The Andes of Southern Peru
by Isaiah Bowman · English · Gutenberg #42860 · 731,545 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Andes of Southern Peru
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Andes of Southern Peru
Author: Isaiah Bowman
Release date: June 2, 2013 [eBook #42860]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42860
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, The University of Florida Digital
Collections and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN PERU ***
Produced by Chuck Greif, The University of Florida Digital
Collections and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's note: The etext attempts to replicate the printed book as
closely as possible. Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have
been corrected. The spellings of names, places and Spanish words used by
the author have not been corrected or modernized by the etext
transcriber. The footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body.
The images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest
paragraph break for ease of reading.
[Illustration]
THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN
PERU
GEOGRAPHICAL RECONNAISSANCE ALONG THE
SEVENTY-THIRD MERIDIAN
BY
ISAIAH BOWMAN
Director of the American Geographical Society
[Illustration: colophon]
PUBLISHED FOR
THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1916
LATIN
AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N.J.
TO
C. G. B.
PREFACE
The geographic work of the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 was
essentially a reconnaissance of the Peruvian Andes along the 73rd
meridian. The route led from the tropical plains of the lower Urubamba
southward over lofty snow-covered passes to the desert coast at Camaná.
The strong climatic and topographic contrasts and the varied human life
which the region contains are of geographic interest chiefly because
they present so many and such clear cases of environmental control
within short distances. Though we speak of “isolated” mountain
communities in the Andes, it is only in a relative sense. The extreme
isolation felt in some of the world’s great deserts is here unknown. It
is therefore all the more remarkable when we come upon differences of
customs and character in Peru to find them strongly developed in spite
of the small distances that separate unlike groups of people.
My division of the Expedition undertook to make a contour map of the
two-hundred-mile stretch of mountain country between Abancay and the
Pacific coast, and a great deal of detailed geographic and physiographic
work had to be sacrificed to insure the completion of the survey. Camp
sites, forage, water, and, above all, strong beasts for the
topographer’s difficult and excessively lofty stations brought daily
problems that were always serious and sometimes critical. I was so
deeply interested in the progress of the topographic map that whenever
it came to a choice of plans the map and not the geography was first
considered. The effect upon my work was to distribute it with little
regard to the demands of the problems, but I cannot regret this in view
of the great value of the maps. Mr. Kai Hendriksen did splendid work in
putting through two hundred miles of plane-tabling in two months under
conditions of extreme difficulty. Many of his triangulation stations
ranged in elevation from 14,000 to nearly 18,000 feet, and the cold and
storms--especially the hailstorms of mid-afternoon--were at times most
severe.
It is also a pleasure to say that Mr. Paul Baxter Lanius, my assistant
on the lower Urubamba journey, rendered an invaluable service in
securing continuous weather records at Yavero and elsewhere, and in
getting food and men to the river party at a critical time. Dr. W. G.
Erving, surgeon of the Expedition, accompanied me on a canoe journey
through the lower gorge of the Urubamba between Rosalina and the mouth
of the Timpia, and again by pack train from Santa Ana to Cotahuasi. For
a time he assisted the topographer. It is due to his prompt surgical
assistance to various members of the party that the field work was
uninterrupted. He was especially useful when two of our river Indians
from Pongo de Mainique were accidentally shot. I have since been
informed by their _patrón_ that they were at work within a few months.
It is difficult to express the gratitude I feel toward Professor Hiram
Bingham, Director of the Expedition, first for the executive care he
displayed in the organization of the expedition’s plans, which left the
various members largely care-free, and second, for generously supplying
the time of various assistants in the preparation of results. I have
enjoyed so many facilities for the completion of the work that at least
a year’s time has been saved thereby. Professor Bingham’s enthusiasm for
pioneer field work was in the highest degree stimulating to every member
of the party. Furthermore, it led to a determination to complete at all
hazards the original plans.
Finally, I wish gratefully to acknowledge the expert assistance of Miss
Gladys M. Wrigley, of the editorial staff of the American Geographical
Society, who prepared the climatic tables, many of the miscellaneous
data related thereto, and all of the curves in Chapter X. Miss Wrigley
also assisted in the revision of Chapters IX and X and in the correction
of the proof. Her eager and in the highest degree faithful assistance in
these tasks bespeaks a true scientific spirit.
ISAIAH BOWMAN.
SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 28. Photograph by H. L. Tucker, Engineer, Yale Peruvian Expedition
of 1911.
Fig. 43. Photograph by H. L. Tucker.
Fig. 44. Photograph by Professor Hiram Bingham.
Figs. 136, 139, 140. Data for hachured sketch maps, chiefly from
topographic sheets by A. H. Bumstead, Topographer to Professor Bingham’s
Peruvian Expeditions of 1912 and 1914.
CONTENTS
PART I
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE REGIONS OF PERU 1
II. THE RAPIDS AND CANYONS OF THE URUBAMBA 8
III. THE RUBBER FORESTS 22
IV. THE FOREST INDIANS 36
V. THE COUNTRY OF THE SHEPHERDS 46
VI. THE BORDER VALLEYS OF THE EASTERN ANDES 68
VII. THE GEOGRAPHIC BASIS OF REVOLUTIONS AND OF HUMAN
CHARACTER IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES 88
VIII. THE COASTAL DESERT 110
IX. CLIMATOLOGY OF THE PERUVIAN ANDES 121
X. METEOROLOGICAL RECORDS FROM THE PERUVIAN ANDES 157
PART II
PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE PERUVIAN ANDES
XI. THE PERUVIAN LANDSCAPE 183
XII. THE WESTERN ANDES: THE MARITIME CORDILLERA OR CORDILLERA
OCCIDENTAL 199
XIII. THE EASTERN ANDES: THE CORDILLERA VILCAPAMPA 204
XIV. THE COASTAL TERRACES 225
XV. PHYSIOGRAPHIC AND GEOLOGIC DEVELOPMENT 233
XVI. GLACIAL FEATURES 274
APPENDIX A. SURVEY METHODS EMPLOYED IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF
THE SEVEN ACCOMPANYING TOPOGRAPHIC SHEETS 315
APPENDIX B. FOSSIL DETERMINATIONS 321
APPENDIX C. KEY TO PLACE NAMES 324
INDEX 327
TOPOGRAPHIC SHEETS
Camaná Quadrangle 114
Aplao " 120
Coropuna " 188
Cotahuasi " 192
La Cumbre " 202
Antabamba " 282
Lambrama "
PART I
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
CHAPTER I
THE REGIONS OF PERU
Let four Peruvians begin this book by telling what manner of country
they live in. Their ideas are provincial and they have a fondness for
exaggerated description: but, for all that, they will reveal much that
is true because they will at least reveal themselves. Their opinions
reflect both the spirit of the toiler on the land and the outlook of the
merchant in the town in relation to geography and national problems.
Their names do not matter; let them stand for the four human regions of
Peru, for they are in many respects typical men.
THE FOREST DWELLER
One of them I met at a rubber station on the lower Urubamba River.[1] He
helped secure my canoe, escorted me hospitably to his hut, set food and
drink before me, and talked of the tropical forest, the rubber business,
the Indians, the rivers, and the trails. In his opinion Peru was a land
of great forest resources. Moreover, the fertile plains along the river
margins might become the sites of rich plantations. The rivers had many
fish and his garden needed only a little cultivation to produce an
abundance of food. Fruit trees grew on every hand. He had recently
married the daughter of an Indian chief.
Formerly he had been a missionary at a rubber station on the Madre de
Dios, where the life was hard and narrow, and he doubted if there were
any real converts. Himself the son of an Englishman and a Chilean woman,
he found, so he said, that a missionary’s life in the rubber forest was
intolerable for more than a few years. Yet he had no fault to find with
the religious system of which he had once formed a part; in fact he had
still a certain curious mixed loyalty to it. Before I left he gave me a
photograph of himself and said with little pride and more sadness that
perhaps I would remember him as a man that had done some good in the
world along with much that might have been better.
We shall understand our interpreter better if we know who his associates
were. He lived with a Frenchman who had spent several years in Africa as
a soldier in the “Foreign Legion.” If you do not know what that means,
you have yet all the pleasure of an interesting discovery. The Frenchman
had reached the station the year before quite destitute and clad only in
a shirt and a pair of trousers. A day’s journey north lived a young
half-breed--son of a drunken father and a Machiganga woman, who cheated
me so badly when I engaged Indian paddlers that I should almost have
preferred that he had robbed me. Yet in a sense he had my life in his
hands and I submitted. A German and a native Peruvian ran a rubber
station on a tributary two days’ journey from the first. It will be
observed that the company was mixed. They were all Peruvians, but of a
sort not found in such relative abundance elsewhere. The defeated and
the outcast, as well as the pioneer, go down eventually to the hot
forested lands where men are forgotten.
While he saw gold in every square mile of his forested region, my
clerical friend saw misery also. The brutal treatment of the Indians by
the whites of the Madre de Dios country he could speak of only as a man
reviving a painful memory. The Indians at the station loved him
devotedly. There was only justice and kindness in all his dealings.
Because he had large interests to look after, he knew all the members of
the tribe, and his word was law in no hackneyed sense. A kindlier man
never lived in the rubber forest. His influence as a high-souled man of
business was vastly greater than as a missionary in this frontier
society. He could daily illustrate by practical example what he had
formerly been able only to preach.
[Illustration: Fig. 1--Tropical vegetation, clearing on the river bank
and rubber station at Pongo de Mainique. The pronounced scarp on the
northeastern border of the Andes is seen in the right background.]
[Illustration: Fig. 2--Pushing a heavy dugout against the current in the
rapids below Pongo de Mainique. The indian boy and his father in the
canoe had been accidentally shot.]
[Illustration: Fig. 3--From the sugar cane, Urubanba Valley, at Colpani.
On the northeastern border of the Cordillera Vilcapampa looking
upstream. In the extreme background and thirteen sixteens of an inch
from the top of the picture is the sharp peak of Salcantay. Only the
lower end of the more open portion of the Canyon of Torontoy is here
shown. There is a field of sugar cane in the foreground and the valley
trail is shown on the opposite side of the river.]
He thought the life of the Peruvian cities debasing. The coastal
valleys were small and dry and the men who lived there were crowded and
poor (sic). The plateau was inhabited by Indians little better than
brutes. Surely I could not think that the fine forest Indian was lower
than the so-called civilized Indian of the plateau. There was plenty of
room in the forest; and there was wealth if you knew how to get at it.
Above all you were far from the annoying officials of the government,
and therefore could do much as you pleased so long as you paid your
duties on rubber and did not wantonly kill too many Indians.
For all his kindly tolerance of men and conditions he yet found fault
with the government. “They” neglected to build roads, to encourage
colonization, and to lower taxes on the forest products, which were
always won at great risk. Nature had done her part well--it was only
government that hindered. Moreover, the forested region was the land of
the future. If Peru was to be a great nation her people would have to
live largely upon the eastern plains. Though others spoke of “going in”
and “coming out” of the rubber country as one might speak of entering
and leaving a dungeon, he always spoke of it as home. Though he now
lived in the wilderness he hoped to see the day when plantations covered
the plains. A greater Peru and the forest were inseparable ideas to him.
THE EASTERN VALLEY PLANTER
My second friend lived in one of the beautiful mountain valleys of the
eastern Andes. We walked through his clean cacao orchards and cane
fields. Like the man in the forest, he believed in the thorough
inefficiency of the government; otherwise why were there no railways for
the cheaper transportation of the valley products, no dams for the
generation of power and the storage of irrigation water, not even roads
for mule carts? Had the government been stable and efficient there would
now be a dense population in the eastern valleys. Revolutions were the
curse of these remote sections of the country. The ne’er-do-wells became
generals. The loafer you dismissed today might demand ten thousand
dollars tomorrow or threaten to destroy your plantation. The government
troops might come to help you, but they were always too late.
For this one paid most burdensome taxes. Lima profited thereby, not the
valley planters. The coast people were the favored of Peru anyhow. They
had railroads, good steamer service, public improvements at government
expense, and comparatively light taxes. If the government were impartial
the eastern valleys also would have railways and a dense population. Who
could tell? Perhaps the capital city might be here. Certainly it was
better to have Lima here than on the coast where the Chileans might at
any time take it again. The blessings of the valleys were both rich and
manifold. Here was neither a cold plateau nor the hot plains, but
fertile valleys with a vernal climate.
We talked of much else, but our conversation had always the pioneer
flavor. And though an old man he saw always the future Peru growing
wonderfully rich and powerful as men came to recognize and use the
resources of the eastern valleys. This too was the optimism of the
pioneer. Once started on that subject he grew eloquent. He was
provincial but he was also intensely patriotic. He never missed an
opportunity to impress upon his guests that a great state would arise
when people and rulers at last recognized the wealth of eastern Peru.
THE HIGHLAND SHEPHERD
The people who live in the lofty highlands and mountains of Peru have
several months of real winter weather despite their tropical latitude.
In the midst of a snowstorm in the Maritime Cordillera I met a solitary
traveler bound for Cotahuasi on the floor of a deep canyon a day’s
journey toward the east. It was noon and we halted our pack trains in
the lee of a huge rock shelter to escape the bitter wind that blew down
from the snow-clad peaks of Solimana. Men who follow the same trails are
fraternal. In a moment we had food from our saddle-bags spread on the
snow under the corner of a _poncho_ and had exchanged the best in each
other’s collection as naturally as friends exchange greetings. By the
time I had told him whence and why in response to his inevitable
questions we had finished the food and had gathered a heap of _tola_
bushes for a fire. The _arriero_ (muleteer) brought water from a spring
in the hollow below us. Though the snow thickened, the wind fell. We
were comfortable, even at 16,000 feet, and called the place “The
Salamanca Club.” Then I questioned him, and this is what he said:
“I live in the deep valley of Cotahuasi, but my lands lie chiefly up
here on the plateau. My family has held title to this _puna_ ever since
the Wars of Liberation, except for a few years after one of our early
revolutions. I travel about a great deal looking after my flocks. Only
Indians live up here. Away off yonder beyond that dark gorge is a group
of their huts, and on the bright days of summer you may see their sheep,
llamas, and alpacas up here, for on the floors of the watered valleys
that girdle these volcanoes there are more tender grasses than grow on
this _despoblado_. I give them corn and barley from my irrigated fields
in the valley; they give me wool and meat. The alpaca wool is most
valuable. It is hard to get, for the alpaca requires short grasses and
plenty of water, and you see there is only coarse tufted ichu grass
about us, and there are no streams. It is all right for llamas, but
alpacas require better forage.
“No one can imagine the poverty and ignorance of these mountain
shepherds. They are filthier than beasts. I have to watch them
constantly or they would sell parts of the flocks, which do not belong
to them, or try to exchange the valuable alpaca wool for coca leaves in
distant towns. They are frequently drunk.”
“But where do they get the drink?” I asked. “And what do you pay them?”
“Oh, the drink is chiefly imported alcohol, and also _chicha_ made from
corn. They insist on having it, and do better when I bring them a little
now and then. They get much more from the dealers in the towns. As for
pay, I do not pay them anything in money except when they bring meat to
the valley. Then I give them a few _reales_ apiece for the sheep and a
little more for the llamas. The flocks all belong to me really, but of
course the poor Indian must have a little money. Besides, I let him have
a part of the yearly increase. It is not much, but he has always lived
this way and I suppose that he is contented after a fashion.”
Then he became eager to tell what wealth the mountains contained in soil
and climate if only the right grasses were introduced by the government.
“Here, before us, are vast _punas_ almost without habitations. If the
officials would bring in hardy Siberian grasses these lava-covered
plateaus might be carpeted with pasture. There would be villages here
and there. The native Indians easily stand the altitude. This whole
Cordillera might have ten times as many people. Why does the government
bother about concessions in the rubber forests and roads to the eastern
valleys when there are these vast tracts only requiring new seeds to
develop into rich pastures? The government could thus greatly increase
its revenues because there is a heavy tax on exported wool.”
Thus he talked about the bleak Cordillera until we forgot the pounding
of our hearts and our frequent gasps for breath on account of the
altitude. His rosy picture of a well-populated highland seemed to bring
us down nearer sea level where normal folks lived. To the Indians the
altitude is nothing. It has an effect, but it is slight; at any rate
they manage to reproduce their kind at elevations that would kill a
white mother. If alcohol were abolished and better grasses introduced,
these lofty pastures might indeed support a much larger population. The
sheep pastures of the world are rapidly disappearing before the march of
the farmer. Here, well above the limit of cultivation, is a permanent
range, one of the great as well as permanent assets of Peru.
THE COASTAL PLANTER
The man from the deep Majes Valley in the coastal desert rode out with
me through cotton fields as rich and clean as those of a Texas
plantation. He was tall, straight-limbed, and clear-eyed--one of the
energetic younger generation, yet with the blood of a proud old family.
We forded the river and rode on through vineyards and fig orchards
loaded with fruit. His manner became deeply earnest as he pictured the
future of Peru, when her people would take advantage of scientific
methods and use labor-saving machinery. He said that the methods now in
use were medieval, and he pointed to a score of concrete illustrations.
Also, here was water running to waste, yet the desert was on either
hand. There should be dams and canals. Every drop of water was needed.
The population of the valley could be easily doubled.
[Illustration: FIG. 4--Large ground moss--so-called _yareta_--used for
fuel. It occurs in the zone of Alpine vegetation and is best developed
in regions where the snowline is highest. The photograph represents a
typical occurrence between Cotahuasi and Salamanca, elevation 16,000
feet (4,880 m.). The snowline is here at 17,500 feet (5,333 m.). In the
foreground is the most widely distributed _tola_ bush, also used for
fuel.]
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Expedition’s camp near Lamgrama, 15,500 feet
(4,720 m.), after a snowstorm The location is midway in the pasture
zone.]
[Illustration: FIG. 6--Irrigated Chili Valley on the outskirts of
Arequipa. The lower slopes of El Misti are in the left background. The
_Alto de los Huesos_ or Plateau of Bones lies on the farther side of the
valley.]
[Illustration: FIG. 7--Crossing the highest pass (Chuquito) in the
Cordillera Vilcapampa, 14,500 feet (4,420 m.). Grazing is here carried
on up to the snowline.]
Capital was lacking but there was also lacking energy among the people.
Slipshod methods brought them a bare living and they were too easily
contented. Their standards of life should be elevated. Education was
still for the few, and it should be universal. A new spirit of progress
was slowly developing--a more general interest in public affairs, a
desire to advance with the more progressive nations of South
America,--and when it had reached its culmination there would be no
happier land than coastal Peru, already the seat of the densest
populations and the most highly cultivated fields.
* * * * *
These four men have portrayed the four great regions of Peru--the
lowland plains, the eastern mountain valleys, the lofty plateaus, and
the valley oases of the coast. This is not all of Peru. The mountain
basins have their own peculiar qualities and the valley heads of the
coastal zone are unlike the lower valleys and the plateau on either
hand. Yet the chief characteristics of the country are set forth with
reasonable fidelity in these individual accounts. Moreover the spirit of
the Peruvians is better shown thereby than their material resources. If
this is not Peru, it is what the Peruvians think is Peru, and to a high
degree a man’s country is what he thinks it is--at least it is little
more to him.
CHAPTER II
THE RAPIDS AND CANYONS OF THE URUBAMBA
Among the scientifically unexplored regions of Peru there is no other so
alluring to the geographer as the vast forested realm on the eastern
border of the Andes. Thus it happened that within two weeks of our
arrival at Cuzco we followed the northern trail to the great canyon of
the Urubamba (Fig. 8), the gateway to the eastern valleys and the
lowland plains of the Amazon. It is here that the adventurous river,
reënforced by hundreds of mountain-born tributaries, finally cuts its
defiant way through the last of its great topographic barriers. More
than seventy rapids interrupt its course; one of them, at the mouth of
the Sirialo, is at least a half-mile in length, and long before one
reaches its head he hears its roaring from beyond the forest-clad
mountain spurs.
The great bend of the Urubamba in which the line of rapids occurs is one
of the most curious hydrographic features in Peru. The river suddenly
changes its general northward course and striking south of west flows
nearly fifty miles toward the axis of the mountains, where, turning
almost in a complete circle, it makes a final assault upon the eastern
mountain ranges. Fifty miles farther on it breaks through the long
sharp-crested chain of the Front Range of the Andes in a splendid gorge
more than a half-mile deep, the famous _Pongo de Mainique_ (Fig. 9).
