[Illustration: THESE LECCOS ARE AMONG THE FINEST INDIANS.]
These Leccos are among the finest Indians, or semi-civilized savages, I have met. They are sturdy and muscular, with a distinctly Malaysian suggestiveness, and very superior to any of the surrounding savage tribes of the interior. Yet they have neither religion nor superstition; they have no legend or tradition, and their only historical recollection is from the time when quinine bark was the main river commerce instead of rubber—the time of the “Great Quina” they call it,—about half a century ago. They are brave and loyal, although not a fighting race, and have made but a poor showing against the neighboring tribes. Their life is on the river, chiefly this Rio Mapiri, and they stick close to its banks. Their sole work is transportation with these balsas and callapos up and down the river.
For months in the year the stream is virtually closed by reason of the rains and the impassable cañons. Down stream is simple and finely exciting, but against the currents up-stream, portaging or hauling the balsas through the cañons, where there is often barely a hand-hold on the naked walls of rock, and often vines must be lowered from above, drenched during the day and sleeping on the sand _playas_ at night, is the hardest kind of labor. As had happened while they were trying to reach me on this trip, the food gives out—it is not a game country—and unless they are near enough to the goal to live on nuts and berries, as they did for two days on this occasion, they have to go back, replenish, and start over again, with all the previous labor lost. And there is scarcely a free Lecco among them; they are always in debt to the rubber barracas, who by the sale and purchase of their debts pass them as veritable chattels. With thriftless, unthinking good nature, they accept this condition and at the end of each trip will squander their credit-wages on worthless trifles. A Lecco friend of mine once squandered the wages of a whole hard trip up-stream on a woman’s straw hat and its mass of pink-ribbon bows that he wore for two days in great pride on the drift down-stream until it was lost overboard in one of the worst rapids. He watched it whirling off in the spray and foam with a childish pleasure and no sense of loss, but rather with the calm complacency of a man who had lost a trifle and could with easy labor earn another.