Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

One expedition passed the midday breakfast with us. Its head was an Englishman, a wiry, frontier hardened man who was on a punitive expedition at the head of his men, rubber pickers, balseros, and headquarters men from his barraca. Somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of acres that represented the rubber domain of which he was chief there was a boundary dispute. His trees had been raided and here, like a feudal baron—or rather like a salaried feudal baron, the fief of a plush-cushioned, rocking chair lord of a board of directors the half of seven seas away—he was at the head of his two callapos and fourteen Winchesters and a scattering of twenty bore, miserable trade-guns with their trade powder in gaudy red tins and a month’s rations for the expedition.

Again, a couple of Englishmen who had drifted down to Rurrenabaque, the last settlement of the frontier from this side of the continent, stopped as they were slowly poling up the river with a couple of new dugouts. Their crew was of Tacana Indians and these dugouts were the first known on the river. In effect these men had independently invented the “whaleback.”

The endless series of rapids made the callapo with its baggage platform a poor freighter. In their mahogany dugouts they had a series of deck hatches that, when the cargo was on board, were bolted down over rubber gaskets—rubber pure as it came from the tree and spread with a bundle of parrot feathers over a sheet of coarse muslin and then smoked in a hot, blue palm smoke. With a couple of these dugouts lashed together they proposed to shoot the little cañons and the Nube, the Incaguarra, the Diablo Pintado and the Ratama. And they did, too, dropping paddles and clinging with tooth and claw to the bare wet decks on which they had omitted to put cleats or rope holds. But it was an eminently successful venture and they slowly chipped away with adze and ax until on their next trip they had a fleet of seven dugouts, each some thirty-five to forty feet in length, and from a single log of caobo, mahogany, or palo-maria, with which they could run the river in either the dry or wet season. With balsas and callapos, as our long delay in Mapiri showed, only under the pressure of emergency was it possible to get up the river.

As the work progressed it became evident that our original outfit was not sufficient to make any adequate preliminary development. It was not possible to get to bedrock without some machinery, a pump, and some means of sawing lumber for sheet piling. The Cholos were perfectly useless at whip-sawing a log. We tried them and the work was too gruelling. They were curiously inefficient in any line outside of their narrow experience. A block and tackle was an unsolved riddle, although they recognized its power. They would take it along cheerfully in the morning and then later send for some one to come up and work it; they could never fathom which rope to pull. Main strength and awkwardness were their reliance and when these failed—carramba, what more could be done?

According to the custom of the montaña they had been contracted for six months before a judge, an intendente, and amid all sorts of mystic ceremonials of red tape without which Bolivian law and custom looks askance. Five weeks had been a dead loss in Mapiri and two weeks more for gathering them and the time of actual transportation and then almost two months of work in camp came perilously near the expiration of their contracts when it was considered necessary to bring in a new gang. These were hungry to get back to their little villages and join in the high class carnivals and drunken dances. Some of the Cholos were worthless, while others would come back again after a rest on the other side of the Andes. Segorrondo, the squat little drunkard, was one of the best men in the gang and he had added a new adornment to his peculiarly unattractive exterior. In a fight with the major domo he had had his head laid open with a machete from over his right eye to almost the back of his neck. It was a mere scalp wound, fortunately for Segorrondo as the machete glanced.

It took six men to hold him while he was stitched up with six stitches. Beauty was to him no object compared with the pain of stitching, and when our surgical job was over, the effect of only six irregular stitches in a twelve inch cut may be imagined. Then we bandaged him securely, gave him an extra drink of cañassa, and once more he grinned cheerfully. Later he and his antagonist appeared for another drink, each affectionately embracing the other. Without the slightest difficulty the wound healed, leaving an interesting scalloped pattern that was a source of much pride to its owner.

But it was obviously necessary to get out to the coast for machinery, supplies and another gang of workers. A proprio, a messenger, was sent overland up the river to notify the Lecco rivermen a few miles above and a week later four balsas and ten Leccos swung around the bend under the bank in the dawn and we started.

The crew of a balsa is two men, one fore and one aft of the platform with poles or a jungle vine for a drag rope. It is not safe for more than one passenger to each balsa for the narrow raft of a wood almost as light as cork is lightly balanced as a canoe. There is no freight worked up river, except rubber, and of that the big bolachas are wedged in under the stilts of the platforms.

Slowly the little fleet of balsas hugged the shore, poling against the current. Then across the river appeared a stretch of narrow beach and the poles were dropped and the balsa swung out across the current to the other side. Here the vine drag rope would come in use with one Lecco pulling and the other poling, and fairly rapid progress could be made. There was a short stop at a tiny Lecco settlement at Incaguarra where the chief Lecco, the cacique, lived. He was a shy, bashful, good natured old man who invited us into his hut where we gave him the customary drink.

On a grass matting was an old woman, a very old woman, his mother, the cacique explained. She was past all intelligence and in the last stages of senile dissolution; huddled up in a corner, she murmured and clucked to herself, meanwhile playing aimlessly with an empty pot and a few bits of grass. The dulled eyes gave no signs of interest or understanding when the old man spoke to her; she suggested more an animal, an aimless, warped little monkey rather than a human being.