Our chief object in descending the line of rapids was to study the
canyon of the Urubamba below Rosalina and to make a topographic sketch
map of it. We also wished to know what secrets might be gathered in this
hitherto unexplored stretch of country, what people dwelt along its
banks, and if the vague tales of deserted towns and fugitive tribes had
any basis in fact.
[Illustration: FIG. 8--Sketch map showing the route of the Yale-Peruvian
Expedition of 1911 down the Urubamba Valley, together with the area of
the main map and the changes in the delineation of the bend of the
Urubamba resulting from the surveys of the Expedition. Based on the
“Mapa que comprende las ultimas exploraciones y estudios verificados
desde 1900 hasta 1906,” 1:1,000,000, Bol. Soc. Geogr. Lima, Vol. 25, No.
3, 1909. For details of the trail from Rosalina to Pongo de Mainique see
“Plano de las Secciones y Afluentes del Rio Urubamba: 1902-1904,” scale
1:150,000 by Luis M. Robledo in Bol. Soc. Geogr. Lima, Vol. 25, No. 4,
1909. Only the lower slopes of the long mountain spurs can be seen from
the river; hence only in a few places could observations be made on the
topography of distant ranges. Paced distances of a half mile at
irregular intervals were used for the estimation of longer distances.
Directions were taken by compass corrected for magnetic deviation as
determined on the seventy-third meridian (See Appendix A). The position
of Rosalina on Robledo’s map was taken as a base.]
We could gather almost no information as to the nature of the river
except from the report of Major Kerbey, an American, who, in 1897,
descended the last twenty miles of the one hundred we proposed to
navigate. He pronounced the journey more hazardous than Major Powell’s
famous descent of the Grand Canyon in 1867--an obvious exaggeration. He
lost his canoe in a treacherous rapid, was deserted by his Indian
guides, and only after a painful march through an all but impassable
jungle was he finally able to escape on an abandoned raft. Less than a
dozen have ventured down since Major Kerbey’s day. A Peruvian mining
engineer descended the river a few years ago, and four Italian traders a
year later floated down in rafts and canoes, losing almost all of their
cargo. For nearly two months they were marooned upon a sand-bar waiting
for the river to subside. At last they succeeded in reaching
Mulanquiato, an Indian settlement and plantation owned by Pereira, near
the entrance to the last canyon. Their attempted passage of the worst
stretch of rapids resulted in the loss of all their rubber cargo, the
work of a year. Among the half dozen others who have made the
journey--Indians and slave traders from down-river rubber posts--there
is no record of a single descent without the loss of at least one canoe.
To reach the head of canoe navigation we made a two weeks’ muleback
journey north of Cuzco through the steep-walled granite Canyon of
Torontoy, and to the sugar and cacao plantations of the middle Urubamba,
or Santa Ana Valley, where we outfitted. At Echarati, thirty miles
farther on, where the heat becomes more intense and the first patches of
real tropical forest begin, we were obliged to exchange our beasts for
ten fresh animals accustomed to forest work and its privations. Three
days later we pitched our tent on the river bank at Rosalina, the last
outpost of the valley settlements. As we dropped down the steep mountain
slope before striking the river flood plain, we passed two half-naked
Machiganga Indians perched on the limbs of a tree beside the trail, our
first sight of members of a tribe whose territory we had now entered.
Later in the day they crossed the river in a dugout, landed on the
sand-bar above us, and gathered brush for the nightly fire, around which
they lie wrapped in a single shirt woven from the fiber of the wild
cotton.
[Illustration: FIG. 9--The upper entrance to the Pongo de Mainique,
where the Urubamba crosses the Front Range of the Andes in a splendid
gateway 4,000 feet deep. The river is broken by an almost continuous
line of rapids.]
[Illustration: FIG. 10--The lower half of a two-thousand-foot cliff,
granite Canyon of Torontoy, Urubamba Valley. The wall is developed
almost entirely along joint planes. It is here that the Urubamba River
crosses the granite axis of the Cordillera Vilcapampa, the easternmost
system of the Andes of southern Peru. Compare also Figs. 144 and 145.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11--A temporary shelter-hut on a sand-bar near the
great bend of the Urubamba (see map, Fig. 8). The Machiganga Indians use
these cane shelters during the fishing season, when the river is low.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12--Thirty-foot canoe in a rapid above Pongo de
Mainique.]
Rosalina is hardly more than a name on the map and a camp site on the
river bank. Some distance back from the left bank of the river is a
sugar plantation, whose owner lives in the cooler mountains, a day’s
journey away; on the right bank is a small clearing planted to sugar
cane and yuca, and on the edge of it is a reed hut sheltering three
inhabitants, the total population of Rosalina. The owner asked our
destination, and to our reply that we should start in a few days for
Pongo de Mainique he offered two serious objections. No one thought of
arranging so difficult a journey in less than a month, for canoe and
Indians were difficult to find, and the river trip was dangerous.
Clearly, to start without the loss of precious time would require
unusual exertion. We immediately despatched an Indian messenger to the
owner of the small hacienda across the river while one of our peons
carried a second note to a priest of great influence among the forest
Indians, Padre Mendoza, then at his other home in the distant mountains.
The answer of Señor Morales was his appearance in person to offer the
hospitality of his home and to assist us in securing canoe and oarsmen.
To our note the Padre, from his hill-top, sent a polite answer and the
offer of his large canoe if we would but guarantee its return. His
temporary illness prevented a visit to which we had looked forward with
great interest.
The morning after our arrival I started out on foot in company with our
_arriero_ in search of the Machigangas, who fish and hunt along the
river bank during the dry season and retire to their hill camps when the
heavy rains begin. We soon left the well-beaten trail and, following a
faint woodland path, came to the river bank about a half day’s journey
below Rosalina. There we found a canoe hidden in an overhanging arch of
vines, and crossing the river met an Indian family who gave us further
directions. Their vague signs were but dimly understood and we soon
found ourselves in the midst of a _carrizo_ (reed) swamp filled with
tall bamboo and cane and crossed by a network of interlacing streams. We
followed a faint path only to find ourselves climbing the adjacent
mountain slopes away from our destination. Once again in the swamp we
had literally to cut our way through the thick cane, wade the numberless
brooks, and follow wild animal trails until, late in the day, famished
and thirsty, we came upon a little clearing on a sand-bar, the hut of La
Sama, who knew the Machigangas and their villages.
After our long day’s work we had fish and yuca, and water to which had
been added a little raw cane sugar. Late at night La Sama returned from
a trip to the Indian villages down river. He brought with him a
half-dozen Machiganga Indians, boys and men, and around the camp fire
that night gave us a dramatic account of his former trip down river. At
one point he leaped to his feet, and with an imaginary pole shifted the
canoe in a swift rapid, turned it aside from imminent wreck, and
shouting at the top of his voice over the roar of the water finally
succeeded in evading what he had made seem certain death in a whirlpool.
We kept a fire going all night long for we slept upon the ground without
a covering, and, strange as it may appear, the cold seemed intense,
though the minimum thermometer registered 59° F. The next morning the
whole party of ten sunned themselves for nearly an hour until the flies
and heat once more drove them to shelter.
Returning to camp next day by a different route was an experience of
great interest, because of the light it threw on hidden trails known
only to the Indian and his friends. Slave raiders in former years
devastated the native villages and forced the Indian to conceal his
special trails of refuge. At one point we traversed a cliff seventy-five
feet above the river, walking on a narrow ledge no wider than a man’s
foot. At another point the dim trail apparently disappeared, but when we
had climbed hand over hand up the face of the cliff, by hanging vines
and tree roots, we came upon it again. Crossing the river in the canoe
we had used the day before, we shortened the return by wading the swift
Chirumbia waist-deep, and by crawling along a cliff face for nearly an
eighth of a mile. At the steepest point the river had so under-cut the
face that there was no trail at all, and we swung fully fifteen feet
from one ledge to another, on a hanging vine high above the river.
After two days’ delay we left Rosalina late in the afternoon of August
7. My party included several Machiganga Indians, La Sama, and Dr. W. G.
Erving, surgeon of the expedition. Mr. P. B. Lanius, Moscoso (the
_arriero_), and two peons were to take the pack train as far as possible
toward the rubber station at Pongo de Mainique where preparations were
to be made for our arrival. At the first rapid we learned the method of
our Indian boatmen. It was to run the heavy boat head on into shallow
water at one side of a rapid and in this way “brake” it down stream.
Heavily loaded with six men, 200 pounds of baggage, a dog, and supplies
of yuca and sugar cane our twenty-five foot dugout canoe was as rigid as
a steamer, and we dropped safely down rapid after rapid until long after
dark, and by the light of a glorious tropical moon we beached our craft
in front of La Sama’s hut at the edge of the cane swamp.
Here for five days we endured a most exasperating delay. La Sama had
promised Indian boatmen and now said none had yet been secured. Each day
Indians were about to arrive, but by nightfall the promise was broken
only to be repeated the following morning. To save our food supply--we
had taken but six days’ provisions--we ate yuca soup and fish and some
parched corn, adding to this only a little from our limited stores. At
last we could wait no longer, even if the map had to be sacrificed to
the work of navigating the canoe. Our determination to leave stirred La
Sama to final action. He secured an assistant named Wilson and embarked
with us, planning to get Indians farther down river or make the journey
himself.
On August 12, at 4.30 P.M., we entered upon the second stage of the
journey. As we shot down the first long rapid and rounded a wooded bend
the view down river opened up and gave us our first clear notion of the
region we had set out to explore. From mountain summits in the clouds
long trailing spurs descend to the river bank. In general the slopes are
smooth-contoured and forest-clad from summit to base; only in a few
places do high cliffs diversify the scenery. The river vista everywhere
includes a rapid and small patches of _playa_ or flood plain on the
inside of the river curves. Although a true canyon hems in the river at
two celebrated passes farther down, the upper part of the river flows
in a somewhat open valley of moderate relief, with here and there a
sentinel-like peak next the river.
A light shower fell at sunset, a typical late-afternoon downpour so
characteristic of the tropics. We landed at a small encampment of
Machigangas, built a fire against the scarred trunk of a big palm, and
made up our beds in the open, covering them with our rubber ponchos. Our
Indian neighbors gave us yuca and corn, but their neighborliness went no
further, for when our boatmen attempted to sleep under their roofs they
drove them out and fastened as securely as possible the shaky door of
their hut.
All our efforts to obtain Indians, both here and elsewhere, proved
fruitless. One excuse after another was overcome; they plainly coveted
the trinkets, knives, machetes, muskets, and ammunition that we offered
them; and they appeared to be friendly enough. Only after repeated
assurances of our friendship could we learn the real reason for their
refusal. Some of them were escaped rubber pickers that had been captured
by white raiders several years before, and for them a return to the
rubber country meant enslavement, heavy floggings, and separation from
their numerous wives. The hardships they had endured, their final
escape, the cruelty of the rubber men, and the difficult passage of the
rapids below were a set of circumstances that nothing in our list of
gifts could overcome. My first request a week before had so sharpened
their memory that one of them related the story of his wrongs, a recital
intensely dramatic to the whole circle of his listeners, including
myself. Though I did not understand the details of his story, his tones
and gesticulations were so effective that they held me as well as his
kinsmen of the woods spellbound for over an hour.
It is appalling to what extent this great region has been depopulated by
the slave raiders and those arch enemies of the savage, smallpox and
malaria. At Rosalina, over sixty Indians died of malaria in one year;
and only twenty years ago seventy of them, the entire population of the
Pongo, were swept away by smallpox. For a week we passed former camps
near small abandoned clearings, once the home of little groups of
Machigangas. Even the summer shelter huts on the sand-bars, where the
Indians formerly gathered from their hill homes to fish, are now almost
entirely abandoned. Though our men carefully reconnoitered each one for
fear of ambush, the precaution was needless. Below the Coribeni the
Urubamba is a great silent valley. It is fitted by Nature to support
numerous villages, but its vast solitudes are unbroken except at night,
when a few families that live in the hills slip down to the river to
gather yuca and cane.
By noon of the second day’s journey we reached the head of the great
rapid at the mouth of the Sirialo. We had already run the long Coribeni
rapid, visited the Indian huts at the junction of the big Coribeni
tributary, exchanged our canoe for a larger and steadier one, and were
now to run one of the ugliest rapids of the upper river. The rapid is
formed by the gravel masses that the Sirialo brings down from the
distant Cordillera Vilcapampa. They trail along for at least a
half-mile, split the river into two main currents and nearly choke the
mouth of the tributary. For almost a mile above this great barrier the
main river is ponded and almost as quiet as a lake.
We let our craft down this rapid by ropes, and in the last difficult
passage were so roughly handled by our almost unmanageable canoe as to
suffer from several bad accidents. All of the party were injured in one
way or another, while I suffered a fracture sprain of the left foot that
made painful work of the rest of the river trip.
At two points below Rosalina the Urubamba is shut in by steep mountain
slopes and vertical cliffs. Canoe navigation below the Sirialo and
Coribeni rapids is no more hazardous than on the rapids of our northern
rivers, except at the two “pongos” or narrow passages. The first occurs
at the sharpest point of the abrupt curve shown on the map; the second
is the celebrated Pongo de Mainique. In these narrow passages in time of
high water there is no landing for long stretches. The bow paddler
stands well forward and tries for depth and current; the stern paddler
keeps the canoe steady in its course. When paddlers are in agreement
even a heavy canoe can be directed into the most favorable channels.
Our canoemen were always in disagreement, however, and as often as not
we shot down rapids at a speed of twenty miles an hour, broadside on,
with an occasional bump on projecting rocks or boulders whose warning
ordinary boatmen would not let go unheeded.
The scenery at the great bend is unusually beautiful. The tropical
forest crowds the river bank, great cliffs rise sheer from the water’s
edge, their faces overhung with a trailing drapery of vines, and in the
longer river vistas one may sometimes see the distant heights of the
Cordillera Vilcapampa. We shot the long succession of rapids in the
first canyon without mishap, and at night pitched our tent on the edge
of the river near the mouth of the Manugali.
From the sharp peak opposite our camp we saw for the first time the
phenomenon of cloud-banners. A light breeze was blowing from the western
mountains and its vapor was condensed into clouds that floated down the
wind and dissolved, while they were constantly forming afresh at the
summit. In the night a thunderstorm arose and swept with a roar through
the vast forest above us. The solid canopy of the tropical forest fairly
resounded with the impact of the heavy raindrops. The next morning all
the brooks from the farther side of the river were in flood and the
river discolored. When we broke camp the last mist wraiths of the storm
were still trailing through the tree-tops and wrapped about the peak
opposite our camp, only parting now and then to give us delightful
glimpses of a forest-clad summit riding high above the clouds.
The alternation of deeps and shallows at this point in the river and the
well-developed canyon meanders are among the most celebrated of their
kind in the world. Though shut in by high cliffs and bordered by
mountains the river exhibits a succession of curves so regular that one
might almost imagine the country a plain from the pattern of the
meanders. The succession of smooth curves for a long distance across
existing mountains points to a time when a lowland plain with moderate
slopes drained by strongly meandering rivers was developed here. Uplift
afforded a chance for renewed down-cutting on the part of all the
streams, and the incision of the meanders. The present meanders are, of
course, not the identical ones that were formed on the lowland plain;
they are rather their descendants. Though they still retain their
strongly curved quality, and in places have almost cut through the
narrow spurs between meander loops, they are not smooth like the
meanders of the Mississippi. Here and there are sharp irregular turns
that mar the symmetry of the larger curves. The alternating bands of
hard and soft rock have had a large part in making the course more
irregular. The meanders have responded to the rock structure. Though
regular in their broader features they are irregular and deformed in
detail.
Deeps and shallows are known in every vigorous river, but it is seldom
that they are so prominently developed as in these great canyons. At one
point in the upper canyon the river has been broadened into a lake two
or three times the average width of the channel and with a scarcely
perceptible current; above and below the “laguna,” as the boatmen call
it, are big rapids with beds so shallow that rocks project in many
places. In the Pongo de Mainique the river is at one place only fifty
feet wide, yet so deep that there is little current. It is on the banks
of the quiet stretches that the red forest deer grazes under leafy
arcades. Here, too, are the boa-constrictor trails several feet wide and
bare like a roadway. At night the great serpents come trailing down to
the river’s edge, where the red deer and the wildcat, or so-called
“tiger,” are their easy prey.
It is in such quiet stretches that one also finds the vast colonies of
water skippers. They dance continuously in the sun with an incessant
motion from right to left and back again. Occasionally one dances about
in circles, then suddenly darts through the entire mass, though without
striking his equally erratic neighbors. An up-and-down motion still
further complicates the effect. It is positively bewildering to look
intently at the whirling multitude and try to follow their complicated
motions. Every slight breath of wind brings a shock to the organization
of the dance. For though they dance only in the sun, their favorite
places are the sunny spots in the shade near the bank, as beneath an
overhanging tree. When the wind shakes the foliage the mottled pattern
of shade and sunlight is confused, the dance slows down, and the dancers
become bewildered. In a storm they seek shelter in the jungle. The hot,
quiet, sunlit days bring out literally millions of these tiny creatures.
One of the longest deeps in the whole Urubamba lies just above the Pongo
at Mulanquiato. We drifted down with a gentle current just after sunset.
Shrill whistles, like those of a steam launch, sounded from either bank,
the strange piercing notes of the lowland cicada, _cicada tibicen_. Long
decorated canoes, better than any we had yet seen, were drawn up in the
quiet coves. Soon we came upon the first settlement. The owner, Señor
Pereira, has gathered about him a group of Machigangas, and by marrying
into the tribe has attained a position of great influence among the
Indians. Upon our arrival a gun was fired to announce to his people that
strangers had come, upon which the Machigangas strolled along in twos
and threes from their huts, helped us ashore with the baggage, and
prepared the evening meal. Here we sat down with five Italians, who had
ventured into the rubber fields with golden ideas as to profits. After
having lost the larger part of their merchandise, chiefly cinchona, in
the rapids the year before, they had established themselves here with
the idea of picking rubber. Without capital, they followed the ways of
the itinerant rubber picker and had gathered “caucho,” the poorer of the
two kinds of rubber. No capital is required; the picker simply cuts down
the likeliest trees, gathers the coagulated sap, and floats it
down-stream to market. After a year of this life they had grown restless
and were venturing on other schemes for the great down-river rubber
country.
[Illustration: FIG. 13--Composition of tropical vegetation in the rain
forest above Pongo de Mainique, elevation 2,500 feet (760 m.). Scores of
species occur within the limits of a single photograph.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14--The mule trail in the rain forest between
Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique. Each pool is from one and a half to two
feet deep. Even in the dry season these holes are full of water, for the
sunlight penetrates the foliage at a few places only.]
[Illustration: FIG. 15--Topography and vegetation from the Tocate pass,
7,100 feet (2,164 m.), between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique. See Fig.
53a. This is in the zone of maximum rainfall. The cumulo-nimbus clouds
are typical and change to nimbus in the early afternoon.]
[Illustration: FIG. 16--The Expedition’s thirty-foot canoe at the mouth
of the Timpia below Pongo de Mainique.]
A few weeks later, on returning through the forest, we met their
carriers with a few small bundles, the only part of their cargo they had
saved from the river. Without a canoe or the means to buy one they had
built rafts, which were quickly torn to pieces in the rapids. We, too,
should have said “_pobres Italianos_” if their venture had not been
plainly foolish. The rubber territory is difficult enough for men
with capital; for men without capital it is impossible. Such men either
become affiliated with organized companies or get out of the region when
they can. A few, made desperate by risks and losses, cheat and steal
their way to rubber. Two years before our trip an Italian had murdered
two Frenchmen just below the Pongo and stolen their rubber cargo,
whereupon he was shot by Machigangas under the leadership of Domingo,
the chief who was with us on a journey from Pongo de Mainique to the
mouth of the Timpia. Afterward they brought his skull to the top of a
pass along the forest trail and set it up on a cliff at the very edge of
Machiganga-land as a warning to others of his kind.
