The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  It will be instructive to compare the planted acreages, under Hevea, in the two leading countries—Ceylon and Malaya:

  271. By 1905, the Straits Settlements were known as the “melting pot” of Asia Frederick Simpich, “Singapore, Crossroads of the East: The World’s Greatest Mart for Rubber and Tin was in Recent Times a Pirate-Haunted, Tiger-Infested Jungle Isle,” National Geographic, March 1926, p. 241.

  271. They strolled around Singapore in their golf brogues W. Arthur Wilson. “Malaya—Mostly Gay: All About Rubber: A Guide for Griffins,” British Malaya, February 1928, pp. 264.

  271. Between 1844 and 1910, some 250,000 indentured Indian laborers Ravindra K. Jain, “South Indian Labour in Malaya, 1840-1920: Asylum, Stability and Involution,” in Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834-1920, Kay Saunders, ed. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p.162.

  271. “Coolies lines, each room 12 ft. by 12 ft.” Ibid., p. 164, quoting the Selangar Journal of 1894.

  272. “Tamils are . . . cheap and easily managed” T. L. Gilmour, “Life on a Malayan Rubber Plantation,” the Field; found in “Cuttings from the Field,” Royal Commonwealth Society Collection, GBR/0115/RCMS 322/11: Malaya.

  272. “is a pleasant one” Ibid.

  272. plantation rubber was beginning to catch the eye Randolph Resor, “Rubber in Brazil: Dominance and Collapse, 1876-1945,” Business History Review, vol. 51, no. 3 (Autumn, 1977), p. 349.

  272. “Mr. Wickham is no longer a young man” Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), p. 653.

  273. “Wickham never sermonized; he just talked” “Palia Dorai.” “The Early Days of Rubber: Memories of Henry Wickham,” British Malaya, vol. 14, no. 12 (April 1940), p. 243.

  273. “Having learned your address from the present director of Kew” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, J. D. Hooker Correspondence, vol. 21, “Wickham to Hooker, Aug. 10th, 1906, London,” file folder 120.

  273. “My Fellow Planters and Foresters” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, frontispiece.

  273. “I was at that time, as one before my time—as one crying in the wilderness” Ibid., pp. 54-57.

  274. In April 1910, it reached its peak at $3.06, and the world’s rubber consumers let out a howl In 1910, the Amazon accounted for over half of the world’s 83,000 tons of wild rubber, and almost all of it high-quality hevea. Africa and Mexico accounted for the rest, with much lower grades of rubber, while the British plantations of the East accounted for a mere 11,000 tons. Although the United States bought 30 percent of the Amazon’s rubber, Britain was still the best customer. In 1905-1909, the empire’s imports of Brazilian rubber far surpassed its other imports from that country; during that time, it shipped £32 million in rubber out of a total £45 million in imports from Brazil.

  274. “The Rubber Market continued to astonish” Quoted in Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood, p. 58.

  274. “It is a maddening revel of speculation” Ibid., pp. 58-59.

  274. “New companies continue to be floated” Ibid., p. 59.

  274. Banks in Pará Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, p. 159.

  275. In the face of such need, it seemed . . . that rubber profits could only soar In 1910, for example, the rubber barons in Manaus were finishing up their biggest decade of export ever. They’d shipped some 345,079 tons of rubber abroad, 100,000 more than they’d shipped in the previous decade. In 1910 alone, 38,000 tons went to New York, Liverpool, Le Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp, the world’s principal markets. Sixty percent of the rubber sold in New York was Brazilian, and by 1915 the U.S. would buy six times more rubber than Great Britain, eight times more than France or Russia, and twelve times more than Italy or Germany. The price per pound reached its 1910 zenith in April when rubber sold for $2.90 a pound. The price dropped after that, but not enough to depress the market—the average price for 1910 would be $2.01 per pound, compared to the $1.60 average in 1909 and $1.18 in 1908. Bradford L. Barham and Oliver T. Coomes, Prosperity’s Promise: The Amazon Rubber Boom and Distorted Economic Development, Dellplain Latin American Studies, no. 34, David J. Robinson, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 32. Prices quoted from “India Rubber World and Electrical Trades Review” (Nov. 15, 1890; Nov. 1, 1900; Nov. 1, 1905; Nov. 1, 1910).

  275. By 1912, the world had 1.085 million acres planted in rubber Herbert Wright, Hevea Brasiliensis, or Para Rubber: Its Botany, Cultivation, Chemistry and Diseases (London: Maclaren & Sons, 1912), p. 45. The following table gives a breakdown of where plantation rubber was grown in 1912:

  Hevea from Wickham’s seeds was cultivated in East Asia. Elsewhere in the world, planters produced rubber from Castilloa, Ficus, Manihot, Landolphia, and Funtimia, but the quality of these types of rubber was never considered as high.

  276. spent it all on grandiose palaces and payoffs to politicians Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 47.

