One Summer: America, 1927 (35 page)

In an attempt to salvage something from the experience, Wickham traveled upriver and into the jungle, and laboriously collected seventy thousand seeds of the Brazilian rubber tree
Hevea brasiliensis
. Rubber was becoming a valued product in the world and had brought great wealth to Manaus, Pará, and other Amazonian ports. Brazil controlled—and jealously guarded—most of the world’s output, so Wickham’s seed collecting had to be done furtively and involved a certain measure of personal risk. He brought the seeds back to England and sold them for a good price to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

With the money thus made, Wickham went to Queensland, in Australia, to start a tobacco plantation. That failed. Then he went to Central America, to British Honduras, to grow bananas. That venture failed, too. Nothing if not resilient, Wickham re-crossed the Pacific to British New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), took out a twenty-five-year lease on land in the Conflict Islands, and set about collecting sponges, cultivating oysters, and producing copra from coconuts. At last he achieved modest success, but the isolation was more than his wife could bear. She decamped to Bermuda and never saw him again.
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In the meantime, the rubber seeds Wickham had brought back to England were doing spectacularly well. Kew sent them to several British colonies and found that they thrived in the rich soils and humid conditions of the tropical Far East—did better, in fact, than in their native jungles. In Brazil,
Hevea
occurred in densities of only three or four trees per hectare, so workers had to cover lots of ground to tap meaningful supplies of latex. In Singapore, Malaya, and Sumatra, however,
Hevea
formed luxuriant groves. It had no natural enemies in Asia, so no insects or fungal blights disturbed its growth and the trees rose majestically to heights of one hundred feet. Brazil was wholly outclassed. Where once it had a virtual global monopoly on the high-quality rubber, by the 1920s it produced less than 3 percent.

Roughly four-fifths of all that rubber was consumed in the United States, mostly by the automobile industry. (Tires on early cars needed replacing every two or three thousand miles on average, so demand was constant and high.) In the early 1920s, when reports circulated that Britain intended to introduce a hefty rubber levy as a way of paying off its war debts, America’s Commerce Department under the tireless watch of Herbert Hoover responded with a crash program to see if there was not some way America could escape its foreign dependence, either by producing its own rubber or inventing a synthetic substitute. Nothing,
however, worked. Rubber trees didn’t do well anywhere in America, and not even Thomas Edison could come up with an artificial version that would work half as well.

Henry Ford took this as a personal challenge. He hated in any case being dependent on suppliers who might raise prices or otherwise take advantage of him, so he always did all in his power to control all the elements of his supply chains. To that end, he owned iron ore and coal mines, forests and lumber mills, the Detroit, Toledo & Irontown Railroad, and a fleet of ships. When he decided to make his own windshields he became at a stroke the second-largest manufacturer of glass in the world. Ford owned four hundred thousand acres of forests in upper Michigan. The Ford lumber mills proudly boasted that they used every bit of the tree but the shade. Bark, sawdust, sap—all were put to commercial use. (One Ford product still with us from this process is the Kingsford charcoal briquette.) Ford could not bear the thought of having to stop production because some foreign despot or business cabal was denying him access to some needed product—and by the 1920s he was the single biggest user of rubber on earth. Thus it was in the summer of 1927 that Henry Ford embarked on the most ambitious, and ultimately most foolish, venture of his long life: Fordlandia.

His plan was to build a model American community in the jungles of Brazil and from it run the greatest rubber-producing estate in the world. The Brazilians were so desperate to rejuvenate their moribund rubber industry that they were happy to give Ford almost anything he asked. They sold him two and a half million acres of Amazonian rain forest—an area approximately the size of Connecticut—for the knockdown price of $125,000, and excused him for fifty years from paying import duties on materials brought in or export duties on latex sold abroad. He was given permission to build his own airports, schools, banks, hospitals, and railroads. Essentially Ford was allowed to set up an autonomous state within Brazil. The company was even given permission to dam the Rio Tapajós if that would make the land more comfortable and productive.

To supervise and execute this immense project, Ford dispatched a thirty-seven-year-old junior manager named Willis Blakeley. Blakeley’s
instructions were precise and vastly beyond his capabilities. He was to build a complete town with a central square, business district, hospital, movie theater, ballroom, golf course, and other useful and fulfilling municipal enterprises. Surrounding this were to be residential neighborhoods of white shingled cottages, each with a neat lawn, flower bed, and vegetable garden. Artists’ illustrations, which the Ford company helpfully provided, showed a tranquil and idyllic community complete with paved streets and Ford cars, in defiance of the obvious fact that there would be nowhere beyond the very modest confines of the town for them to go. Henry Ford considered almost every detail of the undertaking. The clocks would be set to Michigan time, and Prohibition would be observed, even though it was not the law of Brazil. Whatever the cost, Fordlandia would be dedicated to American laws, culture, and values—an outpost of Protestant ideals in the middle of a hot, godless jungle.

Beyond and around the town would lie the greatest agricultural operation on the planet. Blakeley was not just to plant and nurture forests of towering rubber trees but also to find industrial uses for all the other fruits of the jungle. Fordlandia would produce paints, fertilizers, medicines, and other useful compounds from the leaves and bark and gummy resins of its dense and productive plant life.

Blakeley had no skills or experience that would allow him to achieve any of this. He was little more than an uneducated thug. Long before he got his first sight of the land he was to manage, he was already proving himself an embarrassment to civilized values. Settling temporarily in the port city of Belém, six days downriver from the site of Fordlandia, he took a suite overlooking the main plaza in the Hotel Grande. There he horrified the locals by walking around naked and making love to his wife with the shutters open in full view of citizens out for their evening constitutionals. He was frequently drunk, generally boastful, and always obnoxious. He alienated most of the officials who could help him as well as the businesspeople on whom he would be dependent for supplies.

