In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 220

of labor deployment to move the forest latex to market, ranging from slavery to wage
labor. 76
Where Caucho Was King
Thefirstwidespreadexploitation of caucho fornineteenth-century international markets
occurred in the 1870s in what is now known as Panama (then a province of Colombia),
and the latex was known as “Panama rubber.” 77 Amazonian caucho exploitation took
off in the early 1890s. In the Upper Amazon, caucho was often found in large manchals
or groves, suggestive perhaps of a deeper historical ecology. We know caucho could
be sustainably harvested because of the large Meso-American economies that used this
latex, and because of images from Mayan codices that portray tapping of caucho after a
tree's bark is scored. But the modern extraction method was to simply destroy the tree
and bleed the latex into shallow excavations under the trunk.
PAMARY GIRL.—PURUS RIVER.
Figure 14.5. Pamary girl: a coveted extractive product for domestic use.
Full extraction of latex from a Castilla would yield some 15-20 kilos of salable latex
per tree, 78 and in a moderately dense manchal , caucheiros could produce in a month or
so what would take a seringeiro a year. It was a one-time extraction and involved com-
plete deforestation of the groves. Joaquin Rocha described it this way in 1905: “There,
when the forest is virgin, people cut down the Castillas in such quantity that the land is
completely cleared and as open as though it were cut down for agriculture. . . . I have
seen myself that there are many extensions of open areas in the midst of the forest with
an abundance of seedlings of gum trees, and these are growing, coming from the seeds
that germinated in the warmth of the sun on the land after the great clearing made by the
first exploiters.” 79 The problem, at least at first, wasn't a scarcity of trees but a scarcity
of labor.