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. [Illustration: TAPPING THE WILD RUBBER-TREES (HEVEA BRASILIENSIS) IN THE FOREST NEAR PARA, BRAZIL. _Page 23_ _By permission of the Director of the Museum, Para_] About 1900, however, a competitor gave signs of life in the cradle of the Middle East. The public knew little about that competitor, and cared less; the experts with very few exceptions derided it. But a few years later both the experts and the public began to realize that, for the first time in its triumphant career, wild Para had a really fearsome rival. This adversary is commonly known as Plantation Rubber; as a matter of fact, it is Cultivated Para, which has made such a determined fight for supremacy in the raw rubber market. This is indeed a case of child rising up against parent, for the Cultivated Para is all being obtained from trees that owe their existence to seeds taken from the Brazilian forests. The struggle has brought about a revolution in the Rubber World; all of you must have heard of at least one of the stirring events to which it has already given rise--the Rubber Boom in the spring of 1910. CHAPTER IV WE VISIT A SERINGAL We want to see for ourselves the way the present-day rubber-gatherers in Brazil do their work, and the kind of life they lead. So we have made a long journey by boat up one of the tributaries of the River Amazon to the landing-stage for a typical rubber-gatherers’ village.