The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Goodyear scraped by, borrowing heavily, purchasing scraps of rubber, and experimenting with various solvents and processes for making rubber products. In 1839, a partner found that sulfur improved rubber. When Goodyear accidentally dropped a piece of the sulfur-infused rubber onto a stove, it did not melt. In fact, when heated, this treated rubber seemed to take on all the qualities that natural rubber lacked. At last, rubber kept its bounce in heat or cold.

  Ironically, the man who most fully refined the process and reaped the greatest financial reward was Thomas Hancock, an Englishman whose name is virtually unknown. When Goodyear had been unable to find financial backing in America because of the crash, he sent some samples of the treated rubber to England in search of licensees. One of the samples reached Hancock, who had already patented many machines for processing rubber. Hancock was unaware of the source of the rubber or its composition; he only knew that it had the properties he was desperately trying to create. It took him more than a year to close in on the ideal temperature and sulfur-rubber mixture that produced what he called simply “the change.” This change soon laid the groundwork for a boom in the uses of rubber and led tens of thousands of men into the Amazon, where they created splendid cities in the jungle.

  While Goodyear struggled and fiddled and wrote up a patent that included an extra, unnecessary ingredient, white lead, Hancock went about perfecting his process and had it independently confirmed by other scientists. His patent was registered in London on May 21, 1844, one month before Goodyear’s American patent. The owner of a firm that manufactured rubber bottle stoppers then suggested to Hancock a more lively name for “the change”: vulcanization (after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire). The two inventors began marketing products independently in their respective countries. They clashed in court when Goodyear tried, unsuccessfully, to extend his patent to England. Even though he died bankrupt and Hancock prospered, it is Goodyear whose name is associated with vulcanization. As Coates puts it in The Commerce in Rubber, “Charles Goodyear was to be gathered among the immortals of America, while Thomas Hancock received English treatment: due respect while living, fading notice when dead, and on some suitable centenary thereafter, a postage stamp.”

  Quickly, European and American factories began churning out new lines of durable rubber products. As the industrial revolution gathered momentum through the mid-1800s, an increasing number of uses were found for the new material: gaskets in steam engines, bumpers on rail cars, condoms. Between 1827 and 1850, the amount of rubber shipped down the Amazon rose from 34 tons to 1,500 tons a year. Ironically, just as the boom began, the Amazon’s own rubber industry—the small manufacturers of shoes and bottles in Belém—floundered and failed, faced with the superior vulcanized product made north of the equator.

  In typical fashion, the developed countries were turning to a colony only for the raw material on which industry relied. Even though Brazil had gained its independence from Portugal in 1822, for another century it remained a classic colony—a place from which things were taken, with little returned. Indeed, even today, the Amazon is dominated by the economics of extraction—whether the extracted substance is rubber, timber, or gold; the region serves as a colony both for the industrial world and the industrial south of Brazil.

  Exports of raw rubber continued to increase through the 1850s and 1860s, but, before the jungle could really boom, vast new markets had to be created. Sure enough, in the 1870s came the widespread use of electrical power, which required rubber for electrical insulation on cables; and, in 1888, a Scottish veterinarian named John Dunlop crafted hollow tires filled with air for his son’s tricycle. Until that time, bicycles had been equipped with solid rubber tires that sent every bump in the road straight up the rider’s spine.

  In the 1890s, Europe and the United States were swept by a bicycle craze that sent the demand for rubber soaring. And then came the automobile, whose tires soon created an enormous demand for rubber. They became the chief product made of rubber and remain so today. Even with the advent of synthetic rubber during World War II, natural rubber’s unequaled resilience and ability to shed the heat of friction maintained its demand. Today’s most sophisticated radial tires have sidewalls of natural rubber; the tires on the space shuttle fleet are 100 percent natural rubber.

  With demand soaring from 1870 on, the Amazon rubber boom began in earnest. The equatorial forests of Africa and Asia also contained tree species that produced types of latex, and other trees around Central and South America produced useful latexes. But the best quality came only from Hevea brasiliensis, which grew only in the Amazon.

