THE RUBBER INDUSTRY ON THE AMAZON

Rubber, the elastic gum bled from certain trees and shrubs, has been so long associated in thought with the sweltering, shadowy forests of the great Amazon river, that it is not a matter for wonder that for many years after Wickham made his famous experiments with rubber seeds, first in Kew and then in the East, both Brazilians and the general public paid little heed to the possibility of plantation rubber as a commercial rival of the Amazonian product. It was not until 1910 that manufacturers began to take plantation rubber seriously and to use it freely, and not until 1912–13 that production from these sedulously cared-for trees drew level with and surpassed the output from Brazil. Today, with plantation rubber offering something like one hundred and fifty thousand tons of crude rubber, and Brazil maintaining her average output of about thirty-seven thousand tons, the race would be a very uneven one if it were not for one factor, the wonderful resiliency of “hard fine Pará” which renders it unequalled in quality.

The two industries, that of Brazil and of Malaysia, are strikingly at variance in almost everything except the fact that they deal with extraction of the latex of hevea brasiliensis. In Brazil we have enormous areas of dim, sultry, water-bordered forest, where wild rubber trees are sought for amongst eighty or so other varieties of trees: where the labourer is, or at least imagines himself to be, a free agent, bound only by his debt to the central store, working when he thinks fit, living in a solitary hut without society, and making a little balance of profit at the end of the season if he is lucky; he buys all his necessities of food and tools in the dearest market in the world, and sells at the price forced upon the Amazon by the rival industry half the world distant. In the East is an organized industry operated by wealthy companies, where land was cleared, rubber planted methodically, hired labourers working under control, paid by the day, where the latex is coagulated in factories, milled into fine sheets, and goes to market in a form that does not bear outwardly any relation to the big black balls, smoke-cured in the seringueiro’s hut, sent out from the Amazon. Nevertheless it is the unorganized, unscientific industry which yields the product with the highest price on international markets, and, huge as is the deluge of plantation rubber today, there is no good reason why the Eastern and Amazonian industries should not continue side by side. Arabian coffee has not been commercially ruined on account of Brazilian production of coffea arabica.

There are in the world very many plants and trees yielding rubber of differing qualities. Three kinds of elastic gum are exported from Brazil in addition to the latex of the heveas: they are known as mangabeira rubber, from mangabeira hancornia speciosa; maniçoba, from the manihot plants of several kinds (euphorbias, and first cousins of mandioca); and caucho, drawn from the castilloa elastica tree. All these have their places in world markets, but, as also in the case of balata from the Guianas, and the gum of the guayule shrub in Mexico, it is not upon these rubbers that the great manufacturing industries of the world are based. That distinction belongs to the heveas, native dwellers of the deep, hot Amazonian valleys.

The elastic, resilient, waterproof properties of rubber were first discovered by the native children of the Americas, both in South and Central America and Mexico. When Hernan Cortés took his handful of conquering Spaniards into Mexico he found the Aztecs playing a game with bouncing balls made from castilloa, but during three centuries the Europeans visiting the New World did not dream of turning the gum to any utilitarian purpose. The first traveller who took recorded note of native use of rubber for water-proofing was the French scientist, de la Condamine, who came to Peru and travelled down the Amazon in 1743. He took specimens of what he spelled as “caoutchouc” back to Paris. In 1779 Priestly noticed that the gum would erase pencil marks on paper; small pieces were sold for this purpose, and as the chief supplies came from the East Indies (from the ficus elastica) the name India-rubber clung to the product. In 1823 Charles Macintosh found that rubber was soluble in benzine, and so led the way to its commercial adaptation—thinned out, spread into sheets, rendered amenable; the idea applied to waterproof coats immortalized his name.

In 1832 the Chaffee & Hoskins firm, founded in the United States, began manufacturing water-resisting objects, and thus laid the foundation of the present great rubber business in North America; their company, the Roxbury India Rubber Co., had in its employ a young man named Goodwin, and when this experimenter discovered that the gum would resist great extremes of heat and cold when sulphur was mixed with the solution, the process of “vulcanization” was the result, and rubber was made applicable to a score of new uses. Its great commercial employment dates from this time.

The Amazon valley began to send coagulated gum abroad: before this occurred, objects, chiefly high boots, were sent all the way to Pará to be water-proofed with a series of layers of the fresh latex. The industry was still in existence in the 1850’s, but died a natural death when rubber manufacturing got into its stride. It did not make this movement until large quantities of crude rubber began to reach world markets, and such amounts were not shipped until the Amazon received a great addition to its labour supplies. In 1877–79 one of the terrible droughts that scourge the State of Ceará drove the populace out of the foodless region; hardy, daring, the Cearenses swarmed up the Amazon, into the reaches of the upper tributaries, into the Acre, searched the forests for seringueiras, and gathered a great harvest of latex. A little later the bicycle was invented and popularized, rubber tyres were called for in addition to the established demand from the boot and shoe trade, and rubber export became one of the big businesses of the industrial world.

