Rubber began its bouncing global career in the late 15th century. Among the wonders that Christopher Columbus returned with from his second voyage to the Indies or, as it would later become known, the New World (1493–6) was a ball of remarkable characteristics apparently obtained in the Antilles. Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, ‘I saw one, as big as a small jug, which the old admiral brought to Seville’, noting that the rubber ball bounced ‘six times more’ than the inflated balls he knew.¹ Spanish naturalist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés asserted that ‘these balls bounce much more than those filled with air. They are without comparison, because when dropped on the ground, they spring up, and bounce again, again and again, [gradually] slowing their bounce.’² Peter Martyr, chronicler to the Council of the Indies, wondered: ‘How is it that with only a touch they reach the stars with an incredible jump?’³ The Aztec emperor Moctezuma had introduced Hernán Cortés to the rubber ball game, and on his return to the Iberian Peninsula the conqueror presented Tlaxcalan ball players before the court in Barcelona, where Christoph Weiditz depicted two of them lobbing the ball, striking it with their hips (Figure 1).

The early fascination of the Old World with the Mesoamerican rubber ball was less concerned with the botanical species from which elastic rubber is made than with the ingenious products and uses that could be made of it. The balls, made by winding strips of rubber around a perishable core or by compressing coats of rubber by various means, were thus compared to the follis, a leather ball containing an inflated bladder; to the trigonal, a small ball stuffed with hair; to the paganina, which was filled with feathers; and to the harpasso, as described by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. AD 41–c.104) followed by Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco (1539–1613). It is clear, however, that in Mesoamerica the rubber ball and its game was much more than a sport. In the Popol Vuh, a sacred Maya text recounting the mythology of the Quiché people of the Guatemalan highlands, the story of creation begins with Hun-Hunahpú and Vucub-Hanahpú playing ball. The hollow sound of the bouncing ball striking the court bothered the lords of Xibalba, the underworld, who had summoned the twins to play only to trick them and take their ball and equipment away.

The Mesoamerican rubber ball game, today called ulama, was widespread; more than a thousand ball courts have been identified by archaeologists. The Aztecs or Nahua of central Mexico performed a highly prized version of the game. The Codex Mendoza registers 16,000 rubber balls as annual tribute to the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, where caches of balls have been found in the House of the Eagle Warriors. Excavations carried out in El Manatí, southern Veracruz, uncovered Olmec rubber balls associated to ceremonial axes and carved wood figures, and the tunnel beneath the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacán also revealed rubber balls, in sacred caches with strombus shells. Throughout time versions of the game were practiced across Mexico, in the north, south (Monte Albán and Dainzú), east (El Tajín) and west (Teuchitlán), as well as in the Maya region to the southeast and in Belize and Guatemala. At Tikal the remains of a rubber ball were discovered associated with ball game paraphernalia, and in Calakmul rubber was unearthed in a funerary context. Much rubber was also dredged from the cenote of Chichén Itza, found in the shape of balls used for incense and modelled as anthropomorphic figurines, similar to those still made by the Lacandon of Chiapas.

Notably, in early modern accounts of the Mesoamerican game, the rubber ball appears to be the personal property of the player. Mexican players brought to Spain and Italy carried their equipment and balls with them, some of which were collected as objects of interest once the game was over. Early accounts described the rubber ball as measuring the size of a human head and weighing around six pounds. In the wake of conquest and evangelisation, most ball courts were destroyed, being linked to demonic practices, possibly among warriors. The ball game was forbidden, ostensibly to protect players from injury. Thus, only the first generation of conquerors and missionaries saw the masonry ball courts in action. Nevertheless, balls were kept secretly by some. For example, Martín Ocelotl was condemned for practicing idolatry and his possessions, including two rubber balls, confiscated by church authorities and possibly burnt for being works of the devil. Still, the rubber ball game clearly persisted in some places. A film by Roberto Rochín entitled Ulama: el juego de la vida y la muerte revealed the game’s survival in modern Sinaloa.⁴ Today, the game is having a boom, flourishing in communities of hip-ulama ball players seeking the preservation of an ancestral game and part of a burgeoning tourist industry that performs pre-Columbian Mexico as experiences. Nonetheless, rubber was bound for greater things.

In addition to the balls, regular friars repeatedly mentioned other uses of the milky sap that was collected by cutting the bark of the tree. Latex, they noted, was used to make olmaitl, rubber-tipped batons for striking horizontal wooden slit drums called teponaztli; olcactli, rubber-soled shoes; as well as a manner of breastplate that deflected arrows. Latex rubber was also shaped into anthropomorphic sculptures called ulteteo and into irregular rounded forms set afire as sacred offerings in ceremonies. Among the ancient Mexicans, burnt and melted rubber served in rituals as an aromatic substance mixed with copal. It was made into a black ritual paint as well, and as an ointment it was a remedy for skin, eye and stomach ailments.

