One Summer: America, 1927

failed, too. Nothing if not resilient, Wickham recrossed the Pacific to British New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), took out a twenty-five-year lease on land in the Conflict Islands, and set about collecting sponges, cultivating oysters and producing copra from coconuts. At last he achieved modest success, but the isolation was more than his wife could bear. She decamped to Bermuda and never saw him again.
    In the meantime, the rubber seeds Wickham had brought back to England were doing spectacularly well. fn1 Kew sent them to several British colonies and found that they thrived in the rich soils and humid conditions of the tropical Far East – did better, in fact, than in their native jungles. In Brazil, hevea occurred in densities of only three or four trees per hectare, so workers had to cover lots of ground to tap meaningful supplies of latex. In Singapore, Malaya and Sumatra, however, hevea formed luxuriant groves. It had no natural enemies in Asia, so no insects or fungal blights disturbed its growth and the trees rose majestically to heights of one hundred feet. Brazil could not compete. Where once it had a virtual monopoly on the world’s high-quality rubber, by the 1920s it produced less than 3 per cent.
    Roughly four fifths of all that rubber was consumed in the United States, mostly by the automobile industry. (Tyres on early cars needed replacing every 2,000 or 3,000 miles on average, so demand was constant and high.) In the early 1920s when reports circulated that Britain intended to introduce a hefty rubber levy as a way of paying off its war debts, America’s Commerce Department under the tireless watch of Herbert Hoover responded with a crashprogramme to see if there was not some way America could escape its foreign dependence, either by producing its own rubber or inventing a synthetic substitute. Nothing, however, worked. Rubber trees didn’t do well anywhere in America and not even Thomas Edison could come up with an artificial version that would work half as well.
    Henry Ford took this as a personal challenge. He hated being dependent on suppliers who might raise prices or otherwise take advantage of him, so he always did all in his power to control all the elements of his supply chains. To that end, he owned iron ore and coal mines, forests and lumber mills, the Detroit, Toledo & Iron-town Railroad, and a fleet of ships. When he decided to make his own windshields he became at a stroke the second largest manufacturer of glass in the world. Ford owned 400,000 acres of forests in upper Michigan. At the Ford lumber mills, it was the proud boast that they used every bit of the tree but the shade. Bark, sawdust, sap – all were put to commercial use. (One Ford product still with us from this process is the Kingsford charcoal briquette.) He could not bear the thought of having to stop production because some foreign despot or business cabal was denying him access to some needed product – and by the 1920s he was the single biggest user of rubber on earth. Thus it was in the summer of 1927 that Henry Ford embarked on the most ambitious and ultimately foolish venture of his long life: Fordlandia.
    His plan was to build a model American community in the jungles of Brazil and from it run the greatest rubber-producing estate in the world. The Brazilians were so desperate to rejuvenate their moribund rubber industry that they were happy to give Ford almost anything he asked. They sold him two and a half million acres of rainforest – an area approximately the size of Connecticut – for the knockdown price of $125,000, and excused him for fifty years from paying import duties on materials brought in or export duties on latex sold abroad. He was given permission to build his own airports, schools, banks, hospitals and private railways.Essentially Ford was allowed to set up an autonomous state within Brazil. The company was even given permission to dam the Rio Tapajós if that would make it more comfortable and productive.
    To supervise and execute this immense project, Ford dispatched a 37-year-old junior manager named Willis Blakeley. Blakeley’s instructions were precise and vastly beyond his capabilities. He was to build a complete town with a central square, business district, hospital, cinema, ballroom, golf course and other useful and fulfilling municipal enterprises. Surrounding this were to be residential neighbourhoods of white shingled cottages, each with a neat lawn, flower beds and