At Mulanquiato we secured five Machigangas and a boy interpreter, and on
August 17 made the last and most difficult portion of our journey. We
found these Indians much more skilful than our earlier boatmen.
Well-trained, alert, powerful, and with excellent team-play, they swept
the canoe into this or that thread of the current, and took one after
another of the rapids with the greatest confidence. No sooner had we
passed the Sintulini rapids, fully a mile long, than we reached the
mouth of the Pomareni. This swift tributary comes in almost at right
angles to the main river and gives rise to a confusing mass of standing
waves and conflicting currents rendered still more difficult by the
whirlpool just below the junction. So swift is the circling current of
the maëlstrom that the water is hollowed out like a great bowl, a really
formidable point and one of our most dangerous passages; a little too
far to the right and we should be thrown over against the cliff-face; a
little too far to the left and we should be caught in the whirlpool.
Once in the swift current the canoe became as helpless as a chip. It was
turned this way and that, each turn heading it apparently straight for
destruction. But the Indians had judged their position well, and though
we seemed each moment in a worse predicament, we at last skimmed the
edge of the whirlpool and brought our canoe to shore just beyond its
rim.
A little farther on we came to the narrow gateway of the Pongo, where
the entire volume of the river flows between cliffs at one point no
more than fifty feet apart. Here are concentrated the worst rapids of
the lower Urubamba. For nearly fifteen miles the river is an unbroken
succession of rapids, and once within its walls the Pongo offers small
chance of escape. At some points we were fortunate enough to secure a
foothold along the edge of the river and to let our canoe down by ropes.
At others we were obliged to take chances with the current, though the
great depth of water in most of the Pongo rapids makes them really less
formidable in some respects than the shallow rapids up stream. The chief
danger here lies in the rotary motion of the water at the sharpest
bends. The effect at some places is extraordinary. A floating object is
carried across stream like a feather and driven at express-train speed
against a solid cliff. In trying to avoid one of these cross-currents
our canoe became turned midstream, we were thrown this way and that, and
at last shot through three standing waves that half filled the canoe.
Below the worst rapids the Pongo exhibits a swift succession of natural
wonders. Fern-clad cliffs border it, a bush resembling the juniper
reaches its dainty finger-like stems far out over the river, and the
banks are heavily clad with mosses. The great woods, silent,
impenetrable, mantle the high slopes and stretch up to the limits of
vision. Cascades tumble from the cliff summits or go rippling down the
long inclines of the slate beds set almost on edge. Finally appear the
white pinnacles of limestone that hem in the narrow lower entrance or
outlet of the Pongo. Beyond this passage one suddenly comes out upon the
edge of a rolling forest-clad region, the rubber territory, the country
of the great woods. Here the Andean realm ends and Amazonia begins.
From the summits of the white cliffs 4,000 feet above the river we were
in a few days to have one of the most extensive views in South America.
The break between the Andean Cordillera and the hill-dotted plains of
the lower Urubamba valley is almost as sharp as a shoreline. The rolling
plains are covered with leagues upon leagues of dense, shadowy,
fever-haunted jungle. The great river winds through in a series of
splendid meanders, and with so broad a channel as to make it visible
almost to the horizon. Down river from our lookout one can reach ocean
steamers at Iquitos with less than two weeks of travel. It is three
weeks to the Pacific _via_ Cuzco and more than a month if one takes the
route across the high bleak lava-covered country which we were soon to
cross on our way to the coast at Camaná.
CHAPTER III
THE RUBBER FORESTS
The white limestone cliffs at Pongo de Mainique are a boundary between
two great geographic provinces (Fig. 17). Down valley are the vast river
plains, drained by broad meandering rivers; up valley are the rugged
spurs of the eastern Andes and their encanyoned streams (Fig. 18). There
are outliers of the Andes still farther toward the northeast where hangs
the inevitable haze of the tropical horizon, but the country beyond them
differs in no important respect from that immediately below the Pongo.
[Illustration: FIG. 17--Regional diagram of the Eastern Andes (here the
Cordillera Vilcapampa) and the adjacent tropical plains. For an
explanation of the method of construction and the symbolism of the
diagram see p. 51.]
The foot-path to the summit of the cliffs is too narrow and steep for
even the most agile mules. It is simply impassable for animals without
hands. In places the packs are lowered by ropes over steep ledges and
men must scramble down from one projecting root or swinging vine to
another. In the breathless jungle it is a wearing task to pack in all
supplies for the station below the Pongo and to carry out the season’s
rubber. Recently however the ancient track has been replaced by a road
that was cut with great labor, and by much blasting, across the mountain
barrier, and at last mule transport has taken the place of the Indian.
[Illustration: FIG. 18--Index map for the nine regional diagrams in the
pages following. A represents Fig. 17; B, 42; C, 36; D, 32; E, 34; F,
25; G, 26; and H, 65.]
In the dry season it is a fair and delightful country--that on the
border of the mountains. In the wet season the traveler is either
actually marooned or he must slosh through rivers of mud and water that
deluge the trails and break the hearts of his beasts (Fig. 14). Here and
there a large shallow-rooted tree has come crashing down across the
trail and with its four feet of circumference and ten feet of plank
buttress it is as difficult to move as a house. A new trail must be cut
around it. A little farther on, where the valley wall steepens and one
may look down a thousand feet of slope to the bed of a mountain torrent,
a patch of trail has become soaked with water and the mules pick their
way, trembling, across it. Two days from Yavero one of our mules went
over the trail, and though she was finally recovered she died of her
injuries the following night. After a month’s work in the forest a mule
must run free for two months to recover. The packers count on losing one
beast out of five for every journey into the forest. It is not solely a
matter of work, though this is terrific; it is quite largely a matter of
forage. In spite of its profusion of life (Fig. 13) and its really vast
wealth of species, the tropical forest is all but barren of grass. Sugar
cane is a fair substitute, but there are only a few cultivated spots.
The more tender leaves of the trees, the young shoots of cane in the
_carrizo_ swamps, and the grass-like foliage of the low bamboo are the
chief substitutes for pasture. But they lead to various disorders,
besides requiring considerable labor on the part of the dejected peons
who must gather them after a day’s heavy work with the packs.
Overcoming these enormous difficulties is expensive and some one must
pay the bill. As is usual in a pioneer region, the native laborer pays a
large part of it in unrequited toil; the rest is paid by the rubber
consumer. For this is one of the cases where a direct road connects the
civilized consumer and the barbarous producer. What a story it could
tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubber on a New York dock were endowed
with speech--of the wet jungle path, of enslaved peons, of vile abuses
by immoral agents, of all the toil and sickness that make the tropical
lowland a reproach!
[Illustration: FIG. 19--Moss-draped trees in the rain forest near Abra
Tocate between Rosalina and Pongo de Mainique.]
[Illustration: FIG. 20--Yavero, a rubber station on the Yavero
(Paucartambo) River, a tributary of the Urubamba. Elevation 1,600 feet
(490 m.).]
In the United States the specter of slavery haunted the national
conscience almost from the beginning of national life, and the ghost was
laid only at the cost of one of the bloodiest wars in history. In other
countries, as in sugar-producing Brazil, the freeing of the slaves meant
not a war but the verge of financial ruin besides a fundamental
change in the social order and problems as complex and wearisome as any
that war can bring. Everywhere abolition was secured at frightful cost.
[Illustration: FIG. 21--Clearing in the tropical forest between Rosalina
and Pabellon. This represents the border region where the
forest-dwelling Machiganga Indians and the mountain Indians meet. The
clearings are occupied by Machigangas whose chief crops are yuca and
corn; in the extreme upper left-hand corner are grassy slopes occupied
by Quechua herdsmen and farmers who grow potatoes and corn.]
The spirit that upheld the new founders of the western republics in
driving out slavery was admirable, but as much cannot be said of their
work of reconstruction. We like to pass over those dark days in our own
history. In South America there has lingered from the old slave-holding
days down to the present, a labor system more insidious than slavery,
yet no less revolting in its details, and infinitely more difficult to
stamp out. It is called peonage; it should be called slavery. In
Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil it flourishes now as it ever did in the
fruitful soil of the interior provinces where law and order are bywords
and where the scarcity of workmen will long impel men to enslave labor
when they cannot employ it. Peonage _is_ slavery, though as in all slave
systems there are many forms under which the system is worked out. We
commonly think that the typical slave is one who is made to work hard,
given but little food, and at the slightest provocation is tied to a
post and brutally whipped. This is indeed the fate of many slaves or
“peons” so-called, in the Amazon forests; but it is no more the rule
than it was in the South before the war, for a peon is a valuable piece
of property and if a slave raider travel five hundred miles through
forest and jungle-swamp to capture an Indian you may depend upon it that
he will not beat him to death merely for the fun of it.
That unjust and frightfully cruel floggings are inflicted at times and
in some places is of course a result of the lack of official restraint
that drunken owners far from the arm of the law sometimes enjoy. When a
man obtains a rubber concession from the government he buys a kingdom.
Many of the rubber territories are so remote from the cities that
officials can with great difficulty be secured to stay at the customs
ports. High salaries must be paid, heavy taxes collected, and grafting
of the most flagrant kind winked at. Often the concessionaire himself is
chief magistrate of his kingdom by law. Under such a system, remote from
all civilizing influences, the rubber producer himself oftentimes a
lawless border character or a downright criminal, no system of
government would be adequate, least of all one like peonage that permits
or ignores flagrant wrongs because it is so expensive to enforce
justice.
The peonage system continues by reason of that extraordinary difficulty
in the development of the tropical lowland of South America--the lack of
a labor supply. The population of Amazonia now numbers less than one
person to the square mile. The people are distributed in small groups of
a dozen to twenty each in scattered villages along the river banks or in
concealed clearings reached by trails known only to the Indians. Nearly
all of them still live in the same primitive state in which they lived
at the time of the Discovery. In the Urubamba region a single cotton
shirt is worn by the married men and women, while the girls and boys in
many cases go entirely naked except for a loincloth or a necklace of
nuts or monkeys’ teeth (Fig. 23). A cane hut with a thatch to keep out
the heavy rains is their shelter and their food is the yuca, sugar cane,
Indian corn, bananas of many kinds, and fish. A patch of yuca once
planted will need but the most trifling attention for years. The small
spider monkey is their greatest delicacy and to procure it they will
often abandon every other project and return at their own sweet and
belated will.
[Illustration: FIG. 22--Trading with Machiganga Indians in a reed swamp
at Santao Anato, Urubamba Valley, before Rosalina. Just outside the
picture on the right is a platform on which corn is stored for
protection against rodents and mildew. On the left is the corner of a
grass-thatched cane hut.]
In the midst of this natural life of the forest-dwelling Indian appears
the rubber man, who, to gather rubber, must have rubber “pickers.” If he
lives on the edge of the great Andean Cordillera, laborers may be
secured from some of the lower valleys, but they must be paid well for
even a temporary stay in the hot and unhealthful lowlands. Farther out
in the great forest country the plateau Indians will not go and only the
scattered tribes remain from which to recruit laborers. For the
nature-life of the Indian what has the rubber gatherer to offer? Money?
The Indian uses it for ornament only. When I once tried with money to
pay an Indian for a week’s services he refused it. In exchange for his
severe labor he wanted nothing more than a fish-hook and a ring, the two
costing not more than a penny apiece! When his love for ornament has
once been gratified the Indian ceases to work. His food and shelter
and clothing are of the most primitive kind, but they are the best in
the world for him because they are the only kind he has known. So where
money and finery fail the lash comes in. The rubber man says that the
Indian is lazy and must be made to work; that there is a great deal of
work to be done and the Indian is the only laborer who can be found;
that if rubber and chocolate are produced the Indian must be made to
produce them; and that if he will not produce them for pay he must be
enslaved.
[Illustration: FIG. 23--Ornaments and fabrics of the Machiganga Indians
at Yavero. The nuts are made up into strings, pendants, and heavy
necklaces. To the left of the center is one that contains feathers and
four drumsticks of a bird about the size of a small wild
turkey--probably the so-called turkey inhabiting the eastern mountain
valleys and the adjacent border of the plains, and hunted as an
important source of food. The cord in the upper right-hand corner is
used most commonly for heel supports in climbing trees. The openwork
sack is convenient for carrying game, fish, and fruit; the finely woven
sacks are used for carrying red ochre for ornamenting or daubing faces
and arms. They are also used for carrying corn, trinkets, and game.]
It is a law of the rubber country that when an Indian falls into debt to
a white man he must work for the latter until the debt is discharged. If
he runs away before the debt is canceled or if he refuses to work or
does too little work he may be flogged. Under special conditions such
laws are wise. In the hands of the rubber men they are the basis of
slavery. For, once the rubber interests begin to suffer, the promoters
look around for a chance to capture free Indians. An expedition is
fitted out that spends weeks exploring this river or that in getting on
the track of unattached Indians. When a settlement is found the men are
enslaved and taken long distances from home finally to reach a rubber
property. There they are given a corner of a hut to sleep in, a few
cheap clothes, a rubber-picking outfit, and a name. In return for these
articles the unwilling Indian is charged any fanciful price that comes
into the mind of his “owner,” and he must thereupon work at a per diem
wage also fixed by the owner. Since his obligations increase with time,
the Indian may die over two thousand dollars in debt!
Peonage has left frightful scars upon the country. In some places the
Indians are fugitives, cultivating little farms in secreted places but
visiting them only at night or after carefully reconnoitering the spot.
They change their camps frequently and make their way from place to
place by secret trails, now spending a night or two under the shelter of
a few palm leaves on a sandbar, again concealing themselves in almost
impenetrable jungle. If the hunter sometimes discovers a beaten track he
follows it only to find it ending on a cliff face or on the edge of a
lagoon where concealment is perfect. There are tribes that shoot the
white man at sight and regard him as their bitterest enemy. Experience
has led them to believe that only a dead white is a good white,
reversing our saying about the North American Indian; and that even when
he comes among them on peaceful errands he is likely to leave behind him
a trail of syphilis and other venereal diseases scarcely less deadly
than his bullets.
However, the peonage system is not hideous everywhere and in all its
aspects. There are white owners who realize that in the long run the
friendship of the Indians is an asset far greater than unwilling service
and deadly hatred. Some of them have indeed intermarried with the
Indians and live among them in a state but little above savagery. In the
Mamoré country are a few owners of original princely concessions who
have grown enormously wealthy and yet who continue to live a primitive
life among their scores of illegitimate descendants. The Indians look
upon them as benefactors, as indeed many of them are, defending the
Indians from ill treatment by other whites, giving them clothing and
ornaments, and exacting from them only a moderate amount of labor. In
some cases indeed the whites have gained more than simple gratitude for
their humane treatment of the Indians, some of whom serve their masters
with real devotion.
When the “rubber barons” wish to discourage investigation of their
system they invite the traveler to leave and he is given a canoe and
oarsmen with which to make his way out of the district. Refusal to
accept an offer of canoes and men is a declaration of war. An agent of
one of the London companies accepted such a challenge and was promptly
told that he would not leave the territory alive. The threat would have
held true in the case of a less skilful man. Though Indians slept in the
canoes to prevent their seizure, he slipped past the guards in the
night, swam to the opposite shore, and there secured a canoe within
which he made a difficult journey down river to the nearest post where
food and an outfit could be secured.
A few companies operating on or near the border of the Cordillera have
adopted a normal labor system, dependent chiefly upon people from the
plateau and upon the thoroughly willing assistance of well-paid forest
Indians. The Compañia Gomera de Mainique at Puerto Mainique just below
the Pongo is one of these and its development of the region without
violation of native rights is in the highest degree praiseworthy. In
fact the whole conduct of this company is interesting to a geographer,
as it reflects at every point the physical nature of the country.
The government is eager to secure foreign capital, but in eastern Peru
can offer practically nothing more than virgin wealth, that is, land and
the natural resources of the land. There are no roads, virtually no
trails, no telegraph lines, and in most cases no labor. Since the old
Spanish grants ran at right angles to the river so as to give the owners
a cross-section of varied resources, the up-river plantations do not
extend down into the rubber country. Hence the more heavily forested
lower valleys and plains are the property of the state. A man can buy a
piece of land down there, but from any tract within ordinary means only
a primitive living can be obtained. The pioneers therefore are the
rubber men who produce a precious substance that can stand the enormous
tax on production and transportation. They do not want the land--only
the exclusive right to tap the rubber trees upon it. Thus there has
arisen the concession plan whereby a large tract is obtained under
conditions of money payment or of improvements that will attract
settlers or of a tax on the export.
The “caucho” or poorer rubber of the Urubamba Valley begins at 3,000
feet (915 m.) and the “hevea” or better class is a lower-valley and
plains product. The rubber trees thereabouts produce 60 grams (2 ozs.)
of dry rubber each week for eight months. After yielding rubber for this
length of time a tree is allowed to rest four or five years. “Caucho” is
produced from trees that are cut down and ringed with machetes, but it
is from fifty to sixty cents cheaper owing to the impurities that get
into it. The wood, not the nut, of the _Palma carmona_ is used for
smoking or “curing” the rubber. The government had long been urged to
build a road into the region in place of the miserable track--absolutely
impassable in the wet season--that heretofore constituted the sole
means of exit. About ten years ago Señor Robledo at last built a
government trail from Rosalina to Yavero about 100 miles long. While it
is a wretched trail it is better than the old one, for it is more direct
and it is better drained. In the wet season parts of it are turned into
rivers and lakes, but it is probably the best that could be done with
the small grant of twenty thousand dollars.
With at least an improvement in the trail it became possible for a
rubber company to induce _cargadores_ or packers to transport
merchandise and rubber and to have a fair chance of success. Whereupon a
rubber company was organized which obtained a concession of 28,000
hectares (69,188 acres) of land on condition that the company finish a
road one and one-half meters wide to the Pongo, connecting with the road
which the government had extended to Yavero. The land given in payment
was not continuous but was selected in lots by the company in such a way
as to secure the best rubber trees over an area several times the size
of the concession. The road was finished by William Tell after four
years’ work at a cost of about seventy-five thousand dollars. The last
part of it was blasted out of slate and limestone and in 1912 the first
pack train entered Puerto Mainique.
The first rubber was taken out in November, 1910, and productive
possibilities proved by the collection of 9,000 kilos (19,841 pounds) in
eight months.
If a main road were the chief problem of the rubber company the business
would soon be on a paying basis, but for every mile of road there must
be cut several miles of narrow trail (Fig. 14), as the rubber trees grow
scattered about--a clump of a half dozen here and five hundred feet
farther on another clump and only scattered individuals between.
Furthermore, about twenty-five years ago rubber men from the Ucayali
came up here in launches and canoes and cut down large numbers of trees
within reach of the water courses and by ringing the trunks every few
feet with machetes “bled” them rapidly and thus covered a large
territory in a short time, and made huge sums of money when the price of
rubber was high. Only a few of the small trees that were left are now
mature. These, the mature trees that were overlooked, and the virgin
stands farther from the rivers are the present sources of rubber.
In addition to the trails small cabins must be built to shelter the
hired laborers from the plateau, many of whom bring along their women
folk to cook for them. The combined expense to a company of these
necessary improvements before production can begin is exceedingly heavy.
There is only one alternative for the prospective exploiter: to become a
vagrant rubber gatherer. With tents, guns, machetes, cloth, baubles for
trading, tinned food for emergencies, and with pockets full of English
gold parties have started out to seek fortunes in the rubber forests. If
the friendship of a party of Indians can be secured by adequate gifts
large amounts of rubber can be gathered in a short time, for the Indians
know where the rubber trees grow. On the other hand, many fortunes have
been lost in the rubber country. Some of the tribes have been badly
treated by other adventurers and attack the newcomers from ambush or
gather rubber for a while only to overturn the canoe in a rapid and let
the river relieve them of selfish friends.
The Compañia Gomera de Mainique started out by securing the good-will of
the forest Indians, the Machigangas. They come and go in friendly visits
to the port at Yavero. If one of them is sick he can secure free
medicine from the agent. If he wishes goods on credit he has only to ask
for them, for the agent knows that the Indian’s sense of fairness will
bring him back to work for the company. Without previous notice a group
of Indians appears:
“We owe,” they announce.
“Good,” says the agent, “build me a house.”