  276. “inexhaustible natural supplies” and the “unrivaled quality” of “Pará fine” Ibid.

  276. “Yankee speculators” Ibid.

  277. “English firm of gilt-edged bond folk” J. T. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis,” p. 383.

  277. Sometimes those who remained tried to recapture the ostentatious dream The sources for this account of the Bust include:Economic reasons for the Bust: Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, pp. 154-167; Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, pp. 36-52; James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber (New York: Harper, 1931), pp. 12-18; W. C. Holmes, “The Tragedy of the Amazon,” Rubber Age, vol. 9, no. 1 (April 10, 1921), pp. 11-16; John Melby, “Rubber River: An Account of the Rise and Collapse of the Amazon Boom,” pp. 452-469; Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood, pp. 58-59.

  Santarém and Boim: David Bowman Riker, “Handwritten Narrative,” in David Afton Riker’s O Último Confederado na Amazõnia (Brazil, 1983), pp. 111-129; Interview with Elisio Eden Cohen, postmaster and historian of Boim, Oct. 21, 2005.

  Manaus: E. Bradford Burns, “Manaus 1910: Portrait of a Boom Town,” pp. 400-421; Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 151-156.

  Iquitos: Harry L. Foster, “Ghost Cities of the Jungle,” New York Herald Tribune, Sunday magazine section, March 20, 1932.

  Obidos: Eric B. Ross, “The Evolution of the Amazon Peasantry,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (1978), p. 215.

  278. nations do not generally raise more than perfunctory complaints Bernard Porter, Britain, Europe, and the World, 1850-1986: Delusions of Grandeur (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 60.

  278. “The fight for raw materials plays the most important part in world politics” Jacob Viner, “National Monopolies of Raw Materials,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 4 (July 1926), p. 585. Viner quotes Dr. Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, in an interview in the March 26, 1926 New York Times.

  279. By the end of the war, American factories would churn out 3.9 million gas masks William Chauncey Geer, The Reign of Rubber (New York: Century, 1922), p. 309.

  279. The face piece Ibid., p. 303.

  279. Observers in balloons watched overhead Ibid., p. 312.

  280. the United States imported 333.8 million pounds of rubber Harvey Samuel Firestone, America Should Produce Its Own Rubber (Akron, OH: Harvey S. Firestone, 1923), p. 5. Firestone quotes U.S. Department of Commerce records and the London Financier, respectively.

  280. This meant that in two months alone, Ford required 78,800 sets of tiresFord Times, vol. 8, no. 10 (July 1914), p. 474.

  281. by introducing the Stevenson Rubber Restriction Plan Voon Phin-keong, American Rubber Planting Enterprise in the Philippines, 1900-1930 (London: University of London, Department of Geography, 1977), p. 22.

  281. “I am going to fight this law with all the strength that is in me” Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, p. 232.


  282. That meant a $150 million increase “to the crude rubber bill to the United States for 1923” Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933 (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), p. 231.

  282. “in the future Americans can produce their own rubber” Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, p. 233.

  282. “the play an Olympian cast of characters” Ibid.

  282. the United States alone had imported 2.7 billion pounds of rubber for $1.16 billion Firestone, America Should Produce Its Own Rubber, p. 5. Firestone is quoting U.S. Department of Commerce figures for 1922.

  283. “for services in connexion with the rubber plantation industry in the Far East” “The King’s Birthday. First List of Honours. No Ministerial Dinner,” Times (London), June 3, 1920, p. 18. Also, London Gazette, June 4, 1920, second supplement, p. 6315.

  283. “were loaded by stealth in a small steamer under the nose of a gunboat” “Death of Sir H. Wickham,” Planter, vol. 9, no 3 (1928), p. 85.

  284. In 1876, the Brazilian Navy had seventy vessels of warThe Empire of Brazil at the Universal Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia e Lithographia do Imperial Insitituto Artistico, 1876), p. 144.

  285. Edgar Byrum Davis was odd even by American standards The tale of Edgar B. Davis can be found in several sources: Robert Gaston, “Edgar B. Davis and the Discovery of the Luling Oilfield,” URL: www4.drillinginfo.com; “Handbook of Texas Online: Luling Oilfield,” www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook; “Handbook of Texas Online: Edgar Byrum Davis,” www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook; “Money from God,” Time (Sept. 2, 1935), www.TIME.com; Henry C. Dethloff, “Edgar B. Davis and Sequences in Business Capitalism: From Shoes to Rubber to Oil, a Review,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 60, no. 4 (Nov. 1994), pp. 829-830; James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber (New York: Harper, 1931), pp. 30-32; Frank Robert Chalk, The United States and the International Struggle for Rubber, 1914-1941 (Dissertation, Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1970), pp. 6-8.

  286. “made a killing in oil” Quincy Tucker, “A Commentary on the Biography of Sir Henry Wickham,” sidebar to Edward Valentine Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), p. 653.

  287. “America is paying the bills” Chalk, The United States and the International Struggle for Rubber, 1914-1941, pp. 7-8.

