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.