Manaus is haunted by every feverish dream that has flitted through the shadows of this most enormous of the world’s rainforests ever since Orellana, more than four hundred years ago, after straying away from one of Pizarro’s expeditions, made his first desperate journey downriver. On the heels of the slavers and the prospectors for diamonds and the placerminers for gold came the seringueiros: the exploitation and the peonage and the quick riches of the great rubber boom. Borracha is still a word to conjure with.
An Englishman named Henry Wickham, whose name is a hissing among the riversettlements, smuggled seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, the wild rubber tree, out to the Malay States. Intelligent selection produced improved varieties and Amazonia lost its monopoly of the world market. The exploitation of Amazonian rubber strangled in its own ineptitude. Cultivated rubber soon proved it could outsell the wild product even in its home port. The production of synthetics, spurred on by the exigencies of the Second World War, relegated the natural product to a still more subsidiary position; but today an increasing demand, resulting from inordinately increased production in the automotive and electrical goods industries, has opened a new market for various natural rubber, latex, and gutta-percha products.
The challenge of Amazon rubber appealed to Henry Ford’s imagination. He was bound he’d find a way to cultivate the rubber tree in its natural home, but his carefully planned and segregated settlements; Fordlândia, and Belterra on the Rio Tapajós, have hardly left any more trace than the huts of the slaphappy seringueiros who plodded through the forests gathering the “tears” of the wild rubbertrees.
Ford’s was only one of a hundred projects that the junglevines have overgrown. The vast effort expended in the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, which was to link Amazonas with Bolivia and the Pacific coast, though trains do occasionally run on it, has left little behind except legend. Stories of failure in face of the rainforest hang about every streetcorner in Manaus. The city’s history is of great plans gone awry. Even the building of the new airconditioned hotel, which was to have brought in the benefits of the international tourist trade, ended in the bankruptcy of the promoter. Already the new hotel wears the air of having seen better days.
Projects … Projects
In the bar and in the patio of the Hotel Amazonas, cooled by the forced draft from a large ventilating fan, men sit in their shirtsleeves and talk excitedly of the great future of the state of Amazonas. The old bogeys of malaria and yellow fever have been driven back up into the most distant tributaries. Hygiene will do the rest.
Some airline should buy this hotel and renovate it and channel the flow of tourists with money to spend into sport-fishing on the rivers, and exploration, so easy with proper motorboats, of the watery wilderness.
They rattle off lists of minerals and their locations: gold, nickel, hematite, manganese, tin, bauxite, tungsten. Companies are promoting the cultivation of the Brazil nut and the palms and other trees that produce vegetable oils. There are said to be a hundred and nineteen varieties susceptible of exploitation.
Agronomists are catching fire at the first rumors of a technical breakthrough on the production of fertilizers suitable for the special conditions of the tropical rainforest. Locked in certain crumbling formations of rock in the worndown mountain ranges of eastern Brazil there is said to be enough available minerals in a substance called biotite to revolutionize tropical agriculture. In northern Australia the experiment stations are turning under a nitrogenproducing plant named Indigofera that may solve the problem of nitrogen.
Agricultural colonies have been successful in the river valleys of Mato Grosso and Goiás. Why not turn the surplus population of the barren northeast into Amazonas? With proper farming and public health the merest corner of Amazonas could support a population equal to the present population of the entire nation.
While they talk they eat toasted Brazil nuts. Nothing better. Why not can them and ship them to New York and make a fortune?
The city of Manaus, when you walk around by day, does show a few signs of new construction. A new electric light plant, which is to operate on crude oil brought in from Venezuela and Peru, is about to go into operation to furnish muchneeded power and even light for the city streets.
The explanation of why this plant had to be bought entire was not without interest. A good deal of the component machinery could have been manufactured in Brazil, but the result of the laws passed by the federal congress seeking to insure the use of Brazilmade products was that if any item were bought in Brazil the whole inventory of things that had to be bought abroad: generators, various sorts of piping and tubing, copper wire and all the rest, would have had to be approved item by item by the interested government bureaus. Every purchase would be endlessly obstructed by the appropriate bureaucrats. The result would have been interminable delay. To buy an entire plant abroad only one authorization was necessary. A neat case of selfdefeating legislation.
A thoroughly uptodate factory newly installed produces laminated veneer woods. There German and Czechoslovakian machinery is powered by American furnaces. A nearby jutemill has just doubled its capacity. Each of these projects has brought in a group of foreign engineers to supervise the new installations. There aren’t enough Brazilian engineers, and those who are competent would rather work in the cosmopolitan regions of Rio and São Paulo. In spite of themselves the imported engineers catch the speculative fever.
A tall young Hungarian working on the generators at the electric light plant could talk of nothing but the bauxite and manganese he’s found on his wife’s ranch in Amapá at the northern mouth of the Amazon and his vast catches of fish, trolling up the Rio Negro north of Manaus, every afternoon after work.
The pleasantest part of Manaus is a region of gardens and candycolored villas which rambles among the hills that rise behind the old town. In these latitudes even the elevation of a couple of hundred feet above the river brings a noticeable freshness to the air. A new hardtop road extends between gardens, plantations of pineapple and sugarcane and shady mango groves, out into the sandy redsoiled uplands.
Since it’s a fine Sunday morning the road is full of small cars and families on bicycles or on foot headed out for the picnic grounds and swimming holes improvised wherever the road crosses a clear stream. Every rustcolored sandy beach is full of bathers, brown amid the vivid greens of mangoes and banana trees. We pass a nightclub where roulettewheels, supposed to be illegal in Brazil, spin undisturbed by the local authorities.
After the baths and the resorts, the road cuts through rolling hills planted with experimental groves of rubber trees grafted with new varieties imported from Africa and the Far East. Here, we are told, the present state governor, still hopeful in the face of the failure of the largescale experiments of the Ford Company years ago, is promoting a fresh effort to put Amazon rubber cultivation on a commercial basis.
Beyond the rubber plantations the homesteaders begin. Wherever a new road opens in Brazil a band of settlement spreads out along it. Here settlers are encouraged to build themselves houses and to clear small farms on six and a half acre tracts with a good wide frontage on the road. If the planting meets the requirements the settlers are supposed to get title to the land with the lapse of a year.
Clearing land in these parts is a rough business. We heard the same story from Iquitos on. Everything favors the growth of trees over other types of vegetation. Clearing a small patch is long and tedious, even with a bulldozer. It is doubtful whether it is worth the effort and expense. If, as in most cases, a man has only his own two arms and an axe and machete, about the best he can do is burn the underbrush and let the big trees lie where they fall. Grubbing with his machete or a long brushhook he’ll plant corn or manioc in the scorched loam. Chemical fertilizers are unobtainable and even if they could be had the types used in regions of moderate rainfall would wash away with the first tropical downpour. Often, after the tremendous labor of clearing, the patch will only yield one crop because whatever plantfoods there were in the soil will have been dissipated by the continual rains. The procedure is to let the land grow up after harvesting and to go to work to make another clearing.