The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  A hardness began to creep over Violet that she didn’t recognize. In London she’d called herself working-class, but now she and Henry were owners, people with capital, no matter how meager, and in a moment they could lose it all. Possessions do something to people, even in the jungle: she shifted her sympathies, though she was never aware how much. Observations of settlers’ wives and memsahibs across the empire proved time and again how crucial the woman’s attitude was to a plantation’s success: “If she handled the morning ‘clinics’ and other encounters with patience, sympathy and interest, a genuine rapport developed” between the two worlds of British owner and native worker, noted Empire historian Deborah Kirkwood in a study of Rhodesian farms. “[A] readiness to interest herself in the health” and problems of workers and their families “was undoubtedly appreciated.” Violet had successfully negotiated the first hint of crisis—the complaint about the bread on the steamer—but her solution was to quietly embarrass the spokesman, and that proved to be a mistake. Now she had no way to win back her workers’ hearts, and so she, Henry, and Henry’s family were left to clear the fields alone.

  But more than by labor, Henry was defeated by the soil. Despite the luxuriousness of the rain forest, the Amazon soils are more fragile than those in temperate zones. Unlike that found in temperate-zone forests, no thick humus layer exists on the Amazon forest floor. The ancient Indians tried to combat this by heaping generations of black earth, but they could not outwit ecology. The root system of the trees is shallow, usually concentrated in the top eight to sixteen inches of earth, and is three times as dense as that found in the temperate zone; it resembles the “root ball” one disentangles when buying a pot of mums at the local nursery. Nutrients are rarely stored in the organic matter littering the soil but are immediately reabsorbed; this rapid decomposition of forest litter is performed by fungi. Whereas in temperate zones recycling takes place in the soil, in the Amazon it occurs on top: research has shown that nearly all nitrogen and phosphorus are stored here. A 1978 study showed that 99.9 percent of all calcium 45 and phosphorus 32 sprinkled on the root mat near the surface was immediately absorbed, while only 0.1 percent leached through. The rapid growth of small roots and white fingers of mycorrhizal fungi lay behind this process: the forest did not depend upon the soil to grow from, merely to stand upon. The soil was not the principal source of nutrition, just the shallow engine for circulation and exchange.

  When Henry cleared the land for crops, he exposed the soil to the full force of the climate. The daily rain compacted the surface, decreasing its permeability. When absorption declines, runoff increases, which means greater erosion. And there was the sun, raising soil temperature to the point where it cooked the bacteria that destroyed organic waste, meaning no humus could form. Ultraviolet rays, once blocked by the forest canopy, now produced chemical changes in the dirt, converting the nitrogen and carbon dioxide left over by decomposition into gas. Instead of staying in the soil, where they were needed as natural fertilizer, the two elements escaped into the air.

  Soon afterward, the second, more terrible crisis materialized. The first wave of death began. Violet seems callous in her memoirs, only mentioning “burying two or three of the older members of the party” without listing names, but perhaps by then she’d decided that such hardness was the only way to survive. We know the dead from Henry’s sketch of five crosses in the Confederate graveyard “made of some very hard Brazil wood,” he wrote, and “erected in the Forest behind the Town of Santarem.” The first cross stood over the worker George Morley; the second, over Anna Pedley, age fifty-five, the mother of John Wickham’s fiancé, Christine; and the third was for Henry’s own mother, Harriette, age fifty-eight, who’d survived so much to be killed by the place that had fascinated her. She’d filled her son with dreams of the tropics; he brought her with him to paradise, and nearly a year after arrival, on November 6, 1872, she died.

  Henry never wrote of his mother’s death. Violet stayed far away from the subject too. But Harriette’s death marked a turning point, after which the others began to drift from Henry and his crazy hopes, and Henry sank further and further into himself. After 1872, he became a solitary ghost, a melancholy man. He must have tortured himself with guilt for bringing Harriette here to her death. From then on, he became more solicitous and protective of Violet at the same time that he dragged her deeper into his headlong schemes. Henceforth, until she could not take it any longer, she tried to match his toughness with her own.

  What killed them so quickly, then would kill two others in 1875-76? No cause of death was ever mentioned, but the reason was certainly disease. Any number of parasites and microscopic killers live in the tropics, but in this region three culprits were more likely than the others: yellow fever, schistosomiasis, and malaria, Henry’s old friend. Schistosomiasis, a liver disease attacking those who bathe in water where the plenopid snail is present, was least likely, since its main victims were children, but it should be mentioned because it has only two known provenances in the Amazon—back in Pará, and on the Tapajós. Yellow fever was more likely than that: The disease that in 1850 carried off many of Richard Spruce’s friends in Pará recurred with a vengeance at ten-year intervals and came with the mosquitoes and rain. The virus struck quickly, beginning as depression and restlessness, then transforming into searing aches in the joints, back, and head. The victim’s face became flushed, her pulse irregular, eyes glassy. Within five days she most likely would be dead. Sometimes a dark fluid would gush from a victim’s mouth and this was the final horrific blow. A person could contract yellow fever and survive, but once the black vomit appeared, death was assured.

