THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



183 



through the woods on a roughly prearranged plan, generally 

 about four to each group. 



The three commonest sources of rubber in the Congo are the 

 Landolfhia OvMirienscs vine, which produces red rubber; Lan- 

 dolphia Klaiiiei, which produces black rubber, and a tree, the 

 Fiinluiiiia claslica, which also produces black rubber. Of these, 

 the first is the most valuable and furnishes the bulk of the 

 Congo rubber. Some of the large Laiidot/'hia vines grow to a 



RUBBKR CiATl'i ^ ' 



thickness at fhe bottom of 18 inches and arc 200 feet long. 

 They clamber over the tallest trees in the forest, making big 

 loops and festoons, and they produce a fruit as large as a man's 

 head, the seeds of the fruit being coated with a thick, gummy 

 substance which is sweet and eaten freely by the natives. A 

 vine of this size is a veriable veteran of the forest, and is not 

 often found, though in places where it is abundant, such big 

 vines may sometimes be found to the number of fifty to the 

 square mile. Smaller vines occur more frequently, and thirty 

 or forty of them to the acre is a fair estimate. 



When the Landolphia is tapped, the juice oozes out slowly 

 in a white, milky shape, and coagulates quickly upon exposure 

 to the air. The slow bleeding of the vine is an extremely val- 

 uable characteristic of Landolphia, as the rubber coagulates on 

 the bark and does not fall on the ground, unless the cut be too 

 large and deep. Many other rubber plants must have vessels 

 attached to them or placed under them to catch the rapidly 

 flowing juice, and this increases the expense of collection. With 

 the Landolphia, a slit under the bark six inches long and two 

 inches wide will allow the juice to ooze out slowly, and if the 

 slit be made in the afternoon, by the next morning a solid chunk 

 of rubber may be detached and pulled out of the wound. 



Such big vines as that just described might produce ten 

 pounds of rubber per year without being seriously injured. The 

 smaller vines produce in proportion. It may be said in general 

 that five per cent of the weight of a Landolphia vine is rubber, 

 though, of course, this rule is subject to many conditions. The 

 black rubber has to be collected in vessels or in containers made 

 of large leaves, and coagulated by heat or the use of the acid 

 juice of certain plants. 



The quantity of rubber which one man can collect varies 

 enormously according to locality and the conditions, but on 

 the average a native who spends the dry season of about five 

 months collecting rubber might be expected to return with 100 

 pounds, worth between $75 and $300, according to the slate of 

 the market in Europe or the United States. He would get be- 

 tween $15 and $60 for it from the traders in the Congo. This 

 looks like ridiculously poor pay for the natives, but it must be 



remembered that, at least in the early days of the trade, the 

 rubber gatherers spent much of their time hunting game, and 

 regarded the rubber as pin money. 



An American explorer once accompanied one of these expe- 

 ditions into the forest and made the experiment of personally 

 supervising the collection of the rubber for a week in order to 

 form an idea of the maximum capacity of native labor and 

 of the rubber resources of the forest, if the work were done 

 on a thorough business basis, eliminating all other forms of 

 occupation. He found that under this system a native in a 

 fairly good locality might collect three pounds of rubber a day 

 on the average. He also estimated that all the heavy expenses 

 of transportation from the Congo to Europe, the overhead 

 charges, and other expenses might be made with a profit of 30 

 per cent to the business, if the natives were paid 30 per cent 

 of the European market value of the rubber. On this basis, 

 at the price of $2 a pound for red rubber, the natives could be 

 paid as high as $2 a day for their labor in the forest. Such 

 wages, of course, were never obtained by the natives, but the 

 excess profits were taken by the rubber company. At one time 

 a fierce regime of competition set up in the Congo, that raised 

 the rates of pay of the rubber gatherers to a high figure, but 

 this was soon eliminated by the formation of large rubber trusts. 



While rubber gathering on the voluntary system and stimu- 

 lated by decent commercial methods was often a veritable pic- 

 nic to the natives, the sort prompted by force, directly or indi- 

 rectly, became the cause of great misery and suffering. For 

 example, under King Leopold's regime, a government official 

 might count noses in a village and give an arbitrary order to 

 the native chief that the village must produce a certain quan- 

 tity of rubber annually under penalty of heavy fines or impris- 

 onment. The government officials rarely took the trouble to 

 inform themselves specifically about the conditions under which 

 specified amounts of rubber would have to be collected. They 





Forest of "L.^nix)LPhi.\" Vines. 



did nothing to render the work easy, but simply issued their or- 

 ders and then punished the people if the required amount of 

 rubber was not forthcoming. 



If the village endeavored to comply, it often meant that every 

 man, woman and child over eight years old would have to move 

 into the depths of the forest and gather rubber nearly all the 

 year. This meant the abandonment of their fields and farms, 

 upon which their livelihood depended ; as the traders did not 

 give them food in exchange for their rubber, and a.< all the 



