CHAPTER 12
RUBBER MADNESS
Few Victorians who’d done as much for their empire could claim that they’d been personally betrayed by their queen. He’d been ruined before—Santarém, Queensland—but this third time worked its negative charm.
There was a brief denouement to Victoria’s note: On May 4, 1893, Henry’s lease was cancelled. Four months later, on September 7, the courts awarded him $14,500 in damages, plus legal costs, but this was not enough to cover his land and the amount he’d spent on the house, crops, and improvements. A hurricane hammered the colony that summer, ripping the roof off Belize’s Catholic church, dragging five ships ashore, and leveling banana plantations up and down the coast to such an extent that no fruit would be shipped for six months. What did he care if this corrupt colony blew away and went to hell? He might have felt as if his bottled rage had found expression in the howling wind. To make matters worse, a “skin complaint” that Violet never detailed became unbearable, and she needed treatment in London. Shortly after the verdict in his case, Henry left, never to return.
He was deeply embittered, scarred as visibly as the soft bark of hevea slashed by seringuieros. It was during this period when the world began to know him as an opinionated, silver-maned imperialist blustering from the edge of the world. “His keen analytical mind and authoritarian manner made him a difficult partner,” Edward Lane said of this time of his life. “[T]here was much of the intolerant dictator in his makeup, although he was unswervingly loyal and . . . generous towards his friends.”
But that was the way planters were expected to act in the backwaters of the empire, and that’s where he moved next—to the antipodes. In the British Empire, the antipodes referred to New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand, despite the fact that none overlapped the antipodal points of the British Isles. Henry must have felt at times that his strength was at an end. His funds certainly were, as was his patience. He might not abandon his desire to create a plantation, but he would do so miles from contact with his fellow countrymen, in an isolated empire of his own design.
He’d always been driven and obsessed; now, it seems, he went a little crazy. We can trace the psychic route today. He started at Papua New Guinea, an island of “appalling roughness and disrupted character,” where mountains soared up as inaccessible cliffs, then fell away into “rock-walled gorges, through which roil rivers, their courses blocked by boulders and ever-rolling stones.” Henry O. Forbes, a professional Victorian adventurer, said that “during many years of travel in rough countries, I have encountered nowhere such difficulties as in New Guinea.” Nevertheless, settlers in England and Australia saw in New Guinea a “great and salubrious ‘Treasure Island’” with gold trickling down the rivers.
This was too crowded for Henry’s tastes, so on the island of Samarai, at the eastern tip of the New Guinea peninsula, he bought a ten-ton lugger and named it The Carib in honor of his time in the Caribbean. Remembering the tales of Captain Hill, his Cornish savior in Nicaragua, Henry sailed east toward the neighboring archipelagoes—the D’Entrecasteaux Group and the Louisiades, those exotic-sounding pinpoints raided by blackbirders a decade earlier when Henry farmed in Queensland. The former consisted of three or four high, rocky islands that thrust from the depths to great heights. The gradients were obscenely steep, ascending from four hundred to nine hundred feet in a mile, with scant flat land. The Louisiades were the polar opposite, a sprinkling of hundreds of small, low islands reaching east like a tentacle from the toe of New Guinea to Rossell and Sudest (now Taguta) islands deep in the South Pacific. Smack in their middle he found a lonely coral atoll called the Conflict Islands, named after an unlucky British warship that wrecked on a reef in its western extremity. In 1888, the year New Guinea was declared a British possession, a survey of the Louisiades noted that the Conflicts, “like the Cocos Islands, in the Indian Ocean . . . may, someday perhaps, be planted with cocoa nuts, and bring in a fine revenue as the Cocos Islands did.” This was Henry’s plan.
The Conflict Group was made up of 23 coral islands looped around a central lagoon that was five to seven miles wide by twelve miles long. There were two excellent channels into the lagoon, one on the east and the west, if anyone decided to visit—which no one really had. The island group was truly the middle of nowhere: eighty miles from the eastern tip of New Guinea, six hundred miles from Cairns in the northern tip of Australia. No regular shipping lanes crossed close. It even lay outside the path of tropical cyclones. The islands varied in size from one to twenty-four acres across; if they all were lumped together, they’d comprise a land mass one and a half times the size of Monaco. Henry settled on Itamarina, a six-acre island in the lagoon’s center encircled by a smaller inner reef. On a map, Henry’s new home resembled a castle wall, with a wide moat and inner keep. He’d curtained himself off from the world.
Like many wanderers, Henry dreamed of a South Seas paradise, especially after hearing Captain Hill’s stories of white beaches, carefree people, and cool trade winds. But the reality was antipodal, and Henry would have caught a glimmer of this during his disastrous years in Queensland. On most of these islands, explorers found that tribal warfare and cannibalism were not only part of life but a central part of some tribes’ religions. In the Louisiades, cannibalism was a reality, and the hatred left over from the raids of the blackbirders assured that Europeans were sometimes the meals.
Since Henry employed Kanakas on his farm on the Herbert River, he would have heard the bloody tale in 1878 of W. B. Ingham, a popular but unsuccessful Herbert River cockatoo farmer much like him. Ingham had turned beachcomber and bêche-de-mer fisher after his farm went bankrupt. Bêche-de-mer, better known today as sea slug or sea cucumber, was a profitable delicacy in China. As a police official pointed out, the “business is a dirty one but profitable, and seems to possess attractions for the lowest class of whites and Manilla [sic] men, who have no scruples whatever in dealing with their black employees.” One dove over the side of a boat into shark-infested lagoons to pluck the mollusks from the coral, and employers cared little about their divers’ exhaustion or fear. The Queensland government hired Ingham to cruise around the islands and gather information about the fisheries, and in December 1878, a group of Ingham’s “boys” threw him overboard as they floated off an island in the Louisiades. Ingham laughed at their high spirits and swam back to the boat. As he grasped the thwarts to pull himself up, his “boys” cut off his hands, then pulled him aboard to finish the job.
