Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

by Greg Grandin

  But the problems caused by Blakeley’s overconfidence lay in the future. Back in Belém, things were moving along nicely. Bentes was as good as his word, and the state legislature, on September 30, 1927, ratified the concession exactly as the Ford men composed it. It took under three months to negotiate and finalize the deal, a far cry from the fruitless years wasted on trying to get the US Congress to approve Ford’s Muscle Shoals project.

  With his work finished, Ide made arrangements to return home. He wired his wife, who, not having fared well in Belém’s heat, had left for the United States a few weeks earlier: “Everything jake sailing on Hubert tonight love Oz.”

  He also telegrammed Dearborn, urging the home office to compensate Villares: “I am thoroughly sold on Villares, both as to his professional knowledge of tropical horticulture and ability and also as to his reliability and honesty.”

  For his part, Villares, eager to pay off Greite, Schurz, Bentes, and the other “political boys” who made the deal possible, followed up with his own cable.

  “Great joy enthusiasm among people,” he wrote. “Send funds.”16

  CHAPTER 8

  WHEN FORD COMES

  O. Z. IDE RETURNED TO DEARBORN TO DEBRIEF COMPANY OFFIcials. He tried to warn Edsel and Henry Ford about Harry Bennett’s protégé, complaining of Reeves Blakeley’s exhibitionism and other rough behavior while in Belém. Yet Henry Ford, with the same leniency and perhaps fondness he had for Bennett—who just then was increasing his cruelty on the factory floor as well as solidifying his influence over his boss—nonetheless decided to tap Blakeley to head the plantation. Along with a number of other Ford employees, including John R. Rogge, a lumberjack from the Upper Peninsula, and Curtis Pringle, the former sheriff of Kalamazoo, Blakeley returned to the Amazon in early 1928 to begin work and prepare for the arrival of two Ford-owned cargo ships containing heavy equipment and other material needed to establish a small city.

  In Belém, the advance team was joined by Jorge Villares, who for a few months after the concession was ratified enjoyed a good reputation in Dearborn. Blakeley and Villares formed an unlikely partnership. The Ford man was arrogant and filled with purposeful energy, the Brazilian fretfully effete. Yet their shared sense of confidence papered over these differences in style. Blakeley bought a launch and the expedition set out up the Amazon, stopping in the town of Santarém, at the mouth of the Tapajós. After purchasing provisions and hiring a work crew of twenty-five laborers, the group pushed off from the town’s pier, towing a thatch-roofed barge that served as a makeshift kitchen for Tong, a Chinese cook, and his assistant, Ego, and headed up the Tapajós River, to found Fordlandia.

  Blakeley and Villares had already selected the site for the new settlement, a village named Boa Vista, which means pleasant view in Portuguese, based on their reconnaissance of the area during Blakeley’s previous trip to the Amazon. It sat 650 miles from Belém and about 100 from Santarém, at a point where the river stayed deep right to the shore, which would save on dredging expenses and allow the unloading of heavy equipment. The bank quickly rose fifty feet within a hundred yards of the river, continuing to climb another two hundred feet over the course of the next mile.

  It was a providential location high enough to afford protection from mosquitoes and other insects, Blakeley insisted in his report to Dearborn, though he consulted no entomologist to support his claim. And it was rich in trees and resources. One could find about twenty exportable trees on any given acre, he said, including the redwood massaranduba, a dark reddish brown heartwood called angelim, and Spanish cedar, in addition to old-growth wild rubber trees. There was, Blakeley believed, a strong possibility that they would find oil, along with gold, silver, platinum, ores, and possibly diamonds. The Cupary River, a tributary of the Tapajós that ran twenty miles into the estate, would be, Blakeley said, a perfect spot for a hydroelectric dam. And until the planted rubber matured to produce sap—which takes about five years—a number of company outposts could easily be established at key points to buy wild rubber. Blakeley told Ford that the Tapajós valley produced fifteen hundred tons of latex a year and it would be relatively easy to “capture all of that.” With fair treatment and higher prices, the river’s tappers would happily abandon their “Syrian patrons” and sell their rubber to Ford’s agents.1

