Children of South America

by Katharine A. Hodge

By and by we fall asleep. Suddenly we sit up, rubbing our eyes. What was that? Listening, for we are wide awake now, we hear a cry as of someone in distress. The dawn has broken as suddenly as the darkness fell last night. It always does so in the Tropics, and the crying and wailing gradually die away.

Presently we hear a splash, something small and dark has been thrown into the river, and drifts slowly in our direction. Straining our eyes to see what it is, we find to our horror that it is a dear little brown baby, but quite dead, and following in its wake is a huge crocodile. Alas! Alas! Who is it that has been so inhuman to a little child? We will find out.

Like scouts through the trees we stealthily creep along, hardly daring to breathe, and never once speaking above a whisper. Hark! What is that? It is the tramp of many feet, and away in the distance, across an open track, we see a company of naked Indians in charge of men clad in European clothing.

In our eagerness to follow we almost stumble over a brown form, lying so still. It is an Indian woman, dead from a gun-shot wound, and lying at the foot of the tree close by is a little brown baby. We turn away from the sickening sight, for the wee brownie’s brains have been dashed out by one of the wicked white men in charge of the Indian gang, now quickly disappearing in the distance.

But we must hurry on, or we will lose them. By and by they reach the rubber plantation, the place where the rubber-trees abound. The Brazilian and Peruvian forests are full of rubber, and for six months in the year (the other six months the land is under water) these trees are “bled”—as it is called—by the Indians for their taskmasters. The rubber trees grow in groups of 100 to 150, each tree yielding on an average eleven pounds of the grey, sticky juice.

Here the Indians, under pain of terrible torture and death, were made to extract the rubber. The method of doing so is by making a V-shaped gash in the trunk, under which is hung a little clay cup to catch the juice. To each tree is this done in turn, and when the cups are full they are emptied into a large cauldron hanging on a tripod over a fire of pine-cones.

After going through a certain process, the juice becomes a hard, congealed mass. This raw rubber is carried on the backs of Indians, through the forest and over the mountains, to the city of Iquitos, in Northern Peru; and every year sufficient rubber is exported to provide tyres for 300,000 motor-cars.

In order to produce this rubber, the Indians have been hunted through the forests like wild beasts, and have been made to obtain the rubber under the threats and taunts of ignorant and cruel white men from neighbouring republics. The Indians have been allowed a certain time to get a certain quantity of rubber, and if it has not been forthcoming the Indians—men, women, and girls—have been flogged, put into stocks, starved, tortured, and tormented to death.

Saddest and most cruel of all, the children have not escaped, as we have already seen. The mother has been killed because maybe she was too ill or weary to walk any farther, and her little ones, who would only be in the way, have been either thrown into the river to the alligators, or have had their heads smashed against the trees, or been thrown away into the forest alive to be devoured by wild animals.

It was said to be a favourite pastime of some of these so-called “civilized” (!) agents of the rubber companies to sit round smoking, and for a little diversion to have one or more of these little brown children hung up on a tree, and to shoot at them as a target—for sport!