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PART I

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

PART II

PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE PERUVIAN ANDES

INDEX 327

TOPOGRAPHIC SHEETS

Caman? Quadrangle 114

Aplao " 120

Coropuna " 188

Cotahuasi " 192

La Cumbre " 202

Antabamba " 282

Lambrama "

PART I

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

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. 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.

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 . 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

"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?"

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.

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

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.

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 , the gateway to the eastern valleys and the lowland plains of the Amazon. It is here that the adventurous river, re?nforced 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.

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.

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.

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 Se?or 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.

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 , 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.

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.

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.

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