Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 14.6.
Wickham's baby: a tree from the original seeds in Sri Lankan plantations.
This was the complexity and range of the rubber economy. Da Cunha would describe
it as a vast octopus, sucking everything into its insatiable maw—not a bad metaphor for
rubber at that time, and quite apt for the economies of the Purús.
. . .
ItwouldhavebeenhardfordaCunhatoimaginethe“litigiouszone”hewasmarkingout
withhissurveyteamasitisdescribedtoday.TheUpperPurúsisnowanationalparkthe
size of Costa Rica and is portrayed in the usual language of the distant and pristine. The
complex social landscape encountered by da Cunha and the commission on their way
totheheadwaters—native slaves, debtpeons,refugecommunities, andfamily-based ex-
tractors—has been erased from the modern imaginary.
There were many things that would transform the realm of rubber that da Cunha
traveled through at the very apex of its glory. He saw in the forest societies the found-
ations for a “Civilization in the tropics.” The economy of this realm was built on the
ecological substrates and ruins of earlier civilizations.
The Amazon rubber world was on the cusp of collapse. As Haraldo Torres, economist
of extractive economies, has pointed out, when the prices of extractive commodities rise
there are several processes that produce stagnation or undermine wild extraction sys-
tems: overexploitation, which reduces the output of extractive product (this was clearly
happening with
caucho
); the social limits to coercion, which certainly were becoming
evident with various denunciations of terror slavery and debt peonage; domestication
and plantation development away from the commodity's center of origin and its coe-
volved pests; and finally, the search for synthetic replacements for the natural product.
Rubber was subject to all of these.
110
The Purús and its history had found its bard: da Cunha was making his way with the
reconnaissanceteamfromthemouthtotheheadwatersofthecontestedrealmsofrubber.
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