Ingham was so popular around the Herbert River that the main township was named after him. His death gave natives a demonic cast, reinforced two years later when parties of Chinese and European bêche-de-mer fishers were found similarly murdered. Several of these victims were brought to Queensland for burial, and their condition was so gruesome that Australians demanded that Great Britain annex New Guinea and the surrounding islands to protect peaceful fishermen.
Now Henry came to a place that no European had settled. On March 5, 1895, he signed a twenty-five-year lease at the rate of one pound per annum under British New Guinea’s Crown Lands Ordinance. In return, he’d grow sponge, cultivate pearl oysters, and harvest coconuts for copra. A clause gave him the right to purchase the Conflicts during the term of the lease. The terms were his most favorable yet, and he arranged it as he had in British Honduras—by making friends with the colonial governor, Sir William Macgregor, whose Handbook of Information for Intending Settlers in British New Guinea he’d read during his two years in London following the failure in Belize. Henry recruited Kanaka help from the surrounding islands, built a trading store and crude barracks on the central island of Itamarina, and cleared land for a plantation on Panasesa, one of the outside ring of islands looking west toward New Guinea.
Sometime between March 1895 and April 1896, he almost lost his land again over contractual details. According to a tale told to distant relatives, he’d overlooked a clause in his lease that stated that any unplanted island could be designated a reserve for islanders traveling in the area. A friendly trader told him that the government yacht Merrie England was on its way to his central island with just that purpose in mind. Henry and his Kanaka workers hopped in canoes and catamarans, paddled across the lagoon to his coconut plantation on Panasesa, loaded up on coconut seed, and spent the night by torchlight planting Itamarina. Shortly after dawn the Merrie England docked and officials confronted Henry. He showed them that Itamarina was, indeed, planted with coconut and was therefore exempt from the law.
The affair apparently stuck in the craw of the Port Moresby officials, for in April 1896, Governor Macgregor visited the Conflicts during his annual island tour to check on Wickham again. He found him ensconced on Itamarina, living in an open shed. He’d apparently seen worse on the islands, for he did not seem surprised. Henry had already started changing his plans, Macgregor wrote:
This gentleman has been making trial of the sponges found in the vicinity. He turns out a promising looking article, but its market value has not yet been ascertained. Recently he has been giving his attention to the planting of coconut trees—of which he has already put in several thousand.
He did not mention Violet, so in all likelihood she had not yet arrived. She lingered in London for a year, then came in late spring or early summer 1896. She found her husband in the Itamarina shed, surrounded by piles of black sponges. Henry’s initial response was one of shock; nothing was prepared. Three quarters of the shed was “roughly ceiled to make a loft or sleeping place reached by a rough ladder, about half the lower story floored in native fashion, a few inches from the ground, with split cane. Here I remained some months while a more permanent house was built on a neighboring island,” she said.
Violet was forty-six; her tanned and increasingly grizzled husband, fifty. Did Henry think they could go on like this indefinitely? Twenty-five years ago he strode into her father’s shop on Regent Street, and she’d been swept away. Boundless energy and confidence leaked from every pore. He’d been to the jungle, twice, and nearly died, but he always bounced back. Like a rubber ball. Her friends laughed, and all she could do was shake her head and laugh along. It was true. You simply couldn’t keep Henry Wickham down.
There’d never been a question that he loved her: He’d swim a shark-infested lagoon to be with her, live unconcerned in squalor until her arrival, then gaze around ashamed of his surroundings, and spend backbreaking hours just to make her comfortable. She loved him for that: loved him for his hopeless optimism despite the string of failures, for his naïve confidence that someday, if he just worked harder, he would prevail. His life wouldn’t make sense otherwise. But as much as he loved her, he loved his craving more. With each new failure, he’d become more intractable, convinced that his was the only way. Decoyed by the mirage, he’d gone too far, and she’d gone with him. Henry’s strength might be unending, but hers had limitations. They’d tilted together at Henry’s windmills for a quarter of a century, and with sadness she began to realize, as she gazed at Henry standing abashed among his stinking, blackened sponges, that she’d been defeated by this man.
She held on for another two and a half years, watching Henry bounce from scheme to scheme. First there were sponges, but their farming was more than Henry bargained for. They were gathered by two men in a dinghy diving from the side or using iron hooks attached to ten-to-twelve-foot poles. When the dinghy was full, they returned to the island and spread the sponges on a table in the sun for several days to allow the black gelatinous membrane covering the sponge to die and dry. Their house and stores on Itamarina always had a dead-fish smell, which never went away. After a few days in the sun, the sponges were placed in an enclosed “sponge kraal,” where they were washed by lapping water for another six days. They were beaten with sticks until the decayed outer cover dropped off. Then and only then did they resemble the amber-colored sponges that Violet knew from London’s stores. Greek sponge brokers sailed among the islands. They arranged his sponges into lots, keeping some and rejecting many. The automatic costs kicked in—½ percent for “wharfage,” five percent for “brokerage,” two percent for “drayage”—a total of 7½ percent for taking a sponge, and carting it away, and selling it. Henry decided sponging was unprofitable, so he went to the next best thing.
This was planting coconut palms, from which he sold copra, dried coconut meat used as a source of coconut oil. Ripe coconuts were split with a machete and laid out in the sun to dry, then the meat was scraped out and dried again on raised platforms to protect it from land crabs. This was pulverized with rollers, steamed and pressed at about 6,500 pounds per square inch. High-quality copra yielded about 60-65 percent coconut oil. What remained was called coconut oil cake and used as livestock feed. Since Henry could hire Kanaka farmers for five to ten shillings a month, he thought he could turn a profit, but the copra brokers took their percentages just like the sponge merchants, and Henry moved on to bêche-de-mer.
The sea slug was abundant in his lagoon and fetching high prices in China as an aphrodisiac, but Henry’s divers were very slow. He tried breeding oysters for mother-of-pearl shell, growing papaya trees and cardamom plants, and harvesting hawksbill turtles, but the only time his workers caught them was when they came ashore to lay eggs. “Then they turn it on its back and a half a dozen or so haul it home with songs of triumph such as I suppose they have used for their human captives,” Violet wrote, showing her lack of patience for the Louisiades and their people. “They make a fire on its breast plate and kill and cook it at the same time.”
