View of the World (19 page)

Two of their tribes held on through thick and thin to a little of their original land until ten years ago when a doctor – now alleged to have been sent by the Indian Protection Service of those days – instead of
vaccinating them, inoculated them with the virus of smallpox. This operation was totally successful in its aim, and the vacant land was immediately absorbed into the neighbouring white estates.

There are a dozen such dejected encampments along three thousand miles of coastline, and they are the last of the coastal Indians of the kind seen by Caminha, who once appeared from among the trees by their hundreds whenever a ship anchored offshore. The Patachós are officially classified as
integrados
. It is the worst label that can be attached to any Indian, as extinction follows closely on the heels of integration.

The atrocities of the conquistadores described by Bishop Bartolomeo de Las Casas, who was an eye-witness of what must have been the greatest of all wars of extermination, resist the imagination. There is something remote and shadowy about horror on so vast a scale. Numbers begin to mean nothing, as one reads with a sort of detached, unfocused belief of the mass burnings, the flaying, the disembowellings, and the mutilations.

Twelve millions were killed, Las Casas says, most of them in frightful ways. ‘The Almighty seems to have inspired these people with a meekness and softness of humour like that of lambs; and the conquerors who have fallen upon them so fiercely resemble savage tigers, wolves and lions … I have seen the Spaniards set their fierce and hungry dogs at the Indians to tear them in pieces and devour them … They set fire to so many towns and villages it is impossible I should recall the number of them … These things they did without any provocation, purely for the sake of doing mischief.’ Wherever they could be reached, in the Caribbean islands, and on the coastal plains, the Indians were exterminated. Those of Brazil were saved from extinction by a tropical rainforest, as big as Europe, and to the south of it, the half million square miles of thicket and swampland – the Mato Grosso – that remained sufficiently mysterious until our days for explorers like Colonel Fawcett to lose their lives searching in it for golden cities.

For those who pursued the Indians into the forest there were worse dangers to face than poison-tipped arrows. Jiggers deposited their eggs under their skin; there was a species of fly that fed on the surface of the eye and could produce blindness; bees swarmed to fasten themselves to the traces of mucus in the nostrils and at the corners of the mouth; fire ants
could cause temporary paralysis, and worst of all, a tiny beetle sometimes found in the roofs of abandoned huts might drop on the sleeper to administer a single fatal bite.

Apart from that there were the common hazards of poisonous snakes, spiders and scorpions in variety, and the rivers contained not only piranhá, electric eels and sting-rays, but also a tiny catfish with spiny fins which wriggled into the human orifices and could not be removed without a mutilating operation. Above all, the mosquitoes transmitted not only malaria, but the yellow fever endemic in the blood of many of the monkeys. The only non-Indians to penetrate the ultimate recesses of the forest were the Negroes of later invasions, who escaped in great numbers from the sugar estates and mines to form the
quilombas
, the fugitive slave settlements. But these, apart from helping themselves to Indian women, where they found them, followed the rule of live and let live, and they merged with the surrounding tribes, and lost their identity.

The processes of murder and enslavement slowed down during the next three centuries, but did so because there were fewer Indians left to murder and enslave. Great expeditions to provide labour for the plantations of Maranhão and Pará depopulated all the easily accessible villages near the main Amazonian waterways, and the loss of life is said to have been greater than that involved in the slave trade with Africa. Those who escaped the plantations often finished in the Jesuit reservations – religious concentration camps where conditions were hardly less severe, and trifling offences were punished with terrible floggings or
imprisonment
: ‘The sword and iron rod are the best kind of preaching,’ as the Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta put it.

By the nineteenth century some sort of melancholy stalemate had been reached. Indian slaves were harder to get, and with the increasing rationalisation of supply and the consequent fall in cost of Negroes from West Africa – who in any case stood up to the work better – the price of the local product was undercut. As the Indians became less valuable as a commodity, it became possible to see them through a misty Victorian eye, and at least one novel about them was written, swaddled in sentiment, and in the mood of
The Last of the Mohicans
. A
more practical viewpoint reasserted itself at the time of the great rubber boom at the turn of the century, when it was discovered that the harmless and picturesque Indians were better equipped than Negroes to search the forests for rubber trees. While the eyes of the world were averted, all the familiar tortures and excesses were renewed, until with the collapse of the boom and the revival of conscience, the Indian Protection Service was formed.

In the raw, abrasive vulgarity it displayed in its consumption of easy wealth, the Brazilian rubber boom surpassed anything that had been seen before in the Western world since the days of the Klondyke. It was centred on Manaus which had been built where it was at the confluence of two great, navigable rivers, the Amazon and the Rio Negro, for its convenience in launching slaving expeditions, a city that had fallen into a decline that matched the wane in interest for its principal commodity.

With the invention of the motor car and the rubber tyre, and the recognition that the
hevea
tree of the Amazon produced incomparably the best rubber, Manaus was back in business, converted instantly to a tropical Gomorrah. Caruso refused a staggering fee to appear at the opera house, but Madame Patti accepted. There were Babylonian orgies of the period, in which courtesans took semi-public baths in champagne, which was also awarded by the bucketful to winning horses at the races. Men of fashion sent their soiled linen to Europe to be laundered. Ladies had their false teeth set with diamonds, and among exotic importations was a regular shipment of virgins from Poland. These, averaging thirteen years of age, might cost up to £100 (about £500, modern equivalent) for the first night, because intercourse with a virgin was regarded as a certain cure for venereal disease. After that the price would drop to one twentieth of this figure.

The most dynamic of the great rubber corporations of those days was the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company, operating in the ill defined north-western frontier of Brazil, where it could play off the governments of Colombia, Peru and Brazil against each other, all the better to establish its vast, nightmarish empire of exploitation and death.

