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Home > Serendipity > Photo Gallery - Amazonia

 

The following photographs and sketches were made in Amazonia (with the exception of the one in New York and the shipment invoice) around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries and show how 'wild' rubber ' was collected and marketed.

 

This picture apparently shows a typical group of Brazilian rubber tappers. Note that one is carrying a gun. These do not appear to be typical poor tappers (who could rarely afford a gun) and this may have been a 'PR' posed photograph by a rubber baron.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This sketch shows the original way of smoking or 'curing' rubber (not to be confused with curing meaning vulcanization). The native had a wooden paddle which was dipped in the collected latex, smoked until dry, re-dipped and so on until a considerable sized block of dried (cured) latex had been collected

 

 

 

 

 

 

The later process was to smoke much larger 'pelles' of rubber and here one see the smoke house with some smoked pelles in the foreground.

The gun is still in evidence and this may be a guard!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here we have an estate manager's house (seringal) on the river Acre with  a stack of pelles awaiting shipmant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Manaos, with the rubber dealers checking the quality of the pelles. In the foreground one can see a pelle being cut open to check that it does not contain a stone at its centre to increase its weight and hence its 'value'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This similar view to the picture above again shows a pelle being sliced open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After shipment to the US in crates or barrels the whole is weighed and then the crate is broken open and the wood weighed so that a net weight of the rubber is obtained.

In the background the bulk of the case is hanging on some scales.

 

 

 

This invoice to Mr Seth Low of New York is arguably one of the earliest records of a rubber shipment to that city.

It refers to the Schooner Betsy & Eliza with Master E Burr sailing from the port of Belem to New York with one cask and five barrels of rubber for Mr Seth Low. Dated march 9th 1831.

"Invoice of Rubber shipped by Robt Upton on board the Schooner Betsy & Eliza, Burr master, bound for New York & consigned to Mr Seth Low, Merchant there, as advised herewith viz

1 cask rubber 349               tare 101   >     2485 Barrels 74, 78,78,83,74 =389                tare 100       >     289537 nett @30c/lb = $161.10Errors Excepted.   signed by Robt. Upton for James Upton"

 

 

Natural Rubbers - what's in a name?
The Mesoamericans
The Ball Game
Popol Vuh – The Mayan ‘Book of Life’
Rubber goes East
The Putumayo Affair
Growth of the Synthethics

Pictorial Story of Rubber Production
Latex Processing
Dry Rubber Processing
Vulcanization
Ageing
Protective Agents
Conservation

Charles Marie de la Condamine
François Fresneau
Charles Goodyear
Nathaniel Hayward
Thomas Hancock
Leopold II of Belgium, E D Morel & the Congo
Stephen Moulton
Henry Morton Stanley
Sir Henry Wickham

Wallace Carothers
Waldo Semon