The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Manaus was the logical place to begin. Located in the center of the Amazon Valley, the jungle city was the collection point for rubber from the interior, and thus its dealers set prices for the world. In 1870, visitors still thought of Manaus as a shabby little place. In 1865, British visitor William Scully estimated its population at five thousand, with 350 houses and government buildings, most “in a very dilapidated condition.” Manaus was like an American gold mining town just taking root in the Rockies. There was a hardscrabble feel and a distant scent of possibilities, but for the moment, all money was devoted to making more money, not advertising its success to the world.

  In 1853, when Richard Spruce had drifted into Manaus after a four-year journey upriver, he had been as awed as Henry was now. When Spruce had left for the wilderness, the sleepy little village was still called Barra, a place where small-time merchants loaded boats every few days with rubber pallets for Europe and the United States. When he returned, Barra was Manaus, and he counted twenty boats in port. The harbor swarmed with canoes, lanchas, and steamships from other nations. “What has happened?” Spruce shouted.

  “Rubber has happened!” a friend shouted back.

  Spruce witnessed the start of the first Rubber Boom, generally considered that period between 1850 and 1880, before the invention of the pneumatic tire and the endless maw of the auto industry. While he’d been gone, Brazil had opened the river to international trade. A stampede of townsmen and farmers abandoned their holdings for rubber, dropping everything to live in a forest rancho and walk a daily estrada. In the province of Pará alone, twenty-five thousand people dropped everything to steam up jungle rivers. Local agriculture was abandoned; local sources of farina, sugar, and rum dried up, and the commodities had to be imported. As shopkeepers in Pará and Manaus advanced money and goods to new rubber prospectors, they began a debt-peonage system that still exists today.

  Although the seringuiero occupied the bottom rung of rubber’s ladder, his was an autonomous existence that many found appealing, at least in the early years. He’d voyage to an unclaimed rubber site, return with a canoe laden with rubber, and trade directly with the dealer, often in goods. This was what Henry experienced, even as the business was changing into a hierarchy with more levels of middlemen. Manaus was both the center and the embodiment of that change. As the more ambitious gatherers established wider rights of ownership in virgin rubber lands, they became intermediaries, receiving trade goods on credit from wholesale dealers, who in turn financed more tappers in a classic pyramid scheme. Newly hired seringuieros were granted the right to tap on an owner’s grove; they recognized him as their patron, or patrão. The patrão’s real profit came from the sale of trade goods to his hired help; the mark-up was so high that a tapper could end his season in the red. Yet the seringuiero still had some independence: The tapping season was limited to six months, and the manner and intensity of work were his own affair.

  As the world rubber trade expanded, a second kind of middleman emerged. Henry saw them throughout Manaus in their new rubber warehouses. Although the wholesale rubber dealer—known as the aviador, or “forwarder”—was the top of the chain in Brazil, he too was a middleman. He sold to the exporter, the direct source of overseas capital, who was usually British. As more money poured into an aviador’s coffers, he’d launch a fleet of riverboats that pierced deeper into the Amazon Valley. There the trees were said to be thicker in girth, less scattered, and, most important, virgin.

  Although it would be the aviadors who grew fantastically rich, it was the patrão who owned or managed the “rubber estates” in the jungle, who formed the most vital link in the chain. He was the interface between labor and capital. Since he grew rich from the number of trees that were tapped, his success depended upon the number of tappers he could employ. In theory, his control was paternalistic, hence his title. He solved problems, offered guidance, provided resources—as a father provided daily bread. In return he expected obedience, hard work, and smoked balls of rubber. Those considered lazy were corrected, first through debt and diplomacy, later, as huge sums of money flowed unchecked, through intimidation, beatings, enslavement, and torture.

  Rubber served an imperial purpose as well. As the seringuieros fanned out to the most distant parts of the interior, they carried with them Brazil’s territorial claims. By settling in the wilderness, a tapper validated Brazil’s claims of uti possidetis, “as you possess,” the right of owning land simply by taking it—a common practice worldwide. Settlers in the American West and Australian outback claimed homesteads under the same principle; European nations annexed guano islands in the Pacific and assumed dominion over vast swaths of Africa. The entire Earth was up for grabs.

