THE PUTUMAYO

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

IT is something of a terrible irony of fate that in a land whose people for unknown centuries, and up to only four hundred years ago, lived under social laws “so beneficent as had never been known under any ancient kings of Asia, Africa, or Europe, or under any Christian monarch”—laws recorded by a reliable historian and partly capable of verification by the traveller and student to-day—should, in the twentieth century, have been the scene of the ruination and wholesale torture and murder of tribes of its defenceless and industrious inhabitants. Under the Incas of Peru, as recorded by the Inca-Spanish historian Garcilaso de la Vega[1] and other early writers, human blood was never shed purposely; every inhabitant was provided for and had a place in a well-ordered social economic plan; there was no such condition as beggary or destitution; the people were instructed by statute to help each other co-operatively; injustice and corruption were unknown; and there was a belief in a Supreme Director of the Universe. Under the Peruvian republic and the regimen of absentee capitalism to-day, tribes of useful people of this same land have been defrauded, driven into slavery, ravished, tortured, and destroyed. This has been done, not in single instances at the command of some savage potentate, but in tens of thousands under a republican Government, in a Christianised country, at the behest of the agents of a great joint-stock company with headquarters in London: the “crime” of these unfortunates being that they did not always bring in rubber sufficiently fast—work for which they practically received no payment—to satisfy their taskmasters. In order to obtain rubber so that the luxurious-tyred motor-cars of civilisation might multiply in the cities of Christendom, the dismal forests of the Amazon have echoed with the cries of despairing and tortured Indian aborigines. These are not things of the imagination, but a bare statement of actual occurrence, as set forth by the various witnesses in this volume.

The occurrences in the Amazon Valley which, under the name of the Putumayo[2] Rubber Atrocities of Peru, have startled the public mind and aroused widespread horror and indignation—atrocities worse than those of the Congo—cannot be regarded merely as an isolated phenomenon. Such incidents are the extreme manifestation of a condition which expresses itself in different forms all over the world—the condition of acute and selfish commercialism or industrialism whose exponents, in enriching themselves, deny a just proportion of the fruits of the earth and of their toil to the labourers who produce the wealth. The principle can be seen at work in almost any country, in almost every industry; and although its methods elsewhere are lacking in savage lust and barbarity, they still work untold suffering upon mankind. It is easy to condemn offhand the nation of Peru, under whose nominal control the foul spot of the Putumayo exists, and to whose negligence and cupidity the blame for the occurrences is largely to be laid, but the conscience of world-wide commercialism ought also to be pricked.

Leaving, however, that broader aspect of the subject, it is necessary to understand the local conditions which could have brought about such occurrences. The region of the Amazon Valley—a region nearly as large as the whole of Europe without Russia—was early divided between Spain and Portugal. Brazil to-day occupies the eastern and most extensive portion of the valley; and the various Andine republics, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, cover the upper and western portion. The Amazon is the largest river in the world; the entire fluvial system, with perhaps an aggregate of a hundred thousand miles of navigable rivers and streams, gives access to an enormous territory of forests and plains, which neither road nor railway has yet penetrated.

It is to be recollected that the interior of South America is the least known of any of the continents at the present time. Large areas of territory are practically unexplored. The backward state of the Amazon Valley is largely due to the fact that during three hundred years of Portuguese dominion it was closed commercially to the outside world. Slave-raiding by the Portuguese and the Brazilians went on unchecked. The colonists even fought against and destroyed the Jesuit missions which the devout and humane of their priests had established. The whole valley has existed under a dark cloud ever since the time when, in 1540, the first white man, Orellana, Pizarro’s lieutenant, descended the Napo, Marañon, and Amazon from Quito to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1638 Pedro de Texiera performed his great feat of ascending the Amazon from the Atlantic to Quito, and descending it again in 1639, one of the most noteworthy explorations in history. Exaggerations of Indian savagery and dangers of climate have deterred settlers in later times. As for the Putumayo region, it was practically unknown until the last decade of the nineteenth century. The name “Amazon” was probably a result of the experiences of Orellana and his followers, who were attacked by a tribe of Indians, the Nahumedes, on the river of the same name, whose long hair and dress of chemises or shirts caused the explorers to think their attackers were women-warriors, or “amazons.” There is no proof of the existence of any empire of women in South America, although there is a legend bearing on the subject.

The Putumayo River rises near Pasto, in the Andes of Colombia, and traverses a vast region which forms one of the least-known areas of the earth’s surface. This river is nearly a thousand miles long, flowing through territory which is claimed both by Peru and Colombia, and enters the main stream of the Amazon in Brazil. The river crosses the equator in its upper portion. The notorious rubber-bearing region upon the Putumayo and its affluents, the Igaraparaná and the Caraparaná, lies within a square formed by the equator on the north, the 2nd parallel of latitude on the south, and the 72nd and 74th degrees of longitude west of Greenwich. Like most of the Amazon tributaries, the Putumayo and its two affluents are navigable throughout the greater part of their courses, giving access by water up to the base of the Andes; and the rubber traffic is carried out by means of steam-launches and canoes.

The Caraparaná and Igaraparaná rivers, both flowing from the north-west, run parallel for about four hundred miles through dense, continuous forests, discharging into the Putumayo, the first some six hundred miles and the second some four hundred miles above the confluence of that river with the Amazon. The accompanying map renders clear these conditions, and it will be seen that the region is a considerable distance from Iquitos, nearly a thousand miles by water, the small, intermittent river steamers of the rubber traders occupying two weeks in the journey; and a part of the course lies through Brazilian waterway. A much more direct route can be made by effecting a portage from the Putumayo to the Napo River, which enters the Amazon about fifty miles below Iquitos. The Putumayo region, therefore, must be regarded as an extremely outlying part of Peru, with corresponding difficulties of access and governance.

The native people inhabiting the region are mainly the Huitotos, with other tribes of more or less similar character, but with different names. These people, although known as infieles and salvages—that is, “un-faithed” and “savage”—cannot be described as savages in the ordinary sense of the term. They have nothing in common with the bloody savages of Africa and other parts of the world. Their weapons are not adapted for taking life so much as for hunting, and although the tribes of the Amazon Valley have always fought against each other and have reduced their numbers by inter-tribal strife, they are not generally a fortress-building people, and the noiseless blow-pipe takes the place of the blood-shedding weapons of the indigenes of other lands. The Agarunas of the Marañon, however, build war-towers for defence, as do some other tribes.[3] The tunday or manguare, the remarkable instrument for signalling or communicating by sound through the forest, is used by various tribes in the Amazon Valley. Most of the tribes live in great community-houses. The Indians of the Amazon Valley in general are docile and have good qualities; they are naturally free from immorality and disease; they have a strong affection for their women and children and a regard for the aged. They are well worthy of preservation, and might have been a valuable asset to the region. The particular people of the Putumayo region have decreased greatly since the advent of the rubber “industry,” as has been the case all over the Amazon Valley: on the Putumayo they have been reduced, it is calculated, from forty or fifty thousand to less than ten thousand, partly by abuse and massacre, partly by having fled to more remote districts away from their persecutors.