by Joe Jackson
Table of Contents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART I - THE NEED
CHAPTER 1 - THE FORTUNATE SON
CHAPTER 2 - NATURE BELONGS TO MAN
CHAPTER 3 - THE NEW WORLD
CHAPTER 4 - THE MORTAL RIVER
CHAPTER 5 - INSTRUMENTS OF THE ELASTIC GOD
PART II - THE SOURCE
CHAPTER 6 - THE RETURN OF THE PLANTER
CHAPTER 7 - THE JUNGLE
CHAPTER 8 - THE SEEDS
CHAPTER 9 - THE VOYAGE OF THE AMAZONAS
PART III - THE WORLD
CHAPTER 10 - THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER 11 - THE TALKING CROSS
CHAPTER 12 - RUBBER MADNESS
CHAPTER 13 - THE VINDICATED MAN
EPILOGUE
GLOSSARY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgements
PHOTO CREDITS
INDEX
Praise for The Thief at the End of the World
“Fascinating . . . Mr. Jackson relates the tale of Wickham’s Amazon miseries and the scramble for the seeds with an admirable mix of botanical detail and storyteller’s verve.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A fabulous story, well told, with excerpts from Wickham’s own writings and Violet’s memoirs. Jackson is especially good on the magical and dangerous nature of jungle and forest. . . . The book works best when we’re with Wickham, chasing his El Dorados. . . . This story moves and haunts. Perhaps man can’t, in the end, control nature; he can’t even control himself.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Jackson has made a first-rate book out of Wickham’s story. . . . He has done a heroic amount of research, made a coherent story out of a huge mass of material, and identified the larger themes that give the story its resonance. His writing is lucid, occasionally vivid, and he brings to the enterprise a welcome sense of humor, as well as, when it is useful, a sense of the ridiculous. The Thief at the End of the World not merely is informative and instructive, it also is immensely entertaining, an attribute always to be welcomed.”
—The Washington Post
“The Thief at the End of the World is clearly the product of remarkable research and a journalist’s feel for what to keep and what to leave out. Wickham’s heroic failures and his neglected love are narrated with poignancy and humor. There are touches of Joseph Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness. . . . But more than Conrad, Jackson obviously has a good time telling a terrific story.”
—The Seattle Times
“Jackson vividly portrays the rigors of life in the tropics.”
—BookPage
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Jackson is the author of four works of nonfiction and a novel. He was an investigative reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot for twelve years, covering criminal justice and the state’s death row. He lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He can be reached through his Web site, www.joejacksonbooks.com.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008
Published in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © Joe Jackson, 2008
All rights reserved
Image credits appear on page 395
The thief at the end of the world : rubber, power, and the seeds of empire / by Joe Jackson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN : 978-1-1012-0269-2
1. Rubber industry and trade—Amazon River Region—History. I. Title.
HD9161.A562J33 2008
338.4’7678209811—dc22 2007019872
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
http://us.penguingroup.com
AS ALWAYS,
TO KATHY AND NICK
God is great, but the forest is greater.
—Amazonian proverb
PROLOGUE
HENRY’S DREAM
Deep in the forest grew a ruinous tree. From its veins flowed a milky sap that magically shielded man from the elements. From its branches drooped enough fruit to feed entire villages. Birds perched in its crown, filling the forest with song. Those who lived beneath it knew they were blessed: While others toiled and suffered, this tree of life filled their every need. They were the Chosen Ones.
Yet divine gifts come with a warning: This treasure must be hidden from the world. Each tribe who told the tale—the Tupabaya and Mundurucú of the Lower Amazon, the Motoco of Gran Chaco, the Carib and Arawak of Guiana—considered itself the tree’s sacred guardian. Their holy men warned them to stay vigilant: If strangers ever found the tree, they prophesied, they’d cut deep into its heart to reveal the source of riches, but instead of gold would release a deluge. The Father of Waters would never stop, destroying the entire forest.
Drowning all mankind.
In December 1928, a vision of white bobbed on the water off Villa Santarém.
The tiny port was centrally located on the Lower Amazon, hunched between the moiling river and forested highlands, and hadn’t changed much in the last century. The wide sandy beach where caboclo women washed their laundry, the white adobe church with two square turrets, the one-story houses with their blue fronts and red roofs—all were comfortably stuck in the past, the town’s wireless station one of the few concessions to modern times. Plenty of fortune hunters had passed Santarém over the decades, each searching out the newest El Dorado hidden deep in the forest, but what set the smart white steamer Lake Ormoc and the huge barge Lake LaFarge, towed behind it, apart from the others was the promise of industry stored in their holds. The two had left Dearborn, Michigan, four months earlier and arrived without mishap, besting the mouth of the Amazon with its treacherous currents, where a seagoing freighter had run her bow on the bank and turned turtle, where another wrecked and the captain blew out his brains. They passed ghost towns in the wilderness: Pará (now called Belém), with its cavernous warehouses and empty “Parisian” boulevards; small towns at the edge of the jungle like Santana and Monte Alegre, where paved roads were swallowed by rain forest and lavish city centers were now home for bird-eating spiders.
