Iquitos: A Frenchman meets an Indian boy playing with a rubber ball (and guess happens)

Hotel Casa Morey

Hotel Epoca

These are pictures of the hotels we stayed in during our visit to Iquitos in the Amazon and this post is really a just an explanation of the reason for their architecture. That is why they look like turn of the century French European style homes and not like the traditional Spanish colonial architecture normally seen in Peru or the wood homes used by natives. The history of places is often as interesting as the pictures. We have some great pictures of Iquitos and the Amazon too, but those are for the next post. First some history.

Remember Charles-Marie de La Condamine of the team of French explorers who went to South America in 1735 to locate the equator? see La Mitad del Mundo.

Lacking money to return to France any other way, Condamine decided to try his luck floating down the Amazon and was among the first scientists to actually do so. On the trip down the Amazon he saw some Indian children (more correctly indigenous people) playing with a rubber ball -- something he had never seen before.

Investigating further, he determined that the rubber came from the sap of the Para tree and, intrigued by its properties, he took some back to France. Condamine was not the first European to discover this substance and its properties, but was one of the first to try to figure out something useful to do with it. While the rubber from latex from the tree proved useful for flexible tubing, erasers, clothing accessories (garters) and other uses, the rubber had problem. When cold it became hard and brittle, but when warm it became stretchy and sticky, a particular problem for the “clothing accessories.” Fortunately, in 1939, an American, Charles Goodyear, perfected the process of “vulcanization” (treating rubber with sulfur), which solved this problem. 

Meanwhile, with the invention and growing popularity of bicycles and the automobile there was a growing demand for rubber tires.  Despite a wide variety of rubber trees, the highest quality rubber came from the Para tree that grew only in the Amazon.

However, the exploitation of any resources of the Amazon area, including rubber, had been impossible. The area was impassible by land and, while numerous groups had descended the Amazon River, there was no way for commercial size vessels to travel up the Amazon; that is until the steamboat, which began navigating the Amazon in the 1850's. 

Lastly, having finally settled a border dispute with Brazil, Peru decided to build a port on the Amazon to secure its claim over the territory. After a review of potential sites, they decided on the Village of Iquitos, a small Indian fishing village with a population of less than 200. On January 5, 1864, three steamships of the Peruvian Navy:  the Pastaza, the Próspero and the Morona, arrived in the Village of Iquitos, and a modern port was soon constructed in the heart of the Amazon.

 The Boom

The inevitable result of these contemporaneous events was a “rubber boom” with Iquitos at the commercial epicenter. Beginning in the late 1870's Iquitos became a boom town drawing Europeans speculators and merchants to a city where fortunes were made in days.

For the next 30 years or so the Amazon Basin controlled the rubber trade. Although isolated and only accessible by steamboat, Iquitos became a prosperous, dynamic city of ostentatious "nouveau riche" rubber barons, who built beautiful European style homes and buildings in a city in the middle of the jungle.

Dastardly British Colonial Biopiracy – the Bust

A “bust” is the inevitable result of boom, and the bust of the rubber boom has an especially nefarious cause. That all this rubber wealth was outside the economically powerful British empire was, shall we say, something of a disappointment to the British. In what was the world´s greatest act of biopiracy, the British sent a botanist named Henry Wickman on a secret mission to the Amazon to find and steal seeds of the Para tree.

Hacking his way into the heart of the Amazon, Wickham found the Para trees and collected some 70,000 seeds. Listing them as scientific field specimens, he managed to secretly ship them down the Amazon and across the ocean. The future of the Amazonian rubber industry and all these fortunes were then doomed, although they would not know that until years later.

The seeds of the Para tree are large and quite pretty

England planted Wickham’s seeds in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. It would take 35 years of trial-and-error planting, but by 1913, the rubber trade belonged to the British. In 1913, the rubber from the seeds smuggled from the Amazon and planted in Britain’s Asian plantations flooded the market, ruining the trade in the more expensive “wild” rubber from the Amazon. The Amazon rubber industry never recovered. In 1900, the Amazon region produced 95 percent of the world’s rubber. By 1928, the Amazon produced barely 2.3 percent of it. Fortunes were lost, lives ruined, beautiful homes deserted and steamboats left abandoned in the river. A sad time.

Another Part of the Story

When tapped, rubber trees weep a milky latex that is the base form of natural rubber. The Para tree in the Amazon produced “hevea,” the most sought-after raw material for rubber. The Para trees, however, grew in relative isolation, spread across millions of acres, and are not easy to find. For that reason, “tappers,” the men contracted by merchants to collect the sap, used the local indigenous tribes to actually find the trees and tap the sap. 

The latex sap was "cooked" to create large cylindrical balls of rubber balls for ease of handling and transportation 

While many rubber merchants and tappers treated the indigenous people fairly and the tapping provided important economic benefits for these people, this was not always the case. 

Slavery and systematic brutality were also widespread with severe punishment meted out to indigenous communities and people who failed to bring in the requisite amount of latex. In some areas, 90% of the Indian population was wiped out by disease and the brutality. One of the most notorious operations was the Peruvian Amazon Company run by Julio Cesar Arana. He even recruited large, machete wielding African Americans from Barbados, known as the “muchachos.” Using the most brutal means imaginable, they were responsible for assuring that the natives collected the required latex.  Arana and the PAC were eventually investigated by the British Parliament and condemned for its practices. PAC was dissolved and, although never criminally prosecuted, the once all-powerful rubber baron Arana died penniless in Lima. It is recognized in Peruvian history books as one of the saddest parts of Peruvian history (including the atrocities of the Spanish conquistadors).

Uncontacted Tribes (Voluntarily isolated communities)

From time to time we read accounts of primitive indigenous tribes in the Amazon who live without any contact with the outside world. When I was younger I naively thought that this was because the Amazon was so large and the jungle so dense that these people had never been found by outsiders. Actually, that is not quite true. Many of these groups are descendants of the natives who had decided that the only way to survive the brutality of the rubber barons was to flee deeper into the Amazon jungle, forming "voluntary isolated communities." Their experience remains seared in the collective memories and traditions of their descendants. In their view of the world, any contact with the outside will only lead to slavery, brutality, disease and death. 

Fortunes are usually accompanied by ostentatious displays ofwealth and so it was in Iquitos. The wealthiest Europeans built great mansions made with expensive imported Italian and Portuguese tiles, some of which still survive, including the Casa Morey, built by a wealthy rubber baron, Luis Morey in 1913.  The Casa Morey has been restored as a hotel with its original Victorian and Amazonian motifs, and is the reason our hotel looked like this:

All of this, including Peru's decision to locate its Amazon outpost in Iquitos, the Para tree, the rubber boom,  the beautiful old homes and the voluntarily isolated indigenous communities, set the historical backdrop for our visit to Iquitos and the Peruvian Amazon.