  At Manaus, Henry witnessed a side of the trade far different from anything he’d encountered on the Orinoco. On the streets, merchants in white linen suits mixed with the upriver traders who had machetes swinging by their sides. One could dine on pâté de foie gras, Cross & Blackwell’s jams, and imported wine. Rubber flowed into Manaus down the Rio Negro from Venezuela, the Içá and Japurá rivers from Colombia, the Solimões from Ecuador, the Acre and Madeira from Bolivia, and the Juruá, Purús, and Javari from Peru. The city was built on four hills. The Jesuit cathedral was the grandest structure in town, while on the opposite hill stood the governor’s mansion. When the zoologist Louis Agassiz and his wife, Elizabeth, visited Manaus in 1865-66, the governor’s mansion was the social center for the elite. There were innumerable balls, in which the women wore dresses “of every variety, from silks and satins to stuff gowns, and the complexions of all tints, from the genuine Negro through paler shades of Indian and Negro to white. . . .”

  But it was not in the governor’s mansion that the city’s true power resided. Power reigned in the warehouses of the aviadors, each a huge cavern for receiving, examining, and boxing rubber, with offices, clerks, and assistants on the floor above. Older or more prosperous firms built their caverns on the Rio Preto that flowed beside the city and into the Rio Negro. A lancha filled with rubber could be docked and unloaded a few steps from the firm. Rubber was stacked in balls and pellets and lined in rows for grading; wagons loaded with rubber trundled past outside.

  Each warehouse was an oasis of quiet in the clamorous city. Buyers inspected lots and made their choice in silence. The seller drew up a contract and handed it over; the buyer’s continued silence confirmed his acceptance of the deal. It was outside that one heard the din of lesser commerce—the wooden clappers of the haberdasher, the panpipes of the cake seller, the clang of the tinsmith’s iron spoon. Behind mud walls, roosters crowed. Piercing the din, the wandering sellers of lottery tickets shouted their promises.

  “Get rich, get rich!” they cried.

  PART II

  THE SOURCE

  Stolen apples are always sweetest.

  —Medieval proverb

  CHAPTER 6

  THE RETURN OF THE PLANTER

  Rubber was many things to many people. For Henry, it had nearly been his death, but it had also become an addiction. For Joseph Hooker, it was a means to maintain power; for Clements Markham, a door to past glories. To Charles Goodyear, a religious calling; to Thomas Hancock, an international commodity to be bought and sold. The governors in Manaus and Pará, and the emperor in Rio, saw it as a future source of greatness. To the seringuieros scattered through the Basin, it was the escape from a miserable existence; to their patrãos, a dream of wealth and ease. The white milk that dribbled like blood became a mirror: In rubber’s slick, obsidian surface, each man saw his need.

  Strange tales surfaced of those who disappeared into the forest in search of rubber, then emerged reborn. The most famous was that of Crisóstavo Hernández, a Colombian mulatto who fled into the dense Putumayo region separating Colombia and Peru. Information about him is sketchy at best. In the same decade that Henry floated into Manaus, Crisóstavo wrenched a rubber empire from the forest by force and maintained it into the 1880s. With the aid of a tribe of Huitot
o Indians as his personal army, he enslaved a whole region to tap rubber. In the mid- 1900s, a Huitoto oral history emerged told by a man whose mother was Huitoto and father a white rubber tapper: according to this, Crisóstavo was a cauchero in Southern Colombia who killed a man in a fight and fled to escape imprisonment. He rafted down the Caquetá River until spotting thatch roofs; when he entered the village, the Indians froze. Was this black creature a person? A spirit? They’d never seen a black man before. He was taken to the village chief, who decided that Crisóstavo was a harmless refugee. He learned the tribe’s language, was honored with a wife, and became a member of the tribe. In time, however, he fell for another man’s wife; they consummated their affair and fled into the jungle.