They select the trees. Before they cut them down they address them
solemnly. The trees must not hold their destruction against the Indians
and they must not try to resist the sharp machetes. Then the Indians set
to work. They fell a tree, bind it with light ropes woven from the wild
cotton, and haul it to its place. That is all for the day. They play in
the sun, do a little hunting, or look over the agent’s house, touching
everything, talking little, exclaiming much. They dip their wet fingers
in the sugar bowl and taste, turn salt out upon their hands, hold
colored solutions from the medicine chest up to the light, and pull out
and push in the corks of the bottles. At the end of a month or two the
house is done. Then they gather their women and babies together and say:
“Now we go,” without asking if the work corresponds with the cost of the
articles they had bought. Their judgment is good however. Their work is
almost always more valuable than the articles. Then they shake hands all
around.
“We will come again,” they say, and in a moment have disappeared in the
jungle that overhangs the trail.
With such labor the Compañia Gomera de Mainique can do something, but it
is not much. The regular seasonal tasks of road-building and
rubber-picking must be done by imported labor. This is secured chiefly
at Abancay, where live groups of plateau Indians that have become
accustomed to the warm climate of the Abancay basin. They are employed
for eight or ten months at an average rate of fifty cents gold per day,
and receive in addition only the simplest articles of food.
At the end of the season the gang leaders are paid a _gratificación_, or
bonus, the size of which depends upon the amount of rubber collected,
and this in turn depends upon the size of the gang and the degree of
willingness to work. In the books of the company I saw a record of
_gratificaciónes_ running as high as $600 in gold for a season’s work.
Some of the laborers become sick and are cared for by the agent until
they recover or can be sent back to their homes. Most of them have fever
before they return.
The rubber costs the company two _soles_ ($1.00) produced at Yavero. The
two weeks’ transportation to Cuzco costs three and a half soles ($1.75)
per twenty-five pounds. The exported rubber, known to the trade as
Mollendo rubber, in contrast to the finer “Pará” rubber from the lower
Amazon, is shipped to Hamburg. The cost for transportation from port to
port is $24.00 per English ton (1,016 kilos). There is a Peruvian tax of
8 per cent of the net value in Europe, and a territorial tax of two
soles ($1.00) per hundred pounds. All supplies except the few vegetables
grown on the spot cost tremendously. Even dynamite, hoes, clothing,
rice--to mention only a few necessities--must pay the heavy cost of
transportation after imposts, railroad and ocean freight, storage and
agents’ percentages are added. The effect of a disturbed market is
extreme. When, in 1911, the price of rubber fell to $1.50 a kilo at
Hamburg the company ceased exporting. When it dropped still lower in
1912 production also stopped, and it is still doubtful, in view of the
growing competition of the East-Indian plantations with their cheap
labor, whether operations will ever be resumed. Within three years no
less than a dozen large companies in eastern Peru and Bolivia have
ceased operations. In one concession on the Madre de Dios the withdrawal
of the agents and laborers from the posts turned at last into flight, as
the forest Indians, on learning the company’s policy, rapidly ascended
the river in force, committing numerous depredations. The great war has
also added to the difficulties of production.
Facts like these are vital in the consideration of the future of the
Amazon basin and especially its habitability. It was the dream of
Humboldt that great cities should arise in the midst of the tropical
forests of the Amazon and that the whole lowland plain of that river
basin should become the home of happy millions. Humboldt’s vision may
have been correct, though a hundred years have brought us but little
nearer its realization. Now, as in the past four centuries, man finds
his hands too feeble to control the great elemental forces which have
shaped history. The most he can hope for in the next hundred years at
least is the ability to dodge Nature a little more successfully, and
here and there by studies in tropical hygiene and medicine, by the
substitution of water-power for human energy, to carry a few of the
outposts and prepare the way for a final assault in the war against the
hard conditions of climate and relief. We hear of the Madeira-Mamoré
railroad, 200 miles long, in the heart of a tropical forest and of the
commercial revolution it will bring. Do we realize that the forest which
overhangs the rails is as big as the whole plain between the Rockies
and the Appalachians, and that the proposed line would extend only as
far as from St. Louis to Kansas City, or from Galveston to New Orleans?
Even if twenty whites were eager to go where now there is but one
reluctant pioneer, we should still have but a halting development on
account of the scarcity of labor. When, three hundred years ago, the
Isthmus of Panama stood in his way, Gomara wrote to his king: “There are
mountains, but there are also hands,” as if men could be conjured up
from the tropical jungle. From that day to this the scarcity of labor
has been the chief difficulty in the lowland regions of tropical South
America. Even when medicine shall have been advanced to the point where
residence in the tropics can be made safe, the Amazon basin will lack an
adequate supply of workmen. Where Humboldt saw thriving cities, the
population is still less than one to the square mile in an area as large
as fifteen of our Mississippi Valley states. We hear much about a rich
soil and little about intolerable insects; the climate favors a good
growth of vegetation, but a man can starve in a tropical forest as
easily as in a desert; certain tributaries of the Negro are bordered by
rich rubber forests, yet not a single Indian hut may be found along
their banks. Will men of the white race dig up the rank vegetation,
sleep in grass hammocks, live in the hot and humid air, or will they
stay in the cooler regions of the north and south? Will they rear
children in the temperate zones, or bury them in the tropics?
What Gorgas did for Panama was done for intelligent people. Can it be
duplicated in the case of ignorant and stupid laborers? Shall the white
man with wits fight it out with Nature in a tropical forest, or fight it
out with his equals under better skies?
The tropics must be won by strong hands of the lowlier classes who are
ignorant or careless of hygiene, and not by the khaki-clad robust young
men like those who work at Panama. Tropical medicine can do something
for these folk, but it cannot do much. And we cannot surround every
laborer’s cottage with expensive screens, oiled ditches, and well-kept
lawns. There is a practical optimism and a sentimental optimism. The one
is based on facts; the other on assumptions. It is pleasant to think
that the tropical forest may be conquered. It is nonsense to say that we
are now conquering it in any comprehensive and permanent way. That sort
of conquest is still a dream, as when Humboldt wrote over a hundred
years ago.
CHAPTER IV
THE FOREST INDIANS
The people of a tropical forest live under conditions not unlike those
of the desert. The Sahara contains 2,000,000 persons within its borders,
a density of one-half to the square mile. This is almost precisely the
density of population of a tract of equivalent size in the lowland
forests of South America. Like the oases groups in the desert of aridity
are the scattered groups along the river margins of the forest. The
desert trails run from spring to spring or along a valley floor where
there is seepage or an intermittent stream; the rivers are the highways
of the forest, the flowing roads, and away from them one is lost in as
true a sense as one may be lost in the desert.
A man may easily starve in the tropical forest. Before starting on even
a short journey of two or three days a forest Indian stocks his canoe
with sugar cane and yuca and a little parched corn. He knows the
settlements as well as his desert brother knows the springs. The Pahute
Indian of Utah lives in the irrigated valleys and makes annual
excursions across the desert to the distant mountains to gather the
seeds of the nut pine. The Machiganga lives in the hills above the
Urubamba and annually comes down through the forest to the river to fish
during the dry season.
The Machigangas are one of the important tribes of the Amazon basin.
Though they are dispersed to some extent upon the plains their chief
groups are scattered through the heads of a large number of valleys near
the eastern border of the Andes. Chief among the valleys they occupy are
the Pilcopata, Tono, Piñi-piñi, Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea,
Timpia, and Camisea (Fig. 203). In their distribution, in their
relations with each other, in their manner of life, and to some extent
in their personal traits, they display characteristics strikingly like
those seen in desert peoples. Though the forest that surrounds them
suggests plenty and the rivers the possibility of free movement with
easy intercourse, the struggle of life, as in the desert, is against
useless things. Travel in the desert is a conflict with heat and
aridity; but travel in the tropic forest is a struggle against space,
heat, and a superabundant and all but useless vegetation.
The Machigangas are one of the subtribes of the Campas Indians, one of
the most numerous groups in the Amazon Valley. It is estimated that
there are in all about 14,000 to 16,000 of them. Each subtribe numbers
from one to four thousand, and the territory they occupy extends from
the limits of the last plantations--for example, Rosalina in the
Urubamba Valley--downstream beyond the edge of the plains. Among them
three subtribes are still hostile to the whites: the Cashibos, the
Chonta Campas, and the Campas Bravos.
In certain cases the Cashibos are said to be anthropophagous, in the
belief that they will assume the strength and intellect of those they
eat. This group is also continuously at war with its neighbors, goes
naked, uses stone hatchets, as in ages past, because of its isolation
and unfriendliness, and defends the entrances to the tribal huts with
dart and traps. The Cashibos are diminishing in numbers and are now
scattered through the valley of the Gran Pajonal, the left bank of the
Pachitea, and the Pampa del Sacramento.[2]
The friendliest tribes live in the higher valley heads, where they have
constant communication with the whites. The use of the bow and arrow has
not, however, been discontinued among them, in spite of the wide
introduction of the old-fashioned muzzle-loading shotgun, which they
prize much more highly than the latest rifle or breech-loading shotgun
because of its simplicity and cheapness. Accidents are frequent among
them owing to the careless use of fire-arms. On our last day’s journey
on the Urubamba above the mouth of the Timpia one of our Indian boys
dropped his canoe pole on the hammer of a loaded shotgun, and not only
shot his own fingers to pieces, but gravely wounded his father (Fig. 2).
In spite of his suffering the old chief directed our work at the canoe
and even was able to tell us the location of the most favorable channel.
Though the night that followed was as black as ink, with even the stars
obscured by a rising storm, his directions never failed. We poled our
way up five long rapids without special difficulties, now working into
the lee of a rock whose location he knew within a few yards, now
paddling furiously across the channel to catch the upstream current of
an eddy.
The principal groups of Machigangas live in the middle Urubamba and its
tributaries, the Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea, Timpia,
Pachitea, and others. There is a marked difference in the use of the
land and the mode of life among the different groups of this subtribe.
Those who live in the lower plains and river “playas,” as the patches of
flood plain are called, have a single permanent dwelling and alternately
fish and hunt. Those that live on hill farms have temporary reed huts on
the nearest sandbars and spend the best months of the dry season--April
to October--in fishing and drying fish to be carried to their mountain
homes (Fig. 21). Some families even duplicate _chacras_ or farms at the
river bank and grow yuca and sugar cane. In latter years smallpox,
malaria, and the rubber hunters have destroyed many of the river
villages and driven the Indians to permanent residence in the hills or,
where raids occur, along secret trails to hidden camps.
Their system of agriculture is strikingly adapted to some important
features of tropical soil. The thin hillside soils of the region are but
poorly stocked with humus, even in their virgin condition. Fallen trees
and foliage decay so quickly that the layer of forest mold is
exceedingly thin and the little that is incorporated in the soil is
confined to a shallow surface layer. To meet these special conditions
the Indian makes new clearings by girdling and burning the trees. When
the soil becomes worn out and the crops diminish, the old clearing is
abandoned and allowed to revert to natural growth and a new farm is
planted to corn and yuca. The population is so scattered and thin that
the land assignment system current among the plateau Indians is not
practised among the Machigangas. Several families commonly live together
and may be separated from their nearest neighbors by many miles of
forested mountains. The land is free for all, and, though some heavy
labor is necessary to clear it, once a small patch is cleared it is easy
to extend the tract by limited annual cuttings. Local tracts of
naturally unforested land are rarely planted, chiefly because the
absence of shade has allowed the sun to burn out the limited humus
supply and to prevent more from accumulating. The best soil of the
mountain slopes is found where there is the heaviest growth of timber,
the deepest shade, the most humus, and good natural drainage. It is the
same on the playas along the river; the recent additions to the flood
plain are easy to cultivate, but they lack humus and a fine matrix which
retains moisture and prevents drought or at least physiologic dryness.
Here, too, the timbered areas or the cane swamps are always selected for
planting.
The traditions of the Machigangas go back to the time of the Inca
conquest, when the forest Indians, the “Antis,” were subjugated and
compelled to pay tribute.[3] When the Inca family itself fled from Cuzco
after the Spanish Conquest and sought refuge in the wilderness it was to
the Machiganga country that they came by way of the Vilcabamba and
Pampaconas Valleys. Afterward came the Spaniards and though they did not
exercise governmental authority over the forest Indians they had close
relations with them. Land grants were made to white pioneers for special
services or through sale and with the land often went the right to
exploit the people on it. Some of the concessions were owned by people
who for generations knew nothing save by hearsay of the Indians who
dwelt in the great forests of the valleys. In later years they have been
exploring their lands and establishing so-called relations whereby the
savage “buys” a dollar’s worth of powder or knives for whatever number
of dollars’ worth of rubber the owner may care to extract from him.
The forest Indian is still master of his lands throughout most of the
Machiganga country. He is cruelly enslaved at the rubber posts, held by
the loose bonds of a desultory trade at others, and in a few places, as
at Pongo do Mainique, gives service for both love and profit, but in
many places it is impossible to establish control or influence. The
lowland Indian never falls into the abject condition of his Quechua
brother on the plateau. He is self-reliant, proud, and independent. He
neither cringes before a white nor looks up to him as a superior being.
I was greatly impressed by the bearing of the first of the forest tribes
I met in August, 1911, at Santo Anato. I had built a brisk fire and was
enjoying its comfort when La Sama returned with some Indians whom he had
secured to clear his playa. The tallest of the lot, wearing a colored
band of deer skin around his thick hair and a gaudy bunch of yellow
feathers down his back, came up, looked me squarely in the eye, and
asked
“Tatiry payta?” (What is your name?)
When I replied he quietly sat down by the fire, helping himself to the
roasted corn I had prepared in the hot ashes. A few days later when we
came to the head of a rapid I was busy sketching-in my topographic map
and did not hear his twice repeated request to leave the boat while the
party reconnoitered the rapid. Watching his opportunity he came
alongside from the rear--he was steersman--and, turning just as he was
leaving the boat, gave me a whack in the forehead with his open palm. La
Sama saw the motion and protested. The surly answer was:
“I twice asked him to get out and he didn’t move. What does he think we
run the canoe to the bank for?”
To him the making of a map was inexplicable; I was merely a stupid white
person who didn’t know enough to get out of a canoe when told!
The plateau Indian has been kicked about so long that all his
independence has been destroyed. His goods have been stolen, his
services demanded without recompense, in many places he has no right to
land, and his few real rights are abused beyond belief. The difference
between him and the forest Indian is due quite largely to differences of
environment. The plateau Indian is agricultural, the forest Indian
nomadic and in a hunting stage of development; the unforested plateau
offers no means for concealment of person or property, the forest offers
hidden and difficult paths, easy means for concealment, for ambush, and
for wide dispersal of an afflicted tribe. The brutal white of the
plateau follows altogether different methods when he finds himself in
the Indian country, far from military assistance, surrounded by fearless
savages. He may cheat but he does not steal, and his brutality is always
carefully suited to both time and place.
The Machigangas are now confined to the forest, but the limits of their
territory were once farther upstream, where they were in frequent
conflict with the plateau Indians. As late as 1835, according to General
Miller,[4] they occupied the land as far upstream as the “Encuentro”
(junction) of the Urubamba and the Yanatili (Fig. 53). Miller likewise
notes that the Chuntaguirus, “a superior race of Indians” who lived
“toward the Marañon,” came up the river “200 leagues” to barter with the
people thereabouts.
“They bring parrots and other birds, monkeys, cotton robes white and
painted, wax balsams, feet of the gran bestia, feather ornaments for the
head, and tiger and other skins, which they exchange for hatchets,
knives, scissors, needles, buttons, and any sort of glittering bauble.”
On their yearly excursions they traveled in a band numbering from 200 to
300, since at the mouth of the Paucartambo (Yavero) they were generally
set upon by the Pucapacures. The journey upstream required three months;
with the current they returned home in fifteen days.
Their place of meeting at the mouth of the Yanatili was a response to a
long strip of grassland that extends down the deep and dry Urubamba
Valley, as shown in Figs. 53-B and 55. The wet forests, in which the
Machigangas live, cover the hills back of the valley plantations; the
belt of dry grassland terminates far within the general limits of the
red man’s domain and only 2,000 feet above the sea. It is in this strip
of low grassland that on the one hand the highland and valley dwellers,
and on the other the Indians of the hot forested valleys and the
adjacent lowland found a convenient place for barter. The same
physiographic features are repeated in adjacent valleys of large size
that drain the eastern aspect of the Peruvian Andes, and in each case
they have given rise to the periodic excursions of the trader.
These annual journeys are no longer made. The planters have crept down
valley. The two best playas below Rosalina are now being cleared. Only a
little space remains between the lowest valley plantations and the
highest rubber stations. Furthermore, the Indians have been enslaved by
the rubber men from the Ucayali. The Machigangas, many of whom are
runaway peons, will no longer take cargoes down valley for fear of
recapture. They have the cautious spirit of fugitives except in their
remote valleys. There they are secure and now and then reassert their
old spirit when a lawless trader tries to browbeat them into an
unprofitable trade. Also, they are yielding to the alluring call of the
planter. At Santo Anato they are clearing a playa in exchange for
ammunition, machetes, brandy, and baubles. They no longer make annual
excursions to get these things. They have only to call at the nearest
plantation. There is always a wolf before the door of the planter--the
lack of labor. Yet, as on every frontier, he turns wolf himself when the
lambs come, and without shame takes a week’s work for a penny mirror,
or, worse still, supplies them with firewater, for that will surely
bring them back to him. Since this is expensive they return to their
tribal haunts with nothing except a debauched spirit and an appetite
from which they cannot run away as they did from their task masters in
the rubber forest. Hence the vicious circle: more brandy, more labor;
more labor, more cleared land; more cleared land, more brandy; more
brandy, less Indian. But by that time the planter has a large sugar
estate. Then he can begin to buy the more expensive plateau labor, and
in turn debauch it.
Nature as well as man works against the scattered tribes of Machigangas
and their forest kinsmen. Their country is exceedingly broken by
ramifying mountain spurs and valleys overhung with cliffs or bordered by
bold, wet, fern-clad slopes. It is useless to try to cut your way by a
direct route from one point to another. The country is mantled with
heavy forest. You must follow the valleys, the ancient trails of the
people. The larger valleys offer smooth sand-bars along the border of
which canoes may be towed upstream, and there are little cultivated
places for camps. But only a few of the tribes live along them, for they
are also more accessible to the rubbermen. The smaller valleys,
difficult of access, are more secure and there the tribal remnants live
today. While the broken country thus offers a refuge to fugitive bands
it is the broken country and its forest cover that combine to break up
the population into small groups and keep them in an isolated and
quarrelsome state. Chronic quarreling is not only the product of mere
lack of contact. It is due to many causes, among which is a union of the
habit of migration and divergent tribal speech. Every tribe has its own
peculiar words in addition to those common to the group of tribes to
which it belongs. Moreover each group of a tribe has its distinctive
words. I have seen and used carefully prepared vocabularies--no two of
which are alike throughout. They serve for communication with only a
limited number of families. These peculiarities increase as experiences
vary and new situations call for additions to or changes in their
vocabularies, and when migrating tribes meet their speech may be so
unlike as to make communication difficult. Thus arise suspicion,
misunderstanding, plunder, and chronic war. Had they been a united
people their defense of their rough country might have been successful.
The tribes have been divided and now and again, to get firearms and
ammunition with which to raid a neighbor, a tribe has joined its
fortunes to those of vagrant rubber pickers only to find in time that
its women were debased, its members decimated by strange and deadly
diseases, and its old morality undermined by an insatiable desire for
strong drink.[5] The Indian loses whether with the white or against him.
The forest Indian is held by his environment no less strongly than the
plateau Indian. We hear much about the restriction of the plateau
dweller to the cool zone in which the llama may live. As a matter of
fact he lives far below the cool zone, where he no longer depends upon
the llama but rather upon the mule for transport. The limits of his
range correspond to the limits of the grasslands in the dry valley
pockets already described (p. 42), or on the drier mountain slopes below
the zone of heaviest rainfall (Fig. 54). It is this distribution that
brought him into such intimate contact with the forest Indian. The old
and dilapidated coca terraces of the Quechuas above the Yanatili almost
overlook the forest patches where the Machigangas for centuries built
their rude huts. A good deal has been written about the attempts of the
Incas to extend their rule into this forest zone and about the failure
of these attempts on account of the tropical climate. But the forest
Indian was held by bonds equally secure. The cold climate of the plateau
repelled him as it does today. His haunts are the hot valleys where he
need wear only a wild-cotton shirt or where he may go naked altogether.
