DESCENDANTS OF THE INCAS S

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 148, 9 November 1912, Page 10

DESCENDANTS OF THE INCAS S

PUTUMAYO NATIVES DESCRIBED. Sir Roger Casement contributes to the Contemporary Review an interesting description of the Indians of the Putumayo, whose sufferings at the hands of the rubber collectors have stirred the civilised world. There are some six or seven distinct tribes, speaking different language, but identical in maimers and customs, inhabiting the region in which the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company have been carried on. The Huitotos are the most numerous; while the Recigaros are probably reduced, to a mere handful. The Huitotos are the least sturdy and courageous; the Boras and Recigaros the finest physically and in morale. The former are still largely uneonquered, but many have been turned into rubber collectors, and have suffered much in the process. They are fine specimens of manhood, as are the Recigaros, straight and clean-limbed, with often very pleasing features, and are brave, intelligent and capable. All these Indians are, indeed, notably intelligent. Their weakness lies not in lack of intelligence so much as in that prevailing docility of mind which leads the Indian everywhere, in that part of South America, to submit to the white man and to render him an ever too ready obedience.

Sir Roger expresses the view that all the Indians of the New World are derived from a common origin, and he places the tribes interned in the vast Amazon forests as of identical origin with the Aymaras and Quichuas of the Inca Empire. These ••innocent, friendly, child-like human beings" go almost quite naked—the men only wearing a strip of the bark of a tree, wound round the loins, while. the women, entirely nude, stain their bodies with vegetable dyes, and, at dances, stick llulV and feathers with an adhesive mixture to the calves of their legs and sometimes down the hips. The men also stain their'bodies with dyes. Both sexes arc chaste and exceedingly modest. Their minds arc alert, quick and perceptive, and their dispositions cheerful and courteous. Their possessions are practically nil, and their surroundings depressing in the extreme —a morbid, dense and gloomy forest, inhabited by wild beasts, serpents and insects, and subject to one of the heaviest rainfalls of the world, accompanied often by the most tremendous storms of thunder and lightning to appal to stoutest heart. Xo metals anywhere exist, and even stones are very scarce—the forest is their end-all and their be-all. They have no domestic animals of any kind, and no food or materials, save such as might be derived from the unending woodlands in which they are submerged. Such surroundings as these, says Sir Roger, neither offered a future nor held a past, yet nothing became more clear —the more these Indians were studied than that they were children of the forest, but children of elsewhere lost in the forest; babes in the. wood, grown up, it is true, and finding the forest their only heritage and shelter, but remembering that it was not their home. 'While the Indian is spoken of as a savage his mind is not that of a savage. He is an intellectual human being, even a singularly intelligent one in some respects, who finds himself by some strange, fate lost in the woods and compelled to reside in surroundings for which he has no true affection.

Although the wild tribes in the great] Amazon forest live in a constant state of hostility with one another, they are averse to bloodshed. Even their weapons, says Sir "Roger, are "the most gentle engines of death—the silent blowpipe with the tiny dart only a few inches long, the small throwing spear that a woman or boy can hurl, and the noiseless bow and arrow. The blow-pipe is the most effective of those weapons." Turning to the subject of the influence of the white man over these natives, Sir Roger says that the Jesnits might have saved all* the Indian tribes of the lower and middle Amazon had it not been for the greedy savagery of the Portuguese "colonists." "Whereves the "Franciscans, who are in Peru to some extent what the Jesuits were in Brazil, have had means to protect and help the Indians, they have carried on the good work that Lieutenant Herndon and others noted in the early and mid years of the last century. Where they have failed, it has been due to the success of 'commerce' over civilisation, of covetousness over Christianity."