Fordlandia (49 page)

The medical staff, too, learned to accommodate. After first trying to enforce a ban against midwifery, the hospital relented and allowed for home births. “There was so much resistance that half the people didn’t obey it,” recalled Emerick Szilagyi, a surgeon from Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital who did a tour of duty on the new plantation, “so I lifted the rule and made it voluntary.”
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As a result of this newfound willingness to adapt rather than impose, labor problems were much less acute at Belterra than at Fordlandia. There were no more kitchen riots and nighttime evacuations of the Americans, no more urgent telegrams to Juan Trippe asking for Pan Am hydroplanes to shuttle in detachments of soldiers and disperse armed crowds by flying in low over their heads.

Nature, though, refused to be subdued.

IN LATE 1936, Belterra’s plantation seemed to be in relatively fine shape. Pringle had cultivated a nursery with over 5,000,000 seedlings to serve as rootstock, cleared and blocked out a good part of the estate, and planted 700,000 trees. These trees came from a mix of the surviving Southeast Asian stock, clones from Fordlandia trees that had weathered the epidemic relatively unscathed (thus indicating that they had some immunity to blight), stumps obtained in Panama, and seeds gathered from trees around the mouth of the Amazon, mostly from Marajó Island, that showed strong resistance. Blight began to make an appearance on the leaves of Belterra’s young trees, yet it seemed like workers would have a better chance at controlling it than they did on Ford’s first plantation. The new estate had good soil and was much flatter than Fordlandia’s rolling hills, which made it easier to fumigate and prune. Set back from the river, it experienced less morning fog than Fordlandia, and the winds were drier, which also slowed the growth of fungi.

The main threat to Belterra’s rubber, at least at first, was not blight but bugs. The company had great success in eradicating mosquitoes and flies by draining and oiling wet areas where they could breed and maintaining a rapid-response team of swatters. But as with blight, the concentration of
Hevea
accelerated the reproduction of insects that fed off rubber, leading to wave after wave of infestations. “The bugs have never been seen before in such quantities,” wrote Johnston of an early mite epidemic, “the reason being there has never been a Rubber Estate before with such large nurseries.”
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The lace bug was rubber’s worst predator. In normal jungle conditions, the natural food chain kept the population low and the threat contained. But as the entomologist Charles Townsend, brought in on more than one occasion to respond to an outbreak, observed, the “extensive planting of rubber . . . has created a greatly increased food supply and the bugs took advantage of it to multiply in proportion.”

Dusting nursery at Belterra against leaf fungi and insects
.

Dearborn officials received a crash course in tropical entomology, having asked Townsend to compile an “insect census” for Fordlandia. Townsend started with lace bugs, noting that they deposited their “eggs on the underside of the rubber trees and these hatch into small spiny larvae, which pierce the leaf epidermis with a sharp proboscis and suck the juices of the leaves, thus greatly weakening the seedlings.”
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He went on to register scores of other problem pests. Red mites sucked the sap from leaves, as did the white flies, which fed on a variety of plants but preferred rubber. They “fly freely” about, Townsend observed, and “it is only a matter of time” before they “extend over the whole plantation.” The flies were “attended” to by “small black ants,” which likewise drained sap from the rubber leaf. Then there were the white weevils, ten millimeters long with light blue legs, bluish to pinkish leafhoppers, treehoppers with broad bodies and two short, sharp horns, spanworms, mandarova moths, green roaches and green grasshoppers, large locusts, and generic broad and flat “plant bugs.” A similar multicolor palette of scale insects—green, white, and black—attached their long stylets to leaves, draining them of their vigor and leaving a brown or black crust when they were done.

Caterpillars are especially harmful to rubber, and they thrived on Ford’s estates. There were pale caterpillars and small yellowish to greenish caterpillars with erect pointed dorsal tubercles sporting stinging hairs. And there were plenty of tussock caterpillars, slug caterpillars, sphinx caterpillars, and hairy caterpillars with “slender tufts of black hair near the head.” For a brief period, fire and suava ants, which swarm from September to November, ate caterpillars, but like the white flies they came to prefer rubber. This cavalcade of insects attacked not just rubber but machinery as well. “Nocturnal spiders,” for instance, would “spin webs from wire to ground during wet weather,” causing the telegraph equipment to short-circuit.
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The protocol to fight such an array of threats was exhaustive and included placing a standing bounty on the “head” of a “mole-type animal that eats stumps.” Reports back to Dearborn extensively detailed the activity of “ant men making their regular rounds,” teams of women who pulled weeds and picked insects, new experimental techniques to deal with lace bugs, and weekly inspections of trees for
Fomes lignosus
, a root fungus, and Diplodia dieback, another fungus distinct from leaf blight.

The company mobilized Belterra’s whole population to respond to outbreaks. During one early caterpillar assault on a block of the first trees to be planted on the estate, “every available person, man and women, was lined up to do an effective handpicking.” In five hours, they collected an estimated 250,000 caterpillars, filling fifty one-gallon containers. When no more caterpillars could be found, they emptied the containers into a pile, threw gasoline on it, and torched the pyre.

Beyond bounty hunting and bonfires, Belterra chemists did come up with innovative insecticides. They extracted poison from timbo and cassava, concocted a fish oil wash laced with kerosene, mixed a compound of nicotine sulfate and arsenate, and boiled a “poisoned syrup” that was effective against fire ants, “designed to kill the whole nest including the queen.” The fight against insects added even more expense to what it would cost the company to produce a pound of latex.

