One Summer: America, 1927

vegetable gardens. Artists’ illustrations, which the Ford company helpfully provided, showed a tranquil and idyllic community complete with paved streets and Ford cars, in defiance of the obvious fact that there would be nowhere beyond the very modest confines of the town for them to go. Henry Ford considered almost every detail of the undertaking. The clocks would be set to Michigan time and Prohibition would be observed, even though it was not the law of Brazil. Whatever the cost, Fordlandia would be dedicated to American laws, culture and values – an outpost of Protestant ideals in the middle of a hot, godless jungle.
    Beyond and around the town would lie the greatest agricultural operation on the planet. Blakeley was not just to plant and nurture forests of towering rubber trees, but also to find industrial uses for all the other fruits of the jungle. Fordlandia would produce paints, fertilizers, medicines and other useful compounds from the leaves and bark and gummy resins of its dense and prolific plant life.
    Blakeley had no skills or experience that would allow him to achieve any of this. He was little more than an uneducated thug. Long before he got his first sight of the land he was to manage, he was already proving himself an embarrassment to civilized values. Settling temporarily in the port city of Belém, six days downriver from the site of Fordlandia, he took a suite in the Hotel Grande overlooking the main plaza. There he horrified the locals by walking around naked and making love to his wife with the shutters open infull view of citizens out for their evening constitutionals. He was frequently drunk, generally boastful and always obnoxious. He alienated most of the officials who could help him as well as the business people on whom he would be dependent for supplies.
    Using American and Brazilian overseers, Blakeley hired 3,000 labourers to clear the jungle and build the camp, but little went well once work began. Clearing the jungle was a nightmare. Saw blades designed for the softwood forests of Michigan spun uselessly against iron-hard Brazilian hardwoods. In the dry season the water level in the Tapajós could fall by as much as forty feet, and for much of the year it was too shallow for boatloads of equipment to reach the plantation. Such equipment as did arrive frequently proved to be useless or at least premature. One crate sent from Detroit contained ice-making machines. Another consignment included a narrow-gauge steam locomotive and several hundred feet of track. Blakeley failed to build adequate storehouses, so supplies spoiled on the riverbanks. Bags of cement absorbed moisture from the air and became hard as rock. Machines and tools rusted and grew unusable. Anything that was remotely portable was pilfered.
    Blakeley found moreover that local growers, fearful of his competition, would not sell him seedlings, so his stock had to be imported from the Far East. Although the seeds he brought in were descended from seeds native to Amazonia – Wickham, as it happened, had collected just across the river from the Ford estate – they struggled to thrive when planted on newly cleared land. Blakeley failed to appreciate that hevea was a jungle tree and needed protection from the scorching sun. It had evolved to grow in isolation, so lacked the resistance needed in crowded conditions. When planted together, the trees became magnets for leafhoppers, caterpillars, red mites, whiteflies and other ravenous insects which overwhelmed the trees with devastating effect.
    The clearing of great swathes of landscape also exposed to direct sunlight streams that had formerly been heavily shaded. Now algae bloomed as never before, causing snail populations to explode.The snails hosted tiny parasitic worms that harboured schistosomiasis, a horrible disease that leaves its victims chronically prostrate with abdominal pain, high fever, fatigue and diarrhoea. Schistosomiasis had been unknown in the region before Ford came along; after Fordlandia, it was endemic. Malaria, yellow fever, elephantiasis and hookworm were rife as well.
    Agonizing discomfort could come from almost anywhere. The river teemed with a little fish, the candiru, or toothpick fish, which would swim into any available human orifice (most notoriously the penis), then extend prickly, backward-facing spines, making it impossible to dislodge. On land, maggots from the botfly Dermatobia hominis burrowed into the skin and hatched eggs; victims