THE FOREST INDIANS 43 



with firewater, for that will surely bring them back to him. Since 

 this is expensive they return to their tribal haunts with nothing 

 except a debauched spirit and an appetite from which they can- 

 not run away as they did from their task masters in the rubber 

 forest. Hence the vicious circle : more brandy, more labor ; more 

 labor, more cleared land; more cleared land, more brandy; more 

 brandy, less Indian. But by that time the planter has a large 

 sugar estate. Then he can begin to buy the more expensive 

 plateau labor, and in turn debauch it. 



Nature as well as man works against the scattered tribes of 

 Machigangas and their forest kinsmen. Their country is exceed- 

 ingly broken by ramifying mountain spurs and valleys overhung 

 with cliffs or bordered by bold, wet, fern-clad slopes. It is 

 useless to try to cut your way by a direct route from one 

 point to another. The country is mantled with heavy forest. 

 You must follow the valleys, the ancient trails of the people. The 

 larger valleys offer smooth sand-bars along the border of which 

 canoes may be towed upstream, and there are little cultivated 

 places for camps. But only a few of the tribes live along them, 

 for they are also more accessible to the rubbermen. The smaller 

 valleys, difficult of access, are more secure and there the tribal rem- 

 nants live today. While the broken country thus offers a refuge 

 to fugitive bands it is the broken country and its forest cover that 

 combine to break up the population into small groups and keep 

 them in an isolated and quarrelsome state. Chronic quarreling 

 is not only the product of mere lack of contact. It is due to many 

 causes, among which is a union of the habit of migration and 

 divergent tribal speech. Every tribe has its own peculiar words 

 in addition to those common to the group of tribes to which it be- 

 longs. Moreover each group of a tribe has its distinctive words. 

 I have seen and used carefully prepared vocabularies — no two of 

 which are alike throughout. They serve for communication with 

 only a limited number of families. These peculiarities increase 

 as experiences vary and new situations call for additions to or 

 changes in their vocabularies, and when migrating tribes meet 

 their speech may be so unlike as to make communication difficult. 



