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By Root 3060 0

he intended to help build a railroad to transport it. Then as now the primary source of natural rubber was latex from Hevea brasiliensis. Native to the Amazon basin, the tree is most abundant on the borderlands between Brazil and Bolivia. The ports nearest to this area are on the Pacific coast, across the Andes. Sending rubber to those ports would mean carrying it across the high, icy mountains. After doing that, shipping the latex to England would involve dispatching ships around the stormy southern tip of South America, a long and dangerous trip of almost twelve thousand miles. The entire route was so difficult, in fact, that the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society calculated in 1871 that it would be four times faster to ship rubber to London from the western Amazon by transporting it down the Madeira River to the Amazon itself, and thence to the Atlantic. The problem was that waterfalls and violent rapids blocked a 229-mile section of the lower Madeira. West of this stretch were three thousand miles of navigable river in Bolivia and vast supplies of rubber and other valuable goods; east of it was the wide Amazon, and then the Atlantic. The downstream end of the impassable stretch was the Brazilian hamlet of Santo Antônio. My ancestor went to Santo Antônio to build a railroad around the rapids.

Born in Pittsburgh, Craig took his undergraduate and engineering degrees at Yale. He was a fine student who won two university mathematics prizes and was hired by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey before graduation. Five years later, seeking excitement, he joined P. & T. Collins, a Philadelphia railway-construction firm, which had obtained the contract, secured by the Bolivian government, to build the Madeira railroad. The two Collins brothers seem to have believed that their considerable experience with railroads trumped their utter lack of experience with the Amazon. In January 1878 they sent out two shiploads of eager engineers and laborers from Philadelphia. Craig went in the first vessel.

Neville B. Craig (Photo credit 7.3)

As he later recounted in a memoir, winter gales plagued the journey to Amazonia. The storms wrecked the second—and, alas, much less seaworthy—ship about one hundred miles south of Jamestown, Virginia. More than eighty people drowned. Company officers had trouble replacing the lost men—Philadelphians, shocked by the disaster, had lost their enthusiasm for the venture. Eventually Collins hired a new workforce from “the slums of several of our large eastern cities,” to quote Craig’s book, people “exhibiting in shape, countenance and gesture, striking evidence of the soundness of Darwin’s theory.” Most were immigrants from southern Italy; many had been pushed out of their homes for their anarchist beliefs. As my ancestor’s snarky put-down suggests, anti-Italian prejudice was then widespread; these newly arrived Americans in consequence were desperate for work. The Collins brothers took advantage of their desperation to sign them up for lower wages than they paid the laborers on the first ship—$1.50 per day, instead of $2.00. Apparently it did not occur to the brothers that the anarchists would discover this arrangement, or that they would find it unacceptable.

Meanwhile Craig steamed up the Amazon and the Madeira to the proposed railway terminus at Santo Antônio and set to work surveying the route. He learned of the fate of the men on the second ship only when the Italians arrived as replacements. At the same time the Italians found out that they were being paid less than everyone else. Within days they went on strike. The engineers, Craig among them, constructed a cage from the steel rails for the railway and forced the strikers into it at gunpoint. Reading the memoir, I waited in vain for any recognition from Craig that imprisoning the workforce could have a negative impact on the construction schedule. Ultimately the strikers went back to work, sullenly hacking at the forest. A few weeks later “seventy-five or more” took off for Bolivia. None made it—perhaps, Craig luridly speculated, because