Children of South America

by Katharine A. Hodge

Think of the agony of suffering of these children, flogged by wicked men, and even burned alive, in order to force them to tell where their parents were hidden. If those rubber-trees could only speak, what awful secrets they would reveal! Every thousand tons of rubber that have come to our own Christian land have cost seven Indian lives! Who knows, my young reader, what tragedy lies behind even the india-rubber ball with which you play so skilfully, and yet lose so carelessly!

For ten long, weary years all this went on, before we heard in England the wail of the little brown children of the Brazilian and Peruvian forests. Have the cries ceased? God only knows, for the sounds are too far away for us to catch them.

Now I want to introduce you to some more Brazilian babies, but of a very different kind. So we will leave this “Paradise of Satan,” and travel in an easterly direction, which will take us through the heart of the continent.

In the Amazon Valley there are many, many tribes of savage Indians, who hide away as we approach, thinking in their great fear that we must be rubber-gatherers. Occasionally we see a large space, where once stood an Indian village, a place of ruins and desolation, and along the tracks are human bones lying bleached and dry, telling a silent, yet eloquent story of what had been once living forms.

We, too, must be careful as we journey along, for the Indians near this rubber region we are leaving behind are in a dangerous mood, and there is much to be feared from their deadly blow-pipes. One little prick from the poisoned arrow, and we would be dead in a very few seconds. So we will proceed cautiously.

As we get farther into the interior, we gradually find the vegetation becoming more dense; we enter the region of “Matto Grosso” (meaning, in English, “Big Woods”), covering a million square miles. You will see it on the map, in the centre of the continent. This forest swarms with monkeys, snakes, parrots, and many kinds of beautiful birds.

Most wonderful of all the plants are the exquisite orchids, which grow luxuriantly on the moss-covered boughs in the gloomiest parts of the dark forest. They are beautiful both in shape and colour—pink, white, and yellow. Some spotted, and others striped with crimson.

It may seem strange that such loveliness should be hidden away from the eyes of all but the God who made them, but it is the same everywhere in this wonderful country. The choicest flowers bloom unseen except by the chance traveller, and the strangest animals and birds hide in the most out-of-the-way places. Some of the trees are fully two hundred feet high, so that birds on the topmost branches are safe from the hunter.

Right in the heart of the forest is a dead silence; no animal life is to be seen, though probably there are swarms of monkeys, birds, and other creatures hidden away in the tree-tops. Female monkeys usually carry their babies on their backs or shoulders, though sometimes they are carried on the breast with the legs and arms clasped round the body. They are very fond of Brazil nuts, several of which grow in one large, round shell, and in order to get at them the monkey beats the shell against the bough until it breaks and scatters the nuts upon the ground beneath.

South America has been spoken of as a Christian country, and yet, here in Brazil, which is large enough to include the whole of the United States, and France as well, we find many tribes of savage Indians, each tribe speaking its own language, but to whom no messenger of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ has ever been sent.