The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  There were no labor problems either. Although conditions for seringuieros had grown ever more degrading, new tappers arrived. One effect of the Boom was a settlement of the valley like nothing seen since the original Portuguese conquest. Thousands of small expeditions ascended hundreds of small tributaries, searching for undiscovered trees.

  But each new surge up the river made seringuieros more dependent on the patrão. The cost of living in Pará and Manaus was two to four times greater than in London and New York, but the aviadors compensated by selling ever higher down the line. At each link of the chain, practices were structured to drive up costs. Brokers on the Amazon charged higher prices than their counterparts in London and New York. The steamship companies charged whatever they wanted for shipment. The tax on exported rubber was exorbitant and drove up costs by as much as a third. The manager sold supplies to the seringuiero for a final profit of 50-200 percent, and the isolated seringuiero had no choice but to buy. His economic helplessness made him the victim of every swindle imaginable. Beans and rice were sold at seven times their price in Rio. The “trade gun” became notorious—a muzzle-loader with a wire-wound barrel, which would unwind and fall apart after fifty shots. The gun sold so well that it was made in Europe specifically for the Amazon. In some distant estradas, food was rotten and swarmed with maggots by the time it reached the workers, but the seringuiero either bought the spoiled meat or starved.

  Legally, there was no obligation for a seringuiero to remain; he could pick up and go at any time. But managers had ways to ensure that their labor force stayed. They built their base camps in strategic locations so no tapper could slip past unnoticed. They hired gunmen to check on the ranchos. In Peru and Bolivia a fugitive could be returned to his master until he liquidated the debt; he could also be sold to another manager for the price of the debt, and this “truck system” of debt peonage was widespread. Because the rubber houses drew labor from the parched wastelands of the northeast, unhappy seringuieros were far from home with nowhere to run. They came to the Amazon by the shipload, thousands of hard, desperate men willing to bet everything on “Pará fine.” By the peak of the Boom in 1910, an estimated 131,000-149,000 men were tapping from 21.4 million hevea trees on 24,000-27,000 estradas deep in the Amazon.

  It was a changed world from when Henry tapped goma. He’d been an independent owner-operator, a posseiro, as had generations of caboclos before him. By law, the tapper was supposed to receive 60 percent of the value of the rubber he produced, and the average tapper produced about 1,750 pounds a year. But there were a number of ways to separate a tapper from his money, and the seringuiero who eked out enough to cover his living expenses without going into debt was a wise, or lucky, man. By the turn of the century, the aviador was a big-time capitalist, hiring anywhere from two hundred to five hundred men and shipping them into the field at his expense, then advancing each tapper £40-£70 in provisions, arms, medicine, clothing, and other basics, which he priced at 30-40 percent over what he paid. He was in turn exploited by the wholesale merchants in Pará and Manaus, who gave him credit up to £40,000. These merchants were funded by investors and speculators in London and New York, who received their payment in rubber at season’s end.

  For the men at the pyramid’s base, the attrition was frightful. A January 1899 report by the U.S. Consul in Pará said that for every hundred new recruits, seventy-five would die, desert, or leave because of disease. A patrão in the Upper Amazon could plan on losing a minimum of five out of twenty-one workers. Death rates as high as 50 percent were recorded among tappers in Bolivia.

  Even Henry would not have been blind enough to tap rubber now. And he never had the capital necessary to employ so many men. The closest he might have come was to let the Indians gather for him, as they had for the traders in Boim. The western side of the Tapajós was sewn up by the Boim trading houses, but on the eastern shore, tributaries like the Cupari were open for business, stretching back to the forested table-land as far as the Cuara du Sol and beyond. This was the home of the Mundurucú Indians who’d saved Henry’s life when he nearly chopped off his foot. A 1912 survey of land claims on the Tapajós listed “400 tame Mundurucu Indians” who’d been coaxed into gathering rubber. Though they were often cheated, they were not forced at gunpoint to collect rubber as in some of the horror stories filtering from the Upper Amazon. Instead, they wanted the goods rubber could buy—the steel machetes, iron pots, and dyed cloth they could not produce on their own. Their conquest was by seduction, the same strategy employed by the legendary Crisóstavo Hernández. Although the rubber trade destroyed their culture, it did so quietly, by paying tribesmen to spend their time gathering rubber rather than in traditional farming or hunting. The Boom was relentless as it crept up the most remote tributaries, sniffed out rubber, promised a life of ease.

