Brazil and Her People of To-day / An Account of the Customs, Characteristics, Amusements, History and Advancement of the Brazilians, and the Development and Resources of Their Country

by Nevin O. Winter

The city of Santa Maria de Belem do Pará is the principal port of the Amazon basin, and the greatest rubber shipping port in the world. It lies nearly a hundred miles from the Atlantic, but is as much on the Atlantic as New Orleans is on the Gulf, and is usually called an Atlantic port. It is only a few miles from the equator, and consequently is quite hot, for its elevation is only a few feet above sea level. And yet right here, almost on the “line,” has grown up a beautiful city of over one hundred thousand people, who enjoy life and live almost as many years as those in more favourable locations. This city with the long name is generally known as Pará, although Belem, meaning Bethlehem, is the proper name. It is perhaps the prettiest city in Brazil, except Rio de Janeiro, and has many parks and plazas filled with the luxuriant vegetation and noble palms which grow so luxuriantly here. Statues ornament nearly all of their public squares and parks, and many of them are well done. The public buildings are numerous and tasty, as is most of the architecture of the country.

The sanitary conditions of the city have been greatly improved in the past few years, and a new sewer system to be worked by pumps something like the New Orleans method has just been begun. It is as a shipping port that the city is best known. To quote again from the American Consul: “Eight hundred and fifty-three steamers entered the port of Pará in 1908, having a tonnage of nine hundred and fifty thousand tons, but it was mainly remarkable for the fact that we did not fly the flag on even one cargo boat.” It is only in the last few decades that this city has become very important, for no longer ago than the Civil War Pará was only a tropical trading port.

The docks are busy places, for steamers from all parts of the world, and flying many flags, come here. Men of all shades, from a dirty yellow to black and white, are busy handling the staple commodity of rubber. The rubber is all put up in sacks, and taken to the shipping houses, of which there are scores near the wharves. Every one handles “caoutchouc” and the air smells of it, the hot sun giving it an odour of burnt rubber. Everywhere they are cutting the dried rubber, which looks like great cheeses, chopping it, packing it, carrying it and loading it on vessels.

The Amazon district dominates the rubber market of the world. Pará and Manaos are the greatest rubber exporting ports of that district. From these cities the rubber buyers make their expeditions into the very heart of the Amazon, and its many tributaries are nearly all the home of rubber gatherers. From these centres the Indian gatherers make their expeditions by canoe, and through almost trackless forests to the trees which they are tapping. These trees do not grow in clumps, but one will be found here, another there, and oftentimes these single trees are at a distance of several hundred yards from each other. The amount of crude rubber that the native can gather depends on how close the trees may be to each other.

Upwards of one hundred rubber-bearing trees, vines and shrubs have been classified; but the one known as the Hevea is the rubber tree par excellence of Brazil. It is indigenous to the Amazon and its tributaries. Trees are oftentimes found which are as much as twelve feet in circumference, but those are exceptional. They require an abundance of moisture, and it is only in the thick forest, where the necessary moisture is constant and abundant, that they will reach this extraordinary size, although the trees can be successfully cultivated. It is quite probable that thousands of these trees are still undiscovered, and perhaps large districts still await development; but it is equally certain that the rubber prospector has threaded his way through thousands of miles of Amazonian jungle in his search after this profitable article of commerce. The present unprecedented prices have bestirred the exporting firms to feverish activity. Sections of hitherto unpierced forest are now being treaded by the prospector, with his Indian guides busily engaged in cutting a path through the dense undergrowth and labyrinth of vines. The howling of the enraged beasts thus disturbed in their lairs, the fear of poisonous snakes, the dread of the fever-laden mosquito, the annoyance of troublesome insects are nothing, with the price of rubber soaring upwards towards three dollars per pound.

An American rubber expert, who recently visited the Amazon rubber camps, says: “The past year more than seventy thousand tons of crude rubber, having a value approximating $300,000,000, were produced, of which forty thousand tons came out of the Amazon River. This was wholly wild rubber, gathered almost entirely from a belt extending along the Amazon and its tributaries, and running less than three miles into the interior. The vast forest beyond these borders is substantially untouched; but with the building of the railroad around the falls of the Madeira, which will be completed in 1911, with the building of roads through the forest connecting up rivers, and with the introduction of the gasoline boat, vast districts heretofore inaccessible will be brought within the reach of the rubber gatherer; and, while the gain in production each year has been approximately but ten per cent. over the previous year, there is no question that this percentage will increase largely from this time forward.”

It is not the sap of the tree that produces the rubber, but a juice which is yielded by the bark. As it flows this juice has the appearance of milk, and acts in much the same way. If left to itself it will separate into a lower fluid and a surface mass like cream, and this is the so-called india-rubber. Less than fifteen per cent. of this “cream” in the product of the tree is unprofitable and does not pay for the working. Various ways have been devised to separate the rubber by processes of coagulation. The native method has always been by a smoking heat, but in some places chemicals are used; again separators, similar to those employed in butter making, have been introduced with good results, so it is said. The method and care used has a very marked influence on the price and value of the crude rubber in the markets. The heating by smoke is generally considered to produce the cleanest and purest form of rubber for commercial export.

The tapping of a rubber tree is a seemingly simple operation, and yet it requires considerable skill to so tap a tree as to produce the maximum of sap, and inflict the minimum of injury to the tree. A tree properly treated will stand continual tapping for twenty years, while a tree abused might die after two or three seasons. Hence it is to the interest of all to preserve the life of the tree. The tapper first affixes a small cup to the tree, and then with a wedge-shaped axe makes a gash in the bark, being careful not to penetrate the wood. This operation is repeated at intervals of a foot in a line around the tree. Into these cups the milk flows slowly. The next day a row of incisions is made just below the first, and so on until the ground is reached. A good tree will yield up to a height of at least twenty feet. An expert can tap a hundred trees a day, provided that they are close together. The sap, which is collected once each day, is then brought to the camp. Heat is then applied and the crude rubber is made into roughly-shaped balls of different sizes. The buyers usually cut these in two in order to see that no extraneous substance has been placed inside to give weight. Stones have frequently been found moulded in with the rubber, and stones are easier to gather even along the Amazon than rubber. Many plantations of rubber trees, principally of the Maniçoba species, which will grow on higher and drier lands of the interior, have been set out in Brazil, but their production is very small when compared with that of the dense Amazonian forests.

Of the other valuable trees of the Amazon basin Agassiz says: “The importance of the basin of the Amazons to Brazil, from an industrial point of view, can hardly be over-estimated. Its woods alone have an almost priceless value. Nowhere in the world is there finer timber, either for solid construction or for work of ornament, and yet it is scarcely used even for the local buildings, and makes no part whatever of the exports. The rivers which flow past these magnificent forests seem meant to serve, first as a waterpower for the sawmills, which ought to be established along their borders, and then as a means of transportation for the material so provided. Setting aside the woods as timber, what shall I say of the mass of fruits, resins, oils, colouring matters and textile fabrics which they yield?” These words of this great naturalist, although written years ago, are just as true to-day. At least one hundred and fifty varieties of valuable hardwood timbers have been found in these forests. As mahogany and other better known woods become scarcer, these woods will certainly find a market.