TheThiefattheEndoftheWorld

What was it about the jungle that robbed a man of his judgment and fueled the most grandiose dreams? In 1928, the year of Wickham’s death, it was Henry Ford’s turn. Like his predecessors, he saw the Amazon as a limitless, untapped treasure. Of all the schemes in progress to wean America from her dependence on foreign rubber, his seemed most likely to succeed. The deed to a 2.5-million-acre swath of land—four fifths the size of Connecticut—was signed, sealed, and delivered. All deemed necessary to conquer the jungle was loaded into the hold of the white Lake Ormoc and her barge Lake LaFarge. Someone from Ford’s legal department traveled to Pará and the Tapajós to review preliminaries. Ford was returning to where the rubber industry started, but he would do it better. Nothing could go wrong.

Ford’s name inspired confidence. He had a compelling vision of a bright new age, and he aimed to spread it to every dark corner of the world. Mass production would create a world economy of wonders. Rising wages and falling prices would increase society’s buying power, and abundance would change the world. Scale models of cars, factories, and towns were designed in his headquarters and turned into reality whenever he saw fit. If Fordism had conquered the jungles of American capitalism, it could subdue the Amazon.

David Riker was sixty-seven when, in December 1928, the Lake Ormoc anchored outside Santarém, and Ford’s managers hired him as guide. By then, he’d built a large family estate overlooking the Tapajós. It was fashioned in the antebellum style of the Lower Mississippi Valley and built of wood in defiance of the white ants. A parrot squawked from its perch on the veranda. But this was nothing compared to the Lake Ormoc. The vessel had been refitted to serve as Fordlandia’s initial headquarters: a hospital, laboratory, and refrigeration unit were squeezed into its interior. The ship lay offshore like some industrial odalisque, awing the locals like the blue-lit Amazonas fifty-two years earlier.

The birth of Fordlandia progressed with assembly-line efficiency. The little village of Boa Vista was a beautiful site: The shore mounted fifty feet above the clear river. The land rose as one progressed inland, the hills forested with towering, lovely trees—castanheira, or Brazil nut, Spanish cedar, uxy, and itauba. All were burned clear and bulldozed flat. In their place rose a modern suburb with rows of white, green-shuttered bungalows. The main street was paved and ran uphill. Residents collected well-water from spigots in front of their houses, while the American staff and few Brazilian managers enjoyed running water inside. Screens were installed in the windows to keep out mosquitoes. A modern hospital was staffed with tropical specialists and equipped to produce quinine. Schools for the children of workers and managers were staffed with teachers from Pará. There was a private club and pool in the “American village”; the caboclo workers had their own separate pool. The “Villa Brasiliena” boasted tailors, shops, bodegas, and a butcher; the smell of fried bread wafted from the bakery. Until the first tapping, scheduled for 1936, the sawmill would process and export hardwoods felled on the property. U.S. newspapers called it “The Miracle City of the Amazon.”

At first it seemed Fordlandia would bring prosperity to the valley as advertised. Over three thousand Brazilians were hired to clear land, plant rubber seedlings, expand the physical plant, and run timber through the mill. Several old confederado families leased their land to Ford at profitable rates, while their sons were recruited into a variety of white-collar jobs. Three of Riker’s sons were hired soon after their father: Robert and Rubim, his oldest, would go to Dearborn, while Ditmar, the third boy, would stay as a field manager, first for Ford and later for Goodyear. Ford’s advance guard had arranged with planters across the river to set out one thousand rubber seedlings from the highlands behind Boim to be used when Fordlandia was cleared. By August 28, 1929, less than a year after the Ormoc’s arrival, 1,440 acres had been flattened, much of it planted with young rubber trees sown six inches apart on the naked hills. Riker would later say he planted the first rubber tree for Henry Ford.

