare when they failed to bring in a sufficient quota of rubber or attempted to escape, were left to die with their wounds festering with maggots, and their bodies were used as food for the agents' dogs; that flogging of men, women, and children was the least of the tortures employed; that the Indians were mutilated in the stocks, cut to pieces with machetes, crucified head downwards, Iheir limbs lopped off, target shooting for diversion was practised upon them, and that they were soused in petroleum and burned alive, both men and women. The details of these matters were almost too repugnant for production in print, and only their outline was published.

Notes

1. See "Peru" by the present writer, London, 1909.
2. The present writer travelled extensively in this region, which he described in an address to the Royal Geographical Society, and in his book, "The Andes and the Amazon", London, 1907 : T. Fisher Unwin (4th edition).
3. Documentos oficiales del Departmento de Loreto, Lima, 1905, of which extracts were published in "The Andes and the Amazon".
4. Jorge von Hassel.
5. Name given to the Indians.