All Henry needed, he told Violet, was more capital!—the mantra of his age. He’d steam back to London to sniff out investors, leaving Violet to manage affairs. He wanted a total of £22,000, added to his own personal investment of £2,000. With that he’d create his own trading empire in the South Seas. He’d build a steamer for £6,000 to haul cargo and passengers, plus a smaller one to collect exotic produce from the islands. He’d hire a hundred native workers, sailors for his ships, clerical workers, European overseers, scientific experts, and so on. His estimated profits on copra and pearl-shell would be £9,400 the first year, increasing to £26,100 by year three. The scheme would work, he promised, because nowhere else in the world did such conditions exist for raising mother-of-pearl. A South Sea investor named J. G. Munt heard Henry’s pitch and later described it as “nonsense.” The Conflicts were “not a locality where anyone would, or could, work Mother-of-Pearl for the reason that the tides or currents are far too strong,” he said. “What few shells are to be found are very inferior.”
The one thing Henry did produce in abundance was loneliness, and Violet sampled that in full. “During the whole time of my sojourn there I never saw another white woman or left these two islands” of Itamarina and Panasesa, she wrote. Except for Henry, she had no more than perfunctory contact with anyone. Expatriate society was ultraconservative. Cut off from the exhilarating change of the city, the residents developed a siege mentality, which included more stringent and unbreakable barriers between whites and “blacks” than any she’d ever seen. Planters took for granted their “right” to exploit cheap labor while bestowing on them the joys of civilization. “We expected to be respected, have privileges, be superior,” one colonial woman in New Guinea later said.
In return, we were the Rock on which such fragile structures as honesty, fair play, protectiveness, obligation were to be erected. Generally, we lived a life of natural apartheid, in which the native inhabitants went their way and we ours.
This meant that Violet rarely saw Europeans with whom she could relate. Those she saw were sponge brokers and copra buyers. Her contact with islanders was superficial or distant. In calm weather, the natives would canoe between islands or, on larger trading missions, lash eight or nine canoes athwart, plant two sails “shaped like the claws of a crab,” and put in at island after island, collecting tons of sago and other goods. They’d pull into Itamarina when they wanted water or tobacco, or when becalmed.
I did not come in contact with their family life or seen [sic] anything of the women, beyond the one or two who came ashore for water. They wore their hair in apparent ringlets, but when you get closer you see the ringlets are just matted locks. Their dress is composed of petticoats of cocoanut leaves bound round the waist. When they put on two or three of these skirts they look something like the old ballet girls. This is all except tightly fitting bracelets [woven] around the upper arm, in which they tuck anything they wish to carry, and perhaps a bead necklace. The men take pride in their appearance, they paint their faces and rub themselves with cocoanut oil and comb out their wool into most becoming, mop-like head dresses. Occasionally they shave it into eccentric shapes. They use bracelets like the women and put them to the same purpose, tie bracelets under their knees with hanging tossels of shells which rattle as they walk. They have a hole through the nose and when fully dressed wear a large crescent shaped piece of shell there. Both men and women have the ears pierced and stick all manner of things in them for ornaments.
She did not participate in any society; she only observed. In places like Port Moresby and the Solomon Islands, a strange tension evolved, amounting to sexual hysteria. The 1926 White Women’s Protection Ordinance carried the death penalty for rape and attempted rape, but its passage seemed based more on rumors of interracial lust than objective reality. By the 1930s the fear mutated to the absurd—an islander could receive 100-150 lashes for an imagined lewd glance, while “boy-proof” sleeping rooms, enclosed in heavy chicken wire, were installed at government expense in all houses where white women lived. But here on the Conflicts there wasn’t even eye contact that could be misinterpreted, and Violet wasn’t the sort to indulge in that kind of lunacy. But she was susceptible to loneliness, and the hermit’s life did strange things to people.
All she could do was stare to the west, where Port Moresby lay beyond the horizon. Maybe it was just as well she didn’t go. Although Port Moresby was dubbed “a quite civilized town” by promoters—a tropical London, with hotels, stores, reading rooms, and running water—in truth, said world traveler Henry O. Forbes, the town consisted of the original native village,
a few Government weatherboard buildings, a residence or two for the officials, the mission station, one store, a three-celled jail, and the Government printing office—which was the hotel—dotted anyhow along a couple of miles of shore. The “water supply” is a dribbling discharge from a . . . pipe, conducted for some hundred yards. . . .
Finally, she could take it no longer. One morning, “we woke to find our boys had gone off with one of the boats leaving only [Henry] and one Malay man to manage the large boat.” They took off after the thieves in the undermanned vessel, “and I was left alone for nineteen days not knowing but that they were wrecked, and wondering how many weeks or months before I would be rescued.”
Violet kept her fears to herself in her memoirs, but they are not hard to surmise. She knew that Henry might have fallen prey to shipwreck, drowning, sharks, or the tide, and she already had admitted her awareness of local cannibalism. In most cases, cannibal tales served as an “agenda” for the Great Powers to annex new lands: Those engaged in cannibalism were less than human and needed saving from themselves. In the Louisiades and New Guinea, however, cannibalism was not an unreasonable fear. She’d have known about poor beachcombing Ingham during her ordeal in Queensland. As late as 1901, the missionary James Chalmers and eleven others were last seen rowing up a mangrove creek on a densely wooded island in the Gulf of Papua when they vanished from sight forever. Seven weeks later an expedition learned their fate: When the missionaries had entered a Goacribari village, they had been stabbed with cassowary daggers, beheaded, cut up, mixed with sago, and eaten the same day.
Violet’s reaction when Henry finally returned was not recorded. But soon afterward, she gave her husband an ultimatum. It’s this place or me. I can’t live like this, she told him. He had to choose.
Back at home, the newspapers called this the Rubber Age. The world was mad about rubber, and Henry was half mad that he’d never be involved. It was better to hide away.
