“The man Dyall, who had completed nearly six years’ service when I met him at Chorrera on the 24th of September, appeared to be in debt to the company to the sum of 440 soles (say, £44) for goods nominally purchased from its stores. Some of this indebtedness was for indispensable articles of food or clothing, things that the working-man could not do without. These are all sold at prices representing often, I am convinced, 1,000 per cent. over their cost prices or prime value. Much of the men’s indebtedness to the company was also due to the fact that they were married—that is to say, that every so-called civilised employee receives from the agent of the company, on arrival, an Indian woman to be his temporary wife. Sometimes the women are asked; sometimes, I should say from what I observed, their wishes would not be consulted—they certainly would not be consulted in the case of a white man who desired a certain Indian woman. With the Barbados men it was, no doubt, a more or less voluntary contract on each side—that is to say, the agent of the company would ask one of the numerous Indian women kept in stock at each station whether she wished to live with the new arrival. This man Dyall told me, in the presence of the chief agent of the Peruvian Amazon Company at La Chorrera, that he had had nine different Indian women given to him as ‘wives’ at different times and at the various stations at which he had served. When an employee so ‘married’ leaves the station at which he is working to be transferred to some other district, he is sometimes allowed to take his Indian wife with him, but often not. It would depend entirely upon the goodwill or caprice of the agent in charge of that station. As a rule, if a man had a child by his Indian partner he would be allowed to take her and the child to his next post, but even this has been more than once refused. In Dyall’s case he had changed his wives as often as he had changed his stations, and always with the active approval of the white man in charge, since each new wife was the direct gift or loan of this local authority. These wives had to be fed and clothed, and if there were children, then all had to be provided for. To this source much of the prevailing indebtedness of the Barbados men was due. Another fruitful cause of debt was the unrestricted gambling that was openly carried on up to the period at which I visited the district. The employees at all the stations passed their time, when not hunting the Indians, either lying in their hammocks or in gambling. As there is no money in circulation, gambling debts can only be paid by writing an I O U, which the winner passes on to the chief agency at La Chorrera, where it is carried to the debit of the loser in the company’s books.
“The wild forest Indians of the Upper Amazon are very skilful builders with the materials that lie to their hands in their forest surroundings. Their own dwellings are very ably constructed. Several Indian families congregate together, all of them united by close ties of blood; and this assembly of relatives, called a tribe or ‘nation,’ may number anything from 20 to 150 human beings. In many cases such a tribe would live practically in one large dwelling-house. A clearing is made in the forest, and with the very straight trees that abound in the Amazon woods it is easy to obtain suitable timber for house-building. The uprights are as straight as the mast of a ship. The ridge-pole will often be from thirty to forty feet from the ground, and considerable skill is displayed in balancing the rough beams and adjusting the weight of the thatch. This thatch is composed of the dried and twisted fronds of a small swamp palm, which admirably excludes both rain and the rays of the sun. No tropical dwelling I have ever been in is so cool as one roofed with this material. The roofs or thatches of Indian houses extend right down to the ground. They are designed to keep out wet and sunlight, not to bar against intruders. They afford no protection against attack, and are not designed for defence, except against climatic conditions. The white settlers in the forest, from the first, compelled the Indians to build houses for them. The plan of the house would be the work of the white man, but the labour involved and all the materials would be supplied by the neighbouring Indian tribe or tribes he had reduced to work for him. All the houses that I visited outside the chief station of La Chorrera in which the company’s agents lived, and where their goods were stored, were and are so constructed by the surrounding Indians, acting under the direct supervision of the agent and his white or half-caste employees. This labour of the Indians goes unremunerated. Not only do they build the houses and the stores for the white men, but they have to keep them in repair and supply labour for this purpose whenever called upon. The Indian in his native surroundings is satisfied with quite a small clearing in the forest around his own dwelling, but not so the white man who has come to live upon the Indian. These decree that their dwelling-houses shall stand in the midst of a very extensive clearing, and the labour of felling the forest trees, and clearing the ground over an area of often two hundred acres, or even more, falls upon