Casement, Hoodwinked Upriver into the Deep Interior

Casement's reports appeared first as a government Blue Book in July 1912; whereas his actual travel diary remained unpublished until 1997. Titled The Amazon Journal, it recorded seventy-five days of river travel in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, commencing on September 23 and ending on December 6, 1910. The majority of the region's main rubber stations were along the Putumayo River; often unchecked, they were places where terror reigned, and he was to witness the horrors of an economy's culture of terror, bolstered by the crumbling morality of British free-trading principles.¹³ Before leaving Iquitos for the Putumayo River, his sense of vulnerability was captured by his entry: “It is fully 1,000 miles … anything may happen to me up there” (1997: 106).

Santos-Granero and Frederica Barclay have questioned the view that “during the nineteenth-century Peru showed little interest in integrating its Amazon territories; the idea that it had no clear geopolitical agenda … no presence in peripheral regions, is clearly a mistake” (2000: 12). Nonetheless, Casement, at the beginnings of the twentieth century, found the P. A. Co. to be in complete control, armed and waging war with Colombians along frontier zones, administering justice and executions, taking and terrorizing prisoners, harassing the authorities in Iquitos and the local press, and controlling all the river traffic along the Putumayo and other regional rivers.¹⁴ The white ivory that had rested on the tips of everyone's tongues in Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness became black gold in Peru. This rubber latex came from the Hevea Brasiliensis, or Siphonia tree,¹⁵ being the principal rubber tree of Peru's Amazonian regions. It was supplying the rubber for tires in the European motorcar industry, in which Britain was a forerunner. Iquitos quickly became the central trading river-post for all the rubber collected from the Putumayo River regions (see Map 1 on previous page).

“Amazonian Rubber Stations of Putumayo; Roger Casement's Travels, 1910,” showing the rubber stations that Casement visited. Drawn by author.

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“Amazonian Rubber Stations of Putumayo; Roger Casement's Travels, 1910,” showing the rubber stations that Casement visited. Drawn by author.

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“Amazonian Rubber Stations of Putumayo; Roger Casement's Travels, 1910,” showing the rubber stations that Casement visited. Drawn by author.

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The facts related to Casement's deployment follow the story of US railroad engineer Walt Hardenburg's account¹⁶ of how he had collected statements of atrocities along the Putumayo River after he and his companion, W. Perkins, had been taken prisoners by the P. A. Co. in 1908. After their escape and forthcoming publications, the anti-slavery and aboriginal movements acted, culminating in a national outcry. Britain's then foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, entrusted Casement to investigate the P. A. Co.'s methods, activities, and employment of British subjects from Barbados.

“Wild and Plantation Rubber Regions, 1922” of Latin America. Drawn by author.

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“Wild and Plantation Rubber Regions, 1922” of Latin America. Drawn by author.

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“Wild and Plantation Rubber Regions, 1922” of Latin America. Drawn by author.

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Helen Carr summed up some of the challenges facing a racially and socially fractured nation like Peru during its attempts to modernize and decolonize:

The later eighteenth and the nineteenth century had seen the invention of distinct national identities, the establishment of firm racial hierarchies, the consolidation of narratives of progress, development, scientific advance, and white supremacy; those were the ideologies that made imperialism possible. Yet the very process of colonisation meant that these clear distinctions began to dissolve: transculturation, miscegenation, the barbarism necessary to impose rule—all conspired to make the question of which was the savage and which the civilised a disturbing one to answer. (2002: 73)

The ideologies that made imperialism possible were deeply entrenched in Peru's social-historical fabric. Arana's nature-exporting business had been successfully immersed in the globalized financial sectors, including stocks and shares in London.¹⁷ As a ruthless exploiter of a massive region of Amazon forests, his deeds and company outlook harked back to a conquistador mindset—one when Peru's environments and indigenous peoples were commodities, mere exploitable subalterns.

Arana's logic posited nature as “the other,” as a subordinate alongside “colonial and third world Natures, women's and brown bodies and alternative spiritualities” (Escobar 2007: 197). It failed to articulate whatsoever any histories of nature and people, save through the “capitalization of nature and labor” (Escobar 2007: 197). Yet navigable rivers and healthy forests were key to the success of this economy. Networks of information, including rumors and whispers, spread along these river systems; travelers have always tuned in, used, embellished, and contributed greatly to such networks. This was especially true for geographers and archaeologists. In 1903, for instance, rubber tappers had informed Mesones Muro that all along the banks of the Ucayali the forests were already depleted, but “throughout the Marañon River this grand region is virgin” (1903: 78).

Julio César Arana (1864–1952), the Peruvian Creole entrepreneur and politician who was the director of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Julio César Arana (1864–1952), the Peruvian Creole entrepreneur and politician who was the director of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Julio César Arana (1864–1952), the Peruvian Creole entrepreneur and politician who was the director of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Writing seven years after Mesones Muro, Casement, in conversation with the boat's captain, also noted the poor condition of the forests close to the shores of the Ucayali river:

This, the true Mother of the waters of the Amazon system, is still the principal feeder of the Iquitos export market. It used to send caucho—the rubber of the Castilloa tree—now none—and it is taking up “rubber”, ie the milk of the Hevea brasiliensis. … The caucho was a great source of wealth, but the caucheros have destroyed in ten years, the Captain says, every milk-bearing Castilloa, within reach of the banks of the Ucayali. (1997: 451)

Roger Casement, born in Dublin, 1864, knighted in 1911 for his bravery and humanitarian work, and hung at Pentonville Prison, London on August 3, 1916, aged fifty-one. In the same style that Conrad had set Heart of Darkness from the deck of a boat, Casement spent much of his time on deck collecting accounts from the people who plied the rivers for a living. He developed an aversion toward imperialism after forming the links between slave labor, environmental destruction, wild capitalism, and global consumerism. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Roger Casement, born in Dublin, 1864, knighted in 1911 for his bravery and humanitarian work, and hung at Pentonville Prison, London on August 3, 1916, aged fifty-one. In the same style that Conrad had set Heart of Darkness from the deck of a boat, Casement spent much of his time on deck collecting accounts from the people who plied the rivers for a living. He developed an aversion toward imperialism after forming the links between slave labor, environmental destruction, wild capitalism, and global consumerism. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Roger Casement, born in Dublin, 1864, knighted in 1911 for his bravery and humanitarian work, and hung at Pentonville Prison, London on August 3, 1916, aged fifty-one. In the same style that Conrad had set Heart of Darkness from the deck of a boat, Casement spent much of his time on deck collecting accounts from the people who plied the rivers for a living. He developed an aversion toward imperialism after forming the links between slave labor, environmental destruction, wild capitalism, and global consumerism. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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These rumors and narratives confirmed that the caucheros were moving rapidly through the forests, leaving chains of destruction in their wake. The gendering of the rivers (and continent) as a motherly, life-giving force was common place. However, the eagerness to secure “milk-bearing” and “virgin” territories—while adhering to rape-and-run economics—demonstrated how nature was being dominated by a violent masculinity and short-termism. Raw materials were being rapidly and violently sourced from the peripheries to reach the global centers. It seemed impossible to align such practices to any general patriotic cause other than the rewards being reaped by a few.¹⁸ “How many Indians of the riverine tribes have also been destroyed, God alone knows. An entire industry ruthlessly killed in a decade,” he wrote (451). In his thinking, Peru's forests and indigenous peoples were inseparable—together they formed the essential and expendable raw materials of the rubber industry.¹⁹ Casement turned to the supernatural to express sanctification for both the forests and the Amazonian people in the face of their plights against the cauchero. He wrote, “God help the tree and the Indian it shelters who stand in his path” (451).

The racial axis was/is central to global power, and it never seemed very far below the surface in Peru's modernizing processes. Mitchell argued that the killing of indigenous people “in the South America which Casement described … was considered a civilizing act” (in Casement 1997: 54).²⁰ As previously mentioned, the paradoxical colonial logic of civilized versus savage was deeply embedded within sectors of Peruvian society. Arana promoted this centuries-old thinking: to an audience in Iquitos in 1912 he responded to press criticism of his murderous methods in the Putumayo by stating, “It is a region … with part of its forests inhabited by cannibal natives … and has for a long time resisted every attempt at civilization” (Arana cited in Goodman 2009: 181).²¹ During the enquiries later held in London and coming to Arana's defense was another Peruvian referred to as Alarco who informed the hearing that “one does not conquer by caressing” (Alarco cited in Goodman 2009: 179).²² Alarco's arguments were centered on heroism and patriotism, adding that “the world owed a great debt to Peru, especially Britain. … Peruvians had laid down their lives in order to defend themselves against the ‘savage,’” and, ultimately, “Peru was only doing in the Amazon what European powers had been doing for centuries worldwide” (Goodman 2009: 179). Despite Lima's intentions to centralize and decolonize aspects of society and the environment, it did not alter the fact that the violence was historically intrinsic and linked to the civilizing acts of conquest and colonialism.

The problems of geography—its political embodiment as much as human—and language were clearly determining factors regarding concepts of national morality, state, and social security, defense, natural resources, and naming of places.²³ For example, Mesones Muro raised such concerns, writing, “As much as we found out by asking, these Indians do not know the name of their nationality. The Christians are the ones who have given the already indicated names” (1903: 80). This neglect of interior regions by the state—“I never encountered any authority on the part of the Peruvian government” (Casement 1911/1985: 41)—provoked haunting lines in Casement's diary. Before departing from Iquitos for the Putumayo River the atmosphere was already unsettling him. To get the evidence he so needed, Casement believed that his best strategy was to interview the Barbadian employees of the P. A. Co. These British subjects were equally embroiled in the inhumane workings of extracting rubber quotas from indigenous Amazonians. The Barbadian Frederick Bishop became Casement's guide and reliable interpreter of the indigenous language, Huitoto, thus permitting him to speak to native victims. All of a sudden, Casement was succumbing to a culture of terror himself: “I shall try to terrify this man into confessing. … I shall find means to induce them to speak,” he wrote (102). His description of the places and scenes were already reading like the introduction to a horror story: “buried in the wilds of a nameless forest in a debatable land claimed by two or three South American Republics” (104). The geopolitical ambiguity meant that “there is no one in the Putumayo empowered to investigate criminal acts … there has been no effective administration in the past, owing to the boundary dispute with Colombia, by Peru—and thus lamentable deeds have been committed with impunity” (126).

The numerous moral concerns he struggled with seemed inextricably woven into notions of secure and clearly defined geographical boundaries. Edward Said emphasized how often the “bitterly disputed recovery of geographical territory which is at the heart of decolonization” (1993: 252) often transforms into spaces of struggle. The evidence presented here—and supported by Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre as well as Mesones Muro—suggests that Peru's overall geographical vagueness contributed toward the country's vulnerability. This had led to petty wars and atrocities as well as muddying the basic binary forces of right and wrong / good and evil.

Writing on the “Culture of Terror” in the Putumayo, Michael Taussig described the debased environment in warped terms—one without logic, the place of the “unreal atmosphere of ordinariness, of the ordinariness of the extraordinary” (1984: 477). This confused state exemplified how daily life was resumed among the perpetrators of horrific crimes. Casement would, for instance, sit at the table for dinner with a cook who earlier had been ruthlessly flogging indigenous laborers, many of whom were children and who bore deep lacerations.²⁴ The culture of terror permeated his own thoughts. He held imaginary conversations with the caucheros in his head—aware that all reasoning was purposely confused and impossible to anchor in any reality. It became gobbledegook like the “unreal atmosphere of ordinariness” or like “magic realism”²⁵—all were off-limits, constructed whereby in the “ordinary” Selva, we make the way things are done “extraordinarily.” After all, both “we” and “you” are not where you believe “ourselves to be.” Casement wrote,

In one breath they agree the system is a bad one, that the people are slaves, and in the next, that it is not all bad.

I say “I am prepared any time you like to prove my assumption, but you demur, on two grounds—one that is “Peru”, and the other is that it is not Peru, and there are no authorities at all, it is impossible to investigate anything of this kind. (178)²⁶

Such conversational entries implied that Casement was under mental duress. He felt very alone—not just in the Putumayo but also in the world, perhaps. While making the connections and realizing that he needed to denounce an entire world system and its founding logic of having historical capitalism and colonial power as its central framework were overwhelming odds. He began by arguing it out with ink and paper—as if the narrative itself represented order and was, thankfully, governed by the page's geographical borders.

Interestingly, some early global consumerist responsibility emerged from the Putumayo reports, which today are commonplace in social-environmental debates. Again Alarco, while defending the P. A. Co., said, “the Englishman who spends his mornings speeding along the broad dusty highroad in his 40 horsepower ‘Argyll car’ … does he know not or does he not wish to know how great the daring of the Peruvian who produces the rubber for the tyres of his car?” (Alarco cited in Goodman 2009: 179).²⁷ All of a sudden, Alarco was probing Europeans to reflect deeper on their concepts of civilization and the resources, geography, personnel, and distribution involved in global consumerist goods. The invisibility of global economic relations between centers and peripheries were Alarco's poignant insights.

Was Travel Writing Effective as a Resistance Literature in Its Engagement with Globalization?

The act of writing such content wretched up the following lines from Casement: “The diary makes me sick again—positively sick—when I read it over and it brings up so vividly that forest of hell” (36). How could it not after what he had witnessed, lived, traveled, feared, argued, and reasoned out under surreal and harrowing conditions and then put into a narrative form? There was, after all, only the page left—and it resonated as a space where moral reason could be pinned, defined, and the evil exposed.²⁸ “In my diary … its only value is that it is honest,” wrote Casement (37). But the act of writing always takes something from its author—and clearly this was travel and writing exposing their cutting edges. It is life threatening to investigate crimes to humanity and nature or to resist land seizures that have their underlying causes in powerful global oligarchies and governments.²⁹ He had been told by an informer shortly before his departure for Europe that “had you been a mere traveller and had seen things. … Your death would have been put down to Indians” (472).

Casement described the lawlessness as “rampant capitalism's’ workings,” and it was equally one of “foreign policy.” Under a subheading “Who is to blame?” Casement gave details: “The Aranas “brought their wares (50,000 Indian slaves) to market” in London. Not, be it observed, to Madrid or to Lima, but to London” (504). Equally, the Peruvian government was exposed as having had a sizeable hand in affairs, so the networks of criminality reached the highest levels on an international stage. For Casement the socioeconomic and environmental realities for a country like Peru still amounted to “the persistence of neo-colonialism, imperialism, and “structures of dependency” (Coronil 2008: 415). This was rendered functional due to distances, a facelessness, as well as disassociations with source product and final market destination.³⁰ History was repeating, and any belief that a continental independence had been won was merely illusionary. Casement saw the necessity for peripheral supplier nations to decolonize their nature and minds while enforcing company/individual responsibilities and business-consumerist ethics. Such thinking was also prevalent for many Peruvians too. For example, Mesones Muro commented outright on Peru's rubber industry, describing how it was being dominated by fear, terror, violence, and short-termism. Passing through Alto Marañón during his journey to Iquitos in 1913, Mesones Muro portrayed the region as being “beautiful, silent, uninhabited and its forests are full of rubber trees” (1913: 56). But throughout other areas of the region where various rubber companies had expanded, he described otherworldly, secretive, and debased scenes:

Indians from one tribe assassinate those from another and are commanded by Christians; The few subjugated Indians are used for the collection of rubber … they are considered as property and are guarded from all contact with anyone who is not tied to the Alto Marañón Rubber Company; Many of the settled Christians in the region are hoping to leave, threatened by the Company. (1913: 59)

Mesones Muro had always expressed a passionate belief in his work, in travel, and in the Peruvian government's dedication toward mestizaje and modernization. He encouraged these settlers to stay on, believing that his reports would influence authorities to act and protect its citizens from the criminality. An industrious societal base was his solution: “I am of the opinion,” he wrote, “that the government cancels the operating concessions of the aforementioned company and dedicates the region to colonization” (1913: 59). Wanting to denounce the Alto Marañón Rubber Company, Mesones Muro used his travel narratives in moves toward countering those who were working against the modernizing and stabilizing goals of the country.

In 1928 Muro concluded that his years dedicated to patriotic exploration, while questing for a more viable future for the country, had been fraught with “so many difficulties in a country made ill from an epidemic of unprecedented crimes, of lawless and godless people!!!” (1928: 59). Casement suffered the same disillusionment, leading Vargas Llosa to describe him as having been a “very tragic figure … a very difficult life: solitude, prejudices around himself … his rejection of empire and of colonialism in his youth he thought were the tool of modernisation, of democratisation” (Vargas Llosa in Mitchell 2009: 138).³¹ Environmental destruction also featured in his diary. For example, “All the rubber trees for miles around had been killed. This also accounts for the famine stricken district” (320), and “the forest path was gradually giving out its stock of rubber … we found these “stations” were continually changing their locality. … Look at the list of abandoned stations … rubber trees … exhausted and hacked to exhaustion. … The forest extremely poor, small stunted trees and I only saw one rubber tree in the whole 4 miles tramp, and it hacked to death” (150). Poignantly he noted how ‘“getting rich” quick, and exploiting natural resources, like these of the Amazon valley. … Vegetable filibustering could never take the place of agriculture” (79). Indeed, “As places become ‘consumed’, they lose much of their former uniqueness” (Stack 1988: 661). The premise to the modern/colonial global structure of power will always be nature and cheap/slave labor (Escobar 2004; 2007). In these brief examples the humanitarian concerns of both protagonists extended outward to those on the environment—all being interconnected phenomena, whereby degraded environments reflected exploited and marginalized people.³²

Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro (1862–1930). The eccentric Peruvian explorer-geographer pioneered ideas of an interoceanic route between Peru's Pacific coast toward the Amazon and Atlantic Ocean. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro (1862–1930). The eccentric Peruvian explorer-geographer pioneered ideas of an interoceanic route between Peru's Pacific coast toward the Amazon and Atlantic Ocean. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro (1862–1930). The eccentric Peruvian explorer-geographer pioneered ideas of an interoceanic route between Peru's Pacific coast toward the Amazon and Atlantic Ocean. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Casement's final words were: “I see no hope for the Amazon under Peru at all, and very little for the Amazon under Brazil” (451), believing that the forests were being stripped of their mystery and creating in him “a nostalgic, even atavistic, search for some last hidden tokens of its former wild savagery and exoticism” (Whitehead 2002: 135). He ruminated on how “The valley of the Amazons covers an area fully two million square miles and the “commercial” product of this vast region has been first (and for centuries) Indians and latterly Indian rubber” (500).³³ Thus, after three centuries and Peru with nearly a century of independence, “we are witnessing similar phenomena to those that took place in the sixteenth century” (Quijano 2008: 249).

In spite of his aversion to imperialism, Casement expressed his ideas on European settler colonialism—that shared schizophrenic similarities with the previous century's travelers, such as Alexander Von Humboldt, Clements Markham, and Lieutenant Herndon. Firstly, Casement wrote that Peru must be freed from European imperialism, then he proclaimed the “justice and labour advancing up this mighty river” that “would subdue the forest and found cities … that the perfect race of the future attain to complete fruition of man's beautiful heritage—the earth” (434). And who was the perfect race to lead this colonization of the Amazon forests—those people who could replace these wildernesses of unsurpassable biodiversity with urban centers? Casement concluded, “I believe that the people for the task are … our friends the Germans” (434). This is a further example of how in the most critical of Western minds that European civilizations—and their societal-political structures—were still the forces needed to develop Amazonia.

In some abstract way for Casement as a European, “the challenge of travel itself becomes a way of connecting the modern travel experience with the conquistadors of old, thereby again placing native peoples and their landscapes outside historical time, waiting patiently for the pen of the discoverer to bring them into the light of understanding and knowledge” (Whitehead 2002: 135).³⁴ Casement's Journal also contained descriptive scenes that gave the reader a sense of the gorgeous thriving forests, rivers, and their ubiquitous qualities. His contemplative use of scenic depth, color, and appreciation of a living landscape all add a literary beauty and mysteriousness to his entries:

The sunset was again magnificent, and the night came gloriously. After a fierce sun the cool of the evening was delicious, and the moon rose with a veritable column of gold, clean cut, in the river below, shining half across the stream in angular reflection. The palms stood out above the forest. (416)

In 1913, one year after the distribution of Casement's damning report of 1912, the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima published a study by Oyague y Calderón on the “Crisis of rubber in Amazonas.” It detailed the prevailing global market and developments being made in the production of synthetic substitutes. He made serious observations on the caucheros, such as how “they must replant the destroyed woods as close as is possible to the river stations” (1913: 201). This meant that prosperous harvests from the same forests were currently impossible and that this loss was now both a localized and globalized issue for Peru.

Replanting clearly supported a move toward a more enlightened usage of the forests—even when replanted forests are not exactly natural—or unnatural. However, what was lacking in Oyague y Calderón's study were careful observations on forest ecosystems. In fact, no such surveys were broached. Neither did he engage in any depth with the human costs that Casement's report had only so recently exposed. He merely noted that “there were ignorant methods” and an “inconsiderate exploitation of indigenous people” (176). “Crisis” here was limited to the faltering economy of Peru's rubber industry and its effects on the state's expansionist program. His outlook perceived nature and people as “an accounting system and thereby became a tool for the capitalization of the planet” (Haraway et al. 2016: 539).

Cárlos Oyague y Calderón (1860–1932?), an engineer, traveler, and active member of the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Cárlos Oyague y Calderón (1860–1932?), an engineer, traveler, and active member of the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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Cárlos Oyague y Calderón (1860–1932?), an engineer, traveler, and active member of the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima. © Hélène Guyot. For further information, see www.firstrainofsummer.com.

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In response to Europe's industrial advances in synthetic alternatives—as well as other growing overseas market threats, such as Africa and Malaysia—Oyague y Calderón suggested an upgrade of the production base for rubber extraction along the Ucayali and Marañon River banks. In doing so, he shamefully proposed the colonial plantation model, writing “little by little, it is necessary to substitute primitive exploitation of the forest with the plantation regime” (201). Resulting from three decades of indiscriminate and wasteful exploitation of natural resources, Peru was now suffering fairly long-term environmental damage. Furthermore, the international market had largely abandoned the country now that new and more lucrative ones had evolved overseas.

There was still a sense of the daring Peruvian confronting the savage in Oyague y Calderón's approach. The oppositions he constructed were similar to Arana's stance—namely, the primitive and wild forests, like their inhabitants dwelling within, must eventually succumb to the civilized, structured, and army-like plantation regime. Being proposed once again to geographers, elite scientists and policy makers were colonial constructs for the exploitation of Peru's nature and indigenous workforce. The indigenous people did not participate in the discussions about their rights, and yet, in Oyague y Calderón's undoubting opinion, they were to form the new workforce. This is an image that has strong connotations to slavery. “The aborigines,” he wrote are “the true sons of the forests; in spite of all the bad treatment they receive and the miserable life they lead, they are always ready to sell their labor; they are also infected with the civilizing fever of capital” (206). The bad treatment of the “true sons” of the forests was written in the present tense, implying that indigenous peoples had no real mastery of human emotions and that they held participating as exploited subalterns in capitalistic systems in higher esteem than the very recent extermination of their population under the same industry. By now, under Oyague y Calderón's analysis, indigenous communities were “infected” by capitalism—the structural component of civilization. This reinforces a common intellectual thread in postcolonial studies: “New species, new systems of production, new forms of social relations were all the out-workings of the colonial mind. Nature was conquered, made productive despite itself. People were dealt with in the same way” (Adams and Mulligan 2003: 43).

Oyague y Calderón's vision remained true to frontier hypothesis that had already been fundamental in shaping North American society. Consequently, their travels “set men free—made them rich—made them bold … the frontier was … a windfall of natural resources: precious metals, furs, amber-gris, slaves, pasturage; things that brought immediate profit … the boom modified economic and political structures” (Green 1980: 130–131). Ultimately, he remained emotionally distant, sharing much in common with Arana. While the latter considered his presence and commerce in the Putumayo as a civilizing act, Oyague y Calderón viewed factory-style regimes as civilized, modern, and in keeping with the evolving global economy. Due to their preconceived notions of Latin America's others and environments, their cravings were repeatedly prioritized over the actual circumstances.

