Fordlandia - the lost city of the Amazon

I didn’t know quite what to expect of Santarem, but its waterfront emblazoned its unique history better than any book. Firestone, Goodyear and Dunlop were totem poles lining its shore. Each took turns to zap mosquitoes with a sizzling tzing. Tube upon tube of the Michelin man glowed with such energy that all the rolls of neon fat around his stomach seemed an indictment of his electrical diet.

These global brands on the shore of the middle Amazon are now soulless corporations underpinning capitalism. Yet it was not long ago that these overbearing names so prevalent in light industrial areas had very human features. Two centuries ago, Harvey Firestone, Charles Goodyear, John Dunlop and brothers Andre and Edmund Michelin were young men whose ambitions challenged nature and whose inventions changed the world.

In 1839, Charles Goodyear invented vulcanisation, the process that gave elasticity to natural rubber (to avoid deformity in warm temperatures or fragility in cold). By 1888, John Dunlop had developed the pneumatic tyre; later the Michelins created the first detachable tyre which was used successfully in the 1895 Paris to Bordeaux rally. Along with Henry Ford, these industrial pioneers transformed everyday life. Gone were the horse and buggies clip-clopping down Caballococha’s streets that I imagined upriver. But who could have guessed that the tracks of the automotive industry originated in the Amazon jungle?

Rubber was extracted from the Brazilian weeping tree, hevea brasiliensis. When the milky white resin hardened in the sun, its durability meant rubber could not only carry vehicles over asphalt, but continue to outfit the wheels revolving on space shuttles.

It was in Santarem that the first act of bio-piracy occurred. Henry Wickham arrived in 1874, a plucky 28-year-old who gained the confidence of Indian traders, then promptly stole 70,000 seeds and hid them in banana leaves before sending them to London’s Kew Gardens. Within decades, British and Dutch colonies in Malaya began to outstrip Brazil with rubber trees that grew faster, produced higher yields, and had easier access to markets. More importantly, the dreaded South American leaf blight hadn’t made it to Asia.

By 1912, the value of Amazonian rubber had fallen so dramatically that rubber barons no longer served their horses French champagne chilled in buckets, let alone themselves. It’s little wonder that Brazilian history books depict Henry Wickham as a criminal.

Local guide Gil Seringue was said to know all there was to know about the jungle. He could be located holding court at Carol’s Bar. Gil is a curious soul. Santarem’s most informative guide preferred “hock & holl” to “heggae” and dressed in black; he also took an unusual delight in birdwatching. He had the privilege of guiding many famous faces in the Tapajós. His clients included U2 as well as the late Kirsty McCall, and he had even starred in a Michael Jackson video clip.

Without doubt, the arrival of English royalty - the “King of Pain”, Gordon Sumner, a.k.a. “Sting” - who flew into Santarem in February 1989 to great fanfare, left the biggest impression on him. It was the destruction of the Amazon, which Sting had heard about from activists in Rio de Janeiro in 1987, that compelled him to investigate. Only one year earlier, the World Bank had approved US$500 million in loans for dams in the Amazon basin.

The most hotly debated project was the proposed construction of six hydro-electric dams along the Xingu River. If built, these dams would have cut a swathe across indigenous land. Amazonian Indians banded together to protest at the Transamazonia highway in Altamira. The protest coincided with the Kayapo’s maize festival, Baridjumoko, so a big turnout was assured with Chief Raoni of the Mentuktire and Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman presiding. The Golden King of Pain may not have bathed himself in resin from a sacred lake like El Dorado, but Sting’s long blond locks and luminous tan startled everyone. A god of sorts had descended from a helicopter, having journeyed all the way from Newcastle. He spoke like most gods would, with a Geordie accent.

Gil Seringue retrieved a photo album from behind the counter that showed a younger version of himself standing beside his idol. What took my eye were the colours blazing on bodies, feathers, spears, headpieces and lip discs. The photos made an interesting contrast - they captured a meeting of modernity and the Stone Age. Sting got to act out his inner warrior.

Sting’s involvement in the protection of the Amazon rainforest has since become legendary. By raising international awareness, and thus pressuring the Brazilian government, he helped create triangular boundaries protecting Kayapo territory along the Xingu River; a 133,000 square kilometres, or “an area larger than England”, was granted incorporating Raoni’s territory, the Menkragnoti reserve. Its existence acted as an essential buffer to repel developers, ranching, mines and lumber mills, although the proposal has since been revived.

Sting did what Che Guevara and Jorge Luis Borges could not - unite art with politics. To this day, Gil informed me, vinyl copies of Dream of the Blue Turtles are handed around, and “Eshtingue” is as fondly remembered in Santarem - unlike the villain Wickham.

“So, where do you want to go?” the best guide in Santarem inquired with a yawn.

Gil’s phone rang constantly. He arranged tour schedules on his coaster. He wanted to refer me to colleagues, but they were busy.

“You interested in cars?” His remark threw me. I said my cousin Paul built a Model T from an abandoned chassis in his Padstow backyard. But what had that to do with the jungle?

“Great!” His eyes lit up as though hitting the jackpot. “Pack your stuff. You’re heading to Fordlandia.”

So now I was going to a place deemed “a tropical ghost town”. When Seringue bought my ticket, a local asked why in the world I wanted to visit such a forlorn place as Fordlandia?

“All they do is fish, drink and live on government handouts!” he snorted. I had no idea, but the irony appealed to me. You could only get to Fordlandia by boat.

