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

by Isaiah Bowman

This camp was number thirteen out of Abancay, and here our topographer was laid up for three days. Heretofore the elevation had had no effect upon him, but the excessively lofty stations of the past few days and the hard climbing had finally prostrated him. We had decided to carry him out by the fourth day if he felt no better, but happily he recovered sufficiently to continue the work. The delay enabled the Governor to overtake us with a fresh outfit. On the morning of our third day in camp he overtook us with a small escort of soldiers accompanied by the fugitive Teniente. He said that he had come to arrest me on the charge of maltreating an official of Peru. A few packages of cigarettes and a handful of raisins and biscuits so stirred his gratitude that we parted the best of friends. Moreover he provided us with four fresh beasts and four new men, and thus equipped we set out for a rendezvous about ten miles away. But the faithless Governor turned off the trail and sought shelter at the huts of a company of mountain shepherds. That night his men slept on the ground in a bitter wind just outside our camp at 17,200 feet. They complained that they had no food. The Governor had promised to join us with llama meat for the peons. We fed them that night and also the next day. But we had by that time passed the crest of the western Cordillera and were outside the province of Antabamba. The next morning not only our four men but also our four beasts were missing. We were stranded and sick just under the pass. To add to our distress the surgeon, Dr. Erving, was obliged to leave us for the return home, taking the best saddle animal and the strongest pack mule. It was impossible to go on with the map. That morning I rode alone up a side valley until I reached a shepherd’s hut, where I could find only a broken-down, shuffling old mule, perfectly useless for our hard work.

Then there happened a piece of good luck that seems almost providential. A young man came down the trail with three pack mules loaded with llama meat. He had come from the Cotahuasi Valley the week before and knew the trail. I persuaded him to let us hire one of his mules. In this way and by leaving the instruments and part of our gear in the care of two Indian youths we managed to get to Cotahuasi for rest and a new outfit.

The young men who took charge of part of our outfit interested me very greatly. I had never seen elsewhere so independent and clear-eyed a pair of mountain Indians. At first they would have nothing to do with us. They refused us permission to store our goods in their hut. To them we were railroad engineers. They said that the railway might come and when it did it would depopulate the country. The railway was a curse. Natives were obliged to work for the company without pay. Their uncle had told them of frightful abuses over at Cuzco and had warned them not to help the railway people in any way. They had moved out here in a remote part of the mountains so that white men could not exploit them.

In the end, however, we got them to understand the nature of our work. Gifts of various sorts won their friendship, and they consented to guard the boxes we had to leave behind. Two weeks later, on his return, the topographer found everything unmolested.

I could not but feel that the spirit of those strong and independent young men was much better for Peru than the cringing, subservient spirit of most of the Indians that are serfs of the whites. The policy of the whites has been to suppress and exploit the natives, to abuse them, and to break their spirit. They say that it keeps down revolution; it keeps the Indian in his place. But certainly in other respects it is bad for the Indian and it is worse for the whites. Their brutality toward the natives is incredible. It is not so much the white himself as the vicious half-breed who is often allied with him as his agent.

I shall never forget the terror of two young girls driving a donkey before them when they came suddenly face to face with our party, and we at the same time hastily scrambled off our beasts to get a photograph of a magnificent view disclosed at the bend of the steep trail. They thought we had dismounted to attack them, and fled screaming in abject fear up the mountain side, abandoning the donkey and the pack of potatoes which must have represented a large part of the season’s product. It is a kind of highway robbery condoned because it is only robbing an Indian. He is considered to be lawful prey. His complaint goes unnoticed. In the past a revolution has offered him sporadic chances to wreak vengeance. More often it adds to his troubles by scattering through the mountain valleys the desperate refugees or lawless bands of marauders who kill the flocks of the mountain shepherds and despoil their women.

There are still considerable numbers of Indians who shun the white man and live in the most remote corners of the mountains. I have now and again come upon the most isolated huts, invisible from the valley trails. They were thatched with grass; the walls were of stone; the rafters though light must have required prodigious toil, for all timber stops at 12,000 feet on the mountain borders. The shy fugitive who perches his hut near the lip of a hanging valley far above the trail may look down himself unseen as an eagle from its nest. When the owner leaves on a journey, or to take his flock to new pastures, he buries his pottery or hides it in almost inaccessible caves. He locks the door or bars it, thankful if the spoiler spares rafters and thatch.

At length we reached Cotahuasi, a town sprawled out on a terrace just above the floor of a deep canyon ([Fig. 29]). Its flower gardens and pastures are watered by a multitude of branching canals lined with low willows. Its bright fields stretch up the lower slopes and alluvial fans of the canyon to the limits of irrigation where the desert begins. The fame of this charming oasis is widespread. The people of Antabamba and Lambrama and even the officials of Abancay spoke of Cotahuasi as practically the end of our journey. Fruits ripen and flowers blossom every month of the year. Where we first reached the canyon floor near Huaynacotas, elevation 11,500 feet (3,500 m.), there seemed to be acres of rose bushes. Only the day before at an elevation of 16,800 feet (5,120 m.) we had broken thick ice out of a mountain spring in order to get water; now we were wading a shallow river, and grateful for the shade along its banks. Thus we came to the town prepared to find the people far above their plateau neighbors in character. Yet, in spite of friendly priests and officials and courteous shopkeepers, there was a spirit strangely out of harmony with the pleasant landscape.

Inquiries showed that even here, where it seemed that only sylvan peace should reign, there had recently been let loose the spirit of barbarism. We shall turn to some of its manifestations and look at the reasons therefor.

In the revolution of 1911 a mob of drunken, riotous citizens gathered to storm the Cotahuasi barracks and the jail. A full-blooded Indian soldier, on duty at the entrance, ordered the rioters to stop and when they paid no heed he shot the leader and scattered the crowd. The captain thereupon ordered the soldier to Arequipa because his life was no longer safe outside the barracks. A few months later he was assigned to Professor Bingham’s Coropuna expedition. Professor Bingham reached the Cotahuasi Valley as I was about to leave it for the coast, and the soldier was turned over to me so that he might leave Cotahuasi at the earliest possible moment, for his enemies were plotting to kill him.