The Romance of Rubber | Page 7

in one year.
How different is life on the rubber plantations of to-day from the life of
the gatherer of wild rubber in the jungle. In Brazil, the solitary workers
have to plunge at dawn into the perilous forest, with its lurking wildcats
and jaguars, its coiled and creeping serpents. The dwellings are flimsy
huts, food is scarce and expensive, and disease and fever cause many
deaths.

On the other hand, workers on a well-managed plantation live in
comfortable houses in healthy surroundings and are supplied with
plenty of good food. In fact the conditions are so much better than
generally prevail among natives in the Orient that work on a plantation
is considered more desirable than most other forms of labor. The
unmarried men live in barracks, but the men with families have
individual houses with garden plots adjoining. Big kitchens prepare and
cook the food in the best native style. Schools for the children,
recreation centers for old and young, and hospitals to care for the sick,
are all parts of the plantation organization.
In erecting hospitals and caring for the health of its plantation workers,
as in other branches of the rubber industry, America has taken the lead.
So well is this recognized, that the Dutch Government has awarded a
medal to the United States Rubber Company for the efficiency and
completeness of its plantation hospital, which happens to be the largest
private hospital in the East Indies, having accommodations for nearly a
thousand patients.

CHAPTER 7
HARVESTING THE RUBBER
It is a cheerful sight to see the workers, men and women, dressed in all
the colors of the rainbow, trooping out from their quarters to begin the
day's work. The tapping must be done early in the day, for the latex or
rubber juice stops flowing a few hours after sunrise.
When the trees reach eighteen inches in girth at a point eighteen inches
from the ground, they are ready for tapping. This growth is usually
attained when the trees are about five years old.
In tapping, a narrow strip of bark is cut away with a knife, the cut
extending diagonally one-quarter of the way around the tree. At each
succeeding day's tapping the tapper widens the cut by stripping off a
sliver of bark one-twentieth of an inch in width. [Footnote: This

method of tapping is shown on the front cover] He must be careful not
to cut into the wood of the tree, as such cuts not only injure the tree but
permit the sap to run into the latex and spoil the rubber. When the
tapper has made the proper gash in the bark he inserts a little spout to
carry the dripping latex to a glass cup beneath.
Later in the morning the workers make the rounds of the trees with
large milk cans, gathering the latex from the cups. When the cans are
full they are carried to a collecting station, called a Coagulation Shed. It
is as clean and well kept as a dairy. Here the latex is weighed, and
when each collector has been credited with the amount he has brought,
it is dumped into huge vats.
The next step is to extract the particles of rubber from the latex and to
harden them. The jungle method of hardening rubber is to dip a
wooden paddle in the latex and smoke it over a fire of wood and palm
nuts.[Footnote: See picture, page 12.] It is a back- breaking process to
cover the paddle with layer after layer, until a good-sized lump, usually
called a "biscuit," is formed. The plantation method is a quicker and
cleaner one. Into the vats is poured a small quantity of acid, which
causes the rubber "cream" to coagulate and come to the surface. The
"coagulum," as it is called, is like snow-white dough. It is removed
from the vats and run in sheets through machines which squeeze out the
moisture and imprint on them a criss-cross pattern to expose as large a
surface as possible to the air.
These sheets of rubber are then hung in smoke houses and smoked
from eight to fourteen days in much the same way that we smoke hams
and bacon. After being dried in this way they are pressed into bales or
packed in boxes ready for shipment.

CHAPTER 8
A LAST WORD
It would be an adventure to follow a bale of plantation rubber as,

carefully boxed or wrapped in burlap, it starts on its long and
picturesque journey. Bullock carts, railroads, boats and steamers bring
it at last to one of the world markets, Singapore, Colombo, London,
Amsterdam or New York, where it is bought by dealers, and then sold
to factories which make rubber goods.
An equally fascinating story might be told of its