But these trees were harbingers of things to come. By September 1929, most of the seedlings were dead or dying. Hevea was a jungle tree, used to shelter, and Ford had exposed the seedlings to the burning sun and pelting rain. His Dearborn managers made two great mistakes, ones that ran counter to all their training in the latest time-and-motion technologies. Although Ford insisted that they industrialize the forest, nature could not be forced into a schedule. And by clearing the forest, he’d depleted the thin layer of soil and nutrients, and destroyed the natural weather machine. Ford had created a desert. His seedlings withered and died.

Fortunately, there were still those thousand seedlings planted across the river—until the managers learned they could not be used. The Tapajós divides the states of Amazonas and Pará, and old rivalries divided them more than the river. In 1927, before Ford concluded the deal with Pará, Amazonas officials had tried to woo him away. When he moved to Boa Vista, they held a grudge. When Ford needed those one thousand seedlings, Amazonas forbade their export; in retaliation, Pará refused to permit their entry. The case went to court, but in vain. Good seedlings were suddenly in rare supply just when Ford needed them most, so his men traveled to Malaya and bought seeds that descended from Wickham’s stolen hevea.

So Henry’s seeds completed their global journey, a great circle from the Amazon, to Asia, and now back home. Much was made of it, but as Thomas Wolfe would write, you can’t go home again. Henry’s seeds had been gone too long: they’d lost their resistance to local conditions. Almost as soon as they were planted, Henry’s hevea wilted from the climate and local disease.

In late 1929-early 1930, an expedition was mounted to the Acré territory, with Riker along as translator. At the time, American and Brazilian scientists were convinced that the Acré would yield a mother lode of mythic trees, whose latex flow would surpass all others and whose natural resistance would defeat disease and predators. The Acré was considered an unofficial state devoted to rubber. In the 1890s, thousands of Cearense tappers rose up to wrest it from Bolivia and claim the land for Brazil. Afterward, the seringueiros returned to their tapping, only to rise again in 1907 when Brazil tried to “regularize” land titles. The Acré was the only place in the Amazon Valley where tappers had not been reduced to slaves, the only place where the romance of rubber had evolved into effective grassroots power. Riker and his group came to the Acré expecting miracles but instead encountered problems. They’d arrived six months before fruiting and had to wait for the season to start. Even then, the seed they collected didn’t do well.

When Riker returned, he saw Fordlandia through different eyes. It had reached impressive proportions, having become the Amazon’s third-largest town. It had comfortable housing, a school, a sanitary water supply, thirty miles of road, a cinema, machine shop, and a sawmill with a capacity of twenty-five thousand board-feet, the largest in Brazil. Plans were made to produce wooden auto parts for use in the United States. A new manager revealed plans for a tire factory and envisioned Fordlandia as a city of ten thousand within a decade. Ford’s workers received free housing, free medical and dental care, recreational facilities, and a wage of thirty-three to sixty-six cents a day, twice that paid anywhere else in the region. The workers bought food and supplies at controlled rates; the debt system of the patrão did not exist here. Babies born in Fordlandia got free pasteurized milk. Workers who died on the job received free burial in the Fordlandia cemetery. From birth to death, the company enfolded the worker in Ford’s vision of a protective, paternal industry.

Very little of this had anything to do with rubber, however, and it seemed to Riker that Fordlandia was drifting in the same way that Henry Wickham had drifted fifty-four years earlier. Purpose dissipated like that in this country. A man woke up one morning and wondered what had become of his life. He came up the river with hope, but soon the bright plans vanished, replaced by the daily fight for survival.

By 1930, it was obvious that Fordlandia’s workers were not about to embrace Fordism in the way Henry Ford desired. Ford’s “humanity in industry” was a distant benevolence, unlike the patrão system, which the caboclos knew. True, the patrão held the worker in debt, but the patrão also served as protector, advisor, and godfather. Direct obligations existed that were familial and human. In contrast, Ford’s approach was characterized by his statement: “A great business is really too big to be human. It supplants the personality of man.”

