Fordlandia (18 page)

The rebellion broke out in 1835, when thousands of
mestizos
,
mulattos
, Africans, and Indians marched on Belém, which before it would be celebrated for its tropical Beaux Arts buildings and boulevards was associated with another French tradition: revolution. The ranks of the insurgents came from the city’s majority destitute residents, who lived in the adobe and wood-planked hovels,
cabanas
, which gave the rebellion its name. The red-shirted rebels declared the city independent and ran it for a year, emptying prisons, outlawing forced labor of all kind, distributing the wealth of merchants, setting up a communal food distribution system, and terrorizing landlords and merchants, especially if they were Portuguese. Beneficiaries of what a Prussian prince then touring the region called “the fruits of ceaseless oppression,” the Portuguese were known by a set of regionally specific derogatory names, including
caiado
(“chalk skin”) and
caramuru
(“fish face”). The white-faced cebus monkey was popularly known as the
macaco português
. The British navy helped Brazil’s newly independent federal government blockade the city, yet it still took troops more than a year to retake Belém. The insurgents were finally forced to give up the city, but the rebellion spread throughout the vast interior, as far west as Manaus and deep into the Amazon’s many tributaries, including the Tapajós.
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Martial law was declared throughout the lower Amazon, and soldiers hunted down the revolutionaries, now joined by rural African and indigenous slaves, with a vengeance that made the violence against the Portuguese pale in comparison. Troops engaged in mass drownings and mass shootings, festooning themselves with rosaries made of the strung-together ears of the executed. Insurgents occupied Santarém in 1836 for a few months but eventually retreated up the Tapajós, which became the scene of the rebellion’s drawn-out final stage. For five years, the rebels engaged in a rearguard hit-and-run guerrilla war with federal troops before finally surrendering, at a trading post just upriver from where Ford would found his settlement. As many as 30,000 out of a regional population of 120,000 were killed, most of them at the hands of government soldiers.

The Cabanagem uprising and its repression had a lasting effect on the valley. As historian Barbara Weinstein writes, the violence weakened the control of white Portuguese elites over the rural population. Runaway slaves deserted plantations en masse, founding fugitive communities throughout the forest. But the breakdown of social relations also allowed provincial merchants and traders to fill the vacuum, especially once federal troops got the upper hand against the rebels. These new regional elites leveraged the assault on Portuguese power to set up trading outposts and claim large parcels of jungle land, laying the foundation for the impending rubber boom. Once established, they began to resort to a variety of mechanisms to erode the autonomy of peasant communities. Pará’s government passed vagrancy laws aimed directly at driving smallholders who didn’t have deeds to their property into debt to merchants. Indigenous communities were particularly hard-hit, and many soon found themselves on the edge of cultural and often physical extinction, having suffered slave raids, tribal dispersal, and forced relocation. Men were conscripted as tappers and boatmen, while women were forced into domestic service or into concubinage. Survivors sought refuge deep in the jungle, leaving the Tapajós’s main trunk and tributaries to the poor migrant families that came from Brazil’s impoverished northeast—the forebears of the unfortunates so graphically described by LaRue.
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Memories of the rebellion lingered for decades. In 1866, the conservationist and poet George Washington Sears, more famous for his descriptions of canoe trips through the Adirondacks, traveled up the Amazon and spoke with rebel survivors. Having grown up among Native Americans in upstate New York and himself having just fought for the Union in the Civil War, Sears was moved by their stories to write an ode to the insurrection. The historical precision of “Tupi Lament” is haunting, capturing the rueful pride in having staged the revolt but also the shame of defeat and sexual subjection that underwrote what Amazonian scholar Susanna Hecht has called “terror slavery”:

We sing the noble dead to-night

Who sleep in jungle covered graves.

We sing the brave who fell in fight

Beside the Amazona’s waves,

The white man counts us with his beasts,

And makes our girls the slaves of priests.

Woe, woe for the Cabano!

. . . . . . .

We swept their forces at Para,

But English ships were on the waves.

