CHAPTER 7
HARVESTING THE RUBBER
It is a cheerful sight to see the workers, men and women, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, trooping out from their quarters to begin the day's work. The tapping must be done early in the day, for the latex or rubber juice stops flowing a few hours after sunrise.
When the trees reach eighteen inches in girth at a point eighteen inches from the ground, they are ready for tapping. This growth is usually attained when the trees are about five years old.
In tapping, a narrow strip of bark is cut away with a knife, the cut extending diagonally one-quarter of the way around the tree. At each succeeding day's tapping the tapper widens the cut by stripping off a sliver of bark one-twentieth of an inch in width.[2] He must be careful not to cut into the wood of the tree, as such cuts not only injure the tree but permit the sap to run into the latex and spoil the rubber. When the tapper has made the proper gash in the bark he inserts a little spout to carry the dripping latex to a glass cup beneath.
[2] This method of tapping is shown on the front cover.
Later in the morning the workers make the rounds of the trees with large milk cans, gathering the latex from the cups. When the cans are full they are carried to a collecting station, called a Coagulation Shed. It is as clean and well kept as a dairy. Here the latex is weighed, and when each collector has been credited with the amount he has brought, it is dumped into huge vats.
The next step is to extract the particles of rubber from the latex and to harden them. The jungle method of hardening rubber is to dip a wooden paddle in the latex and smoke it over a fire of wood and palm nuts.[3] It is a back-breaking process to cover the paddle with layer after layer, until a good-sized lump, usually called a "biscuit," is formed. The plantation method is a quicker and cleaner one. Into the vats is poured a small quantity of acid, which causes the rubber "cream" to coagulate and come to the surface. The "coagulum," as it is called, is like snow-white dough. It is removed from the vats and run in sheets through machines which squeeze out the moisture and imprint on them a criss-cross pattern to expose as large a surface as possible to the air.
[3] See picture, page 12.
These sheets of rubber are then hung in smoke houses and smoked from eight to fourteen days in much the same way that we smoke hams and bacon. After being dried in this way they are pressed into bales or packed in boxes ready for shipment.