Men and Medicine Move-ln on the Amazon

THE RIVER SEA

Mustering all their resources of will and strength, arming themselves with weapons of modern development from the bulldozer to the hypodermic needle, men are again battling to tame the wild basin of the Amazon. From the moldering towns that stand as monuments to earlier defeats, new roads are slashing into the jungle; virgin timber crashes down, letting in sunlight and packhorse aircraft. Raw new concrete emerges from forms to make the walls of factories, the piers of bridges, the foundations for machines. This time modern man, with all his new tools, may be able to do what his predecessors could not: build a permanent and growing economy out of a bewilderingly immense frontier.

The job will take generations. Brazilians call the Amazon O Rio Mar (The River Sea), and it plows into the Atlantic with such momentum that its silt-brown stain can be seen 100 miles from the coast. In one minute it empties 3 billion gallons of water, as much as 14 Mississippis. Oceangoing freighters can navigate its channel for a distance as great as from New York to Ireland--and still find water deep enough to cover a ten-story apartment building. Ten of its 1,100 tributaries are longer than the Rhine; so broad is its mouth that it holds an island (Marajo) larger than Switzerland. Melting Andean snows and glaciers, plus the 90 in. of tropical rain that falls each year, can make the river below Manaus rise 60 ft., flood an area the size of Poland. The Amazon's tangled trees make up 25% of the earth's forests; its basin covers an area nearly as great as the continental U.S.

It is as though Nature, in grim humor, rolled out an immense green piecrust, poured in a rich filling of almost every conceivable vegetable and mineral in the world, and then handed puny man a tiny fork.

Warrior Women. The first man to take on the challenge of the Amazon was the river's discoverer, Spanish Explorer Francisco de Orellana. Plunging over the Andes from the west coast in 1541, Orellana and his men sailed and fought their way downstream for eight months. According to the expedition's chronicler, they found a race of warrior women equal to the Amazons of Greek legend: "These women are very white and tall," he wrote. "They are very robust, and go about naked (but with their privy parts covered), carrying bows and arrows in their hands, each doing as much fighting as ten Indian men. They have a great wealth of gold and silver, and great cities of white stone glistening in the sun."

Thus the river got its name, though no one ever found the women again, or the great cities, or the gold. But the lands drained by the river do hold vast riches. Of the world's 22,767 known plant species, scientists have found 19,619 in the Amazon basin. The river and its tributaries churn with 1,800 species of fish (v. 150 in all Europe), including the voracious little piranha (which attacks in schools to reduce a horse or a man to a skeleton in minutes) and the manatee (the sea cow that gave rise to the mermaid legend among early mariners).

Rubber Barons. The biggest development of Amazon riches was the rubber boom, which began when Charles Macintosh started making raincoats in 1823. Vulcanization and later the automobile fed the prosperity; output rose to a peak of 42,286 tons in 1912--at prices that hit $3 a lb. In the jungle, the rubber barons enslaved Indians and immigrants, drove them so hard that 300,000 died; a 230-mile railroad, built to carry rubber from Bolivia, cost 70 lives a mile to build. In Manaus, the rubber tycoons built mansions and watched Pavlova dance in a $10 million opera house. Then England's Henry Wickham smuggled rubber tree seeds to London's Kew Gardens and on to the Far East, where efficient plantations broke Brazil's monopoly. Now Brazil buys Malayan rubber.

Men Wanted. The Amazon's new awakening is beset with old problems. Tennessean Ronald Richardson, now 46, who after World War II duty in Belem stayed on to set up a lumber mill outside the town, knows them well; jungle vines are spreading over the mill and pigs root through his crumbling office. "It's here," he says. "No doubt about it--all the riches on earth. I don't know how to get it out, but dammit"--he pounded his desk so hard the Scotch bottle jumped--"it's here! We need men, real men."