  But before Blakeley, Villares, and their crew could start work in Boa Vista, they needed to sort out competing claims to the land along the riverbank where they wanted to base their operation. When O. Z. Ide was researching the Amazon’s property registry during the concession’s negotiation, he noticed that there existed a few hundred deeded lots within the boundaries of the land granted to Ford. About seventy-five or so families lived along the bank of the Tapajós River, another fifty up the Cupary River, and more scattered throughout the estate, mostly rubber tappers who worked a trail or two. Some had title to their land, but many paid rent to local merchants who held the deed, like the Franco family, who lived just across the Tapajós, or the Cohen family, just downriver in the small town of Boim. Most were descendants of boom-time migrants who settled in the area during the height of the rubber trade. They were generally known as caboclos, or “copper-colored,” the term used to refer to the rural poor of mixed ancestry, a blend of Portuguese, Native American, and African. Also scattered throughout Ford’s two and a half million acres were a number of small communities of Tupi-speaking people, who hunted and gathered, farmed and fished, living on cassava and other jungle fruits. “I met Indians there,” John Rogge, the lumberjack on Blakeley’s advance team, wrote home to the Upper Peninsula, “and ate everything but monkey meat.”2

  Ide wasn’t too concerned. They were “just squatters,” he thought, who lived in little shacks on “very, very small patches of land along the river. If anybody had any property right where we were going to clear,” their land would just be purchased and they would be moved somewhere else. Back in Dearborn, Ernest Liebold agreed, thinking they were just “some native tribes” that didn’t “stay in one place very long.” Ide decided the best thing to do was to “forget about those fellows” until operations were under way, and he wrote into the Bentes contract a clause that would allow Ford to buy title to any property within the boundaries of the concession.3

  It was hard, though, to “forget about” the Franco family, since they owned the entire village of Boa Vista. They were descendants of Alberto José da Silva Franco, a Portuguese migrant who a century earlier had been one of the region’s most prosperous rubber traders. How Franco came to the Tapajós is bound up in one of the most brutal chapters in Amazonian history.

  ALBERTO FRANCO ARRIVED in the Amazon from Lisbon in the early nineteenth century, wealthy but not enough to enter into Belém’s elite lusitana—the prosperous Portuguese class that controlled the city during the colonial period. So he settled in provincial Santarém, establishing himself as a slave-owning merchant. But he was soon on the move again, in flight from the Cabanagem Revolt, or the War of the Cabanas, Brazil’s bloodiest uprising.4

  The rebellion broke out in 1835, when thousands of mestizos, mulattos, Africans, and Indians marched on Belém, which before it would be celebrated for its tropical Beaux Arts buildings and boulevards was associated with another French tradition: revolution. The ranks of the insurgents came from the city’s majority destitute residents, who lived in the adobe and wood-planked hovels, cabanas, which gave the rebellion its name. The red-shirted rebels declared the city independent and ran it for a year, emptying prisons, outlawing forced labor of all kind, distributing the wealth of merchants, setting up a communal food distribution system, and terrorizing landlords and merchants, especially if they were Portuguese. Beneficiaries of what a Prussian prince then touring the region called “the fruits of ceaseless oppression,” the Portuguese were known by a set of regionally specific derogatory names, including caiado (“chalk skin”) and caramuru (“fish face”). The white-faced cebus monkey was popularly known as the macaco português. The British navy help
ed Brazil’s newly independent federal government blockade the city, yet it still took troops more than a year to retake Belém. The insurgents were finally forced to give up the city, but the rebellion spread throughout the vast interior, as far west as Manaus and deep into the Amazon’s many tributaries, including the Tapajós.5

  Martial law was declared throughout the lower Amazon, and soldiers hunted down the revolutionaries, now joined by rural African and indigenous slaves, with a vengeance that made the violence against the Portuguese pale in comparison. Troops engaged in mass drownings and mass shootings, festooning themselves with rosaries made of the strung-together ears of the executed. Insurgents occupied Santarém in 1836 for a few months but eventually retreated up the Tapajós, which became the scene of the rebellion’s drawn-out final stage. For five years, the rebels engaged in a rearguard hit-and-run guerrilla war with federal troops before finally surrendering, at a trading post just upriver from where Ford would found his settlement. As many as 30,000 out of a regional population of 120,000 were killed, most of them at the hands of government soldiers.

