Evening Star Newspaper, February 16, 1930, Page 104

20 j THE, SUNDAY STAR, WASH',INGT,ON, D. C, FEBRUARY 16, 1930. The Great Rubber Bubble in the Amazon - When W, ages of Natives Were Increased | : b From $25 a Year to $25 a Day—Running a Boat on Absinthe and Hunting Crimi- nals With Sir Robert Casement—A South American Klondike and the Comedy of Javary—The Putumayo Tragedy. EDITOR'S NOTE: In two previous articles, Dr. Dickey has told how, fresh from medical school, he went through a revolu- tion in Colombia and into the Putumayo District of Peru, where he was captured and cruelly tor- tured by the Andoke Indians. Rescued, he went on to Iquitos, in Brazil, to regain his health. Other adventures of his are related in his book, “The Misadventures of a Tropical Medico.” BY HERBERT SPENCER DICKEY, M.D., AND HAWTHORNE DANIEL. QUITOS, in those days, was like the Wild West of the old movies trans- mmhmto(mhurmhgndhvlud one to ices and ice creams translated -into “sorbetes,” “refrescos” and “heladas.” Tales drifted constantly into Iquitos about the wealth of the River Javary. This stream, which forms a part of the boundary between steaming below Iquitos. . It was famous for the quantity of fine rubber that was grown on its banks, and was famous as well because it was a hotbed of disease. rubber-rich land, and to make my fortune expeditiously as possible in order to leave the jungles of that overheated ever. ° It was to Remate de Males—a town on Bragilian side of the Javary—that I made way, and there, just where the Rio Itecoah joins the Javary, that I disembarked. This new town to which I had come blazoned isted and Remate de Males was fllled with just such individuals as one might expect to find in such +a place. ; Acn.oes the river go, for Peruvian them. But as all their mitted beyond the border, they were in standing in Remate de river, in a Peruvian Males as could be, i with murderers, kinds. " It must be remembered that all the time I spent at Remate de Males attending to the ills of the people of the vicinity was during the short-lived period of the rubber boom. Rubber, in those days, was only just coming into its own. Automobiles were making huge demands for rubber to be used in manufacturing their tires, and the Amazon Valley was the world's major source of supply. Many years before, cuttings had been taken from these Amazonian rubber trees and thus founded the enormous rubber plantations of the British and Dutch East Indies, but that supply did not seriously compete with the Amazon until several years later when, of course, more efficient methods developed by the British and the Dutch elim- inated Amazonian rubber almost completely. Before that calamity befell the Amazon Val- ley, however, the very humblest rubber gatherer —save those who were exploited by others, of course—could earn the equivalent of a pound sterling a day. Rubber was worth 10 shillings —$2.50—a pound, and a man with his wife and several children could, with comparatively little effort, earn $25 a day. Such an income, of course, was tremendous “r'wealth (o these people. Formerly many of them never saw that much money in a year, and in the jungle, where one’s needs are simple and inexpensive, such an income was actual opulence, .} Great as their incomes were, however, these nouveaux riches benefited little from it. - Ex- travagance and lavish waste marked the lives of every one on the Javary. Lack of experience in controlling funds and the ease with which dirty blanket or two. Their cooking apparatus remained as it had always i established in one corner served as a kitchen, dining room, parlor, and with three stones to su the soot-blackened enameled kettles still served the purposes for w! had originally been purchased. The the fire, lacking a flue, still percolated the thatch of the roofs and the cracks of the walls, leaving a black and sticky covering of soot on everything within doors. pours set the roofs to they often were, Nor must it be su that only the na- tives were thus affected by the sudden influx of easy money. All of us felt it to some extent, and many of the few white men of the district were almost as foolish in their expenditures as were the most inexperienced of the natives There was, near Remate de Males, at this time a most amusing French company called the Comptoir Colonial Francais. This concern seemed to be very similar to most of the French companies doing business in tropical America. It was very, very strong on luxuries and dis- play, and correspondingly weak on administra- tion and other necessities. One of the em- ployes, however, was a man of great ingenuity and resource. He bore the name of Schwarts, it is true, but he was a Frenchman to the very medulla of his_bones. It so happened that a director of the com- managed to get to the local manager of the Comptoir Colonial Prancais, however, a short time before the director actually arrived at the station; with the result that he had time to be duly flustered