The Amazon had shipped 31 tons in 1827; 156 tons in 1830; 388 tons in 1840. In another ten years she was shipping 1,467 tons; in 1860, 2,673 tons; 1870, 6,591 tons; 1880, 8,680 tons. Three years later she was sending over 11,000 tons, year by year adding about 1,000 tons until by 1890 the supply and demand came to 19,000 tons. It may be said here that up to the present demand has invariably taken the year’s supply; with great volumes coming from the Eastern plantations a surplus may occur, but with the present greatly stimulated demand such a condition is not yet in sight.

Steady rises in Amazonian production went on at the end of the century, and 1903 registered the receipt of over thirty thousand tons; when in 1906–07 the crop attained thirty-eight thousand tons output it had about reached its maximum with the quantity of labour available upon the Amazon. Production has fluctuated about this figure for the last ten years. It could be increased, if the estimate of 300,000,000 untapped trees in the deep interior forests is anywhere near the mark, to almost any amount; but the present production is the work of some one hundred and twenty thousand seringueiros, chiefly Brazilians, with some Bolivians and Peruvians, and there is no immediate prospect of labour supplies being largely augmented.

The sensational leaps in prices that have occurred in world markets since rubber became commercialized have brought great quantities of money to the Amazon; many fortunes rocketed to the skies, and there was a period when a golden flood flowed up the river as well as down, when Manáos, the rubber city of the riverine interior, displayed more luxury for its size than Paris, and the best diamond market in the world was in this remote spot. Anything sufficiently extravagant could be sold; a stream of jewels, silks, fine wines and foods, furniture, carriages, adventuring people and solid cash went up the Amazon, passing for a thousand miles nothing but the green matted walls edging the huge yellow river and an occasional palm leaf shack perched half in the water, and one or two trading points, to find their objective in the brilliant little mushroom town on the Rio Negro. There was one year when the yield of taxes from rubber to the public revenue of Amazonas was twenty-three thousand contos of reis, and this at an exchange of over £66 to the conto, means £1,520,000 or nearly $8,000,000. Practically the whole of this money was collected and spent in Manáos, then (1899–1900) a city of fifty or sixty thousand population—much of it “floating,” as its present reduction to about forty thousand demonstrates. It was in the golden period of Amazonian rubber exports that both Manáos and Pará clothed themselves in all modern civic graces; fine public buildings, well-paved streets, street-cars, good sanitation, water-supplies of unimpeachable source, electric light, and numbers of splendid private dwellings remain as a return for some of the floods of money earned by the gum of the deep forests. There was at the same time tremendous waste and an enthusiastic “graft” era, which has left a heavy burden of debt upon the Amazon. Numbers of unfinished buildings, some begun at great cost, still stand in Manáos, eloquent witnesses to the headlong gambling spirit that informed this city a few years ago. The Amazon refused to believe that any but temporary shadows could fall upon the rubber industry: there had been several periods of depression from various causes before plantation rubber loomed into view, but always “something happened to help the Amazon,” whether quickened demand or a fall in exchange which reduced local costs; now the European War is operating to stimulate American demands for Brazilian rubber, and to that extent faith in good luck is again justified, but the rubber-producing centres will need good works as well as faith if the present rewards, comparatively modest as they are, are to be maintained.

In 1874, and for some years afterwards, Amazonian rubber prices ranged between fifty-two and seventy-five cents (U. S. currency) a pound; between 1879 and 1880 there was a quick climb, due to the bull operations of a Brazilian syndicate which bought and held rubber. It was temporarily successful, prices during the last year of the ring’s existence touching one dollar and twenty cents and never falling below ninety-five cents, but in 1884 the bottom fell out, and rubber took a hasty dive to forty-eight cents—recovering, however, in the course of the next year, in response to demand for rubber tyres, to ninety-eight cents. For the next ten years rubber fluctuated about sixty, seventy and eighty cents, with new industrial uses developing in Europe and North America and demand always keeping pace with supply; by this time the total yield offered to the markets was about fifty thousand tons yearly, the Amazon supplying half and the rest coming from West Africa, Mexico and Central America. In 1896 the price rose, ranging between ninety cents and one dollar and twelve cents, and the Amazon boomed again as it had done twelve years before; Manáos, the terminus of ocean transportation and the central collecting point for the rubber of the upper rivers, bedecked herself in these rosy days. Five years later the failure of the American Crude Rubber Company, a distributing firm domiciled in New York, threw large stocks of the goma upon unready markets, and the price slumped. Rubber merchants upon the Amazon would have suffered more than they actually did had not the factor of exchange come to their aid; between 1899 and 1906 the value of the milreis oscillated all the way from sixpence to fifteenpence, and while to some Brazilian operations a low rate of exchange meant embarrassment if not ruin, it spelt salvation to the dealer in raw products. In 1906 exchange was fixed by the establishment of the Conversion Office in Rio, but by this time rubber was fetching such good prices that the Amazon was again basking in prosperity. The prices paid for Amazonian rubber during the period from 1903 to 1915 show the rise of the third great crest of rubber waves to the dazzling height of 1910, when the merchants who would have sold at seventy-five cents and made a profit found themselves with a dollar and a half, two dollars, two and a half and then three, without knowing why; money came like dew from heaven. In many instances it also melted as readily:

