The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Of the two, malaria was the oldest, deadliest in number of deaths, and most pervasive. Yellow fever was self-limiting, since the parasite either killed its victim in five to seven days or allowed a complete recovery that brought with it a lifelong immunity. Not so with malaria. It struck, lingered, then returned repeatedly, teasing its victim, slacking off before rolling back like a scalding wave. Anyone who ventured into its domain saw others die around them before they, too, succumbed to debilitating headaches, chills, and fevers. Physicians prescribed general bleeding as a cure: 20-50 ounces of blood taken at the fever’s onset, then more for a total that could exceed 100 ounces. Since the body contains about 180 ounces of blood, and anemia is one of malaria’s most common symptoms, the loss of so much blood could be fatal. The common treatment with mercurous chloride (calomel), was no better. Malaria is dehydrating; since calomel is a purgative, it intensified the loss of fluid. The two treatments administered together sent many to an early grave.

  Only one thing quelled the fever, a bitter alkaloid in the red bark of a tree. That tree grew in only one place on Earth, along the east slope of the Andes near the source of the Amazon—a place that, for most Europeans, seemed like the dark side of the moon.

  Although quinine is best known today as a bitter taste in tonic water, during Victoria’s reign it was the most powerful antimalarial medicine known to man. It came from the bark of the evergreen cinchona tree, native only to South America. Cinchona belongs to the Rubiaceae, or madder family, which includes gardenia, bluet, bedstraw, coffee, and the ipecac (ipecacuante) shrub. There are nearly sixty-five species of cinchona, and most prefer the mountainous forests of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. They grow in a narrow belt between 22° S latitude and 10° N latitude at 3,000-6,000 feet above sea level, an area characterized by high humidity and frequent heavy rain. Only four of the species contain an alkaloid content in the bark of their roots or stems high enough to be any use to man: the highest concentrations were thought to exist in the cascarilla roja, or “red-bark tree.” Quinine’s preparation had been the same for centuries: Cascarillos uprooted the tree, beat loose the bark, and peeled it off by hand. The dried bark was then ground into powder or infused in water.

  In 1859, the London journals began to chronicle Britain’s two-year quest to smuggle cinchona from the Andes. That there was something different about this incursion was apparent from the beginning. Most British expeditions claimed discovery and the furtherance of science as their purpose, but the cinchona affair was an unabashed imperial endeavor swaddled in justifications ranging from free trade to the good of mankind. If the single source of this life-giving drug were being mismanaged to the point of extinction, argued colonial authorities, didn’t the world’s most powerful nation have a moral obligation to plant seeds elsewhere? When cascarillos felled cinchona during collection, they pulled up young trees with no thought of replanting or conservation. The world’s only defense against malaria might go the way of the dodo. Theft in such a case would be a humanitarian act. Global thievery was a small price to pay if millions were saved. Left unsaid was the fact that malaria’s defeat would end the deathwatch of the “white man’s grave” and leave the tropics open for colonization.

  The midcentury belief that a nation could appropriate for itself another’s vegetable resources did not occur in a vacuum, especially if clothed in the garments of religion. Natural theology had long assumed that everything in nature existed for man’s use and instruction: Natural riches, scattered to the ends of the earth, were not for one people alone and should be available to all. J. H. Balfour’s 1851 Phytotheology argued that God’s orderly plan was reflected in the structure and function of plants. T. W. Archer’s 1853 Economic Botany claimed that God had clothed the Earth “with every necessary for men’s wants,” and even rubber, with its remarkable versatility, was used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as a prime example of God’s affection for man. The transfer of plant species from one part of the world to another was nothing new. The Spanish Conquest had opened Europe up to what has since been called the “Colombian exchange.” Wheat, grapes, lettuce, cabbage, apples, peaches, mangoes, bananas, alfalfa, and many other crops crossed the Atlantic in one direction or the other. Most important was maize, which thrived in the drier soils of southern Europe, the Balkans, and West Africa, and the white potato, which fed the poor throughout industrial Europe. After the First Opium War of 1839-1842, a plant collector named Robert Fortune brought two thousand tea plants and seventeen thousand seeds out of China and transplanted them in the sprawling Indian plantations around Darjeeling. It was obvious that transplanted crops could make British settlers rich and their colonial administrations solvent: The Ceylon coffee crop, for example, was worth £500,000 in 1850 and would be worth three times that in just another decade. Cocoa showered riches on Trinidad; sugar, on the colonies in the Caribbean. In Burma, officials urged the enclosure and protection of teak; in British Honduras, mahogany companies ran the colony.

