Program 38: The River That God Forgot

Latin America perspectives a series of information and

comment about Latin America with Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor

of history at Southern Illinois University. These programs are recorded

by station w s i u FM. Here now is Dr. Gardner.

On occasion cast in the form of a novel it is come out brutal

primitive inhumane grotesque and much else that grates on your

sensibilities and on occasion set down is history.

It has come out brutal primitive inhumane grotesque. And

equally grating on one's sensibilities. What in the slice

of Latin America that emerges much the same whether caste is

truth or fiction. It is the story of a robber especially the

heyday of the robber boom in the Amazon Valley.

Decades ago in the 1920s a Colombian named oh

say your Stasio Rivera wrote a novel called the vortex.

It was an unforgettable picture of the inhumane exploitation of rubber workers

in the Colombian jungles of the upper Amazon basin. That book is a

classic of 20th century Latin American writing. Now

in the long stream of words written about the days of the rubber boom in the Amazon world

comes another telling of a story titled The rabbit that

God forgot. It is from the pen of the English writer Richard Collier

the publisher is Dutton and company. Lighted with colorful

adjectives vigorous verbs and much more that suggests flights of

fancy. It also offers dozens of photographs that force

the reader to face the reality of the record. Basically

Collier tells this dramatic story as a struggle between a Peruvian

exploiter one Julio and a humanitarian from the

United States. One Walter Hardenberg

a rat on the Peruvian began by drifting down

from the heights of Peru into the jungles in the eastern part of that country

and learning that a little money could be made in rubber. He then enlarged

his acquaintance with the operation. His identification with it and

gradually became a big time operator. Indeed one of the

barons of the rubber industry we meet him now in one of

the peculiar settings that was that of acquiring a workforce.

Each of the rubber tappers who Madonna signed on were already

$150 in debt for the passage money from Sat on

Brazil along the wooden jetty where a canoe was and by just

tied up they marched to Iran as white painted trading post

perched on poles above the river. A store pungent with

dried salt coffee and paraffin. Its beams a

small forest of machetes rifles and fishing lines. It

was here they collected their three month supply of goods food a

Winchester and ammunition buckets and calabashes for

latex worth perhaps $20 in all but you

know right I was bulky ledgers each Tapper was deputed for upward of

three hundred fifty dollars a debt he could wipe out only by selling a round of

rubber. He had yet to harvest but Iran had studied the

system along the riverbanks. He knew he was safe enough. Few men

in the ensuing three months could collect enough rubber to cancel their debts and by

then they needed fresh supplies. There was no time to hunt or fish or

raise crops outside that flimsy palm leaf huts. The winning

of rubber swallowed up every daylight hour come the next load of

supplies. The debt mounted higher yet rarely did

any man repay what he owed. Few as long as they lived so hard

cash for their labors. Don was the hour when I ran

as Tapper Spurs hit the trail. It was then following the first oblique

incision of the soft iron machete that the latex flowed most freely.

Armed with hundreds of small tin cups like beggars bones they inch

painfully from tree to tree hacking at underbrush striving to reach trees

at hundreds of tantalizing yards apart through the deep jungle

sometimes clamping the cups in position. They worked in darkness so

intense only the light of kerosene had lamps clamped on their heads like

fashion visors revealed a latex Welling silently

like white emulsion. I had like six hours of his

labor. I don't most tappers trails were roughly elliptical. They went

around as far as a mile in line dotted with as many as two hundred trees

and away it was a stumbling blundering purgatory over a

narrow log bridges spanning malarial creeks.

The particular setting in which the Peruvian who are gonna build his rubber

Empire was a zone known as the the point

of my year as a stream as we shall come to know and it is a tributary of the

Amazon that meet that great stream about sixteen hundred miles

in from the Atlantic. And so it is very much to the western

side of Brazil close up against both Peru and

Colombia. What riveted around is attention to this fertile

forest land was its unique situation born as an infant ice

cold stream in the quarter yet as of the Columbia Andes. But put on my old

flowed for much of its length as a natural frontier between Colombia and

Peru a riverfront hotly contested by both nations.

Finally in May 1904 the two governments had patched up an

agreement then within three months both deemed it unacceptable.

