A Rubber Plantation.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 26 March 1910, Page 4

A Rubber Plantation.

SLAVE TRADE HORRORS

j'ollowing up its exposure of the existence of slavery on the tobacco plantations in Mexico, the " American Magazine" for February publishes_ an article on slave trade horrors in the rubber plantations. The article is from the pein of Mr Harman Whitaker, who has just returned from a tour of the plantation, where he was an eyewitness of the scenes be relates. The writer gives harrowing details of the awful existence dragged out by the "engauchados," or labourers, mala .and female, who are kept continually in debt to their employers, and are practically slaves. ilr Wbitaker declares that men, women, and children are worked to death daily in the plantations, by slave managers, who use whips or prods until some of the wretched labourers collapse from sheer exhaustion, and are left to <lio in the fields.

At night the labourers are driven into heavily-guarded buildings and penned up without regard for the decencies of life. Disease, under such conditions, is rampant among them, especially as there is no pretence of sanitary methods. Itching sores, erysipelas, and blood poisoning from insect bites, declares the writer, are treated alike with boraeic acid, sprinkled-on top of the .sweat and dirt. Naturally tho diseases are not cured and the writer describes one cast , that he witnessed of a sick man who was given up as incurable being driven to work "to get the last that's in him," as the planter put it. "Prodded along with machete pricks till be, gained, the plantation, the poor fellow fell down and was beaten to death." Another example of the horrors which came under his notice is described by Mr Wbitaker as follows: "My horse shied at a bundle of rags which turned out to be a woman lying fiat on her lace in the mud of a marsh.. Her baby sat up to its waist in mud and water. The .sight of a white man was sufficient to cause her to rise and stagger forward another mile. When I mentioned the cuse to the planter, be said, 'Oh, she'll crawl off and die somewhere in the jungle." Planters are not supposed to have the "euganchndos" longer than .six months, but they generally manage to keep them twelve, and by that time those who survive are broken and diseaso-ridden wrecks.