The Andes of Southern Peru / Geographical Reconnaissance along the Seventy-Third Meridian

by Isaiah Bowman

Here for five days we endured a most exasperating delay. La Sama had promised Indian boatmen and now said none had yet been secured. Each day Indians were about to arrive, but by nightfall the promise was broken only to be repeated the following morning. To save our food supply—we had taken but six days’ provisions—we ate yuca soup and fish and some parched corn, adding to this only a little from our limited stores. At last we could wait no longer, even if the map had to be sacrificed to the work of navigating the canoe. Our determination to leave stirred La Sama to final action. He secured an assistant named Wilson and embarked with us, planning to get Indians farther down river or make the journey himself.

On August 12, at 4.30 P.M., we entered upon the second stage of the journey. As we shot down the first long rapid and rounded a wooded bend the view down river opened up and gave us our first clear notion of the region we had set out to explore. From mountain summits in the clouds long trailing spurs descend to the river bank. In general the slopes are smooth-contoured and forest-clad from summit to base; only in a few places do high cliffs diversify the scenery. The river vista everywhere includes a rapid and small patches of playa or flood plain on the inside of the river curves. Although a true canyon hems in the river at two celebrated passes farther down, the upper part of the river flows in a somewhat open valley of moderate relief, with here and there a sentinel-like peak next the river.

A light shower fell at sunset, a typical late-afternoon downpour so characteristic of the tropics. We landed at a small encampment of Machigangas, built a fire against the scarred trunk of a big palm, and made up our beds in the open, covering them with our rubber ponchos. Our Indian neighbors gave us yuca and corn, but their neighborliness went no further, for when our boatmen attempted to sleep under their roofs they drove them out and fastened as securely as possible the shaky door of their hut.

All our efforts to obtain Indians, both here and elsewhere, proved fruitless. One excuse after another was overcome; they plainly coveted the trinkets, knives, machetes, muskets, and ammunition that we offered them; and they appeared to be friendly enough. Only after repeated assurances of our friendship could we learn the real reason for their refusal. Some of them were escaped rubber pickers that had been captured by white raiders several years before, and for them a return to the rubber country meant enslavement, heavy floggings, and separation from their numerous wives. The hardships they had endured, their final escape, the cruelty of the rubber men, and the difficult passage of the rapids below were a set of circumstances that nothing in our list of gifts could overcome. My first request a week before had so sharpened their memory that one of them related the story of his wrongs, a recital intensely dramatic to the whole circle of his listeners, including myself. Though I did not understand the details of his story, his tones and gesticulations were so effective that they held me as well as his kinsmen of the woods spellbound for over an hour.

It is appalling to what extent this great region has been depopulated by the slave raiders and those arch enemies of the savage, smallpox and malaria. At Rosalina, over sixty Indians died of malaria in one year; and only twenty years ago seventy of them, the entire population of the Pongo, were swept away by smallpox. For a week we passed former camps near small abandoned clearings, once the home of little groups of Machigangas. Even the summer shelter huts on the sand-bars, where the Indians formerly gathered from their hill homes to fish, are now almost entirely abandoned. Though our men carefully reconnoitered each one for fear of ambush, the precaution was needless. Below the Coribeni the Urubamba is a great silent valley. It is fitted by Nature to support numerous villages, but its vast solitudes are unbroken except at night, when a few families that live in the hills slip down to the river to gather yuca and cane.

By noon of the second day’s journey we reached the head of the great rapid at the mouth of the Sirialo. We had already run the long Coribeni rapid, visited the Indian huts at the junction of the big Coribeni tributary, exchanged our canoe for a larger and steadier one, and were now to run one of the ugliest rapids of the upper river. The rapid is formed by the gravel masses that the Sirialo brings down from the distant Cordillera Vilcapampa. They trail along for at least a half-mile, split the river into two main currents and nearly choke the mouth of the tributary. For almost a mile above this great barrier the main river is ponded and almost as quiet as a lake.

We let our craft down this rapid by ropes, and in the last difficult passage were so roughly handled by our almost unmanageable canoe as to suffer from several bad accidents. All of the party were injured in one way or another, while I suffered a fracture sprain of the left foot that made painful work of the rest of the river trip.

At two points below Rosalina the Urubamba is shut in by steep mountain slopes and vertical cliffs. Canoe navigation below the Sirialo and Coribeni rapids is no more hazardous than on the rapids of our northern rivers, except at the two “pongos” or narrow passages. The first occurs at the sharpest point of the abrupt curve shown on the map; the second is the celebrated Pongo de Mainique. In these narrow passages in time of high water there is no landing for long stretches. The bow paddler stands well forward and tries for depth and current; the stern paddler keeps the canoe steady in its course. When paddlers are in agreement even a heavy canoe can be directed into the most favorable channels. Our canoemen were always in disagreement, however, and as often as not we shot down rapids at a speed of twenty miles an hour, broadside on, with an occasional bump on projecting rocks or boulders whose warning ordinary boatmen would not let go unheeded.

The scenery at the great bend is unusually beautiful. The tropical forest crowds the river bank, great cliffs rise sheer from the water’s edge, their faces overhung with a trailing drapery of vines, and in the longer river vistas one may sometimes see the distant heights of the Cordillera Vilcapampa. We shot the long succession of rapids in the first canyon without mishap, and at night pitched our tent on the edge of the river near the mouth of the Manugali.

From the sharp peak opposite our camp we saw for the first time the phenomenon of cloud-banners. A light breeze was blowing from the western mountains and its vapor was condensed into clouds that floated down the wind and dissolved, while they were constantly forming afresh at the summit. In the night a thunderstorm arose and swept with a roar through the vast forest above us. The solid canopy of the tropical forest fairly resounded with the impact of the heavy raindrops. The next morning all the brooks from the farther side of the river were in flood and the river discolored. When we broke camp the last mist wraiths of the storm were still trailing through the tree-tops and wrapped about the peak opposite our camp, only parting now and then to give us delightful glimpses of a forest-clad summit riding high above the clouds.