ffums, Resinss, 



296 



October, 1910. 



worth about 100 eontos. When he there- 

 fore sent letters to rubber producers 

 offering to outfit them and sell their 

 rubber, they were much impressed and 

 he got the business. 



The manner as just cited is not the 

 usual way, by any means, and it could 

 not be done to-day. The bulk of the rub- 

 ber business is built with real capital, 

 and many of the aviadores are serin- 

 gueiros who,selling their places or retain- 

 ing them as they chose, established 

 themselves in Para or Manaos as avia- 

 dores. The aviador is the most generous 

 man in the world in certain respects, 

 lie 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 la- 

 bourers. Each year before the beginning 

 of the rubber season, they send agents 

 to Ceara, Rio Grande do Norte, Parahyba 

 and Piauhy, where abide the hardwork- 

 ing Brazilians commonly known as the 

 '' Caerenses," They live very well by 

 cultivating the land and raising cattle ; 

 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 labourer to the seringal. 

 These advances are later deducted from 

 his earnings. 



Cearense, with what little baggage 

 he owns, including always a gaudy 

 handkerchief and a business-like stil- 

 letto, 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 in 

 the first part of A.pril, 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 

 labourers, if he has his family with him; 

 if he travels as a bachelor he may sling 

 his hammock in a large thatched house 

 with the rest of the unmarried men. 



A seringal is really a little village, 

 which centres 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 labourers. 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 abosolute 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 ot rubber trees is discontinu- 

 ed. 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 phy- 

 sician 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 ex- 

 tracting 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 preponder- 

 ance ot any one kind of tree. It is a 

 heterogeneous crowding of hundreds of 

 different kinds of trees, crisscrossed and 

 lashed together by giant vines. Where 

 the rubber 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 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 theeu paths, and 

 once he was on one would have diffi- 

 culty in following it. 



