Read Ebook: The Andes of Southern Peru Geographical Reconnaissance along the Seventy-Third Meridian by Bowman Isaiah

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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.

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 ma?lstrom 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.

THE RUBBER FORESTS

The white limestone cliffs at Pongo de Mainique are a boundary between two great geographic provinces . 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 . 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.

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.

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!

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.

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 . 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.

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.

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 Mamor? 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 Compa?ia 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 first rubber was taken out in November, 1910, and productive possibilities proved by the collection of 9,000 kilos 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 , 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 Compa?ia 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 Compa?ia 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.

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.

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-Mamor? 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.

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, Pi?i-pi?i, Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea, Timpia, and Camisea . 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.

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 . 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.

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. 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?"

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:

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