Free Fordlandia by Greg Grandin Page A

push his boat through fast-moving water. He was less enthusiastic about his cook, also barefoot and dressed in a “pair of pants and a jacket that were so greasy and dirty that they interfered with his every movement on account of their stiffness.” Rogge ordered him to put on clean clothes and to keep the cooking area neat and orderly, which he did, though he never learned to prepare eggs to the lumberjack’s taste.
    ROGGE LEFT FORDLANDIA in early December 1930, traveling during the last stretch of the rubber season, the six-month dry period when latex is tapped, smoked, and sent downriver. He passed riverboats and canoes taking balls of rubber to trading posts. He slept in the houses of local merchants and traders and negotiated with local tappers to allow his crew to string their hammocks around the trappers’ huts. All of this gave him a firsthand view of the river’s rubber economy.

    As in other areas of the Amazon, rubber trees were not planted but rather grew wild along the 1,235-mile Tapajós, particularly in its upper headwaters and floodplains. Making his way to these thick, rubber-rich groves, Rogge found that the sloping banks framing the river’s wide lower reaches gave way to forbidding jungle overhang. Within a few days upriver of Fordlandia, the jungle became dense and the Tapajós narrowed to a gap, flanked by limestone cliffs and dotted with tree-filled islands. The river then climbed over a series of white-water torrents and falls that only low-draft boats, light enough to be poled, pulled, or dragged overland, could travel. For the first couple of decades after the 1835 Cabanagem Revolt, when the rubber trade took off, these obstacles had discouraged commercial exploitation. A Frenchman who made this trip in the early 1850s described “roaring and terrible” rapids that “cross and recross and dash to atoms all they bear against black rocks” guarding the “deep solitudes” of the upper Tapajós. Yet by the 1870s, the diminishing yield of Hevea around the mouth of the Amazon, combined with increasing world demand, prompted merchants and traders to push farther and farther into the valley, avoiding the rapids and falls by building portage paths through the jungle. In the early twentieth century, most of the upper Tapajós latex trade was dominated by one man, Raymundo Pereira Brazil, whose family had migrated to the region from the state of Minas Gerais. At the height of the boom, Brazil owned two thousand rubber estradas , or trails. He controlled the river’s workforce through debt bondage and monopolized trade and transportation routes. 8
    Brazil’s bankruptcy in 1918, following the collapse of latex prices, left a power vacuum on the upper Tapajós. Although abuses of workers continued, river residents were now in a position to better their lot by playing the remaining traders, merchants, and trail owners off one another. At the same time, the decline of the rubber trade forced many tappers, including no doubt Rogge’s boatmen, to broaden their survival strategies, supplementing their tapping by gathering nuts, planting, fishing, supplying riverboats with wood for their boilers, and hiring out as crews on steamboats.
    Even with this diversification, the misery Rogge witnessed was intense. At every hut he passed, he saw poverty and disease, including chronic malaria and hookworm. Through a Portuguese interpreter he brought with him on the trip, Rogge heard the same kind of stories of abuse and exploitation LaRue told Henry Ford a few years earlier. Tappers complained about the low price of rubber and said that if they could save enough money for their passage they would leave their rubber trails and look for work in Brazil’s industrializing south.
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    ROGGE SET OFF in search of the real Amazon, yet no matter how far he traveled his thoughts continually returned to America.

    It took Rogge a few weeks to reach the trading post at Barra, the last reported location of Johansen