  After six days of travel, the couple came to another Huitoto village. The pattern repeated: the villagers were frightened but decided that he was, after all, a man. This time, however, Crisóstavo had brought with him an iron ax, shotgun, and machete, wonders they’d never seen. These, with his singular blackness, made Crisóstavo unique and powerful, and an idea dawned in him. He’d move again, but this time with two hundred Huitoto allies from his new tribe; he continued like this, building an army, until finally coming to the large and powerful village of Chief Iferenanuique. He settled there, increasing the chief ’s power and prestige, but after four years told Iferenanuique that he wanted to go home and visit friends. But he could not do so empty-handed. The chief asked what he wanted. Crisóstavo marked out a space three meters long that reached over his head—he said he wished this filled with rubber. In three months it was done, and when Crisóstavo returned from civilization he brought with him a similar mountain of magical gifts: metal axes, knives, clothing, machetes and shotguns, needles, beads, combs, salt, mirrors, and cane liquor. There was something for everyone, and thus his power grew. Although he would be known as a conqueror, feared throughout the Putumayo, the core of his power lay in temptation and trade.

  Crisóstavo’s was the British way, using rubber as a fulcrum for wider influence. Great Britain didn’t have the political or military muscle in South America that it had in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East: early attempts at expansion in Argentina threw the people into civil war; clumsy attempts to bully Rio de Janeiro to abolish slavery weakened Britain’s influence in Brazil. But it did possess economic clout, what has since been called “informal empire.” After 1856, that economic clout became considerable when Brazil’s railways—built and operated by British companies—gained generous concessions from the emperor. The São Paulo Railway Company, Ltd. operated a railway down the mountain from its namesake city to the coffee port of Santos: the company lasted from 1876 to 1930, climbed from £2 million to £3 million in total shares, and paid an average dividend of 10.6 percent per year. Business was good. Although the railroad was Britain’s most lauded investment, Englishmen bought stock in Brazilian mines, banks, coffee exporters, public utilities, and natural gas; from 1825 to 1890, they preferred Brazil as a field of investment to all other Latin American countries because of its political stability. In 1856, Great Britain got its foot in the rubber trade when it bought the Amazon Steam Navigation Company and a million acres of Amazon real estate; Goodyear’s discovery and the opening of the river to international trade made rubber cheap and accessible. It was as if the world had suddenly discovered rubber; with a solid stake in its trade, there might be no limit to Britain’s power in the region.

  One person who saw this clearly was James de Vismes Drummond-Hay, the British Consul in Pará. The office of “consul” was ancient: It was natural that merchants in foreign lands, trading in alien and sometimes hostile cities, would appoint a spokesman to conduct affairs with the local authorities. For their part, the local authorities found it easier to deal with one official than a mob of businessmen. In a seaport like Pará, a consul’s first responsibility was the protection and regulation of British ships and seamen, but in Latin America especially he often found himself thrust into the role of the “man on the spot,” that strategic British character who rose above himself when Britain’s interests were at stake and gave his all for the empire. For consuls in particular this meant watching for new opportunities and acting as agents for expanding British trade. The role sounds important, but in practice consuls were the forgotten stepchildren of the Foreign Office. They were considered “lower in dignity” than diplomats since their mercantile duties belonged “rather to individual interests than those of the state.” The uniform was embroidered in silver and not the diplomat’s gold; the pay could be below subsistence level. Diplomats did not call on them; they did not belong to the same club.

  Few of these restrictions applied to the family Drummond-Hay. James Drummond-Hay came from a long line of distinguished consul-generals, all posted in Morocco. Because of its interests in Gibraltar, Britain was anxious for that North African country to remain independent, and a remarkably close relationship sprang up between the British Empire and Morocco’s sultan, due in large part to two successive consuls, Edward Drummond-Hay (1829-45) and his son John (1845-86). The latter was so effective that he was knighted in 1862. Between them, they arranged for the Royal Navy to take the sultan’s sons to Mecca for the hajj, smoothed the way for the English education of Moroccan princes, and arranged the military training of Moroccan officers in Gibraltar and England. James was the younger brother of Edward, and in 1856, the vice-consulship in Tetuan passed to him. He stayed in Morocco for ten years, married, had a son, then in 1866 was appointed vice consul in Pará with the understanding that it would lead to a consul-generalship somewhere in the New World.

