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doom the Brazilian rubber trade; Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce made significant contributions to nineteenth-century evolutionary theory by using Santarém as a base of operations to send samples of plants and insects back to London’s Kew Gardens. * And during the high-water season, a parade of up-valley debris, the bloated carcasses of alligators and manatees, fallen trees, and even whole islands made of river grass, bromeliads, vines, moss, and philodendrons, floated past the town as the river made its way to the Atlantic. 14

    A faded view of Santarém’s waterfront, 1928 .

    But that September there was a new show, as onlookers took in the Ford ships and waited to see what they would do next. The Ormoc and Farge were hearty American vessels, about 250 feet long and nearly 50 across. Well provisioned and newly painted, they spoke for Ford’s seriousness of purpose and proven capability. Yet they seemed rather forlorn as they sat in the Tapajós’s massive “mouth-lake”—twelve miles wide and ninety long—which intersected with the Amazon River to create a body of water one anthropologist compared to an “inland sea or one of the North American Great Lakes.” One could, observed a Ford employee, “drop Lake Houghton, the largest of Michigan’s inland lakes,” into the Tapajós “and still have miles of margin left over.” 15

    CAPTAIN OXHOLM, WHO had taken over command from Prinz upon the ships’ arrival in Brazil, considered his options. He could wait a month or so for the waters to rise, but impatient Dearborn wanted to see progress. That meant he had to transfer most of the cargo to smaller launches and use the Bellcamp to tug them to the plantation site. One local company, affiliated with the British Booth Line, offered to do the job for six dollars a ton. This was perhaps the last time Oxholm would be quoted a fair estimate, for in the months ahead, after Ford made the captain chief manager of the plantation, he developed a reputation as a “soft touch” easily fleeced for goods and services. In this instance, though, he declined a reasonable bid. He opted instead to rent lighters and hire labor directly, which not only wasted much valuable time but cost, according to a subsequent audit, roughly thirty-five dollars a ton. With a capacity of 3,800 tons, Oxholm paid out about $130,000 to unload just the Farge . 16
    The transfer was slowed because the “special cranes” needed to remove the heavy equipment were packed first, “below all other freight on the ships.” In future shipments, managers urged Rouge workers to “endeavor to use good judgment” in filling the Ormoc so that “articles of general use or which might have several uses can be easily found.” Another reason for delay was that it took at least two days for the Bellcamp to make it up to the construction site and back, teaching the Ford staff an early lesson in the slow rhythms of Amazon life. And even if the tug could go faster, the makeshift dock the advance team had constructed was too small to handle such a massive shipment of material and too wobbly for much of the heavy equipment. Nor was enough of the riverbank cleared to receive the cargo, which led to more bottlenecks. Then there was the confusion of Portuguese-ignorant foremen supervising local laborers, making for what one eyewitness described as good “material for a super Charlie Chaplin film.” Modern Times meets Fitzcarraldo .

    On October 4, the plantation’s representative in Belém cabled Charles Sorensen in Dearborn good news: “ Lake Ormoc left Santarém last night bound for plantation.” But later that day he sent a correction: “Report Ormoc leaving Santarém for plantation in error due to misunderstanding. Ormoc still at Santarém.” Then a third: “Water going down instead of rising.” 17

    At the end of November, there were still over a thousand tons of equipment on the Farge , and the general chaos of the work got