Fordlandia (20 page)

But the ships were ready to go at the end of June, and back in Brazil Blakeley and Villares’s advance team had already started to clear the plantation site and they needed the heavy equipment. So Ford decided to dispatch the
Ormoc
and
Farge
despite Oxholm’s advice to wait until the rainy season. They would at least make it as far as Santarém, about a hundred miles downriver from Boa Vista, the sleepy river village of a few dozen families picked to be the “capital of Fordlandia.” In these early days, “Fordlandia” referred not to the plantation settlement but rather to the entirety of Ford’s 2.5 million acres.
7

With Captain K. E. Prinz at the helm, the
Lake Ormoc
left the Rouge dock on July 26, three days before Ford’s sixty-fifth birthday. Its departure was an event momentous enough to earn front-page applause in most every major US daily. All of Brazil, announced the
Detroit News
, was eagerly awaiting the two ships loaded with “science, brains, and money.” “Brazilian Area Bigger Than New Jersey Expected to Yield Gum to Make Tires for 2,000,000 Cars Yearly,” ran the
Washington Post
’s headline. The
Christian Science Monitor
said that Ford planned to plant five million acres with rubber, while the
New York Times
predicted that the estate would eventually produce “five times the total world production estimated by experts for this year,” or “6,000,000,000 pounds of rubber a year, enough to make nearly 1,000,000,000 Ford tires.”
8
*

Despite this fanfare, Ford, usually loath to miss a publicity opportunity, skipped the send-off. A week earlier, he and Edsel had taken the
Ormoc
out on a trial run down the Rouge River into Lake Erie. But now, a heat wave had settled over lower Michigan, killing scores of people. Defying the Amazon’s dry season from a world away was one thing. Suffering Detroit’s humidity in the flesh was another, so Ford escaped the city by taking off on one of his road trips.

By this point in his life, Ford had become an ardent antiques collector, another one of his eccentricities that the press enjoyed reporting on. The
Detroit News
ran a steady stream of stories detailing his purchases of old furnaces, musical instruments (particularly violins), clocks, books, tools, kitchen utensils, London churches—anything that could be shipped back to an overflowing warehouse in Ford’s tractor factory. Just that year, Ford had Thomas Edison’s Fort Myers, Florida, workshop—a house built by the inventor’s father in 1884—disassembled and rebuilt in Greenfield Village, a model town Ford had started building in Dearborn composed of important landmarks in American history.

Now, in his flight from the heat, Ford first headed to a train depot in Fraser, Michigan, where he hoped to acquire the key on which a young Edison had learned how to transmit telegraph messages.

“What do you want for it?” he asked the stationmaster.

“Well, I’d like to get delivery on my new Ford. It was ordered a long time ago.”

“We can fix that up.”

Ford got his “relic” and the next day the stationmaster received his newly painted Model A. Ford then continued on to New Jersey to celebrate his birthday with the aging Edison in person.
9

Returning to Dearborn a few days later, Ford held a press conference where he told reporters that he himself had driven a good part of the seven-hundred-mile trip in the new Model A. Ford’s birthday corresponded to the silver anniversary of his company, which now employed well over 200,000 men in operations on six continents. It had gone from producing less than two thousand cars a year in its old Mack Avenue workshop to over nine thousand in a single day. “The company’s 25th birthday,” wrote the
Wall Street Journal
, “finds Henry Ford in the midst of the most intensive period of activity since he first began to dream of horseless carriages.” “Isn’t there an age limit somewhere?” he was asked by a reporter on his return from New Jersey, about not just his endurance behind the wheel but his steerage of his company. “I haven’t found it yet,” Ford answered. He said he expected to “do more in the next five years than I have in the last 20.” “You have got to keep going and doing,” Ford wrote in his notebook.
10

THE
ORMOC
CUT across Lake Erie to the Welland Canal and Lake Ontario, then out the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic, docking at Kearny, New Jersey, in New York Harbor. There it joined the slower moving
Lake Farge
, which had left Dearborn two weeks earlier pulled by the tug
Bellcamp
. The ships picked up additional supplies, along with fourteen passengers—the plantation’s staff and their wives—who had arrived from Detroit by train: a doctor from the Henry Ford Hospital, an electrical engineer, a chemist, an accountant, and “several competent managers.” The
Ormoc
had plenty of science, brains, and money on board. What it didn’t have was a horticulturalist, agronomist, botanist, microbiologist, entomologist, or any other person who might know something about jungle rubber and its enemies.
11

The ships averaged about a hundred miles a day, stopping in Belém for a few days and then arriving in Santarém in mid-September, in time for a jungle heat wave that for the next three months raised temperatures ten degrees higher than normal. It was an exceptionally dry season, and the Tapajós’s banks were drawn low, exposing a two-meter strip of sand, rock, and cracked clay. As predicted, it would be at least two months, probably longer, before the ships would be able to make the final hundred miles to Boa Vista.
12

Ford executives on the deck of the
Lake Ormoc. Left to right:
William Cowling; Edsel Ford; Einar Oxholm; Henry Ford; Pete Martin, in charge of production at Highland Park; Charles Sorensen; and Albert Wibel, head of company purchasing
.