The bicycle craze had gripped the West during their time in British Honduras. Now, as they quarantined themselves in the Conflicts, the world entered the Age of the Automobile, the second great development to fuel the madness for rubber. Pneumatic tire design accompanied that of autos every step of the way, and soon the tires would be purchased by the millions. Rubber exports from the Amazon jumped from a yearly average of 9,386 metric tons in 1886-90 to 14,939 tons in 1891-95.
By the time Violet was ready to call it quits in the Conflicts, the United States was on its way to being the world’s largest consumer of rubber. Ransom E. Olds cranked out thousands of cars each year. Henry Ford was nine years away from producing the first inexpensive Model T. By the turn of the century, the auto industry was becoming one of the world’s most complex and interlinked industries, with hundreds of interdependent parts, and rubber was a great reason for that success. Tire and tube manufacturers would consume 60-70 percent of the rubber sent to the United States. Five major tire and rubber companies emerged in the three decades after 1870. North American rubber imports jumped from 8,109 tons in 1880 to 15,336 in 1890. From 1875 to 1900, in keeping with its sudden, surprising ascendance as a world power, the United States consumed half of all the rubber produced in the world.
And where were Henry’s seeds? Not only was he excluded from the profits, it was as if his seed theft had never occurred. It didn’t seem to matter. It was a failed enterprise that took the lives of his mother, sister, and others and seemed to illustrate the foolhardiness of dreams. By now, the story of Wickham’s hevea theft had filtered back to the Amazon, but not even the smallest ripple of worry spoiled the calm assurance of the Brazilian rubber men. They laughed at the early British attempts at domestication. The growers in Ceylon and Malaya who received the seeds soon after 1876 made a complete mess of their attempt to grow and tap rubber trees. “God has planted for us,” Brazilians boasted. If rubber trees were meant to grow in rows, God would have planted them that way. Statistics seemed to support their lack of concern. In the first year of the new century, four tons of plantation rubber from the East trickled into the market. That same year, exporters shipped 26,750 tons from wild trees.
This was the belle époque of the Amazon, the decades from 1880 to 1910 that are still nostalgically called the Boom. By 1907, as many as five thousand new men a week flooded into the valley past Santarém. It was the biggest boom since the Klondike, a black gold bonanza that ignited the economies of Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. In 1906 alone, the £14 million in rubber that came down the Rio Negro paid off 40 percent of Brazil’s annual debt. It was said that 100- 300 million virgin rubber trees still existed in the unexplored forest, scattered across an area of two million square miles. Although that sounds like another dream of El Dorado, it was a fact that in each of those three decades, Brazilian output alone rose by ten thousand tons. The Amazon held the world’s only viable supply of hevea, no matter what the pathetic Wickham had done—and hevea was the gold standard now. Those who didn’t participate in the Boom were foolish. Even the great steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had lamented, “I ought to have chosen rubber” instead of steel.
There were no labor problems either. Although conditions for seringuieros had grown ever more degrading, new tappers arrived. One effect of the Boom was a settlement of the valley like nothing seen since the original Portuguese conquest. Thousands of small expeditions ascended hundreds of small tributaries, searching for undiscovered trees.
But each new surge up the river made seringuieros more dependent on the patrão. The cost of living in Pará and Manaus was two to four times greater than in London and New York, but the aviadors compensated by selling ever higher down the line. At each link of the chain, practices were structured to drive up costs. Brokers on the Amazon charged higher prices than their counterparts in London and New York. The steamship companies charged whatever they wanted for shipment. The tax on exported rubber was exorbitant and drove up costs by as much as a third. The manager sold supplies to the seringuiero for a final profit of 50-200 percent, and the isolated seringuiero had no choice but to buy. His economic helplessness made him the victim of every swindle imaginable. Beans and rice were sold at seven times their price in Rio. The “trade gun” became notorious—a muzzle-loader with a wire-wound barrel, which would unwind and fall apart after fifty shots. The gun sold so well that it was made in Europe specifically for the Amazon. In some distant estradas, food was rotten and swarmed with maggots by the time it reached the workers, but the seringuiero either bought the spoiled meat or starved.
Legally, there was no obligation for a seringuiero to remain; he could pick up and go at any time. But managers had ways to ensure that their labor force stayed. They built their base camps in strategic locations so no tapper could slip past unnoticed. They hired gunmen to check on the ranchos. In Peru and Bolivia a fugitive could be returned to his master until he liquidated the debt; he could also be sold to another manager for the price of the debt, and this “truck system” of debt peonage was widespread. Because the rubber houses drew labor from the parched wastelands of the northeast, unhappy seringuieros were far from home with nowhere to run. They came to the Amazon by the shipload, thousands of hard, desperate men willing to bet everything on “Pará fine.” By the peak of the Boom in 1910, an estimated 131,000-149,000 men were tapping from 21.4 million hevea trees on 24,000-27,000 estradas deep in the Amazon.
It was a changed world from when Henry tapped goma. He’d been an independent owner-operator, a posseiro, as had generations of caboclos before him. By law, the tapper was supposed to receive 60 percent of the value of the rubber he produced, and the average tapper produced about 1,750 pounds a year. But there were a number of ways to separate a tapper from his money, and the seringuiero who eked out enough to cover his living expenses without going into debt was a wise, or lucky, man. By the turn of the century, the aviador was a big-time capitalist, hiring anywhere from two hundred to five hundred men and shipping them into the field at his expense, then advancing each tapper £40-£70 in provisions, arms, medicine, clothing, and other basics, which he priced at 30-40 percent over what he paid. He was in turn exploited by the wholesale merchants in Pará and Manaus, who gave him credit up to £40,000. These merchants were funded by investors and speculators in London and New York, who received their payment in rubber at season’s end.
For the men at the pyramid’s base, the attrition was frightful. A January 1899 report by the U.S. Consul in Pará said that for every hundred new recruits, seventy-five would die, desert, or leave because of disease. A patrão in the Upper Amazon could plan on losing a minimum of five out of twenty-one workers. Death rates as high as 50 percent were recorded among tappers in Bolivia.