  The Cabanagem uprising and its repression had a lasting effect on the valley. As historian Barbara Weinstein writes, the violence weakened the control of white Portuguese elites over the rural population. Runaway slaves deserted plantations en masse, founding fugitive communities throughout the forest. But the breakdown of social relations also allowed provincial merchants and traders to fill the vacuum, especially once federal troops got the upper hand against the rebels. These new regional elites leveraged the assault on Portuguese power to set up trading outposts and claim large parcels of jungle land, laying the foundation for the impending rubber boom. Once established, they began to resort to a variety of mechanisms to erode the autonomy of peasant communities. Pará’s government passed vagrancy laws aimed directly at driving smallholders who didn’t have deeds to their property into debt to merchants. Indigenous communities were particularly hard-hit, and many soon found themselves on the edge of cultural and often physical extinction, having suffered slave raids, tribal dispersal, and forced relocation. Men were conscripted as tappers and boatmen, while women were forced into domestic service or into concubinage. Survivors sought refuge deep in the jungle, leaving the Tapajós’s main trunk and tributaries to the poor migrant families that came from Brazil’s impoverished northeast—the forebears of the unfortunates so graphically described by LaRue.6

  Memories of the rebellion lingered for decades. In 1866, the conservationist and poet George Washington Sears, more famous for his descriptions of canoe trips through the Adirondacks, traveled up the Amazon and spoke with rebel survivors. Having grown up among Native Americans in upstate New York and himself having just fought for the Union in the Civil War, Sears was moved by their stories to write an ode to the insurrection. The historical precision of “Tupi Lament” is haunting, capturing the rueful pride in having staged the revolt but also the shame of defeat and sexual subjection that underwrote what Amazonian scholar Susanna Hecht has called “terror slavery”:

  We sing the noble dead to-night

  Who sleep in jungle covered graves.

  We sing the brave who fell in fight

  Beside the Amazona’s waves,

  The white man counts us with his beasts,

  And makes our girls the slaves of priests.

  Woe, woe for the Cabano!

  . . . . . . .

  We swept their forces at Para,

  But English ships were on the waves.

  And still our girls are serfs and slaves.

  Woe, woe, for the Cabano!

  We drove them from the Tocantins,

  We swept them from the Tapajoz.

  A feeble race with feeble means,

  Our courage conquered all our foes.

  . . . . . . . .

  We were a fierce avenging flood

  That no Brazilian force could stem.

  We reddened all their towns with blood,

  From Onca’s isle to Santarem,

  But ah, our best are in their graves

  And we again are serfs and slaves!

  Woe, woe, for the Cabano!7

  FAMILY LORE SAYS that Alberto José da Silva Franco, along with his wife, his children, and a handful of loyal slaves, barely escaped Santarém, fleeing up the Tapajós. After nearly a week paddling on the river, as they took shelter from a storm in a marshy inlet of a large island named Urucurituba, a bass jumped out of the river and into the boat, which Alberto José took as a divine sign that the island was where his family should stake their new life. The revolt was still roiling the valley. Just a year after his landing on Urucurituba, insurgents slaughtered forty residents of the village of Aveiros, an hour downriver, on the opposite bank. So the Francos kept a low profile, building a small house with an adjacent chapel to Saint Peter, whom Alberto José designated as the island’s patron. Once the insurrection was put down, Alberto José began to spread out, soon becoming one of the Tapajós’s most important landlords and merchants, well placed to profit from the pacification of the valley and increasing rubber trade. He registered the island, as well as land on both banks of the river, in his name and planted sugar to distill and sell cachaça. The rum was valuable not just as a tradable product but for its effectiveness in weakening the will of those who tried to hold out against falling into debt. He also built a statelier Casa Grande, a hacienda. The new house had six airy rooms, one consecrated as a chapel to Saint Peter, right next to the office where rubber was weighed and debt recorded, and a twelve-posted terracotta-tiled veranda that ran along the entire length of its front. Where his first modest home was set in an inconspicuous cove, this one was built on a prominent knoll, framed by a row of grand Havana palms. When he died, he left Urucurituba, along with his other holdings, including Boa Vista, opposite the island on the Tapajós’s right bank, to his many sons.8

