Peru in the Guano Age / Being a Short Account of a Recent Visit to the Guano Deposits, with Some Reflections on the Money They Have Produced and the Uses to Which It Has Been Applied

by A. J. Duffield

The Chinese immigration, if such it can be called, is the only considerable immigration that has ever taken place in Peru. It began as a commercial speculation; and there are many orthodox and highly respectable men in Lima who owe their wealth to the traffic in Chinese, in whose magnificent salas a conversation on China is as welcome as the mention of the gallows in a family, one of whose members had been hanged.

Of the 65,000 Chinese taken from their native land, 5,000 died on their way to Peru; they threw themselves overboard or smoked a little too much opium, or were shot, or all these causes were put together. It was once my lot to be seated in a very small room filled for the most part with guano men, where I was compelled to listen to the tale of an Italian who had served as chief mate on a ship freighted with Chinamen. He thought his life was once in danger.

'And what did you under the circumstances?' enquired some one.

'I shot two of them down, sacramento,' answered the villainous-looking wretch; on which there was a burst of laughter that did not seem to me very appropriate.

'And what was done with you?' I enquired in no sympathising tone.

'Senor,' replied the assassin, 'the Captain, Senor Venturini, accommodated me with a passage in his gig to the shore, where I remained to make an extended acquaintance with the Celestial Empire.'

The cold insolence of this criminal suggested to me that I had just as well keep my troublesome tongue as still as possible.

The Chinese question, as is natural that it should, has agitated the public mind in Lima not a little. At one time it assumed such alarming features that it was seriously proposed in Congress to expel the free Chinamen from Peru, or compel them to contract themselves anew[2]. It was known that the free Chinamen stirred up their enslaved brethren to revolt; explained to them—which was perfectly true—that according to Peruvian law they could not be held in bondage, and if they escaped they could not be recaptured. Many attempts at escape were made and many murders were the result.

According to the Peruvian author quoted above, the Chinamen brought to the dung heaps of Peru, or its sugar plantations, are selected from the lowest of their race. 'The planters promote the natural degeneration of their Chinese labourers; they lodge them in filthy sheds without a single care being bestowed upon them, while they are condemned to a ceaseless unremitting toil, without a ray of hope that their condition will be ever bettered. For the enslaved Chinaman the day dawns with labour; labour pursues him through its weary hours, a labour which will bring no good fruit to him, and the shadows of night provide him with nothing but dreams of the tormenting routine which awaits him to-morrow. In his sickness he has no mother to attend him with her care; he has not even the melancholy comfort that he will be decently buried when he dies, much less that his grave will be watered with the sacred tears of those who loved him. Of the meanest Peruvian the authorities know where he lived, when he died, and for what cause, and where he is buried. But the Asiatics are disembarked and scattered among numerous private properties, their existence is forgotten, they do not live, rather they vegetate, and at last die like brutes beneath the scourge of their driver or the burden which was too heavy to bear. We only remember the Chinaman when, weary of being weary, and vexed with vexation, he arms himself with the dagger of desperation, wounds the air with the cry of rebellion, and covers our fields with desolation and blood.'

The great distance, observes the same author, of the private estates from the centre of authority, is one of the securities of their owners that their abuse of their Chinese slaves will neither be corrected or chastised. On the contrary, his influence with the local authorities is oftentimes such as to make them instruments of his designs. Between the master and the slave respect for the law does not exist, and the consequence is, that the one becomes more and more a despot, and the other more and more insolent and vicious.