One Summer: America, 1927

knew of an infestation when they could see something wriggling just under their skin or when sores erupted and newborn maggots spilled out.
    Beyond the camp boundaries, vipers and jaguars lurked in the undergrowth. The natives were universally hostile. By coincidence, this was the area where the British explorer Percy Fawcett had famously vanished two years earlier with his son and another young Englishman while searching for the mythical lost city of Z. Fawcett had developed a theory – more a fixation really – that a great civilization of pale-skinned people had once existed deep in the rainforests and had left behind a magnificent city that awaited rediscovery. He called the city Z for no reason that he ever explained. He had no evidence for its existence; he was driven purely by intuition. Fawcett may have been slightly mad, but he was an experienced explorer. He had been making expeditions through Amazonia since 1906, so he knew his way around. That he and his two companions vanished without trace was something of a testament to how tough conditions were in this part of the world.
    One theory was that Fawcett and his companions had been confused with the members of another party of adventurers led by the American Alexander Hamilton Rice, who had been exploring the area at about the same time (to Fawcett’s extreme irritation).Rice was fabulously rich thanks to marriage to a wealthy widow, Eleanor Widener (who endowed the Widener Library at Harvard). His wife’s money allowed Rice to fund enormous expeditions with all the latest gadgetry. The expedition of 1925 even included an aeroplane – one of the first archaeological expeditions to do so. Rice used the plane for aerial surveying but also stocked it with bombs to drop on any jungle natives he found difficult or obstreperous. This naturally left them disinclined to look favourably on any white people who stumbled into their midst, which may explain poor Fawcett’s unfortunate end.
     
    Considering that he had three thousand workers at his disposal, Blakeley’s achievements were slight. A small section of road was graded and paved. A clinic and dining hall were built. Accommodation was provided, though it was mostly rough and substandard. Superior houses for American managers were sent in kit form from America, but these had been designed by architects in Michigan and showed a complete lack of understanding of jungle conditions. All were provided with heat-retaining metal roofs instead of the traditional thatch, which made them like ovens. No one at Fordlandia was ever comfortable.
    Blakeley, having proved largely incompetent, was replaced by Einar Oxholm, a Norwegian sea captain who was described by one impartial observer as a big man with a small mind. Like Blakeley, Oxholm knew nothing about botany, agronomy, the tropics, rubber or anything else that would help him to run a large agricultural operation in the jungle. He was a better human being than Blakeley, but not a more competent one and merely extended the run of ineffectual management.
    During Oxholm’s unhappy time there, four of his own children died from fevers. Oxholm’s maid went bathing in the river one evening and emerged in wide-eyed shock with an arm missing. A caiman had bitten it off. The unfortunate woman bled to death.
    Morale, never good, plunged further under Oxholm. Workerswere deeply disenchanted over pay and conditions and mystified by the American foods like oatmeal and Jell-O that they were served in the dining hall (though mercifully Ford did not insist on his workers following his soybean diet). Wages were a particularly sore point. Most estate employees had assumed that they would be paid $5 a day, as Ford workers in America were. Instead, they found their pay was 35 cents a day, and from those meagre wages money was deducted for food whether it was eaten or not. The limitations placed on personal freedom – in particular strictures against drinking – were also much resented, especially when the plantation managers could be seen enjoying cocktails on their verandas of an evening. The upshot is that the employees one night cracked and rioted, running through the camp with machetes, belaying pins and other dangerous implements. Many of the managers had to escape by boat or flee into the jungle until things calmed down.
    Eventually, Ford appointed a Scottish-born manager named Archibald Johnston, who was intelligent and able and made many belated improvements. Shops and