The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  A few aging veterans from the Ford era still remain in the dusty town. The dirt streets climb the red hillside. The fastest way up is also the bumpiest, crammed into the town’s one taxi, an aging, rust-colored Toyota Corolla. Although its passenger door is held shut by wire and the windows are stuck, “that doesn’t matter,” said the owner, “because it still gets around.” At the top of the hill lives Biamor de Sousa Pessoa, whose father was a company rubber tapper. Now seventy-five, he can still remember the sounds of the clarinet played between ten and ten-thirty A.M. to call the rubber workers from the fields. It was a haunting sound, he said, like something ancient that drifted from the forest and settled like mist over the young trees. Doña Olinda Pereira Branco lives close to him and is even older. In 2005 she was ninty-two and could still recall being paid for each ugly, red-striped caterpillar she plucked from the trees. The thought still makes her shudder. There were no Brazilians promoted into management, she said, and plenty of resentment grew up around that fact. A few Americans died of fever, as did many Brazilians, but no American bosses were buried at Fordlandia. “There were bosses for everything,” she remembered. She paused, and gazed out the window. “Too many bosses,” she said.

  And what of the thousands of rubber trees that once crept up the hills? She smiled and shook her head. Until recently, a few of the old giants still stood. “But they were getting rotten and started to fall. So we cut them down.”

  Two decades would pass before new developers dared take on the jungle again. When they did, they made the same mistakes, but on a more massive scale. In 1967, American billionaire and shipping magnate Daniel K. Ludwig bought 1.6 million acres of Amazon land along the Jari and Paru rivers for $3 million, then expanded that to 3.7 million acres, an area equivalent to half of Belgium. Expecting the world to run out of wood fiber, he cleared 250,000 acres of rain forest and planted Gmelina arborea, a fast-growing Burmese species—his own “miracle tree.” He brought in by barge a seventeen-story preassembled pulp mill made in Japan. He also envisioned mining and cattle empires, the world’s largest rice plantation, and modern suburbs in the jungle. He built a settlement, Monte Dourado, with houses, schools, nurseries, bridges, and community centers. Given enough money, he thought, any place could be civilized.

  Instead he created a wasteland. His heavy land-clearing equipment scraped and compacted the soil, repeating the same mistakes Ford had made. The transplanted Gmelia grew slower than in its native environment, and the pulp had to be supplemented by local wood—which he had judged useless before. He replaced his plantations of Gmelia with equally disappointing eucalyptus and pine. Although the mill processed pulp, it was never enough to be profitable, and Ludwig’s dream began to fade. Workers contracted malaria; insects destroyed the wood and supplies. After fourteen years, Daniel Ludwig gave up, losing an estimated two thirds of a billion dollars to the same mistakes Ford had made.

  Today it is soy that drives such dreams. In 2003, Cargill Inc., the Minneapolis commodities giant, opened a new $20-million soybean terminal on the river at Santarém. The draft at the Amazon port is forty to fifty-five feet, deep enough to load oceangoing vessels directly and avoid the transfer of freight once the ship reaches sea. Cargill bet that Brazil would pave the impassable 1,071-mile mud and rock path optimistically known as BR-163. This would open the Amazon port to the vast soybean fields in the south that cover the state of Mato Grosso. During the 2003-2004 harvest, Brazil exported 20.5 million tons of soybeans, ranking it second in the world to the United States, which exported 24.5 million tons. Brazil hoped to rank first: While U.S. producers have run out of land, Brazil has millions of acres of Amazon jungle that could be cleared.