That he raided the lands of the plateau Indian is certain, but he could
never displace him. Only along the common borders of their domains,
where the climates of two zones merged into each other, could the forest
Indian and the plateau Indian seriously dispute each other’s claims to
the land. Here was endless conflict but only feeble trade and only the
most minute exchanges of cultural elements.
Even had they been as brothers they would have had little incentive to
borrow cultural elements from each other. The forest dweller requires
bow and arrow; the plateau dweller requires a hoe. There are fish in the
warm river shallows of the forested zone; llamas, vicuña, vizcachas,
etc., are a partial source of food supply on the plateau. Coca and
potatoes are the chief products of the grassy mountain slopes; yuca,
corn, bananas, are the chief vegetable foods grown on the tiny
cultivated patches in the forest. The plateau dweller builds a
thick-walled hut; the valley dweller a cane shack. So unlike are the two
environments that it would be strange if there had been a mixture of
racial types and cultures. The slight exchanges that were made seem
little more than accidental. Even today the Machigangas who live on the
highest slopes own a few pigs obtained from Quechuas, but they never eat
their flesh; they keep them for pets merely. I saw not a single woolen
article among the Indians along the Urubamba whereas Quechuas with
woolen clothing were going back and forth regularly. Their baubles were
of foreign make; likewise their few hoes, likewise their guns.
They clear the forest about a mid-cotton tree and spin and weave the
cotton fiber into sacks, cords for climbing trees when they wish to
chase a monkey, ropes for hauling their canoes, shirts for the married
men and women, colored head-bands, and fish nets. The slender strong
bamboo is gathered for arrows. The chunta palm, like bone for hardness,
supplies them with bows and arrow heads. The brilliant red and yellow
feathers of forest birds, also monkey bones and teeth, are their natural
ornaments. Their life is absolutely distinct from that of their Quechua
neighbors. Little wonder that for centuries forest and plateau Indians
have been enemies and that their cultures are so distinct, for their
environment everywhere calls for unlike modes of existence and distinct
cultural development.
CHAPTER V
THE COUNTRY OF THE SHEPHERDS
The lofty mountain zones of Peru, the high bordering valleys, and the
belts of rolling plateau between are occupied by tribes of shepherds. In
that cold, inhospitable region at the top of the country are the highest
permanent habitations in the world--17,100 feet (5,210 m.)--the loftiest
pastures, the greatest degree of adaptation to combined altitude and
frost. It is here only a step from Greenland to Arcady. Nevertheless it
is Greenland that has the people. Why do they shun Arcady? To the
traveler from the highlands the fertile valleys between 5,000 and 8,000
feet (1,500 to 2,500 m.) seem like the abode of friendly spirits to
whose charm the highland dweller must yield. Every pack-train from
valley to highland carries luxury in the form of fruit, coca, cacao, and
sugar. One would think that every importation of valley products would
be followed by a wave of migration from highland to valley. On the
contrary the highland people have clung to their lofty pastures for
unnumbered centuries. Until the Conquest the last outposts of the Incas
toward the east were the grassy ridges that terminate a few thousand
feet below the timber line.
In this natural grouping of the people where does choice or blind
prejudice or instinct leave off? Where does necessity begin? There are
answers to most of these questions to be found in the broad field of
geographic comparison. But before we begin comparisons we must study the
individual facts upon which they rest. These facts are of almost every
conceivable variety. They range in importance from a humble shepherd’s
stone corral on a mountain slope to a thickly settled mountain basin.
Their interpretation is to be sought now in the soil of rich playa
lands, now in the fixed climatic zones and rugged relief of deeply
dissected, lofty highlands in the tropics. Some of the controlling
factors are historical, others economic; still other factors have
exerted their influence through obscure psychologic channels almost
impossible to trace. The _why_ of man’s distribution over the earth is
one of the most complicated problems in natural science, and the
solution of it is the chief problem of the modern geographer.
At first sight the mountain people of the Peruvian Andes seem to be
uniform in character and in mode of life. The traveler’s first
impression is that the same stone-walled, straw-thatched type of hut is
to be found everywhere, the same semi-nomadic life, the same degrees of
poverty and filth. Yet after a little study the diversity of their lives
is seen to be, if not a dominating fact, at least one of surprising
importance. Side by side with this diversity there runs a corresponding
diversity of relations to their physical environment. Nowhere else on
the earth are greater physical contrasts compressed within such small
spaces. If, therefore, we accept the fundamental theory of geography
that there is a general, necessary, varied, and complex relation between
man and the earth, that theory ought here to find a really vast number
of illustrations. A glance at the accompanying figures discloses the
wide range of relief in the Peruvian Andes. The corresponding range in
climate and in life therefore furnishes an ample field for the
application of the laws of human distribution.
In analyzing the facts of distribution we shall do well to begin with
the causes and effects of migration. Primitive man is in no small degree
a wanderer. His small resources often require him to explore large
tracts. As population increases the food quest becomes more intense, and
thus there come about repeated emigrations which increase the food
supply, extend its variety, and draw the pioneers at last into contact
with neighboring groups. The farther back we go in the history of the
race the clearer it becomes that migrations lie at the root of much of
human development. The raid for plunder, women, food, beasts, is a
persistent feature of the life of those primitive men who live on the
border of unlike regions.
The shepherd of the highland and the forest hunter of the plains
perforce range over vast tracts, and each brings back to the home group
news that confirms the tribal choice of habitation or sets it in motion
toward a more desirable place. Superstitions may lead to flight akin to
migration. Epidemics may be interpreted as the work of a malignant
spirit from which men must flee. War may drive a defeated group into the
fastnesses of a mountain forest where pursuit by stream or trail weakens
the pursuer and confines his action, thereby limiting his power. Floods
may come and destroy the cultivated spots. Want or mere desire in a
hundred forms may lead to movement.
Even among forest tribes long stationary the facile canoe and the light
household necessities may easily enable trivial causes to develop the
spirit of restlessness. Pressure of population is a powerful but not a
general cause of movement. It may affect the settled groups of the
desert oases, or the dense population of fertile plains that is rooted
in the soil. On the other hand mere whims may start a nomadic group
toward a new goal. Often the goal is elusive and the tribe turns back to
the old haunts or perishes in the shock of unexpected conflict.
In the case of both primitive societies and those of a higher order the
causes and the results of migration are often contradictory. These will
depend on the state of civilization and the extremes of circumstance.
When the desert blooms the farmer of the Piura Valley in northwestern
Peru turns shepherd and drives his flocks of sheep and goats out into
the short-lived pastures of the great pampa on the west. In dry years he
sends them eastward into the mountains. The forest Indian of the lower
Urubamba is a fisherman while the river is low and lives in a reed hut
beside his cultivated patch of cane and yuca. When the floods come he is
driven to the higher ground in the hills where he has another cultivated
patch of land and a rude shelter. To be sure, these are seasonal
migrations, yet through them the country becomes better known to each
new generation of men. And each generation supplies its pioneers, who
drift into the remoter places where population is scarce or altogether
wanting.
[Illustration: FIG. 24--This stone hut, grass-thatched, is the highest
permanent habitation in Peru, and is believed to be the highest in the
world. Altitude of 17,100 feet (5,210 m.) determined by instrumental
survey. The general geographic relationships of the region in which the
hut is situated are shown in Fig. 25. For location see the topographic
map, Fig. 204.]
Dry years and extremely dry years may have opposite effects. When
moderate dryness prevails the results may be endurable. The oases
become crowded with men and beasts just when they can ill afford to
support them. The alfalfa meadows become overstocked and cattle become
lean and almost worthless. But there is at least bare subsistence. By
contrast, if extreme and prolonged drought prevails, some of the people
are driven forth to more favored spots. At Vallenar in central Chile
some of the workmen in extreme years go up to the nitrate pampa; in wet
years they return. When the agents of the nitrate companies hear of hard
times in a desert valley they offer employment to the stricken people.
It not infrequently happens that when there are droughts in desert Chile
there are abundant rains in Argentina on the other side of the
Cordillera. There has therefore been for many generations an irregular
and slight, though definite, shifting of population from one side of the
mountains to the other as periods of drought and periods of rain
alternated in the two regions. Some think there is satisfactory evidence
to prove that a number of the great Mongolian emigrations took place in
wet years when pasture was abundant and when the pastoral nomad found it
easy to travel. On the other hand it has been urged that the cause of
many emigrations was prolonged periods of drought when the choice lay
between starvation and flight. It is evident from the foregoing that
both views may be correct in spite of the fact that identical effects
are attributed to opposite causes.
[Illustration: FIG. 25--Regional diagram for the Maritime Cordillera to
show the physical relations in the district where the highest habitation
in the world are located. For location, see Fig. 20. It should be
remembered that the orientation of these diagrams is generalized. By
reference to Fig. 20 it will be seen that some portions of the crest of
the Maritime Cordillera run east and west and others north and south.
The same is true of the Cordillera Vilcapampa, Fig. 36.]
_Note on regional diagrams._--For the sake of clearness I have
classified the accompanying facts of human distribution in the
country of the shepherds and represented them graphically in
“regional” diagrams, Figs. 17, 25, 26, 32, 34, 36, 42, 65. These
diagrams are constructed on the principle of dominant control. Each
brings out the factors of greatest importance in the distribution
of the people in a given region. Furthermore, the facts are
compressed within the limits of a small rectangle. This
compression, though great, respects all essential relations. For
example, every location on these diagrams has a concrete
illustration but the accidental relations of the field have been
omitted; the essential relations are preserved. Each diagram is,
therefore, a kind of generalized type map. It bears somewhat the
same relation to the facts of human geography that a block diagram
does to physiography. The darkest shading represents steep
snow-covered country; the next lower grade represents rough but
snow-free country; the lightest shading represents moderate relief;
unshaded parts represent plain or plateau. Small circles represent
forest or woodland; small open-spaced dots, grassland. Fine
alluvium is represented by small closely spaced dots; coarse
alluvium by large closely spaced dots.
To take an illustration. In Figure 32 we have the Apurimac region
near Pasaje (see location map, Fig. 20). At the lower edge of the
rectangle is a snow-capped outlier of the Cordillera Vilcapampa.
The belt of rugged country represents the lofty, steep, exposed,
and largely inaccessible ridges at the mid-elevations of the
mountains below the glaciated slopes at the heads of tributary
valleys. The villages in the belt of pasture might well be
Incahuasi and Corralpata. The floors of the large canyons on either
hand are bordered by extensive alluvial fans. The river courses are
sketched in a diagrammatic way only, but a map would not be
different in its general disposition. Each location is justified by
a real place with the same essential features and relations. In
making the change there has been no alteration of the general
relation of the alluvial lands to each other or to the highland. By
suppressing unnecessary details there is produced a diagram whose
essentials have simple and clear relations. When such a regional
diagram is amplified by photographs of real conditions it becomes a
sort of generalized picture of a large group of geographic facts.
One could very well extend the method to the whole of South
America. It would be a real service to geography to draw up a set
of, say, twelve to fifteen regional diagrams, still further
generalized, for the whole of the continent. As a broad
classification they would serve both the specialist and the general
student. As the basis for a regional map of South America they
would be invaluable if worked out in sufficient detail and
constructed on the indispensable basis of field studies.
It is still an open question whether security or insecurity is more
favorable for the broad distribution of the Peruvian Indians of the
mountain zone which forms the subject of this chapter. Certainly both
tend to make the remoter places better known. Tradition has it that, in
the days of intertribal conflict before the Conquest, fugitives fled
into the high mountain pastures and lived in hidden places and in caves.
Life was insecure and relief was sought in flight. On the other hand
peace has brought security to life. The trails are now safe. A shepherd
may drive his flock anywhere. He no longer has any one to fear in his
search for new pastures. It would perhaps be safe to conclude that there
is equally broad distribution of men in the mountain pastures in time of
peace and in time of war. There is, however, a difference in the kind
of distribution. In time of peace the individual is safe anywhere; in
time of unrest he is safe only when isolated and virtually concealed. By
contrast, the group living near the trails is scattered by plundering
bands and war parties. The remote and isolated group may successfully
oppose the smaller band and the individuals that might reach the remoter
regions. The fugitive group would have nothing to fear from large bands,
for the limited food supply would inevitably cause these to disintegrate
upon leaving the main routes of travel. Probably the fullest exploration
of the mountain pastures has resulted from the alternation of peace and
war. The opposite conditions which these establish foster both kinds of
distribution; hence both the remote group life encouraged by war and the
individual’s lack of restraint in time of peace are probably in large
part responsible for the present widespread occupation of the Peruvian
mountains.
The loftiest habitation in the world (Fig. 24) is in Peru. Between
Antabamba and Cotahuasi occur the highest passes in the Maritime
Cordillera. We crossed at 17,400 feet (5,300 m.), and three hundred feet
lower is the last outpost of the Indian shepherds. The snowline, very
steeply canted away from the sun, is between 17,200 and 17,600 feet
(5,240 to 5,360 m.). At frequent intervals during the three months of
winter, snowfalls during the night and terrific hailstorms in the late
afternoon drive both shepherds and flocks to the shelter of leeward
slopes or steep canyon walls. At our six camps, between 16,000 and
17,200 feet (4,876 and 5,240 m.), in September, 1911, the minimum
temperature ranged from 4° to 20°F. The thatched stone hut that we
passed at 17,100 feet and that enjoys the distinction of being the
highest in the world was in other respects the same as the thousands of
others in the same region. It sheltered a family of five. As we passed,
three rosy-cheeked children almost as fat as the sheep about them were
sitting on the ground in a corner of the corral playing with balls of
wool. Hundreds of alpacas and sheep grazed on the hill slopes and valley
floor, and their tracks showed plainly that they were frequently driven
up to the snowline in those valleys where a trickle of water supported a
band of pasture. Less than a hundred feet below them were other huts and
flocks.
Here we have the limits of altitude and the limits of resources. The
intervalley spaces do not support grass. Some of them are quite bare,
others are covered with mosses. It is too high for even the tola
bush--that pioneer of Alpine vegetation in the Andes. The distance[6] to
Cotahuasi is 75 miles (120 km.), to Antabamba 50 miles (80 km.). Thence
wool must be shipped by pack-train to the railroad in the one case 250
miles (400 km.) to Arequipa, in the other case 200 miles (320 km.) to
Cuzco. Even the potatoes and barley, which must be imported, come from
valleys several days’ journey away. The question naturally arises why
these people live on the rim of the world. Did they seek out these
neglected pastures, or were they driven to them? Do they live here by
choice or of necessity? The answer to these questions introduces two
other geographic factors of prime importance, the one physical, the
other economic.
The main tracts of lofty pasture above Antabamba cover mountain slopes
and valley floor alike, but the moist valley floors supply the best
grazing. Moreover, the main valleys have been intensively glaciated.
Hence, though their sides are steep walls, their floors are broad and
flat. Marshy tracts, periodically flooded, are scattered throughout, and
here and there are overdeepened portions where lakes have gathered.
There is a thick carpet of grass, also numerous huts and corrals, and
many flocks. At the upper edge of the main zone of pasture the grasses
become thin and with increasing altitude give out altogether except
along the moist valley floors or on shoulders where there is seepage.
If the streams head in dry mountain slopes without snow the grassy bands
of the valley floor terminate at moderate elevations. If the streams
have their sources in snowfields or glaciers there is a more uniform
run-off, and a ribbon of pasture may extend to the snowline. To the
latter class belong the pastures that support these remote people.
In the case of the Maritime Andes the great elevation of the snowline is
also a factor. If, in Figure 25, we think of the snowline as at the
upper level of the main zone of pasture then we should have the
conditions shown in Figure 36, where the limit of general, not local,
occupation is the snowline, as in the Cordillera Vilcapampa and between
Chuquibambilla and Antabamba.
A third factor is the character of the soil. Large amounts of volcanic
ash and lapilli were thrown out in the late stages of volcanic eruption
in which the present cones of the Maritime Andes were formed. The coarse
texture of these deposits allows the ready escape of rainwater. The
combination of extreme aridity and great elevation results in a double
restraint upon vegetation. Outside of the moist valley floors, with
their film of ground moraine on whose surface plants find a more
congenial soil, there is an extremely small amount of pasture. Here are
the natural grazing grounds of the fleet vicuña. They occur in
hundreds, and so remote and little disturbed are they that near the main
pass one may count them by the score. As we rode by, many of them only
stared at us without taking the trouble to get beyond rifle shot. It is
not difficult to believe that the Indians easily shoot great numbers in
remote valleys that have not been hunted for years.
The extreme conditions of life existing on these lofty plateaus are well
shown by the readiness with which even the hardy shepherds avail
themselves of shelter. Wherever deep valleys bring a milder climate
within reach of the pastures the latter are unpopulated for miles on
either side. The sixty-mile stretch between Chuquibamba and Salamanca is
without even a single hut, though there are pastures superior to the
ones occupied by those loftiest huts of all. Likewise there are no
permanent homes between Salamanca and Cotahuasi, though the shepherds
migrate across the belt in the milder season of rain. Eastward and
northward toward the crest of the Maritime Cordillera there are no huts
within a day’s journey of the Cotahuasi canyon. Then there is a group of
a dozen just under the crest of the secondary range that parallels the
main chain of volcanoes. Thence northward there are a number of
scattered huts between 15,500 and 16,500 feet (4,700 and 5,000 m.),
until we reach the highest habitations of all at 17,100 feet (5,210m.).
[Illustration: FIG. 26--Regional diagram to show the physical relations
in the lava plateau of the Maritime Cordillera west of the continental
divide. For location, see Fig. 20. Trails lead up the intrenched
tributaries. If the irrigated bench (lower right corner) is large, a
town will be located on it. Shepherds’ huts are scattered about the edge
of the girdle of spurs. There is also a string of huts in the deep
sheltered head of each tributary. See also Fig. 29 for conditions on the
valley or canyon floor.]
The unpopulated belts of lava plateau bordering the entrenched valleys
are, however, as distinctly “sustenance” spaces, to use Penck’s term, as
the irrigated and fertile alluvial fans in the bottom of the valley.
This is well shown when the rains come and flocks of llamas and sheep
are driven forth from the valleys to the best pastures. It is equally
well shown by the distribution of the shepherds’ homes. These are not
down on the warm canyon floor, separated by a half-day’s journey from
the grazing. They are in the intrenched tributary valleys of Figure 26
or just within the rim of the canyon. It is not shelter from the cold
but from the wind that chiefly determines their location. They are also
kept near the rim of the canyon by the pressure of the farming
population from below. Every hundred feet of descent from the arid
plateau (Fig. 29) increases the water supply. Springs increase in number
and size; likewise belts of seepage make their appearance. The gradients
in many places diminish, and flattish spurs and shoulders interrupt the
generally steep descents of the canyon wall. Every change of this sort
has a real value to the farmer and means an enhanced price beyond the
ability of the poor shepherd to pay. If you ask a wealthy _hacendado_ on
the valley floor (Fig. 29), who it is that live in the huts above him,
he will invariably say “los Indios,” with a shrug meant to convey the
idea of poverty and worthlessness. Sometimes it is “los Indios pobres,”
or merely “los pobres.” Thus there is a vertical stratification of
society corresponding to the superimposed strata of climate and land.
At Salamanca (Fig. 62) I saw this admirably displayed under
circumstances of unusual interest. The floor and slopes of the valley
are more completely terraced than in any other valley I know of. In the
photograph, Fig. 30, which shows at least 2,500 feet of descent near the
town, one cannot find a single patch of surface that is not under
cultivation. The valley is simply filled with people to the limit of its
capacity. Practically all are Indians, but with many grades of wealth
and importance. When we rode out of the valley before daybreak, one
September morning in 1911, there was a dead calm, and each step upward
carried us into a colder stratum of air. At sunrise we had reached a
point about 2,000 feet above the town, or 14,500 feet (4,420 m.) above
sea level. We stood on the frost line. On the opposite wall of the
valley the line was as clearly marked out as if it had been an
irrigating canal. The light was so fully reflected from the millions of
frost crystals above it that both the mountainside and the valley slopes
were sparkling like a ruffled lake at sunrise. Below the frost line the
slopes were dark or covered with yellow barley and wheat stubble or
green alfalfa.
