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Of course, you have already guessed that the material used by the “poor savages” I have been talking about was rubber. But I should not be at all surprised if you are thinking that I have made up the whole story I have told you about the discovery of the product.

For the moment, I will neither confess nor deny that I have spun you a fairy story. Instead, I will ask you to give your attention to a few well-known facts about the history of rubber.

On the authority of an old and honoured historian, Herrera by name, Columbus saw the natives of the Island of Haiti, in the West Indies, playing with balls which were said to be made of gum from a tree. This was during his second voyage of discovery, in 1493 to 1496. A sixteenth-century document refers to elastic balls which the aborigines of the New World used in their games. And early in the seventeenth century a report was issued dealing with a tree growing in Mexico, from which the natives extracted a milky liquid that came to be used by the Spaniards for the purpose of making their garments water-tight.

In each case, the historical reference is generally admitted to concern the material we now call rubber. Therefore, by the way, so far as history enlightens us, Columbus was the first European to become acquainted with this forest product.

According to history, then, the aborigines in different parts of Southern America discovered rubber, and made use of it, without any help from the civilized world. By the way, they called the material “cahucu.” When an English scientist, by name Priestley, discovered in the latter part of the eighteenth century that cahucu would rub out pencil marks, this wonderful product was named india-rubber, in plain English. In nearly every other country it is now spoken of as caoutchouc.

Now, to come back to that story I told you “out of my head.” As regards the time in which the events occurred I have already proved to you that rubber was discovered before Columbus discovered America; and as there is no authority which permits me to be more definite on this point, I think you will agree with me that I was bound to give the period of my narrative as Once Upon a Time. The scene of that story is, I now frankly admit, laid in Brazil—to be more exact, in the Valley of the River Amazon.

Here, you will surely ask what explanation I have to offer for selecting Brazil as the home of the great discovery—why not Haiti, since the first mention of rubber in history is connected with this island? Or why not Mexico, since the natives of this country are also credited by history with being amongst the earliest folk to make themselves acquainted with the uses of rubber?

I am quite ready to reply to such very natural questions. Just as no one can deny that the discovery of rubber has brought about a great revolution in the industrial world, so no one who knows the whole history of that revolution can dispute the fact that it was the discovery of Brazilian rubber which has been far and away the most powerful agent in effecting it. And although history does not give me a cut-and-dried date to support my belief that the aborigines of Brazil collected rubber sap, and made use thereof as early as, or even earlier than, did the natives of Haïti and Mexico, it supplies me with facts which uphold this theory.

The Portuguese founded the colony of Brazil early in the sixteenth century, but naturally their first settlements were on the coast. About a hundred years later they began to explore the Amazon. The first European pioneer to journey along this wonderful waterway was a Portuguese missionary, and it is said that he was the first civilized man to see the natives of Brazil making use of rubber. Be this as it may, it is certain that the natives had long been acquainted with the product when the Portuguese began to colonize the Amazon Valley, for the settlers found that the aborigines of the district were skilled in making not only balls for playthings, but such useful articles as water-tight shoes and bags out of the sap of a tree that flourished in this locality.

It is not at all likely that the natives of Brazil had received any help from the natives of Haïti or Mexico in the matter of discovering that tree and the peculiar value of its sap. For the aborigines of Southern America are not given to wandering off to foreign lands either on business or pleasure, and even in these days it is only the very enthusiastic traveller or the man whose living depends on the rubber industry who undertakes a journey into the interior of Brazil, where, for the most part, the means of communication are still very primitive.

So far, I have shown you there is little doubt that the aborigines of Brazil discovered the rubber in their own country; and I think I have given you sufficient evidence for asking you to believe that the discovery was made off their own bat, and at quite as early a period as the natives of Haïti and of Mexico separately and independently discovered the rubber-trees in their own homelands.

I will now give you some further proofs that there is more truth than fiction in the story I told you.

Come with me into the Brazilian forests this very day. The scenery, you find, is so wildly beautiful that words cannot possibly do it justice, much less exaggerate its delights; in spite of the coming of the European, and the annual invasion by hundreds of rubber-gatherers, few changes have been made in the name of Progress within these forests; so in the days before the white man knew of their existence they must have looked very much the same as they do now. And the pure-bred Brazilian native has not been entirely wiped off the face of his homeland. You may still come across some of the aborigines, and they still scorn clothes, adorn themselves with feathers and beads, carry a blowpipe, hunt their meat, and trap their fish.