It was growing obvious that Henry Ford would never visit his Miracle City in the Amazon. He planned to run his empire by remote control. Everything was done by American standards, and Ford made the decisions from Dearborn. In exchange for health care, housing, and wages, Ford expected his plantation workers to adjust to company-imposed routines. Ford’s temperance rule was a failure: On paydays, boats filled with potent cachaca, brewed from sugar cane, pulled up to the docks. Between paydays, workers motored down to Aveiro, and the little town of fire ants experienced a firewater boom. A people accustomed to living in open-sided houses felt suffocated by Ford’s four walls; they found the two-family houses hot and ugly, the idea of indoor bathrooms repulsive. The six A.M. to three P.M. workday was unpopular with tappers accustomed to slashing trees several hours before dawn. Planting trees in a man-made desert, just to watch them die, was especially perplexing and discouraging. Said one old confederado who watched from the sidelines: “They tried to do to these Brazilians what Northerners had always wanted to do to the South—Yankeefy it!—and it didn’t work there either.” Within two years, two thousand of Ford’s original three thousand workers were fired or had left on their own.

In 1930, there was a riot. Actually, there were two. The first ignited over the rigid work regime and appeared in the least likely place—the new cafeteria during the noon meal. Ford had introduced the cafeteria as a way to reduce time spent on lunch breaks. As the workers filed down the serving line for the first time, one stopped and shouted, “I’m a worker, not a waiter!” The foremen were already angry after learning they’d be eating in the same manner as their subordinates. There’d been complaints. The Midwestern cuisine gave Brazilians indigestion. Others grumbled that they were not dogs and deserved to be served.

With that cry, the caboclos Ford officials saw as their “little brown brothers” turned wild. They smashed the cafeteria, tore down everything loose, then armed themselves with rifles, shotguns, and machetes and rampaged through the plantation, breaking tractors, smashing windows, and gutting cars. The North American staff and their families escaped on company boats to the middle of the Tapajós. In the panic, the young daughter of a boss fell into the river and was swept by the currents into a high stanchion by the pier. One of the rioters dived in, pulled her to safety, and took her to her family. As the rioters tore through Fordlandia, the managers heard what sounded like slogans. At first they thought it was “Down with Ford!”, but it turned out to be “Down with spinach! No more spinach!” The caboclos were sick of spinach and other “well-vitaminized” foods; they could not even look at the stuff, while corn flakes made them gag.

The managers remained in the middle of the river until Brazilian troops arrived and squelched the riot, but by then the violence had run its course. After that, recalled Doña Olinda Pereira Branco, then a twenty-two-year-old laundress for the managers who still lives at Fordlandia, people began to leave. The riot had opened a chasm that seemed hard to bridge. All sensed a void beneath the bright surface. “Everyone was sad,” she recalled.

“In one night,” observed Brazilian writer Vianna Moog, “the officials of the Ford Motor Company learned more sociology than in years at the university.

The second riot started later in the year. The caboclos complained that black Barbadians who lived across the Tapajós would take their jobs and be paid a higher wage. The violence erupted on payday as everyone stood in line. Three West Indian workers were injured, and afterward, Ford managers ended the employment of all Barbadians at Fordlandia. What happened to the immigrants after their dismissal remains a mystery. Brazilians in Santarém later told writer Mary Dempsey that they never made it home. They drifted to the cities of the Amazon, looking for work or entering the latest rush for riches. Today, their descendants are sprinkled throughout the valley.

Labor trouble ceased in 1930, replaced by assaults from the jungle. By 1932, nearly seven thousand acres of forest had been cleared; nine thousand by 1934. The timber proved useless because some of it absorbed too much moisture, while other trees were hard as stone. Waves of insects and fungi advanced from the tree line to attack the young hevea: five species of fungi were counted and two dozen types of insects. The pests included black crust, yellow scale, white root disease, canker, red mites, hawk moths, sauva ants, lace bugs, and army caterpillars. Olinda Branco remembered how the Ford managers paid residents a bounty per bug to pick army worms off the leaves and stems: “I was really scared of them. They were gray and flat, with red stripes, so they were easy to find. But they had pincers that went right through your skin.” The caterpillar problem was temporarily solved when the sauva ant attacked, but after the ants had exterminated the caterpillars, they turned on the young rubber trees.

