"No missions or missionaries would seem to have ever penetrated to the regions here in question. On the upper waters of the Putumayo itself religious instruction and Christian worship appear to have been established by Colombian settlers, but these civilising influences had not journeyed sufficiently far downstream to reach the Huitotos or their neighbours. Save for the raids of slavers coming up the Japurá or Putumayo, their contact with white men had been a distant and far-off story that in little affected their home life, save possibly to add an element of demoralisation in the inducements offered for the sale of human beings. "Lieutenant Maw, an officer of the British Navy who crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic by way of the Amazon early in the last century, in his work speaks of the Putumayo in the vaguest terms, and it is clear that then, in 1827, and later on in 1851, when Lieutenant Herndon, of the United States Navy, went down the Amazon in a canoe, nothing was really known either of the river or of its inhabitants. They were practically an untouched, primitive people when the first Colombian _caucheros_, coming down the Putumayo from the settled regions on its upper waters, located themselves at different points along the head waters of the Caraparaná and Igaraparaná, and entered into what are termed trade dealings with those unsophisticated tribes. "This first Colombian invasion of the Putumayo regions took place, I am informed, in the early eighties, some of my informants stated about 1886. The earliest of these _conquistadores_ were Crisóstomo Hernandez and Benjamin Larrañaga, who entered the region in search of the inferior kind of rubber there produced, known as _sernambi_ or _jebe debil_ (weak, fine rubber). The banks of these two rivers, and the whole of the region inhabited by the Huitotos, the Andokes, and the Boras Indians, are fairly well stocked with trees that furnish the milk out of which an inferior rubber is elaborated. The Putumayo Indians merely gash the tree with a knife or _machete_, and, catching the milk as it exudes in little baskets made of leaves, they wash it in their streams of running water and pound it with wooden pestles into long sausage-shaped rolls, termed in Peruvian rubber parlance _chorizos_, which ultimately are put upon the market just as the Indian carries them in to whoever may be locally exploiting him and his neighbourhood. That these wild Indians welcomed the coming into their country of Hernandez, Larrañaga, and the other Colombians who succeeded these earliest of the modern _conquistadores_ it would be absurd to assert. They were, doubtless, glad to get _machetes_, and powder and caps for the few trade guns they possessed, with the prospect even of acquiring more of these priceless weapons themselves, along with such trifles as beads, mirrors, tin bowls, fish-hooks, and tempting tins of sardines or potted meats--all of them