  Alberto José’s great-grandson, Eimar Franco, is still alive, and he remembers the coming of Ford to the Tapajós as “provoking a true revolution up and down the valley.” He was seven years old in 1928 and had only twice traveled beyond Santarém, when “all of a sudden modern boats were plying the river in all directions and immense tractors were roaring day and night, digging up the dirt, pulling down trees, opening roads,” he says. On “our side of the river we were still living like our ancestors did, with a few alterations.” Eimar’s memories accord with those of David Riker, who was just a boy when his Baptist father, along with other Confederate “cavaliers” and “roughs” who preferred exile rather than submission to the terms of Appomattox, settled near Santarém after the Civil War. Riker described the coming of Ford as shaking the Tapajós “to its foundations.” It was like a “blood transfusion,” he said, jolting alive a moribund economy with an injection of money, electricity, and internal combustion engines in a region that still relied mostly on barter, debt, and wood-burning steamboats to circulate goods and people. Nearly overnight there was a cash “market for anything negotiable.”9

  One thing that had not been negotiable for a long time was land, as its value had plummeted to almost nothing in the trail of the rubber bust. But as Blakeley and Villares pitched camp and began preliminary clearing, Henry Ford sent a trusted accountant (he didn’t trust too many accountants), James Kennedy, up the Tapajós with a satchel of cash to buy whatever land Blakeley indicated was necessary to advance operations. And since the Francos had fallen on hard times with the collapse of rubber, they welcomed not just the cash Ford’s accountant was offering but the possibility of making money by provisioning the work camp.

  As in Muscle Shoals and the Florida Everglades, wherever Ford or his company went, or was believed to be going, land prices skyrocketed and speculators bought up property to resell at jacked-up prices. When word got out in Iron Mountain, Michigan, that Ford was opening a sawmill, rents jumped from fifteen dollars a month to fifty-five and the prices of houses increased threefold. Boa Vista’s value just a few months earlier was negligible, but now, in 19
28, the Ford Motor Company was buying it in cash for four thousand dollars.10

  The sale took place on Urucurituba, in the first modest house built by Alberto José ninety years earlier. James Kennedy, along with his satchel, arrived on the island, accompanied by a notary to officiate the sale and David Riker to interpret the proceedings. Helping foreigners get by on the Tapajós had become something of a tradition for the Confederates and their descendants; a half century earlier, David’s father had lent a hand to down-on-his-luck Henry Wickham, just before Wickham lighted out for London with the seeds that would doom the Brazilian rubber trade. A large crowd of Urucurituba’s residents—the equivalent of sharecroppers, who paid the Francos rent in rubber and other jungle products—gathered around the house, which stood next to the already crumbling chapel of Saint Peter. “An almost religious silence” fell over the assembly as the notary began to recite the terms of the transaction from an “enormous book.” When the reading was finished, Kennedy opened his bag and handed the money to Eimar’s father, Francisco. Francisco was standing proxy for his young nephew, Luiz, who had just inherited Boa Vista from his father. The boy looked on wide-eyed as his uncle counted out the bills, one by one, on the dining room table. When Francisco finished the tally, he handed the money to a trembling Luiz, who took the payment under his arm and left for his house, with a large procession in tow. “Nothing like that,” Eimar said, “had ever happened on the Tapajós!”11