1903 78 to 1.13 cents
1904 94 to 1.30
1905 1.18 to 1.35
1906 1.22 to 1.37
1907 82 to 1.21
1908 67 to 1.24
1909 1.20 to 2.15
1910 1.50 to 3.00
1911 93 to 1.75
1912 93 to 1.30
1913 59 to 1.10
1914 49 to 1.15
1915 75 to 1.00

While the feverish drama of the Amazon was going through scenes typical of a gold-mining rush, the curtain was slowly rising upon another rubber scenario away over on the islands and peninsulas of Malaysia. Its movement passed almost unnoticed and unheeded by the very people who had most cause to watch it with alarm.

In 1871 an Englishman named Henry Alexander Wickham sailed from Trinidad up the Orinoco river, there studied latex-yielding trees and eventually made his way to the Amazon through the interior forests by way of the river Negro. His book of notes was published in London in 1872—Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness, with his own excellent drawings to illustrate his story of actual labour in the “ciringa” districts. In 1876 he was back again on the Amazon, with the idée fixe of rubber so firmly in his head that, going up the Tapajoz from Santarem, he filled his cases with seventy thousand seeds of hevea brasiliensis and carried them over to Kew Gardens in London. Here in carefully graduated hot houses the oval, mottled seeds were germinated, and in June of the same historic year Wickham was carrying his baby seedlings to Ceylon, believing that this island offered the climate most similar to that of the Amazon to be found under the British flag.

Two thousand nurslings were thus transplanted to the Spice Isle, lesser quantities going to Java, British Burma, Singapore and other points which appeared to offer the needed conditions for healthy growth. It was in Ceylon that the first young rubbers flowered in the year 1881; there is no earlier record of the blossoming of heveas outside their habitat in the Amazonian valleys. The resulting seeds were used to create new plantations, but the whole thing was still in a purely experimental stage; time proved that many saplings were planted under incorrect conditions, but the planters had nothing but theory as their guide; they cleared land—at great expense—kept it clean while the young plants grew, and waited; they did not know if the heveas would live, or that, living, they would produce latex coagulating into commercial rubber. Nor did the Amazon rubber dealers know it or believe it. When tales of Wickham’s enterprise came to Brazil a law was passed forbidding the export of rubber seeds, but this locking of the stable door after the loss of the steed was of no more avail than the subsequent measures promulgated to prevent export of the uricury nuts used for smoking the latex.

That the Amazonian industry could be duplicated in the East was not seriously credited. The thing was impossible! The plants would die; or if they did not die they would not yield latex; if they yielded latex it would coagulate into such wretched rubber that no market would accept it. Disease, blight, drought, would ruin the presumptuous plantations—something, in fact, must happen to prevent such an incredible, absurd event as rivalry between the famous and unique “black gold” of the Amazon and a plantation stepchild. The few people who spoke out about the danger were ignored.

While unbelievers still protested the deluge of plantation rubber began. In 1900, 4 tons of crude rubber were exported from the East; in 1905, 145 tons; in 1910, over 8,000 tons; in 1912, over 28,000 tons; in 1914, well over 71,000 tons; in 1915, nearly 107,000 tons. The output for 1916 is variously reckoned at 140,000 and 160,000 tons, from an area totalling about 1,350,000 acres in Ceylon, Malaysia, Dutch East Indies, India and Borneo.