For months local newspapers had talked about what would happen “when Ford comes.” Now, a year after the concession’s ratification, the moment had finally arrived. Santarém was founded as a fort in the early seventeenth century, when Portuguese slavers pushed up the Amazon River, obliterating the peaceful Tapajó Indians. Home to a few thousand people in the late 1920s, the city is located where the impressive Tapajós River comes to an end, giving way to the even more imposing Amazon. The juncture of the two rivers sits where the rocky bluffs of Brazil’s southern alluvial shield butt up against the lower and flatter alluvial plain, creating a sheer drop just off Santarém’s shore that allows large vessels like the
Ormoc
and
Farge
to pull up close. But despite a natural advantage that made the inland town a deepwater port, residents were used to big ships ignoring them, stopping only for a moment, or not at all, on their way to Manaus or Iquitos. Decades later, Elizabeth Bishop, poet laureate of the United States, visited Santarém and wrote an eponymously titled poem that captured the town’s languid, time-stopping qualities:

That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;

more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile

in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,

grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.

Suddenly there’d been houses, people, and lots of mongrel

riverboats skittering back and forth

under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,

with everything gilded, burnished along one side,

and everything bright, cheerful, casual—or so it looked.

I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.

Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung

from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four

and they’d diverged. Here only two

and coming together. . . .

A long river beach—which Bishop described in a letter to a friend as made of “deep orange sand”—and wharf served as the heart of the city, whose irregular cobblestoned streets, then lined with a mix of close-cropped blue and red stucco and tile houses and thatched straw huts, rise gently from the beach, like aisles away from a stage in an amphitheater. The town had one car, an old rusted Ford truck, and had recently built a small electric plant, which powered a few straggling streetlamps. Facing the river stood the bleached blue and white Nossa Senhora da Conceição, Our Lady of the Conception, the town’s turreted cathedral built in the eighteenth century.
13

The scene rarely changed. Women beat dirty laundry on the beach rocks. Freighters, steamships, fishing boats, and the occasional timber raft vied for dockside space. Small boats filled with birds, monkeys, fruits, and “turtles of mammoth dimension” paddled to intercept ocean liners heading to Manaus. Dockmen hoisted steers onto cattle boats with a harness and a pulley rope. “Two rivers full of crazy shipping—people / all apparently changing their minds, embarking, / disembarking, rowing clumsy dories,” Bishop’s poem continues. There was also the strange confluence of the blue green water of the Tapajós and the muddy brown of the Amazon, each keeping its own color, flowing like two bands for miles without blending. Occasionally, a boat would discharge a fortune seeker or naturalist: Henry Wickham lived just outside the city before gathering the seeds that would doom the Brazilian rubber trade; Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce made significant contributions to nineteenth-century evolutionary theory by using Santarém as a base of operations to send samples of plants and insects back to London’s Kew Gardens.
*
And during the high-water season, a parade of up-valley debris, the bloated carcasses of alligators and manatees, fallen trees, and even whole islands made of river grass, bromeliads, vines, moss, and philodendrons, floated past the town as the river made its way to the Atlantic.
14

A faded view of Santarém’s waterfront, 1928
.

But that September there was a new show, as onlookers took in the Ford ships and waited to see what they would do next. The
Ormoc
and
Farge
were hearty American vessels, about 250 feet long and nearly 50 across. Well provisioned and newly painted, they spoke for Ford’s seriousness of purpose and proven capability. Yet they seemed rather forlorn as they sat in the Tapajós’s massive “mouth-lake”—twelve miles wide and ninety long—which intersected with the Amazon River to create a body of water one anthropologist compared to an “inland sea or one of the North American Great Lakes.” One could, observed a Ford employee, “drop Lake Houghton, the largest of Michigan’s inland lakes,” into the Tapajós “and still have miles of margin left over.”
15

CAPTAIN OXHOLM, WHO had taken over command from Prinz upon the ships’ arrival in Brazil, considered his options. He could wait a month or so for the waters to rise, but impatient Dearborn wanted to see progress. That meant he had to transfer most of the cargo to smaller launches and use the
Bellcamp
to tug them to the plantation site. One local company, affiliated with the British Booth Line, offered to do the job for six dollars a ton. This was perhaps the last time Oxholm would be quoted a fair estimate, for in the months ahead, after Ford made the captain chief manager of the plantation, he developed a reputation as a “soft touch” easily fleeced for goods and services. In this instance, though, he declined a reasonable bid. He opted instead to rent lighters and hire labor directly, which not only wasted much valuable time but cost, according to a subsequent audit, roughly thirty-five dollars a ton. With a capacity of 3,800 tons, Oxholm paid out about $130,000 to unload just the
Farge
.
16

The transfer was slowed because the “special cranes” needed to remove the heavy equipment were packed first, “below all other freight on the ships.” In future shipments, managers urged Rouge workers to “endeavor to use good judgment” in filling the
Ormoc
so that “articles of general use or which might have several uses can be easily found.” Another reason for delay was that it took at least two days for the
Bellcamp
to make it up to the construction site and back, teaching the Ford staff an early lesson in the slow rhythms of Amazon life. And even if the tug could go faster, the makeshift dock the advance team had constructed was too small to handle such a massive shipment of material and too wobbly for much of the heavy equipment. Nor was enough of the riverbank cleared to receive the cargo, which led to more bottlenecks. Then there was the confusion of Portuguese-ignorant foremen supervising local laborers, making for what one eyewitness described as good “material for a super Charlie Chaplin film.”
Modern Times
meets
Fitzcarraldo
.