1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [143]
In one way the workers’ flight may have been a boon: the expedition was running out of food. Like the Jamestown colonists, my ancestor’s party was starving in the midst of plenty. Ten years before, the German engineer Franz Keller had surveyed the Madeira rapids with a party of Mojos Indians who so regularly feasted on turtle that he groused about the monotony; Keller preferred the pirarucu, an armored fish so big that Amazonians regularly toss huge pirarucu steaks on the barbecue, and the Amazonian manatee, a bulbous aquatic mammal whose meat, “when properly prepared, decidedly reminds one of pork.”
Like the Jamestown colonists, the railroad expedition was starving in the midst of plenty. Agricultural geneticists have long argued that the area around the railroad route—the Brazil-Bolivia border—was the development ground for peanuts, Brazilian broad beans (Canavalia plagiosperma), and two species of chili pepper (Capsicum baccatum and C. pubescens). But in recent years evidence has accumulated that the area was also the domestication site for tobacco, chocolate, peach palm (Bactris gasipaes, a major Amazonian tree crop), and, most important, the worldwide staple manioc (Manihot esculenta, also known as cassava or yuca). My ancestor nearly died from lack of food in one of the world’s agricultural heartlands.
Only after five famished months did Craig learn from a local resident to fish not in the main channel, as the Americans had been doing, but in the smaller tributaries. Rather than using hooks and lines, to which Amazonian fish rarely respond, Indians sprinkled over the water a paralyzing elixir made from the tree genus Strychnos (the name suggests the poison). Temporarily unable to breathe, fish floated to the surface and were scooped into baskets. Craig’s crew put down their fishing rods and learned to make poison. They stopped trying to grow peas and carrots in their gardens and began eating palm fruits and manioc.
What finally capsized the venture was malaria. Introduced to the coast by African slaves, probably in the seventeenth century, Plasmodium slowly transformed the Amazon basin into a collection of depopulated fever valleys that few foreigners wanted to enter. (I am picking up a story I began in Chapter 3.) Vulcanization brought people back. At a stroke European and American industries found themselves hungering for huge amounts of rubber. Most of it initially came from the mouth of the Amazon, near the port city of Belém do Pará. Each rubber tree produced perhaps an ounce of rubber per day, could only be milked 100 to 140 days a year, and needed to recuperate every few years. As demand grew, Belém’s rubber tappers worked their trees too hard, killing many of them. Then the entire northeast coast was hit by a terrible drought in 1877–79. As many as half a million people died. Abandoning their stricken fields and tapped-out trees, burning with cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, and beriberi, the starving backlanders—flagelados, they were called, the scourged—fled upstream on the Amazon’s new steamships by the tens of thousands, hoping to make a living from rubber. Those with a little money or political clout obtained land grants or concessions from local officials; those with only ambition or ruthlessness just looked for untapped H. brasiliensis and set up shop. Ultimately they created about twenty-five thousand rubber estates, the Brazilian historian Roberto Santos has estimated, most of them small, employing more than 150,000 laborers overall. The throngs of migrants provided new targets for malaria. Keller, the German engineer, traveled the Madeira in 1867 and saw little malaria. Neville Craig arrived there a decade later and saw little else.
The toll was appalling. Craig landed at Santo Antônio on February 19, 1878. On March 23 the second ship arrived and the number