June i, 1910.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD. 



309 



One of the Para Hospitals. 



seringueiro, if money is sent the commission is 20 per cent. ; if 

 merchandise, 10 per cent. 



In times past, according to the stories of some rubber 

 merchants, it was an exceedingly easy thing to become an 

 aziador. One asset only was necessary. That was the friend- 

 ship of a director of a local bank. The man who planned to 

 become an aviador would register his firm at the Junta Com- 

 mercial with a capital perhaps of 50 contos. Through the 

 director he would discount notes for that amount. This 

 money would be used for buying shares in that bank, which 

 would be pledged in another bank for a certain amount. This 

 money he would deposit in a third bank. By this means the 

 aviador was able to give two banks as references. In one of 

 them he was a stockholder to the amount of about 45 contos, 

 and in the other a depositor of 40 contos. Without a cent of 

 money of his own, he would be rated as being worth about 

 100 contos. When he therefore sent letters to rubber pro- 

 ducers offering to outfit them and sell their rubber, they 

 were much impressed and he got the business. 



The manner just cited is not the usual way, by any means. 

 and it could not be done today. The bulk of the rubber busi- 

 ness is built with real capital, and many of the aviadores are 

 seringueiros who, selling their places or retaining them as 

 they chose, established themselves in Para or Manaos as 

 aviadores. The aviador is the most generous man in the 

 world in certain respects. He will gladly supply the seringueiro 

 with two or three times as much as he orders, and when 

 the proper time comes take a mortgage on his estates, and very 

 rarely is the mortgage liquidated. Indeed, many times it is 

 foreclosed and the seringal thereafter is the property of the 

 aviador. 



The aviadores also attend to another detail of the rubber 

 gathering business, which is the arranging for contract labor- 

 ers. Each year, before the beginning of the rubber season, 

 they send agents to Ceara, Rio Grande do Norte, Parahyba 

 and Piauhy, where abide the hard-working Brazilians com- 

 monly known as the "Caerenses." They live very well by culti- 

 vating the land and raising cattle; that is, when the rains are 

 regular; but one dry season works great havoc. Their crops 

 are destroyed, the cattle die of hunger and thirst, and the 

 Amazon and rubber gathering is all that stands between them 

 and starvation. It is usually necessary for the agent of the 

 aviador to advance a little money and pay the passage of the 

 laborer to the seringal. These advances are later deducted 

 from his earnings. 



The Cearense. with what little baggage he owns, including 

 always a gaudy handkerchief and a business-like stilletto is 



loaded on one of the small river boats with hundreds of others 

 and started on his journey. This is at the time of high water, 

 the start being made in the latter part of March or the first 

 part of April, and it is probably the beginning of May before 

 the seringal is reached. Here he is installed in one of the 

 thatched huts provided for the laborers, if he has his family 

 with him; if he travels as a bachelor he may sling his ham- 

 mock in a large thatched house with the rest of the unmar- 

 ried men. 



A seringal is really a little village, which centers about the 

 big frame house roofed with tile where the manager lives, 

 where is also the office and the store. Round about this are 

 grouped the thatched huts of the laborers. These villages are 

 located on rising ground beyond the reach of the river, and 

 cut off as they are from the rest of the world for months at 

 a time, the manager is really absolute ruler. 



The Amazon begins its great rise in December, and the 

 land is not uncovered so that men can work until about the 

 middle of May. During all of this time the tapping of rubber 

 trees is discontinued. The laborers who remain spend their 

 time in smoking and sleeping and in endless trivial gossip. 

 Occasionally they take too much "cachaca" and do some 

 desperate fighting. According to a physician whom I know, 

 whose practice lies in the waterways above Iquitos, the 

 Cearenses do a good deal of shooting at each other. One of 

 his chief duties was the extraction of bullets from rubber 

 gatherers' arms and legs. He said they never seemed to hit 

 each other in the body, and it was only rarely that one was 

 killed. His fee, incidentally, for extracting a bullet was paid 

 in rubber, and at present prices would be about $1,000. 



As has been often explained, a tropical forest rarely shows 

 a preponderance of any one kind of tree. It is a heterogeneous 

 crowding of hundreds of different kinds of trees, criss- 

 crossed and lashed together by giant vines. Where the rub- 

 ber trees flourish they may be thirty feet apart or hundreds 

 of feet apart. They certainly are never close together. In 

 order to work them, narrow pathways are cut through the 

 forest, leading from one tree to another in some general 

 direction, until 50 or 60 trees have been located. The path 

 then turns, either to the right or to the left, and is continued 

 back to the central camp from rubber tree to rubber tree. 

 This makes a very irregular ellipse and is called an estrada, or 

 path. 



The rubber gatherers do not waste effort, and if the reader 

 has pictured a sylvan pathway, broad and smooth and easy 

 to traverse, he is going too far. A stranger, unused to a 

 forest, would never suspect the existence of these paths, and 

 once he was on one would have difficulty in following it. 



[TO BE CONTINUED.] 



Hut of a Seringueiro Near Para. 



