The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Markham got lucky. The president was “a rough, illiterate, though shrewd and valiant Indian,” who cared only for the strength of his army; he’d appointed as finance minister a former colonel of horse who knew little about customs regulations. Markham bribed and threatened the man, and the order was signed. On May 23, 1860, he watched his precious seeds stowed onto a steamer for London and sail away.

  Even so, his triumph turned to failure. Although the seeds made it to Kew, one case of seedlings fell into the sea en route to India. The remaining plants baked in temperatures topping 107° F when the ship experienced engine failure on the Red Sea. When the cases arrived in India, the saplings were rushed to the cool Nilgiri hills in the north and quickly replanted, but it was too late. By December 1860, every plant had died.

  The bad luck continued. When the gray-bark seeds arrived from the central region, their alkaloid content proved to be too weak for any medical use. England’s hopes were pinned to the group in the north, headed by a very sick man.

  Richard Spruce was already a legend, at least in the small world of botany. In 1849, he’d traded the safe English life of a mathematics teacher for the risky one of collecting South American plants. A decade later, he’d traveled ten thousand miles by river, identified thousands of plants, compiled the world’s most complete collection of mosses, and written a glossary of twenty-one Indian languages. He was restless, gangly, thin, and dark. When it came to Hooker’s requests, he didn’t seem capable of saying no. In 1846, after spending ten months collecting mosses in the Pyrenees, Spruce was approached by Hooker, who asked if he’d live a similar life of discomfort in the New World in Kew’s employ. Spruce readily accepted. He trained at Kew in tropical botany from 1848 to 1849, and on June 7, 1849, embarked from Liverpool to Brazil.

  Along with the naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry W. Bates, whom he met in Santarém, Spruce was a new breed of explorer. Previous wanderers, like la Condamine, had their own wealth to support them or were sponsored by a government, like Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle. Spruce lived on a shoestring, earning his slender keep by selling his collections, often for threepence a specimen, often for less—and sometimes for nothing should the dried specimens spoil en route to Kew. His mandate from Hooker was to discover new plants that could be of use to the Empire, and a major part of that commission was to solve the mystery of “Pará fine.” There were hundreds of species of rubber-bearing plants in the Amazon Valley, and every region called their rubber “Pará fine.” Did it come from the Maceranduba, the cow-tree, so called because of its copious secretions of a sweet latex that Spruce called a “drinkable milk”? He spotted several trees near Pará and mixed the latex with his coffee. “Its consistency is that of good cream,” he reported, “and its taste perfectly creamy and agreeable.” Or was the source a tree yet undiscovered, waiting in the green fastness like some wondrous Sangreal?

  It was an impossible task for any one man. Over five hundred species of plant flow with a milky latex that can produce rubber. They belong to several botanical families, in several different genera, distributed throughout the earth. All are united by the milk in their veins, an elastic latex, which, strictly speaking, is any mixture of organic compounds produced in lactifers, the cells or strings of cells that form tubes, canals, and networks in various plant organs. The latex flowing in these tubes varies in composition from species to species, but each is an emulsion loaded with hydrocarbons and mixed with other compounds, including alkaloids, resins, phenolics, terpenes, proteins, and sugars. While most have elastic properties, some, like the opium latex of the poppy, are prized for different qualities. No one truly understands the function of latex in the wild. While many botanists believe latex has evolved as a defense against herbivores, since it usually gives the plant a bitter taste, others think that lactifers have developed as a conduit for waste, that lactifers are the sewage system of the plants and latex the liquid manure.

