194 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 52 



pathetic wail or lament seems the climax of all the sadness and 

 pathos of their four centuries of servitude. 



The average Peruvian would no doubt show resentment at the 

 statement that slavery exists in Peru, yet such is in reality the case 

 with most of the Indians who come in contact with the whites. For 

 the greater part, however, they are not treated harshly, and in their 

 submissive way, with enough to eat and drink, seem to be contented 

 and probably as well off as when roaming the woods. Their condi- 

 tion might be termed a system of peonage. The Indians enter the 

 employ of some rubber-gatherer, often willingly, though not infre- 

 quently by force, and immediately become indebted to him for food, 

 etc. According to Peruvian law a person so indebted to another 

 can be held and obliged to work till that debt is paid, and in these 

 instances the employer sees to it that the employee never receives 

 sufficient wages to extinguish his indebtedness, and he is therefore 

 always practically a slave. By paying off this indebtedness a person 

 may obtain the servant, who in this way becomes similarly the slave 

 of him who pays the debt. However, the scarcity of labor and the 

 ease with which the Indians can usually escape and live on the nat- 

 ural products of the forest oblige the owners to treat them with some 

 consideration. The Indians realize this, and their work is not at all 

 satisfactory, judging from our standards. This was particularly 

 noticeable during a recent visit I made to a mill where cachassa, or 

 aguardiente, is extracted from cane. The men seemed to work 

 when and how they chose, requiring a liberal amount of the liquor 

 each day (of which they are all particularly fond), and if this is not 

 forthcoming or they are treated harshly in any way they run away 

 to the forests. The employer has the law on his side, and if he can 

 find the runaway he is at liberty to bring him back, but the time lost 

 and the almost useless task of trying to track the Indian through 

 the dense forests and small streams makes it far the more practical 

 that the servant be treated with consideration in the first place. 



Through intermarriage with the whites, disease, and wars, the 

 Indians of Peru are rapidly disappearing, and I am told that statistics 

 compiled for a given period during recent years show that their 

 numbers are diminishing at the rate of five per cent per annum ; that 

 in twenty years the wild Indians of the Upper Amazon will have 

 disappeared almost entirely, and it seems only a question of time 

 when the dying tribes of South American Indians must meet the 

 fate of their brothers of North America, and the two in common, 

 once the rulers of two continents, become only scattered remnants 

 of their former greatness, if not entirely engulfed by the wave which 

 seems sweeping over them. 