  By 1875, the area around Belém swarmed with an estimated 25,000 rubber tappers. Initially, the tappers were free-lancers who hunted for Hevea in the unclaimed forests a few days by canoe from Belém; they collected and smoked the latex, then paddled back to town to sell the rubber. The more aggressive tappers soon laid claim to swathes of forest and began to employ others to do the tapping. The landholders then acted as middlemen, collecting rubber from their tappers and paying them with goods from the merchants back in town.

  The rubber merchants and representatives of foreign capital, mainly British, began looking farther and farther up the Amazon for untapped trees, for the trees near Belém were already being excessively tapped. Little care was employed in such boom times; the tappers often used a simple hatchet to scar the bark, and their sloppiness killed many trees as the deeper sapwood was struck. The river system was already being scoured by fleets of canoes carrying peddlers, who actively traded with the Indians, mixed-blood caboclos, and ribeirinhos who inhabited the banks upstream. The river trade in rubber evolved from this network.

  The only thing lacking was a supply of labor. In some areas, Indians had been enslaved or forced to collect latex, but most tribes were either slaughtered or withdrew farther into the forest as the quest for rubber moved up the Amazon. As the price of rubber steadily rose, workers from Belém and the surrounding state of Pará abandoned other enterprises, such as agriculture, to head into the forests after latex. In 1854, the president of Pará complained that the state now had to import food that had once been grown there because so many men were heading into the forest. In Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians, John Hemming writes that the president said the rubber trade “is leading into misery the great mass of those who abandon their homes, small businesses and even their families to follow it. They surrender themselves to lives of uncertainty and hardship, in which the profits of one evening evaporate the following day.”

  Between 1850 and 1900, the number of men harvesting rubber in the Amazon rose from 5,300 to 124,300. Once the immediate labor pool was exhausted, agents for the rubber estate owners sought a new source of would-be seringueiros. They found it 600 miles southeast of Belém, in the parched state of Ceará, which occupies the bulge of Brazil that protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean. This state once had richly forested uplands, called the sertão. But by the 1850s, the forests had been razed and replaced with cattle pasture.

  A steadily worsening cycle of drought had begun to affect the region every decade or so. (It is thought that the deforestation may have amplified the effects of the drought.) The cycle reached one of its worst peaks between 1877 and 1879. Crops and cattle died; famine followed. Thousands of people fled from the desiccated hills of the interior and swarmed to the coastal towns, particularly to the port of Fortaleza. But there was no work, and soon the region became the poorest in Brazil. The agents had no trouble luring tens of thousands of desperate men into the rain forest. Word of the white gold that was harvested simply by cutting tree bark had already spread. Even now, in places like Acre, there are few rubber tappers who are not nordestinos, northeasterners, with their roots in Ceará. The music of the Amazon and the names for foods and dances are all from the northeast coast.

  These workers were loaned the cost of their passage into the Amazon, so even before they left Ceará they were saddled with debt. This was their first contact with the sy
stem of aviamento, advances, under which they suffered for a century. The debts that were incurred at the start only compounded, never diminished. The farther upriver a tapper settled, the longer the line of middlemen standing between him and the market for the latex.

  The system started on the seringal, a large tract of forest owned or claimed by someone who lived there, in a nearby town, or a thousand miles downriver in Manaus—which was still 1,000 miles upstream from the mouth of the great river. Almost always, the seringal was on a river or stream, so that rubber could be shipped to market. (Many of the smaller streams disappeared completely during the dry season, cutting the tappers off from the outside world for months at a time.) The lowest rung on the ladder was the seringueiro. A tapper and his family, or sometimes several single men, lived deep in the forest, in a clearing at the center of a cloverleaf of two or three traile, called estradas, each of which wound through the forest past 100 to 200 rubber trees. The clearing and trails together were called a colocação, collection area.

  The tappers scored the bark of the rubber trees, and the latex bled into a cup propped against the tree. The liquid latex was brought back to the tapper’s shack, then ladled onto a paddle as it was rotated over a smoky fire. The latex congealed, layer after layer, forming a dark brown ball. A tapper was given the right to tap trees on the seringal, but he could only sell his latex to the patrão of the estate. (Patrão, which literally translates to the beneficent-sounding “patron,” may seem an odd choice to describe these bosses who robbed the tappers blind.)