A young American engineer, Walter Hardenburg, carried accidentally
in a fit of wanderlust over the company’s frontier, was immediately seized and imprisoned for a few days during which time he was given a chance to see the kind of thing that went on. Several thousand Huitoto Indians had been enslaved and at the post where Hardenburg was held, El Encanto (Enchantment), he saw the rubber tappers bringing back their collection of latex at the end of the day. Their bodies were covered with great raised weals from the overseers’ tapir-hide whips, and Hardenburg noticed that the Indians who had managed to collect their quota of rubber danced with joy, whereas those who had failed to do so seemed terror-stricken, although he was not present to witness their punishment. Later he learned that repeated deficiencies in collection could mean a sentence of a hundred lashes, from which it took six months to recover.

An element of competition was present when it came to killing Indians. On one occasion one hundred and fifty hopelessly inefficient workers were rounded up and slashed to pieces by
macheteiros
employing a grisly local expertise, which included the
corte do bananeiro
, a backward and forward swing of the blade which removed two heads at one blow, and the
corte maior
, which sliced a body into two or more parts before it could fall to the ground. High feast days, too, were celebrated by sporting events when a few of the more active – and therefore more valuable – tappers might be sacrificed to make an occasion. They were blindfolded and encouraged to do their best to escape while the overseers and their guests potted at them with their rifles.

Barbadian British subjects were recruited by the Peruvian Amazon Company as wild Indian-hunters, being sent on numerous expeditions into areas where the company proposed to establish new rubber trails. These were paid on a basis of piecework, and were obliged to collect the heads of their victims, and return with them as proof of their claims to payment. Stud farms existed in the area where selected Indian girls would breed the slave-labour of the future, when the wild Indian had been wiped out. Some rubber companies have been suspected, too, of not stopping short of cannibalism, and there were strong rumours of camps in which ailing and unsatisfactory workers were used to supply the tappers’ meat.

The world-wide scandal of the Peruvian Amazon Company, exposed by Sir Roger Casement, coincided with the collapse of the rubber boom caused by the competition of the new Malayan plantations, and a crisis of conscience was sharpened by the threat of economic disaster. The instant bankruptcy of Manaus was attended by spectacular happenings. Sources of cash suddenly dried up, and the surplus population of cardsharpers, adventurers and whores pouring into the river steamers in the rush to escape to the coast paid for their passages with such possessions as diamond cuff-links and solitaire rings. Merchant princes with their fortunes tied up in unsaleable rubber committed suicide. The celebrated electric street cars – first of their kind in Latin America – came suddenly to a halt as the power was cut off, and were set on fire by their enraged passengers. A few racehorses found themselves between the shafts of converted bullock carts. The opera house closed, never to open again.

When Brazilians had got used to the idea that their rubber income was substantially at an end, they began to examine the matter of its cost in human lives in the light of the fact, now generally known, that the Peruvian Amazon Company alone had murdered nearly thirty thousand Indians. Brazil was now Indian-conscious again and its legislators reminded each other of the principles so nobly enunciated by José Bonifacio in 1823, and embodied in the constitution: ‘We must never forget,’ Bonifacio said, ‘that we are usurpers, in this land, but also that we are Christians.’

It was a mood responsible for the determination that nothing of this kind should ever happen again, and an Indian Protection Service – unique and extraordinary in its altruism in America – was founded in 1910 under the leadership of Marshall Rondon, himself an Indian, and therefore, it was supposed, exceptionally qualified to be able to interpret the Indian’s needs.

Rondon’s solution was to integrate the Indian into the mainstream of Brazilian life – to educate him, to change his faith, to break his habit of nomadism, to change the colour of his skin by inter-marriage, to draw him away from the forests and into the cities, to turn him into a wage-earner and a voter. He spent the last years of his life trying to do this, but just
before his death came a great change of heart. He no longer believed that integration was to be desired. It had all been, he said now, a tragic mistake.

The conclusion of all those who have lived among and studied the Indian beyond the reach of civilisation is that he is the perfect human product of his environment – from which it should follow that he cannot be removed without calamitous results. Ensconced in the forest in which his ancestors have lived for thousands of years, he is as much a component of it as the tapir and the jaguar: self-sufficient, the artificer of all his requirements, at terms with his surroundings, deeply conscious of his place in the living patterns of the visible and invisible universe.

It is admitted now that the average Indian Protection Service official recruited to deal with this complicated but satisfactory human being was all too often venal, ignorant and witless, and it was natural that he should call to his aid the missionaries who were in Brazil by the thousand, and were backed by resources that he himself lacked. But the missionary record was not an imposing one, and even those incomparable colonisers of the faith, the Jesuits, had little to show but failure.

In the early days they had put their luckless converts into long white robes, segregated the sexes, and set them to ‘godly labours’, lightened by the chanting of psalms in Latin, mind-developing exercises in mnemonics, and speculative discussions on such topics as the number of angels able to perch on the point of a pin. It was offered as a foretaste of the delights of the Christian heaven, complete with its absence of marrying or giving in marriage, and many of the converts died of melancholy. After a while demoralisation spread to the fathers themselves and some of them went off the rails to the extent of dabbling in the slave trade. When these settlements were finally overrun by the bloodthirsty pioneers and frontiersmen from São Paolo, death can hardly have been more than a happy release for the listless and bewildered Indian flock.

When the Indian Protection Service was formed the missionaries of the various Catholic orders were rapidly being outnumbered by
nonconformists
, mostly from the United States. These were a very different order of man, no longer armed only with hellfire and damnation, but
with up-to-date techniques of salesmanship in their approach to the problems of conversion. By 1968 the
Jornal de Brasil
could state: