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.

The Indians whom I had met before were the Quechuas and the AymarÁs, the great tribes of the high plains; heavy-boned, stocky, and powerful peoples, who, in feature and color strongly resemble our own Sioux and Apache type. These Leccos, on the contrary, were slender, well-built men, with a direct, soft quickness of movement that revealed the perfect strength that lay behind it. In feature they were absolutely Malay—a perfect reproduction of any of the Malay tribes that fringe the coast of Asia.

Other rivers have the balsa and the callapo too, and the long rapids through narrow gorges, but the Indians of those rivers lie down and clutch for safety when they go through them. Your Lecco goes into the boiling smother of a cataract with a grinning yell of pure joy, and keeps his feet like a Glo’ster skipper in a high gale.

The balsa of the Leccos is a raft made of the light, corky wood from which it takes its name. Eight-inch logs of this balsa wood are pinned together with palm spikes from the hard, black palm that is also used as arrow-points and for bows. When floating in the water it looks like some unwieldy amphibian that has risen to the surface for a fresh supply of air. It is generally about twenty-five feet long and about four feet wide. The Leccos lash three balsas together, broadside on, by means of stout cross-logs tied with strips of bark or vine, and this result is called a callapo. It is a structure that is capable of carrying some three tons of cargo—that is if handled by Leccos.

The first thing that impressed me about these Leccos was the distinctness with which they represented another race. It was not the mere divergence of tribe; it was more fundamental—it was a racial difference. There was nothing in it to suggest even a remote relation to any of the tribes with whom I had come in contact up to that time, or, for that matter, with any of those that I subsequently met. To begin with, the Leccos looked clean—a condition that one seldom finds in the Quichua or AymarÁ nations; although cleanliness is almost an invariable condition of all river peoples. Their complexion was of the soft, warm brown of the Hindu or the Filipino, having no suggestion of the dull chocolate of the negro or the weather-beaten copper of the AymarÁs or of our own Western Indians.

Their features again are decidedly Malaysian—straight high nose with thin nostrils; forehead fairly high and well shaped; finely cut thin lips, and the narrow, though not slanting eyes of the East. The hair is oily jet-black, thick, and grows to a point on the forehead, in the style made known by Aguinaldo, and is kept neatly cut in a straight, bristly pompadour. They do not care for the gaudy feather head-dresses of their savage neighbors—not even ear-rings—and for head decorations are content with the brilliant bandanna of the trader, twisted and tied in a band about the head in very much the same manner as used by our own Apaches of Arizona. A band necklace of bright beads, strung and designed in simple patterns by their own women, on threads of wild cotton, is their only ornament. These are almost invariably worn by the men only and are tied tightly about the throat.

Another striking point about the Leccos, one in which they differ from all of the “barbaros,” or the savages of the Amazon tributaries, is their muscular development. The barbaro in this respect is very deficient. He is strong almost beyond belief, but it is the strength of sinew and not of muscle. It is like the strength of the monkey, that is not made visible by the ordinary signs of muscular development. The barbaro has no apparent deltoid, no biceps, no triceps, none of the finely developed muscles of the leg and thigh that with us make for strength. He is built like an undeveloped boy who has suddenly suffered from too rapid growth. The Leccos, on the contrary, are beautifully developed physically; knotted muscles shift and play evenly under the soft skin and suggest a swift sureness of movement and a strength of endurance that are demanded in their life on the river.

The likeness of these people to the Malays is still further accented by their costume. They wear rather tight breeches of white tucuyo, a coarse muslin, that taper to the ankle, and above it a short shirt of gaudy red, yellow, or blue, or even sometimes white, though the red is popularly regarded as the most aristocratic. The shirt is cut square with the armholes in the two upper corners. The hole for the head is emblazoned by a border of crude design cut from varied-colored calicos and sewed on. In the course of many days’ association with them, I discovered that the little chipa, or bag of native-woven wild cotton, which every Lecco carries with him on any of his river expeditions, is filled with clean clothing. The muddy water of the Rio Mapiri and the Rio Kaka—which the Mapiri becomes farther down—soils everything it touches, and so the Leccos, who are as much in the water as out of it, regularly changed their garments daily, only making an exception when some extra-hard passages would have made it a useless extravagance.

In my contact with the South American Indians, whether among the high plains of the Andes or among the forests drained by the tributaries of the Amazon, I received rather the impression of inert, passive races; of peoples who were patiently hoping for the return of the legendary days of their fathers, yet who, dimly, in some way felt that the hope was vain. It might poetically be interpreted as a vague consciousness of their doom of ultimate extinction. The Lecco is probably doomed to extinction as well, but he is by no means a despondent specimen. On the contrary, no more cheery, indeed hilarious, outfit can be imagined than that with which we embarked on our callapos at Mapiri. Candor compels me to own that this exuberance of spirits was probably largely alcoholic, for it is one of the few rights to which he clings tenaciously—that of being allowed to keep drunk while making a voyage on the river. For the Lecco will not work to any good purpose if kept sober; they feel that they have been defrauded and cheated of an inalienable right, and at the first convenient opportunity they will avenge the injury by running the callapo on a rock in a rapid, while they themselves will swim through it like otters and make the shore below safe and unrepentant. Unlike all other savages, who become treacherous and turbulent under the influence of liquor, the Lecco becomes even more genial and jovial when in his cups. He is pre-eminently a man of peace.

From the moment that we shoved out into the stream everything was a huge joke. If one slipped on the submerged logs of the callapo and floundered overboard, the rest hailed it with yells of delight, and they dug their heavy paddles into the water and tried to pull the callapo beyond his reach. The victim would dive and come up in some unexpected place, where the effect of the black pompadour and the beady eyes suddenly popping above the opaque depths of an eddy, followed by a damp, sheepish grin, was irresistibly funny.

They are perfectly at home in the water, and will swim any rapid and the dangerous whirlpools that are constantly forming below them, without hesitation—places that it would be fatal for a white man to attempt. There is a story of a Lecco who went through the most dangerous of the rapids with his wife and baby and a mule—the mule and baby inclosed in a framework of palm amidships on the balsa, and the wife helping with a paddle at the stern. They made the passage safely, but it was the survival of the mule that excited their admiration.

Their huts are one-roomed affairs with the floor of beaten clay, upon which, at night, are laid woven grass mats that serve as beds. The walls are of charo—a kind of poor relative of the bamboo—lashed to a slender framework of the same material by split strips of the mora, the typical hut of the tropical frontier. Stout posts sunk at the corners give the strength to support the roof. The huts are about ten by fifteen feet. The steep-pitched roof is thatched with split palm-leaves that render it water-proof even in the heavy tropical thunder-storms. A high broad shelf at one end serves as a second story and a place of storage. In some there is a low shelf of charo along one side that serves as the family bed, though these latter are only in the houses of the more ambitious Leccos. All cooking is done at one end over an open fire, the smoke escaping as best it may through the interstices between the layers of charo. A single door is the only opening.

Near by is the little platano or plantain patch, and a few yuccas. A few scrawny chickens use the house as their headquarters, and are reserved for fiestas. A pot or two, purchased from the traders complete the household equipment. Invariably they boil their food, even to the platanos that are so much better roasted. This is in striking contrast to the barbaros of the farther interior, who are without the knowledge of boiling food; they either eat it raw or roast it slightly.

The Lecco women are also as distinctly Malaysian in appearance as the men. They have fine figures and retain the free gracefulness of carriage of the nude savage, and, up to the time they are sixteen, if not absolutely pretty in feature, are distinctly pleasing. One, however, that I saw in the rubber barraca of Caimalebra, living with a Bolivian refugee murderer, was an absolute beauty by any standards of comparison. They were living happily, and on one trip I enjoyed their hospitality for five days. The single garment of the women is an exaggeration of the Lecco shirt, reaching nearly to the ankles. It is pleasing in its effect, and sets off the graceful beauty of their figures in a way that recalls the simple fashions of the Hawaiian and Polynesian peoples. The women of other tribes are apt to adopt slatternly skirts after their introduction to the frontier civilization.

The girls are fully developed at fourteen, and they usually mate a year or so later with a Lecco boy of about their own age. The boy at that time is a full-fledged balsero and able to hold his own in the struggle with the river—their only test of arrival at man’s estate.

Sometimes a mission priest comes down the river, and then, if the family has prospered, there will be a grand fiesta and a marriage will be performed according to the rites of the Church. This will cost forty bolivians—about eighteen dollars—for the priest’s fee, and considerably more for the drunken orgy that follows. To have been married according to the ceremonies of the Church is a great distinction, and also a rare one.