That unjust and frightfully cruel floggings are inflicted at times and in some places is of course a result of the lack of official restraint that drunken owners far from the arm of the law sometimes enjoy. When a man obtains a rubber concession from the government he buys a kingdom. Many of the rubber territories are so remote from the cities that officials can with great difficulty be secured to stay at the customs ports. High salaries must be paid, heavy taxes collected, and grafting of the most flagrant kind winked at. Often the concessionaire himself is chief magistrate of his kingdom by law. Under such a system, remote from all civilizing influences, the rubber producer himself oftentimes a lawless border character or a downright criminal, no system of government would be adequate, least of all one like peonage that permits or ignores flagrant wrongs because it is so expensive to enforce justice.
The peonage system continues by reason of that extraordinary difficulty in the development of the tropical lowland of South America—the lack of a labor supply. The population of Amazonia now numbers less than one person to the square mile. The people are distributed in small groups of a dozen to twenty each in scattered villages along the river banks or in concealed clearings reached by trails known only to the Indians. Nearly all of them still live in the same primitive state in which they lived at the time of the Discovery. In the Urubamba region a single cotton shirt is worn by the married men and women, while the girls and boys in many cases go entirely naked except for a loincloth or a necklace of nuts or monkeys’ teeth ([Fig. 23]). A cane hut with a thatch to keep out the heavy rains is their shelter and their food is the yuca, sugar cane, Indian corn, bananas of many kinds, and fish. A patch of yuca once planted will need but the most trifling attention for years. The small spider monkey is their greatest delicacy and to procure it they will often abandon every other project and return at their own sweet and belated will.
Fig. 22—Trading with Machiganga Indians in a reed swamp at Santao Anato, Urubamba Valley, before Rosalina. Just outside the picture on the right is a platform on which corn is stored for protection against rodents and mildew. On the left is the corner of a grass-thatched cane hut.
In the midst of this natural life of the forest-dwelling Indian appears the rubber man, who, to gather rubber, must have rubber “pickers.” If he lives on the edge of the great Andean Cordillera, laborers may be secured from some of the lower valleys, but they must be paid well for even a temporary stay in the hot and unhealthful lowlands. Farther out in the great forest country the plateau Indians will not go and only the scattered tribes remain from which to recruit laborers. For the nature-life of the Indian what has the rubber gatherer to offer? Money? The Indian uses it for ornament only. When I once tried with money to pay an Indian for a week’s services he refused it. In exchange for his severe labor he wanted nothing more than a fish-hook and a ring, the two costing not more than a penny apiece! When his love for ornament has once been gratified the Indian ceases to work. His food and shelter and clothing are of the most primitive kind, but they are the best in the world for him because they are the only kind he has known. So where money and finery fail the lash comes in. The rubber man says that the Indian is lazy and must be made to work; that there is a great deal of work to be done and the Indian is the only laborer who can be found; that if rubber and chocolate are produced the Indian must be made to produce them; and that if he will not produce them for pay he must be enslaved.