Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
when, in 1862, from the most remote outposts there began to arrive dark brown slabs formed from
another elastic gum, a competitor with rubber for the needs of industry.
It was
caucho
, and those who worked this gum called themselves
caucheiros
, fearless pioneers
who boldly explored those forgotten backlands. They came from the West, crossing the Andes and
tolerating all the climates on earth—from the burning littoral of the Pacific to the chill
punos
of the
cordillera. Between them and our native clay were two soaring ramparts in excess of 6,000 m and a
long valley that gave onto the abyss. They faced the Amazon plains, a stretch of hundreds of miles
to the northeast, vast enough to lose oneself in forever, facing toward the distant Atlantic without a
scarp of a mountain to serve as a guidepost in this immensity. Never have such imposing landscapes
been confronted by such mediocre actors.
Naturally, the frontiersmen wandered for many years—few, invisible, fumbling in the perpetual
dusk of far-off forests where other difficulties, graver than the unmeasured distances, the thickening
wildness, began to dog their uncertain steps.
The entire area where one now provisionally traces the demarcation lines of the Brazil-Peru bor-
ders, where the creeks spread out that eventually form the Purús and Juruá, the northernmost falls of
the Urubamba and the farthest branches of the Madre de Dios, figure among the most unknown areas
of America, less a consequence of their exceptional physical conditions (which were surmounted in
1844 by F. Castelnau)
22
than by the terrifying reputation of the tribes that populate and traverse these
regions—they are known by the generic name
chunchos
and incarnate the deepest dread of boldest
pioneer.
These tribes are countless. Who ascends the Purús ponders the distance to the outskirts of
Cachoeira, where the Panemís people are becoming rarer, little resembling the noble masters of the
floodplains they once were. From there, continuing upriver, the inoffensive Ipurinanas; on leaving
the Iaco, there are those Tucurinos who seem born old, so much do they reflect in their foolish ex-
pressions the decrepitude of their race. At the head of the river, where these unusual forest dwellers
reside, is the greatest surprise. There the tribes, diverse in their habits and provenance, are composed
offorcedgroupings—the tame Amahuacas, whocongregate attrading postsof
caucho
extractors; the
indomitable Coronaus, masters of the headwaters of the Curanjá; the coppery Piros, their teeth tin-
ted with a dark stain that when they smile gives their faces indefinable traces of grim menace; the
bearded Cashillos, threatened with extermination by two hundred years of manhunts, chased, as they
have been for centuries, over the ruins of the missions of Pachitea; the Conibos with their deformed
craniums and chests dazzlingly striped in red and blue; the Setebos, Sipibos, and Yurimauás, the cor-
pulent Mashcos from the Manú—evoking in their aberrant and imposing physiognomy the fabled gi-
ants of the early cartographers of Amazonia—and above all, exceeding everyone in fame and valor,
the warlike Campa of the Urubamba.
Thevarietyoftribesinsoreducedanareaimpliesastrangecoercion:thisgatheringisforced.They
have obviously fled to their last redoubt. This is the denouement of the crusade that began with the
campaigns of Jesuits in the forests of Maynas, that vast ecclesiastical domain, and extends to our
modernexpeditions,andwhosefinalepisodesareyetmurky.Thenarratoroftheselastdaysarrivesat
the end of a drama, confused and disoriented, contemplates the very end of the last scene, “Civiliza-
tion,” savagely armed withrepeating rifles, thoroughlybesieges thissavagery attheendoftheworld:
the Peruvians from the west and the south, Brazilians from the northeast and southeast, and finally,
closing in from the valley of the Madre de Dios, the Bolivians.
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