by Eric Flint
Unfortunately, the Para rubber trees do not lend themselves to snatch-and-run operations. While they are prolific latex producers, their wound-healing mechanisms assure that only a small amount of latex is extracted on a given day. Nor has it been found to be productive to fell the trees in order to get a "one time" bonanza. So that means lingering in the Amazon, for weeks or months, until one has collected an adequate cargo of rubber. Which, in turn, increases the risk that native allies of the Portuguese will report your presence, guaranteeing that you have to fight your way back to the ocean.
It is safe to say that it is impossible to establish a USE trading post in the lower Amazon, and supply it on a continuing basis by ships traversing the entrance channels, without either obtaining the permission of the king of Spain, or overwhelming the Portuguese military forces in the region.
While you cannot hope to collect a substantial amount of rubber in the lower Amazon without your presence becoming known to the authorities in Belem, a stealth run could be made for the purpose of collecting seeds. However, we then run up against the problem that Hevea seeds have a very short period of viability. Hence, for such a mission, you really want to have a ship with both sails and steam engines. It enters and leaves the river quietly, under sail, and it steams home. (Ocean steamers can navigate the Amazon as far upriver as Iquitos, 2,300 miles from the ocean.) When Wickham needed to collect Hevea seeds for Britain in 1876, he chartered the steamship Amazonia. The "seed raid" is probably impractical prior to the conclusion of the Baltic War.
Another option is to seek out a "back door" into the Amazon basin. The shortest routes are through the Guyanas, the coastal region between Venezuela and Brazil. The stretch separating the mouth of the Orinoco River (Venezuela) and the mouth of the Amazon was known in this period as the "Wild Coast," because of the paucity of European habitation. The Spanish made no effort to settle it, and minimal effort to control it (Hemming, 182-3; Burns, 173).
Of the possible routes, the most interesting one is probably the one exploited in our timeline by the Dutch. Beginning in 1617, they established settlements on the Essequibo River (in British Guyana). They ascended the Essequibo River, then its tributary, the Rupununi, portaged over to the Rio Branco (the Rupununi savannah is flooded over during the rainy season), and then sailed on to the Rio Negro, the Amazon, and the Madeira. Once in the Amazon basin, they traded in iron and slaves. In OTL, the Portuguese eventually blocked this traffic, first with a fort at Manaus (1667), and later with a mission at the mouth of the Rio Branco (1720). (Furneaux, 51; Guyana.org; Burns, 173-6, 196, 214)
The EB11 entry for "Guiana" warns, "The Essequibo can be entered only by craft drawing less than 20 ft. and is navigable for these vessels for not more than 50 m., its subsequent course upwards being frequently broken by cataracts and rapids." So, if we use this route to trade for rubber, much of the traveling would have to be done by canoes. This would result in much higher transportation costs and longer transportation times than if we could take full advantage of the Amazon River.
There are alternative routes which look shorter on paper, but are less likely to be practicable. For example, one could ascend the Maroni and Litani Rivers (the border between Suriname and French Guyana), and portage over to the Paru or the Jari tributaries of the Amazon, but that requires crossing the Tumucumaque Mountains.
These routes also allow you to play "Johnny Rubber Seed": collect Hevea seeds in the Amazon basin; plant them on your return trip, at a marked location, while they are still viable; and come back four years or so later to collect the seeds from your transplants. Eventually, you will get the seeds to the coast and onto a ship.
It is not strictly necessary to cross the Guyana Highlands into the Amazon Basin in order to find rubber trees; there are some in the Guyanas. These are not the famous Hevea brasiliensis, but another Hevea species, Hevea guianensis. Hence, USE exploration of the Guyanas could be somewhat improvisational; we try to use the river system to reach the Amazon Basin, but if we find rubber trees along the way, we exploit them.