  What if Violet and Henry had stayed? They might have become rich, like some of the confederados who’d held on. Judge Mendenhall built his lonely plot of land at Piquiá-tuba into a “model, prosperous plantation.” The Jenningses and Vaughans intermarried, raised rubber and sugar, and were on the way to owning a two-thousand-acre cattle ranch outside Santarém. A “Dr. Pitts” would write to the Mobile Daily Register that he raised sugarcane, cotton, papaya, squash, five kinds of sweet potato, Irish potatoes, and a variety of beans. “I have made enough to live well on and am better pleased than ever,” he said. The confederados who stayed introduced the plow, harrow, spade, and rake to the area. Some Brazilians copied their techniques, and they fared well too.

  None did better than Harriette Jane’s student David Riker. In 1888, Brazil decreed unconditional emancipation, ending slavery—the reason Riker’s father had settled there. But David was of a different generation and considered himself Brazilian. The old conflicts and prejudices meant nothing to him. When his father had railed about the mixing of races, David had listened respectfully, but he didn’t really care. He’d married a mixed-blood Brazilian woman from the wastelands of Ceará and eventually had fourteen children with her. He expanded his father’s cattle ranch at Diamantino into a huge landholding; in 1884 he planted rubber, and by 1910 this had grown significantly. That year he sold out to a consortium of English investors, who incorporated it as the Diamantino Rubber Co., Ltd. Riker sold it for six thousand dollars, a fortune at the time. He retired, at age forty-nine, a rich man.

  Hundreds of similar plantation companies sprang up across the world. They were promoted haphazardly, managed by men who knew little or nothing about rubber, and described to buyers as if they’d existed for years. As the price of rubber continued up, any investment seemed a sure thing. In the 1860s, rubber in the United States sold for six to ten cents a pound. Over the next thirty years it gradually rose to about sixty cents. In 1903-04 the average price was still about 68.2 cents per pound. A plantation company like Tapajós Pará Rubber Forests Ltd. was typical: Incorporated in 1898, its directors included a London merchant, a coffee planter, a printer, and an accountant. Since it never appeared to do any business, it probably never existed anywhere except on paper, like many such companies. As quietly as it started, it folded in 1901.

  In the summer of 1905, the madness escalated. The price of rubber hit $1.50 a pound and stuck, something no one had ever seen. In the Stock Exchanges of New York and London the effect was electrifying. Capital bottled up in England during the Boer War sought a release; in the United States, the Rubber Boom coincided with an economic expansion so rapid and comprehensive that by 1900 the market was glutted with cash for investment and speculation. To attract money from smaller investors, plantation companies offered “low denominational shares,” or shares going for under a pound or a dollar, an unheard-of offering. Lured by the gimmick, the public became unhinged. Everyone wanted a share in rubber, but so many companies had formed that they could only make a profit if rubber’s selling price stayed at this unnatural high.

  The “bubble” covered the world. Anywhere on the planet that a plant wept latex, stock companies f
ollowed. They formed to harvest Landolphia vine in the Congo, Ficus elastica in Liberia, Ule (Castilloa elastica) in Mexico, and plants in the recently conquered Philippines. Those companies that failed to meet the requirements of the New York or London Stock Exchanges pursued the new and unsophisticated investor: the teacher, waiter, and widow. Journalists were hired to write copy that sold confidence instead of value. This became the age of the paid endorsement, as prominent businessmen, politicians, and even a former treasury secretary sold their names to promote bad deals. Enormous profits were promised. A monthly investment of $5-$150 assured an annual income of $500-$5,000, promoters said.