When plantation rubber was first offered to manufacturers they were not greatly interested; it was taken rather grudgingly and at prices well below those paid for the black pelles of the Amazon to whose perfections and imperfections the industry was thoroughly accustomed. It was the artificial forcing up of prices in 1910 that sent manufacturers into the arms of the planters, for, while plantation rubber profited by the golden rain of that year, it did not attain the value of “fine hard Pará.” Today plantation rubber sent to the markets in sheets of creamy “crêpe” or clear brown gum is used for almost every manufacture demanding rubber; there are still some complaints that it is over-milled, that the treatment it undergoes takes the “nerve” out of it, and for this reason Amazonian rubber remains triumphant in certain lines requiring the highest resiliency—as, for instance, rubber thread. In spite of the preponderance of quantity of the plantation product since 1913 there has nearly always been a margin of price in favour of Brazil; during September and October, 1916, “fine hard Pará” fetched about seventy-five cents a pound in the New York markets while Plantation only brought sixty-five (due to shortage of Amazonian supplies through shipping difficulties as well as droughts upon the upper rivers which, impeding navigation, prevented normal supplies from finding exit); the difference in price is larger than is apparent, for reasons resulting from differences of preparation of the two products. Plantation rubber, product of an organized modern industry, is placed upon markets in such a form that the manufacturer can send it direct to his mills; the average amount of impurities contained in the sheets is less than one per cent. Amazonian rubber on the other hand contains anything from fifteen to forty per cent of impurities, which may include leaves, sticks and dirt due to sheer carelessness, or gums other than that of hevea, old nails, lumps of wood and axe-heads, deliberately introduced by the seringueiro to add weight to his pelle. Add to these considerations the cost of cleaning Amazonian rubber and the loss in time while this operation is performed, and it is plain that the manufacturer really pays a great deal more than the few cents’ difference of the market price for the Brazilian product; this money advantage might be largely retained by the Amazon if methods, not necessarily those of the East, but more careful and cleanly, were employed in coagulation.

The entire series of processes of Amazon rubber production, from the day when the matteiro clears a path in the forest from rubber tree to rubber tree, until the shipper boxes the split halves of the pelles in the armazem in Manáos or Pará, is in remarkable contrast not only to plantation methods, but to the system under which that other great Brazilian export staple, coffee, is prepared for market. It is the contrast between an industry that has evolved itself from methods first discovered by Indians of the forest interior, and another whose processes are mapped out on a preconceived plan. To this day the rubber dealers on the Amazon will tell you that they do not know the cost of production of a kilo of rubber; all that they or the collectors know with certainty is that it must necessarily cost less than the price at which the rubber is marketed—a smaller amount must be paid, and adjustment has to be made in the seringal, not in New York or London; with the inflated prices paid for every simplest necessity of life upon the Amazon, nearly all imported because the craze for rubber-collecting some years ago led to the abandonment of even such prolific crops as beans and mandioca, a time of stress falls most severely upon the people who are least able to bear it. Remedies for the ills of the Brazilian rubber industry have been suggested and demanded for many a year by the more far-seeing Brazilians; there is perhaps no better presentment of the subject than the paracer read to the Brazilian Congress in December, 1913, by Eloy de Souza, afterwards published in Rio under the title A Crise da Borracha (The Rubber Crisis); he speaks of the condition of “economic paradox” by which Amazonas “gave millions upon millions of gold without any part of this being used for the prosperity of the immense region where so much wealth was produced” and tells that when plantation rubber was looming in competition with the Brazilian product the authorities were entreated to arm themselves against the danger, but “the echo of these voices was lost in the wide desert of national indifference.” When the truth could be no longer avoided steps were at last taken, with nothing but the waste of enormous sums in the tragi-comedy of the “Defesa da Borracha” as the result: its failure was no fault of the men who constantly spoke out about conditions, such as Miguel Calmon, the Deputy, the journalist Alcindo Guanabara, Dr. Passos de Miranda, and the “genial and devoted Apostle of the Amazon,” Euclydes da Cunha.

Almost all of the people engaged or interested in the rubber business of the Amazon are agreed upon certain measures which should be taken to put it upon a sounder footing; they are, briefly:—

1. Increased production of cleaner rubber, whether obtained from Amazonian plantations or by opening out new forestal wild regions. 2. Reduction of living expenses of the rubber-collector, by increased Amazonian cultivation of cereals, beans, mandioca, fruit, vegetables, etc. 3. Creation of a sturdier and larger labour supply, by rendering rubber regions healthy, improving living conditions, and thus inviting and retaining permanent dwellers. 4. Reduction of export taxes imposed by the State authorities of the rubber regions.

The question of Amazon plantations is hotly debated. A few exist, and are living proofs of the fact that planted rubber kept clean of other growth yields latex at four or five years, at which time it is as large as a wild rubber twelve years old; but opponents of the system ask why they should plant “when Nature has already planted?” and declare that the best thing to do is to tap the latex of more of the reserves of the interior, calculated at three hundred million trees. Arguments in favour of this system include insistence upon the superiority of the latex from matured trees slowly developed in their native habitat, the chief reason of the high resilient quality of the Amazonian product; it is along the upper rivers of the Amazonian fluvial network that the “black” hevea is found most abundantly, yielding latex of the best variety, tough, elastic, resilient, and always fetching a better price than the fraca (weak) rubber from the latex of the “white” hevea, or the product of the “red,” which coagulates badly, and is listed as “entre fina” instead of “fina.” It is partly because the seeds which Wickham took from the Tapajoz in 1876 were of the “white” hevea brasiliensis variety, common in these lower regions, that the product of the plantations is more or less of the “fraca” quality; only a few hundred acres of the entire Eastern area under cultivation is planted with the fine “black” rubbers.