  On October 8, 1850—while four-year-old Henry Wickham was just facing life without a father—Spruce began a solitary canoe journey that took four years and covered eight thousand miles of river. Hooker, his mentor, saw the Amazon as a huge warehouse for economic use, a wilderness to be plumbed and tamed. It was a common idea among naturalists, a fresh twist on El Dorado. Their precursor was the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose 1799-1800 journey up the Orinoco River in what today is Venezuela verified a legendary link between the Orinoco and Amazon river systems. Humboldt envisioned thriving cities and a great civilization amidst the intertwined creepers and flooded river plains. Spruce’s friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, was just as enthusiastic: “It is a vulgar error that in the tropics the luxuriance of the vegetation overpowers the efforts of man,” he wrote in 1853. Just the opposite: The growing season never stopped, the climate was favorable to agriculture, and a man could produce in six hours of work “more of the necessities and comforts of life than by twelve hours’ daily labor at home.” Two or three families might convert the virgin forest into “rich pasture and meadow land, into cultivated fields, gardens, and orchards,” within three years, he asserted.

  Spruce did not share Hooker’s vision. He preferred an Amazon in its pristine state, an opinion unusual for its time. “How often have I regretted that England did not possess the magnificent Amazon valley instead of India,” he wrote in his journal:If that booby King James I, instead of putting Raleigh in prison and finally cutting off his head, had persevered in supplying him ships, money and men until he had formed a permanent establishment on one of the great American rivers, I have no doubt that the whole American continent would have been at this moment in the hands of the English race.

  He paid dearly for this love of the wild. Soon after setting out, he contracted malaria; its visitations would progressively weaken him. On the Rio Negro, he stumbled into a planned Indian massacre of two Portuguese merchant families: Where the old hatreds lingered, a white skin was the reminder of slavers. He survived the night when the Indians realized they were outgunned—and that they, not the Portuguese, would be slaughtered. Farther up the Negro, he fell into a fever: he hired an old “Zamba” woman named Carmen Reja to nurse him. Unfortunately for Spruce, she hated foreigners too. During the malarial attacks, he was plagued by violent sweats, an unquenchable thirst, and difficulty breathing. He was convinced that death was only hours off and gave instructions on what to do with his plants and how to contact Hooker. Then he collapsed in apathy on his hammock, waiting for death to come. During such times, Carmen Reja left the house for hours, hoping to find him dead when she returned. In the evening, after lighting his lamp and leaving a jug of water within reach, she filled the house with friends and spent the night abusing him, calling him names and crying, “Die, you English dog, that we may have a merry watch-night with your dollars!”

  Even with such punishment, Spruce tried to find the source of “Pará fine.” By 1855, he was nearly convinced that the answer lay in a soaring giant with a peculiar three-lobed seed. He first noticed the tree growing close to the river or rising from the floodplain. It arrested the eye: The lower trunk was thick, dark, and warty, the upper trunk and crown so light that it seemed to shine. The medium-sized leaves were trisected evenly, glowing a beautiful light green. For ten to twelve feet above the ground, the trunk was often striated with the cuttings of the seringuiero, or rubber tapper, thin welts from which wept a pale stream of latex like blood. In an 1855 article for Hooker’s Journal of Botany, Spruce would be the first botanist to accurately describe the techniques of rubber tapping. He mentioned the climbing price of rubber, a sign for him of rising demand. He described a village ball game he’d witnessed two years earlier: The balls were made of India rubber, and he asked the players to save two or three for him after the game. “But during the night,” he wrote, “they all got gloriously drunk and burst their balls.”

  The tree that he suspected is now called Hevea brasiliensis, and a cross-section shows why it was so prized. Unlike other rubber sources, i
ts large lactifers lay just underneath the inner bark. Because of this, it could be tapped repeatedly without cutting deep into the cambial layer, producing a steady flow of latex, high in both quality and quantity, for decades. A towering tree, quite common in the steamy Amazon Valley, it seemed an infinitely renewable resource, a well that would never run dry. It healed its cuts and continued to drip latex like the “tree of life” of Indian tales. And when it died, another could always be found down the next jungle path or up the next tributary.

  Hevea seemed the logical source of “Pará fine,” and when Spruce wrote Hooker of his suspicions, the director asked that he send back some suitable seeds. If germinated in Kew’s greenhouses, they could be grown and classified, once and for all solving the taxonomic mystery. Spruce sent several specimens, but the oil in the seedpods turned rancid so quickly that they never survived the sea voyage, a misfortune that doomed every British attempt to procure the valuable seeds for the next two decades.