Effects of South American leaf blight on rubber tree
.

BUT WORKERS WERE holding the insects at bay, and Belterra was progressing. The key to success, as always, was to find stock that both yielded profitable amounts of latex and had strong immunity to fungi and pests. Pringle and others involved in planting the new estate had identified high yielders (mostly from strains found at the headwaters of the Tapajós, as well as on the upper Amazon River, around Acre) and strong resisters (many from Marajó Island, at the mouth of the Amazon). But the staff soon came to realize that these two traits tended to be mutually exclusive in wild
Hevea
: high yielders had low immunity, while strong resisters produced too little latex.

It was ostensibly to search for an ever elusive strain of high-yielding and hardy
Hevea
that James Weir, in late 1937, organized yet another seed-gathering expedition to the state of Acre. But the pathologist had no intention of returning. “This is my last day on the Tapajós,” he wrote a confidant. “I did not tell anyone at Fordlandia that I did not plan to return after I finish with the Upper Amazon. I will drop you a line from God knows where.” Perhaps Weir had decided to quit the plantation because the appearance of blight had convinced him of the futility of trying to grow estate rubber in the Amazon. Or maybe he left because he was peeved that Dearborn denied him permission to make a second trip to Southeast Asia. Whatever the case, in keeping with his aversion to teamwork, he said not a word to anyone at Fordlandia or Belterra.
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Johnston was glad to be rid of him. Once it was clear that Weir was not returning to Fordlandia, Johnston told Dearborn he would welcome a replacement, so long as he didn’t have previous experience in Asia and thus wasn’t steeped in assumptions that “might not apply” in Brazil. “Some young Harvard graduate in Botany and Genetics, one that came from the West with a farm background,” was his idea of a suitable candidate. “Bring him here,” he said, and “let him learn plantation practices, and through time he will develop into the man you want.” Actually, Johnston didn’t have to look far, for two individuals with the qualities he described, short of a Harvard pedigree, were already on the plantation.

Edward and Charles Townsend—sons of the entomologist—had been Weir’s assistants, and now they took over research. They focused on selection and controlled cross-fertilization to try to produce hybrids that had both desirable traits. They made some progress, particularly using bees as pollinators. Yet they had trouble finding just the right combination. One hybrid proved resistant to blight
and
a high yielder, but its leaves were thin and unusually vulnerable to lace bug. Another, with thicker leaves, ran unimpressive amounts of sap.
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Even as they worked to cultivate hybrids, the Townsend brothers began experimenting with crown, or top, grafting, a technique that had been developed in Southeast Asia to control leaf mildew but never put to large-scale commercial use. Once a tree created by grafting a high-yielding strain of
Hevea
to a healthy rootstock attained a height of seven feet, planters would perform a second graft higher on the trunk, this one from
Hevea
that had demonstrated strong resistance. After this splice took, the old crown would be lopped off and the result would be a tree formed of three distinct genetic compositions: durable roots, a high-yield trunk, and a full, verdant crown of blight-and bug-resistant leaves.
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To Johnston’s delight, the experiment was working. The grafts were holding, even against the Tapajós’s strong winds, and the circumference of twice-grafted trees grew at the same rate as did an unspliced tree’s. The procedure was time-consuming and costly and entailed building bulky scaffolding in the field to perform the operation and to support the graft until the tissue fused. And since only about every other graft took, the process had to be performed twice or sometimes three times until the graft bonded. But until a suitable hybrid could be created and multiplied in sufficient quantities, crown-grafted rubber was the only potentially competitive alternative to mass-produced Southeast Asian latex. And it held enough promise that US agricultural scientists—who, with Japan on the march through China and Germany gearing up its military and munitions industry, had once again been mobilized by Washington to find a secure source of “war rubber”—began to copy the method in experimental stations in Costa Rica and the Panama Canal Zone.

After Weir’s departure, Johnston stepped up planting at Belterra. Over the next couple of years, work crews cleared over twenty thousand acres and planted close to two million trees, about a third of them top grafted. The plantation continued to suffer from chronic insect invasions, yet Belterra finally began to look like a true commercial estate, with its level groves blocked out in twenty-square-acre sections in an orderly fashion and its technicians keeping precise records of where they planted which seeds, seedlings, and bud grafts, so as to control for and develop better strains of
Hevea
.

But then Johnston lost his two best men. In late 1937, as John Rogge was traveling to Fordlandia to deliver a payroll, his boat was tipped by a late afternoon Tapajós storm, the kind that can come out of nowhere and call up oceanlike waves. Rogge fell overboard and drowned. A year later, Pringle, who had survived his fight with Weir relatively unscathed, had a nervous breakdown. He had been in the Amazon for a decade, having taken very little of his assigned vacation time. He became entangled in a series of petty fights with fellow staff members and started to suffer from insomnia, aggravated by drinking cup after cup of coffee “day and night, and through the night,” and chain-smoking strong Brazilian cigarettes. Belterra’s doctor diagnosed him as having all the symptoms of a “very nervous condition.” His hands grew cold despite the heat, “denoting,” the doctor said, a “general let down.” The sheriff’s wife also began to let herself go, ignoring a tooth abscess until the infection spread to her jaw.