Realizing the need to better Peru's agricultural base, Oyague y Calderón made an important observation that contradicted his earlier hypothesis. He gleaned his facts from Dr. Pedro de Toledo, the then agricultural minister of Brazil. Toledo had introduced a law in 1912 that sought to prevent the risks to crops from diseases caused by monocultures. Oyague y Calderón concluded his own report by suggesting that the Brazilian law could serve as an example for Peru to follow. He wrote, “in order to avoid exposing ourselves to the dangers of monoculture, which are always high, this law offers protection to all agricultural industries that give value to the riches of our country, such as ranching, fish farming, crop cultivation etcetera” (210).

To conclude, many Peruvian scholars believe that Amazonia has functioned as “a colonial space of the Peruvian state” (Rumrrill 2008: 116). Today it comprises a geographic, social, scientific, natural, and economic reality that has a history of myths in the Western consciousness as well as modernity experiments.³⁵ The historical narratives by Casement and Mesones Muro demonstrated that travel writing was effective in its dealings and reporting on environmental issues, lawlessness, and crimes to humanity. Equally, the genre was instigating international dialogues that resisted deeply entrenched capitalistic and colonial attitudes. Mesones Muro's narratives in particular contributed significantly toward national decolonization processes. As a progressive figure, his home-grown explorations and travel writing were responding to localized knowledges. Overall, though, the grander liberal and intellectual atmospheres inspired by modernity did little to radically influence the prevailing political policies. The age-old colonial attitudes toward alternative peoples and nature pursued—loosely described as a take, transport, manufacture, and throw-away circular economy. Aside from capitalism's ability to continually reinvent itself, it clearly shows that modernity is fundamentally anti-ecological.

Irresistibly today—and yet unknown to Casement then—his travel itinerary and writing forged his own script. He became a star; his was a “character whose natural environment is a very great novel.” And “the nuances are essential in his personality, nuances and contradictions … he is much more human than the usual heroes” (Vargas Llosa 2012 in conversation with Mitchell 2009: 138). As he reflected upon the socioeconomic relations of power and their effects on both nature and indigenous peoples, Casement understood how “capitalism as a system of relations of production … the heterogeneous linking of all forms of control of labor and its products under the dominance of capital, was constituted in history only with the emergence of America” (Quijano 2008: 199). At the heart of this modern/colonial world system, exemplified by the P. A. Co., was not nationality but global economic interests, racial constructs based on evolutionary differences, and social and environmental violence. Arana—who in defense of his company's objectives, profits, acts of terror, and environmental destruction—held up a mirror to Europe, arguing that what they had done followed the very examples set earlier by Europe. Casement's Journal contributed toward a pivotal moment in North-South relations—when people of the North were prompted to reflect further by questioning the ethics of sourcing distant raw materials while exploiting slave/cheap labor.

The Eurocentrism present in the P. A. Co.'s and Oyague y Calderón's thinking revealed how their overall aspirations were more in tune with the interests of their European peers. The narratives produced here for the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima exposed the various levels to which Peruvians were portraying themselves as a nation of fractured identities and hierarchies. Mesones Muro remained convinced that Peru required an intellectual base of explorers: it was “for the traveler to meditate on what it would signify for the well-being of these eastern Selva regions if they were exploited for their riches by intelligent and hard-working industrial means” (1903: 61). Peru's international expansionism required a long-term focus, fairer trading relations, and deliberate state interventionism to prevent the harrowing exploitation of nature and marginalized communities. Such beliefs linked him closer to Casement than to his own countryman and Sociedad Geográfica de Lima member Oyague y Calderón.

