“In the prospectus issued at the formation of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in 1908, Señor Arana is represented as claiming that there were then 40,000 Indian ‘labourers’ dwelling within the area of his Putumayo enterprise.
“Whatever the true figures may have been, it is certain that the region laying between the Putumayo and the Japurá (or Caquetá) was for many years known to be prolific in native life, and furnished therefore the most attractive field for slave-raiding in the earlier years of the last century. No civilised settlements would seem to have arisen in this region until towards the close of the nineteenth century, and the Indian tribes continued to dwell in their primitive state, subject only to visits from slave-searching white or half-breed bands until a quite recent period.
“The four principal tribes were the Huitotos (pronounced Witotos), the Boras, the Andokes, and the Ocainas, with certain smaller tribes, of which the Ricigaros and the Muinanes are frequently mentioned. These tribes were all of kindred origin and identical in habits and customs, although differing in language and to some extent in feature, complexion, and stature. The Huitotos are said to have been the most numerous, and may at one time recently have numbered 30,000 individuals, although to-day they amount to nothing like that figure.
“The Huitotos, although the most numerous, were physically the least sturdy of the four chief tribes named. The name ‘Huitotos’ is said to signify ‘Mosquito,’ I know not with what truth, and to have been applied to these people by their stouter neighbours in derision of their attenuated extremities, for neither their arms nor legs are shapely or muscular. The Boras are physically a much finer race than the Huitotos, and, generally speaking, are of a lighter hue. While some of the Huitotos are of a dark bronze or chocolate complexion, I have seen Boras little, if at all, of darker skin than a Japanese or Chinese. The Mongolian resemblance was not alone confined to similarity of colour, but was often strikingly apparent in features as well as in stature, and in a singular approximation of gait to what may be termed ‘the Asiatic walk.’ So, too, with the hair and eyes. Both are singularly Mongolian, or at least Asiatic, in shape, colour, and, the former, in texture, although the Indian hair is somewhat less coarse and more abundant than either Chinese or Japanese.
“A picture of a Sea Dyak of Borneo using his sumpitan, or blow-pipe, might very well stand for an actual presentment of a Boras Indian with his cerbatana. The weapons, too, are identical in structure and use, and in several other respects a striking similarity prevails between two races so widely sundered.
“These Putumayo Indians were not only divided tribe from tribe, but within each tribe more or less constant bickerings and disunion prevailed between the various ‘families’ or naciones into which each great branch was split up. Thus, while Huitotos had a hereditary feud with Boras, or Ocainas, or Andokes, the numerous subdivisions of the Huitotos themselves were continually at war with one another. Robuchon enumerates thirty-three sub-tribes or families among the Huitotos, and he by no means exhausts the list. Each of these, while intermarriage was common and a common sense of origin, kinship, and language prevailed as against all outsiders, would have their internal causes of quarrel that often sharply divided neighbour from neighbour clan.
“Such conflicts led to frequent ‘wars,’ kidnappings and thefts of women being, doubtless, at the bottom of many disputes, while family grievances and accusations of misuse of occult powers, involving charges of witchcraft and sorcery, made up the tale of wrong. As a rule, each family or clan has its great central dwelling-house, capable often of housing two hundred individuals; and around this, in the region recognised by tribal law as belonging to that particular clan, individual members of it, with their families, would have smaller dwellings scattered at different cultivated spots through the neighbouring forest. The wars of those clans one with another were never bloodthirsty, for I believe it is a fact that the Amazon Indian is averse to bloodshed, and is thoughtless rather than cruel. Prisoners taken in these wars may have been, and no doubt were, eaten, or in part eaten, for the Amazon cannibals do not seem to have killed to eat, as is the case with many primitive races, but to have sometimes, possibly frequently, in part eaten those they killed. More than one traveller in tropical South America records his impression that the victims were not terrified at the prospect of being eaten, and in some cases regarded it as an honourable end. Lieutenant Maw mentions the case of a girl on the Brazilian Amazon in 1827 who refused to escape, to become the slave of a Portuguese ‘trader,’ preferring to be eaten by her own kind.
“The weapons of the Putumayo Indians were almost entirely confined to the blow-pipe, with its poisoned darts, and small throwing-spears with poor wooden tips, three or more of which, grasped between the fingers, were thrown at one time. The forest must have been fairly full of game up to quite recently, for the Indians seem to have had a sufficiency of meat diet; and, with their plantations of cassava, maize, and the numerous fruits and edible leaves their forest furnished, they were not so short of food that cannibalism could be accounted for as a necessity. They were also skilled fishermen, and as the forests are everywhere channelled with streams of clear water, there must have been a frequent addition of fish diet to their daily fare.
“No missions or missionaries would seem to have ever penetrated to the regions here in question. On the upper waters of the Putumayo itself religious instruction and Christian worship appear to have been established by Colombian settlers, but these civilising influences had not journeyed sufficiently far downstream to reach the Huitotos or their neighbours. Save for the raids of slavers coming up the Japurá or Putumayo, their contact with white men had been a distant and far-off story that in little affected their home life, save possibly to add an element of demoralisation in the inducements offered for the sale of human beings.
“Lieutenant Maw, an officer of the British Navy who crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic by way of the Amazon early in the last century, in his work speaks of the Putumayo in the vaguest terms, and it is clear that then, in 1827, and later on in 1851, when Lieutenant Herndon, of the United States Navy, went down the Amazon in a canoe, nothing was really known either of the river or of its inhabitants. They were practically an untouched, primitive people when the first Colombian caucheros, coming down the Putumayo from the settled regions on its upper waters, located themselves at different points along the head waters of the Caraparaná and Igaraparaná, and entered into what are termed trade dealings with those unsophisticated tribes.