High level bickering took place before both countries in September the following year

submitted their case for arbitration to Pope Pius the tenth. Finally in

July 19 secs the modus vivendi then agreed upon

came into operation from that date in one thousand six pending final

settlement of the delineation dispute. Peru and Colombia undertook to

withdraw all military authority from the put on my your

territory overnight an area of two

hundred thousand square miles became a no man's

land a land beyond the law and it is of course

in particularly that kind of setting in which no country could

intervene with its authority no police force no army could come that

the robber baron could do as he pleased. And this of course including the idea

that he could abuse his workers. He was in such a setting

as this that and that workers overworked

abused badly indeed subjected almost to conditions akin to

slavery that we find young American idealistic

inclinations accidentally wandering. This was a young man named

Hardenberg von Galena Illinois I adventuresome in

his youth he decided to go to Panama and worked at the time when the Panama Canal was

being built. He wanted Ansar from Panama into South America

and gradually spilled already and he is now into the upper reaches

of the Amazon basin. That he perhaps would not have noticed the

mistreatment the rubber workers were receiving if he had not been suspect as an

outsider and grabbed by agents of Ana and so manhandled by

them all of it unjustly that he began to wonder what it was all

about. This the matter of private citizens taking the

law into their own hands or putting him selves about the law gradually

than Hardenberg began to investigate the complaints

of rubber neckers he began to sense the reality of the

pain and the misery the brutality of the way of life to which they were

subjected. He incidentally spent a lot of time in the key to us Peru in

company with an American consul when he turned to the American Council for

Aid. He learned that that official who also doubled as a dentist in the

community was more interested in keeping his dental patients than he was doing what was

Mali right. And so they represented a United States government said that he could do nothing.

Or rather that he would do nothing about it. So I have at length

reached a drastic decision realizing there was no chance of a rousing the public

conscience against Urana and others like him on the AMA's and he had

decided his one hope was to reach London and lay the facts

before the British directors of the Peruvian Amazon company.

If it comes as a bit of surprise that the Peruvian had seen fit to

incorporate his company under British law. It resulted from the fact that he

realized that British prestige would keep

him from being troubled by a Peruvian authorities are Colombian

authorities if and when they did settle the dispute between them.

And so he had turned abroad and not to that very same area Hardenberg went

with 18 sworn depositions in his possession. He made one last appeal

to the American consul was again refused. And so that he prepared

and went to London in London Incidentally he turned to

a very vigorous and humanitarian

organisation which had a publication of its own. And this publication

speedily set forth the details that Hardenberg was able to document.

The British government became stirred to action saw fit to send a man a famous

investigator Sir Roger Casement out and in July of 1912

after more than a delay years delay. So Roger casements report

on the Amazon was at last published. It caused an

international furor. To rout Hardenberg grasped the depositions.

The consul had added telling statistics every ton of

put on my latex had cost seven human

lives. You know when top grade wild robber

had passed twenty five hundred dollars a ton. In 12 years

4000 tons of ironic shipments. Had fetched seven and a

half million dollars on the London market. But some 30000

forest Indians had died to make that possible. We have

been in these early years prior to World War One. The telling story of the

peak period of the popularity and the profitability of the Amazon

basin and rubber gathering. And we have also this moment of decline from

both model and economic reasons the economic reasons incidentally tie

in yet another Englishman Henry Wickham who had gone into Brazil

in the middle in 1970s and had gathered 70000

seeds of rubber. These had not all survived at Kew Gardens

in London but out of those seedlings plantation rubber was

undertaken in South East Asia. And this became productive in discussing

early pre-war period 1910 and thereabout.

And so it was that the challenge economically to

the area of South America came at the same time that the challenge came

Molly. And we have in consequence the breakdown of what had been

a great empire. The body of the river that God

forgot authored by Richard Collier and published by

Dutton and Company is a telling exposition of the drama

of the brutality of all of it is the history of that turn of century

episode known as the heyday of the Brazilian rubber boom.

This was another program in the series. Latin America

perspectives with Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at

Southern Illinois University joined us for our next program when Dr.

Gardner will comment on another interesting aspect of Latin American affairs.

These programs are recorded by station WFIU FM and are made available

to this station by the national educational radio network.