44 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



[November i, 1909. 



44 Red Rubber" in Eastern Peru. 



THE authors of the most shocking stories of atrocities prac- 

 ticed upon the rubber collectors in the Congo Free State 

 must now feel abashed since the Right Hon. Henry La- 

 bouchere, r.c, m.f., has printed in his important London weekly 

 paper, Truth, the series of articles headed "The Devil's Paradise." 

 He has eclipsed all the narrators of horrors who have gone be- 

 fore. And "Labby" has been dealing with rubber, too. Having 

 in mind that the most bitter critics of "Congo misrule" have been 

 Britishers, like himself, he tells his readers that the real rubber 

 Hades is under British control — not in a British colony, but in an 

 extensive South American domain owned practically by a cor- 

 ; i" 1. n ion registered at Somerset House, London, the directorate 

 of which is dominated by English gentlemen. 



Whoever buys rubber at $2 a pound and more may readily ap- 

 preciate the suggestion that when the stuff is so expensive its 

 production is not work of a kind that is exceedingly pleasant 

 to those engaged in it. Do people rush into the rubber fields 

 of any country — wild or forest rubber fields, that is to say — to 

 become busy in producing "fine" or "coarse" or any other grade? 

 THEY DO NOT. If civilized people anywhere insist upon 

 having automobile tires, or hard rubber combs, or dainty rubber 

 footwear, there will be capitalists ready to provide the necessary 

 rubber — but what about the laborers in equatorial forests who 

 bring the precious stuff to the primary markets? How do they 

 live? How are they induced to go out of their way to gather 

 rubber? What redress have these workers, thousands of miles 

 from civilization, against real or fancied abuses at the hands of 

 their masters, who themselves are on the ground, not through' 

 motives of philanthropy, but to fill their own pockets well within 

 the brief time they are willing to be exiled from comfortable 

 homes? 



The cauchero in Peru naturally is not in the position of a clerk 

 in a Wall street office who is working to become ultimately such a 

 master of finance as was the late Edward Henry Harriman, the 

 railway "king." This, by the way, was Mr. Hariman's start in 

 life. The man who gathers rubber up the Amazon is apt to be 

 too poor to be able to leave his occupation at whatever time it 

 may prove uncomfortable. And the manager of a rubber camp is 

 there to GET RUBBER. The point of Henry Labouchere's story 

 is that he does get rubber, and the devil take the poor fellows 

 who are under his control, in a region beyond the pale of law 

 or government. 



The India Rubber World has no intimate knowdedge of the 

 conditions of which the editor of Truth has portrayed in type. 

 But the character of the gentleman named, and of his publica- 

 tion, together with the nature of the evidence which he quotes, 

 all appeal to the man of civilized instincts as worthy of con- 

 sideration, even if in the end the story may prove to be exag- 

 gerated. 



There is not space in these pages for even a summary of what 

 Henry Labouchere feels called upon to say about the outrageous 

 treatment of the employes of The Peruvian Amazon Co., Limited, 

 organized in England with ii.ooo.ooo [=$4,866,500] capital, to 

 take over the business and possessions of the Peruvian firm of 

 J. C. Arana y Ilermanos. [See The India Rubber World, 

 January 1, 1909 — page 146.] 



These are the people who are responsible for the important 

 output of Hevea rubber nowadays from Peru, the shipment which 

 makes necessary a line of steamers from Iquitos to New York 

 and several European ports. Of late years the growing demand 

 for rubber tires, rubber insulation, rubber hose, and a constantly 

 increasing number of articles of rubber manufacture, has en- 

 couraged English and other investors to give their attention to 

 what Truth calls "a sort of no-man's-land" between the upper Am- 



azon and Putumayo — a rubber producing area of hundreds of 

 square miles, sovereignty over which is claimed by Columbia, Peru 

 and Ecuador. Peru, however, is in effective possession, and has the 

 advantage of ocupying a commanding position at Iquitos, the up- 

 permost port on the Amazon. As Truth says, it is "a country 

 where every man is a law unto himself, and there is absolutely 

 no check upon the exercise of his most brutal instincts and 

 passions. The likelihood of such abuse is increased enormously 

 when the earnings of the employes are made dependent upon re- 

 sults." And "employes" in this sense refer only to company 

 agents, and not to the men who "cut" rubber. 



With reference to the requirement that the company agents 

 ship the maximum amount of rubber possible, Truth says : 



To do this, the Indians have either to be paid or punished. If paid, 

 the payment must be enough to tempt a placid, indolent savage to con- 

 tinuous exertion ; if punished, the punishment must be severe eaough to 

 extract from his fears what canjiot be obtained from an appeal to hit 

 cupidity. 



Mr. Labouchere does not stand alone as the author of his 

 statements. He names various individuals, including Mr. W. E. 

 Hardenburg, "a young American engineer," as supplying facts ; 

 likewise quotations are given from two newspapers published at 

 Iquitos and one in Manaos. 



Well, how does rubber come down to Iquitos? Accotding to 

 Truth, the pacific indians of the Putumayo are forced to collect 

 rubber "without the slightest remuneration;" "they flog them in- 

 humanly until their bones are laid bare"; "they do not give them 

 any medical treatment, but let them linger, eaten by maggots, 

 till they die, to serve them afterwards as food for the chiefs' 

 dogs" ; "they mutilate them, cut off their ears, fingers, arms, and 

 legs" ; "they torture them, by means of fire, of water and by tying 

 them up crucified head down" ; the agents even "souse them with 

 kerosene and set fire to them, to enjoy the desperate agony." 

 There are other details in Truth's story which, if repeated here, 

 would exclude The India Rubber World from the United States 

 mails. 



As for the company's agents, Truth would have it understood 

 that they are themselves practically prisoners in the upriver 

 districts, and compelled to follow the customs which have grown 

 up in the collection of rubber by the great company mentioned 

 in this article. 



Space has been given here to Henry Labouchere's story for the 

 reason that England has been the home of the most extreme 

 stories of outrages perpetrated upon rubber collectors in the 

 Congo, and because this particular member of parliament has 

 recognized that Englishmen are not doing better in domains under 

 their own absolute, if not official, control. It is possible that 

 Truth's story will be controverted in full; at the same time Mr. 

 E. D. Morell, of The African Mail, may also find himself without 

 support in his criticisms of conditions in the Belgian Congo 

 rubber districts. 



IN THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT. 



In the house of commons, on September 29, Mr. Hart-Davies 

 asked the foreign secretary whether his attention had been called 

 to the proceedings of an English company called the Peruvian 

 Amazon Co. ; whether any report as to the alleged ill-treatment 

 of British subjects from Barbados had been made by the English 

 consul at Iquitos; and whether he would call for a report on the 

 doings of this company from the local English consul at Iquitos. 



Mr. McKinnon Wood, in reply to this and a similar question 

 by Mr. Cathcart Wason, said : "I have not heard of the ex- 

 istence of the company, and have no information about it. I 

 will ask for a report on the subject." 



Mr. Hart-Davies asked whether the honorable gentleman 