It happened that the frost line was near the line of division between
corn and potato cultivation and also near the line separating the steep
rough upper lands from the cultivable lower lands. Not a habitation was
in sight above us, except a few scattered miserable huts near broken
terraces, gullied by wet-weather streams and grown up to weeds and
brush. Below us were well-cultivated fields, and the stock was kept in
bounds by stone fences and corrals; above, the half-wild burros and
mules roamed about everywhere, and only the sheep and llamas were in
rude enclosures. Thus in a half hour we passed the frontier between the
agricultural folk below the frost line and the shepherd folk above it.
[Illustration: FIG. 27--Terraced valley slopes at Huaynacotas, Cotahuasi
Valley, Peru. Elevation 11,500 feet (3,500 m.).]
[Illustration: FIG. 28--The highly cultivated and thoroughly terraced
floor of the Ollantaytambo Valley at Ollantaytambo. This is a tributary
of the Urubamba; elevation, 11,000 feet.]
[Illustration: FIG. 29--Cotahuasi on the floor of the Cotahuasi canyon.
The even skyline of the background is on a rather even-topped lava
plateau. The terrace on the left of the town is formed on limestone,
which is overlain by lava flows. A thick deposit of terraced alluvium
may be seen on the valley floor, and it is on one of the lower terraces
that the city of Cotahuasi stands. The higher terraces are in many cases
too dry for cultivation. The canyon is nearly 7,000 feet (2,130 m.) deep
and has been cut through one hundred principal lava flows.]
In a few spots the line followed an irregular course, as where flatter
lands were developed at unusual elevations or where air drainage altered
the normal temperature. And at one place the frost actually stood on
the young corn, which led us to speculate on the possibility of securing
from Salamanca a variety of maize that is more nearly resistant to light
frosts than any now grown in the United States. In the endless and
largely unconscious experimentation of these folk perched on the valley
walls a result may have been achieved ahead of that yet reached by our
professional experimenters. Certain it is that nowhere else in the world
has the potato been grown under such severe climatic conditions as in
its native land of Peru and Bolivia. The hardiest varieties lack many
qualities that we prize. They are small and bitter. But at least they
will grow where all except very few cultivated plants fail, and they are
edible. Could they not be imported into Canada to push still farther
northward the limits of cultivation? Potatoes are now grown at Forts
Good Hope and McPherson in the lower Mackenzie basin. Would not the
hardiest Peruvian varieties grow at least as far north as the
continental timber line? I believe they could be grown still farther
north. They will endure repeated frosts. They need scarcely any
cultivation. Prepared in the Peruvian manner, as _chuño_, they could be
kept all winter. Being light, the meal derived from them could be easily
packed by hunters and prospectors. An Indian will carry in a pouch
enough to last him a week. Why not use it north of the continental limit
of other cultivated plants since it is the pioneer above the frost line
on the Peruvian mountains?
The relation between farmer and shepherd or herdsman grows more complex
where deeper valleys interrupt the highlands and mountains. The
accompanying sketch, Fig. 32, represents typical relations, though based
chiefly on the Apurimac canyon and its surroundings near Pasaje. First
there is the snow-clad region at the top of the country. Below it are
grassy slopes, the homes of mountain shepherds, or rugged mountain
country unsuited for grazing. Still lower there is woodland, in patches
chiefly, but with a few large continuous tracts. The shady sides of the
ravines and the mountains have the most moisture, hence bear the densest
growths. Finally, the high country terminates in a second belt of
pasture below the woodland.
[Illustration: FIG. 32--Regional diagram representing the deep canyoned
country west of the Eastern Cordillera in the region of the Apurimac.
For photograph see Fig. 94. For further description see note on regional
diagrams, p. 51. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 correspond in position to the same
numbers in Fig. 33.]
[Illustration: FIG. 30--Terraced hill slopes near Salamanca. There is no
part of the photograph which is not covered with terraces save a few
places where bushy growths are visible or where torrents descend through
artificial canals.]
[Illustration: FIG. 31--Alpine pastures in the mountain valley between
Chuquibambilla and Lambrama. Huge stone corrals are built on either
slope, sheltered from the night winds that blow down-valley.]
Whenever streams descend from the snow or woodland country there is
water for the stock above and for irrigation on the alluvial fan below.
But the spur ends dropping off abruptly several thousand feet have a
limited area and no running streams, and the ground water is hundreds of
feet down. There is grass for stock, but there is no water. In some
places the stock is driven back and forth every few days. In a few
places water is brought to the stock by canal from the woodland streams
above, as at Corralpata.[7] In the same way a canal brings water to
Pasaje hacienda from a woodland strip many miles to the west. The little
canal in the figure is almost a toy construction a few inches wide and
deep and conveying only a trickle of water. Yet on it depends the
settlement at the spur end, and if it were cut the people would have to
repair it immediately or establish new homes.
[Illustration: FIG. 33--Valley climates of the canyoned region shown in
Fig. 32.]
The canal and the pasture are possible because the slopes are moderate.
They were formed in an earlier cycle of erosion when the land was lower.
They are hung midway between the rough mountain slopes above and the
steep canyon walls below (Fig. 32). Their smooth descents and gentle
profiles are in very pleasing contrast to the rugged scenery about them.
The trails follow them easily. Where the slopes are flattest, farmers
have settled and produce good crops of corn, vegetables, and barley.
Some farmers have even developed three-and four-story farms. On an
alluvial fan in the main valley they raise sugar cane and tropical and
subtropical fruits; on the flat upper slopes they produce corn; in the
moister soil near the edge of the woodland are fields of mountain
potatoes; and the upper pastures maintain flocks of sheep. In one
district this change takes place in a distance that may be covered in
five hours. Generally it is at least a full and hard day’s journey from
one end of the series to the other.
Wherever these features are closely associated they tend to be
controlled by the planter in some deep valley thereabouts. Where they
are widely scattered the people are independent, small groups living in
places nearly inaccessible. Legally they are all under the control of
the owners of princely tracts that take in the whole country, but the
remote groups are left almost wholly to themselves. In most cases they
are supposed to sell their few commercial products to the _hacendado_
who nominally owns their land, but the administration of this
arrangement is left largely to chance. The shepherds and small farmers
near the plantation are more dependent upon the planter for supplies,
and also their wants are more varied and numerous. Hence they pay for
their better location in free labor and in produce sold at a discount.
So deep are some of the main canyons, like the Apurimac and the
Cotahuasi, that their floors are arid or semi-arid. The fortunes of
Pasaje are tied to a narrow canal from the moist woodland and a tiny
brook from a hollow in the valley wall. Where the water has thus been
brought down to the arable soil of the fans there are rich plantations
and farms. Elsewhere, however, the floor is quite dry and uncultivated.
In small spots here and there is a little seepage, or a few springs, or
a mere thread of water that will not support a plantation, wherefore
there have come into existence the valley herdsmen and shepherds. Their
intimate knowledge of the moist places is their capital, quite as much
as are the cattle and sheep they own. In a sense their lands are the
neglected crumbs from the rich man’s table. So we find the shepherd from
the hills invading the valleys just as the valley farmer has invaded the
country of the shepherd.
[Illustration: FIG. 34--Regional diagram to show the typical physical
conditions and relations in an intermont basin in the Peruvian Andes.
The Cuzco basin (see Fig. 37) is an actual illustration; it should,
however, be emphasized that the diagram is not a “map” of that basin,
for whilst conditions there have been utilized as a basis, the
generalization has been extended to illustrate many basins.]
The basin type of topography calls into existence a set of relations
quite distinct from either of those we have just described. Figure 34
represents the main facts. The rich and comparatively flat floor of the
basin supports most of the people. The alluvial fans tributary thereto
are composed of fine material on their outer margin and of coarse stony
waste at their heads. Hence the valley farms also extend over the edges
of the fans, while only pasture or dense chaparral occupies the upper
portions. Finally there is the steep margin of the basin where the
broad and moderate slopes of the highland break down to the floor of the
basin.
[Illustration: FIG. 35--Climatic cross-section showing the location of
various zones of cultivation and pasture in a typical intermont basin in
the Peruvian Andes. The thickness of the dark symbols on the right is
proportional to the amount of each staple that is produced at the
corresponding elevation. See also the regional diagram Fig. 34.]
If a given basin lies at an elevation exceeding 14,000 feet (4,270 m.),
there will be no cultivation, only pasture. If at 10,000 or 11,000 feet
(3,000 or 3,350 m.), there will be grain fields below and potato fields
above (Figs. 34 and 35). If still lower, fruit will come in and finally
sugar cane and many other subtropical products, as at Abancay. Much will
also depend upon the amount of available water and the extent of the
pasture land. Thus the densely populated Cuzco basin has a vast mountain
territory tributary to it and is itself within the limits of barley and
wheat cultivation. Furthermore there are a number of smaller basins,
like the Anta basin on the north, which are dependent upon its better
markets and transportation facilities. A dominance of this kind is
self-stimulating and at last is out of all proportion to the original
differences of nature. Cuzco has also profited as the gateway to the
great northeastern valley region of the Urubamba and its big
tributaries. All of the varied products of the subtropical valleys find
their immediate market at Cuzco.
The effect of this natural conspiracy of conditions has been to place
the historic city of Cuzco in a position of extraordinary importance.
Hundreds of years before the Spanish Conquest it was a center of
far-reaching influence, the home of the powerful Inca kings. From it the
strong arm of authority and conquest was extended; to it came tribute
of grain, wool, and gold. To one accustomed to look at such great
consequences as having at least some ultimate connection with the earth,
the situation of Cuzco would be expected to have some unique features.
With the glorious past of that city in mind, no one can climb to the
surrounding heights and look down upon the fertile mountain-rimmed plain
as at an ordinary sight (Fig. 37). The secret of those great conquests
lies not only in mind but in matter. If the rise of the Incas to power
was not related to the topography and climate of the Cuzco basin, at
least it is certain that without so broad and noble a stage the scenes
would have been enacted on a far different scale.
The first Inca king and the Spanish after the Incas found here no mobile
nomadic tribes melting away at the first touch, no savages hiding in
forest fastnesses, but a well-rooted agricultural race in whose center a
large city had grown up. Without a city and a fertile tributary plain no
strong system of government could be maintained or could even arise. It
is a great advantage in ruling to have subjects that cannot move. The
agricultural Indians of the Andean valleys and basins, in contrast to
the mobile shepherd, are as fixed as the soil from which they draw their
life.
The full occupation of the pasture lands about the Cuzco basin is in
direct relation to the advantages we have already enumerated. Every part
of the region feels the pressure of population. Nowhere else in the
Peruvian Andes are the limits between cultivation and grazing more
definitely drawn than here. Moreover, there is today a marked difference
between the types that inhabit highland and basin. The basin Indian is
either a debauched city dweller or, as generally, a relatively alert
farmer. The shepherds are exceedingly ignorant and live for the most
part in a manner almost as primitive as at the time of the Conquest.
They are shy and suspicious. Many of them prefer a life of isolation and
rarely go down to the town. They live on the fringe of culture. The new
elements of their life have come to them solely by accident and by what
might be called a process of ethnic seepage. The slight advances that
have been made do not happen by design, they merely happen. Put the
highland shepherd in the basin and he would starve in competition with
the basin type. Undoubtedly he would live in the basin if he could. He
has not been driven out of the basin; he is kept out.
And thus it is around the border of the Abancay basin and others like
it. Only, the Abancay basin is lower and more varied as to resources.
The Indian is here in competition with the capitalistic white planter.
He lives on the land by sufferance alone. Farther up the slopes are the
farms of the Indians and above them are the pastures of the ignorant
shepherds. Whereas the Indian farmer who raises potatoes clings chiefly
to the edge of the Cuzco basin where lie the most undesirable
agricultural lands, the Indian farmers of Abancay live on broad rolling
slopes like those near the pass northward toward Huancarama. They are
unusually prosperous, with fields so well cultivated and fenced, so
clean and productive, that they remind one somewhat of the beautiful
rolling prairies of Iowa.
It remains to consider the special topographic features of the mountain
environments we are discussing, in the Vilcapampa region on the eastern
border of the Andes (Fig. 36). The Cordillera Vilcapampa is
snow-crested, containing a number of fine white peaks like Salcantay,
Soray, and Soiroccocha (Fig. 140). There are many small glaciers and a
few that are several miles long. There was here in glacial times a much
larger system of glaciers, which lived long enough to work great changes
in the topography. The floors of the glaciated valleys were smoothed and
broadened and their gradients flattened (Figs. 137 and 190). The side
walls were steepened and precipitous cirques were formed at the valley
heads. Also, there were built across the valleys a number of stony
morainic ridges. With all these changes there was, however, but little
effect upon the main masses of the big intervalley spurs. They remain as
before--bold, wind-swept, broken, and nearly inaccessible.
[Illustration: FIG. 36--Regional diagram for the Eastern Cordillera or
Cordillera Vilcapampa. Note the crowded zones on the right (east and
north) in contrast to the open succession on the left. In sheltered
places woodland extends even higher than shown. At several points
patches of it grow right under the snowline. Other patches grow on the
floors of the glaciated valley troughs.]
The work of the glaciers aids the mountain people. The stony moraines
afford them handy sizable building material for their stone huts and
their numerous corrals. The thick tufts of grass in the marshy spots in
the overdeepened parts of the valleys furnish them with grass for their
thatched roofs. And, most important of all, the flat valley floors have
the best pasture in the whole mountain region. There is plenty of water.
There is seclusion, and, if a fence be built from one valley wall to
another as can be done with little labor, an entire section of the
valley may be inclosed. A village like Choquetira, located on a bench on
the valley side, commands an extensive view up and down the valley--an
important feature in a grazing village where the corrals cannot always
be built near the houses of the owners. Long, finger-like belts of
highland-shepherd population have thus been extended into the mountain
valleys. Sheep and llamas drift right up to the snowline.
There is, however, a marked difference between the people on opposite
sides of the Cordillera Vilcapampa. On the west the mountains are
bordered by a broad highland devoted to grazing. On the east there is a
narrower grazing belt leading abruptly down to tropical valleys. The
eastern or leeward side is also the warmer and wetter side of the
Cordillera. The snowline is several hundred feet lower on the east. The
result is that patches of scrub and even a little woodland occur almost
at the snowline in favored places. Mist and storms are more frequent.
The grass is longer and fresher. Vegetation in general is more abundant.
The people make less of wool than of cattle, horses, and mules.
Vilcabamba pueblo is famous for its horses, wiry, long-haired little
beasts, as hardy as Shetland ponies. We found cattle grazing only five
hundred feet below the limit of perpetual snow. There are cultivated
spots only a little farther down, and only a thousand feet below the
snow are abandoned terraces. At the same elevation are twisted quenigo
trees, at least two hundred years old, as shown by their rings of
growth. Thus the limits of agriculture are higher on the east; likewise
the limits of cattle grazing that naturally goes with agriculture. Sheep
would thrive, but llamas do better in drier country, and the shepherd
must needs mix his flocks, for the wool which is his chief product
requires transportation and only the cheap and acclimated llama is at
the shepherd’s disposal. From these facts it will be seen that the
anthropo-geographic contrasts between the eastern and western sides of
the Cordillera Vilcapampa are as definite as the climatic and vegetal
contrasts. This is especially well shown in the differences between dry
Arma, deep-sunk in a glaciated valley west of the crest of the
mountains, and wet Puquiura, a half-day’s journey east of the crest.
There is no group on the east at all comparable to the shepherds of
Choquetira, either in the matter of thorough-going dependence upon
grazing or in that of dependence upon glacial topography.
[Illustration: FIG. 37--Cuzco and a portion of the famous Cuzco basin
with bordering grassy highlands.]
[Illustration: FIG. 38--Terraced valley slopes and floor, Urubamba
Valley between Urubamba and Ollantaytambo.]
[Illustration: FIG. 39--Huichihua, near Chuquibambilla, a typical
mountain village, in the valleys of the Central Ranges, Peruvian Andes.]
[Illustration: FIG. 40--Potato fluid above Vilcabamba at 12,000 feet
(3,660 m.). The natural sod is broken by a steel-shod stick and the seed
potato dropped into a mere puncture. It receives no attention thereafter
until harvest time.]
Topography is not always so intimately related to the life of the people
as here. In our own country the distribution of available water is a far
greater factor. The Peruvian Andes therefore occupy a distinctive place
in geography, since, more nearly than in most mountains, their physical
conditions have typical human relations that enable one clearly to
distinguish the limits of control of each feature of climate or relief.
CHAPTER VI
THE BORDER VALLEYS OF THE EASTERN ANDES
[Illustration: FIG. 41--Regional diagram of the eastern aspect of the
Cordillera Vilcapampa. See also Fig. 17 of which this is an enlarged
section.]
On the northeastern border of the Peruvian Andes long mountain spurs
trail down from the regions of snow to the forested plains of the
Amazon. Here are the greatest contrasts in the physical and human
geography of the Andean Cordillera. So striking is the fact that every
serious student of Peru finds himself compelled to cross and recross
this natural frontier. The thread of an investigation runs irregularly
now into one border zone, now into another. Out of the forest came the
fierce marauders who in the early period drove back the Inca pioneers.
Down into the forest to escape from the Spaniards fled the last Inca and
his fugitive court. Here the Jesuit fathers sowed their missions along
the forest margin, and watched over them for two hundred years. From the
mountain border one rubber project after another has been launched into
the vast swampy lowlands threaded by great rivers. As an ethnic boundary
the eastern mountain border of Peru and Bolivia has no equal elsewhere
in South America. From the earliest antiquity the tribes of the
grass-covered mountains and the hordes of the forested plains have had
strongly divergent customs and speech, that bred enduring hatred and led
to frequent and bloody strife.
[Illustration: FIG. 42--Rug weaver at Cotahuasi. The industry is limited
to a small group of related families, living in the Cotahuasi Canyon
near Cotahuasi. The rugs are made of alpaca wool. Pure black, pure
white, and various shades of mixed gray wool are employed. The result is
that the rugs have “fast” colors that always retain their original
contrasts. They are made only to order at the homes of the purchasers.
The money payment is small, but to it is added board and lodging,
besides tobacco, liqueurs, and wine. Before drinking they dip their
finger-tips in the wine and sprinkle the earth “that it may be
fruitful,” the air “that it may be warm,” the rug “that it may turn out
well,” and finally themselves, making the sign of the cross. Then they
set to work.]
[Illustration: FIG. 43--The floor of the Urubamba Valley from Tarai. The
work of the glaciers was not confined to the lofty situations. Mountain
débris was delivered to all the streams, many of which aggraded their
floors to a depth of several hundred feet, thus increasing the extent of
arable soil at elevations where a less rigorous climate permits the
production of crops and encourages intensive cultivation.]
On the steepest spurs of the Pampaconas Valley the traveler may go from
snow to pasture in a half day and from pasture to forest in the same
time. Another day he is in the hot zone of the larger valley floors, the
home of the Machigangas. The steep descents bring out the superimposed
zones with diagrammatic simplicity. The timber line is as sharply marked
as the edge of a cultivated field. At a point just beyond the huts of
Pampaconas one may stand on a grassy spur that leads directly up--a
day’s journey--to the white summits of the Cordillera Vilcapampa. Yet so
near him is the edge of the forest that he is tempted to try to throw a
stone into it. In an hour a bitter wind from the mountains may drive him
to shelter or a cold fog come rolling up from the moist region below. It
is hard to believe that oppressive heat is felt in the valley just
beneath him.
In the larger valleys the geographic contrasts are less sharp and the
transition from mountains to plain, though less spectacular, is much
more complex and scientifically interesting. The forest types
interfinger along the shady and the sunny slopes. The climate is so
varied that the forest takes on a diversified character that makes it
far more useful to man. The forest Indians and the valley planters are
in closer association. There are many islands and peninsulas of plateau
population on the valley floor. Here the zones of climate and the belts
of fertile soil have larger areas and the land therefore has greater
economic value. Much as the valley people need easier and cheaper
communication with the rest of Peru it is no exaggeration to say that
the valley products, are needed far more by the coast and plateau
peoples to make the republic self-supporting. Coca, wood, sugar, fruit,
are in such demand that their laborious and costly transportation from
the valleys to the plateau is now carried on with at least some profit
to the valley people. Improved transportation would promote travel and
friendship and supply a basis for greater political unity.