over the difficulties that faced him The storehouse of the company was filled with wines of the finest vintages. But, alas, there was no ice, and any one—a PFrenchman particularly—knows that champagne, at a tem- perature of 90 degrees, is hardly palatable, . Still, it was obviously essential that the direc- tor be given some champagne. The ques- tion of cooling it therefore immediately arose. Schwartz, the ingenious employe to whom I have referred, was called in and the matter was discussed, whereupon Schwartz announced that with carte blanche so far as expenditure was concerned, he could cool a little of the cham- pagne—a couple of bottles, at least—and could thereby save the day. The necessary authority was promptly given him, and Schwartz busily set himself the task of gathering together what chemicals he could find that would, when prop- erly manipulated, produce a sharply lowered temperature. He came to me, as a matter of course, and requested a dozen different chemi- cals, none of which I had. I was able, how- ever, to send him to a trader who had a few of the various things he wanted, and from that he went still farther afield. What he obtained I never learned, but he spent $200, whereupon he rigged himself up a weird sort of refrigerator in a steel oil drum, and triumphantly chilled two bottles of cham- pagne, which were served with a flourish at the formal dinner given upon the arrival of the director. r Schwartz’s difficulties, however, did not end there. \ The director, in looking over the property, saw a motor boat that belonged to the station, and asked to be taken for a ride on the Javary. The manager was set all aflutter at this request, for due to an overseight, no gasoline had been ordered and the motor boat had not been used for two solid months. Schwarts, however, again Unbhesitatingly, he poured a considerable quantity of the company’s excellent absinthe into the gasoline tank of the boat. finally, to the delight of the manager, sound of the engine’s exhaust began to tuate the silence of that jungle station. ce more into their former mode of life, victrolas and the pianclas weathered pieces during the succeeding rainy were dumped on refuse piles when their internal mechanisms gave way before the us attacks of rust and decay. But before that time came I found it neces- sary to take a patient to Manaos, there to put him on a ship for Europe in order that his convalescence might be successful. And while I was idling about Manacs, waiting for an up- river steamer, yellow fever, which I had dodged successfully for 10 years, seized me, and when I had managed, by great good fortune, to rid myself of the worst of it, I, too, decided to con- valesce away from the Amazon Valley. Thus it was that early in 1911 I landed at Bridge- town, Barbados, there to idle about until I once more felt strong enough to continue my still unsuccessful search after the fortune that found it so easy to elude me. While I had been in the Putumayo, I had thought more than a little about the horrors of that place, but once I had left the district I managed, with a fair degree of success, to dis- miss the whole matter from my mind. I had no responsibility—or so I thought—calling upon me to aid the poor devils of natives who suf- fered beneath a yoke so terrible that one's. imagination cannot supply even the lighter de- tails. But now that I was in Barbados, with nothing to do and with no responsibility save that of recuperating from my attack of yellow fever, 1 stumbled upon the one man in all the company, Sir Roger Casement was the man. It seems strange that that generous, honest, high-principled person should have died the death of a traitor during the World War. That he aid the Germans—which were merely his ides of aiding Ireland. But all that came later. The World War was not to come for another three years when I met Casement, quite cas- ually, in Bridgetown. E WAS, I learned, the British consul gen- eral at' Rio de Janeiro, He had been, earlier, the consul at Para, and it was while he was there that he heard of the Putumayo conditions that prevailed there. . Six years earlier, Sir Roger Casement—then plain Mr, Casement—had been sent by the British government to investigate the condi- tions in the Belgian Kongo, and largely as & river steamer from Para that day in 1911, when the temperature was floating around 96 in the shade, he wore a thick and very dark brown suit of Irish homespun. How he stood it I do not know, but then, the rest of his costume - His straw hat looked taken from"an ash can X & heavy flannel shirt, but did recognize the tropics to the extent of shoes the soles of which touch was a tremen- walking stick—a shile wo inches in diam- line—spoke to me about it, though not until Casemant appeared at ta- I quite agreed with my friend the captain, but when I spoke to Casement as the captain had suggested, I was told to tell the captain to go to the devil, that my companion’s. feet were hot and that he