The marvels of the Lake Ormoc included a diesel tugboat, a n
arrow-gauge locomotive and tracks, a steam shovel, a pile driver, tractors, motorboats, stump pullers, components of a powerhouse, a disassembled sawmill, prefabricated stores and houses, and ice-making machines. Her crew dripped sweat in their wool sailor suits as they stood at the rail; the Danish captain puffed on his pipe, an act he’d heard would repel mosquitoes. Fragile Portuguese fishing boats surrounded the ship, darting past with their red-and-blue sails and raked prows.
Here at Santarém, where the Amazon met the blue Tapajós, its fifth-largest tributary, nearly 173,000 cubic yards of water passed by each second; when the Amazon slammed into the Atlantic, that increased to 216,000 cubic yards, accounting for nearly one fifth of all fresh water received annually into the earth’s oceans. Millions of tons of debris and sediment streamed past Santarém. If one stood on the beach at night and stared up at the Southern Cross, that unfamiliar sound at the edge of thought was the hiss of the river as it coursed east to the ocean, five hundred miles away. A little of everything washed up on this beach. There were still tales of the day thousands of alligators died on the Tapajós and floated down to Santarém: “So great was the stench of their decomposing carcasses,” wrote British naturalist Richard Spruce, that the town’s main merchants “had all their boats and men employed for some weeks in towing them down the river to a safe distance below the town.”
From 1850 to 1913, the Amazon Valley had been the world’s single source of high-quality rubber, and the ambitions of the Great Powers had transformed the jungle. Great Britain was the first to realize rubber’s geopolitical promise. Rubber was essential for the production of gaskets for steam engines, and by 1870, London saw the need for giant turbines to drive ironclads across the seas. This obscure material, whose chemical composition no one yet understood, accompanied iron and steel wherever railroads, factory machinery, and mining pumps found footing; it was essential for machine belting and tubing, as buffers between railroad cars, and soon for “pneumatic tyres.” Progress meant mobility, and world power depended on uninterrupted access to the three strategic resources necessary for that freedom: the oil, steel, and rubber essential for the production and maintenance of trains, ships, autos, and planes.
Long before the rise of Standard Oil and the Seven Sisters, before the trusts, trustbusters, and the “great carve-up” of the Middle East into oil-rich puppets, the economy and politics of rubber created for a very few the riches of Midas while deciding the fate of nations and enslaving or exterminating legions of natives. For sixty-three years, the Amazon Valley owned the world market in rubber, but then the bubble broke, as so many do. The Amazon Rubber Boom turned into a bust in one short year. In 1913, the rubber from seventy thousand seeds smuggled from Brazil and planted in Britain’s Asian plantations flooded the market, outselling the more expensive “wild” rubber and tossing it from the stage. The bust dealt the Amazon Valley a blow from which it has never recovered: In 1900, the region produced 95 percent of the world’s rubber. By 1928, when the Lake Ormoc floated off Santarém, the Amazon produced barely 2.3 percent of its needs.
Now Great Britain pulled the strings. In 1922, Britain’s rubber plantations in Indochina were still reeling from the economic shock of World War I. Since four out of five plantations did not pay dividends, a government panel called for price restrictions, initiating the twentieth century’s first global experiment in resource control. As expected, rubber prices rose. Hardest hit was the United States, which consumed 70-80 percent of the world’s rubber, most of it going to the gigantic automobile industry. The industrial boom of the Jazz Age rested on the fortunes of Detroit, and the autos rolling from her factories rested on rubber tires. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover ordered that, in the interest of national security, the nation must wean itself from foreign rubber and develop her own supply.
The Lake Ormoc’s mission was to swing the world rubber market in America’s direction and shift the balance of power. It seemed a tall order for any ship, much less a humble freighter, but such was the faith in her owner that anything seemed possible. That owner was Henry Ford.
