Coffee accounts for forty per cent of all the Brazilian export. As far as S. Paulo is concerned, coffee represents over ninety-seven per cent of her exports. In 1915 the state’s total exports were worth a little over 465,000 contos, and of this coffee was worth 453,000 contos. In S. Paulo city itself if one is not in business circles the predominance of coffee might escape the visitor but not so in Santos; here, in the coffee port, the apparatus of shipping has largely been constructed with coffee-loading as the aim: special mechanisms serve the ceaseless stream of laden coffee bags that arrive at the lines upon lines of armazens (warehouses) on the dock front. In the stony streets the scent of coffee prevails; at every doorway burly negroes are hauling out sacks of the aromatic bean; the cluster of banks down the main business street, some Brazilian and many branches of foreign houses, all live upon coffee. The dealers, commission men, shippers, roasters of coffee represent the commercial existence of the port.
The coffee industry is one which is a satisfaction to contemplate because it is a clean, wholesome business, from first to last; the conditions under which it is carried on are not only ably organized and in a prospering state, but the workers as well as the estate owners and shippers have a chance to make money and lead pleasant lives.
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.