[...] according to the Brazilian overseer Valera hired. The overseer said you could not predict. You would not know, by guessing, which of the tappers would come in at quota, which of them would come in under quota, and which of them would die.

Yellow fever, the patrão said, they die of yellow fever.

A rubber worker with a.22-caliber hole in his head:

Yellow fever, it’s written in the booklet.

Another with a hole in his back:

Yellow fever.

A third with an ice pick pushed through his neck, because the patrão’s flimsy muzzle-loader, with its cheap wire-wound barrel, unraveled:

Y.f.

The Valera Company guns the patrão was given were good for fifty shots and then they fell apart. He wrote to the company’s contact in São Paulo about the faulty equipment but was told there was nothing to be done about it.

It was important to keep these Indians on edge, so the patrão had to find ways. The Indians needed threats. They needed to be afraid. They might run away. Or sell the rubber to rubber pirates who roamed the edges of the encampment, and then the patrão would lose his profit share. You could hear these bandits, their cracks and rustlings in the jungle. The patrão’s job was to keep the Indians in line. His tools were the cheap muzzle-loaders, mock drownings with water poured over a facecloth, and various further entrenchments of the Indians’ peon status. They owed a fee for having been brought to the Amazon. They owed for their purchase on credit of goods at the company store. They were forbidden subsistence activities. No collecting Brazil nuts. No growing of crops (anyone caught farming: y.f.).