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The third possible source of natural rubber in the New World is the Ceara Rubber Tree (Manihot glaziovii). "Ceara" is the name of a province in northeast Brazil (the part that bulges toward Africa). Ceara was pretty much ignored by Europeans prior to 1649. However, USE exploration in that region could attract the attention of the Dutch and Portuguese, who are struggling for control of the sugar plantations farther south. The plant we are seeking is native to the sertao (the arid highlands), and hence may also occur in the hinterland of Rio Grande del Norte, Paraiba, Pernambuco and Bahia (the first two are confirmed by Polhamus, 51). Keep your distance from Bahia and Recife if you don't want to be drawn into the Dutch-Portuguese war.
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We only have a written description of the Pernambuco Rubber Tree (Hancornia speciosa), and it occurs in the very region that the Dutch and Portuguese are fighting over. If this rubber enters commerce, it most likely will be the result of their own activity.
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Finally, there is guayule (Parthenium argentatum). This occurs in the Chihuahua desert region of Mexico and Texas, and was used during World War II as an emergency source of rubber. This desert is the largest one in North America, covering over 200,000 square miles, and including parts of modern Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. There is a map in Collier's Encyclopedia (CE) which shows where guayule is found in the wild.
The easiest route into the region is by way of the Rio Grande river. Unfortunately, there are Spanish settlements on the river, at San Juan Bautista and El Paso del Norte, as well as to the south, at Janos, Chihuahua, Parral and Monclova (Spanish Bannon, 4). Hence, the least protected route would be from the northwest, through Apache and Comanche territory. Even to reach that territory, you will have to make a long journey, most likely up the Llano River and then south.
Since you could not expect to make this journey repeatedly without interdiction by Spanish forces, you would mostly like want to do it just to gather seeds and seedlings for transport to a safer region, perhaps one of the Caribbean islands, or somewhere in Africa or in Italy.
Asia
The position of Asia in the natural rubber industry is a curious one. While there are native rubber-producing plants, OTL Asian rubber production is mostly based on the transplanted Hevea brasiliensis. The up-timers have a great advantage over their late-nineteenth-century forebears; they know where Hevea production was most successful. The World Book Encyclopedia says, "more than 80 percent of the world's natural rubber grows on plantations in the Far East, chiefly in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia." Natural rubber-producing regions are mapped by both WBE and CE; they are in rough yet incomplete agreement.
Based on those maps, OTL Thailand has rubber plantations in the valley of the Chao Phraya. The early seventeenth-century Siamese capital was on that river, at Ayudhya (Ayutthaya). Thailand was then a powerful and cosmopolitan kingdom, which traded vigorously, mostly with Portugal, Spain, the Philippines, China and Japan, but also with England, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Muslim states of the Indian Ocean region. There are no European forts in the Siamese kingdom; Europeans are most likely to be found in Ayudhya or in Pattani, as traders or in the royal service. (Van der Kraan; Polenghi; Thai MFA). While the Europeans may offer us competition, they don't dominate the polities of the Thai state, and hence cannot exclude the USE. As of RoF, Thailand is ruled by an usurper, King Prasat-Thong (1629-1656). Despite the usurpation, Thailand offers sufficient political and economic stability to make it reasonable to establish Hevea rubber plantations there, knowing that the trees will not be tappable for five to seven years. The one problem with Thailand is that it was not densely populated in the 1630s.
The Grantville encyclopedias also reveal that OTL rubber plantations of Malaysia and Indonesia are in the Malay peninsula (southern half), Sumatra, Java, and along the coast of Borneo (principally on the north and west coasts, but there are smaller clusters near Saraminda and Band
jarmasin). Of these regions, the only one which is densely populated is Java. European activity is much greater in this region than in Thailand, as the area receives trade from the Spice Islands (the Moluccas). In 1632, the principal European forts were those of the Portuguese at Malacca (Malaya), the Dutch in Batavia (Java), and the Spanish in Tidore and Ternate( Moluccas). You can expect to run into both Dutch and Portuguese traders pretty much anywhere in Malaysia and Indonesia.
As is apparent from the Grantville maps, rubber can also be grown in south India, Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, south Vietnam, and the Philippines. The Dutch and Portuguese have major settlements in India and Ceylon, as the Spanish do in the Philippines. The other areas are more open to infiltration by USE.
