1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [146]
Because latex coagulates after it is exposed to air, tappers constantly had to recut trees, tending them daily through the four-to-five-month tapping season. And they had to process the latex into crude rubber before it dried and became difficult to work with. Both tapping and processing required large amounts of care and attention. And that care and attention had to occur in remote, malarial camps—the trees couldn’t be moved to more convenient, salubrious locations and the latex was too heavy to transport in its liquid state. Disease and European raids had harshly cut back the original indigenous population. Europeans had not replaced them. The ever-greater hunger for rubber was accompanied by an ever-more-desperate shortage of workers. Solutions to the labor problem emerged, many of them bestial.
At first the rubber boom seemed like a godsend—an arboreal jobs program—to the region’s perpetually impoverished people. Needing workers, rubber estates hired local Indians, shipped in penniless farmers from downriver, or shanghaied hands from Bolivia. Economic theory suggests that in a labor shortage the estates would have to promise high wages and comfortable working conditions. They often did, but the promised wages were offset by stiff charges for transportation, supplies, and board. Many supposedly well-paid men were never able to work themselves out of debt; malaria, yellow fever, or beriberi felled others. To keep the labor force from finding better offers—or running away—owners stored workers onsite in barren dormitories with armed guards. Neville Craig’s boss, the chief railroad engineer, visited the concessionaires who controlled the middle reaches of the Madeira. Living in three-story houses with sweeping verandas, the engineer wrote, the concessionaires were “surrounded, like medieval barons, with a retinue of Bolivian servants and their families.… These men are absolute masters of their peons.”
In the 1890s the boom went still further upstream, into the Andean foothills—areas that until then had been regarded as useless, and so left largely to their original inhabitants, most of whom had minimal contact with Europeans. Because H. brasiliensis can’t tolerate the cooler temperatures on the slopes, entrepreneurs focused on another species, Castilla elastica, which provided a less-valuable grade of rubber known as caucho. Although Indians tapped Castilla trees in Mesoamerica—the latex “emerges from sajaduras [the shallow cuts made when marinating meat] on the tree,” one Spanish eyewitness wrote in 1574—they did not in Amazonia. The incisions, caucheiros (caucho collectors) believed, let in diseases and insects that quickly wiped out Castilla. Rather than futilely try to protect the trees, caucheiros simply cut them down, gouged off the bark, and let the latex drain into holes dug beneath the fallen trunk. Sometimes collectors could obtain several hundred pounds of latex from a single tree, thus making up in volume for caucho’s lower price.
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Because caucheiros killed the trees they harvested, they naturally put a premium on being the first into a new area. The goal was to extract the most rubber in the least amount of time; every minute not at the ax was a minute when someone else was taking down irreplaceable trees. Work crews spent weeks or months trekking from tree to tree through steep, muddy, forested hills, carrying heavy loads of caucho from the areas they had just looted. Few people from outside the area were willing to come into the forest for this. Caucheiros thus turned to the people who already lived there: Indians. The situation invited abuse—and there are always people ready to take up such invitations.
Among them was Carlos Fitzcarrald, son of an immigrant