Can the untouched rubber regions of the upper rivers be opened up? The districts richest in seringueiras are frequently on the margins of these rivers, accessible by boat, but there are other areas thickly sown with the trees which, as in the Acre Territory, could be served best by a railroad line, such as has been projected to run across this region. Other plans deal with drainage of forestal areas, now rendered exceedingly unhealthy by their swampy, mosquito-breeding condition, and the introduction of immigrants accustomed to torrid climates. At present the working capacity of the collector is reduced from a possible two hundred and ten days, during the seven months of tapping, to an average of one hundred and twenty, chiefly as the result of sickness: he produces thus only about four hundred and fifty kilos of dry rubber, when under better conditions he could be expected to market about seven hundred kilos.

A few years ago Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a Brazilian authority on tropical diseases, made a report upon the health conditions of certain Amazonian regions and those traversed by the Madeira-Mamoré railway: he said of Santo Antonio that there are “no natives of this place; all children born there die,” and that here (its ill-fame is not unique) “the region is infected in such a manner that its population has no conception of what good health means; for them the normal condition is sickness.” Brazilians born are as much subject to disease, it appears, as strangers, for among the workmen employed in the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré line ninety per cent of the natives of Brazil and seventy-five per cent of the foreigners were weakened by hookworm. Sharp changes of temperature in some districts, producing a devastating pneumonia; dysentery; beri-beri, and the worst and constant scourge, malarial fever, haunt certain of the interior regions: until a better medical service is established, and measures taken to render the country more healthy through engineering work, and through field cultivation, an increase of permanent dwellers in the deep rubber regions cannot be expected. Until then Amazonia can scarcely be other than what Eloy de Souza calls an “invaded region” which has been subjected to a “social phase of pure conquest.”

Cheapening of living expenses can be done just as soon as the fertile Amazon valley again supplies enough food for its population: there was a time, between 1886 and 1891 when the cereals grown sufficed for needs; today, with the threat of falling prices for the precious goma, cultivation has been resumed to an extent which is encouraging, but only a year or two ago Pará, Amazonas and the Acre were together importing beans, rice, and sugar to the value of 11,346 contos (over three million dollars); dried meat (xarque) to the value of 7,400 contos; bacalhau (dried cod), 846 contos; live cattle, 2,000 contos; tobacco, 1,000 contos, and conserves costing 2,600 contos, among other importations. Almost all the above list could be filled from Amazonia if the rubber-collecting fever, relaxing, permitted the development of other industries.

The price paid for many articles of prime necessity upon the Amazon is fantastic. While such rates are maintained it is a matter for admiration that Amazonian rubber can be placed upon the markets at all, in competition with the plantation product; it can only be done by the reduction of the seringueiro’s earnings to a minimum, and this will eventually lead to his extinction if conditions are not remedied. The following is a list of what are considered the chief articles needed by the collector for his lonely sojourn in the forests during the gathering season, with prices in milreis:—

Price in Rio In Pará In the Acre Price to Rubber-collector
5 alqueires of farinha[[12]] 20 27$500 100 175
40 kilos of sugar 14 26 45 80
25 kilos of coffee 24 25 34 100
128 kilos of lard 16 20 36 100
50 kilos dried meat 40 40 77 150
50 kilos of feijão (beans) 12.500 15 51 100
16 pounds of tobacco 11 22 53 120
5 gallons of kerosene 4 4 11 30
Half-sack of salt 1 1$500 8 15
40 kilos of rice 20 20 36 100
Half-case of soap 3 4 11.500 20
30 litres cachaça (rum) 15 15 46 105
3 boxes cartridges 24 30 33 45
Medicines, clothes, etc. 120 130 180 250
Total 324$500 380$ 721$500 1.390$

The price of an outfit for the season thus varies from about 324 milreis in Rio to 1390 milreis in the forest, or between, say, 80 and nearly 350 dollars.

If the collector in the course of his season’s work produces four hundred and fifty kilos of rubber, worth, at a good price of about five milreis, 2:250$000 (two and a quarter contos, or about five hundred and sixty U. S. dollars at 1916 exchange), he has left only seven hundred and fifty milreis to carry him through the rest of the year, and to support his family back in Ceará: but even this modest sum is reduced by the river freight of the rubber before it is marketed at Manáos or Pará, three hundred reis per kilo; rent of the seringal, commission to the aviador, and frequently freight of the pelles from the interior of the forest to the water, which items are likely to add up to another four or five hundred milreis.