Most devastating was the South American leaf blight, caused by the fungal parasite Dothidella ulei. The spores floated in with the breeze and lodged on the leaves. Isolated trees in the forest stood a better chance, since they could not pass on the blight to close neighbors, and those that survived developed immunity. Since the fungus did not attack seeds, it had not been a hidden passenger in Wickham’s smuggled shipment to Kew and thus did not spread to Asia. Riker had seen traces of rust on his small plantation before selling out, and there’d been rumors that a similar disease had wiped out the entire plantation rubber industry of Surinam and Guyana. It struck quickly, spreading through a stand of trees like cholera. In one case, a plantation of two hundred to three hundred acres lost one third of its young trees in a matter of days, while the rest were in such a hopeless state that the plantation was abandoned and the planter ruined.

Dothidella had been at Fordlandia from the beginning, but since the first groves were planted far apart, the conditions mimicked hevea’s isolated behavior in the forest. In time, however, the trees were planted close, and after four to six years, as the rows of trees matured, the canopy closed overhead. This made it easy for the fungus to travel from one tree to another. By 1934, the blight had swept through the plantation, denuding almost every tree. “Practically all the branches of the trees throughout the estate,” said Fordlandia’s chief biologist, “terminate in naked stems.” Each time buds appeared, they were attacked and eaten through. Soon, the hills were covered with skeletal trees or young saplings—and all knew the saplings would die.

In a very real sense, Ford had been given prior warning. Others before him had been ruined. Something had swept through Guyana and Surinam, killing a thousand plants and crippling others. The reason for hevea’s isolated spread through the forest could now be understood. The trees did not grow in dense stands because the fungus feasted in lush conditions and reproduced at a spectacular rate, overwhelming the tree’s defenses. Hevea’s scattered distribution was its best protection. Plantation conditions, meant to encourage growth, instead destroyed them all. Ford’s assault on the Amazon was foreordained to fail.

To many of that era, such an end seemed impossible, so pervasive was the myth of Ford’s invincibility. In 1932, when Ford still dared dream of an Amazon Utopia, a German journalist visited Fordlandia. “Henry Ford has never yet seen one of his big plans fail,” he wrote. “If this one succeeds, if the machine, the tractor, can open a breach in the great green wall of the Amazon jungle, if Ford plants millions of rubber plants where there used to be nothing but jungle solitude, then the romantic history of rubber will have a great new chapter. A new and titanic fight between nature and modern man is beginning.” The Germans had endured the rubber embargo of the First World War and were captivated by the mechanized struggles of “Heinrich Ford,” the American industrialist whom Adolf Hitler most admired.

The industrialized nations had wakened to the strategic danger of resource dependence. Such vulnerability “threatens not only the sane progress of the world,” said Herbert Hoover, “but contains in it great dangers to international goodwill.” Many believed that if an essential resource were held back, a nation-state had the right to go and take it. The Japanese turned the abstract argument into strategy when they went to war for resources: they took the Eastern rubber plantations from the British early during World War II.

In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt bluntly warned that “modern wars cannot be won without rubber.” During World War II, rubber proved indispensable for the manufacture of motor transport, airplanes, submarines, antiaircraft balloons, gas masks, electric motors, ships, trains, electric lights, telephones, telegraph equipment, typewriters, wireless sets, radios, medical goods, fire hoses, shoes and boots, bulletproof gas tanks, deicers on airplane wings, rubberized flying suits, rubber track blocks for tanks and halftracks, inflatable rubber boats, self-sealing airplane fuel line hoses, airfoam pads for wounded limbs, and surgeon’s gloves. Roosevelt asked Americans to undertake a huge rubber recycling program to make up for the lost Eastern plantations. Within three years, the formula for synthetic rubber was perfected, making raw hevea, at least for a time, as obsolete as “Pará fine.”