the surrounding Indian population. Here, again, neither pay nor food is supplied. The Indians are brought in from their homes, men and women, and while the men fell the trees and undertake the heavier duties, women are put to clearing the ground and planting a certain area of it. Those of the stations I visited outside La Chorrera—viz., Occidente, Ultimo Retiro, Entre Ríos, Matanzas, Atenas, and Sur, in addition to a large and extremely well-built dwelling-house for the white man and his assistants, as well as suitable dependencies for servants, women, &c., were each surrounded by immense clearings, which represented a considerable labour in the first case, and one which had fallen wholly upon the Indian families in the vicinity. Sometimes these clearances were put to economic use—notably that at Entre Ríos, where quite a large area was well planted with cassava, maize, and sugar-cane; but this was the only station which can be said to maintain itself, and all the work of clearing and of planting here had fallen, not upon the employees of the company but upon the surrounding Indian population. At other stations one found the dwelling-houses standing in the midst of a very extensive clearing, which apparently served no other purpose beyond giving light and air. At Atenas, for instance, the station houses are built on a slope above the River Cahuinari, and an area of fully two hundred acres has been cleared of its original forest trees, which lie in all stages of decay encumbering the ground, but scarcely one acre is under any form of cultivation. At Matanzas a somewhat similar state of neglect existed, and the same might be said in varying degree of the stations of Ultimo Retiro and Occidente. Large areas of fairly fertile cleared ground are lying waste and serve no useful purpose. Food which might easily be raised locally is brought literally from thousands of miles away at great expense, and often in insufficient quantity.
“The regular station hands—that is to say, the employees in receipt of salaries—do no work. Their duties consist in seeing that the surrounding forest Indians work rubber and supply them so far as may be with what they need. For this purpose the principal requisite is a rifle and a sufficiency of cartridges, and of these there are always plenty.”
A further Report was transmitted by Consul Casement to Sir Edward Grey in March, 1911, giving a general description of methods of rubber-collecting and treatment of Indians on the Putumayo by the Peruvian Amazon Company, containing the following information:—
“The region termed ‘the Putumayo,’ consisting principally of the area drained by two tributaries of the Iça or Putumayo River, the Igaraparaná and the Caraparaná, lies far from the main stream of the Amazon, and is rarely visited by any vessels save those belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company. The only other craft that penetrate that district are steamers of the Peruvian Government sent occasionally from Iquitos. Brazilian vessels may ascend the Japurá, known in Peru and Colombia as the Caquetá, until they draw near to the mouth of the Cahuinari, a river which flows into the Japurá, flowing in a north-easterly direction largely parallel with the Igaraparaná, which empties into the Putumayo after a south-easterly course. The region drained by these three waterways, the Caraparaná, the Igaraparaná, and the Cahuinari, represents the area in part of which the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company are carried on. It is impossible to say what the Indian population of this region may be. Generally speaking, the upper and middle courses of these rivers are, or were, the most populous regions. This is accounted for by the greater absence of insect pests, due to the higher nature of the ground, which rises at La Chorrera to a level of about 600 feet above the sea, with neighbouring heights fully 1,000 feet above sea-level. The lower course of the Igaraparaná, as well as of the Putumayo itself, below the junction of the Igaraparaná down to the Amazon, is through a thick forest region of lower elevation, subject largely to annual overflow from the flooded rivers. Mosquitoes and sand flies and the swampy soil doubtless account for the restriction of the Indians to those higher and drier levels which begin after the Igaraparaná has been ascended for about one hundred miles of its course. In this more elevated region there are no mosquitoes and far fewer insect plagues, while permanent habitations and the cultivation of the soil are more easily secured than in the regions liable to annual inundation.
“In a work officially issued by the Peruvian Government at Lima in 1907, entitled ‘En el Putumayo y sus Afluentes,’ by Eugenio Robuchon, a French explorer who was engaged in 1903 by Señor Julio C. Arana in the name of the Government to conduct an exploring mission in the region claimed by the firm of Arana Brothers, the Indian population of that firm’s possessions is given at 50,000 souls. M. Robuchon lost his life near the mouth of the Cahuinari in 1906, and the work in question was edited from his diaries by Señor Carlos Rey de Castro, Peruvian Consul-General for Northern Brazil. The figure of 50,000 Indians is that given by this official as ‘not a chance one.’