  As in so many speculative bubbles, thousands were ruined. A typical hoax involved the Peru Pará Rubber Company, with a reported capital of $3 million and an “unlimited” number of virgin trees growing in undisclosed parts of the Amazon. In 1905, ads in Chicago newspapers promised dividends of 75 percent for life. Unsurprisingly, no one collected. Another company sold $250,000 in worthless stock to Philadelphia teachers, who lost everything. Pensions, trusts, and holding companies were weakened by their rubber-stock investments. Even managers of widows’ funds, believed the most conservative investors, were fooled. A famous story concerned Lucille Wetherall, who, like thousands others, lost her life savings when in 1900 she invested seven thousand dollars in the Vista Hermosa plantation in Mexico, chartered in her state of Maine. Later that year the company went into receivership, ruining 1,800 stockholders while preserving the interests of company insiders holding A-grade bonds. But Lucy Wetherall was made of stern stuff and gained her place in investment history by showing up at the plantation and demanding residence on the property that had backed her securities. She managed the failing plantation until forced to flee the Revolution in 1914.

  Nowhere was the money and madness more apparent than in Manaus, the rubber capital of the world. Unlike the coffee barons and other commodity tycoons, the rubber barons did not live on their estates. Instead, due to its central location, most lived in Manaus, and extraordinary concentrations of wealth came to what had been the small jungle town. In 1892, the republic’s youngest-ever state governor, the diminutive Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro, swept to power and transformed the city with the profits of the Boom. A 20-percent export tax on every kilo of rubber enriched the state’s treasury by as much as £1.6 million annually. From the malarial forests emerged a city of hospitals, banks, office blocks, a £500,000 Palace of Justice, and forty-five schools. Two million gallons of pure water flowed daily through the city’s water system. Three hundred citizens were linked by the first telephone network in the Amazon.

  The first order of business was to transform the harbor. The Manaus Harbor Co., Ltd., composed of Brazilian investors, English and Brazilian steamship companies, an English rubber firm, and others, was signed to build a customs house and quay along the Rio Negro—a problem, since that river rose and fell as much as sixty feet each year. The solution lay in building a floating dock equipped with huge iron air tanks. A four-hundred-foot platform connected the pontoons to the iron warehouse on shore, and merchandise moved back and forth along cables. Manaus’s floating dock was the largest in the world, capable of unloading three tons of cargo per minute. The year 1910 set a record for ship movement at Manaus, unequaled for another fifteen years: Approximately 1,675 oceangoing steamships, river launches, and sailboats called at port that year.

  But the floating dock was not the only sign of wealth and power. Bottle-green electric streetcars operated in Manaus before any other city in South America, looping sixteen miles from dawn to dusk through the city to the jungle, then back to the praça. The line was subsidized by Charles R. Flint, whose United States Rubber Company purchased a quarter of the city’s rubber. Roads were built, but since no paving stones were quarried in the valley, special Plimsoll cobblestones were shipped from France. The customs house, or Alfândaga, was modeled after Delhi’s, prefabricated in England, and assembled on the spot. Public gardens were sprinkled with fountains in the form of gold cherubs. Telephones, telegraphs, and electricity were installed.

  The world was reflected here. English, French, German, and Portuguese managers directed rubber operations; Spaniards, Italians, Lebanese, and Syrians owned small businesses. One could buy Smith and Wesson revolvers, Omega watches, Scandinavian butter, Black and White whiskey, Underwood typewriters, and Parfum Lubin. A jeweler estimated that, in 1907, the city’s per capita diamond consumption was the largest in the world. The British pound sterling was used as freely as the Brazilian milreis, but French style shaped the tastes of the rubber barons and their wives. The leading stores catering to women bore French names: La Ville de Paris, Au Bon Marché, Parc Royal. There were five “houses of diversion” for vaudeville and movies, projected by the latest Edison cameras. Every Sunday, the Derby Club held horse races at the Prado Amazonense, with five heats and heavy purses for winners. The rubber barons built private palaces out of Italian marble, then furnished them from England and France and hung the ceilings with crystal chandeliers. Their linen came from Ireland. Grand pianos stood in their salons. One baron bought a yacht, another a lion, a third watered his horse on champagne. Jewelry was imported in bulk, diamonds lavished on prostitutes imported from the best European bordellos. Police believed that two out of every three houses in Manaus was a brothel.