A 300km journey southwest of Santarem would take approximately 12 hours.

“Slightly longer” Gil shouted portside, “if it sinks.” He drove away towards wealthy tourists disgorging from a cruise ship that had docked overnight.

On the boat I meet Bruno, a research student at an Amazonian Institute on his way to Itaituba to research the impact of mining. When I mentioned Fordlandia, Bruno didn’t find the notion of a car production plant in the middle of the jungle surreal. “Volkswagon and Xerox have done the same. They’ve bought huge tracts of land. I mean huge!”

I quickly learnt that international investors were lured into the Amazon, aided by subsidised loans, tax credits and writeoffs.

“But they’re unlikely to turn a profit. It’s the Brazilian way,” he said with a wink.

Profit may not be the Brazilian way, but it is the American way. Henry Ford put into reality what Theodore Roosevelt had only dreamt of in 1911. The former president had visions of a jungle criss-crossed with railroad tracks which would service the settlers in towns who communicated by telegraph. To bulldoze an idea into being was a singular American passion. When Confederates fled the United States in 1867, they moved to Santarem believing the Amazon could be transformed into “a second Mississippi” - one they could harness for their material benefit. Pretty soon, these exiles were defeated by heat, humidity and jaguars prowling the streets at night.

The morning mist scattered to reveal Fordlandia as I disembarked on to a long wooden pier. A group of dark gauchos shaded by cowboy hats stood idly by and muttered among themselves. Tourism was up. My arrival had doubled the year’s intake.

I took out my camera and began to focus. Most buildings had broken windows. No one bothered to smash those still intact; the dust that accrued over the years repelled even the hardest stones. Processing ramps criss-crossed at useless angles. I zoomed closer. Even snails had given up on them midway. Tufts of grass tumbled out of the hoods of skeletal Fords lying in fields whilst hydrants “made in Michigan” poked their red heads above weeds starved of fire.

I grabbed a coffee at the dockside canteen and was directed to the Ford production plant behind the schoolyard. At the end of a gravel driveway, a gate was tightly wound with heavy chains and clamped with an enormous lock. I managed to crawl beneath the honeycomb fencing and scramble over barbed wire that blocked the path to the main entrance. I felt as though I was trespassing. If this were a museum I would have it all to myself.

The doors were barred. I entered the main building through a broken window. The interior was vast and practically empty. From what I could tell from holes drilled in the floor, machines had been unbolted and sold as scrap iron. What remained were large green turbines next to electricity meters with dangling wires. I swiped a layer of dust off the metal casing and sneezed over the words “Wesson of Chicago”. Dials and switchboards with burnt fuses in squeaky boxes were the last vestiges of a lost world. A hoist in a corner was surely where the chassis were once welded. In another corner, bric-a-brac piled together: a wheelchair, a pram, a filing cabinet. The Ford factory was a resting home for aged metal.

An iron plaque inscribed Fordlandia’s origins. It had been inaugurated in 1928 with equipment shipped from Detroit, where the Ford Motor Car Company created an alliance with Harvey Firestone (Ford produced the carriage, Firestone the tyres). Fordlandia was an ambitious plan to construct sawmills, a hospital, a radio station, employee housing and even an 18-hole golf course. A workforce of single men, mainly from Brazil’s north-east, was lured there with the prospect of good.

Fordlandia was conceived in the interwar years and designed to break the Anglo-Dutch rubber cartel. By growing his own rubber, Ford was pursuing a long-term strategy conceived in the offices of American planners. The United States was vying for global supremacy; therefore it had to control not only the means of production but also the source. “Vertical integration” became the ruling zeitgeist.

A car can be broken up into constituent parts: iron for the chassis, electricity for internal wiring, rubber for tyres, petrol and oil for energy, aluminium for wipers, chrome for fenders, glass for mirrors and windows. And so Ford bought up big in Brazil: ships, ports, railways, steel mills, hydroelectric plants, iron and coal mines, even the river for water supply and to discharge refuse. But with overheads like this, how was Henry Ford ever going to turn a profit? So where did it all go wrong?

For one, Amazon ecology proved resistant. Trees poorly planted allowed for overhanging canopies to spread the dreaded leaf blight microcyclos. Workers resisted too. They rebelled at the level of segregation in barracks, hygiene rules, eleven-hour shifts, wearing shoes, even the food they were forced to eat in the canteen (“death to spinach” was a rallying cry that fostered solidarity). A strike in 1930 was the beginning of the end. When workers united for better conditions (access to docks, quashing the prohibition on alcohol, unfair dismissals), the Brazilian military was called in to quell the uprising, arresting leaders and gaoling malcontents.

Fordlandia was an experiment that tried to modify human nature by replacing nature: workers were woken by bells and whistles instead of birdsong. They read clocks instead of the sun. The punched card at the entrance signalled the siesta they had lost. It seems inevitable that by 1935 Fordlandia had collapsed and by 1946 Ford had ceased operations in Brazil altogether, US$20 million out of pocket.

Henry Ford was surely of his time. Fordlandia was once a thriving industrial town. Now it’s an abandoned antique warehouse no one bothers to visit.

Fordlandia is not unique. Development along this path has become a Brazilian fixation, acquired from the thinking of its masters. Whether it is roads (the Transamazonia highway), dams (the proposed Belo Monte), cities (Brasilia) or industry (Fordlandia), the zeal to construct is conceived in the Brazilian mind well before it is etched into the landscape. All it takes is a whisper in the ear from America or Europe.