As we start off along a track that has little or no more claim to be called a path than had the Indian trail in my story, I point out to you a specimen of the rubber-yielding tree that is a native of these forests. Very soon you notice for yourselves that there are numbers of these trees in the district. Were you a son of these wilds, wholly dependent on your surroundings for anything and everything in the way of supplies, would you not try to find out whether this tree cannot be made to provide you with something to eat or drink or play with?

Take out your penknife, and cut into the bark of one of these trees. Out oozes a thickish white substance, some of which drops on to your fingers. Without a moment’s thought or hesitation, it comes natural to you to rub thumb against sticky fingers, whereupon the substance gradually solidifies, and at last breaks loose in the form of a tiny pellet. In a similarly simple way the mere savage discovered rubber hundreds of years ago; only he used a flint axehead, or maybe a sharp tooth of some animal, instead of a penknife.

With regard to the method of collecting rubber by scraping a hole in the earth, and leaving the sap which trickled down into it to be dried by the natural heat of the earth and the air, I can only assure you that the white man found the aborigines “making” raw rubber in this way, so they must have invented the plan themselves.

To defend my choice of Brazil as the scene of my story, I must now justify my statement that the discovery of rubber in this country has been of more importance than similar discoveries in the forests of other lands.

The native rubber-tree of Brazil, botanically known as Hevea brasiliensis, yields the finest quality rubber. This specially good material is called “Para rubber,” after the port of Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, which was the first centre of distribution.

The whole flourishing rubber industry of to-day owes its origin to the trade which sprang up in Para rubber, following on the colonization of the Amazon Valley by the Portuguese. During the first half of the eighteenth century Lisbon began to import rubber goods, such as hats, boots, bags, and capes, from Brazil, and in 1759 the Government of Para sent a suit of rubber clothes as a present to the King of Portugal. In the early part of the eighteenth century, too, France began to take an interest in rubber, and it was not long before other countries, including England, began to experiment with the new material.

Until well on in the nineteenth century, rubber goods were made in Brazil only. The chief market for them was North America, which imported a varied assortment of such things as rubber shoes, tobacco-pouches, travelling bags, powder-flasks, and water-bottles. Amongst all these articles, the waterproof shoes did most to popularize the new material; the first shipment was sent to Boston in 1820, and these found such favour with the Americans that a couple of years later the United States imported another 500 pairs. So quickly was this second stock sold out that the States began to think an opportunity had arisen for them to make a new outlet for their manufacturing energy and enterprise, and very soon they decided to import raw rubber and manufacture rubber goods. About the same time, some pioneer rubber-goods factories were erected on the Continent.

The factory soon began to rival the forest workshop in the variety of goods turned out, and in such details of craftsmanship as style and finish. But the new enterprise did not prove very satisfactory, because it was found that these goods did not wear well. Evidently they suffered from exposure to the air, being damaged by changes of temperature.

This great drawback to manufactured rubber goods was removed by the discovery of a method of treating rubber with sulphur. The process, called “vulcanization,” was discovered by an American named Charles Goodyear, who made his first successful experiments in 1839. He himself did much to improve his method of making rubber more durable, and he also worked up this product into a material similar to horn; but it was left for another inventive genius to find out how to polish that material and give us the very useful form of rubber which we call “vulcanite.”

The discovery of the vulcanization process acted as a very great stimulus to the rubber industry. More and more keen and widespread became the desire to manufacture rubber goods, and the growing demand for the raw material led Brazil to extend her search for Hevea trees, and to set about dealing with the export of raw rubber in a more business-like way. Up to about 1877 the forests around the mouth of the Amazon had been the only source of supply. Now some of the upper tributaries of the river were exploited, and the glowing reports as to the wealth of Hevea in the inland forests led to a rush of rubber-gatherers into the interior. It soon became known that these reports had not exaggerated the available supply of Para rubber, and fresh energy and enterprise were attracted to the Valley of the Amazon by the rosy prospects of the raw rubber trade.

“How has that trade prospered?”

The Amazon District (Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru) now has numerous competitors who cater for the world’s annual consumption of upwards of 200,000 tons of raw rubber. But up to 1912 the Amazon Valley continued to control the rubber industry, because it exported such a large proportion of the world’s whole supply of the raw material, and the quality of its output was far superior to that of the supplies from nearly every other rubber-producing country.