  The neophyte tappers were also advanced the necessary gear for living in the forest and collecting latex: a machete, a faca de seringa, and a cheap rifle. Back in Europe, flimsy weapons were manufactured specifically for the rubber trade and, as one historian of the time put it, were good for only “half a hundred shots” before the barrel fell apart.

  The bosses controlled every aspect of the tappers’ lives, and the results were brutal. Thousands of the men died each year from malaria, yellow fever, intestinal diseases, and accidents. From 1900 to 1910, the toll ran so high that between 10,000 and 14,000 new workers had to be recruited each year from Ceará. In many cases, the tappers had to pay in rubber for women (many were prevented from taking their families when they fled the northeast). The bosses and their foremen and hired thugs forbade the tappers from growing their own food or finding other markets for their rubber. Tappers who violated these rules or tried to flee without paying their debt occasionally found themselves ringed with strings of flammable rubber, doused in kerosene, and set afire.

  The exchange of rubber for goods took place at the barracão. There, the boss would advance goods to the tappers at the beginning of the dry season and would collect balls of smoked latex in payment at the end of it. (During the rainy season, the latex became too diluted with water, and the trails of a seringal were nearly impassible.) An energetic tapper could harvest more than a thousand pounds of rubber a year. But it would invariably be bartered away at an impossibly low rate of exchange, leaving a gaping deficit. The deficit was increased by rampant cheating; it was not even necessary for a boss to tamper with the scales because most of these nordestinos were both illiterate and innumerate. On top of this mounting debt would be added the annual rent for the use of the trees, which typically was 130 pounds or so per estrada. Tappers buried under this sort of debt referred to themselves as cativeiro, captive. Euclides da Cunha, a Brazilian journalist who powerfully documented the inhumanity of the rubber boom, wrote that the seringueiro “comes to embody a gigantic contradiction: he is a man working to enslave himself! ”

  The bosses on the rubber estates had far better lives than the tappers, but they too were usually in debt. Most of them were simply agents or lessees, indebted to the actual owner of the land, the seringalista, or to aviadores, the creditors and rubber barons back in the quickly growing rubber trading ports of Belém and Manaus. Every time a ball of smoked latex changed hands as it moved downstream, its value increased. Close to the export docks, where the risk was lowest, the profits were greatest, and astronomical fortunes were made. The aviadores of Manaus began an intense competition with those from Belém, downstream, for control over the flow of rubber from Acre and other far-flung regions, and both groups vied to exceed each other in lavish expenditures. Baroque cathedrals and mansions, museums and monument-studded plazas, sprung up hundreds of miles into the Amazon—islands of opulence in the dark jungle. Laundry was sent by ship back to Europe for cleaning. Manaus had electric trains before Boston.

  No greater monument to that explosion of wealth exists than the domed Teatro Amazonas, the Manaus opera house, a garish palace perched on a hill overlooking the broad Amazon. Its construction started in 1884, when Manaus was a city of 45,000. Almost all of the materials were shipped from Europe and painstakingly assembled over a period of years. The blue and gold tiles that made the Moorish dome gleam were from Alsace. Crystal chandeliers were imported from Venice. The cobblestones around the opera house were replaced with rubber tiles, to quiet the noise from carriage wheels. The only feature built of materials from the Amazon was the main staircase—and that was because the ship carrying the commissioned Carrara marble staircase from Italy sank in a storm shortly before the theater’s opening date, December 31, 1896. Artisans rushed to carve a replacement from tropical hardwoods. By the inaugural performance, the Italian Lyric Opera Company’s La Gioconda, Manaus was a dynamic city of 75,000 (three times the concurrent population of Houston, Texas). But there was something about the almost desperate, profligate indulgence of the rubber barons that implied that the boom could not go on forever.

  Indeed, even as the boom was reaching its peak, the groundwork was being laid for its demise. In 1877, the same year that drought struck Ceará and sent thousands of men up the Amazon, twenty-two seedlings of Hevea brasiliensis arrived by ship in Singapore, having taken a circuitous route. They had started out as a handful of seeds among a batch of 70,000 that had been smuggled out of the Amazon by one Henry Wickham, a British traveler and opportunist. Wickham had carefully wrapped the seeds in banana leaves, stashed them in cane baskets, and stowed them in the hold of the steamship Amazonas. They were taken across the Atlantic to Liverpool and then to London and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, a repository and laboratory where botanical samples from around the world were studied and cultivated both to satisfy scientific curiosity and to uncover any commercial value. Some of the seeds had then been sent on to Ceylon, and from there they hopscotched their way to the Far East.

  Since 1857, the British had been mulling over the idea of cultivating the best rubber tree species on British colonial soil. The man who proposed the idea was Thomas Hancock, Goodyear’s competitor. The demand for rubber was skyrocketing, and the trees around Belém were dying from overuse. The flow of rubber from deep in the Amazon was still irregular. Moreover, Brazil and Great Britain were not on the best of terms. In 1863, Brazil severed diplomatic relations with Britain for five years after the Royal Navy imposed a blockade on Rio de Janeiro in a trade dispute.

  A young geographer with the British East India Company, Clements Markham, had at this time just successfully transplanted chinchona, the tree from which quinine was extracted, from Peru to India—through the Kew Gardens. He was convinced of the importance of securing a permanent—and British—supply of this vital material. In 1876, Markham contacted Wickham, who was considered an authority on the Amazon. Wickham had already tried to develop a rubber plantation in Brazil, but had failed when disease struck the densely packed trees. Almost every attempt to cultivate plantations of the trees in their home range fared no better. It seemed that diseases, including a fungus that was a particular scourge of Hevea, quickly grew to epidemic proportions if the trees were grown more densely than their natural distribution. Like most of the large tree species of the Amazon, Hevea is widely dispersed in the forest. Rarely is there more than one tree per acre. Wickham agreed to the plan and smuggled his batch of seeds to England. Once in
Singapore, those twenty-two seedlings soon became the basis for dense, healthy plantations of rubber trees. It was clear that the fungus had not followed the trees to their new home.

  The first shipment of Asian rubber, a mere 4 tons, arrived in London in 1900, marking the beginning of the end for the Amazon boom. As the coming of the automobile caused the demand for rubber to explode, the price reached $3 a pound in the early 1900s. But the Amazon could not keep up with the demand, and its output peaked in 1910, at 62,891 tons. In contrast, production in Asia steadily climbed. The Asian supply began to catch up with the demand, and world prices fell. With them fell many of the Amazonian aviadores, who as middlemen had built their fortunes on nothing but credit in one direction and debt in the other. In 1913, Asian production exceeded Amazonian for the first time. By 1919, the harvest from Asian rubber plantations had soared to 350,000 tons, whereas Amazonian production had slid to 43,720 tons. Brazil briefly tried to stem the crash by creating a program to encourage investment in the Amazon, called Defense of Rubber. But that failed too.

  The fabulous mansions of Manaus and Belém began to crumble; the forest reclaimed dozens of rubber estates when their owners and bosses were wiped out. The seringueiros in the forest either scratched out an existence by farming and collecting rubber, died of malaria, or drifted downriver. The Amazon basin settled back to its quieter roots, with small-time regatões once again frequenting the backwaters in their canoes, bartering machetes, shotguns, and dry goods for rubber, Brazil nuts, palm oils, and other forest products. With the failure of so many middlemen and bosses, on many rubber estates the tappers were finally allowed to cultivate their own crops and sell their production to more than one buyer.

  By an odd twist of industrial history, a crucial raw material for technological development had come, not from a hole in the earth or a chemist’s lab, but from the scratched bark of trees widely dispersed through a vast tropical rain forest. An illiterate army of workers had been pushed into the forest, exploited, enslaved, and ultimately abandoned. By the end of the boom, the seringueiros who were still alive were hardened survivors. The same laws of natural selection that had evolved the chemical weapons of Amazonian plants, the razor teeth of the piranha, and the killing coils of the anaconda had now given birth to a tough breed of men and women who would not be so easily pushed off their land. Thus the end of the Amazonian rubber boom contributed to the genesis of independent tappers.