DYEING WOOL BY AN ANCIENT FORMULA

Grace Escardó (left) helps worker dye wool in rich, red-violet dye made from cochineal insects that live on cactus plants.

grimage led from library to museum; from old musty manuscripts to older musty shrouds; from Indian thatched huts in the jungles to Indian stone huts on the high, cold, snowy altiplano. It meant collecting samples of contemporary materials and documenting witch doctors' tales and legends about ancient ones. It meant searching for the sources and formulas of the dyes which constitute the incredible range of permanent colors for which the ancient textiles of the highland civilizations are justly famous. It meant endless experiments with herbs, barks, roots, wildflowers, berries, and insects. Some five thousand tests of about 1,500 different materials were executed in this search, which finally produced 325 permanent, tested, natural dyes.

Ancient textiles and motifs as well as modern weaving fibers were examined with the same thoroughness. One result of great importance was the rediscovery of the value of the ancient primitive Indian hip loom and its suitability for use in modern production.

The forests of eastern Peru disclosed an infinite variety of colored woods suitable for carving. The land itself provided an equally rich variety of ceramic materials. The very people, with their latent talent and inherent skill, rooted in the tradition and art of the past, proved the most challenging and probably the most valuable of Peru's nation al resources to be conserved and developed.

After these first nine months, a laboratory-workshop was set up in Lima to serve

a practical demonstration and to place the project on a commercial footing. Almost from the start the experiment proved financially successful. Little by little its reputation grew among artists and the other cultured groups in the cosmopolitan city of Lima. By the mysterious grapevine, it reached out into the small towns, attracting craftsmen as well as untrained people in need of work. Here,

under the enthusiastic and intelligent direction of Truman Bailey and his Peruvian colleague, workers discovered that they were encouraged to develop their own arts, using Peruvian materials, Peruvian methods, and Peruvian tradition, to recapture their legitimate pride in their own racial identity. They learned to make their own tools and looms-a training which enabled many to return to their own communities and make their own equipment.

To accomplish all this, $45,000 was invested by the Inter-American Development Commission in the course of years to cover research and experimentation. Tools were made by the workmen and machinery was purchased from the project's earnings. When production and sales proved that a market existed for these goods, the Peruvian Government offered to take over. It proposed first, to

relieve the Commission of further financial burden, and second, to insure the permanence of the project by creating a National Institute of Manual Arts in Peru. This was done by supreme decree of the Government on June 28, 1946.

The Inter-American Development Commission transferred the property of the project to the Peruvian Government. The latter placed $29,000 in the Institute treasury, selected a board of directors and provided for the continued growth of the Institute by permitting assistance from outside individuals and agencies who be

come honorary members. Finally, it contracted with Truman Bailey and Grace Escardó to remain with the new organization and continue their remarkable work as Director and Assistant Director of the Institute.

It is hoped that under the Peruvian Government this experiment will expand rapidly and that similar laboratory-workshops will soon be functioning in Cuzco, Huancayo, and other cities. This is one "Good Neighbor" program that worked. It should be an inspiration and example for others.

First Voyage Down the
Amazon

EARLY in the year 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro (brother of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru) led an expedition out of Quito bound for the mysterious region beyond the Andes known as the land of El Dorado. With Pizarro, as right hand man of the expedition, went Francisco Orellana, lieutenant-governor and captain-general of the cities of Santiago de Guayaquil and Puerto Viejo. Both men, in keeping with the spirit of the times, were looking for riches and glory. The unfortunate Pizarro found neither, and returned to Quito after a year and a half of futile suffering and hardship with only 80 of the 220 Spaniards and none of the 4,000 Indians who had started out with him. Fate dealt more kindly with Orellana. He found no riches, but he did find an unexpected pathway to glory-a wide, liquid pathway, now known as the Amazon, which he was the first to explore in practically its entire length, from its headwaters in eastern Peru to the sea.1

It all happened like this. Seven or eight months after leaving Quito Pizarro reached the Coca River, which flows in a southeasterly direction into the Napo, a great tributary of the Amazon. His men were so weary and weak from hunger that he had a boat constructed and sent Orellana with 57 of the men downstream to look for food. The boat was carried along rapidly by the current for nine days through un

1 The mouth of the Amazon had been discovered by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón in 1500, but the river had never been explored beyond its estuary.

inhabited regions and finally arrived at the Indian village of Aparia where food was plentiful. Instead of turning back with the food, however, Orellana decided to continue on his way downstream.

For centuries historians have debated the question as to whether Orellana in not turning around at this point was a despicable traitor or a courageous man who honestly felt that a return was impossible because of the strong current and took the only alternative course. José Toribio Medina, a Chilean scholar, made out a plausible case for the latter belief in his Descubrimiento del Río de las Amazonas, but no one will ever know for certain which theory is right. The answer lies buried with Orellana beside the restless waters of the Amazon.

In any case, as Medina says, if we consider the trip from Aparia on, Orellana's "steady endurance of hardships, his qualities as a prudent and watchful leader, his firmness and energy, the courage with which he met trials in that perilous and daring voyage of discovery, entitle him to indisputable glory."

Leaving Aparia on February 2, 1542, Orellana sailed down the Napo River, receiving help from friendly Indians along the way, and entered the main stream of the Amazon on February 12. At the village of an Indian overlord whom Friar Carvajal (who accompanied Orellana and wrote an eye-witness account of the voyage1) calls the Aparia the Great, they

1 Friar Carvajal's account may be read in full in Bertram T. Lee's English translation of Medina's volume, The Discovery of the Amazon River, published by the American Geographic Society (New York, 1934).