With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 2

by Unknown

But, more than all, it is the profusion of orchids and Bromeliæ that excites our admiration. These bright children of the tropics envelop with dense foliage as well the fallen and mouldering trunks as those yet upstanding in full vigor and bloom, thus forming hanging gardens of astounding magnificence, which reveal leaves and flowers of the most irregular shapes and colors. Everywhere, on the branches and on the ground, and even from out the fissures of the bare rock, light ferns and rich moss spring up and clothe the decaying trunks with fresh green. Of mosses and ferns, especially tree-ferns, we found a greater exuberance and a larger variety, in species as well as in individuals, in the Southern provinces of the empire, São Paulo and Paraná; but for splendid palms and gigantic dicotyledons the North is decidedly the richer of the two.

Without the aid of the pencil it is indeed scarcely possible to give an adequate idea of the magnificence of this vegetation, especially of the manner in which the different forms are grouped. We may see, it is true, in our own hot-houses, well-trimmed palms, beautiful orchids with their abnormal blossoms, and Aroideæ with their bright, sappy, sometimes regularly perforated, leaves; but how different is this from the virgin forest, wherein Nature, undisturbed by man, has created her own prodigies, and where no narrow pots separate her children from the maternal soil, and where no dim roof of glass intervenes between them and the blue ether! Nor, in our carefully tended hot-houses, is the eye ever gratified with such agreeable contrasts as are afforded by the silver-gray and rust-brown tints of the decayed leaf of the palm or the fern-tree, or the black bark of the rotting trunk, with the blazing scarlet of some heliconia blossom. How difficult it must be to give to every plant, especially to orchids, the exact quantity of light, warmth, and moisture it requires, can be understood only by those who have seen clusters of them hidden in the deep shade of the tree-crowns, while others are exposed to the scorching rays of the sun in the vicinity of a river or in some clearer part of the forest; some species thriving on the bare rock almost, and others clinging fast with their white rootlets to the moist rotting bark of a tree....

But of far greater importance to the half-civilized riverines than either palms or orchids, for whose beauties they have no eye, are the cacao and the caoutchouc-tree (Siphonia elastica), products of the virgin forest essential to the future prosperity of the whole country.

Although India contributes to the supply of caoutchouc, the precious resin which is transformed into a thousand different shapes every year in the factories of Europe and North America, and sent to the ends of the earth, it cannot compete with Brazil, which takes the first place among the rubber-producing countries, in respect as well of the vastness of its export of the material as of its superior quality.

On the shores of the Amazon its production, it is true, has already been diminished by unreasonable treatment of the trees; the idea of replacing the old ones by young saplings never having presented itself, apparently, to the mind of the indolent population; but the seringaes, or woods of rubber-trees, on the banks of the Madeira, the Purús, and other tributaries of the main river, still continue to furnish extraordinary quantities of it. The province of Amazon alone exports more than fifty thousand arrobas (one million six hundred thousand pounds) yearly, while the total of the exports of the whole basin slightly exceeds four hundred thousand arrobas, or twelve million eight hundred thousand pounds, per annum....

Unfortunately, there has not been until now the slightest attempt made to cultivate this useful tree; and all the caoutchouc exported from Pará is still obtained from the original seringa groves. The trees of course suffer, as they naturally would under the best of treatment, from the repeated tapping and drawing-off of their sap, and the rubber collectors, therefore, must look about for new groves of the tree in the unexplored valleys of the more distant interior.

The planting of the Siphonia elastica would be a more profitable investment, as it yields the precious milk in the comparatively short space of twenty or twenty-five years; but, under the combined influence of the indolence of the Mestitzoes and the shortsightedness of the government, measures to that end will be adopted and carried into effect only when the rubber exportation shall have diminished with the destruction of the trees, and when European and North American manufacturers shall have found out a more or less appropriate substitute for the too costly resin.

Near the Praia de Tamanduá we acquainted ourselves with all the particulars respecting the collection and preparation of the caoutchouc at the cottage of a Bolivian seringueiro, Don Domingo Leigue. As I have already stated, the Siphonia grows, or at least thrives, only on a soil wherein its stem is annually submerged by the floods to the height of three feet or more. The best ground for it, therefore, is the igapó, the lowest and most recent deposit of the river; and there, in the immediate vicinity of the seringaes, may be seen the low thatches of the gatherers’ huts, wretched hovels mostly, rendered tenantable during the inundations by the device of raising the floors on wooden piles of seven feet height, in which the canoe, the seringueiro’s indispensable horse, also finds a protected harbor. Unenviable truly must be the life of the happy proprietor, who has nothing to do in the seringal during the wet season, and who then has ample leisure to calculate exactly the intervals between his fits of ague, and to let himself be devoured by carapanás, piums, motúcas, and mucuims; under which euphonious names are known some of the most terrible of insect pests.

Narrow paths lead from the cottage, through the dense underwood, to each separate tree; and, as soon as the dry season sets in, the inmate of the palace just described betakes himself with his hatchet into the seringal, to cut little holes in the bark. The milk-white sap immediately begins to exude into pieces of bamboo tied below, over little clay cups set under the gashes to prevent their trickling down the stems. The collector travels thus from trunk to trunk; and, to facilitate operations, on his return visit he pours the contents of the bamboos into a large calabash provided with liana straps, which he empties at home into one of those large turtle-shells so auxiliary to housekeeping in these regions, serving as they do for troughs, basins, etc.

Without any delay he sets about the smoking process, as the resinous parts will separate after a while, and the quality of the rubber so become inferior. An earthen jar, without bottom and with a narrow neck, is set by way of chimney over a fire of dry urucury, or uauassú palm-nuts, whose smoke alone, strange to say, has the effect of instantly coagulating the caoutchouc sap, which, in this state, greatly resembles rich cow’s milk. The workman, sitting beside this “chimney,” through which roll dense clouds of a smothering white smoke, from a small calabash pours a little of the milk on a sort of light wooden shovel, always careful, by proper management of the latter, to distribute it evenly over the surface. Thrusting the shovel into the thick smoke over the opening of the jar, he turns it several times to and fro with great rapidity, when the milk is seen to consolidate and to take a grayish-yellow tinge.