Even Henry would not have been blind enough to tap rubber now. And he never had the capital necessary to employ so many men. The closest he might have come was to let the Indians gather for him, as they had for the traders in Boim. The western side of the Tapajós was sewn up by the Boim trading houses, but on the eastern shore, tributaries like the Cupari were open for business, stretching back to the forested table-land as far as the Cuara du Sol and beyond. This was the home of the Mundurucú Indians who’d saved Henry’s life when he nearly chopped off his foot. A 1912 survey of land claims on the Tapajós listed “400 tame Mundurucu Indians” who’d been coaxed into gathering rubber. Though they were often cheated, they were not forced at gunpoint to collect rubber as in some of the horror stories filtering from the Upper Amazon. Instead, they wanted the goods rubber could buy—the steel machetes, iron pots, and dyed cloth they could not produce on their own. Their conquest was by seduction, the same strategy employed by the legendary Crisóstavo Hernández. Although the rubber trade destroyed their culture, it did so quietly, by paying tribesmen to spend their time gathering rubber rather than in traditional farming or hunting. The Boom was relentless as it crept up the most remote tributaries, sniffed out rubber, promised a life of ease.
What if Violet and Henry had stayed? They might have become rich, like some of the confederados who’d held on. Judge Mendenhall built his lonely plot of land at Piquiá-tuba into a “model, prosperous plantation.” The Jenningses and Vaughans intermarried, raised rubber and sugar, and were on the way to owning a two-thousand-acre cattle ranch outside Santarém. A “Dr. Pitts” would write to the Mobile Daily Register that he raised sugarcane, cotton, papaya, squash, five kinds of sweet potato, Irish potatoes, and a variety of beans. “I have made enough to live well on and am better pleased than ever,” he said. The confederados who stayed introduced the plow, harrow, spade, and rake to the area. Some Brazilians copied their techniques, and they fared well too.
None did better than Harriette Jane’s student David Riker. In 1888, Brazil decreed unconditional emancipation, ending slavery—the reason Riker’s father had settled there. But David was of a different generation and considered himself Brazilian. The old conflicts and prejudices meant nothing to him. When his father had railed about the mixing of races, David had listened respectfully, but he didn’t really care. He’d married a mixed-blood Brazilian woman from the wastelands of Ceará and eventually had fourteen children with her. He expanded his father’s cattle ranch at Diamantino into a huge landholding; in 1884 he planted rubber, and by 1910 this had grown significantly. That year he sold out to a consortium of English investors, who incorporated it as the Diamantino Rubber Co., Ltd. Riker sold it for six thousand dollars, a fortune at the time. He retired, at age forty-nine, a rich man.
Hundreds of similar plantation companies sprang up across the world. They were promoted haphazardly, managed by men who knew little or nothing about rubber, and described to buyers as if they’d existed for years. As the price of rubber continued up, any investment seemed a sure thing. In the 1860s, rubber in the United States sold for six to ten cents a pound. Over the next thirty years it gradually rose to about sixty cents. In 1903-04 the average price was still about 68.2 cents per pound. A plantation company like Tapajós Pará Rubber Forests Ltd. was typical: Incorporated in 1898, its directors included a London merchant, a coffee planter, a printer, and an accountant. Since it never appeared to do any business, it probably never existed anywhere except on paper, like many such companies. As quietly as it started, it folded in 1901.
In the summer of 1905, the madness escalated. The price of rubber hit $1.50 a pound and stuck, something no one had ever seen. In the Stock Exchanges of New York and London the effect was electrifying. Capital bottled up in England during the Boer War sought a release; in the United States, the Rubber Boom coincided with an economic expansion so rapid and comprehensive that by 1900 the market was glutted with cash for investment and speculation. To attract money from smaller investors, plantation companies offered “low denominational shares,” or shares going for under a pound or a dollar, an unheard-of offering. Lured by the gimmick, the public became unhinged. Everyone wanted a share in rubber, but so many companies had formed that they could only make a profit if rubber’s selling price stayed at this unnatural high.
The “bubble” covered the world. Anywhere on the planet that a plant wept latex, stock companies followed. They formed to harvest Landolphia vine in the Congo, Ficus elastica in Liberia, Ule (Castilloa elastica) in Mexico, and plants in the recently conquered Philippines. Those companies that failed to meet the requirements of the New York or London Stock Exchanges pursued the new and unsophisticated investor: the teacher, waiter, and widow. Journalists were hired to write copy that sold confidence instead of value. This became the age of the paid endorsement, as prominent businessmen, politicians, and even a former treasury secretary sold their names to promote bad deals. Enormous profits were promised. A monthly investment of $5-$150 assured an annual income of $500-$5,000, promoters said.
As in so many speculative bubbles, thousands were ruined. A typical hoax involved the Peru Pará Rubber Company, with a reported capital of $3 million and an “unlimited” number of virgin trees growing in undisclosed parts of the Amazon. In 1905, ads in Chicago newspapers promised dividends of 75 percent for life. Unsurprisingly, no one collected. Another company sold $250,000 in worthless stock to Philadelphia teachers, who lost everything. Pensions, trusts, and holding companies were weakened by their rubber-stock investments. Even managers of widows’ funds, believed the most conservative investors, were fooled. A famous story concerned Lucille Wetherall, who, like thousands others, lost her life savings when in 1900 she invested seven thousand dollars in the Vista Hermosa plantation in Mexico, chartered in her state of Maine. Later that year the company went into receivership, ruining 1,800 stockholders while preserving the interests of company insiders holding A-grade bonds. But Lucy Wetherall was made of stern stuff and gained her place in investment history by showing up at the plantation and demanding residence on the property that had backed her securities. She managed the failing plantation until forced to flee the Revolution in 1914.