No man more fully epitomized American ingenuity and industry in 1928; no one more truly believed in the gospel of work and salvation by capitalism. He was portrayed in the press as a modern Prometheus, bringing the light of cheap goods and high wages to the masses. His 1913 implementation of the moving assembly line made “Fordism” the most imitated business concept in the world. With his fair skin, pale blue eyes, and sharp profile, he projected a jaunty self-confidence. He was small and wiry, built like a sprinter, famous for racing employees across his factory floor. In 1928, at age sixty-three, he was still at the top of his game and eager, he said, to conquer the Amazon. It seemed inevitable that he would come to this jungle, the original source of the rubber used for his tires. Detroit’s consumption of the rubber known as “Pará fine” was the reason for the growth of the Federated Malay States, capital of Britain’s rubber-plantation industry and center of its world monopoly. In 1914 alone, Detroit consumed 1.8 million tires, and of these, Ford used 1.25 million. He envisioned a southern extension of his flagship River Rouge plant carved from the jungle. The Amazon was a chance to build from scratch his vision of an “agro-industrial utopia” modeled after small-town America. It was an opportunity to create, as he said in his Ford Sunday Evening Hour Sermonettes, a world in which workers had “one foot in industry and one foot on the land.” To do this, he purchased 2.5 million acres of rainforest along the Tapajós, an area 82 percent the size of Connecticut. He planned to build an entire American city smack in the middle of the jungle, and like other empire builders, he would name it for himself.
Fordlandia was the logical extension of Ford’s career. It is hard today to remember the hold that the “romance of rubber” had on the imaginations and pocketbooks of the Western world. Ford’s life was bracketed by what brokers in the commodities markets of London and New York had dubbed the “Rubber Age.” He was born in 1863, the height of the American Civil War, the first modern war to make extensive military use of India rubber and its close cousin, gutta-percha, for everything from coats, capes, caps, buttons, haversacks, and canteens to pontoon boats, cartridge belts, and horse syringes. He grew into manhood as the bicycle craze exploded across Europe and America. In 1885, when Ford was twenty-two, Carl Benz made the first differential gear tricycle, an oversized three-wheeler with a small engine turning the rear axle. By 1891, a vibrant automobile industry was emerging in Europe, made up primarily of former bicycle makers—Opel in Germany; Clément, Darracq, and Peugeot in France; and Humbert, Morris, and Rover in Great Britain. By the twentieth century, auto production had shifted to the United States: From 1908 to 1927, Ford alone had sold 15 million black Model Ts, the linchpin to his empire, which he’d christened the “people’s car.”
To those living in Santarém, neither Fordlandia nor the arrival of the Lake Ormoc came as any great surprise. For the past six years, a half dozen “secret” U.S. expeditions had searched the Basin for likely spots to establish vast rubber plantations as a way to undercut the British price controls. There were few secrets out here. Land speculators fanned out ahead of the Americans. The most successful was Jorge Villares, a Brazilian coffee producer and elevator manufacturer who heard rumors of Ford’s quest and secretly planted half a million rubber seedlings along a seventy-five-mile stretch of forest on the east bank of the Tapajós River. He left behind armed guards as protection against rival speculators and contacted the leader of the most important American mission, the University of Michigan agronomist Carl LaRue.
The well-connected LaRue had been appointed by Herbert Hoover to explore the junction of the Tapajós and Amazon, reputed source of the stolen rubber that gave birth to the British monopoly. If a lone Briton could succeed in this malarial backwater, think what could be accomplished by American money and know-how. All that was needed was a reliable source of labor: “A million Chinese in the rubber section of Brazil would be a godsend to that country,” LaRue wrote
in 1924. Three years later, he convinced Ford to buy Villares’s concession for $125,000; the next year, Ford learned that the state of Pará had been willing to give him the land for free.
The Villares payout had all the hallmarks of a swindle, and according to several accounts, Ford never trusted LaRue again. Nevertheless, the terms were favorable, and Ford forged ahead. Pará was happy to forgive Ford’s taxes for fifty years; in return, Ford Inc. promised the government a 7-percent return on all profits after twelve years. Ford vowed to begin the industrial conquest of the Amazon and expected his sons and grand-sons to complete the job in future decades. As the Lake Ormoc steamed from Dearborn, the last piece fell into place for Ford.
Fordlandia would replace Boa Vista, a small jungle village whose Portuguese name meant “beautiful view.” One final tract remained to complete the package, a spit of land at the point where Ford planned to build a giant pier capable of off-loading oceangoing steamers. But this spot was still owned by a family named Franco, and Old Man Franco held out for more. After Ford closed the deal with the state, his representatives met Franco in his kitchen and began stacking money on the table. The old man’s eyes grew wider as he watched: He’d never seen so much money in one place at one time. When the stacks reached over his head, Ford’s men stepped back. Old Man Franco looked at the stacks, looked at the men, and shoveled the money into a canvas sack. He didn’t say a word but stuck out his hand. The deal was done.
North Americans greeted the news with a fervor bordering on religious ecstasy: “While there may be a difference of opinion as to the prospects of rubber growing in the Philippines and in Africa, there is none as to the Amazon Valley,” crowed the Outlook, a New York business magazine. “Brazil is the native home of the rubber plant, and the possibilities of extending production are almost unlimited.” Nothing could go wrong.
