Not only were they not compensated, but no reproof or punishment of any kind had been inflicted upon the agents so grossly maltreating them. With one exception, that of Rodríguez, these agents were still in the service of the company at the time I was on the Putumayo, and I met all three of them. I have dealt at length with these cases of assault upon the British employees because they are typical of the manner of dealing of so-called white men with inferiors placed under their orders in that region. The Barbados men were not savages. With few exceptions they could read and write, some of them well. They were much more civilised than the great majority of those placed over them--they were certainly far more humane. "The man Dyall, who had completed nearly six years' service when I met him at Chorrera on the 24th of September, appeared to be in debt to the company to the sum of 440 _soles_ (say, £44) for goods nominally purchased from its stores. Some of this indebtedness was for indispensable articles of food or clothing, things that the working-man could not do without. These are all sold at prices representing often, I am convinced, 1,000 per cent. over their cost prices or prime value. Much of the men's indebtedness to the company was also due to the fact that they were married--that is to say, that every so-called civilised employee receives from the agent of the company, on arrival, an Indian woman to be his temporary wife. Sometimes the women are asked; sometimes, I should say from what I observed, their wishes would not be consulted--they certainly would not be consulted in the case of a white man who desired a certain Indian woman. With the Barbados men it was, no doubt, a more or less voluntary contract on each side--that is to say, the agent of the company would ask one of the numerous Indian women kept in stock at each station whether she wished to live with the new arrival. This man Dyall told me, in the presence of the chief agent of the Peruvian Amazon Company at La Chorrera, that he had had nine different Indian women given to him as 'wives' at different times and at the various stations at which he had served. When an employee so 'married' leaves the station at which he is working to be transferred to some other district, he is sometimes allowed to take his Indian wife with him, but often not. It would depend entirely upon the goodwill or caprice of the agent in charge of that station. As a rule, if a man had a child by his Indian partner he would be allowed to take her and the child to his next post, but even this has been more than once refused. In Dyall's case he had changed his wives as often as he had changed his stations, and always with the active approval of the white man in charge, since each new wife was the direct gift or loan of this local authority. These wives had to be fed and clothed, and if there were children, then all had to be provided for. To this source much of the