Nowhere was the money and madness more apparent than in Manaus, the rubber capital of the world. Unlike the coffee barons and other commodity tycoons, the rubber barons did not live on their estates. Instead, due to its central location, most lived in Manaus, and extraordinary concentrations of wealth came to what had been the small jungle town. In 1892, the republic’s youngest-ever state governor, the diminutive Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro, swept to power and transformed the city with the profits of the Boom. A 20-percent export tax on every kilo of rubber enriched the state’s treasury by as much as £1.6 million annually. From the malarial forests emerged a city of hospitals, banks, office blocks, a £500,000 Palace of Justice, and forty-five schools. Two million gallons of pure water flowed daily through the city’s water system. Three hundred citizens were linked by the first telephone network in the Amazon.
The first order of business was to transform the harbor. The Manaus Harbor Co., Ltd., composed of Brazilian investors, English and Brazilian steamship companies, an English rubber firm, and others, was signed to build a customs house and quay along the Rio Negro—a problem, since that river rose and fell as much as sixty feet each year. The solution lay in building a floating dock equipped with huge iron air tanks. A four-hundred-foot platform connected the pontoons to the iron warehouse on shore, and merchandise moved back and forth along cables. Manaus’s floating dock was the largest in the world, capable of unloading three tons of cargo per minute. The year 1910 set a record for ship movement at Manaus, unequaled for another fifteen years: Approximately 1,675 oceangoing steamships, river launches, and sailboats called at port that year.
But the floating dock was not the only sign of wealth and power. Bottle-green electric streetcars operated in Manaus before any other city in South America, looping sixteen miles from dawn to dusk through the city to the jungle, then back to the praça. The line was subsidized by Charles R. Flint, whose United States Rubber Company purchased a quarter of the city’s rubber. Roads were built, but since no paving stones were quarried in the valley, special Plimsoll cobblestones were shipped from France. The customs house, or Alfândaga, was modeled after Delhi’s, prefabricated in England, and assembled on the spot. Public gardens were sprinkled with fountains in the form of gold cherubs. Telephones, telegraphs, and electricity were installed.
The world was reflected here. English, French, German, and Portuguese managers directed rubber operations; Spaniards, Italians, Lebanese, and Syrians owned small businesses. One could buy Smith and Wesson revolvers, Omega watches, Scandinavian butter, Black and White whiskey, Underwood typewriters, and Parfum Lubin. A jeweler estimated that, in 1907, the city’s per capita diamond consumption was the largest in the world. The British pound sterling was used as freely as the Brazilian milreis, but French style shaped the tastes of the rubber barons and their wives. The leading stores catering to women bore French names: La Ville de Paris, Au Bon Marché, Parc Royal. There were five “houses of diversion” for vaudeville and movies, projected by the latest Edison cameras. Every Sunday, the Derby Club held horse races at the Prado Amazonense, with five heats and heavy purses for winners. The rubber barons built private palaces out of Italian marble, then furnished them from England and France and hung the ceilings with crystal chandeliers. Their linen came from Ireland. Grand pianos stood in their salons. One baron bought a yacht, another a lion, a third watered his horse on champagne. Jewelry was imported in bulk, diamonds lavished on prostitutes imported from the best European bordellos. Police believed that two out of every three houses in Manaus was a brothel.
Stories of the barons’ profligacy were legion. One “colonel,” as they liked to be called, bought an entire consignment of thirty-six hats destined for a local merchant, chose five for himself and threw the rest in the river. Another paid four hundred pounds for a ride in the city’s only Mercedes Benz limousine: he picked up his mistress, then rode three hundred yards from the theater to a bar. At the height of the Boom, 133 rubber firms and buyers were represented in the city’s Rubber Exchange, and most were foreign firms, like Dusendchon, Zargas, & Co.; Kingdom & Co.; and Anderson Warehouses. The leader of this mercantile polyglot was Waldeman Scholz, president of the powerful Commercial Association. Scholz gazed over his empire with a round pale face, receding hairline and pince-nez. He was the city’s second largest exporter of rubber and imported a wide variety of goods from European firms. A local paper described him as a man of “clear vision, incomparable energy, and extraordinary activity.” He built for himself the finest house in the city, which is occupied today by the State Governor.
Manaus’s crowning glory was the Teatro Amazonas, the famous opera house, inspired by the Opéra-Garnier in Paris and built completely of imported materials. Funded entirely from rubber profits, its construction lasted from 1891 to 1896 and cost $2 million, a cosmological sum for the time. Even Violet had heard of it. She would have loved to see it, but she was in the South Pacific, waking each morning to the smell of rotting sponge. Even for Manaus, the Opera House was out of scale, rising above the river like a huge Gothic cathedral that dwarfed some medieval town. Its green, blue, and yellow dome was laid with thirty-six thousand Alsatian ceramic tiles acquired from Maison Koch Frères in Paris. The floor was paved in marble, and sixteen Corinthian columns lined the foyer. The theater itself was built in the shape of a lyre, with three rising tiers of box seats and a ceiling painted to resemble the base of the Eiffel Tower. There were 701 seats: since the city’s turn-of-the century population was about forty thousand, this meant it could hold nearly 2 percent of Manaus’s residents under its dome. For opening night, some of Europe’s most famous performers were booked at vast fees to brave malaria and abandon all other engagements for months to perform in the middle of the Amazon. Tradition holds that Enrico Caruso sang in the fantastic auditorium, that Sarah Bernhardt performed, and Anna Pavlova danced, but all are unsupported by opera house records. They were apparently sought out, but could not be coaxed to the jungle for fear of death and disease.
By the turn of the century, two great streams of rubber flowed into American and European factories from the two greatest river basins in the world. Each year, approximately twenty-five thousand tons of rubber came from the Amazon and another five thousand tons from the Congo. The horrors in both regions were so similar that they seemed part of a continuum.
In 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium emerged, under the guise of philanthropy, as the sole owner and ruler for the next twenty years of the Congo Free State, an area as large as Europe. The purported reason for this masterstroke was to improve the moral and material conditions of the native, “a crusade worthy of this century of progress,” Leopold said. The Congo’s riches—its copper, ivory, diamonds, and, above all else, rubber—were the real targets. The rise of the bicycle and auto industries made rubber the most lucrative resource in Leopold’s realm. Although the Congo produced a second-grade rubber, extracted by cutting down and smashing the plentiful Landolphia vine, so great was the need that manufacturers snapped it up immediately.