And still our girls are serfs and slaves.

Woe, woe, for the Cabano!

We drove them from the Tocantins,

We swept them from the Tapajoz.

A feeble race with feeble means,

Our courage conquered all our foes.

. . . . . . . .

We were a fierce avenging flood

That no Brazilian force could stem.

We reddened all their towns with blood,

From Onca’s isle to Santarem,

But ah, our best are in their graves

And we again are serfs and slaves!

Woe, woe, for the Cabano!
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FAMILY LORE SAYS that Alberto José da Silva Franco, along with his wife, his children, and a handful of loyal slaves, barely escaped Santarém, fleeing up the Tapajós. After nearly a week paddling on the river, as they took shelter from a storm in a marshy inlet of a large island named Urucurituba, a bass jumped out of the river and into the boat, which Alberto José took as a divine sign that the island was where his family should stake their new life. The revolt was still roiling the valley. Just a year after his landing on Urucurituba, insurgents slaughtered forty residents of the village of Aveiros, an hour downriver, on the opposite bank. So the Francos kept a low profile, building a small house with an adjacent chapel to Saint Peter, whom Alberto José designated as the island’s patron. Once the insurrection was put down, Alberto José began to spread out, soon becoming one of the Tapajós’s most important landlords and merchants, well placed to profit from the pacification of the valley and increasing rubber trade. He registered the island, as well as land on both banks of the river, in his name and planted sugar to distill and sell
cachaça
. The rum was valuable not just as a tradable product but for its effectiveness in weakening the will of those who tried to hold out against falling into debt. He also built a statelier Casa Grande, a hacienda. The new house had six airy rooms, one consecrated as a chapel to Saint Peter, right next to the office where rubber was weighed and debt recorded, and a twelve-posted terracotta-tiled veranda that ran along the entire length of its front. Where his first modest home was set in an inconspicuous cove, this one was built on a prominent knoll, framed by a row of grand Havana palms. When he died, he left Urucurituba, along with his other holdings, including Boa Vista, opposite the island on the Tapajós’s right bank, to his many sons.
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Alberto José’s great-grandson, Eimar Franco, is still alive, and he remembers the coming of Ford to the Tapajós as “provoking a true revolution up and down the valley.” He was seven years old in 1928 and had only twice traveled beyond Santarém, when “all of a sudden modern boats were plying the river in all directions and immense tractors were roaring day and night, digging up the dirt, pulling down trees, opening roads,” he says. On “our side of the river we were still living like our ancestors did, with a few alterations.” Eimar’s memories accord with those of David Riker, who was just a boy when his Baptist father, along with other Confederate “cavaliers” and “roughs” who preferred exile rather than submission to the terms of Appomattox, settled near Santarém after the Civil War. Riker described the coming of Ford as shaking the Tapajós “to its foundations.” It was like a “blood transfusion,” he said, jolting alive a moribund economy with an injection of money, electricity, and internal combustion engines in a region that still relied mostly on barter, debt, and wood-burning steamboats to circulate goods and people. Nearly overnight there was a cash “market for anything negotiable.”
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One thing that had not been negotiable for a long time was land, as its value had plummeted to almost nothing in the trail of the rubber bust. But as Blakeley and Villares pitched camp and began preliminary clearing, Henry Ford sent a trusted accountant (he didn’t trust too many accountants), James Kennedy, up the Tapajós with a satchel of cash to buy whatever land Blakeley indicated was necessary to advance operations. And since the Francos had fallen on hard times with the collapse of rubber, they welcomed not just the cash Ford’s accountant was offering but the possibility of making money by provisioning the work camp.

