Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
native labor to exploit them. Estimates of indigenous mortality on the Putumayo place it
overseen by managers who were rewarded on commission. The material was moved
on company boats—the Casa Arana ran twenty-two steamboats up the Putumayo, on
whichitheldthesteamtravelmonopoly—andsoldthroughitsclearinghousesinManaus
and Iquitos, with finances raised on international capital markets via the London seat
of Arana's Peruvian Amazon Company. Julio Arana was among the wealthiest of the
latex barons until a combination of Asian product and scandal unraveled his empire. He
blamed geopolitical intrigue with Colombia as the underlying reason for his persecu-
tion.
84
The sensationally grisly nature of Putumayo rubber extraction became known in-
ternationally largely through the revelations of Roger Casement, Irish nationalist, gay
libertine, fervent anticolonialist, and indefatigable crusader for social justice, who had
played a pivotal role in revealing (and ultimately ruining) King Leopold's Congo en-
terprises. Traveling with Casement on that trip was Joseph Conrad, who would ulti-
mately use his African experience to write the anti-imperial novel
The Heart of Dark-
ness
. Newspaper denunciations like those of Walter Hardenburg (
Putumayo, the Devil's
Paradise
) and many brave Peruvian journalists appealed to Casement, whose inquests
and travel on the Putumayo brought the horrors of this enterprise—the Amazonian
Congo—to the glare of international attention. He was well placed in the diplomatic
corps and was able to make his denunciations at the highest levels in Britain while mo-
bilizingnationaloutrage.Thereweremovementstoboycottrubber.Casement'sstrategy,
in the end, involved what we today call “commodity chain analysis” and triggered a ma-
jorinternationalhumanrightscrusadeonbehalfofthebrutalizedHuitoto,Bora,andAn-
withnewbiographies,compendiumsofhiswork,andprofiles.Hisattempttofomentan-
ticolonial movementsinIreland,however,resultedinhishangingasatraitor,inpartdue
tohisactionsintheIrishrebellion,butalsobecauseofamiasmaofscandalthatsurroun-
ded his “black diaries,” writings that chronicled details of his Amazonian travels (stops
at wooding stations, how much things cost) as well as numerous homosexual exploits.
86
It was not only people that were doing the dying. The relentless clearing of
caucho
also produced a major deforestation pulse during the heyday of Amazon latex. Ecolo-
gical constraints and the failure of plantations in the nineteenth century helped foster the
shifttootherlatexeslike
caucho
and
balata
(aswellasthe“weak
Hevea
s”),butthemost
efficient (and lucrative) alternative was to home in on the pure stands of
caucho
.
The
caucho
economy of the upper Amazon generated an important but largely unre-
cognized deforestation pulse, a period of “selective logging” unmatched until the late
twentieth century. More than six million
caucho
trees were cut, and millions of other
Search WWH ::
Custom Search