The method of collection was designed more for instant output than the continued life of the source, or the collector. “Each town and district is forced to bring in a certain quantity (of rubber) to the headquarters of the Commissaire every Sunday,” wrote the American missionary John Murphy, in what would be a typical report.
It is collected by force; the soldiers drive the people into the bush. If they will not go, they are shot down, and their left hands cut off and taken to the Commissaire. . . . [T]hese hands, the hands of men, women and children, are placed in rows before the Commissaire who counts them to see that the soldiers have not wasted cartridges. The Commissaire is paid a commission of about 1 d. a lb. on all the rubber he gets. It is therefore in his interest to get all the rubber he can.
In 1896, the British consul recounted how he’d been sitting with the commissaire in the Upper Congo one evening when a group of “sentries” passed, fresh from their pursuit of escapees. The sergeant held aloft a necklace of human ears to illustrate the results of the hunt; the commissaire congratulated his subordinate on a job well done.
Free trade became publicly equated with evil. It had been the battle cry for civilizing the Congo, but now, in the name of profit, mass murder was condoned. Immediately after Leopold took over, the missionary Holman Bentley exulted, “The most rigid injunctions enforcing free trades, absolute religious liberty and freedom of worship are guaranteed. We cannot fail to see the hand of God in this result.” Within fifteen years, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declared profit the True God:
[I]t is the call to brutality which comes from above; the urgent call for rubber, more rubber, higher dividends, at any price of native labour and native coercion, driving the local agents on to torture and murder. . . . Is there anywhere any shadow of justification for the hard yoke which these helpless folk endure? Again we turn to the Treaty which regulates the situation. ‘All the Powers . . . pledge themselves to watch over the preservation of the native populations and the improvement of their moral and material conditions of existence.’ And this pledge is headed, ‘In the name of Almighty God.’
The key to exposing the situation in the Congo was British diplomat Roger Casement’s forty-page white paper, written for the government in 1903. Casement’s grim tales of murder, mutilation, abduction, and beatings by soldiers of Leopold’s Congo Administration were so incendiary that the British government tried to keep it secret; it was only released in 1904 after a struggle. Casement’s investigations confirmed the horrific accounts of missionaries and journalists. The difference was that he took names. In one instance, he wrote, “Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the lake district:
One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. . . . In both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.
The climax came in 1908 when international pressure forced Belgium to wrest the Free State from the private ownership of King Leopold, but by then the damage was done. During the fifteen years of Leopold’s stewardship, the population in the Congo Free State dropped from 25 million to 10 million—15 million dead for approximately 75,000 tons of rubber. That equalled one life per every 5 kilograms, a little more than the amount used in one automobile tire.
In 1907, similar evils came to light on the Upper Amazon. The Putumayo is a vast area around a river of the same name, which runs through territory that was disputed between Peru and Colombia; the river joins the Amazon near the western border of Brazil. In many ways, the revelations about this “Devil’s Paradise” were merely part of a larger continuum. During the Boom of 1890-1912, small wars of conquest erupted throughout the Amazon, but now the conquerors were rubber men. The Boom struck the Indian tribes their most destructive blow since the arrival of the Jesuits. Slavers rounded up entire tribes and forced them to work on rubber plantations. When some rose up and killed their masters, massacres and atrocities exploded on both sides.
What made the Putumayo different was its extreme isolation. There was no competition or ameliorating influence when the family of rubber baron Julio Cesar Araña established its empire. Although many latex-bearing trees grew in the Putumayo, the main source was Castilloa elastica, a tree that is destroyed during tapping. Unlike the long-term process involved with hevea, the production of caucho from Castilloa was quick, efficient, and designed for maximum profit. Since a tapper destroyed one tree and proceeded to the next, production could go on all year—an assembly line of rubber more in keeping with modern demands. As a British Select Committee charged with judging the atrocity would later note, “The insatiable desire to obtain the greatest production in the least time and with the least possible expense was undoubtedly one of the causes of the crime.”
The scandal began in the northwest Amazon boomtown of Iquitos with a series of articles in the muckraking newspaper La Sanción. Editor Benjamín Saldaña Rocca accused the Casa Arana of systematically employing terror and torture against its native work force for higher profits. The Indians worked day and night; they were starved and sold at market. They were beaten, mutilated, tortured, and killed as punishment for “laziness” or the amusement of bored overseers. Women and girls were raped, the elderly were killed when they could no longer work, and children’s brains were bashed out against trees. Moreover, Arana registered his Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in London, thus linking Britain, the world’s leading antislavery nation, with a firm that was enslaving Indians.
La Sanción did not circulate outside Iquitos, however, and it would take American adventurer Walter E. Hardenburg to bring the story to the world. In 1907, while drifting through the Putumayo, he ended up in a gun battle between Peruvian and Colombian rubber traders. He was nearly killed, and a friend from upriver died. Hardenburg was taken prisoner by the Casa Arana and for the next few months taught English in Iquitos in an attempt to earn his passage home. During his stay, he read the paper’s allegations and collected further horrors on his own.
When Hardenburg arrived in London, he contacted Rev. John H. Harris, secretary of the Quaker-sponsored Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. Harris sent him to the crusading London magazine Truth, which carried Hardenburg’s article under the title “The Devil’s Paradise: A British Owned Congo.” The reference to the Congo stung badly, but it was apt. Arana owned 8 million acres on the Putumayo. His 1,500 armed section chiefs and their 600 hired gunmen were paid only by commission on the amount of rubber they sent downstream, thus ensuring systematic brutality. Worse, Arana had manipulated the British cult of free trade like a maestro, equipping his company with a tame set of British directors who allowed easy access to London funding. This was a British company involved in the evil. Even its Barbadian overseers were British subjects.
