Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald

This article is about the Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald. For the province of the same name in Peru see Province of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald

Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald at the age of 30

Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald López (born July 6, 1862 in San Luis de Huari , Ancash , Peru , † July 9, 1897 in Upper Urubamba , Peru) was a Peruvian entrepreneur and rubber trader during the rubber boom .

Life

Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald was one of seven children of the American sea ​​captain William Fitzgerald, who Hispanicized his name in Peru to Guillermo Fitzcarrald , and the Peruvian Esmeralda López. Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald grew up in Huaraz , where he also attended school. Later he went to the Liceo Peruano in Lima . In 1878 he returned to his hometown of San Luis de Huari, where he survived an attack by the bandit Benigno Izaguirre.

After the death of his father, he went to the Huánuco region to seek his fortune as a trader. After the outbreak of the war between Peru and Chile, he was apprehended as a minor without papers and, since he owned several maps, charged as a Chilean spy and sentenced to death by a court martial. Fortunately for him, he was recognized by his confessor, who testified for him in time and thus achieved his release. Fitzcarrald set out for the upper Ucayali in the Loreto region in 1879 , where his trail is lost for nine years.

As early as 1888, when he appeared in Iquitos on the Peruvian Amazon , Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald was considered the richest rubber producer and the undisputed master of the region on the upper Ucayali. In Iquitos he sold large quantities of rubber at the Brazilian dealer Cardoso. Soon afterwards he married his daughter Aurora Cardoso, with whom he then had four children who later went to France. With Cardoso he founded a society for the exploitation of rubber in the Peruvian rainforest.

Fitzcarrald's rubber company controlled an area from Ucayali to Madre de Dios . By giving the rubber collectors advances on money and goods, which they had to redeem with corresponding amounts of rubber, he turned them into debtors. Fitzcarrald knew how to take advantage of the hostility among the indigenous peoples of the region. For example, he had indigenous people equipped with weapons, for which they had to capture a number of members of hostile tribes as slave labor. So were bonded labor and direct gunpoint important means of maintaining work. Armed Asháninka (then known as Campa ) and Piro , who themselves became dependent on Fitzcarrald, captured "wild" Mashcos ( Amarakaeri , Toyoeri ) and put them into slave labor as rubber collectors for Fitzcarrald's empire.

Map of the isthmus discovered by Fitzcarrald

Fitzcarrald traveled along the Camisea River and reached Upper Manú . He initially pursued the goal of connecting the rivers Ucayali and Purus with a road, and during his travels discovered the isthmus between the two, which is now called the Istmo de Fitzcarrald .

Shortly after the discovery of the isthmus, Fitzcarrald and his men met a group of Mashco-Piro on upper Manú in 1894 , who refused any service for the whites and asked them to leave the area, as they drove the game they hunted and brought them diseases . As a show of force, Fitzcarrald showed them his Winchester rifles and bullets, which, however, made no impression on the indigenous peoples because, unlike an arrow, they couldn't even cut a wound. Shortly thereafter, Fitzcarrald attacked the Mashco village, who returned fire with a shower of arrows. In the end, the majority of the Mashcos - over 100 men, women and children - lay dead on the shore, which is still called Playa Mashco today . The Mashco, however, are described as skilled fighters who inflicted heavy losses on Fitzcarrald's men. Fitzcarrald reacted with harsh violence: In one day, 30 captured Mashco on Comerjali were executed after a short “trial”. The survivors of these massacres fled to inaccessible areas, where their descendants still avoid contact with intruders.

In 1894 Fitzcarrald had his motor ship Contamana towed from Upper Urubamba over the isthmus to Upper Manú. About a thousand piros and asháninkas and nearly a hundred whites were needed to tow the ship. The company lasted more than two months. Fitzcarrald was able to control a trade route from Madre de Dios to Iquitos, because the Urubamba flows into the Ucayali, while the Manú flows over the Madre de Dios and Madeira into the Amazon in Brazil. He now planned to bridge the isthmus with a railway line. Fitzcarrald also traveled to Liverpool , where he commissioned the construction of his ship Adolfito in a shipyard .