Using American and Brazilian overseers, Blakeley hired three thousand laborers to clear the jungle and build the camp, but little went
well once work began. Clearing the jungle was a nightmare. Saw blades designed for the softwood forests of Michigan spun uselessly against iron-hard Brazilian trees. In the dry season the water level in the Tapajós could fall by as much as forty feet, and for much of the year it was too shallow for boatloads of equipment to reach the plantation. Such equipment as did arrive frequently proved to be useless or at least premature. One crate sent from Detroit contained ice-making machines. Another consignment included a narrow-gauge steam locomotive and several hundred feet of track. Blakeley failed to build adequate storehouses, so supplies spoiled on the riverbanks. Bags of cement absorbed moisture from the air and became hard as rock. Machines and tools rusted and grew unusable. Anything that was remotely portable was pilfered.

Blakeley found, moreover, that local growers, fearful of his competition, would not sell him seedlings, so his stock had to be imported from the Far East. Although the seeds he brought in were native to the region—Henry Wickham, as it happened, had collected just across the river from the Ford estate—they struggled to thrive when planted on newly cleared land. Blakeley failed to appreciate that
Hevea brasiliensis
was a jungle tree and needed protection from the scorching sun. It had evolved to grow in isolation and so lacked the resistance needed in crowded conditions. When planted together, the trees became magnets for insects that overwhelmed the trees with devastating effect.

The clearing of great swaths of landscape also exposed to direct sunlight streams that had formerly been heavily shaded. Now algae bloomed as never before, causing snail populations to explode. The snails hosted tiny parasitic worms that harbored schistosomiasis, a horrible disease that leaves its victims chronically prostrate with abdominal pain, high fever, fatigue, and diarrhea. Schistosomiasis had been unknown in the region before Ford came along; after Fordlandia, it was endemic. Malaria, yellow fever, elephantiasis, and hookworm were rife as well.

Agonizing discomfort could come from almost anywhere. The river teemed with a little fish, the candiru, or toothpick fish, which would swim into any available human orifice (most notoriously the penis),
then extend prickly, backward-facing spines, making it impossible to dislodge. On land, maggots from the botfly
Dermatobia hominis
burrowed into the skin and hatched eggs; victims knew of an infestation when they could see wriggling just under their skin or when sores erupted and newborn maggots spilled out.

Beyond the camp boundaries, vipers and jaguars lurked in the undergrowth. The natives were universally hostile. By coincidence, this was the area where the British explorer Percy Fawcett had famously vanished two years earlier with his son and another young Englishman while searching for the mythical lost city of Z. Fawcett had developed a theory—more a fixation really—that a great civilization of pale-skinned people had once existed deep in the rain forests and had left behind a magnificent city that awaited rediscovery. He called the city Z for no reason that he ever explained. He had no evidence for its existence; he was driven purely by intuition. Fawcett may have been slightly mad, but he was an experienced explorer. He had been making expeditions through Amazonia since 1906, so he knew his way around. That he and his two companions vanished without trace was something of a testament to how tough conditions were in this part of the world.

One theory was that Fawcett and his companions had been confused with the members of another party of adventurers led by the American Alexander Hamilton Rice, who had been exploring the same area at about the same time (to Fawcett’s extreme irritation). Rice was fabulously rich thanks to marriage to a wealthy widow, Eleanor Widener (who endowed the Widener Library at Harvard). His wife’s money allowed Rice to fund enormous expeditions with all the latest gadgetry. The expedition of 1925 even included an airplane—one of the first archaeological expeditions to do so. Rice used the plane for aerial surveying but also stocked it with bombs to drop on any jungle natives he found difficult or obstreperous. This naturally left the natives disinclined to look favorably on any white people who stumbled into their midst, which may explain poor Fawcett’s unfortunate end.

Considering that Willis Blakeley had three thousand workers at his disposal, his achievements were slight. A small section of road was graded and paved. A clinic and dining hall were built. Accommodation was provided, though it was mostly rough and substandard. Superior houses for American managers were sent in kit form from America, but these had been designed by architects in Michigan and showed a complete lack of understanding of jungle conditions. All were provided with heat-retaining metal roofs instead of the traditional thatch, which made them like ovens. No one at Fordlandia was ever comfortable.

Blakely, having proved largely incompetent, was replaced by Einar Oxholm, a Norwegian sea captain who was described by one impartial observer as a big man with a small mind. Like Blakeley, Oxholm knew nothing about botany, agronomy, the tropics, rubber, or anything else that would help him run a large agricultural operation in the jungle. He was a better human being than Blakeley, but not a more competent one, and merely extended the run of ineffectual management.

During Oxholm’s unhappy time there, four of his own children died from fevers. Oxholm’s maid went bathing in the river one evening and emerged in wide-eyed shock with an arm missing. A caiman had bitten it off. The unfortunate woman bled to death.

Morale, never good, plunged further under Oxholm. Workers were deeply disenchanted over pay and conditions, and mystified by the American foods like oatmeal and Jell-O that they were served in the dining hall (though mercifully Ford did not insist on his workers following his soybean diet). Wages were a particular sore point. Most estate employees had assumed that they would be paid $5 a day, as Ford workers in America were. Instead, they found, their pay was 35 cents a day, and from those meager wages money was deducted for food whether it was eaten or not. The limitations placed on personal freedom—in particular, strictures against drinking—were also much resented, especially when the plantation managers could be seen enjoying cocktails on their verandas of an evening. The upshot was that the employees one night cracked and rioted, running through the camp with machetes, belaying pins, and other dangerous implements.
Many of the managers had to escape by boat or flee into the jungle until things calmed down.