  287. “If you men think you are doing the best for the industry” James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber, p. 31.

  287. “of senile decay” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IX—Closing Years,” p. 7.

  288. the belief was probably mistaken, his wish was fulfilled Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” p. 656.

  288. “Sir Henry Alexander Wickham . . . was the man who, in the face of extraordinary difficulties” “Sir Henry Wickham. The Plantation Rubber Industry.” Times (London), Sept. 28, 1928, p. 19.

  288. “She showed her heroism . . . by remaining on the job” Tucker, “A Commentary on the Biography of Sir Henry Wickham,” p. 653.

  289. And when she sold the rubber shares, they were worthless too Ibid.

  Epilogue: The Monument of Need

  291. abundance would change the world Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003 (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 135, paraphrasing Arthur M. Schlesinger on “Fordism.”

  292. Three of Riker’s sons Sources on Riker and the confederado descendants still remaining when Henry Ford arrived include: Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, pp. 107-113; J. T. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis,” pp. 383-384; James E. Edmonds, “They’ve Gone—Back Home!” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 4, 1941, pp. 30-47.

  294. Ford’s vision of a protective, paternal industry The early years of Fordlandia are chronicled in the following sources: John Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs vol. 21, no. 2 (May 1979), pp. 261-276; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933, pp. 230-238; Joseph A. Russell, “Fordlandia and Belterra: Rubber Plantations on the Tapajos River, Brazil,” Economic Geography, vol. 18, no. 2 (April 1942), pp. 125-145; Mary A. Dempsey, “Fordlandia,” Michigan History Magazine, Jan. 24, 2006, www.michiganhistorymagazine.com/extra/fordlandia/fordlandia.html; Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, pp. 67-86; Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, pp. 232-235.

  295. “A great business is really too big to be human” Quoted in Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” p. 276.

  295. “They tried to do to these Brazilians what Northerners had always wanted to do to the South” Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, p. 111.

  296. while corn flakes made them gag Sources describing the first Fordlandia riot include: Interview, Doña Olinda Pereira Branco, Fordlandia, Oct. 21, 2005; Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” p. 277; Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, pp. 111-112; Dempsey, “Fordlandia,” p. 5 of 9.

  296. “In one night . . . the officials of the Ford Motor Company learned more sociology” Vianna Moog is quoted in Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, p. 112.

  296-97. What happened to the immigrants after their dismissal remains a mystery Dempsey, “Fordlandia,” p. 5 of 9.

  297. “I was really scared of them” Interview, Doña Olinda Pereira Branco, Fordlandia, Oct. 21, 2005.

  298. “Practically all the branches of the trees throughout the estate . . . terminate in naked stems” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 77; also, Rubber Research Institute of Malaya, “Memorandum on South American Leaf Disease of Rubber” (Kuala Lumpur: Rubber Research Institute of Malaya, May 1948).

  298. “Henry Ford has never yet seen one of his big plans fail” Roger D. Stone, Dreams of Amazonia (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 85.

  298. “threatens not only the sane progress of the world” Quoted in Viner, “National Monopolies of Raw Materials,” p. 586.

  300. “take from us our flora and fauna” Michael Astor, “Fears of Biopiracy Hampering Research in Brazilian Amazon,” Americas’ Intelligence Wire, Oct. 20, 2005.

  300. “Brazil has lost the capacity to control its own resources” Ibid.

  300. A few aging veterans from the Ford era still remain in the dusty town Interviews, Doña Olinda Pereira Branco and Biamor de Sousa Pessoa, Fordlandia, Oct. 21, 2005.

  303. “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness” Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” p. 67.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I. Printed Sources

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  Agassiz, Professor, and Mrs. Louis. A Journey in Brazil (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868).

  Akers, C. E. The Rubber Industry in Brazil and the Orient (London: Methuen, 1914).

  Allen, Arthur Watts. “The Occupational Adventures of an Observant Nomad,” an unpublished memoir written by Allen and kept in the care of David Harris and Jenepher Allen Harris.

  Allen, P. W. Natural Rubber and Synthetics (New York: Wiley, 1972).

  “Amazon Bubble: U.S. Rubber Program Fizzles; Brazil Will Handle Production,” News-week, Feb. 21, 1944, p. 66.

  “Amazon Rubber Atrocities: The Brazilian System of Indian Protection,” Times (London), November 27, 1913, p. 7.

  Amazon Steam Navigation Company, The Great River, Notes on the Amazon and Its Tributaries and the Steamer Service (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1904).

  “Arghan Company, Limited: Commercial Value of the Fibre,” Times (London), April 4, 1922, p. 20.

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  “The Atrocities in the Putumayo: British Consul’s Report,” Times (London), April 5, 1913, p. 7.

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  ———. Prosperity’s Promise: The Amazon Rubber Boom and Distorted Economic Development, Dellplain Latin American Studies, no. 34, David J. Robinson, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

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