  Stories of the barons’ profligacy were legion. One “colonel,” as they liked to be called, bought an entire consignment of thirty-six hats destined for a local merchant, chose five for himself and threw the rest in the river. Another paid four hundred pounds for a ride in the city’s only Mercedes Benz limousine: he picked up his mistress, then rode three hundred yards from the theater to a bar. At the height of the Boom, 133 rubber firms and buyers were represented in the city’s Rubber Exchange, and most were foreign firms, like Dusendchon, Zargas, & Co.; Kingdom & Co.; and Anderson Warehouses. The leader of this mercantile polyglot was Waldeman Scholz, president of the powerful Commercial Association. Scholz gazed over his empire with a round pale face, receding hairline and pince-nez. He was the city’s second largest exporter of rubber and imported a wide variety of goods from European firms. A local paper described him as a man of “clear vision, incomparable energy, and extraordinary activity.” He built for himself the finest house in the city, which is occupied today by the State Governor.

  Manaus’s crowning glory was the Teatro Amazonas, the famous opera house, inspired by the Opéra-Garnier in Paris and built completely of imported materials. Funded entirely from rubber profits, its construction lasted from 1891 to 1896 and cost $2 million, a cosmological sum for the time. Even Violet had heard of it. She would have loved to see it, but she was in the South Pacific, waking each morning to the smell of rotting sponge. Even for Manaus, the Opera House was out of scale, rising above the river like a huge Gothic cathedral that dwarfed some medieval town. Its green, blue, and yellow dome was laid with thirty-six thousand Alsatian ceramic tiles acquired from Maison Koch Frères in Paris. The floor was paved in marble, and sixteen Corinthian columns lined the foyer. The theater itself was built in the shape of a lyre, with three rising tiers of box seats and a ceiling painted to resemble the base of the Eiffel Tower. There were 701 seats: since the city’s turn-of-the century population was about forty thousand, this meant it could hold nearly 2 percent of Manaus’s residents under its dome. For opening night, some of Europe’s most famous performers were booked at vast fees to brave malaria and abandon all other engagements for months to perform in the middle of the Amazon. Tradition holds that Enrico Caruso sang in the fantastic auditorium, that Sarah Bernhardt performed, and Anna Pavlova danced, but all are unsupported by opera house records. They were apparently sought out, but could not be coaxed to the jungle for fear of death and disease.

  By the turn of the century, two great streams of rubber flowed into American and European factories from the two greatest river basins in the world. Each year, approximately twenty-five thousand tons of rubber came from the Amazon and a
nother five thousand tons from the Congo. The horrors in both regions were so similar that they seemed part of a continuum.

  In 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium emerged, under the guise of philanthropy, as the sole owner and ruler for the next twenty years of the Congo Free State, an area as large as Europe. The purported reason for this masterstroke was to improve the moral and material conditions of the native, “a crusade worthy of this century of progress,” Leopold said. The Congo’s riches—its copper, ivory, diamonds, and, above all else, rubber—were the real targets. The rise of the bicycle and auto industries made rubber the most lucrative resource in Leopold’s realm. Although the Congo produced a second-grade rubber, extracted by cutting down and smashing the plentiful Landolphia vine, so great was the need that manufacturers snapped it up immediately.

  The method of collection was designed more for instant output than the continued life of the source, or the collector. “Each town and district is forced to bring in a certain quantity (of rubber) to the headquarters of the Commissaire every Sunday,” wrote the American missionary John Murphy, in what would be a typical report.