Before this, however, Henry Ford had realized that he would never be king of an American rubber empire. He would not do for his nation what Henry Wickham had done for Great Britain. In 1934, after Dothidella laid his dream to waste, he traded a third of his property at Fordlandia for a new site thirty miles closer to the mouth of the Tapajós and called it Belterra. He abandoned all essential operations in Fordlandia, designating it a “research station.” Belterra was laid out in squares, and planting went slowly. By 1937, twelve thousand acres were cleared and 2.2 million seedlings sown. By 1941, that number rose to 3.6 million. But in 1942, the harvest yielded a mere 750 tons of rubber, a fraction of the Amazon’s 45,000-ton output at the height of the Boom. By 1945, after spending $10 million, Ford sold everything to Brazil for $500,000.

Nature had won.

The fear of biopiracy that haunts Brazil today is one legacy of Henry Wickham’s dream. The Amazon rain forest is thought to contain forty percent of all plant and animal species on Earth, many still undiscovered, while loggers and farmers slash the forest at a rate of six football fields a minute. Yet the search for new species—and development of new drugs from them—is hampered by a deep suspicion among Brazilians that the rain forest crawls with biopirates scooping up animal blood samples, leaves, and seeds. Thomas Lovejoy, the U.S. scientist credited with bringing the Amazon’s deforestation to the world’s attention in the 1980s, was accused of being a CIA agent while doing rain-forest research for the Smithsonian Institute. Marc Van Roosmiler, a Dutch researcher who’d discovered twenty new monkey species, was accused of trying to smuggle primates when twenty-seven rare monkeys were found in his home in Manaus. Although Van Roosmiler insisted he was studying the animals, the case showed how former friends of the forest were now branded their enemy. General Luiz Gonzaga Schroeder Lessa, former chief of the Amazon Military Council, claimed that collectors disguised as missionaries or scientists were stealing biological samples. Amazonas State Governor Eduardo Braga warned that foreigners planned to “take from us our flora and fauna.” Even Brazilian scientists feel the squeeze. “I’ve all but given up,” said Paulo Buckup, a professor of ichthyology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who collects river fish for research. “Brazil has lost the capacity to control its own resources because it doesn’t know what it has.”

A few aging veterans from the Ford era still remain in the dusty town. The dirt streets climb the red hillside. The fastest way up is also the bumpiest, crammed into the town’s one taxi, an aging, rust-colored Toyota Corolla. Although its passenger door is held shut by wire and the windows are stuck, “that doesn’t matter,” said the owner, “because it still gets around.” At the top of the hill lives Biamor de Sousa Pessoa, whose father was a company rubber tapper. Now seventy-five, he can still remember the sounds of the clarinet played between ten and ten-thirty A.M. to call the rubber workers from the fields. It was a haunting sound, he said, like something ancient that drifted from the forest and settled like mist over the young trees. Doña Olinda Pereira Branco lives close to him and is even older. In 2005 she was ninty-two and could still recall being paid for each ugly, red-striped caterpillar she plucked from the trees. The thought still makes her shudder. There were no Brazilians promoted into management, she said, and plenty of resentment grew up around that fact. A few Americans died of fever, as did many Brazilians, but no American bosses were buried at Fordlandia. “There were bosses for everything,” she remembered. She paused, and gazed out the window. “Too many bosses,” she said.

And what of the thousands of rubber trees that once crept up the hills? She smiled and shook her head. Until recently, a few of the old giants still stood. “But they were getting rotten and started to fall. So we cut them down.”

