some of them had been warned by outsiders that in the countries to which they were going they would not be employed as labourers, but would be armed and used to force the Indians to work for their employers; they were further told that the Indians, being savages, would kill them. Several of them, taking alarm, had protested at Manaos, and had even appealed to the British Vice-Consul to interfere so that they might be released from their engagement. This was not done. They were assured that their contracts, having been lawfully entered into in a British colony, would be faithfully observed in Peru, and that they must fulfil them. In some cases the men were not reassured, and had to be taken on board the river steamer waiting to convey them to the Putumayo under police supervision.[125] "The first party to disembark in the Putumayo consisted of thirty men with five women. They were landed at La Chorrera, on the Igaraparaná, the headquarters station of the Arana Brothers, in November, 1904. Here they were armed with Winchester rifles and a large supply of cartridges for these weapons, and, headed by a Colombian named Ramón Sanchez, with a man called Armando Normand, who served as interpreter, and several other white men, Colombians or Peruvians, they were dispatched on a long journey through the forest to open up what were styled trade relations with an Indian tribe called the Andokes. This tribe inhabits a district between the Igaraparaná and the Japurá, but lying closer to the latter river. On arrival in this region the men were employed at first in building a house, and then on raids through the surrounding forests in order to capture Indians and compel them to come in and work for Señor Sanchez. They were also used on what were termed 'punitive expeditions' sent out to capture or kill Indians who had killed not long before some Colombians who had settled in the Andokes country with a view to enslaving that tribe and forcing it to work rubber for them. These men had been killed by the Andokes Indians and their rifles captured, and it was to recover these rifles that many of the first raids of the Barbados men were directed by Sanchez and Normand. In this way the station of Matanzas was founded, and the man Normand soon afterwards, on the retirement of Sanchez, became its chief. At the date of my visit to the Putumayo he was still in charge of this district as representative of the Peruvian Amazon Company. The station at Matanzas was founded at the very end of 1904. I visited it on foot in October, 1910. It lies some seventy miles by land from La Chorrera, and the route followed by the Barbados men would occupy some four to five days of hard marching. The forest tracks in the Putumayo present innumerable obstacles. Owing to the very heavy rainfall, water and mud accumulate, many streams--some of them even rivers--have to be crossed either by fording or upon a fallen tree, roots of trees and fallen tree-trunks innumerable bar the