  By 1859, Richard Spruce was tired. He’d collected thirty thousand specimens for Kew, including two thousand new flowering plants. He’d come closer than anyone to solving the enigma of “Pará fine.” He’d served his country well, but the decade took its toll. He suffered miserably from malaria and had nearly been killed by natives. That he’d lasted at all spoke to his intelligence, good sense, and good luck, but many wondered how much longer he might hold on. He was nearing the Amazon’s headwaters, his final present to himself before leaving South America forever. Then, just when he thought he had the right to call it quits, he got a letter from London drafting him for Markham’s scheme:Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for India has entrusted the Hon. Richard Spruce, Esq., with the commission to procure seeds and plants of the Red Bark Tree which contains the chemical ingredient known as quinine.

  To be so entrusted was an order, and he had no choice: The letter directed him to proceed to Ecuador, collect money at Guayaquil from the British Consul, then head inland to gather cinchona. Then and only then could he come home—with cinchona seeds.

  Spruce would be joined by the “very able and painstaking” Kew gardener Robert Cross, a Scotsman who carried an umbrella in the jungle to ward off the sun, rain, and deadly reptiles. They were to meet in Guayaquil. The fact that Ecuador was in the midst of revolution didn’t register with the planners. “Matters are in a very unsettled state here, and preparations for war with Peru resound on every hand,” Spruce wrote in his journal. “Recruiting—forced contributions of money and horses—people hiding in the forest and mountains to avoid being torn from their families—scarcity and dearness of provisions.”

  Spruce arrived in Ecuador before Cross and began to climb the Andes from the Amazon Valley below. He followed the Rio Pastaza, which joined the Amazon in Northern Peru; he followed it up the gorges of the Ecuadorian Andes until halting at the town of Ambata, within sight of Mount Chimborazo, at 20,702 feet the highest peak in Ecuador. It was misty and cold, and he was struck by an attack of catarrh, a cough so violent that blood flowed from his mouth and nose. But he suddenly found himself in one of the most moss-laden places on the planet, and mosses, his first and greatest botanical passion, seemed to sooth all aches and pains. The penetrating drizzle created a glade out of some old Celtic romance, where the forest itself was moss-draped and lofty, and every rock and bush was shaggy and green. “I find reason to thank heaven which has enabled me to forget the moment of my troubles in the contemplation of a simple moss,” he said.

  The idyll didn’t last. As he dragged himself up the heights, condors attacked. He sat on his mule above the Rio Pastaza, contemplating the fact that he could no longer feel his hands or feet and wondering whether death had finally caught up to him. He crossed an undulating plain swept by the paramero, a wind laden with frost “that withers every thing it meets.” Crosses sprouted from the rocks; a pilgrim appeared and said these were the graves of people who had died in the wind. When he was a boy, the pilgrim remembered, he’d crossed this plain with his father. When he spotted a grinning man sitting on an ice-sheathed rock, he told his father, “See how that man is laughing at us?”

  “Silence, or say a prayer for his soul!” his father shouted over the paramero. “That man is dead.”

  Robert Cross was having his own problems on the other side of Ecuador. He arrived in Guayaquil in May 1860 but immediately fell victim to fever, then could not proceed until the war abated. In July, he boarded a ship into the interior packed with troops and weapons. Two days south of Ambato, he found Spruce huddled beneath the huge snow-covered hulk of Chimborazo, where glaciers stood out like marble against the cerulean sky. Spruce had found the thickly-matted cinchona forests on the slopes beneath the glaciers. He’d camped at a place called Limón, little more than a collection of huts on stilts. For the next two months, this would be their base as they took thousands of cuttings, collected seedpods, and bought them from locals. Cross sowed a number in case the seeds did not survive the ocean voyage. As soon as they took root, caterpillars attacked, followed by waves of maroon-colored ants. By September, they’d collected one hundred thousand well-dried seeds. They built a sixty-foot square raft from twelve huge balsa logs, then floated down the white-water river until they reached Guayaquil on December 13, 1860. On January 2, 1861, Cross and 637 cases of cinchona embarked for London.