Although botanical information and harvesting practices were recorded in the 16th century, systematic scientific interest in the sources of rubber notably expanded in the 18th century. In New Spain, the history of the first royal botanical garden (1791) is closely linked to the history of the rubber tree, called olquahuitl in Nahuatl. Following Linnaean classification systems, in the garden’s inaugural ceremonies the rubber tree of southern Mexico and Central America was named Castilla elastica, Cerv.

In South America, the Franco-Hispanic expedition to measure the equator, led by Charles Marie de La Condamine, reported that the Omágua tribe near the city of Manaus in the Brazilian Amazon possessed good knowledge of rubber trees and latex. Amazonian samples, stored in rolls, were sent to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, together with information about the uses of the plants from which the dark, resinous material was extracted. Amazonian people used it to make very resistant bottles and containers, boots, and hollow balls that collapsed when kneaded then returned to their original shape. The samples were accompanied by a text entitled Extrait historique de la suite des opérations des académiciens pendant les dix années qu’a duré le voyage de l’Équateur,⁵ in which La Condamine explained that the material was known in Quito, whence he had shipped it, by the name of caoutchouc or cahuchuc. In his report presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1745, he stressed that the everyday uses of the plant were extraordinary. When cahuchuc was recently collected and the resin still fresh, he noted, it could be moulded however one wished.

After La Condamine published his findings in Paris, botanists focused on the taxonomic classification of the rubber tree. In France, Jean Baptiste Christophe Fusée Aublet published an accurate description of a tree producing rubber, native to Guyana, and named it Hevea guianensis without realising its relationship to the sample sent earlier by La Condamine. In the same year, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck analysed a dry species suspected to be different than that classified by Aublet. In 1807, the Austrian botanist Franz Sieber, passing through Belém, in the state of Pará, Brazil, obtained a specimen with flowers and sent it to the director of the Berlin Botanical Garden, Carl Ludwig Willdenow. In Germany the species already known as the rubber tree was given a scientific name by Willdenow in 1811: Hevea brasiliensis. In 1865, Johann Müller von Aargau published a taxonomic analysis of the specimen sent by Sieber in the journal Linnaea, confirming the name Hevea brasiliensis and establishing this as the highest yielding species of rubber latex.⁶ The rubber tree finally won a prominent place in the herbarium of the botanic gardens in Rio de Janeiro (Figure 2) and Pará, Brazil, in Kew Gardens, England, and in the Berlin Botanical Garden.

From the 18th to the 20th century, rubber sparked growing economic interest. Portuguese colonisers in Northern Brazil produced waterproof boots in the 18th century. By the mid 19th century, products such as waterproof clothing and galoshes were being distributed by Latin American and US merchants. The emerging rubber industry developed along with advances in knowledge about the latex coagulation process and the dissolution of rubber, whose thickness, when varied, enabled the manufacture of different kinds of objects. Among the achievements of the laboratories, vulcanisation using sulphur, discovered by Goodyear in 1844, stood out due to the resistance and hardness it lent to rubber.

Rubber became an irrepressible instrument of technological innovation, fetching high prices on the international market. The worldwide expansion of the telegraph, for example, caused a huge demand when rubber was applied to transmission wires in 1874. In that year, England imported 58,710 kilograms of rubber from the Amazon, six times more than it had imported two decades earlier. This demand caused a latex rush, with collectors flocking to Amazonian forests.

The boom was on, followed by the inevitable bust. Attracted by profits, many rubber tappers submitted to poor working conditions comparable to captivity, while indigenous inhabitants of the region resisted or avoided extractivist demands. As rubber became Brazil’s primary export product, the rubber trees began to wither in the fields, threatening latex production capacity. The old extraction method was questioned and cultivation of Hevea became more attractive. Nevertheless, in Brazil extraction was still seen as the most viable way to collect latex on a large scale and move it quickly to port. In 1881 in the Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden, João Barbosa Rodrigues took the initiative to plant rubber trees. His tests established that Hevea brasiliensis was the variety best suited to latex production. In Europe, Kew Gardens had been performing similar acclimatisation tests.

The British colonial rubber boom in Asia of 1910–11 was based on seeds from Brazil, however. Hevea brasiliensis seeds obtained in Brazil were transferred not via official diplomatic means, as was customary, but surreptitiously by an English explorer named Henry Wickham who had lived for many years in the Amazon.

