ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
seen with my own eyes a German gentleman of refinement 
in that humble condition. 
In the present condition of things the slave, in the first 
instance, sells himself or is sold by his family. There 
were indeed few, if any, of the labouring classes in Matto 
Grosso and Goyaz provinces who were free men or women. 
All were owned by somebody, and if you wished to employ 
them, especially to take them away from a village or a 
city, you had to purchase them from their owners. That 
meant that if you intended to employ a man, even for a 
few days, you had to disburse a purchase sum equivalent 
to two or three hundred pounds sterling, sometimes more. 
In the following way it was made impossible for the slaves 
to become free again. Taking advantage of the poverty 
and vanity of those people, loans of money were offered 
them in the first instance, and also luxuries in the way of 
tinned food, clothing, revolvers, and rifles. When once 
they had accepted, and could not repay the sum or value 
of the articles received, they became the property of the 
lender, who took good care to increase the debt constantly 
by supplying cheap articles to them at fifty times their 
actual cost. The seringueiro , or rubber collector, had a 
caderneta, or booklet, and the master a livro maestro , or 
account book, in which often double the quantity of 
articles actually received by the rubber collector were 
entered. The debt thus increased by leaps and bounds, 
and in a short time a labourer owed his master two or three 
hundred pounds. The rubber collectors tried hard to 
repay the debt in rubber, which they sold to their masters 
at a low rate; but it was always easy for the masters to 
keep the men in debt. 
It must be said for the masters that their slaves were 
not in any way ill-treated; on the contrary — except that 
a man was seldom given the slightest chance of redeeming 
himself — they were indeed treated as well as circum¬ 
stances permitted. Labour, it must be remembered, was 
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