  In March 2007, the federal government closed the Cargill plant for failure to comply with environmental laws, but by then the damage was done. Tens of thousands of acres around Santarém had been cleared of forest for rice and soybeans, in a region that had already lost 20 percent of its trees to loggers. It didn’t rain once in Santarém during my trip, and only once in the south around Fordlandia. A day without rain in the Amazon is extremely rare, even during the “dry” season. Older residents called it the greatest drought they remembered in fifty years. A few hundred miles west in Amazonas the water level sank to unprecedented levels, closing ports and crimping river traffic, resulting in the declaration of a state of emergency. The jungle’s weather machine seemed broken, and even the most hardened Amazonian seemed scared. The newest dream of riches may have gone the way of Fordlandia, but this time something essential to the health of the region seemed to go with it, also.

  There is an old saying on the Amazon, often uttered with a cynical tilt of the head. Deus é grande, mas o mato é maior: “God is great, but the forest is greater.” Brazilians also say, “God sees the truth, but sometimes forgets,” but the jungle never forgets. One way or another, nature always wins.

  Henry Wickham could have warned them all of this—the soybean prophets, the Daniel Ludwigs and the Henry Fords. A man is never greater than the jungle, no matter what his worth back home. But Henry understood their mania, too. There was something in the jungle that drove a man beyond all wisdom: He chased his El Dorado until the fever killed him, until he was broken and humiliated, until his obsessions destroyed those who dared believe in his dreams. It was an enslavement unlike anything on earth, because he forged the shackles himself. Joseph Conrad felt it, in the site of another rubber madness half a world away. “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness bearing us towards the sea,” he wrote in his most famous work. The only hope was to leave the jungle for the ocean’s far horizon.

  But once seduced, one was never free.

  APPENDIX I

  World Rubber Production1905-1922 (percent)

  Source: James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber (New York & London, Harper & Bros., 1931), p. 31.

  APPENDIX II

  The World’s Rubber Requirements, 1922(a conservative estimate, in tons)

  Source: Harvey S. Firestone, America Should Produce Its Own Rubber (Akron, OH: Harvey S. Firestone, 1923), p. 13.

  APPENDIX III

  New York Price Quotations for Crude Rubber(price per pound)

  Sources: Bradford L. Barham and Oliver T. Coomes, Prosperity’s Promise: The Amazon Rubber Boom and Distorted Economic Development, Dellplain Latin American Studies, no. 34, David J. Robinson, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 31; Harvey S. Firestone, America Should Produce Its Own Rubber (Akron, OH: Harvey S. Firestone, 1923), p. 17.

  GLOSSARY

  aguardiente. A local rum brewed in the Americas from sugar cane.

  aldeira. Village.

  aviador. The wholesale rubber dealer, or “forwarder,” who sat at the top of the chain in the Amazon rubber business. He bought rubber from the patrão and sold it to the exporter.

  balatá. A type of rubber made from the latex of the Manilkara bidentata tree native to northern South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. The rubber produced from this tree is almost identical to gutta-percha.

  borracha. Rubber (latex of the hevea tree).

  caboclo. The peasant and subsistence farmer of the Amazon Valley.

  cacau. Cocoa.

  campos. Prairie-like pasture leading up to or on the high plateaus and mountaintops.

  candiru. The “toothpick fish,” a tiny catfish that swims up the stream of uric acid released by bigger fish (or animals), then lodges in the gills or cloaca (or urethra) with the help of some sturdy, sharp spines.

  caoutchouc. Early name for rubber, still current in France.

  caucho. Rubber from the Castilla elastica, or Panama rubber tree, a genus of the Moraceae (or mulberry family). Caucho was the rubber reported in his travels by la Condamine.

  caudillo. A type of landed strongman or populist dictator, a social force in revolutionary South America of the early nineteenth century.

  cidade. City. Nearly every Amazon town was divided into cidade and aldeira, the city and the v
illage.

  cinchona. A genus (Cinchona) of about twenty-five species of the Rubiaceae family, native to tropical South America. They are large shrubs or small trees, and the bark is the source of a variety of alkaloids, the most famous and sought after of which was the antimalarial quinine.

  confederado. Former Confederates of the defeated American South, who came to Latin America after the Civil War in hopes of starting a new slave society.