Denunciations of the “truck” system, and the prices charged to the rubber collector are common; but the supplier of foodstuffs, etc. (the aviador) himself takes long risks and is bound to insure himself against them. His customer (aviado) may become ill and unable to work; he may die; he may, if he can elude the river guards and traverse the steaming interior forests, run away, although in these regions where the river is the only highway, this does not often happen. Also the price of rubber may drop—rubber has been a business so speculative that it has become a gamble in which the aviador, himself caught in a deeply-rooted system, takes long odds. He makes money nearly always, and the ownership of much of the great areas of Amazonian rubber forest has passed into his hands, but he is scarcely to be blamed for securing his profits in the manner decreed by the system; to change the industrial routine would be to effect a revolution upon the Amazon.

The approach of the dry season upon the Amazon heralds the incoming from other northern regions, generally Ceará, of a host of workers. Anyone who has travelled on the steamers going up the river at the beginning of the rubber season has looked down upon the deck where throngs of people are herded together, their hammocks slung in tiers one above the other; at times of drought whole families come out from the “distritos flagellados,” and men, women and children are crowded in an intimacy which would be more trying than it is were it not for the apparently unfailing good-nature and mutual courtesy of these northern peasants. Much of their simple cooking, washing, and toilet changes are perforce unsheltered; gentle, easily amused, they never seem to complain, but, playing their inevitable guitars and singing their modinhas, they watch the yellow flood of the great river, bordered with the line of distant forest, so vast that ideas of size are lost in its sweeping monotony. Arrived at Manáos the collector goes to the store of the aviador, gets his outfit of tools—cups for collecting latex, big knife (machado), little axe, bucket, and metal cone for smoke-regulation in the coagulating process—as well as food and such clothes as he may need, possibly adding a gun, and when the cost of his lodging has been added to the bill, he may set out in one of the gaiolas that ascend the upper rivers, en route to the seringal where he has arranged to work. An average seringal contains fifty estradas; to each seringueiro (collector), two estradas are allotted, tapped on alternate days and each estrada (literally road or walk) contains, in a good seringal, an average of seventy to one hundred and twenty trees. Before the seringueiro does a stroke of work there has been a heavy outlay by the owner (patrão) of the estate for its preparation. Forestal opening is done by the matteiro, the expert forester whose work is probably better paid than any other manual labour of the Amazon; it is he who enters the wild forest, locates the rubber trees within a given area, and makes paths from each seringueira (rubber tree) to the next in the central part of each estrada, always ending by cutting an encircling road which runs all about the estrada. On this outer road the rubber collector usually builds his little hut—“more of an oven than a home,” says Eloy de Souza—of palm thatch, and the tiny smoking room (defumador) where each day’s supply of latex is coagulated.

The work of the matteiro is paid according to the number of rubber trees found and prepared for tapping; he gets about the equivalent of one dollar for each tree; Woodroffe reckons that in the cases when the patrão of an estate has advanced money for the steamship fares of his imported labourers, advanced food and equipment, and paid for preparation of the seringal, each man represents an outlay of “quite £100 by the time he stands up under the trees to tap them.” It must not be supposed, therefore, that because rubber is wild upon the Amazon that it costs nothing to collect it; on the contrary in spite of the lavish hand of Nature expenses in the wild regions of South America are far higher than they are in the East, where land has been cleared and each sapling patiently planted and tended.

Rubber on the Amazon.
Hevea brasiliensis tree, scarred by tapping.
Smoking the day’s collection of latex.
Hut of the Seringueiro.

The seringueiro has no easy life. He gets out of his hammock before dawn, and with his lantern fixed to his head makes his way through the forest, laden with his little machadinho, the universally used and abused axe with which the trees are gashed, with the big knife, the machado or machete inseparable from the Central or South American, and perhaps a gun in case any edible animal of the woods is encountered. As each tree is reached it is hastily gashed, a little metal cup (tigelinha) fixed below each wound to receive the milk which immediately runs out; when he returns at last by way of the outer path to his hut it is past six o’clock and quite light. If he has a family with him, his senhora has prepared his coffee, but if as is usual he is alone he will now light a fire, drip his coffee, prepare a little food, and smoke a cigarro. Later in the morning he must make a second round, if the milk is not to coagulate in the cups; he takes his bucket (the balde), tips the contents of each little cup into it, carefully inverting these on sticks at the foot of the tree, to prevent the clotting of drippings and the invasion of insects. When he returns he may have four or more litres of milk which must now be coagulated in the defumador; the process may take half an hour or over two hours, according to the amount brought in and the quality of the latex. A fire is made with nuts of one of the attalea palms, generally “uricury,” which give off a remarkably acrid smoke with properties for rendering the rubber just what it should be that are the despair of chemists: no substitute has been found that equals it. A metal cone a couple of feet high is placed over the well-started fire, to bring the smoke into a narrow channel at the top; the seringueiro takes a prepared piece of wood, dips it into the bucket of milk, or pours milk over it with the cuia (little bowl made of a half-gourd) and holds it over the smoke. The milk coagulates instantly, turning pale brown on the outside; layer after layer is added, a skin at a time, until all the latex in the bucket is coagulated. It may be late at night before the seringueiro has finished his work, for in the course of the day he has walked anything from six to ten miles, and every part of the operations has been performed by him alone. It is fortunate that his housekeeping work is limited to the preparation of his food: practically the only furnishing of his hut is his hammock.