  Spruce was ready to go home. He hoped to write his findings in the scientific journals and study his thousands of specimens in the peaceful environs of Kew. But soon after Cross departed, the Guayaquil bank in which he’d placed his savings (about seven hundred pounds, or six thousand dollars in today’s currency) promptly failed. He was forced to collect for another three years before earning enough to come home. By then, he was deaf in one ear and suffered partial paralysis of his back and legs. In May 1861, the Ecuadorian government outlawed the export of cinchona, but by then it was too late. England had already planted the seeds in India, a fact remembered bitterly by every Latin nation. The entire venture cost England £857, and by 1880, the government of India would reap thousands of pounds in annual income from Spruce’s cinchona, replanted in northern India and Ceylon. Markham, who’d say he’d broken no law by taking the seeds, would eventually become a lion of English society. By 1870, a lifesaving dose of quinine was being sold for “half a farthing” at village post offices throughout India.

  The real winner was Kew. Thanks to the success of the cinchona expedition, the scale of Kew’s imperial work grew enormously. A new network of gardens was established in far-flung colonies. Colonial officials consulted Kew on an increasing range of questions. Hooker gained powers of patronage far beyond anything he’d dreamed.

  Yet everyone touched by cinchona was not equally blessed. Pritchett, who smuggled the gray-bark variety to England in 1866, was too late to matter and is forgotten today. Markham’s partner, Weir, was crippled by disease and forced to live on his wife’s earnings. Cross suffered from malaria and slept with a gun beneath his pillow.

  And Spruce, broken in health and denied a pension until 1877, lived the rest of his life in Yorkshire on one hundred pounds a year.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEW WORLD

  Henry Wickham was thirteen when the cinchona mission started and fifteen when Robert Cross straggled back to Kew with the purloined red-bark seeds. Though the triumph was covered in the papers, he could not have cared less about the imperial implications of cinchona’s domestication. What mattered was the jungle and the writings of Spruce, Darwin, Bates, Wallace, and others. In the heat and moisture of the Amazon Basin existed a fertility like nothing Western man had experienced, a force of life beyond control. There was something hypnotic about the rain forest: “I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest,” Darwin wrote in his Beagle journals. “The air is deliciously cool and soft; full of enjoyment, one fervently desires to live in retirement in this new and grander world.”

  Earthly paradise was the recurring theme. Columbus was the first European to be enchanted by the land
where “the good and soft smell of flowers and trees was the sweetest thing in the world.” The scientific names for the banana—Musa paradisiaca and M. sapientum—elicited this notion, the latter associated with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree was God’s dwelling place in sacred mythology: the cypress was sacred, the ash in Scandinavia represented the universe, the fig in India. Just as God spoke from trees in the Bible, He spoke to explorers in the forest. It was in the jungle that Man was closest to the Divine.

  But Nature’s exuberance could seduce the unwary. In the forests of Yucatán and Belize, there dwelt a lovely but sinister temptress called Xtabay who appeared to hunters who’d spent too much time in the bush. They glimpsed her through the leaves and could not help themselves; they followed deeper into the forest as the twilight thickened, sometimes drawing so close that they could catch her wild scent or feel the lash of her hair. If they ever awoke, they were lost and disoriented. If they emerged from the forest, they spent the rest of their lives in ruin.

  It was irresistible for a dreamer, which by all accounts Henry had become. Although his education was “indifferent,” he possessed by his teenage years an intense love of art; when asked at school of his ambitions, he’d said he’d be an artist someday. At seventeen, he began a two-year class in art, and “his many drawings with pen and ink, supplemented by colour washes, reveal considerable ability and technical skill,” said Edward Lane. This was not a passing fancy: In the 1871 census, when he was twenty-five and about to embark upon his greatest adventure, he identified himself as a “traveling artist,” and throughout his travels he’d keep his sketchbook nearby.