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of workers swelled to about seven hundred. Malaria had incapacitated almost half of them by the end of May. By the end of July, two-thirds of the crew were too sick to work; three weeks later, the proportion had risen to three-fourths. Some thirty-five people had died, the first of many. Only about 120 Americans, more than half of them sick, were left by January 1879. The next month, my ancestor wrote, the enterprise achieved “complete collapse.” As a capstone, the railroad’s British bankers, perhaps anticipating legal action, refused to pay the survivors’ accumulated wages. Sick and broke, shoeless and ragged, Craig and a hundred or so others straggled down the Amazon into Belém, where they had to beg passage home. But even as they haunted the docks, financiers in Europe and the United States were already planning another shot at building the railroad—there was too much money in rubber to let the idea go.

Even in a time of crazy boom-and-bust cycles the rubber boom stood out. Brazil’s rubber exports grew more than tenfold between 1856 and 1896, then quadrupled again by 1912. Ordinarily such an enormous increase would drive down prices. But instead they kept climbing. Attracted by tales of fortunes gained, speculators leaped into the market—“even the widow and parson are in for all they are worth,” the New York Times observed—and pushed up prices higher still. How high? Meaningful figures are hard to provide, because speculation caused markets to shoot up and down erratically; in 1910, to pick an extreme example, New York rubber oscillated between $1.34 and $3.06 a pound. On top of that, the inflation, financial panics, and political instability of the era caused the currencies of Brazil, Britain, and the United States to gyrate wildly in value. Still, rubber kept going up. Its “soaring price is turning rubber manufacturers gray,” the Times claimed on March 20, 1910. “One ounce of rubber, washed and prepared for manufacture, is worth nearly its weight in pure silver.”

The newspaper was hyperventilating, but not entirely wrong. One economist recently calculated that the average London price of rubber roughly tripled between 1870 and 1910. The statistic is more remarkable than it may seem. Compare what happened to the price of rubber to what happened to the price of oil after a huge strike was discovered in Texas in 1900. World oil production doubled—and prices crashed. Crude didn’t reach its 1900 price for twenty years. That rubber production went up by an order of magnitude while prices tripled is the kind of thing that makes natural-resource economists rub their eyes in bemusement. “It’s pretty amazing,” said Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economics Research, of Winchester, Massachusetts. “No wonder people were going crazy.”

The financial center of the trade was Belém. Founded in 1616 at the entrance to the world’s greatest river, it had a strategic location—but little ability to take advantage of it. So much sediment washed in from the Amazon that the harbor was shallow and treacherous. Worse, the currents and winds generated by the river’s vast outflow isolated the city from the rest of Brazil—incredibly, from Belém it was faster to sail to Lisbon, a distance of 3,700 miles, than to Rio de Janeiro, a distance of 2,500 miles. In consequence the city’s population had never risen much above twenty-five thousand. The rubber boom allowed it to become, at last, what Amazonian dreamers had long hoped: the economic capital of a vibrantly growing realm.

Convinced they were building the Paris of the Americas, Belém’s newly rich rubber elite filled the cobbled streets with sidewalk cafés, European-style strolling parks, and Beaux-Arts mansions with (a concession to the tropics) the exceptionally tall, narrow windows that promote air circulation. Social life centered around the neoclassical Teatro de Paz, where rubber barons in box seats smoked cigars and drank cachaça, the distilled sugarcane liquor that is Brazil’s preferred high-alcohol beverage. Tall mango trees shaded the avenues that led to the harbor,