  Cruzob. During the Caste War of the Yucatán peninsula, followers of the “Talking Cross.”

  curiara. Small fishing canoe.

  curupira. The “pale man of the forest,” a lethal spirit in Indian myth that kills forest wanderers, inhabits their bodies, then kills their families.

  Dothidella ulei. Fungal parasite known to destroy vast stands of maturing Hevea brasiliensis in Central and South America. It does not naturally occur in the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia. Dothidella destroyed Henry Ford’s dream of becoming a rubber baron in the Amazon Valley.

  engenho. Sugarcane plantation.

  estrada. The jungle path cut between trees in a rain-forest rubber “estate.”

  faca. The small, curved knife used by rubber tappers in Central and South America to make a thin cut through the bark of the rubber tree.

  farinha. Manioc flour, toasted and often popped in the mouth like popcorn. Also farinha de mandioca.

  feiticeira. “Witches” living at the edge of the forest in solitary hovels. Most of them specialized in jungle cures and love potions, though some had knowledge of native poisons.

  Ficus elastica. A species of plant in the banyan group of figs, native from northeast India south to Indonesia. Grown today around the world as a houseplant, its milky latex sap could be used to produce an inferior grade of rubber.

  formigas de fogo. Fire ants.

  goma. On the Orinoco River, the local term for rubber.

  gaurapo. The heated juice of sugarcane.

  guayule. A shrub of the Parthenium genus, native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. It can be used as an alternate source of latex that is hypoallergenic, unlike the normal hevea rubber.

  gutta-percha. The Palaquium genus of tropical trees native to southeast Asia and northern Australasia, which produces a latex that is a good electrical insulator. By 1845, telegraph wires and transatlantic telegraph cables were being coated with gutta-percha, since this rubber was not attacked by marine plants or animals.

  Hevea brasiliensis. Also known as the Pará rubber tree and referred to simply as hevea throughout this book, a tree of the Euphorbiaceae family that initially grew only in the Amazon rain forest and is still the world’s primary source of natural rubber. Today most rubber-tree plantations are grown with hevea in Southeast Asia, though some are also found in tropical Africa. In 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand hevea seeds from the Amazon Valley to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a disputed act of biopiracy that began the British rubber plantation industry.

  jararaca. The fer-de-lance, the most common, and deadliest, venomous snake in Amazonia.

  lancha. Portuguese term for a larger trading vessel used in the rain-forest rivers, often covered with a shelter, or toldo, a half-open deck.

  Landolphia. A genus of rubber vine, also known as white rubber vine and mbungu vine, particularly indigenous to tropical Africa.

  Lingoa Geral. European missionary script form of Tupi Guarani language.

  llanos. The vast tropical grasslands situated east of the Andes in the Orinoco Basin.

  matapalo. The parasitic “tree-killer,” or strangler fig, native to tropical America.

  mestizo, mestiza. A term of Spanish origin used to describe people of mixed European and Indian ancestry.

  mishla. A native beer in Nicaragua made from fermented cassava and other fruits and vegetables.

  Paranáquausú. “Great River,” Indian name for the Amazon River.

  Paraponera clavata. An inch-long, glistening black ant native to Central and South America that sports a massive hypodermic syringe at the end of its abdomen and large venom reservoirs.

  patrão. The rubber boss, or patron, who often owned the rubber stands in the jungle, hired the seringueiro, and supplied him with food and essential supplies during the tapping season.

  perros de agua. “Water dogs,” the large river otters of South America.

  pitpan. A long, flat-bottomed canoe used in the rivers and lagoons of Central America.

  praça. Plaza or square.

  rancho. A rude thatch hut or open-air shed.

  rede. Hammock used for sleeping in the Amazon Valley.

  saudade. A Portuguese term considered untranslatable: a sadness of character best thought of as the longing that infiltrates many literary descriptions of life in the Amazon Valley. Weltschmerz.

  seringa. Early name for “syringe” rubber.