A change in these conditions is imminent. Years ago the Peruvian
government decreed the construction of a railway from Cuzco to Santa Ana
and preliminary surveys were made but without any immediate practical
effect. By June, 1914, 12.4 miles (20 km.) had been opened to traffic.
The total length of the proposed line is 112 miles (180 km.), the gauge
is to be only 2.46 feet (75 cm.),[8] and the proposed cost several
millions of dollars. The financial problem may be solved either by a
diversion of local revenues, derived from taxes on coca and alcohol, or
by borrowed foreign capital guaranteed by local revenues.
A shrubby vegetation is scattered along the valley from the village of
Urubamba, 12,000 feet (3,658 m.) above sea level, to the Canyon of
Torontoy. It is local and of little value. Trees appear at
Ollantaytambo, 11,000 feet (3,353 m.), and here too are more extensive
wheat and maize fields besides throngs of cacti and great patches of
wild geraniums. On our valley journey we camped in pleasant fields
flanked by steep hills whose summits each morning were tipped with snow.
Enormous alluvial fans have partly filled up the valleys and furnished
broad tracts of fertile soil. The patient farmers have cleared away the
stones on the flatter portions and built retaining walls for the smooth
fields required for irrigation. In places the lower valley slopes are
terraced in the most regular manner (Fig. 38). Some of the fans are too
steep and stony for cultivation, exposing bare tracts which wash down
and cover the fields. Here and there are stone walls built especially to
retain the rush of mud and stones that the rains bring down. Many of
them were overthrown or completely buried. Unless the stream channels on
the fans are carefully watched and effective works kept up, the labor of
years may be destroyed in a single slide from the head of a steep fan.
Each group of fans has a population proportioned to its size and
fertility. If there are broad expanses a town like Urubamba or a great
hacienda like Huadquiña is sure to be found. One group of huge stony
fans below Urubamba (Fig. 180) has only a thin population, for the soil
is coarse and infertile and the rivers deeply intrenched. In some places
the tiny fans perched high upon the flanks of the mountains where little
tributaries burst out of steep ravines are cultivated by distant owners
who also till parts of the larger fans on the main valley floors.
Between the fans of the valley bottoms and the smooth slopes of the high
plateaus are the unoccupied lands--the steep canyon walls. Only in the
most highly favored places where a small bench or a patch of alluvium
occurs may one find even an isolated dwelling. The stair-like trails, in
some places cut in solid rock, zigzag up the rocky slopes. An ascent of
a thousand feet requires about an hour’s travel with fresh beasts. The
valley people are therefore walled in. If they travel it is surely not
for pleasure. Even business trips are reduced to the smallest number.
The prosperity and happiness of the valley people are as well known
among the plateau people as is their remarkable bread. Their climate has
a combination of winter rain and winter cold with light frosts that is
as favorable for good wheat as the continuous winter cold and snow cover
of our northern Middle West. The colder grainfields of the plateau are
sowed to barley chiefly, though there is also produced some wheat.
Urubamba wheat and bread are exported in relatively large quantities,
and the market demands greater quantities than the valley can supply.
Oregon and Washington flour are imported at Cuzco, two days’ muleback
journey from the wheat fields of Urubamba.
Such are the conditions in the upper Urubamba Valley. The lower valley,
beginning at Huadquiña, is 8,000 feet (2,440 m.) above sea level and
extends down to the two-thousand-foot contour at Rosalina and to one
thousand feet (305 m.) at Pongo de Mainique. The upper and lower
sections are only a score of miles (30 km.) apart between Huadquiña and
Torontoy, but there is a difference in elevation of three thousand feet
(915 m.) at just the level where the maximum contrasts are produced. The
cold timber line is at 10,500 feet (3,200 m.).[9] Winter frosts are
common at the one place; they are absent altogether at the other.
Torontoy produces corn; Huadquiña produces sugar cane.
These contrasts are still further emphasized by the sharp topographic
break between the two unlike portions of the valley. A few miles below
Torontoy the Urubamba plunges into a mile-deep granite canyon. The walls
are so close together that it is impossible from the canyon floor to get
into one photograph the highest and steepest walls. At one place there
is over a mile of descent in a horizontal distance of 2,000 feet. Huge
granite slabs fall off along joint planes inclined but 15° from the
vertical. The effect is stupendous. The canyon floor is littered with
coarse waste and the gradient of the river greatly steepened. There is
no cultivation. The trees cling with difficulty to patches of rock waste
or to the less-inclined slopes. There is a thin crevice vegetation that
outlines the joint pattern where seepage supplies the venturesome roots
with moisture. Man has no foothold here, save at the top of the country,
as at Machu Picchu, a typical fortress location safeguarded by the
virtually inaccessible canyon wall and connected with the main ridge
slopes only by an easily guarded narrow spur. Toward the lower end of
the canyon a little finer alluvium appears and settlement begins.
Finally, after a tumble of three thousand feet over countless rapids the
river emerges at Colpani, where an enormous mass of alluvium has been
dumped. The well-intrenched river has already cut a large part of it
away. A little farther on is Huadquiña in the Salcantay Valley, where a
tributary of the Urubamba has built up a sheet of alluvial land, bright
green with cane. From the distant peaks of Salcantay and its neighbors
well-fed streams descend to fill the irrigation channels. Thus the snow
and rock-waste of the distant mountains are turned into corn and sugar
on the valley lowlands.
[Illustration: FIG. 44--The snow-capped Cordillera Vilcapampa north of
Yucay and the upper canyon of the Urubamba from the wheat fields near
Chinchero. In the foreground is one of the well-graded mature slopes of
Fig. 123. The crests of the mountains lie along the axis of a granite
intrusion. The extent of the snowfields is extraordinary in view of the
low latitude, 13° S.]
[Illustration: FIG. 45--Rounded slopes due to glacial action at
Pampaconas in the Pampaconas Valley near Vilcabamba. A heavy tropical
forest extends up the Pampaconas Valley to the hill slopes in the
background. Its upper limit of growth is about 10,000 feet (3,050 m.).
The camera is pointed slightly downhill.]
[Illustration: FIG. 46--Hacienda Huadquiña in the Salcantay Valley a
short distance above its junction with the Urubamba, elevation 8,000
feet (2,440 m.). The cultivated fields are all planted to sugar cane.
The mountain slopes are devoted to grazing.]
The Cordillera Vilcapampa is a climatic as well as a topographic
barrier. The southwestern aspect is dry; the northeastern aspect
forested. The gap of the canyon, it should be noticed, comes at a
critical level, for it falls just above the upper border of the zone of
maximum precipitation. The result is that though mists are driven
through the canyon by prolonged up-valley winds, they scatter on
reaching the plateau or gather high up on the flanks of the valley or
around the snowy peaks overlooking the trail between Ollantaytambo and
Urubamba. The canyon walls are drenched with rains and even some of the
lofty spurs are clothed with dense forest or scrub.
Farther down the valley winds about irregularly, now pushed to one side
by a huge alluvial fan, now turned by some resistant spur of rock.
Between the front range of the Andes and the Cordillera Vilcapampa there
is a broad stretch of mountain country in the lee of the front range
which rises to 7,000 feet (2,134 m.) at Abra Tocate (Fig. 15), and falls
off to low hills about Rosalina. It is all very rough in that there are
nowhere any flats except for the narrow playa strips along the streams.
The dense forest adds to the difficulty of movement. In general
appearance it is very much like the rugged Cascade country of Oregon
except that the Peruvian forest is much more patchy and its trees are in
many places loaded with dense dripping moss which gives the landscape a
somber touch quite absent from most of the forests of the temperate
zone.
The fertility of the eastern valleys of Peru--the result of a union of
favorable climate and alluvial soil--has drawn the planter into this
remote section of the country, but how can he dispose of his products?
Even today with a railway to Cuzco from the coast it is almost
impossible for him to get his sugar and cacao to the outside world.[10]
How did he manage before even this railway was built? How could the
eastern valley planter live before there were any railways at all in
Peru? In part he has solved the problem as the moonshiner of Kentucky
tried to solve it, and from cane juice makes aguardiente (brandy). The
latter is a much more valuable product than sugar, hence (1) it will
bear a higher rate of transportation, or (2) it will at the same rate of
transportation yield a greater net profit. In a remote valley where
sugar could not be exported on account of high freight rates brandy
could still be profitably exported.
The same may be said for coca and cacao. They are condensed and valuable
products. Both require more labor than sugar but are lighter in bulk and
thus have to bear, in proportion to their value, a smaller share of the
cost of transportation. At the end of three years coca produces over a
ton of leaves per acre per year, and it can be made to produce as much
as two tons to the acre. The leaves are picked four times a year. They
are worth from eight to twelve cents gold a pound at the plantation or
sixteen cents a pound at Cuzco. An orchard of well-cultivated and
irrigated cacao trees will do even better. Once they begin to bear the
trees require relatively little care except in keeping out weeds and
brush and maintaining the water ditches. However, the pods must be
gathered at just the right time, the seeds must be raked and dried with
expert care, and after that comes the arduous labor of the grinding.
This is done by hand on an inclined plane with a heavy round stone whose
corners fit the hand. The chocolate must then be worked into cakes and
dried, or it must be sacked in heavy cowhide and sewed so as to be
practically air tight. When eight or ten years old the trees are mature
and each may then bear a thousand pounds of seed.
[Illustration: FIG. 47--The Urubamba Valley below Paltaybamba. Harder
rocks intruded into the schists that in general compose the valley walls
here form steep scarps. It has been suggested (Davis) that such a
constricted portion of a valley be called a “shut-in.” The old trail
climbed to the top of the valley and over the back of a huge spur. The
new road is virtually a tunnel blasted along the face of a cliff.]
[Illustration: FIG 48--Coca seed beds near Quillabamba, Urubamba Valley.
The young plants are grown under shade and after attaining a height of a
foot or more are gradually accustomed to sunlight and finally
transplanted to the fields that are to become coca orchards.]
If labor were cheap and abundant the whole trend of tropical agriculture
in the eastern valleys would be toward intensive cultivation and the
production of expensive exports. But labor is actually scarce. Every
planter must have agents who can send men down from the plateau towns.
And the planter himself must use his labor to the best advantage.
Aguardiente requires less labor than cacao and coca. The cane costs
about as much in labor the first year as the coca bush or the cacao
tree, but after that much less. The manufacture of brandy from the cane
juice requires little labor though much expensive machinery. For
chocolate, a storehouse, a grinding stone, and a rake are all that
are required. So the planter must work out his own salvation
individually. He must take account of the return upon investments in
machinery, of the number of hands he can command from among the “faena”
or free Indians, of the cost and number of imported hands from the
valley and plateau towns, and, finally, of the transportation rates
dependent upon the number of mules in the neighborhood, and distance
from the market. If in addition the labor is skilfully employed so as to
have the tasks which the various products require fall at different
periods of the year, then the planter may expect to make money upon his
time and get a return upon his initial investment in the land.[11]
[Illustration: FIG. 49--Fig tree formerly attached to a host but now
left standing on its stilt-like aërial roots owing to the decay of the
host.]
[Illustration: FIG. 50--A tiny rubber plant is growing under the tripod
made of yuca stems tied with banana leaves. Growing yuca is shown by the
naked stalks to the left and right of this canopy, and banana plants
fill the background. A plantation scene at Echarati.]
The type of tropical agriculture which we have outlined is profitable
for the few planters who make up the white population of the valleys,
but it has a deplorable effect upon the Indian population. Though the
planters, one and all, complain bitterly of the drunken habits of their
laborers, they themselves put into the hands of the Indians the means of
debauchery. Practically the whole production of the eastern valleys is
consumed in Peru. What the valleys do not take is sent to the plateau,
where it is the chief cause of vicious conduct. Two-thirds of the
prisoners in the city jails are drunkards, and, to be quite plain, they
are virtually supplied with brandy by the planter, who could not
otherwise make enough money. So although the planter wants more and
better labor he is destroying the quality of the little there is, and,
if not actually reducing the quantity of it, he is at least very
certainly reducing the rate of increase.
The difficulties of the valley planter could be at least partly overcome
in several ways. The railway will reduce transportation costs,
especially when the playas of the valleys are all cleared and the
exports increased. Moreover the eastern valleys are capable of
producing things of greater utility than brandy and coca leaves. So far
as profits are increased by cheaper transportation we may expect the
planter to produce more rather than less of brandy and coca, his two
most profitable exports, unless other products can be found that are
still more profitable. The ratio of profits on sugar and brandy will
still be the same unless the government increases the tax on brandy
until it becomes no more profitable than sugar. That is what ought to be
done for the good of the Indian population. It cannot be done safely
without offering in its place the boon of cheaper railway transportation
for the sugar crop. Furthermore, with railway improvements should go the
blessings that agricultural experiments can bestow. A government farm in
a suitable place would establish rice and cotton cultivation. Many of
the playas or lower alluvial lands along the rivers can be irrigated.
Only a small fraction of the water of the Rio Urubamba is now turned out
upon the fields. For a large part of the year the natural rainfall would
suffice to keep rice in good condition. Six tons a year are now grown on
Hacienda Sahuayaco for local use on account of the heavy rate on rice
imported on muleback from Cuzco, whither it comes by sea and by trail
from distant coastal valleys. The lowland people also need rice and it
could be sent to them down river by an easier route than that over which
their supplies now come. It should be exported to the highlands, not
imported therefrom. There are so many varieties adapted to so many kinds
of soil and climate that large amounts should be produced at fair
profits.
The cotton plant, on the other hand, is more particular about climate
and especially the duration of dry and wet seasons; in spite of this its
requirements are all met in the Santa Ana Valley. The rainfall is
moderate and there is an abundance of dry warm soil. The plant could
make most of its growth in the wet season, and the four months of cooler
dry season with only occasional showers would favor both a bright staple
and a good picking season. More labor would be required for cotton and
rice and for the increased production of cacao than under the present
system. This would not be a real difficulty if the existing labor
supply were conserved by the practical abolition, through heavy
taxation, of the brandy that is the chief cause of the laborer’s vicious
habits. This is the first step in securing the best return upon the
capital invested in a railway. Economic progress is here bound up with a
very practical morality. Colonization in the eastern valleys, of which
there have been but a few dismal attempts, will only extend the field of
influence, it will not solve the real problem of bringing the people of
the rich eastern territory of Peru into full and honorable possession of
their natural wealth.
The value of the eastern valleys was known in Inca times, for their
stone-faced terraces and coca-drying patios may still be seen at
Echarati and on the border of the Chaupimayu Valley at Sahuayaco.
Tradition has it that here were the imperial coca lands, that such of
the forest Indians as were enslaved were obliged to work upon them, and
that the leaves were sent to Cuzco over a paved road now covered with
“montaña” or forest. The Indians still relate that at times a
mysterious, wavering, white light appears on the terraces and hills
where old treasure lies buried. Some of the Indians have gold and silver
objects which they say were dug from the floors of hill caves. There
appears to have been an early occupation of the best lands by the
Spaniards, for the long extensions down them of Quechua population upon
which the conquerors could depend no doubt combined with the special
products of the valley to draw white colonists thither.[12] General
Miller,[13] writing in 1836, mentions the villages of Incharate
(Echarati) and Sant’ Ana (Santa Ana) but discourages the idea of
colonization “... since the river ... has lofty mountains on either
side of it, and is not navigable even for boats.”
In the “Itinerario de los viajes de Raimondi en el Peru”[14] there is an
interesting account of the settlement by the Rueda family of the great
estate still held by a Rueda, the wife of Señor Duque. José Rueda, in
1829, was a government deputy representative and took his pay in land,
acquiring valuable territory on which there was nothing more than a
mission. In 1830 Rueda ceded certain lands in “arriendo” (rent) and on
these were founded the haciendas Pucamoco, Sahuayaco, etc.
Señor Gonzales, the present owner of Hacienda Sahuayaco, recently
obtained his land--a princely estate, ten miles by forty--for 12,000
soles ($6,000). In a few years he has cleared the best tract, built
several miles of canals, hewed out houses and furniture, planted coca,
cacao, cane, coffee, rice, pepper, and cotton, and would not sell for
$50,000. Moreover, instead of being a superintendent on a neighboring
estate and keeping a shop in Cuzco, where his large family was a source
of great expense, he has become a wealthy landowner. He has educated a
son in the United States. He is importing machinery, such as a rice
thresher and a distilling plant. His son is looking forward to the
purchase of still more playa land down river. He pays a sol a day to
each laborer, securing men from Cotabambas and Abancay, where there are
many Indians, a low standard of wages, little unoccupied land, and a hot
climate, so that the immigrants do not need to become acclimatized.
The deepest valleys in the Eastern Andes of Peru have a semi-arid
climate which brings in its train a variety of unusual geographic
relations. At first as one descends the valley the shady and sunny
slopes show sharply contrasted vegetation.
[Illustration: FIG. 51--Robledo’s mountain-side trail in the Urubamba
Valley below Rosalina.]
[Illustration: FIG. 52--An epiphyte partly supported by a dead host at
Rosalina, elevation 2,000 feet. The epiphyte bears a striking
resemblance to a horned beast whose arched back, tightly clasped
fingers, and small eyes give it a peculiarly malignant and life-like
expression.]
[Illustration: FIG. 53A--The smooth grassy slopes at the junction of the
Yanatili (left) and Urubamba (right) rivers near Pabellon.]
[Illustration: FIG. 53B--Distribution of vegetation in the Urubamba
Valley near Torontoy. The patches of timber in the background occupy the
shady sides of the spurs; the sunny slopes are grass-covered; the valley
floor is filled with thickets and patches of woodland but not true
forest.]
The one is forested, the other grass-covered. Slopes that receive the
noon and afternoon sun the greater part of the year are hottest and
therefore driest. For places in 11° south latitude the sun is well to
the north six months of the year, nearly overhead for about two months,
and to the south four months. Northwesterly aspects are therefore driest
and warmest, hence also grass-covered. In many places the line between
grass and forest is developed so sharply that it seems to be the
artificial edge of a cut-over tract. This is true especially if the
relief is steep and the hill or ridge-crests sharp.[15]
[Illustration: FIG. 54--Climatic cross-section from the crest of the
Cordillera Vilcapampa down the eastern mountain valleys to the tropical
plains.]
At Santa Ana this feature is developed in an amazingly clear manner, and
it is also combined with the dry timber line and with productivity in a
way I have never seen equaled elsewhere. The diagram will explain the
relation. It will be seen that the front range of the mountains is high
enough to shut off a great deal of rainfall. The lower hills and ridges
just within the front range are relatively dry. The deep valleys are
much drier. Each broad expansion of a deep valley is therefore a dry
pocket. Into it the sun pours even when all the surrounding hills and
mountains are wrapped in cloud. The greater number of hours of sunshine
hastens the rate of evaporation and still further increases the dryness.
Under the spur of much sunlight and of ample irrigation water from the
wetter hill slopes, the dry valley pockets produce huge crops of fruit
and cane.
The influence of the local climate upon tree growth is striking. Every
few days, even in the relatively dry winter season, clouds gather about
the hills and there are local showers. The lower limit of the zone of
clouds is sharply marked and at both Santa Ana and Echarati it is
strikingly constant in elevation--about five thousand feet above sea
level. From the upper mountains the forest descends, with only small
patches of glade and prairie. At the lower edge of the zone of cloud it
stops abruptly on the warmer and drier slopes that face the afternoon
sun and continues on the moister slopes that face the forenoon sun or
that slope away from the sun.
But this is not the only response the vegetation makes. The forest
changes in character as well as in distribution. The forest in the wet
zone is dense and the undergrowth luxuriant. In the selective slope
forest below the zone of cloud the undergrowth is commonly thin or
wanting and the trees grow in rather even-aged stands and by species.
