A Fiscal Agency—Former Atrocities—The Apiacar Indians—Plentiful Rubber—Unexploited Regions—Precious Fossils thrown away by Author's Followers—A Terrific Storm—Author's Canoe dashed to Pieces—The Mount S. Benedicto
The State of Matto Grosso had recently established a fiscal agency at the junction of the two rivers in order to collect the tax on the rubber exported from that region. The Fiscal Agent, Mr. José Sotero Barretto, and his assistant, Mr. Julio Vieira Nery, were intelligent and polished gentlemen. Their predecessor was not like them. His barbarity, not only to the Apiacar Indians but also to the Brazilians in his employ, was almost incredible. For no reason whatever he killed men right and left, until one day as he was getting out of his canoe one of his men shot him in the back.
So much has been said of late of atrocities in the Putumayo Region that perhaps one may be allowed to say that the Putumayo Region is not the only place where atrocities have occurred. To any one not acquainted with those regions it is difficult to understand why those atrocities take place at all. Curiously enough, they are due to a large extent to medicine. Those regions are all extremely malarial. The people who are ordered there are afraid of being infected long before they start on their journey. They begin taking preventive quinine and arsenic, which renders them most irritable and ill-tempered; the solitude preys upon them, and they add to the poisoning from medicine the evil effects of excessive drinking. Add again to this that few men can manage to be brave for a long period of time, and that the brain gradually becomes unbalanced, and you have the reason why murders are committed wholesale in a stupid effort chiefly to preserve oneself.
The Apiacar Indians, I was told, were formerly much more numerous in that region than at present. Most of them had been killed off, and their women stolen. When Mr. Barretto arrived at the collectoria he had great trouble in persuading the Indians to come near him; but he has been so extremely kind to them that now the entire tribe—some twenty people—have established themselves at the collectoria itself, where they are given work to do as police, rubber collectors, and agriculturists combined. Mr. Barretto and his assistant were much respected and loved by the natives. Unlike his predecessor, he treated them with the greatest consideration and generosity.
Mr. Barretto furnished me with an interesting table showing the amount of production and export of rubber from that district for the year 1910. From this table it appears that from May 3rd to December 31st 30,356 kil. of the finest quality rubber, 10,153 kil. of sernamby (or scrap rubber), 4,858 kil. of caoutchouc, and 30,655 kil. of sernamby caoutchouc—altogether a total of 76,022 kil.—passed through the collectoria on the Matto Grosso side, which does not include the opposite side of the river, belonging to the Province of Para, where another collectoria has been established. That quantity of rubber had been collected by some eighty people, all told, including the local Indians.
Mundurucu Indians.
Mundurucu Indians.