Amazonian Rubber: The Spectacular Rise and Even Faster Fall

For thousands of years, the Amazon basin was full of trees that bled a strange white sap. It was a curiosity — it bounced, it stretched, it was waterproof — but it melted in summer heat and cracked in winter cold, which made it essentially useless. Then, in 1844, Charles Goodyear figured out how to make it stable, and suddenly the world had a material it desperately needed: bicycle tires, automobile tires, telegraph wire insulation, industrial gaskets. Modern life, as it turned out, ran on rubber.

Within decades, the only place on earth with enough rubber trees to meet demand was hundreds of miles deep in the Amazon jungle. The money that flowed out of that jungle was so staggering that the city of Manaus — carved out of the rainforest in the middle of nowhere — built one of the most opulent opera houses in the world. Italian marble. Parisian chandeliers. Tiles shipped from Alsace. Enrico Caruso performed there while the men harvesting the rubber died of malaria and debt an hour upstream.

Twenty years later, it was abandoned and left to rot. This is the story of how that happens.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In nineteen hundred, the Amazon basin produced roughly ninety percent of all the rubber on earth, every bicycle tire in Europe, every industrial belt in the factories of Ohio and Manchester, every length of electrical wire insulation running beneath the streets of the cities that were building themselves into the modern world. Almost all of it began in one place, a vast and largely unmapped forest in the interior of South America, tapped by hand, one tree at a time, by men who would never see any of those cities and who were paid when they were paid at all, in debt. Thirteen years later, in nineteen thirteen, the Amazon produced less than four percent of the world's rubber. The boom that had transformed a jungle trading post into one of the most opulent cities on earth collapsed so completely and so fast that the opera house that rubber had built in the middle of the rainforest, the Teatro Amazonas, its dome tiled in thirty six thousand ceramic tiles in the colors of the Brazilian flag, its marble shipped from Italy, its chandeliers from Paris, its ceiling painted to make you feel you were standing beneath the Eiffel Tower and looking up, fell silent mid-season and did not reopen for decades. How does that happen? How does a commodity go from being the lifeblood of an entire region to being sourced almost entirely from somewhere else in the space of a single decade? The answer involves a British botanist and decisions made in London boardrooms that reached all the way into the deepest tributaries of the Amazon River system. But you did not know any of that. All you knew was the man who showed up at your village. You are Benedito Santos, and you are twenty three years old, and you were born in the drought blasted state of Sayara in northeastern Brazil, where in eighteen eighty eight the rain did not come for the second year running and the cattle died and then the crops died and the children started dying, and a man arrived in your village with a contract and a boat ticket, and a promise of wages in the Amazon where the rubber trees were so thick you could practically smell the money from the shore. The contract was in Portuguese and you could not read it. You signed it anyway. What else was there to sign? The journey to the Serengal, the rubber estate, took three weeks by river boat, first down to the coast and then up the Great Brown Mouth of the Amazon, and then up a tributary and then up a smaller tributary, and then up a creek so narrow the trees on both banks touched overhead and the boat moved through a green tunnel that blocked out the sky. You had never seen forests like this. You had grown up in country that was scrub and red dirt and the occasional thorny tree that looked as though it had been put there by a god in a bad mood. The Amazon was not that. The Amazon was something for which you had no frame of reference and no language. It started at the water's edge and went up. The trees were enormous, the biggest you had ever seen or would ever see, some of them fifteen feet across at the base, their roots spreading out of the ground in great flanged buttresses, like the fins of something from the deep sea, and from those roots they rose straight and branchless for sixty, eighty, a hundred feet before the first branches appeared, and then above those branches were more branches, and above those more still, and the whole thing went up until it reached a canopy two hundred feet above the ground that absorbed the sky so completely that you could be directly beneath the midday sun and not see it. The light that reached the forest floor was green and dim and came in thin shafts through gaps in the canopy where a tree had fallen and taken its neighbors with it. The floor itself was not what you expected. No thick undergrowth, no tangle of bushes. The canopy was too dense for light to reach the floor in sufficient quantity for much to grow there. What you walked through was more like a cathedral than a thicket. The great trunks rising from their buttress roots into the dimness above, the floor carpeted in decomposing leaves and the threads of fungal networks that broke everything