  seringal, ciringal. A stand of rubber trees.

  seringueiro. A rubber tapper, rubber collector.

  sucuruju. Anaconda.

  temblador. Electrophorus electricus, the South American electric eel.

  terra firme. Forest on land above the flood plains, terra firma.

  terra preta do Indio. “Indian black earth,” a rich compost built up over the generations by ancient Indian farmers, still found around ancient sites in the Amazon Valley.

  timbó. Vine from which insecticides are produced.

  toldo. Shelter, awning.

  tonina. The fresh-water dolphin of the Amazon basin.

  ubá. A fire-hollowed dugout canoe.

  vulcanization. A chemical curing process for rubber discovered accidentally in 1839 by American chemist Charles Goodyear. Individual polymer molecules are linked to other polymer molecules by atomic bridges, resulting in a springy rubber that is hard, durable, and more resistant to wear.

  Xtabay. In Mayan mythology, the sinister and seductive temptress of the rain forest who lured men to their doom.

  zamora. The ubiquitous “turkey buzzard” found throughout tropical and semitropical America.

  NOTES

  Prologue: Henry’s Dream

  1. Deep in the forest grew a ruinous tree Several Indian myths of the Tree of Life in the South American rain forest are summarized and compared in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 1, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975, first published in France as Le Cru et le Cuit, 1964, Librairie Plon), pp. 184-186.

  2. where another wrecked and the captain blew out his brains Henry C. Pearson, The Rubber Country of the Amazon; a detailed description of the great rubber industry of the Amazon Valley, etc. (New York: India Rubber World, 1911), pp. 18-19.

  2. increased to 216,000 cubic yards Alex Shoumatoff, The Rivers Amazon (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978), p. 89.

  2. “So great was the stench of their decomposing carcasses” Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, Alfred Russel Wallace, ed., vol. 1, (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1908), p. 114.

  4. In 1914 alone, Detroit consumed 1.8 million tires “Automobiles and Rubber: How the Automobile, and Especially Ford Cars, Has Revolutionized the Rubber Industry,” Ford Times, July 1914, vol. 7, no. 10, p. 473.

  4. “agro-industrial utopia . . . one foot on the land” John Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs vol. 21, no. 2 (May 1979), p. 273.

  6. “A million Chinese in the rubber section of Brazil” Carl LaRue is quoted in Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 97.

  6. to buy Villares’s concession for $125,000 Hecht and Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest, p. 98.

  6. Old Man Franco Interview with Cristovao Sena, regional rubber historian, Santarém, Pará, Brazil, October 18, 2005.

  6. “While there may be a difference of opinion” Roger D. Stone, Dreams o
f Amazonia (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 86.

  7. rumors of a kickback began to taint the venture Hecht and Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest, p. 98. No charges were ever filed against LaRue, but the Michigan professor would have been the natural choice to head the plantation. Yet after the purchase, Ford reportedly never had anything more to do with LaRue, despite overtures by the professor.

  8. “take root almost without fail” Hecht and Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest, p. 99.

  10. A 1976 article in theTimes Michael Frenchman, “Unique Link with Amazon,” Times (London), no. 59694 (May 3, 1976), p. 2, col. 6.

  10. A British cruise-boat tourist recently claimed Interview with Gil Sérique, guide, Santarém, Pará, Brazil. December 15, 2005.

  Chapter 1: Fortunate Son

  19. “I will tell you what I believe” Joseph Conrad, “The Planter of Malata,” first published in Empire Magazine (January 1914), then as a novella in the collection Within the Tides (London, 1915).

  20. “a crowded island where towns and cities rub up against one another” John Cassidy, “The Red Devil,” New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2006, p. 48.

  20. “province covered with houses,” “a state” Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 15.

  20. “No one will ever understand Victorian England” John Gardiner, The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), p. 4.

  21. “For them . . . the empire was hazily exotic” Gardiner, The Victorians, p. 6.

  21. “being need for any inflation” Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 268.