To produce a pelle, the big black ball which may be seen in Pará and Manáos on the wharves, in warehouses, on the pavements, whole or sliced in halves with their creamy hearts displayed, or floating down the tributary rivers on rafts, the seringueiro has to work for about a month. Each day’s collection of latex is coagulated on top of the previous rubber until the ball is made to what the seringueiro thinks is a convenient size. Day after day, only interrupted by sickness, he labours in the sweltering forest at this toil, eating food of very limited variety, without exchanging a word, perhaps, with another human being for weeks at a time; each seringal is supposed to be under inspection, to avoid maltreatment of the trees, but as a rule this supervision is a fiction. Small wonder that when the collector at last leaves the seringal, and takes his rubber to Manáos, he spends a few riotous days, limited by the amount of his money balance remaining after the debt has been paid to the aviador. The aviador it is who also buys the pelles and in the busy season when rubber begins to come in, these stores present a curious sight. Sometimes the seringueiro, in good years, saves money; he may buy a seringal or a little store of his own; a few fortunes have thus been made from the collector class, but they are rather the exceptions that prove the rule.

These conditions, under which a nominally independent collector works in a rented estrada and sells his rubber to the store-keeper to whom he is in debt—and who is often also the owner of the seringal—are general as regards the collection of the latex of the “black” rubber trees of the upper Amazon. This is the origin of the fina class of rubber, with sernamby or scrap as a kind of by-product, result of carelessness; the fina, however, is usually at least eighty per cent of a good workman’s product, and this is the rubber which, with caucho, has made Manáos.

Caucho is rubber produced from the milk of castilloa elastica, growing in profusion along the banks of the Rio Branco, tributary of the Negro, in North Amazonia and on many streams of Peruvian origin; the industry connected with this tree is really independent, the result of individual searchings for trees. Parties go up these rivers, hunt in the bordering woods for the castilloa, straightway cut it down and bleed it for the last drop of latex, and go on their way.

Down near the mouth of the Amazon, where the “white” rubber trees are most commonly found, it is not unusual for collectors to own sections of forest with their little homes at its edge; they, too, are almost independent—of everything except the industrial conditions upon the Amazon, and the rubber prices fixed far away in London or New York.

Nearly all South American States depend upon export and import taxes for their main revenues, and it is a fairly general rule that native products leaving the country pay heavily for that privilege. In Brazil all import dues are imposed and collected by the Federal Government, and are similar throughout the country without respect to the special conditions of separate states; the export taxes are imposed by the State Governments, without restraint. In some regions the “pauta” or export tax is changed every week or so in conformity with prices in world markets, a board sitting specially for the purpose of making these constant adjustments. Some Brazilian products are taxed to what may be called a reasonable extent, but in others exports have been bled out of existence, while still others are barely able to enter world markets, staggering under their load. How many exporting countries would put upon a product facing competition abroad a tax equal to one-third of its value? This is the weight with which Amazonian rubber went to market for many years: the combined charges of the State, municipalities, and other smaller items added up to over thirty per cent of the “official value” of the product.

In response to appeals, export taxes were reduced after the outbreak of the European War, and during the year 1916 State taxes, together with dues put on by cities, amounted to about twenty per cent of the value of the rubber—a sufficiently heavy burden, but which Amazonas proposes to increase again; at the same time the product of Matto Grosso pays only twelve per cent, an equal amount is imposed upon rubber originating in the Acre Territory, while that exported from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, but finding its exit by the water highways of the Amazon, pays only five per cent. As a result of these lesser dues collected by sister countries, there is a certain amount of smuggling done: rubber originating near the boundaries is passed across, and exported as if coming from one of the three Republics named; that such evasion of taxes is limited is due to the lack of roads or of any communication means besides those of the rivers, all of which are watched by Government agents. At the same time that the Amazon imposes this burden upon her rubber, the Eastern (Plantation) product pays nothing at all when the market price is below 18 pence—say thirty-six cents—a pound, and when it stands above two shillings a tax of two and a half per cent of the value is paid.

