The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, JULY 13. ATROCITIES ON THE AMAZON.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 80, 13 July 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, JULY 13. ATROCITIES ON THE AMAZON.

Yesterday's cables told us of the murder and enslavement of Indians in the rubber districts of the Amazon, and that the Aborigines Protection Society has memorialised the British Minister for Foreign Affairs on the subject. The Society should have no difficulty in proving their case, that is if the accounts that have been published during the past few months regarding the awful happenings on the South American rubber plantations are reliable, about which there seems little room for doubt. We hear of the "Congo atrocities," we hold up our hands in indignation, and we denounce the Belgians, but the British capitalists interested in the rubber trade have quite as much to answer for. It may be, of course, that they were not fully aware of the labor conditions obtaining in the country at the time they purchased their estates, but they could not (have remained long in this state oi blissful ignorance. Recent English files have been flooded with rubber company prospectuses. The average prospectus dealing with South Africa remarks: "Labor is cheap and plentiful." Or that, so successful was the native o\vn«r «f this estate, that they propose to continue his methors so far as labor is concerned. They will, for instance, supply their rubber-getters with food and clothing from the company's stores on the estate. By so doing, they explain, they will be able to keep their laborers. They certainly will. The truth is, the men of these forests can't leave the estates when they wish to.. They will be in debt to their employers for the goods supplied from the estates' stores—until they die. And their children, born on the estates, will inherit, their fathers' dcb f .s and they, in their turn, will be in debt still when they die. It isn't slavery, they argue. Should not a man pay his just debts? The fact is that rubber hunters must stop with their employers, like it or lump it; and the discontented can be whipped in Bolivia and Peru, either by the local authorities or by the estate manager. There are extreme cases, according to well-known writers, when a peon is shot by the exasperated boss. If questions are asked about him by anybody interested, by officials or by relatives—well, he died of fever, or he was lost in the forest. Thus there is, in the Amazonian rubber industry, an expressed ownership of human flesh; bodies can be whipped because they are the property of someone else, or can be transferred or sold to another owner. Slavery, that is. A journalist just back from the country, writing on the subject recently, said:—

•Several Englishmen and Americans out there (we were, at the time, about 1000 miles from any large town) told me that the wild Indians on some of the tributary streams are shot on sight by the rubber-getters; for these "savages" won't get the rubber, and sometimes forcibly prevent others from getting it. Travelling on another stream, I met an English explorer who was still sore about the loss of a hombre, a hand. This man had been with him some while, on a journey through Bolivia. On arrival at a station in Brazil the man disappeared, in the absence of his English employer.' He was told the agents of a local rubber magnate had taken h.* hombre. On demanding the release of his man he was informed that the man belonged to "them." More, they had locked him up, and definitely refused to surrender him. He was in "their" debt. Which, no doubt, was true. The natives out there would find it hard not to be in "their" debt.

In order to make clear the position of the rubber hunter in relation to the nominal forest owner who uses him, it is necessary' first to realise the kind of land on which he works. The remoteness of the richest rubber region can be compared only to points in Central Africa, for it is barred from the Pacific ports by the chain of the Andes and two thousand miles of river and forest are between it and the city of Para on the Atlantic side. It is all impenetrably tropical jungle, laced by intricate waterways. The river courses are the only means of getting there. Nearly every necessity of life has to be imported from England, New York or Lisbon, laboriously, and at great expenditure on freight and taxes. Supposing, now, a man with money and influence has got a concession of virgin forest from the Government. There is no local labor. He must bring it along. He persuades some laborers in Southern Brazil to emigrate to the upper Amazons. They know as much about the place as Londoners. They travel, at the forest owner's expense, to some far headwater, and are landed uii the little clearing in the forest. Here they arc lodged in houses made of palm leaves. As a rule, the country is badly malarial. Cut off entirely from any mollifying influence of social intercourse, the loneliest laborer in the world, the rubber hunter collects in forests as sombre as the interior of a great cathedral, often up to his waist in morass (because these forests are deeply flooded for months at a time), the precious gum for somebody else. His pay? When ,he arrived he was supplied with clothes, tfood. « gun, and all he needed, at any price the owner cared to insist on, and : that debt he is to work off by getting j rubber. Naturally, he never gets enough. It was noti'ntended that he j should get enough. And he cannot leave the country—it is his master's. The master is absolute. He is the giver of

life and death. Anywhere it is bad for a man to be the absolute master of another; so picture the consequence in these lands beyond the map of certainties, where there is no witness of evil except the mute and shadowing forest. The least we can do is to see that suca men are not aided by British savings. England ought to remember that there is a national reputation to be kept, and join issue with the Aborigines Association in stamping out practices that are a disgrace to Christendom.