On July 9, 1897, Fitzcarrald had an accident with his ship Adolfito , which had loaded rails for the crossing of the Istmo de Fitzcarrald. Due to a navigational error by the helmsman Alberto Perla, the ship hit a rock with full force, so that the rudder broke, and capsized in the Shepa de Urubamba rapids near Mapalja. The bodies of Fitzcarrald and his friend Vaca Diez, whom he wanted to save from drowning, were found together two days later. Fitzcarrald was buried at the mouth of the Río Iyuna.

reception

In contrast to his contemporary, the rubber baron Julio César Arana del Águila , Fitzcarrald was largely received positively in Peru. He is credited with the discovery of the Istmo de Fitzcarrald between the Urubamba and Manú rivers, which still bears his name today. Likewise, the province of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald , in which his birthplace San Luis is located, is named after him.

The Peruvian writer Ernesto Reyna wrote a novel about Fitzcarrald that came out in 1942. In this story, Fitzcarrald is venerated by the Asháninka (Campa) as the mythical “savior” of Amachengua . Among the Asháninka there was a myth of the return of the Inca - similar to the Inkarrí myth in the Andes - which is called Amachegua (also Amachénga or Amachénka ). Building on this myth, Fitzcarrald was heralded in the novel as the reincarnation of the rebellious indigenous leader of the 18th century, Juan Santos Atahualpa . Like the Inca kings, he called himself the "son of the sun", to whom the jungle Indians had to obey. His father Sonne had ordered the roaming tribes to settle down and build villages with churches.

Fitzcarrald is also the model for the main character in the film Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog , in which he of Klaus Kinski is played.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of Shadows - The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon , p. 62.
2. ↑ Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana, p. 173.
3. ^ S. Varese 1973: La Sal de los Cerros. Una Aproximación al Mundo Campa . Ediciones Retablo de Papel, Lima. P. 247.
4. ^ Andrew Gray: Enslaved Peoples in the 1990s. Indigenous Peoples, Debt Bondage and Human Rights . P. 189.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of Shadows - The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon , S. 63f.
6. ^ Charles C. Mann: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York City 2011, pp. 246f.
7. ↑ P. José Alvarez (Dominican missionary) 1951, in: Beatriz Huertas Castillo: Indigenous Peoples in Isolation in the Peruvian Amazon: Their Struggle for Survival and Freedom . International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Copenhagen 2004. pp. 51f.
8. ^ Scott Wallace: More Sightings, Violence Around Uncontacted Tribes - Why Would Isolated Indians Kill Their Point of Contact With the Outside World? ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. National Geographic (online) January 31, 2012.
9. ↑ Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of Shadows - The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon , pp. 64f.
10. ^ Ernesto Reyna: Fitzcarrald, el rey del caucho . Taller Grafico P. Barrantes, Lima 1942.
11. ↑ Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of Shadows - The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon , p. 61.

literature

• Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana . Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca (España) 2003.
• Andrew Gray: Peru: Freedom and Territory. Slavery in the Peruvian Amazon . In: Anti-Slavery International & IWGIA 1997 (Eds.): Enslaved Peoples in the 1990s: Indigenous Peoples, Debt Bondage and Human Rights . London 1997. Chapter Eight . Pp. 183-215.
• Michael Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of shadows: the struggle for utopia in the Peruvian Amazon. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles (California) 1991. pp. 61-65.
• Charles C. Mann: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York City 2011, pp. 246–247 (cf. excerpt from other edition: Chapter 7: Black Gold . Pp. 328–329).
• Ernesto Reyna: Fitzcarrald, el rey del caucho (novel). Taller Grafico P. Barrantes, Lima 1942.

Web links

• AncashNet: Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald ( Memento from June 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive )