by Joe Jackson
Henry was convinced, and they headed back to San Fernando for supplies. They arrived on November 12, at noon. The town was deserted: “We found that the whole of the inhabitants had been seized by a kind of mania for goma, and were gone al monto in search of it,” he said. A “rubber madness” had them in its grip: “The idea appeared to have struck them that this really must be a good thing, if an Englishman, like myself, coming from so far, desired to go in for it.”
They struck out ten days later, on the morning of November 22. Joining Henry, Ramón, and Rogers were two boys they hired in San Fernando. Manuel was very bright, “somewhat approximating in character to a London street boy,” intelligent in a canny, watchful way. Henry made him a kind of personal servant, but like street urchins, he was “given to pilfering.” Narciso was twice the size of his companion, but “decidedly stupid; he did not seem to comprehend Spanish very well, so it was trabajoso [difficult] with him.” Along the way they picked up two others: Mateo, “a queer, wizened-looking old fellow, who, whenever he glanced at me, assumed a most insinuating grin, making me feel as if my own features were involuntarily taking the same expression,” and Benacio, “a stolid old man” whose most distinguishing characteristic was the way he took his time in getting anywhere. Henry dubbed Ramón the headman, since he had tapped rubber before; he did this despite Rogers, who by now had taken a dislike to Ramón.
They went past the meeting of the Orinoco and the Ventuari, where Señor Hernandez had been joined by friends from San Fernando, deep into the forest until, after five days of paddling, they reached a tributary called the Caricia, or Chirari, a stream so small it rarely shows on maps. This is difficult country, a landscape alternating so suddenly between choked forest and swamp that travel by foot is almost impossible. There were few footpaths, and most travel was by curiara. Birds and insects dominated the wildlife. Large squawking swarms of parrots and macaws glided over the treetops, while clouds of mosquitoes explained why no other rubber tappers were near.
But rubber trees were everywhere. On the first day, he let Mateo and Benacio off on a small dry spit, and soon they returned with fifty-seven notches carved on their counting sticks—that many trees in a small space of land. Farther upriver he found an island dominated by rubber; two streams within sight pierced deep into the shadows, and they found more rubber trees. Henry’s depression seemed ages in the past; he’d found the cure he wanted, and it showed by his plans. On December 1, he built his rancho on a bluff overlooking dark water and settled his workers on tiny creeks at various rubber stands. He’d collect rubber in a triangle formed by his creek and the Orinoco, clearing paths between the trees with machetes while Rogers went for supplies. He estimated that by the start of the dry season he’d have a thousand trees for tapping—a grandiose plan for a beginner, but one he didn’t consider unrealistic. He was cutting a plantation out of the jungle, a tiny empire “in this little creek in the very core of the continent.”
Henry’s typical day as a rubber tapper began at 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. He ate a frugal breakfast—black coffee and a handful of chibéh, or farina with cold water—then strolled into the forest with his gun, shot pouch, powder flask, and machete at his side. He followed the path for two or three hours as it meandered between the rubber trees, always alert for any dangerous snake or unexpected game. He stopped before a rubber tree and seized one of the small tin cups piled at its foot. He ran his finger around the rim to clean out dirt, and with a small curved faca, or rubber knife, he examined the trunk of the tree. He selected a spot above the last day’s cutting and with the blade of the faca struck one sharp blow sideways at a rising angle, letting the blade almost bite into the cambium, or formative layer of the tree. This is the real art of the tapper: Too shallow, and he doesn’t reach the latex; too deep, he injures the tree. After this stroke, he stuck the tin cup into the bark under the lower angle of the cut so that the slowly exuding latex would ooze down into it. He made three or four such gashes in the tree, and if the tree were newly tapped, as many as five to seven per day, a lattice of cuts that extended 10 to 12 feet high. Greedy seringueiros made more cuts; the prudent tapper rarely exceeded five.
What exactly had he done? He’d severed several bundles of vascular ducts that carried the latex through the tree’s outer cell layers, causing it to bleed. His little ax had cut a gash of about one and a half inches in length and no more than three eighths of an inch in width. If he exceeded these dimensions or cut deeper into the trunk he’d destroy his livelihood, Ramón explained. The wood bled for three or four hours. It was very much like dragging a razor blade across the skin. Severed blood vessels bleed freely, but then begin to heal, the edges of the wound meeting and closing, leaving only a slight scar. Cut too deep and infection gains a foot-hold; the surrounding tissue becomes diseased. So with a tree. The faca’s gash is often attacked by ants and other insects, and by fungus: Cut too deeply and rot sets in. Some tappers twist the blade of the ax to increase the flow of the milk, not knowing or caring that by doing so the vessels are widely separated, thus creating a permanent wound. Treat the tree with respect and the riches keep flowing, Ramón preached. One must be a good husbandman and give his trees time to heal.
On a good day an experienced tapper could visit 150-200 trees during his morning round. This was impressive enough, considering the torturous route of the estrada, the path, doubling back on itself, crossing fallen logs over gaps in the hillside or stream. By noon, he’d finish tapping and return to his rancho for the balde, or hollow gourd, used to collect latex. He repeated his morning route, emptying each tin cup of white milk into the balde, then placing it bottom up in the pile beneath the tree. A tin cup filled with two ounces of latex was a good average per tree: Those trees that were young and healthy could yield three to four ounces, while those that were old or abused might yield less than one.
Henry ate lunch—usually a repeat of his breakfast—then devoted the afternoon to smoking the latex over a fire. Every tapper had a defumador, or rubber-smoking hut, near his rancho. The best fuel for smoking rubber was old nutshells scattered at the base of the cucurito palm. When the smoke rose steadily, Henry settled down for the most tedious part of his day. With a wooden paddle alongside the blaze and the basin containing latex at his side, he dipped the paddle into the milk and twirled it over the smoking fire. In a few seconds, the latex coagulated and turned the color of cream. After a dozen turns of the paddle, he’d created a thin layer of cured rubber. Again he dipped the paddle, repeating the performance until all the milk was gone. He might attain a thickness of one or two inches, depending upon the amount of latex collected that day. It might not look like much, but the operation took at least three hours and required some 1,200-1,500 movements of his hands and arms. When all the milk was smoked, the fire was extinguished and the paddle supported on sticks so that the blackened, pliable ball of rubber retained its shape as it hardened and was not pulled out of shape by gravity.
Henry sometimes felt “shut out from the rest of the world.” He’d pass through the mouth of the creek and all trace of humanity was lost, even those in his band. It was silent as a grave. A chief feature of the forest around him was the corded vines, or bejucas, that bound the forest together—they tied the canopy into bundles, wound around the trunks, and coiled upon the ground. Cutting through them wore him out, but that exhaustion gave him peace. In his rancho at night, he would “watch the cold shadows of night gradually creep up from the water on the opposite side of the creek, and when the topmost boughs of the forest trees were alone tipped with golden light, I had the fires built for supper.”
Psychologists have suggested that place, as a force, can impress itself upon the psyche and serve as a crucible for creating a sense of the holy. They speak of “peak” and “flow” sensations, where the individual experiences a loss of self; where the normal distinctions between subject and object, “I” and “everything else,” break down. When that happens, the observer becomes immersed in the present: He or she t
ranscends. This is when people feel the touch of God—the connection to all things.
Now Henry felt touched by that hand. “Sometimes, during the time for rest, I would sit down and look up into the leafy arches above and, as I gazed, become lost in the wonderful beauty of that upper system—a world of life complete within itself.” Above him existed a world of strangely plumaged birds and the “elvish little ti-ti monkeys, which never descend to the dark, damp, soil throughout their lives, but sing and gambol in the aerial gardens of dainty ferns and sweet-smelling orchids.”
He felt heavy and earthbound, while all above him was light. “All above overhead seemed the very exuberance of animal and vegetable existence,” he wrote, “and below, its contrast—decay and darkness.”
CHAPTER 5
INSTRUMENTS OF THE ELASTIC GOD
Darkness and decay. Henry dwelled on these words as the New Year passed and his body began to rot. The first hint that he’d be smart to leave his thousand-tree utopia were the infected mosquito bites covering his hands and legs. Unable to control his scratching, he ripped apart his skin. “The constant irritation,” he complained, “caused my hands and feet to swell.” The sores grew so inflamed that his knuckles and the backs of his hands became red, runny patches. “My feet especially were so inflamed, that I was confined to my hammock for some days, whilst Ramon and the two boys were putting up the lodge.” He was stung by a scorpion, but he’d learned to rate degrees of torment: It was “not so painful as I had anticipated . . . [and] the smarting and accompanying feeling of numbness was not so great as that caused by the sting of a forest wasp.” His camp was raided by a giant vulture, uruba-tinga, which bore off a large piece of salted fish when Henry returned from the forest. Their ammo was running low, and they were all slowly starving, so he couldn’t waste shells on anything but food. His only consolation was to imagine “the pangs of thirst he will suffer after such a gorge of salt fish.”
Then Henry became another creature’s home and meal. The culprit was the human botfly, Dermatobia hominis. Flies were a plague. First he bemoaned the fact that uncovered troughs of liquid rubber would fill in an instant with “self-immolated blue bottles,” ruining the day’s effort. Meat was honeycombed within hours with masses of eggs. On January 2, 1870, a maggot fed on him. It started as a simple itch, the same as a mosquito bite, but a small mound formed on his skin. Other mounds rose, like volcanoes: “The first time I felt them, I could not imagine what on earth was the matter with me: it seemed as if some one was making a succession of thrusts into my side with a red-hot needle.” Ramón checked his back where Henry couldn’t see and gave his verdict: Several large-headed worms were wriggling in his skin.
“Edible,” Ambrose Bierce would write eleven years later in his Devil’s Dictionary: “Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.” Once again, mosquitoes caused his woe. Botflies are too large and slow to parasitize targets like monkeys and men, so they’ve opted for stealth: The female fly captures a female mosquito, glues an egg to its hairs, and then releases it. When one such tagged mosquito landed on Henry, his body heat triggered the egg to hatch; the tiny larva fell from its original carrier and burrowed into the bigger and more palatable Henry.
Ramón delivered the disgusting truth: His back was home to several botfly larvae, all happily wiggling in their pustules. The larva has evolved two anal hooks to hold it firmly in place; pull it out and the maggot bursts, filling the cavity with toxins and loosing an infection more dangerous than the original larva. It breathes through snorkel-like spiracles poking from the skin. Henry and a botfly could have coexisted peacefully, except for when it started feeding, and that’s when the pain began. There were two cures, Ramón said. The first was the “meat cure,” sandwiching a piece of raw, soft steak over the spiracle tightly enough that the botfly was forced to burrow up for air. But they were low on steak, so Henry chose the painful alternative: killing the maggot with a dollop of latex or tobacco juice, after which Ramón sliced out each corpse with a sterilized blade.
By January 8, Henry had tapped one hundred trees, learning the seringuieros ’ secrets by trial and error. Never again did he speak of tapping a thousand trees; the latex yield was small, the smoked rubber polluted and disappointing. The trees were loaded with green fruit; some trees were too young to tap, others between seasons. Ramón and the others were having the same bad luck; the latex flow was weak, the trees green.
There’d be no quick riches from this triangular plot of goma. Their disappointment was made worse by the sickness creeping over each man. Mateo and Benacio were pale and weak, Rogers so frail from fever that he could barely steer the curiara down the river for supplies. Ramón had a game leg that swelled so badly that he couldn’t leave his hammock. Narciso refused to work and ran into the forest when Henry caught him loafing. Manuel turned to full-scale thievery. The only man healthy and honest was not even one of the party, a young Spanish Creole named Rojas Gil, who, with his two young wives, had followed Henry from San Fernando and built a rancho up the river, around the bend. At first, Henry resented the intrusion, but Gil proved a lifesaver. What little cassava they procured was shared among all; what little fresh fish they trapped was parceled out. Rojas shot a sloth one morning as it swam across the stream. The meat was badly cooked but delightful, since at least it was a change.
On February 8, the recurrent fever Henry had dreaded so long struck again, without warning, flattening him in a wave of nausea as he was out tapping trees. He crawled back to his curiara: “[E]ach time the fit of nausea returned, I became quite powerless, and had to drop to the damp earth and wait until the paroxysm was over.” When he staggered to his feet the machete tripped him up; he was lucky he didn’t gash himself, which would have been the end. He reached the canoe and tried to paddle to his rancho, “but the sun was too powerful for me” and he scrambled to the cool dirt of shore. His skin burned from within. He crawled on, “the remainder of my strength fast failing.” He reached camp and pulled himself up on the raised bed. “I remember little of what passed during the four days that the constant nausea and vomiting lasted,” he said.
These days merged into a hallucinatory blur. He recalled the torment of being eaten alive by mosquitoes and sandflies, of being too weak to do anything but lie on his bed and provide a meal. He was close to death, and none of the others in his group could help him because they were either away, like Rogers, or fighting for life themselves.
Algot Lange, an American adventurer who wrote several books about his explorations of the Upper Amazon, documented the sufferer’s psychological state in excruciating detail. Lange traveled to the rubber lands of the Javari River, a major Amazon tributary forming the border between Peru and Brazil. He visited a rubber camp where every tapper was prostrate, and in a few days the sickness hit him, too. “For five days I was delirious,” Lange wrote, “listening to the mysterious noises of the forest and seeing in my dreams visions of juicy steaks, great loaves of bread, and cups of creamy coffee.” Soon the hunger turned into a “warm, drugged sensation” that “pervaded his system,” and he listened to “the voice of the forest”—the nighttime call of tree frogs. He imagined “the murmuring crowd of a large city” and was soothed.
But soon his visions changed. The jungle was no longer a gentle place. “I saw myself engulfed in a sea of poisonous green, caught by living creepers that dragged us down in a deadly octopus embrace.” His dreams and actions became indistinguishable. Did he bolt from the hammock, crying and babbling, or was he hallucinating? He fled from the jungle’s “impenetrable wall of vegetation, its dark shadows, and moist, treacherous ground.” Lange and Henry had reached the same point: They found the jungle no longer transcendent but claustrophobic, a parasite world of shadows and green. It was “a place of terror and death,” filled with savagery.
Jungle tales almost always dwell on this savagery. It is a trope, a literary motif, and the question in
each survivor’s account is often the same: Is savagery an omnipresent part of the forest or one that man brought with him? In the 1920s, the Capuchin father Francisco de Vilanova addressed the same problem. Vilanova and his party made a famous excursión apostoliá to the Putumayo River in northern Peru, a place that had become synonymous with rubber and murder. They went to save the native Huitoto tribesmen from rapacious rubber barons but in the end could barely save themselves. De Vilanova watched as one guide fell sick and insisted upon a shaman’s cure that killed him. He lost heart when treating the wounds of Indians flogged by rubber bosses.
It is almost something unbelievable to those who do not know the jungle. It is an irrational fact that enslaves those who go there. It is a whirlwind of savage passions that dominates the civilized person who has too much confidence in himself. It is a degeneration of the spirit in a drunkenness of improbable but real circumstances. The rational and civilized man loses respect for himself and his domestic place. He throws his heritage into the mire from where who knows when it will be retrieved. One’s heart fills with morbidity and the sentiment of savagery. It becomes insensible to the most pure and great things of humanity. Even cultivated spirits, finely formed and well-educated, have succumbed.