With such labor the Compañia Gomera de Mainique can do something, but it is not much. The regular seasonal tasks of road-building and rubber-picking must be done by imported labor. This is secured chiefly at Abancay, where live groups of plateau Indians that have become accustomed to the warm climate of the Abancay basin. They are employed for eight or ten months at an average rate of fifty cents gold per day, and receive in addition only the simplest articles of food.
At the end of the season the gang leaders are paid a gratificación, or bonus, the size of which depends upon the amount of rubber collected, and this in turn depends upon the size of the gang and the degree of willingness to work. In the books of the company I saw a record of gratificaciónes running as high as $600 in gold for a season’s work.
Some of the laborers become sick and are cared for by the agent until they recover or can be sent back to their homes. Most of them have fever before they return.
The rubber costs the company two soles ($1.00) produced at Yavero. The two weeks’ transportation to Cuzco costs three and a half soles ($1.75) per twenty-five pounds. The exported rubber, known to the trade as Mollendo rubber, in contrast to the finer “Pará” rubber from the lower Amazon, is shipped to Hamburg. The cost for transportation from port to port is $24.00 per English ton (1,016 kilos). There is a Peruvian tax of 8 per cent of the net value in Europe, and a territorial tax of two soles ($1.00) per hundred pounds. All supplies except the few vegetables grown on the spot cost tremendously. Even dynamite, hoes, clothing, rice—to mention only a few necessities—must pay the heavy cost of transportation after imposts, railroad and ocean freight, storage and agents’ percentages are added. The effect of a disturbed market is extreme. When, in 1911, the price of rubber fell to $1.50 a kilo at Hamburg the company ceased exporting. When it dropped still lower in 1912 production also stopped, and it is still doubtful, in view of the growing competition of the East-Indian plantations with their cheap labor, whether operations will ever be resumed. Within three years no less than a dozen large companies in eastern Peru and Bolivia have ceased operations. In one concession on the Madre de Dios the withdrawal of the agents and laborers from the posts turned at last into flight, as the forest Indians, on learning the company’s policy, rapidly ascended the river in force, committing numerous depredations. The great war has also added to the difficulties of production.
Facts like these are vital in the consideration of the future of the Amazon basin and especially its habitability. It was the dream of Humboldt that great cities should arise in the midst of the tropical forests of the Amazon and that the whole lowland plain of that river basin should become the home of happy millions. Humboldt’s vision may have been correct, though a hundred years have brought us but little nearer its realization. Now, as in the past four centuries, man finds his hands too feeble to control the great elemental forces which have shaped history. The most he can hope for in the next hundred years at least is the ability to dodge Nature a little more successfully, and here and there by studies in tropical hygiene and medicine, by the substitution of water-power for human energy, to carry a few of the outposts and prepare the way for a final assault in the war against the hard conditions of climate and relief. We hear of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, 200 miles long, in the heart of a tropical forest and of the commercial revolution it will bring. Do we realize that the forest which overhangs the rails is as big as the whole plain between the Rockies and the Appalachians, and that the proposed line would extend only as far as from St. Louis to Kansas City, or from Galveston to New Orleans?
Even if twenty whites were eager to go where now there is but one reluctant pioneer, we should still have but a halting development on account of the scarcity of labor. When, three hundred years ago, the Isthmus of Panama stood in his way, Gomara wrote to his king: “There are mountains, but there are also hands,” as if men could be conjured up from the tropical jungle. From that day to this the scarcity of labor has been the chief difficulty in the lowland regions of tropical South America. Even when medicine shall have been advanced to the point where residence in the tropics can be made safe, the Amazon basin will lack an adequate supply of workmen. Where Humboldt saw thriving cities, the population is still less than one to the square mile in an area as large as fifteen of our Mississippi Valley states. We hear much about a rich soil and little about intolerable insects; the climate favors a good growth of vegetation, but a man can starve in a tropical forest as easily as in a desert; certain tributaries of the Negro are bordered by rich rubber forests, yet not a single Indian hut may be found along their banks. Will men of the white race dig up the rank vegetation, sleep in grass hammocks, live in the hot and humid air, or will they stay in the cooler regions of the north and south? Will they rear children in the temperate zones, or bury them in the tropics?
What Gorgas did for Panama was done for intelligent people. Can it be duplicated in the case of ignorant and stupid laborers? Shall the white man with wits fight it out with Nature in a tropical forest, or fight it out with his equals under better skies?
The tropics must be won by strong hands of the lowlier classes who are ignorant or careless of hygiene, and not by the khaki-clad robust young men like those who work at Panama. Tropical medicine can do something for these folk, but it cannot do much. And we cannot surround every laborer’s cottage with expensive screens, oiled ditches, and well-kept lawns. There is a practical optimism and a sentimental optimism. The one is based on facts; the other on assumptions. It is pleasant to think that the tropical forest may be conquered. It is nonsense to say that we are now conquering it in any comprehensive and permanent way. That sort of conquest is still a dream, as when Humboldt wrote over a hundred years ago.
CHAPTER IV
THE FOREST INDIANS
THE people of a tropical forest live under conditions not unlike those of the desert. The Sahara contains 2,000,000 persons within its borders, a density of one-half to the square mile. This is almost precisely the density of population of a tract of equivalent size in the lowland forests of South America. Like the oases groups in the desert of aridity are the scattered groups along the river margins of the forest. The desert trails run from spring to spring or along a valley floor where there is seepage or an intermittent stream; the rivers are the highways of the forest, the flowing roads, and away from them one is lost in as true a sense as one may be lost in the desert.