  The Amazon must have seemed like another planet to someone from the Levant. Tangier was dry and exotic, blown by sea breezes; Pará was humid and crumbling, plagued by periodic bouts of yellow fever. In Morocco, he was days away from London on a fast clipper ship; from Pará the journey took weeks, and the fare was an astounding £60 or £70, a sizable portion of his annual salary. Although the approach to Brazil itself from the sea was lovely, running from deep blue to light green water, Pará lay another eighty miles up a wide muddy estuary afloat with uprooted trees and vast islands of grass that had drifted from thousands of miles inland. The city fought a constant struggle with vegetable life; the jungle was like an invading army, and from roofs and cornices grew plants and small trees that stormed the ramparts and waved their tops like enemy flags. Every consul found himself the inheritor of at least one Distressed British Subject: faced with such a pathetic case at his doorstep, the consul had no choice but to come to his aid. One consul in Siam found such a case asleep in his bed, full of the contents of his liquor cabinet. Here they floated from the jungle filled with madness and parasites. They looked more animal than British, as penniless as church mice, demanding the fare back home.

  But now a particularly interesting straggler had materialized: he called himself Wickham, and Drummond-Hay was intrigued. In September, the consul had drafted his “Report on the Industrial Classes in the Provinces of Pará and Amazonas, Brazil,” in which he concluded that the average English worker could do well for himself out here, if he were willing to apply himself scientifically to rubber’s domestication. Yet none of the natives seemed to consider its possibility: “The labour of extracting rubber is so small, and yet so remunerative,” he wrote, “that it is only natural” to continue tapping rubber for a few months each year. In a good district a man could extract thirty-two pounds of rubber per day, yet no real attempt had been made to tap rubber on a large scale. The investment potential was phenomenal: “The rubber-bearing country is so vast,” yet locals had not considered “the idea of planting the rubber-tree or caring for its growth.”

  Now into his office came this twenty-four-year-old, burned-out Britisher named Henry Wickham, who’d hopped a steamer from Manaus and floated downriver. He seemed like any other wanderer down on his luck until Drummond-Hay flipped through his journal and spotted the first accurate taxonomic drawing of hevea he’d ever seen, something even the vaunted R
ichard Spruce hadn’t sketched. This was tucked away among other drawings—an Indian standing by a rubber tree, a sunset on the Orinoco, a rancho in the jungle. What’s more, the boy had learned to tap rubber, had actually made enough money from the effort to cover his passage back to Pará and Liverpool. This was another first—the first time, to the consul’s knowledge, that an Englishman had gone native and tapped rubber himself. Richard Spruce had described the process, as had Wallace and Bates, but none had spent a season as a seringuiero. As far as he knew, it had never been done.

  So Drummond-Hay did something unusual for a consul. He took Wickham into his confidence, bucked him up, and turned his life around. He told Wickham that a young man willing to sweat and suffer a bit could remake himself out here. Rubber was the key. If a man arrived with some capital or fellow hopefuls, was willing to work hard, he’d become in two or three years the only rubber planter in the entire Amazon Basin. His fortune would be as great as the sugar planters of the West Indies, the coffee men of Malaya, the tea planters of Assam. The place to do it was five hundred miles back upriver in a region rumored to have the best hevea in the Amazon Basin. Somewhere in the unmapped jungle near the town of Santarém.

  In fact, Wickham already seemed to know the place. It was one of the few excursions he’d made off the boat, though he was apparently more interested in the town’s dwindling group of American Southerners than in its bordering jungle or environs. The consul urged the young man to publish his “rough notes” as a travel diary, and he did something unprecedented. He gave him his own report to include in his book, as a kind of afterword.

  Wickham seemed inspired by the confidences of this important man. After a narrative of privation, failure, disease, and near death, he would unexpectedly write:I have come to the conclusion that the valley of the Amazon is the great and best field for any of my countrymen who have energy and a spirit of enterprise as well as a desire for independence, and a home where there is at least breathing room, and every man is not compelled to tread on his neighbour’s toes. I purpose to make the tablelands in the triangle betwixt the Tapajos and the Amazon, behind the town of Santarem, in future the base of my operations.