  The reality of plant transfer was not at issue. What emerged with the 1859 cinchona theft was a new rationale. The Earth was a treasure house that had to be managed: Nature belonged to man to harvest and “improve.” This was especially true in the tropics, where vegetable riches ran rampant but were also wasted and destroyed. By the Victorian era, when the British Empire had endowed its expansion with a moral flavor, the idea had new urgency. Not only the conquest of nature was at stake but the course of the future. Conservation sometimes meant saving environments from those who lived in them. At best, natives could be educated; at worst, they must be expelled. The “Profligate Native” became a common theme of empire, often rephrased as “the labor problem,” used as a justification for the right to intervene. In Cameroon, reservoirs of palm oil were being wasted because the African laborers “waltz through life in a dream with their heads wrapped in clouds too deep to receive the instructions given to them,” complained botanist Gustav Mann. To colonial governor Sir Charles Bruce, “the very existence of [tropical] colonies as civilized communities required the intervention of capital and science of European origin.” To Benjamin Kidd in his 1898 The Control of the Tropics, the native had no right “to prevent the utilization of the immense natural resources which they have in charge.” This certainly applied to the profligate Andeans killing off the world’s shrinking stock of quinine. The motive was as old as Babylon. The world’s riches were up for grabs. Only the justifications changed.

  Every great theft demands a mastermind, and he requires the machine to help launch his schemes. In the case of cinchona and rubber, the usual genesis was reversed. The great machine came first, awaiting its machinator.

  The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was that great machine. Formed from two adjoining pleasure gardens of the Hanoverian kings, Kew was given new life in 1841 as a state institution. Funded by Parliament and charged to aid “the Mother Country in everything that is useful in the vegetable kingdom,” its mandate was to be the nerve center for “the many gardens in the British colonies and dependencies, such as Calcutta, Bombay, Saharanpur, Mauritius, Sidney, and Trinidad, whose utility is wasted for want of unity and central direction.” Although its beauties were open to the public, its true role was that of research and development, providing scientific aid to the empire’s vast plantation economy—a mission considered crucial for “the founding of new colonies” and the maintenance of their economies. To succeed in such an endeavor, a walking encyclopedia of botany was needed at the helm. The man selected for this, William Jackson Hooker, was Regis Professor at the University of Glasgow, director of the Glasgow Botanic Garden, founder and editor of several botanical journals, and one of the few professional botanists of the time. He was also politically savvy, transforming the new state institution into a world center for “economic botany,” closely tying the young science of botany with the rising fortunes of empire.

  Hooker wasted no time in making the Royal Botanic Gardens indispensable. Soon after his appointment o
n April 1, 1841, he established a Museum of Economic Botany at Kew. This acted as a clearinghouse for global seed transfers, shuffling plants throughout the empire as the economic possibilities presented themselves. By 1854, Hooker could boast that not a day passed without investors, planters, or administrators coming to Kew for information about the useful woods, fibers, gums, resins, drugs, and dyestuffs awaiting exploitation in their chosen wilderness. By 1855, he felt confident enough to claim that Kew was “essential to a great commercial country.” By the extent and nature of her power, Great Britain sat in the crossroads of Providence; Kew was there, Hooker said, to organize and improve the bounty from the four corners of the globe.