As in Muscle Shoals and the Florida Everglades, wherever Ford or his company went, or was believed to be going, land prices skyrocketed and speculators bought up property to resell at jacked-up prices. When word got out in Iron Mountain, Michigan, that Ford was opening a sawmill, rents jumped from fifteen dollars a month to fifty-five and the prices of houses increased threefold. Boa Vista’s value just a few months earlier was negligible, but now, in 1928, the Ford Motor Company was buying it in cash for four thousand dollars.
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The sale took place on Urucurituba, in the first modest house built by Alberto José ninety years earlier. James Kennedy, along with his satchel, arrived on the island, accompanied by a notary to officiate the sale and David Riker to interpret the proceedings. Helping foreigners get by on the Tapajós had become something of a tradition for the Confederates and their descendants; a half century earlier, David’s father had lent a hand to down-on-his-luck Henry Wickham, just before Wickham lighted out for London with the seeds that would doom the Brazilian rubber trade. A large crowd of Urucurituba’s residents—the equivalent of sharecroppers, who paid the Francos rent in rubber and other jungle products—gathered around the house, which stood next to the already crumbling chapel of Saint Peter. “An almost religious silence” fell over the assembly as the notary began to recite the terms of the transaction from an “enormous book.” When the reading was finished, Kennedy opened his bag and handed the money to Eimar’s father, Francisco. Francisco was standing proxy for his young nephew, Luiz, who had just inherited Boa Vista from his father. The boy looked on wide-eyed as his uncle counted out the bills, one by one, on the dining room table. When Francisco finished the tally, he handed the money to a trembling Luiz, who took the payment under his arm and left for his house, with a large procession in tow. “Nothing like that,” Eimar said, “had ever happened on the Tapajós!”
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NEWS THAT FORD had completed the deal prompted wild speculation as to his ability to revive the Amazon’s economy. Modernizers, both those from São Paulo like Consul de Lima but also many from the Amazon, hoped that Ford’s plan for capital-intensive, high-wage industrial development would overcome the jungle’s poverty and backwardness, which many understood to be rooted in its extractive debt economy. National and local newspapers reported that Ford would build a railroad linking the interior to the Atlantic, roads that would flank the jungle’s many rivers, and electric trolley lines running up and down both banks of the Tapajós, all allowing easy access to the Atlantic market for the state’s agricultural products.
*
Rumors circulated in the press about how big Ford’s city would be (the biggest in the Amazon, most agreed), the amount of money he intended to spend ($40 million, reported one paper), and how many workers he would hire (at least fifty thousand, wrote another). The Amazon would finally become, as Humboldt predicted, the “world’s granary.” On news of Ford’s imminent arrival, Belém’s municipal government paved roads, filled potholes, and laid new sidewalks; the city began to rouse itself, “just like an old broken-down fire horse when he sniffs smoke. The moment somebody says ‘rubber’ out loud there is a sudden stir in all the old river towns.”
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In the press frenzy surrounding the concession, Ford was a symbol of hope but also a flashpoint of conflict, as many began to question his motives. Members of Brazil’s intellectual and political class were often strongly nationalistic. They admired US industry and needed US capital, but they distrusted Washington’s intentions. Not an unreasonable fear, considering that even as Ford was organizing his rubber project, US marines were occupying Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. And the death of Henry Wickham—now generally known around Belém as “Henry the First”—in September 1928, widely reported in the Brazilian press just as Ford’s men were getting under way, reminded many of an earlier treachery.
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The tension between the promise of development and the fear of loss of sovereignty was especially acute in the Amazon, over which Rio had but a precarious hold—as witnessed by the prolonged Cabanagem Revolt. The vast rain forest seemed to attract international intrigue, both rumored and real. In 1850, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the head of the US Naval Observatory, floated perhaps the first of what would be a long history of schemes to transfer the Amazon to some jurisdiction other than Brazil’s.
*
In the hope that the United States could both avoid a civil war
and
keep its expanding cotton industry, Maury proposed that Washington transfer the entire southern plantation economy—slaves, slavers, and livestock—to the lower Amazon valley. The question Maury asked was whether the Amazon would “be peopled with an imbecile and an indolent people or by a go ahead race that has the energy and enterprise equal to subdue the forest and to develop and bring forth the vast resources that lie hidden there.”
†
“How men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazon,” waxed another American observer in 1910.
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