Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview
  • Blood Rubber

  • How the Amazon Died
  • By: Adam Courtenay
  • Narrated by: Richard I Moss
  • Length: 2 hrs and 39 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (7 ratings)

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Blood Rubber

By: Adam Courtenay
Narrated by: Richard I Moss
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £0.99

Buy Now for £0.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

Blood Rubber: How the Amazon Died tells the extraordinary story of one of the blackest episodes in Amazonian history, known as the Putumayo Affair.

In 1907 Walter Hardenburg, a young American explorer and engineer, was canoeing slowly down a meandering tributary of the great river, in deepest Amazonia, in search of adventure. The realm of Captain Kurtz’s Apocalypse Now seems tame by comparison with what he found through the mist up ahead. Hardenburg had entered the rubber domain of Julio César Arana, a rubber fiefdom gone mad - where the only law that counted was the ‘Winchester constitution’: the rifle made all the rules.

The native people were routinely enslaved to work the rubber plantations and flogged, raped and tortured to death if they resisted. Something snapped inside the young, idealistic Hardenburg when he witnessed these scenes of horror: thousands of native people were being slaughtered to satisfy the West’s insatiable demand for rubber. The rubber extraction methods that produced car tires, rubber hoses and countless other products relied on an entrenched system of utter barbarism.

Hardenburg vowed to seek justice for the thousands of victims of the Putumayo atrocities and to publicize the destruction of their lives and culture across the world. This is the story of how he did it. Blood Rubber is about the power of one versus the power of the machine...of utter evil versus improbable goodness.

Adam Courtenay is an Australian adventurer and writer who canoed up the Amazon as part of his research for this book. He has trekked some of the world’s most enthralling and difficult trails: retraced Hannibal’s footsteps over the Alps; slogged over the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea; and walked the Aboriginal Larapinta ‘Dreamtime’ in the central Australian desert.

As a journalist he has worked for the Financial Times and as a Sydney-based correspondent for the UK’s Sunday Times. He currently writes for The Sydney Morning Herald/Age and is the Australia correspondent for the online finance platform TradingFloor.com.

His interest in Amazonian history goes back five years - he has explored the Amazon twice and written one ebook, Grand Mistresses of the Amazon. He is currently writing a larger nonfiction work on the entire history of the Amazon basin, which he plans to publish soon as Amazon Men.

©2015 Adam Courtenay (P)2015 Audible, Ltd
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Ultimate Folly cover art
The Secret History of Costaguana cover art
The Last Englishmen cover art
Blood Moon cover art
Black Snake cover art
A Way in the World cover art
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes: Volume 1 cover art
Jimmy Hoffa cover art
In Full Flight cover art
Eureka cover art
The Whisky King cover art
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London cover art
Between Man and Beast cover art
Dreamers and Deceivers cover art
Revolution by Murder cover art
Charlie Chan cover art

What listeners say about Blood Rubber

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    6
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Greed and Savagery

This is so reminiscent of King Leopold's Ghost. Here is human nature at it's most debased. This story is a lead in to further understanding of the destruction of the Amazon. It is happening right now. People are still being murdered.
An essential read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!