  Hooker was not the first to see rubber’s importance to the empire: that honor may have gone to the industrialist Thomas Hancock. By the 1850s, it was becoming obvious that vulcanization was transforming rubber from a natural oddity to a world commodity. In 1830, Britain imported 211 kilograms of raw rubber; by 1857, that figure jumped to 10,000 kilograms, a 4,700-percent increase in a quarter century. Even more telling was the fact that Brazil was becoming the world center for supply. In 1827, the nation exported 69 metric tons of rubber, an amount exploding to 1,544 tons annually from 1851 to 1856. Hancock began to worry that Brazil might someday cease to provide the quantities of rubber that Britain was beginning to require. Rubber was a jungle product, extracted from secret groves in the rain forest by methods no European understood. There was no way to predict annual supply; Hancock knew that the price would increase as the world demanded more. The market needed a prod. In 1850, Hancock proposed creating rubber plantations “in Jamaica and the East Indies” to William Hooker. The director, in turn, promised Kew’s resources and vowed to “render any assistance in his power to parties disposed to make the attempt” to move the rubber tree from Brazil to some friendly territory within the British Empire.

  Thus, Kew first turned its attention to rubber in the same year that Henry Wickham’s father died. Its interest in caoutchouc paralleled Henry’s coming-of-age. Unlike cinchona, however, a major mystery prevailed. Industrialists like Hancock had determined that “Pará fine” was the most durable rubber on the market, able to withstand more punishment and shrink less during transport than any other variety. But no one knew what it came from or where. The Amazon Basin was huge and uncharted; accurate maps did not exist; rubber suppliers kept the locations of their rubber stands secret or lied about the source, calling everything “Pará fine” to drive up the price. Rubber went by such names as seringa rubber, India rubber, “Pará fine,” and now a new term, siphonia, which perplexed everyone. Experts added to the confusion, bringing rubber-producing plants to Kew from throughout Latin America, often in a deteriorated state. They brought Castilla elastica and its cousins from Central America; three kinds of Hevea from the Amazon and Orinoco valleys; the Ceará rubber tree, Manihot glaziovii; and a Brazilian species of Sapium. They confused seringa with Castilla and were lost regarding the ranges of separate species of Hevea. There were alternate sources from other continents, since each nation had an interest in proclaiming its rubber the best in the world. Botanists found Kickxia, Funtumia elastica, Landolphia, Clitandra, and Carpodinus in Africa; Ficus elastica in India and Burma; and “gutta-percha” from the leaves of the towering Isonandra tree in Borneo, the Malay peninsula, and Ceylon. For a long time, “gutta-percha” and “India rubber” were interchangeable. As rubber became essential, only one thing was certain. Confusion reigned.

  Such was not the case with cinchona. Its taxonomy was settled. Collectors knew what they were looking for. Although never parsed so finely, it made a certain sense to smuggle cinchona before attempting the same with rubber: In order to solve the mystery of rubber, one needed to survive the tropics and its great assassin, malaria. In order to do this, one needed a reliable supply of quinine.

  There was also imperial demand. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in Bengal and North India catalyzed Great Britain just as the French Revolution transformed France and September 11, 2001, changed the United States. The world was a dangerous place, the homeland surrounded by deadly plots and enemies. In such a world, the best defense was a preemptive offense, and this meant sending British troops, administrators, and their dependents to the empire’s malarial possessions around the world. The Dutch were already mounting a campaign to secure and control cinchona. Quinine was more than a drug. It was a fetish: a symbol of the power of science to control an unruly world.

  Into this tumult stepped the caper’s mastermind. Clements R. Markham was a handsome fellow, with a broad forehead, muttonchops, and pale, distant eyes—one of those eminent Victorians who seemed “irritatingly destined for high office,” a biographer said. In time he would be knighted, made president of the Royal Geographical Society, and write forty-four books, most on South America, but in 1859 he was a thirty-year-old junior clerk in the India Office, recently decommissioned from the Royal Navy. Most of his seven-year service was spent sailing off the American coasts, and he still dreamed of the tropics. On April 5, 1859, Markham proposed in a letter to Sir James Hogg, Chairman of the Revenue for the Judicial and Legislative Committee of the Council of India, that cinchona seeds could be stolen by an Englishman and replanted in the plantations of northern India. “My qualifications for the task,” he wrote, “consisted in a knowledge of several parts of the chinchona [sic] region and of the plants, an acquaintance with the country, the people, and their languages, both Spanish and Quichi.” He maintained that past attempts to collect seeds had failed because the work had not been assigned to someone who was “really interested” in the project, like him. Perhaps most importantly, he showed a keen understanding of the parsimonious nature of British bureaucracy by offering to undertake the project for his current salary of £250 annually, plus expenses.

