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on oceangoing ships often miss the sublime, radiant sensation many experience under the rain forest canopy; traveling on a crowded boat, wrote Nash, one is even cheated of the “poignancy of solitude.” * After leaving Santarém, the Ormoc ’s captain, unfamiliar with the Tapajós’s shifting channels that make it difficult to travel even when the water is high, ran the ship aground and was pulled free by a tug only after “considerable effort.” 6

    Victor was even less taken with Fordlandia, and whatever recoil he might have felt on his voyage from the human emptiness of the jungle was intensified when he confronted the amount of work the place needed. His first impression upon leaving the dock was of tractors and trucks “wailing in mud,” slipping and sliding on roads that weren’t graded, drained, or surfaced properly. The rain was constant, and the wet heat, without the relief of a river breeze, overpowering. “There is so much to be done that it looks hard to decide where to start. . . . It will be necessary,” he thought, “to start a railroad line at once,” along with houses, schools, and a receiving building. 7

    DESPITE PERINI’S INITIAL impression, and despite first Blakeley’s and then Oxholm’s clumsy administration, Cowling’s lecture had had a galvanizing effect on Fordlandia’s managers and the project of transforming the jungle into a settlement and plantation had advanced considerably. The labor situation had stabilized somewhat, and by the end of 1930 Fordlandia employed nearly four thousand people, most of them migrants from the poverty- and drought-stricken northeast states of Maranhão and Ceará. Before he departed, Cowling delegated more authority to the engineer Archilaus Weeks, who had arrived in Fordlandia in 1929 from Ford’s L’Anse lumber mill, located on Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to take charge of construction. 8

    Under Weeks’s direction, a recognizable town had begun to take shape along the Tapajós to replace Blakeley’s work camp. Having pulled up the stumps and burned the undergrowth along the river frontage, Weeks organized a more efficient system to receive material and process potential employees. Workers had begun to lay pipes and wires for water, sewage, and electric systems. The sawmill and powerhouse had been completed, and the water tower was rising. About thirty miles of roads crisscrossed the property, pushing into the jungle. Work was under way on a 3,200-square-foot dining hall to replace the shambles of a mess hall left by Blakeley. The old lopsided hospital was torn down, and in its place was built a sleek new clinic designed by Albert Kahn. And soon after his arrival, Perini took charge of supervising the construction of what would be a three-mile-long railroad, cutting through the estate’s many hills and linking the sawmill to the farthermost field camps, which were charged with clearing more land for rubber planting. 9
    Dearborn had also finally sent a topographer down to do a proper survey and identify the best location for a “city of at least 10,000 people to cover about three square miles.” Though Fordlandia was going on its third year, the construction of permanent houses for its Brazilian workers had not yet begun. Single laborers lived in bunkhouses or in holdout towns like Pau d’Agua along the plantation’s periphery. A few took up residence across the river, on Urucurituba island, and paddled to work every morning. Married workers mostly lived in the ever metastasizing “native village” stretching along the river. The largest, rambling part of this settlement was made up of the families of the plantation’s common laborers. They slept and cooked in one-room thatch houses, some of them reinforced with planks pried off discarded packing crates. Children, mothers, fathers, and other relatives hung their hammocks like radiating spokes from a central pole; the cooking fire’s smoke damaged their lungs but