The old and the new Peru

by Marie Robinson Wright

Another product of the Peruvian Montaña, cacao, promises to be an important source of revenue when the industry is better developed. The cacao trees of Cuzco produce a chocolate of exceptional quality and a delicious cocoa, the fruit being especially rich and possessing the properties required in chocolate of the best taste and finest aroma. But none of the Cuzco cacao ever gets into the foreign market, as it is all consumed in Peru. The cacao tree grows spontaneously in many districts of the Montaña, and requires little cultivation to make it yield in abundance. Wherever cacao orchards have been planted, the results have been eminently satisfactory, and every year sees an increase of cacao plantations, chiefly in the region of Chanchamayo, in the province of Jaen, Department of Cajamarca, and in the lower provinces of Amazonas and San Martin. The future of the cacao industry is particularly promising, and no other enterprise offers greater reward for the slight labor invested, as the trees, once planted, continue to bear for a hundred years, requiring no other labor than the gathering of the harvest.

CHICAPLAYA, IN THE HEART OF THE MONTAÑA.

The largest coffee plantations of Peru are cultivated in the region of the Montaña, though the coffees of Pacasmayo, on the coast, and of Choquisongo, in the sierra, are of excellent quality. Carabaya, in the Department of Puno, produces some of the best coffee known, the Carabaya bean being particularly rich in caffeine. Chanchamayo is also an important coffee-producing centre, more than five million trees growing on the haciendas of this district, in the province of Tarma, Department of Junín. In one colony alone are thirty-five coffee plantations, covering seventeen hundred acres, on which two million trees are cultivated. The plantations are being improved every year, and there is, apparently, no reason why Peru should not be among the leading coffee-growing countries of the world. At present, a little more than a thousand tons are exported annually, after the home market is supplied, as Peru imports no coffee of any kind.

All the agricultural products that flourish on the coast, and many of those that are cultivated on the sierra, may be grown with success in the Montaña. Sugar, rice, tobacco, maize, and even wheat, barley, and potatoes, thrive in some of the provinces of Cuzco, Junín, and other interior departments. Tobacco is grown in all the provinces of the Montaña, including those of the Department of Loreto, which lies almost entirely in the Amazon plain. The cultivation of tobacco is carried on in the most primitive fashion, and the plantations do not yield what they are capable of producing under more scientific methods.

CHUNCHO INDIANS OF THE PENEDO VALLEY.

The most important industry of the lower Montaña is rubber-gathering, the forests of the vast Amazon plain abounding in these trees of ever-increasing commercial value. The jebe, or seringa, as it is called in Brazil, known abroad as Pará rubber, grows best in the low lands of Loreto, where the altitude does not exceed three hundred feet, and where abundant rains and an equatorial climate cause the warm humidity necessary to the production of the latex, or milk, of the rubber tree. The jebe grows to an average height of seventy-five feet, the leaves forming a tuft of green at the top; the trunk is of cylindrical shape, often measuring six or seven feet in diameter near the base. The quality of the latex is known by its color, the best being of a violet grey hue while the inferior latex is much lighter. The rubber trees grow sometimes in groups of eight or ten together, and again singly, at intervals of from sixty to two hundred feet apart. A jebe property is usually defined by estradas, or paths, leading past a number of rubber trees, the average estrada embracing an area of a hundred acres, more or less, in which are from a hundred to a hundred and fifty trees, yielding rubber. One man is usually employed on each estrada, and his day’s work consists in tapping the trees in the early morning by notching a place with a hatchet and fixing in it a tichela, or little tin cup, to receive the latex, as it oozes out of the cut. When he has made his round, he returns to collect the latex, emptying the contents of the tichela into a pail, which he carries to his camp to be smoked in preparation for its shipment. The process of “smoking,” or coagulation, consists in twirling the latex around a ladle that is held over the smoke of burning wood, the hard wood known as vegetable marble being best suited to this purpose. The seringuero, as this class of rubber gatherer is called, collects upward of twenty-five pounds of rubber a year from each tree in the forests of Loreto, northern Cuzco and the region of the Madre de Dios.

MASISEA, THE FIRST WIRELESS TELEGRAPH STATION BUILT BETWEEN PUERTO BERMUDEZ AND IQUITOS.