  To accomplish the task, he suggested a pairing of the India Office and Kew. The India Office, caretaker of Britain’s “crown jewel” among colonies, certainly had the power to see such a project to fruition, and Kew had the know-how. When presented with the idea, William Hooker hopped aboard without any apparent hesitation, laying the groundwork for a successful partnership between Kew and the India Office that would last for decades. Hooker must have immediately sensed the advantages: With cinchona, Kew entered a wider circle of colonial officials, merchants, and planters than had ever been possible. Within a year, the tight-fisted Treasury was granting funds to Kew for such projects as a “double forcing house” for seed germination, money that had not been previously available. Aligning one’s fortunes with India was a wise course for the future.

  Markham’s plan of attack was three-pronged. The cinchona region followed the curve of the Andes for about one thousand miles. Since this was too much for one group to handle, he suggested three. Markham and Kew gardener John Weir would tackle the southern region—Bolivia’s province of Caravaya and southern Peru—where the “yellow-bark” version, or C. calisaya, flourished. The “gray-bark” species (C. nitida, C. micrantha, and C. peruviana) grew in the center section, the forests of northern Peru, where collection was entrusted to G. J. Pritchett, an English expatriate. Penetration into the Ecuadorian highlands where the “red-bark” species flourished was entrusted to Kew gardener Robert Cross and Richard Spruce, who’d been collecting new plants in South America since 1849. Except for Spruce, who was still in the jungle, all would train at Kew in the fine points of collecting and preserving cinchona; each group was budgeted £500 and was to complete its mission within a year. The greatest obstacle, Markham feared, would be the “narrow-minded jealousy” of those South American officials who might object to their nation’s loss of an important source of revenue.

  In December 1859, Markham left London and spent a month in Lima organizing supplies and planning strategy. Revolution was in the air. Seven thousand Peruvians had died in uprisings since 1853, and in Bolivia, coups and civil war had dominated life since that country’s independence from Spain in 1809. At least in Peru a British smuggler could call on
the British minister or vice consul if he got into trouble. In Bolivia, there were no sympathetic representatives of the Union Jack. Not surprisingly, Markham skipped Bolivia and confined his search to the southern Peruvian province of Caravaya.

  On March 6, 1860, Markham and Weir headed into the interior, struggling up the Caravayan Andes into a fantastic country of volcanoes and some of the deepest canyons in the world. Andean condors soared above the clouds and valleys. It seemed prehistoric, and on the last leg of the journey they ascended seven thousand feet in 30 miles to the mountain town of Sandia, where they began collecting seedlings and seeds.

  But Sandia was not a friendly town. A certain Don Martel, ex-colonel in the Peruvian army, heard of Markham’s intentions and told inhabitants to do what they could to stop him. On May 6, the mayor of Quiaca ordered that any estranjero inglés seen in the area should be arrested. Since the mayor had no real authority, he depended on hired guns. Desertions and mutiny plagued Markham’s company. He grew desperate to defend his plants if necessary. At one point he brandished a pistol whose damp powder rendered it useless, but the bluff succeeded. He needed to escape with what few seeds he’d already collected, so he sent Weir north as a decoy and struck south over the mountains to the coast. The mules burdened with the seeds seemed determined to do what the Peruvian officials had not. Several times they nearly rolled off the narrow paths into the deep ravines. Yet Markham somehow got the plants to Islay, where he rejoined Weir.

  Now he entered the web of Latin bureaucracy. At Islay, the superintendent of the customs house refused Markham’s request to ship his four bundles of seeds to England unless he first produced a signed order from the minister of finance in Lima. This was bad news. The previous president had issued a decree forbidding any export of cinchona, but the order had never passed outside Lima. Perhaps the finance minister did not have a copy, he hoped. Since “all the clerks in public offices are changed in every revolution,” most officials had no more than two or three years’ tenure. If he could bluff his way through the layers of rival officialdom, he might still escape, and if there was one thing Markham understood, it was the tangled ways of politics.