down and fed it back upward into the trees. It was quiet in a way that was not silent. The insects produced a continuous hum that rose and fell with the temperature, and never stopped. Something was always moving in the canopy above you, invisible. Occasionally a sound came from up there that you could not identify and that you eventually stopped trying to identify. The heat was not the dry heat of Ciara that you could at least understand. It was wet heat, saturating heat, heat that lived in the air itself so that breathing felt like drinking, and the sweat that came out of you did not evaporate because the air was already full of water and had no room for more. You were wet from the first morning to the last night and then wet again before the next morning began. Your clothing rotted. The leather of your boots developed a white fungal bloom that had to be scrubbed off every few days or the leather softened into uselessness. Everything metal rusted, everything organic decayed. The forest was the fastest and most thorough decomposition engine on earth, and if you held still long enough, it would begin to work on you. The animals were present, but mostly invisible. You learned to fear the things you could not see more than the things you could. The Fer de Lance was the one the older Serengueros talked about most, a pit viper, the color of dead leaves, three to six feet long, perfectly camouflaged against the forest floor, responsible for more deaths in South America than any other snake. Its venom was hemotoxic, meaning it destroyed tissue rather than attacking the nervous system, meaning you did not simply go numb and stop. A bad bite left the limb swollen to twice its size within hours, the skin blistering and splitting, the tissue beneath beginning to die. If you were lucky and the dose was not too large and someone could get you to a town with a doctor, which was several days river travel from where you were, you might keep the limb. Men lost feet to it, men lost legs, men died of it alone in the forest because they had stepped wrong in the dark, and there was no one close enough to hear them fall. You learn to look at the ground before every step. You learn to tap the ground ahead of you with your long handled ladle when the light was bad. You learn to check inside your boots every morning before putting them on because scorpions and spiders liked the warmth of leather in the night. These were not precautions that anyone had to explain more than once. You watched a man get stung by a bullet ant on his third week and you watched him spend the next twelve hours in a state that could not accurately be described as pain and could not accurately be described as anything else. The bullet ant's sting is the most painful insect sting in the world, cataloged by the entomologist Justin Schmidt on his scale of insect pain as the highest category, described as pure, intense, brilliant pain like walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail embedded in your heel. The man who was stung recovered. He was more careful about where you put his hands after that. Malaria was the thing that killed the most people, and was considered by the men around you to be simply the way things were. The Anopheles mosquito bred in every pool of standing water in the forest, and in the Amazon there was no shortage of standing water, and the fever it carried came on fast and hard, a burning that climbed until it seemed impossible that a body could contain it, and then crashed into a shaking cold that was equally impossible, and then climbed again. Men worked through the early stages because stopping work meant stopping income, and stopping income meant the debt grew. Some of them worked until they collapsed on the trail. One man you knew walked his trail for three days with a fever that had reached the stage where he was seeing things in the forest that were not there, creatures moving in the undergrowth, voices in the canopy. Before another seringuero found him and got him back to the camp. He survived. Others did not. The fever moved through the camps along the tributaries with no regard for the rubber schedule. Your trail was two kilometers long, ninety two trees. The rubber trees, the Hevea Brasilienis, did not grow in groves. They did not grow in rows. They grew the way everything in the Amazon grew, dispersed and scattered among ten thousand other species, one per acre if you were lucky, separated from their neighbors by distances that required you to walk the full two kilometers of trail to collect from all of them. This was not an accident of nature. It was nature's defense against a fungal blight called South American leaf blight that would devastate any plantation where rubber trees grew close together. The blight could not spread efficiently across the distances between wild trees. This biological fact made plantation rubber growing impossible in the Amazon and meant that every rubber ball produced here had to be produced exactly the way you produced it. One man, one trail, ninety-two trees, walked every day of the tapping season from August to January. He made the cuts before dawn with a curved knife that removed a thin diagonal strip of bark without cutting into the living wood beneath. A clay cup pressed against the bark just below the cut. The latex came immediately, white and liquid, flowing along the cut and dripping into the cup at a rate that looked slow but added up over hours. You made the cut and moved to the next tree. By the time you had worked through all ninety two trees and turned back to the first, each cup held its quantity of latex. You collected it in tin cans, carrying the cans back to the smoking shed, and then the afternoon was the smoking. The smoking shed was a low structure, with a fire pit at the center, burning Urukuri palm nuts in a way that produced thick, acrid smoke. You dipped a wooden paddle into the latex and held it over the smoke, rotating slowly. The latex coagulated on contact, building up on the paddle in pale layers. You dipped and rotated and dipped again, hour after hour, the smoke working into your eyes and your lungs and your hair, a smell that did not leave you no matter how you washed. The ball grew by increments over days and then weeks, a dark, cured sphere that eventually weighed sixty to eighty pounds, solid rubber, ready to travel. When the ball was complete you carried it to the Baraco, the estate trading post run by the Serengalista's agent, and you set it on the scale and the agent wrote the weight in the ledger next to your name. Then he subtracted from it. The cost of your passage from Ciara, the cost of your tools, your knife and your paddle, and your clay cups, which you had purchased from the Baracao at prices the Baracao set, the cost of your food, which you had also purchased from the Baracao because there was nowhere else, the nearest market being days of river travel away, the cost of your shelter, the cost of your mosquito net, the cost of the quinine that was the only thing that gave you any chance against the malaria also purchased from the Baracao. These costs were recorded in the ledger as debts that accumulated faster than the rubber balls paid them off, because the price of the rubber was also set by the agent, and the price of the supplies was also set by the agent, and the difference between those two prices was arranged carefully and by design, so that the debt never quite cleared. This system was called aviamento, and its genius, if genius is the right word, was that it required no chains. You could leave the Serengal any time you chose. You could walk into the forest and not come back. What followed you was the debt, and the debt was recorded in ledgers in Manaus and in Bellum, and in the offices of export houses that had tentacles reaching up every tributary in the Amazon basin, and any Serengalista on any river who took you on, knowing you carried another man's debt, was inviting the kind of trouble that tended to arrive by armed canoe. You were not a slave in the legal sense. The legal sense had stopped mattering fairly quickly. The writer Euclides Dacuna, who traveled this river in nineteen oh four and wrote about what he found, described the Serenguero as the man who worked to enslave himself. He meant it as an indictment of the system. It was accurate either way. The rubber ball traveled without you. The Serengalisa's man loaded it with the others onto the river trader's boat, a wide shallow drafted craft with a covered hold, and an awning over the stern and a small steam engine that moved it upriver against the current at a pace a walking man could match on a good road. River traders worked the tributaries in a circuit, calling at the various syringis, collecting rubber balls, delivering supplies, carrying information between isolated camps that had no other connection to the world outside the forest. They were the circulatory system of the rubber trade, and like all circulatory systems, they extracted a share of everything that passed through them. From your tributary, the rubber went to the main river, from the main river it went to Manaus. Manaus sits roughly a thousand miles from the mouth of the Amazon, at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Negro, two great rivers meeting in a phenomenon you could see from the shore. The black water of the Rio Negro and the brown water of the Amazon running side by side for miles before finally mixing, two colors of river refusing to blend, a seam of dark and light visible for kilometers downstream. The city rose above this junction as a shock. You had been in the forest for months, and the forest had no edges, no distances, no visible horizon, only trees and canopy and the narrow green tube of the trail and the river as an occasional break in the vegetation. Manaus was buildings. Manaus was streets paved with Portuguese stone. Manaus was electric lights that burned after dark, which Manaus had been among the first cities in Brazil to have. The rubber from the forest arrived at the Manaus docks in bales and balls, weighed and grated and stamped by customs agents who collected the export duty at rates that represented a significant fraction of the federal government's total revenue. The rubber was loaded onto ocean steamers for the passage down the Amazon to the Atlantic, and then across to Liverpool or Hamburg or New York. From the docks, a steamer could make Bellum at the river's mouth in three days and the Atlantic in four, and Liverpool in three weeks. At every port the rubber passed through, someone weighed it and taxed it, and took a percentage.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

By the time it arrived at the Dunlop factory in Birmingham or the Goodrich plant in Akron, Ohio, it had passed through a dozen pairs of hands, and the price had multiplied several times over from what the agent at the Baraco had credited against Benedito's debt.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

The wealth that resulted from this system collected in Manaus the way cream collects at the top of a jar. The rubber barons built mansions with tiles shipped from Portugal, and ironwork shipped from Scotland and servants imported from Europe because, it was said, the laundresses of Manaus could not be trusted with fine linen. They sent their shirts to Lisbon to be laundered and returned. They installed bidet toilets in their bathrooms, which required the plumbing infrastructure to support them, which Manaus had. They drank champagne in a city surrounded by a forest of incalculable biological richness, and attended, periodically, the opera. The Teatro Amazonas was proposed in eighteen eighty one and completed in eighteen ninety-six, fifteen years of construction in the middle of the Amazon that required shipping every significant material from Europe, because the Amazon did not produce marble or ceramic tile or crystal chandeliers, or the specific gilded ironwork that the architects had specified. The dome was covered in thirty six thousand tiles glazed in the green and gold and blue of the Brazilian flag. The interior was painted to evoke standing beneath the Eiffel Tower and looking up. The seats were upholstered in Italian velvet. The stage was large enough for grand opera and had been designed by the same firms that built stages in Lisbon and Milan. The building cost something in the range of ten million dollars in the currency of its era, which is not a number that can be converted cleanly into modern values, but which can be understood by noting that the entire state budget of Amazonas in a normal year was roughly that amount, and most of it came from rubber taxes. At the time of the inauguration, men like Benedito were walking their trails. In eighteen seventy six, a British explorer and plant hunter named Henry Wickham had been in the Amazon and had collected approximately 70,000 seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, packed them into large wicker baskets lined with banana leaves, obtained an export license from Brazilian authorities for what he described as specimens for the Royal Gardens at Kew, and loaded them onto a requisitioned British steamship called the Amazonas, which made for Liverpool at speed because rubber seeds lose their viability quickly and time was short. Of the 70,000 seeds, roughly 3,000 germinated at Kew Gardens in London. The seedlings were later packed into sealed glass wardian cases, and distributed to British colonial botanical gardens in Ceylon and Singapore and the Malay states, where the climate matched the Amazon and where, crucially, the South American leaf blight that prevented rubber plantation agriculture in its native forest did not exist. The trees were planted in rows, they grew. The Malayan plantations produced their first commercial rubber in the late 1890s. By 1905, there were 38,000 acres of rubber trees under cultivation in the Malay states alone. By 1910 there were 540,000 acres. Plantation rubber was more consistent than wild rubber, cheaper to produce, and available in quantities that the Amazon's dispersed tree population, tapped by exhausted men on two-kilometer trails, could not match. The price of Amazon rubber began to fall in 1910. By 1913, it had fallen so far and so fast that the sirengais began to empty, the river traders stopped making their circuits. The export houses in Manaus began to close their books, and the floating dock went quiet. The Teatro Amazonias closed mid season. The rubber barons left.

unknown 21:59

The mansion

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Were shuttered or abandoned. The streets that had been paved with Portuguese stone began to crack in the heat, and the roots of the forest began to work their way through the cracks. Werner Herzog would film parts of his movie Fitzcaraldo in the opera house in 1982, a film about a man who wants to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle, using an actual opera house built during the Amazon rubber boom as his set, because no constructed set could match what the boom had left behind. The building was a better set than anything a production company could afford to build because the building was real, and the story was real, and the forest pressing against its walls was real. Benedito Santos did not leave when the price fell. There was nowhere to go. The aviamento debt did not dissolve when the market did. It remained in the ledger with the same calm permanence it had always had, and the agent at the Baracao remained at his desk, and the forest remained around the trail, and the trees bled their latex into the cups every morning, regardless of what the price of rubber was doing in London, or New York, or the exchange in Hamburg. You went out in the dark and made the cuts. The latex ran. You collected it in the afternoon and smoked it in the shed and built the ball over the days and weeks, and carried it to the agent, and watched him write it in the ledger and subtract from it. In the background, though you could not hear it from the forest, the silence where the opera had been.