Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

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.