Consumption of the entire supply of marketed rubber was, immediately prior to the European War, almost evenly divided between North America and Europe: one of the industrial adjustments made after hostilities began was the shifting of a larger share of rubber, and rubber manufacturing, to the United States, so that in 1914 she took fifty per cent of the marketed total, one hundred and twenty thousand tons, and in 1915 increased these purchases to nearly sixty-two per cent of the total marketed, or ninety-seven thousand tons out of about one hundred and fifty-eight thousand.

Distribution of the world’s crop in 1915:—

United States61.597,000
Great Britain9.615,072
Russia7.612,000
France7.211,500
Italy4.87,500
Germany, Austria3.86,000
Canada2.54,000
Japan and Australia1.62,500
Scandinavia1.42,252

The course of the next few years may see Brazil herself on the lists as a rubber-consuming country. For fifty years she has exported rubber, crude, and such manufactures of rubber as she has used have been imported from the United States or Europe; she imported in 1915 about six hundred and eighty-three tons of rubber manufactures, chiefly tyres, worth a million dollars, which was less than the imports of 1913, and which might show greater diminution if the unfortunately conceived law intended to protect “fine hard Pará,” but which resulted in paralyzing rubber imports, were sustained. This alteration in the tariff, operating early in 1915, changed the old import tax of five per cent ad valorem to a scale with violent differences; rubber manufactures made with the Brazilian product were charged one hundred reis a kilo (a fraction over two cents U. S.) while articles made with foreign rubber were taxed ten milreis (say two dollars and sixty cents) a kilo.

An excellent idea, warmly applauded; but when the time came to apply the law it was found impossible to discover the real origin of the rubber, and in order to avoid any chance of letting in foreign material practically scot free the official valuers charged all entering articles at the high rate.

Thus a consignment of two hundred pneumatic tyres which under the old law would have paid about 2:200 milreis in duties for entry were under the new tariff charged 22:000—or let us say about $5,500 instead of the former $550, for import taxes alone. Needless to say, importing houses left rubber goods in the customs-houses while they appealed to the authorities for relief from this too paternal measure. Some of the Amazonian rubber merchants have defended the idea, which is good enough in theory, but in practice it seems to have been as little useful as that extraordinary commission charged with the Defesa da Borracha, which in the years 1912–14 spent about twenty-eight thousand contos of reis (over $7,000,000) in salaries, investigations, recommendations, experiments and printed matter, and has today not an iota of improvement of Amazonian conditions to show for the money.

Brazil has a few rubber factories of her own, generally small, but doing a satisfactory and increasing business; the Brazilian Government has also concluded an arrangement with the Goodyear Tire Company for the erection of a factory which should greatly increase national rubber manufactures. The first modern rubber factory in Brazil was established in São Paulo State, in 1913, by Theodore Putz and Company, where solid tyres, tubes, stamps, valves, and other articles are made; it has a capital of two hundred contos and an annual turnover of three hundred contos, paying twenty-five contos a month for labour. Five hundred kilos of Pará, and one thousand kilos of mangabeira rubber are used monthly. Another firm of recent origin is that of Berrogain & Cia. in Rio, turning out a variety of manufactures and prospering.

The future of rubber production is a question frequently discussed. It is not immediately probable that the Brazilian output will greatly increase from its average of twenty to thirty thousand tons, not only because more labour is not as yet available, but also because the untapped resources away from the easily reached river banks can scarcely be reached without large outlays on roads, drainage, and other expenses connected with opening-up, which are not more than planned for the time being. Plantation rubber has not yet reached its expected maximum, but no very great areas have been added since 1911, and it is reckoned that with an average yield of four hundred pounds an acre the world’s output will in a few years place from three hundred thousand to three hundred and thirty thousand tons of dry rubber on the markets. Demand by the year 1930, if it kept up at the same ratio as the last five or six years, would require a great deal more than this, no less than three hundred and seventy-three thousand tons of rubber. This will not occur unless automobile sales in the United States keep up also at the same rate (tyres for this industry already take over 100 thousand tons of rubber) but even with a diminution in the increase there appear to be good prospects ahead for the rubber industry: Germany, for instance, will be demanding crude rubber in great quantities when the European War comes to an end, for in spite of the ingenuity of German chemists it is plain that synthetic rubber is not a success. If it were anything like a substitute for the real thing the Central Powers would not have made such constant efforts to obtain even small quantities of the precious gum through the blockade of the Allies. The war has definitely disposed of that spectre. Synthetic rubber requiring a base of a special turpentine is said to be produced at a cost four times that of the gum of the hevea, and that figure alone would dispose of it as a commercial possibility, apart from the limitation of turpentine supplies, the need for mixing the solution with real rubber, and the practical demonstration of its unsatisfactory quality.