It is important to note that the Dutch are, at least for the time being, the dominant naval power in both the Indian Ocean and the southeast Asian waters. Before the RoF, the Dutch were in the process of taking control of the spice trade away from the Portuguese, and were ruthless in their treatment of trade rivals. However, since the Dutch are not going to be receiving reinforcements from home any time soon, they are likely to be on the defensive, and low in morale. The second European power of the region, the Portuguese, is likely to reassert itself. Moreover, the English may come back in force, looking for revenge for the 1623 Dutch massacre of the English at Amboina, as well as for profit.
If the USE tries to establish rubber plantations in the Indian subcontinent or in southeast Asia, its agents will need to build fortifications and make alliances, lest they be eliminated (like the English in Amboina in 1623, or the Portuguese in Malacca in 1641). To me, the best bets are in Thailand, in the southern Malayan state of Johore, in the Mataram kingdom of Java, and in north Borneo, where other Europeans are either relatively weak, or balanced by a strong indigenous power.
Africa
In Africa, the indigenous rubber trees (Funtumia elastica) are said to be in central Africa, from "Uganda to Sierra Leone" (EB11). You can get a better idea of where to look by consulting the vegetation map in the Hammond Citation World Atlas (I feel it safe to assume that someone in Grantville owns a copy.) This shows that there is tropical rainforest in modern-day Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo and Zaire, and light tropical forest in those countries as well as in Uganda. There are also economic maps in that atlas, and they show that rubber is presently grown in Liberia, Nigeria, and the middle reaches of the Congo.
EB11 also reveals that it is possible to cultivate, not only Funtumia elastica, but also the Latin American rubber trees, in Africa. The Para and Castilla rubber trees thrive under pretty much the same conditions as Funtumia, while the Ceara tree is better suited for drier conditions (compare the Hammond Citation Atlas vegetation maps for Brazil and Africa).
If the February, 1948, issue of National Geographic can be found in someone's attic or basement, it will reveal the location of the Firestone Para Rubber plantation in Liberia as being mostly within the triangle formed by the modern towns of Careysburg, Kakala and Harbel.
In West Africa, the Europeans don't control large territories. However, they do have forts and trading posts. The principal Portuguese forts are at Elmina, Axim and Chama in Ghana, Sao Salvador, Sao Felipe and Sao Jose in the Congo and Luanda/Sao Paulo in Angola. The Dutch are based in Mouri (Ghana) and the fort of Sao Tome (near Guinea). This would be well-known to the major down-time merchants. My inclination is that if the USE tries to develop a rubber trade in Africa, it will look to Liberia and Nigeria first.
What might be the effect of the rubber industry on the slave trade? It is very likely that if the down-time Europeans outside USE control awake to the advantages of rubber, that they will use African slaves to collect it in the New World. If USE citizens employ foreign factors there, they may unwittingly contribute to this tragedy.
On the other hand, a West African-based rubber industry might serve as a brake on the slave trade, by giving the local chiefs an incentive to keep the available labor force home to grow rubber rather than send it abroad. Besides attempting to grow rubber, we could also have African partners cultivate cocoa, coffee, oil palms, and so forth, and perhaps we could even drill for oil in Nigeria (see Drillers in Doublets).
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Transplanting rubber seeds from one part of the world to another was much practiced in OTL, and has the advantage that the new home may be more congenial for both the plants (escape animals, insects and microorganisms which normally prey upon it) and the planters (lower transportation costs, more easily defended).
The Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch are certainly able to play this game if they want to produce rubber for themselves. The Portuguese can transplant Hevea seeds from the Amazon to their holdings in Africa and Asia. The Spanish can demand those seeds from their Portuguese subjects, and then plant them in the Philippines. For that matter, they might be able to cultivate guayule in Spain. The Dutch and Portuguese can establish Manihot or Hancornia plantations in the drier parts of Africa or Asia. Or raise Funtumia in Brazil, or Trinidad (Christy 237).
The main limitation on these competitive activities is a subtle one; it is not worth the trouble of establishing a plantation if you will not be assured of a market for many years. Any down-time government which is astute enough to realize that natural rubber is desirable is also going to realize that at some point Grantville will be producing synthetic rubber. We can certainly play on their fears; they lack the experience in up-time technology which would allow them to estimate how soon synthetic rubber factories would come online.