Getting out the riches is notably hindered by disease. Malaria, yellow fever, yaws, trachoma and filariasis (a forerunner of elephantiasis) sap men's will to work and win. But disease is being fought hard and successfully. During World War II, the U.S. launched a Special Public Health Service (SESP) to protect vital rubber workers from the Amazon's scourges. Now only eight of SESP' 3,153-man staff are U.S. citizens, and 97% of its annual $10 million budget comes from Brazil. The outfit runs 249 rural clinics, 22 hospitals, 109 city water systems, 97 sewage-disposal systems. It has broadened life expectancy from 30 to 41 years, reduced infant mortality in some areas as much as 50%, confidently plans to eliminate filariasis in two years and malaria in seven. Last week in Iquitos, Peruvian and Colombian health ministers signed a bilateral pact to eradicate small pox, malaria and yellow fever in ther parts of the Amazon basin.

Two other big problems are power and transportation. Brazil's Amazon development board has built or is building plant to boost power by 61,000 kw. It has cut roads into millions of empty acres and most important, has connected the Amazon basin to the rest of Brazil by a 1,363 mile jungle highway from Belem south to the new capital of Brasilia.

Builders from All Over. Seeing hope in these improvements, settlers are coming in, turning wasteland into farms and farms into communities. The town of Gurupi, nonexistent 18 months ago, has jus finished harvesting a 2 1/2 million-lb. rice crop. Directed by U.S. geologists, seismograph crews are hacking their way through the brush to set off exploration blasts and measure the echoes for the government oil monopoly, Petrobras; drilling crews are battling their way through vines and tangled trees to bore into promising substratum. Results so far: traces.

Another mineral is a rich reality. In 1941 a trader picked up a big black stone to ballast his canoe on the Amapari River, later had it analyzed. It turned out to be 60% pure manganese, and today the mine is the Amazon's biggest enterprise, shipping out 75,000 tons a year.

The newcomer who has struck it richest is Isaac Sabba, 53. The son of Czechoslovakian immigrants who arrived in Manaus when he was 14, he worked on the docks to build capital, started buying and selling jungle produce, branched out into manufacturing ("This country can't develop if we just take things out of it"). Now Sabba's string of eleven corporations is making tin cans and rubber tapping cups, shotgun shells, kraft paper, oil drums, prefabricated houses, dynamite. He distills essential oils, makes leather products, refines and distributes petroleum. He has set up a businessman committee to attract others to .the frontier.

"There is plenty of room," says Sabba, and more men are moving into it. Belem-born Isaac Benzecry is processing alligator hides, distilling rosewood (for oils used in cosmetics), curing furs (ocelot, jaguar, otter) and skins (water hog, wild boar, deer). Onetime Belem Fruit Peddler and Cabbie Manuel Pinto Silva now turns out building tiles, cement and lumber, is putting the finishing touches on the Amazon's first skyscraper in downtown Belem. Ukraine-born U.S. Citizen Maurice Kleinberg started Belem's first deep-sea fishing fleet in 1956, now ships giant shrimp and red snapper to the U.S. and the Caribbean as fast as he can freeze them.

Work v. Tears. Despite the influx, the vast Amazon has only a sprinkling of people. The League of Nations once reckoned that the basin could support 900 million people, but only a scant 4,000,000 occupy the area, two-thirds of them caboclos, who live in huts, fish and loll in hammocks. Japan is one source of newcomers who seem immune to the easy-living lethargy that strikes native Brazilians and Indians. At Tome Acu, below Belem, the Japanese have helped to carve out one of the world's biggest pepper plantations. At nearby Guama colony, they are working round the clock to supply Belem with food. Outside Manaus. others have turned cleared jungle into lush truck gardens. Amazonas Governor Gilberto Mestrinho says that the Japanese are exactly the kind of settlers the Amazon needs to build the future. "They don't cry for help every time they break an ax handle," he says. "They are not afraid to work."

For the men who come to work, Brazil is determined to lend all the support it can. "Here man is overwhelmed by the enormity of nature," says SESP Physician Carlos Guimaraees. "But we are going to make the Amazon a safe and healthy place to live. Then it can produce wealth and abundance."

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