Ayapua Boat Museum in Iquitos, Peru

Before the 1850s travel by boat up the Amazon river, against the current, was nearly impossible, but with the arrival of steamboats new industries became possible. The most lucrative of these was the rubber trade, and from 1880-1912 the Amazon was flooded with adventurers looking to make their fortunes.  Steamboats like the Ayapua were the lifeline of this boom. They functioned as cargo boats, passenger liners, naval vessels, hotels, brothels, and everything in between. The Ayapua itself was built in 1906 in Hamburg, Germany, for the express purpose of carrying up to $2,000,000 worth of rubber per load in today’s money from the Peruvian Amazon to Europe and the United States. The Amazonian rubber boom, however, was doomed almost before it began. After the British managed to smuggle a load of rubber seeds to their Asian colonies the price of rubber plummeted. Reports of the brutal living conditions and wholesale slaughter of the indigenous rubber tappers also started to reach Europe and Lima, despite the propagandising of the Rubber Barons, and by 1912 most of the adventurers and speculators had fled Iquitos, leaving nothing but mansions, trauma, and steamboats.