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the sawyer.
    “I haven’t got anything to say. If I’m of more use to the company down there than I am here, I’d be a damn poor stick if I wouldn’t go. They’ve been feeding me here quite a while. It would be a good thing to go down there and eat off them for a while.”
    “Well, that’s pretty good,” said Perini, who later described Mulrooney as a “gentlemanly young man.”
    “Don’t say anything about it now for a while,” Perini told his recruit, “later on, we’ll see.”
    Mulrooney proved more obliging than did Perini’s wife. Constance was tired of packing up house as they moved from one post to another and wanted to “live at the same number on the street” for just a bit longer. “You go by yourself this time,” she told her husband.

    “Okay, you can stay here,” Victor said. But Ford overruled him. Dearborn had by then received word that the drinking and gambling of Fordlandia managers was mitigated somewhat by the “presence of American women.” Wives were having a “beneficial effect on the general appearance of all the men here,” a Fordlandia manager wrote. Even the “whiskermania” that had gripped Americans cut free from Michigan’s clean-shaven decorum waned in their presence. Ford’s men and machines would civilize the Amazon, but Ford’s women were needed to civilize his men. 5
    “Where you go,” Ford told Perini when the two men met later in Dearborn to discuss specifics, “your family goes with you.” Victor nodded and phoned Constance back in Iron Mountain. “I guess you better get ready.”
    THE PERINIS’ TRIP, in early March, was nothing like Ide and Blakeley’s gentle roll to Belém two years earlier. Off the coast of Florida, the Ormoc ran into a hurricane. Lashing rain drenched the ship, whose motors were no match for the whitecaps washing over its deck. Unable to make steerageway, the boat drifted hundreds of miles into the Atlantic. Pitching and rolling “all day and night,” the Ormoc tossed cargo into the sea as the passengers huddled in their cabins.

    The Perini family .
    It took two days for the ship to right its course, and another two weeks to arrive in Belém. The Perinis and their three children stayed at the Grande Hotel, which was the best in the city yet still a place where spiders could be found in the bedclothes. Belém’s Ford agent, James Kennedy, told Constance to get used to it. In the Amazon, he said, “the cockroaches follow the ants, and the mice follow the cockroaches. Everything takes care of itself, don’t worry about it.”

    After a rough night in a soft bed, which gave out under Victor’s weight, the Perinis were “glad to get back on the Ormoc because it was nice and clean there, even though traveling was rough.” Both the Amazon and the Tapajós are broad rivers, in places vastly so. In a work published just that year, the Brazilian writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro noted that the Amazon makes perspective impossible. Instead of appreciating its vast panorama, first-time observers “recoil sharply under the overpowering sensation of the absolute which seems to have presided over the formation of that world.” And as the Perinis made their way up to the plantation, the wide sky combined with long stretches of dense forest to weigh on Victor’s mind. He complained of the tedium as they passed endless low banks with “no hills of any kind and nothing but trees and vines visible.” The view was interrupted only by occasional villages, most derelict and some deserted. The family was traveling during the rainy season, when the Amazon just below Santarém is at its widest and the constant green of the shore at its most distant. During these months, the floodplain spills over into the forest, creating half-submerged islands and a “vast flow of muddy water,” as the writer Roy Nash, who made the trip just a few years before, described his impression. Sailing as close up the middle of the waterway as possible, voyagers