By the same token, it may not be strictly necessary for us to establish rubber plantations. However, natural rubber is superior to synthetic rubber for tires.
Homegrown Rubber
The USE in 1632 is in a position somewhat like that of Russia during World War II, and therefore has an incentive to look at sources of natural rubber which, while they may not be economical in the long run, are less susceptible to disruption by enemy action.
CE mentions several rubber plants which grow in temperate regions: guayule, goldenrod (studied by Edison, it notes), and Russian dandelion. There is no reference in any of the "rubber" entries to milkweed, but I believe that it is reasonable to assume that Grantville residents would know that it exudes a latex when cut.
Guayule isn't likely to grow in northern Europe, and there are problems with obtaining guayule and Russian dandelion for planting purposes, so I expect that the domestic rubber production, if any, will be based on milkweed or goldenrod.
Milkweed
Over 100 species of milkweed are found in the United States. At least thirteen of them are native to West Virginia. The Monarch is the West Virginia state butterfly, and it lays its eggs on milkweeds. Thus, it is quite likely that milkweeds were actually cultivated in Grantville gardens, before the Ring of Fire, in order to attract Monarchs. But even if that was not the case, we can expect that milkweeds, being hardy and abundant roadside, thicket and pasture plants, accompanied the up-timers on their involuntary voyage to seventeenth-century Thuringia.
How many? We can make an estimate using USDA wild milkweed density data: 0.027 to 0.039/m2 (Maryland), 1.052/m2 (Wisconsin), and 3.604/m2 (Ontario), all for nonagricultural land. If the Ring of Fire had a three mile radius, then that is an area of about 28 square miles, or about 72,500,000 square meters. If half of that area were nonagricultural, with milkweed at the lowest density quoted—0.027—that would still add up to almost 1,000,000 plants.
Milkweeds have several advantages as a source of rubber. First and foremost, they will grow in the USE; we don't have to worry about running overseas milkweed rubber plantations. They are also extremely hardy; well suited for machine harvesting because the stalks grow tall and erect (Whiting, 24); and productive of other useful materials (see below) besides rubber. Finally, their rubber is equivalent in quality to Para rubber.
Their principal disadvantage is their relative low rubber productivity. Also, the rubber cannot be har
vested without killing the plant, while Hevea trees can be tapped for several years. This second disadvantage is somewhat offset by the rapid growth rate of milkweed; the harvested plants will be quickly replaced, certainly by the following year.
The Russians experimented with A. syriaca during the Second World War, and they reported an annual yield of 100-150 kilograms of rubber per hectare, from a crop of two tons of leaves. (The rubber content is highest in the leaves, especially mature ones.) The necessary seed was about four to five kilograms per hectare. Of course, the up-timers are going to have to learn all this the hard way.
Because of its relatively low rubber yield, milkweed rubber never became a commercial product. However, the labor costs of producing it are somewhat offset by the possibility of extracting a second useful product from the crop. In 1746, Germans began using the seed hairs (floss) as padding material. In 1918, it was suggested that it could be used as a substitute for kapok, a silky fiber, with excellent buoyancy, used for stuffing and insulation. (Whiting) During World War II, Americans collected 11 million kilograms of pods, filling 1.2 million "Mae West" life jackets (Witt). About 24% of the pod is floss. The reported average annual yield of floss from wild milkweed is, depending on who you ask, 187-349 (Witt), 550 (Whiting) or 1,368 (Duke) kilograms per hectare.
Harvesting the widely scattered wild milkweeds would not be productive. However, we can collect their seeds, and then plant them in rows. Each stalk has four to six seed pods, each pod contains, on average, 220 viable seeds. One hundred seeds weigh about 42-73 milligrams. (DeGooyer) Based on the Russian seeding data, we need about 100,000 seeds per hectare—the seed production of 1,000 stalks. The first plot would probably be an experimental plot where the up-timers experiment with different spacings, seed times, fertilizers, and so on. They would begin production farming in the second year.
