Of all the great feats of that era of botanical discovery, none was more imposing than that of the domestication of rubber. New World inhabitants had shown rubber, which they obtained from several tropical plant species, to early explorers, including Columbus. Since it was an unstable product, it remained for more that three centuries a mere curiosity. Then, in 1839, it was founded that through treatment with sulphur and heat, rubber’s elastic properties could be made more permanent . Its applications multiplied and the exploitation of many wild rubber-bearing plants, including some that were soon discovered in Asia and Africa, was much intensified.

Meanwhile one other aspect of the problem must be understood. Even to bring the whole available area of the Ford Plantations into full production would require a much larger number of workers than are at present available. To clear any considerable area of the Amazon country and bring new rubber plantations into production which would seriously rival the plantations of Malaya and Sumatra would require an enormous number of immigrants. Under what conditions such a migration to the North of Brazil might take place is difficult to conceive. Under present conditions the Brazilians would not be likely to permit the entrance of any adequate number of Oriental people, nor any other single foreign group; yet as long as Sao Paulo continues to produce one form or another of wealth, the remote Amazon is not likely to prove sufficiently attractive to reverse the present trend of the Brazilian population. The possibilities of development in the North, as in most other parts of Brazil, are fundamentally restricted by lack of people.

The chief problem was finding laborers to do the work. The story of the recruiting of the rubber gatherers is not a pretty one—especially in the eastern parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, where the arm of the law could scarcely reach across the Andes. The virtual slavery and the almost universal mistreatment of the Indians, many of them recruited from the highland communities of the Andes, makes a sad chapter of human brutality, now long since closed. The Brazilian Amazon conditions were scarcely better. Most of the workers who came into the region during the 70’s and 80’s were from the drought-stricken regions of Ceara . People from Ceara poured into the Amazon during part of the rubber period in numbers averaging 20,000 a year; but few of them returned. Today a very large proportion of the Brazilians scattered over this vast extent of territory came originally from the sertao of the Brazilian Northeast.

There could have been but one result. In 1905 the plantations of British Malaya and Dutch Sumatra produced only a small fraction of the world’s supply of rubber. In 1910 they produced 9 per cent; in 1914 they produced 60 per cent; and by 1924 the plantations accounted for about 93 per cent. Early in 1909 the increasing demand for rubber for use in the manufacture of automobile tires caused a frenzied boom in the Amazon, even in the face of the growing competition of the plantations . Credits were extended; new laborers were hastily recruited and sent into the forests. But in April, 1910, the whole crazy financial structure of credits collapsed, ruining large numbers of speculators. Since 1912 Brazil has had only a very minor share of the world’s production of rubber.

Here was a situation characteristically Brazilian. A new world market of unlimited possibilities suddenly makes its appearance; Brazil finds itself in possession of a monopoly of the raw material needed to supply this market; the chief factor limiting the increase of production is the scarcity of labor. The immediate result—a frantic rush to the rubber forests and a mad scramble to share in this new source of speculative wealth. Land was purchased in Belem or Manaus without any preliminary survey, much as one would draw a hand in a poker game. Later, the purchaser, who was in most cases an already rich landowner, would find out whether he was wealthy beyond his dreams or had completely last the purchase price—all depending on the number of rubber trees that could be found in his forest. Who in that region and in that atmosphere of speculative profit could have thought of undertaking the hard work of clearing the forest, preparing the land, planting young rubber trees, and caring for them during their period of early growth.

There were rich rubber forests beyond the limits of navigation along the southern tributaries of the Amazon. Towns were founded at the heads of navigation, a

Some topics in this essay:
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