186 
TIIE AMAZON AND MADEIRA RIVERS. 
cano, tobacco and cotton, or to make nse of tbe magnificent dye- 
woods, timbers, and resins wborewith prodigal l^ature has so lavishly 
endowed it. As little is done for industry, to wit, in the development 
of the extraordinary skill exliibited by the Indians in plaitings and 
weavings of all kinds, and which, if assisted somewhat by Eui-opean 
culture, would justify the best hopes for the future. On the contrary, 
everything is done to dishearten them thoroughly in this respect. They 
are required to sell at the lowest prices the varied produce of their 
industry ; solid palm-straw hats (the so-called Panama hats), tastefully 
ornamented mats made of brilliantly-dyed rushes, and cotton weavings 
(macanas), which far excel ,Euroj)can goods in quality of texture and 
harmony of colour, and which, moreover, are in great demand and fetch 
high prices in the towns, Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz ; * and again, 
they are forced to buy, at six times their fair value, oiu gaudy cottonsi 
printed with glaring aniline colour's, wliich the fair sex vastly prefer to 
the spotless white, or to the subdued colours of their own manufactures. 
No wonder, then, that a kind of lethargy creeps over the Indians, 
thus abused, and that with their good humoiu' their skill at the work 
also gradually wears away. Indeed, experienced Bolivians have assured 
me that, of late, it was easy to observe not only a reduction in the 
quantity, but even a deterioration in the quality of their macanas. 
The chieftains, of whom there is one in every Pueblo, usually 
negotiate in the more important mattei’s ; they hue the paddlers for 
yoiu voyage to the Amazon, for instance, and arc entrusted with the 
money paid in advance ; but even they, as well as their inferiors, are 
exposed to frauds perpetrated by white men; and they have so often 
fallen victims to their own credulity that little may now be expected 
from their intervention. Only recently two of the richest of them, 
the one at Exaltacion, and the good old chieftain of Trinidad, had 
been swindled by unscrupulous rascals out of their whole fortune, — 
house and home, cattle and plate. The former, who to his misfortune 
took to dressing after the European fashion, was persuaded by an 
* In tlie Brazilian province of Minas Geraes similar fabrics are produced by the 
wives and daughters, and sometimes the female slaves of the poorer planters, or cattle 
breeders. As these were always on a small scale, and therefore in larger demand than 
fte supply, some merchants of Eio de Janeiro had them imitated in England, and 
imported great quantities of cotton stuff’s exactly resembling them in colour, but of 
very different quality. The consequence was that all those fabrics fell into discredit, 
from which the modest Brazilian industry was not exempt. 