Finally, on the valley floor and the tributary fans, there is a distinct
growth of scrub with bands of trees along the water courses. Local
tracts of coarse soil, or less rain on account of a deep “hole” in a
valley surrounded by steeper and higher mountains, or a change in the
valley trend that brings it into less free communication with the
prevailing winds, may still further increase the dryness and bring in a
true xerophytic or drought-resisting vegetation. Cacti are common all
through the Santa Ana Valley and below Sahuayaco there is a patch of
tree cacti and similar forms several square miles in extent. Still
farther down and about half-way between Sahuayaco and Pabellon are
immense tracts of grass-covered mountain slopes (Fig. 53). These extend
beyond Rosalina, the last of them terminating near Abra Tocate (Fig.
15). The sudden interruption is due to a turn in the valley giving
freer access to the up-valley winds that sweep through the pass at Pongo
de Mainique.
[Illustration: FIG. 55--Map to show the relation of the grasslands of
the dry lower portion of the Urubamba Valley (unshaded) to the forested
lands at higher elevations (shaded). See Fig. 54 for climatic
conditions. Patches and slender tongues of woodland occur below the main
timber line and patches of grassland above it.]
Northward from Abra Tocate (Fig. 55) the forest is practically
continuous. The break between the two vegetal regions is emphasized by a
corral for cattle and mules, the last outpost of the plateau herdsmen.
Not three miles away, on the opposite forested slope of the valley, is
the first of the Indian clearings where several families of Machigangas
spend the wet season when the lower river is in flood (Fig. 21). The
grass lands will not yield corn and coca because the soil is too thin,
infertile, and dry. The Indian farms are therefore all in the forest and
begin almost at its very edge. Here finally terminates a long peninsula
of grass-covered country. Below this point the heat and humidity rapidly
increase; the rains are heavier and more frequent; the country becomes
almost uninhabitable for stock; transportation rates double. Here is the
undisputed realm of the forest with new kinds of trees and products and
a distinctive type of forest-dwelling Indian.
At the next low pass is the skull of an Italian who had murdered his
companions and stolen a season’s picking of rubber, attempting to escape
by canoe to the lower Urubamba from the Pongo de Mainique. The
Machigangas overtook him in their swiftest dugouts, spent a night with
him, and the next morning shot him in the back and returned with their
rightful property--a harvest of rubber. For more than a decade
foreigners have been coming down from the plateau to exploit them. They
are an independent and free tribe and have simple yet correct ideas of
right and wrong. Their chief, a man of great strength of character and
one of the most likeable men I have known, told me that he placed the
skull in the pass to warn away the whites who came to rob honest
Indians.
The Santa Ana Valley between the Canyon of Torontoy and the heavy forest
belt below Rosalina is typical of many of the eastern valleys of Peru,
both in its physical setting and in its economic and labor systems.
Westward are the outliers of the Vilcapampa range; on the east are the
smaller ranges that front the tropical lowlands. Steep valleys descend
from the higher country to join the main valley and at the mouth of
every tributary is an alluvial fan. If the alluvium is coarse and
steeply inclined there is only pasture on it or a growth of scrub. If
fine and broad it is cleared and tilled. The sugar plantations begin at
Huadquiña and end at Rosalina. Those of Santa Ana and Echarati are the
most productive. It takes eighteen months for the cane to mature in the
cooler weather at Huadquiña (8,000 feet). Less than a year is required
at Santa Ana (3,400 feet). Patches of alluvium or playas, as they are
locally called, continue as far as Santo Anato, but they are cultivated
only as far as Rosalina. The last large plantation is Pabellon; the
largest of all is Echarati. All are irrigated. In the wet months,
December to March inclusive, there is little or no irrigation. In the
four months of the dry season, June to September inclusive, there is
frequent irrigation. Since the cane matures in about ten months the
harvest seasons fall irregularly with respect to the seasons of rain.
Therefore the land is cleared and planted at irregular intervals and
labor distributed somewhat through the year. There is however a
concentration of labor toward the end of the dry season when most of the
cane is cut for grinding.
The combined freight rate and government tax on coca, sugar, and brandy
take a large part of all that the planter can get for his crop. It is
120 miles (190 km.) from Santa Ana to Cuzco and it takes five days to
make the journey. The freight rate on coca and sugar for mule carriage,
the only kind to be had, is two cents per pound. The national tax is one
cent per pound (0.45 kg.). The coca sells for twenty cents a pound. The
cost of production is unknown, but the paid labor takes probably
one-half this amount. The planter’s time, capital, and profit must come
out of the rest. On brandy there is a national tax of seven cents per
liter (0.26 gallon) and a municipal tax of two and a half cents. It
costs five cents a liter for transport to Cuzco. The total in taxes and
transport is fourteen and a half cents a liter. It sells for twenty
cents a liter. Since brandy (aguardiente), cacao (for chocolate), and
coca leaves (for cocaine) are the only precious substances which the
valleys produce it takes but a moment’s inspection to see how onerous
these taxes would be to the planter if labor did not, as usual, pay the
penalty.
Much of the labor on the plantations is free of cost to the owner and is
done by the so-called _faena_ or free Indians. These are Quechuas who
have built their cabins on the hill lands of the planters, or on the
floors of the smaller valleys. The disposition of their fields in
relation to the valley plantations is full of geographic interest. Each
plantation runs at right angles to the course of the valley. Hacienda
Sahuayaco is ten miles (16 km.) in extent down valley and forty miles
(64 km.) from end to end across the valley, and it is one of the smaller
plantations! It follows that about ten square miles lie on the valley
floor and half of this can ultimately be planted. The remaining three
hundred and ninety square miles include some mountain country with
possible stores of mineral wealth, and a great deal of “fells”
country--grassy slopes, graded though steep, excellent for pasture, with
here and there patches of arable land. But the hill country can be
cultivated only by the small farmer who supplements his supply of food
from cultivated plants like potatoes, corn, and vegetables, by keeping
cattle, mules, pigs, and poultry, and by raising coca and fruit.
The Indian does not own any of the land he tills. He has the right
merely to live on it and to cultivate it. In return he must work a
certain number of days each year on the owner’s plantation. In many
cases a small money payment is also made to the planter. The planter
prefers labor to money, for hands are scarce throughout the whole
eastern valley region. No Indian need work on the planter’s land without
receiving pay directly therefor. Each also gets a small weekly allotment
of aguardiente while in the planter’s employ.
The scene every Saturday night outside the office of the _contador_
(treasurer) of a plantation is a novel one. Several hundred Indians
gather in the dark patio in front of the office. Within the circle of
the feeble candlelight that reaches only the margin of the crowd one may
see a pack of heavy, perspiring faces. Many are pock-marked from
smallpox; here and there an eye is missing; only a few are jovial. A
name is shouted through the open door and an Indian responds. He pulls
off his cap and stands stupid and blinking, while the contador asks:
“Faena” (free)?
“Si, Señor,” he answers.
“Un sol” (one “sol” or fifty cents gold). The assistant hands over the
money and the man gives way to the next one on the list. If he is a
laborer in regular and constant employ he receives five soles (two fifty
gold) per week. There are interruptions now and then. A ragged,
half-drunken man has been leaning against the door post, suspiciously
impatient to receive his money. Finally his name is called.
“Faena?” asks the contador.
“No, Señor, cinco (five) soles.”
At that the field _superintendente_ glances at his time card and speaks
up in protest.
“You were the man that failed to show up on Friday and Saturday. You
were drunk. You should receive nothing.”
“No, mi patrón,” the man contends, “I had to visit a sick cousin in the
next valley. Oh, he was very sick, Señor,” and he coughs harshly as if
he too were on the verge of prostration. The sick cousin, a faena
Indian, has been at work in another cane field on the same plantation
for two days and now calls out that he is present and has never had a
sick day in his life. Those outside laugh uproariously. The contador
throws down two soles and the drunkard is pushed back into the sweating
crowd, jostled right and left, and jeered by all his neighbors as he
slinks away grumbling.
Another Indian seems strangely shy. He scarcely raises his voice above a
whisper. He too is a faena Indian. The contador finds fault.
“Why didn’t you come last month when I sent for you?”
The Indian fumbles his cap, shuffles his feet, and changes his coca cud
from one bulging cheek to the other before he can answer. Then huskily:
“I started, Señor, but my woman overtook me an hour afterward and said
that one of the ewes had dropped a lamb and needed care.”
“But your woman could have tended it!”
“No, Señor, she is sick.”
“How, then, could she have overtaken you?” he is asked.
“She ran only a little way and then shouted to me.”
“And what about the rest of the month?” persists the contador.
“The other lambs came, Señor, and I should have lost them all if I had
left.”
The contador seems at the end of his complaint. The Indian promises to
work overtime. His difficulties seem at an end, but the superintendent
looks at his old record.
“He always makes the same excuse. Last year he was three weeks late.”
So the poor shepherd is fined a sol and admonished that his lands will
be given to some one else if he does not respond more promptly to his
patron’s call for work. He leaves behind him a promise and the rank
mixed smell of coca and much unwashed woolen clothing.
It is not alone at the work that they grumble. There is malaria in the
lower valleys. Some of them return to their lofty mountain homes
prostrated with the unaccustomed heat and alternately shaking with
chills and burning with fever. Without aid they may die or become so
weakened that tuberculosis carries them off. Only their rugged strength
enables the greater number to return in good health.
A plantation may be as large as a principality and draw its laborers
from places fifty miles away. Some of the more distant Indians need not
come to work in the canefields. Part of their flock is taken in place of
work. Or they raise horses and mules and bring in a certain number each
year to turn over to the patron. Hacienda Huadquiña (Fig. 46) takes in
all the land from the snow-covered summits of the Cordillera Vilcapampa
to the canefields of the Urubamba. Within the broad domain are half the
climates and occupations characteristic of Peru. It is difficult to see
how a thousand Indians can be held to even a mixed allegiance. It seems
impossible that word can be got to them. However the native “telegraph”
is even more perfect than that among the forest Indians. From one to the
other runs the news that they are needed in the canefields. On the trail
to and from a mountain village, in their ramblings from one high pasture
to another, within the dark walls of their stone and mud huts when they
gather for a feast or to exchange drinks of brandy and _chicha_--the
word is passed that has come up from the valleys.
For every hundred faena Indians there are five or six regular laborers
on the plantations, so with the short term passed by the faena Indians
their number is generally half that of the total laborers at work at any
one time. They live in huts provided for them by the planter, and in the
houses of their friends among the regular laborers. Here there are
almost nightly carousals. The regular laborer comes from the city or the
valley town. The faena laborer is a small hill farmer or shepherd. They
have much to exchange in the way of clothing, food, and news. I have
frequently had their conversations interpreted for me. They ask about
the flocks and the children, who passed along the trails, what accidents
befell the people.
“Last year,” droned one to another over their chicha, “last year we lost
three lambs in a hailstorm up in the high fields near the snow. It was
very cold. My foot cracked open and, though I have bound it with wet
coca leaves every night, it will not cure,” and he displays his heel,
the skin of which is like horn for hardness and covered with a crust of
dirt whose layers are a record of the weather and of the pools he has
waded for years.
Their wanderings are the main basis of conversation. They know the
mountains better than the condors do. We hired a small boy of twelve at
Puquiura. He was to build our fires, carry water, and help drive the
mules. He crossed the Cordillera Vilcapampa on foot with us. He
scrambled down into the Apurimac canyon and up the ten thousand feet of
ascent on the other side, twisted the tails of the mules, and shouted
more vigorously then the arrieros. He was engaged to go with us to
Pasaje, where his father would return with him in a month. But he
climbed to Huascatay with us and said he wanted to see Abancay. When an
Indian whom we pressed into service dropped the instruments on the trail
and fled into the brush the boy packed them like a man. The soldier
carried a tripod on his back. The boy, not to be outdone, insisted on
carrying the plane table, and to his delight we called him a soldier
too. He went with us to Huancarama. When I paid him he smiled at the
large silver soles that I put into his hand; and when I doubled the
amount for his willingness to work his joy was unbounded. Forthwith he
set out, this time on muleback, on the return journey. The last I saw of
him he was holding his precious soles in a handkerchief and kicking his
beast with his bare heels, as light-hearted as a cavalier. Often I find
myself wondering whether he returned safely with his money. I should
very much like to see him again, for with him I associate cheerfulness
in difficult places and many a pleasant camp-fire.
CHAPTER VII
THE GEOGRAPHIC BASIS OF REVOLUTIONS AND OF HUMAN CHARACTER IN THE
PERUVIAN ANDES
Human character as a spontaneous development has always been a great
factor in shaping historical events, but it is a striking fact that in
the world of our day its influence is exerted chiefly in the lowest and
highest types of humanity. The savage with his fetishes, his taboos, and
his inherent childlikeness and suspicion needs only whim or a slight
religious pretext to change his conduct. Likewise the really educated
and the thoughtful act from motives often wholly unrelated to economic
conditions or results. But the masses are deeply influenced by whatever
affects their material welfare. A purely idealistic impulse may
influence a people, but in time its effects are always displayed against
an economic background.
There is a way whereby we may test this theory. In most places in the
world we have history in the making, and through field studies we can
get an intimate view of it. It is peculiarly the province of geography
to study the present distribution and character of men in relation to
their surroundings and these are the facts of mankind that must forever
be the chief data of economic history. It is not vain repetition to say
that this means, first of all, the study of the character of men in the
fullest sense. It means, in the second place, that a large part of the
character must be really understood. Whenever this is done there is
found a geographic basis of human character that is capable of the
clearest demonstration. It is in the geographic environment that the
material motives of humanity have struck their deepest roots.
These conclusions might be illustrated from a hundred places in the
field of study covered in this book. Almost every chapter of Part I
contains facts of this character. I wish, however, to discuss the
subject specifically and for that purpose now turn to the conditions of
life in the remoter mountain valleys and to one or two aspects of the
revolutions that occur now and then in Peru. The last one terminated
only a few months before our arrival and it was a comparatively easy
matter to study both causes and effects.
A caution is necessary however. It is a pity that we use the term
“revolution” to designate these little disturbances. They affect
sometimes a few, again a few hundred men. Rarely do they involve the
whole country. A good many of them are on a scale much smaller than our
big strikes. Most of them involve a loss of life smaller than that which
accompanies a city riot. They are in a sense strikes against the
government, marked by local disorders and a little violence.
Early in 1911 the Prefect of the Department of Abancay had crowned his
long career by suppressing a revolution. He had been Subprefect at
Andahuaylas, and when the rebels got control of the city of Abancay and
destroyed some of the bridges on the principal trails, he promptly
organized a military expedition, constructed rafts, floated his small
force of men across the streams, and besieged the city. The rebel force
was driven at last to take shelter in the city jail opposite the
Prefectura. There, after the loss of half their number, they finally
surrendered. Seventy-five of them were sent to the government
penitentiary at Arequipa. Among the killed were sons from nearly half
the best families of Abancay. All of the rebels were young men.
It would be difficult to give an adequate idea of the hatred felt by the
townspeople toward the government. Every precaution was taken to prevent
a renewal of the outbreak. Our coming was telegraphed ahead by
government agents who looked with suspicion upon a party of men, well
armed and provisioned, coming up from the Pasaje crossing of the
Apurimac, three days’ journey north. The deep canyon affords shelter not
only to game, but also to fugitives, rebels, and bandits. The government
generally abandons pursuit on the upper edge of the canyon, for only a
prolonged guerilla warfare could completely subdue an armed force
scattered along its rugged walls and narrow floor. The owner of the
hacienda at Pasaje is required to keep a record of all passengers rafted
across the Apurimac, but he explains significantly that some who pass
are too hurried to write their names in his book. Once he reaches the
eastern wall of the canyon a fugitive may command a view of the entire
western wall and note the approach of pursuers. Thence eastward he has
the whole Cordillera Vilcapampa in which to hide. Pursuit is out of the
question.
When we arrived, the venerable Prefect, a model of old-fashioned
courtesy, greeted us with the utmost cordiality. He told us of our
movements since leaving Pasaje, and laughingly explained that since we
had sent him no friendly message and had come from a rebel retreat, he
had taken it for granted that we intended to storm the town. I assured
him that we were ready to join his troops, if necessary, whereupon, with
a delightful frankness, he explained his method of keeping the situation
in hand. Several troops of cavalry and two battalions of infantry were
quartered at the government barracks. Every evening the old gentleman, a
Colonel in the Peruvian army, mounted a powerful gray horse and rode,
quite unattended, through the principal streets of the town. Several
times I walked on foot behind him, again I preceded him, stopping in
shops on the way to make trivial purchases, to find out what the people
had to say about him and the government as he rode by. One old gentleman
interested me particularly. He had only the day before called at the
Prefectura to pay his respects. Although his manner was correct there
was lacking to a noticeable degree the profusion of sentiment that is
apt to be exhibited on such an occasion. He now sat on a bench in a
shop. Both his own son and the shopkeeper’s son had been slain in the
revolution. It was natural that they should be bitter. But the precise
nature of their complaint was what interested me most. One said that he
did not object to having his son lose his life for his country. But that
his country’s officials should hire Indians to shoot his son seemed to
him sheer murder. Later, at Lambrama, I talked with a rebel fugitive,
and that was also his complaint. The young men drafted into the army are
Indians, or mixed, never whites. White men, and men with a small
amount of Indian blood, officer the army. When a revolutionary party
organizes it is of course made up wholly of men of white and mixed
blood, never Indians. The Indians have no more grievance against one
white party than another. Both exploit him to the limit of law and
beyond the limit of decency. He fights if he must, but never by choice.
[Illustration: FIG. 56--The type of forest in the moister tracts of the
valley floor at Sahuayaco. In the center of the photograph is a tree
known as the “sandy matico” used in making canoes for river navigation.]
[Illustration: FIG. 57--Arboreal cacti in the mixed forest of the dry
valley floor below Sahuayaco.]
[Illustration: FIG. 58--Crossing the Apurimac at Pasaje. These are
mountain horses, small and wiry, with a protective coat of long hair.
They are accustomed to graze in the open without shelter during the
entire winter.]
[Illustration: FIG. 59--Crossing the Apurimac at Pasaje. The mules are
blindfolded and pushed off the steep bank into the water and rafted
across.]
Thus Indian troops killed the white rebels of Abancay.
“Tell me, Señor,” said the fugitive, “if you think that just. Tell me
how many Indians you think a white man worth. Would a hundred dead
Indians matter? But how replace a white man where there are so few? The
government _assassinated_ my compatriots!”
“But,” I replied, “why did you fight the government? All of you were
prosperous. Your fathers may have had a grievance against the
government, but of what had you young men to complain?”
His reply was far from convincing. He was at first serious, but his long
abstract statements about taxes and government wastefulness trailed off
into vagueness, and he ended in a laughing mood, talking about
adventure, the restless spirit of young men, and the rich booty of
confiscated lands and property had the rebels won. He admitted that it
was a reckless game, but when I called him a mere soldier of fortune he
grew serious once more and reverted to the iniquitous taxation system of
Peru. Further inquiry made it quite clear that the ill-fated revolution
of Abancay was largely the work of idle young men looking for adventure.
It seemed a pity that their splendid physical energy could not have been
turned into useful channels. The land sorely needs engineers,
progressive ranchmen and farmers, upright officials, and a spirit of
respect for law and order. Old men talked of the unstable character of
the young men of the time, but almost all of them had themselves been
active participants in more than one revolution of earlier years.
Every night at dinner the Prefect sent off by government telegraph a
long message to the President of the Republic on the state of the
Department, and received similar messages from the central government
about neighboring departments. These he read to us, and, curiously
enough, to the entire party, made up of army officers and townsmen. I
was surprised to find later that the company included one government
official whose son had been among the imprisoned rebels at Arequipa. We
met the young man a week later at a mountain village, a day after a
general amnesty had been declared. His escape had been made from the
prison a month before. He forcibly substituted the mess-boy’s clothing
for his own, and thus passed out unnoticed. After a few days’ hiding in
the city, he set out alone across the desert of Vitor, thence across the
lofty volcanic country of the Maritime Andes, through some of the most
deserted, inhospitable land in Peru, and at the end of three weeks had
reached Lambrama, near Abancay, the picture of health!
Later I came to have a better notion of the economic basis of the
revolution, for obviously the planters and the reckless young men must
have had a mutual understanding. Somewhere the rebels had obtained the
sinews of war. The planters did not take an open part in the revolution,
but they financed it. When the rebels were cru
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/42860