Now the story circulated worldwide, not just in a remote part of the Amazon. Hardenburg’s account was even more horrific than that in La Sanción. The Huitoto, Boras, Andokes, and Ocainas were flogged till their bones showed. They were denied medical treatment, left to die, then eaten by the company’s dogs. They were castrated. They were tortured by fire, by water, by being tied head-down, and by crucifixion. Their ears, fingers, arms, and legs were lopped off with machetes. Managers used them for target practice and set them afire with kerosene on the Saturday before Easter as human fireworks for the Saturday of Glory. Whole tribal groups were exterminated if they failed to produce sufficient rubber. At one point, a manager called for hundreds of Indians to gather at his station.
He grasped his carbine and machete and began the slaughter . . . leaving the ground covered with over 150 corpses, among them men, women, and children. Bathed in blood and appealing for mercy, the survivors were heaped with the dead and burned to death, while the manager shouted, “I want to exterminate all the Indians who do not obey my orders about the rubber that I require them to bring in.”
The climax of Hardenburg’s story focused on that crucial moment when Indians brought rubber in from the forest to be weighed. The Indians were so terrified by their treatment that if the scale did not register the required ten kilos, they threw themselves on the ground to await punishment. Then the manager or his lieutenant
advances, bends down, takes the Indian by the hair, strikes him, raises his head, drops it face downward on the ground, and after the face is beaten and kicked and covered with blood, the Indian is scourged. This is when they are treated best, for often they cut them to pieces with machetes.
Those who fought back had their limbs hacked off, then were thrown alive into the fire. In the rubber station of Matazas, Hardenburg said, “I have seen Indians tied to a tree, their feet about half a yard above the ground. Fuel is then placed below, and they are burnt alive. This is done to pass the time.”
Once more, Roger Casement was sent in by the British Government. Once more, he confirmed the accounts, with more details. Of the 1,600 Indians he saw on his 1910 journey, 90 percent showed scars from being flogged. Beating wasn’t enough: The lash was combined with near-drowning, “designed,” Casement wrote, “to just stop short of taking life while inspiring the acute mental fear and inflicting much of the physical agony of death.” Casement heard of little boys who watched as their mothers were beaten for “just a few strokes” to make them better workers. When Casement asked a Barbadian whether he knew it was wrong to torture Indians, he replied “that a man might be a man in Iquitos, but ‘you couldn’t be a man up there.’ ”
Casement’s report led to commissions. The Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company was dissolved and an order issued for Arana’s arrest. By now the rubber baron had escaped to Iquitos, where he was untouchable, even hailed for bringing prosperity to that remote land. When the company resumed business, it cut back on the overt bloodshed but retained flogging as a motivator, a practice that remains on the river today. From 1900 to 1912, the Putumayo’s total output of four thousand tons of rubber cost the lives of thousands of Indians. The population dropped by at least thirty thousand.
Years later, an Indian tribesman would tell a reporter for the Viennese newspaper Neus Wiener Tagblatt that, “Rubber has taken the blood, the health, and the peace of our people.” Tribes entered into debt and could never get out. Those who ran were beaten; those who didn’t died. “Liquor consoled us, helped us to forget our troubles. The debt remained.”
This was the world that Henry would not confront in his island hideaway. In early 1899, Violet could no longer bear the hermit’s life and told him he must choose between her and his self-destructive dreams. He chose, and Violet left. After all the wandering, hardship, and danger, he could not see, or admit, how good a friend she’d been. In fact, she’d been his only constant friend. She left and eventually settled in Bermuda, never to see him again.
For a short while longer, he stayed in the Conflict Islands. He seemed to realize that, with Violet gone, he could no longer run his “plantation” alone. Soon after her departure, he left for London, seeking a new partner in his schemes. But no one was as patient as Violet. After four months of negotiation he agreed, in June 1899, to transfer all interest to the financial firm of L. F. Sachs of London. Sachs paid him £15,000 for the title and property, and Henry retained his post as resident manager, with payment of 10 percent of profits in addition to his salary. He returned to the Conflicts with a “Dr. Jameson,” an expert on fisheries from the Science College of South Kensington. Henry was in charge of copra, Dr. Jameson in charge of pearl-shell.
But all did not go well. He quarreled with Jameson, and a final argument was so heated that the scientist left, declaring to Sachs that they could not be reconciled. In fact, the whole deal with Sachs had fallen through. In 1901, Henry returned to London and throughout the year tried to find a buyer for the islands, or at least someone to provide extra capital. In 1902, he returned to the Conflicts with a “Captain Holton” and three others, including Arthur Watts Allen, a distant cousin by marriage.
Allen was twenty-three, a freshly minted Cambridge graduate inspired by Henry’s exotic tales. In August 1902, Henry borrowed money from Allen’s family to finance his trading schemes, apparently with the caveat that he take young Arthur along. In his memoirs, written near the end of his life, Allen describes the beginning, at least, as an idyllic South Seas cruise. With the investment from the Allens, Henry was able to buy the freighter he’d always dreamed about. He filled the Arthur with trade goods like rice, bolts of calico, and Jews’ harps, which his Papuan laborers loved. He brought staple foods, oakum for caulking decks, one hundred machetes, and a deep sea diver’s suit with a hand-operated air pump and a complete set of hoses, all to reenergize his plans to harvest sponge, mother-of-pearl, and bêche-de-mer. They repaired and improved the houses on Itamarina and Panasesa. In addition to coconuts, he tried to cultivate bananas and papayas. In the evening, Henry sat on the deck, smoking pipefuls of trade tobacco as he regaled young Allen with tales of his travels, including that of the rubber theft. Henry’s personality was unique, exhibiting an “absence of aggressiveness,” Allen would write. “He envied nobody, coveted nothing, lived simply and frugally.”
It seemed a dreamlike state, a paradise painted so long ago in Nicaragua when Captain Hill played the same role to the captivated young Wickham. But once again, there were problems. We do not know the details, only the results. Things were not as idyllic as young Allen described, and at the end of the year, a deal was finally made. Henry would receive three hundred pounds annually—provided he leave his appropriately named island paradise and never show his face there again.
