"The unrelieved barbarity of this Report does not rest alone on the testimony of the Barbados men whose depositions accompany it. I had other evidence to go by at the outset, and this was found to be in more than one instance amply confirmed by the independent statements of the British witnesses and again and again borne out by the evidence of our own eyes and the general conditions of the Indians. Could these people have been themselves fully interrogated, the weight of testimony would have been far greater, but could not have been more convincing.
"A magistrate was said to be residing at one of the company's stations on that river, but I never heard him once referred to, and when peculiarly atrocious crimes were dragged to light, admitted, and deplored, the criminal charged with them would be sitting at table with us, and the members of the company's commission and myself were appealed to to give no indication of our disgust lest this man 'might do worse things' to the Indians or provoke an impossible situation with the armed bandits under his orders. The apology for this extraordinary situation was that there was 'no authority, no administration, no one near to whom any appeal could be made,' and that Iquitos was 1,200 miles away. Every chief of section was a law unto himself, and many of the principal agents of this British company were branded by the representative of that company, holding its power of attorney, in conversation with me as 'murderers, pirates, and bandits.'"
A considerable part of Consul Casement's Report is taken up with the depositions, sworn before him, of the Barbados men; one of these, by name Stanley Lewis, stated:--
"I have seen Indians killed for sport, tied up to trees and shot at by Fonseca and the others. After they were drinking they would sometimes do this. They would take a man out of the _cepo_ and tie him to a tree, and shoot him for a target. I have often seen Indians killed thus, and also shot after they had been flogged and their flesh was rotten through maggots."
This man also described terrible barbarities committed on and murder of two Indian girls by Fonseca. James Chase, another Barbados man, gave a long account of Indians being flogged to death, starved, or shot, and describes the terrible occurrence connected with the murdering of the family of Katerene as follows:--