Overall, the evidence shows that travel writing does not need to act as a compass for imperialism, even when the raw truths expose that these “nature-exporting nations are frequently recast in their old colonial role as sources of primary products, a role now rewritten in terms of the neoliberal rationality of globalizing capitalism” (Coronil 1997: 7).³⁶ Upon leaving South America Casement wrote, “and so adieu to the Peruvian Amazon” (488).³⁷ The ambiguity of that “farewell” has been left lingering above the Amazon River, forests, and its people until today. Environmental lawlessness, social violence, and ill-conceived modernity projects were then—and are today—ruining the country.³⁸

Afterword, as the Amazon Forests Burn … 

In 2019 and since the start of the dry season, the Amazon forests have been blazing with over seventy thousand fires—all clearly visible using Google Earth. Let us term this as a veritable inferno of sporadic fires, purposely started and with thirty thousand separate incidents registered in August. According to a plethora of online sources and uploaded for all by indigenous communities and their spokespeople, travelers, journalists, NGOs, eco-activists, and eye witnesses throughout regions such as Rondônia: President Jair Bolsonaro's erosion of resources for federal environment agencies, sanctioned increase in the use of concrete for the construction of hydro-electric dams, cessation of any further legal claims on rights to land by indigenous communities, granting of mining concessions on those lands already registered and protected, placing of the environment ministry under the agriculture ministry and controlled by the powerful agribusiness lobby—these actions have all somehow given credence to the extreme violence currently being waged within the forests.

Bolsonaro's decidedly anti-environmental rhetoric makes it clear beyond any doubt that Brazil's previous commitment to reforesting twelve million hectares by 2030—as agreed at the 2015 Paris Conference of the Parties—is no longer the case. Rhetoric and policy also create reality: the Amazon is close to reaching its tipping point. Thus, the negative synergies now in flux and driven by deforestation—forest fires, chainsaws, dams—spiral outward from a planetary boundary named as “land-system change.” By altering finely tuned ecosystems above and beyond their natural states, these effects then feed into the adjacent boundary of “biosphere integrity,” which relates to ecosystems’ overall ability to function in response to biodiversity losses as well as determining the rates of species extinctions—now termed as the sixth mass extinction. These crucial Earth systems boundaries are already in critical states, and as all the planetary boundaries interact, they culminate in climate change itself.³⁹

Glossary

Amazonia: a forested territory under the jurisdiction of eight sovereign states, namely; Venezuela, Surinam, Peru, Guyana, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia. A signed “Treaty for Amazon Cooperation” (1978), represents common ground between the countries based on regional interests. All Amazonia's territory has a national state owner, each managing its own resources—if any shared ownership exists this is due to concessions given under state laws as private agreements.

Cauchero: a rubber tapper.

Caucho: rubber, black rubber, black gold.

Civilistas: Peru's first political party was known as the Civil Party and was founded in 1871 by Peru's oligarchy. Their ideological stance was positivist philosophy. In simple terms, this signified local responses toward the expansionist policies of urban centers of capital industrialization.

Criollo/a: a highly nuanced term. In Peru it generally refers to a person born in Latin America of European lineage during the colonial period. Such a person was aligned with elitism—being, generally, white and wealthy. It is used today for the same implications. However, it also refers to a diverse cultural heritage. In the Caribbean, Creoles share mixed African and Spanish heritage. It also depicts the white settlers in the Caribbean.

Eurocentrism: Quijano's description acts as a definition here: “Eurocentrism is … the name of a perspective of knowledge whose systematic formation began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century, although some of its roots are … much older. In the following centuries this perspective was made globally hegemonic, travelling the same course as the dominion of the European bourgeois class” (2008: 197).

Mestizo/a: a person of mixed indigenous and white ancestry. Consider Cortéz and Malintzin—this symbolic struggle over the racial politics of mestizaje.

Mestizaje: encompasses the long-term outcomes of racial mixing in the Americas and intended to become the New Latin American identity. Much racism, exploitation, and misunderstandings also evolved.

Sarsaparilla: Peruvian bark; a tropical plant of the genus Smilax—the dried leaves and roots make a herbal tonic used in the treatment of psoriasis and was one of the most important commodities in the extractive economy of South America's tropical forests. They were widely plundered for this plant in the two hundred years before the advent of rubber.