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This was an enormous procession of vehicles; private carriages, with elaborate equipment, were filled with finely-dressed gentlemen and ladies; common rented coaches were in line, and some of them were loaded to their full capacity with common people four, five, or even six, in one; in one were four brawny, young cargadors; in another an old grandmother, her two daughters, and some grandchildren, pure indians, rode complacently, enjoying the admiration which they knew their best clothes must attract; in some of the fine private coaches, no one but indian nurses or favored servants rode.
They go to the low west coast as cargadors or as primitive merchants, and they return to their mountain country enervated by the heat, their systems filled with impure water, and their blood teeming with mosquito-planted malaria.
Early the following morning, as no cargadors were at hand, our little company resolved itself into a band of carriers and we took our baggage and equipment to the Peto station.
We secured six cargadors one each for the four moulds, one for the instruments, and one for the remaining plaster, as our pack-animals had long since passed. Five of them were left to follow at their leisure, on condition that they reach Tumbala early the next morning, but the sixth, a wee old man, who had helped us woman-hunting, went with us, by his own request, to carry the instruments.
We paid cargadors four times, draymen three times, more than we have ever done in any other part of Mexico. In the restaurants we saw cargadors calling for plates at thirty cents, boot-blacks eating ices at one real, newsboys riding in coaches, and other astonishing sights.
On most of our trips through northern Luzon cargadors and guides could readily be secured to go to the nearest pueblo, but in most cases they absolutely refused to go on to the second pueblo, and could seldom be driven on by any argument or force.
They are the only cargadors, though in the Kiapa area of Benguet Province women sometimes go on the trails as paid burden bearers for Americans. Only men are said to tattoo and circumcise.
They get down with fever, lose their appetite, neither know the value of nor have the medicines of civilization, their minds are often poisoned with the superstitious belief that they will die and they do die in from three days to two months. In February, 1903, three cargadors died within two weeks after returning from the coast.
The nearest approach to it is in a practice which grew up in Spanish time but is of Igorot origin. When to-day cargadors are required by Americans, as when Government supplies must be brought in, the members of each cargador's ato furnish him food for the journey, though the cargador personally receives and keeps the wage for the trip.
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