Two decades would pass before new developers dared take on the jungle again. When they did, they made the same mistakes, but on a more massive scale. In 1967, American billionaire and shipping magnate Daniel K. Ludwig bought 1.6 million acres of Amazon land along the Jari and Paru rivers for $3 million, then expanded that to 3.7 million acres, an area equivalent to half of Belgium. Expecting the world to run out of wood fiber, he cleared 250,000 acres of rain forest and planted Gmelina arborea, a fast-growing Burmese species—his own “miracle tree.” He brought in by barge a seventeen-story preassembled pulp mill made in Japan. He also envisioned mining and cattle empires, the world’s largest rice plantation, and modern suburbs in the jungle. He built a settlement, Monte Dourado, with houses, schools, nurseries, bridges, and community centers. Given enough money, he thought, any place could be civilized.

Instead he created a wasteland. His heavy land-clearing equipment scraped and compacted the soil, repeating the same mistakes Ford had made. The transplanted Gmelia grew slower than in its native environment, and the pulp had to be supplemented by local wood—which he had judged useless before. He replaced his plantations of Gmelia with equally disappointing eucalyptus and pine. Although the mill processed pulp, it was never enough to be profitable, and Ludwig’s dream began to fade. Workers contracted malaria; insects destroyed the wood and supplies. After fourteen years, Daniel Ludwig gave up, losing an estimated two thirds of a billion dollars to the same mistakes Ford had made.

Today it is soy that drives such dreams. In 2003, Cargill Inc., the Minneapolis commodities giant, opened a new $20-million soybean terminal on the river at Santarém. The draft at the Amazon port is forty to fifty-five feet, deep enough to load oceangoing vessels directly and avoid the transfer of freight once the ship reaches sea. Cargill bet that Brazil would pave the impassable 1,071-mile mud and rock path optimistically known as BR-163. This would open the Amazon port to the vast soybean fields in the south that cover the state of Mato Grosso. During the 2003-2004 harvest, Brazil exported 20.5 million tons of soybeans, ranking it second in the world to the United States, which exported 24.5 million tons. Brazil hoped to rank first: While U.S. producers have run out of land, Brazil has millions of acres of Amazon jungle that could be cleared.

In March 2007, the federal government closed the Cargill plant for failure to comply with environmental laws, but by then the damage was done. Tens of thousands of acres around Santarém had been cleared of forest for rice and soybeans, in a region that had already lost 20 percent of its trees to loggers. It didn’t rain once in Santarém during my trip, and only once in the south around Fordlandia. A day without rain in the Amazon is extremely rare, even during the “dry” season. Older residents called it the greatest drought they remembered in fifty years. A few hundred miles west in Amazonas the water level sank to unprecedented levels, closing ports and crimping river traffic, resulting in the declaration of a state of emergency. The jungle’s weather machine seemed broken, and even the most hardened Amazonian seemed scared. The newest dream of riches may have gone the way of Fordlandia, but this time something essential to the health of the region seemed to go with it, also.

There is an old saying on the Amazon, often uttered with a cynical tilt of the head. Deus é grande, mas o mato é maior: “God is great, but the forest is greater.” Brazilians also say, “God sees the truth, but sometimes forgets,” but the jungle never forgets. One way or another, nature always wins.

Henry Wickham could have warned them all of this—the soybean prophets, the Daniel Ludwigs and the Henry Fords. A man is never greater than the jungle, no matter what his worth back home. But Henry understood their mania, too. There was something in the jungle that drove a man beyond all wisdom: He chased his El Dorado until the fever killed him, until he was broken and humiliated, until his obsessions destroyed those who dared believe in his dreams. It was an enslavement unlike anything on earth, because he forged the shackles himself. Joseph Conrad felt it, in the site of another rubber madness half a world away. “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness bearing us towards the sea,” he wrote in his most famous work. The only hope was to leave the jungle for the ocean’s far horizon.

But once seduced, one was never free.