While the British rubber plantations in Asia were still doing well, in Brazil in the 1920s, the government of the state of Pará established a land grant system. One million hectares in the Tapajós valley were ceded to W.L. Reeves Blakeley for the Ford Motor Company, which permitted ‘the use of the land to exploit native rubber trees and intensive planting of rubber trees’. The concession was operated by Companhia Ford Industrial do Brasil, which, to set up its operations, founded the city of Fordlândia. In 1934, the company negotiated an exchange of land, near Santarém, named Belterra. The Americans sought to develop Hevea agriculture and study its chemical processing. The botanist Adolpho Ducke, working for the Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden on the American project, studied the geography of the different and best rubber species and sought to identify the plant that could solve issues related to latex processing, coagulation and concentration. For the latex concentration problem, the creaming methods patented in 1923 and 1924 in Germany and England, which involved adding colloidal materials, predominated. The Fordlândia technicians undertook a broad search of Amazon plants to find a creaming agent that was abundant in the region. Ducke noted that the local people used the seed of the jutaí tree. The result of the research was latex creaming on an industrial scale.

Despite the industrial expansion obtained with rubber, local techniques of latex preparation persisted in some areas of both Mexico and Brazil. During the expedition of 1938 headed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, which produced the classic work Tristes Tropiques, Brazilian National Museum anthropologist Luiz de Castro Faria photographed children playing with a rubber ball and wearing rubber boots made by local inhabitants. He also photographed smoking and curing of latex and loading of processed rubber to be shipped to the export port. In 2007, in a meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC), held in Belém, the chemist Fernando Galembeck stated that only now in the 21st century, with nanotechnology, have chemists been able to perfect the qualities of natural rubber. However, the material and the preparation process remain the same traditional ones photographed by Luiz de Castro Faria in 1938.

The boots acquired by Castro Faria during that expedition were part of the ethnological collections of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Sixty years after taking those pictures, Castro Faria published them in the book Um outro olhar, diário da expedição à Serra do Norte, Mato Grosso, 1938 (Figure 3).⁷ The boots, however, disappeared 70 years after they had been added to the museum’s collection, along with the 20 million scientific objects gathered over two centuries of research in the natural sciences in Brazil that were consumed by the fire that destroyed the National Museum in September 2018.

FURTHER READING

Carreón, E. (2006) El olli en la plástica mexica: los usos del hule entre los nahuas del siglo XVI (Mexico: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas).

Carreón, E. (2013) Le tzompantli et le jeu de balle: relation entre deux espaces sacres (Oxford: BAR).

La Condamine, C.M. (1981) Voyage sur l’Amazone (Paris: Éditions la Découverte).

Castro Faria, L. (2001) Um outro olhar: diário da expedição à Serra do Norte (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro Sobre Azul).

Dean, W. (1987) Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).

Harp, S.L. (2016) A World History of Rubber: Empire, Industry and the Everyday (Oxford: Wiley).

Huber, J. (1912) Relatório sobre o estado actual da cultura da Hevea brasiliensis nos principais países de producção do Oriente (Belém: Imprensa Official do Estado).

Minguet, H. (2004) L’Étrange histoire des plantes (Paris: Ed. Plon).

Spruce, R. (1908) Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, 2 vols., edited and condensed by A.R. Wallace (London: Macmillan and Co).

Stern, T. (1966) The Rubber-Ball Games of the Americas, monographs of the American Ethnological Society (Seattle, WA/London: University of Washington Press).

Weinstein, B. (1983) The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Wright, H. (1912) Hevea Brasiliensis or Pará Rubber (London: MacLaren & Sons Ltd).

¹ B. de las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria cuanto a las cualidades, disposición, descripción, cielo y suelo destas tierras, y condiciones naturales, policías, repúblicas, manera de vivir e costumbres de las gentes destas Indias Occidentales y Meridionales cuyo imperio soberano pertenece a los reyes de Castilla (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1967), vol. 1, 322.

² G.F. de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y Tierra firme del Mar Océano, libro 6, cap. 2 (Mexico: Centro de Estudios para la Historia de México, Condumex, 1979), folio LIX.

³ P.M. de Anglería, Décadas del Nuevo Mundo (Mexico: Porrúa, 1964), vol. 2, 537–49.

⁴ R.R. Naya, Ulama: el juego de la vida y la muerte (documentary film, 1986).

⁵ C.M. de la Condamine, Dossier biographique (Paris: Institut de France-Academie des Sciences), doc. 15, 31. https://www.academiesciences.fr/pdf/dossiers/Condamine/Fonds_Condamine.pdf

⁶ W. Dean, A luta pela borracha no Brasil (São Paulo: Livraria Nobel, 1989), 33.

⁷ L. Castro Faria, Um outro olhar: diário da expedição à Serra do Norte (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro Sobre Azul, 2001).