  The most likely culprit, however, was malaria. Henry would have stood beside his mother as his own savior had, fanning away flies, bringing the cooling draught of sugarcane juice to her lips, remembering how even the simplest act of kindness was appreciated. But it wasn’t enough this time. The egg-shaped plasmodium parasite killed her in five to seven days, rupturing the oxygen-rich red blood cells in huge quantities. Soon the hallucinations start. It is almost a blessing when the sufferer lapses into coma and dies.

  By 1874, three years after arrival, Henry was ruined. A rift occurred within the original party. Those who’d survived so far—Henry’s sister and brother and their spouses—set up house in Santarém. They dreamed of returning to London, but that took money. They established a school in town, saved for the passage, and counted the days.

  Only Henry and Violet remained in the jungle. “We alone of the original party picked up and once more started afresh,” Violet wrote. But starting afresh meant moving ever deeper into the forest. There’d be no backup if they made mistakes. They’d be alone.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SEEDS

  Henry might feel alone, but for the first time in his life he was about to be used by a higher power: Kew. He’d be turned into a tool, and he encouraged the conversion. If Henry and Violet had any hope, it came from halfway around the world.

  The change began with publication. In early 1872, Henry received word that his book was ready to hit the London bookstands. His Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness would never be a hit like Livingstone’s or Burton’s journals, but the book did include Henry’s sketches of jungle life, and one sketch in particular proved important: his drawing of the leaf, seed, and seed pod of Hevea brasiliensis. This drawing, more than anything else, would be the key to Henry’s future.

  Word that he was an author seems to have filled Henry’s sails. This was still early, when he could dream that his small plot in Piquiá-tuba would someday be a huge plantation and he, a feudal lord. He apparently informed Drummond-Hay of his “success” on the Tapajós, but more important, in March 1872, he contacted Joseph Hooker at Kew. In a letter from Santarém, he told the director that his house was on “a spur just off from the forest covered table highlands S. of Santarem which occupy the triangle formed by the junction of the Tapajos with the Amazon.” He always described his ho
ldings in strategic terms: a triangle of land guarding all approaches; a view from the heights commanding his ancestral lands. “The waters of both rivers, islands and estuaries are taken into the view by new home,” he wrote. He was, in essence, the lord of all he surveyed, and thus in position to send valuable specimens to Kew. Though Hooker did not bother to reply, Henry was buoyed by his own confidence. He followed up the first letter with a package filled with tubers and palm seeds.

  If Henry did one thing right during those disastrous years 1871-74, it was to maintain this correspondence with London. He apparently sensed that his best chance to succeed in the Amazon lay in some alliance with Kew. That he set his sights on Hooker suggests that the salesman in him sought ascendancy. He thought he could be a planter, but his real talent lay in self-promotion. In Hooker, he identified the one man who could salvage this tropical wreck he’d created and perhaps give it meaning. As he had with young Watkins and then James Drummond-Hay, Henry placed all his faith in one man.

  And Hooker did take notice. Sometime in 1872-73, he read Henry’s book and spotted his sketch of hevea. Although there was by now plenty of anecdotal evidence linking hevea to “Pará fine,” not even Spruce had made the absolute botanical determination that Hevea brasiliensis was the sought-after Grail. Along came this badly organized book in which an obscure and cocky Englishman not only observed the collection of rubber but engaged in its tapping and curing. The drawing of the leaf, seed, and seed pod was a first. It convinced Hooker (and soon enough, Clements Markham) that Henry could identify hevea in the wild, not an easy thing to do in the chaos of the rain forest. Henry had always fancied himself a budding artist. The irony would be that the importance of his work lay far outside the art world.

  Yet as important as this and related drawings would be to Henry’s fate, they also contained a level of mystery that symbolizes so much of his career. Henry’s simple, shaded drawing of hevea’s “leaf and fruit” assured Hooker that he knew his business, and his descriptions of rubber tapping on the Orinoco established his reputation as a rubber expert, the latest in the fortuitous line of “men on the spot” on whom the empire’s fortunes so often depended. But how well did he know his business? Although it could not have been known in London at the time, it has since been demonstrated that Hevea brasiliensis did not grow so far north. Henry and his assistants must have been tapping another variety on the Orinoco. An accompanying sketch depicted the removal of the entire bark of the trunk, a practice never reported in the Amazon among myriad travelers’ accounts and one that would kill a tree. “His drawings of the leaf and seeds, if they did indeed represent H. brasiliensis, must have been of specimens found along the Amazon on his journey home,” perhaps during his brief stop at Santarém, mused environmental historian Warren Dean. Hooker innocently put himself in the same position as Henry’s family—placing his faith in one who was considerably less knowledgeable than he supposed.

  But Hooker did know that another cinchona coup would help him politically. Three decades had passed since Charles Goodyear patented vulcanization, and each year industry discovered more uses for this nonconductive, waterproof, elastic material. The wars in Crimea, the American South, and the Franco-Prussian War proved its strategic and even geopolitical necessity. Shoes with vulcanized soles fused to canvas uppers and called “brothel creepers” were a big hit in the United States. In Great Britain, they became known as plimsolls. In 1870, B. F. Goodrich founded a rubber factory in Akron, Ohio; in 1871, Continental Kautschuk und Gutta Percha Co. started in Hanover, Germany; in 1872, Italy entered the race with G. B. Pirelli and Co. In 1849, when Spruce first came to Santarém and scoured the jungle for caoutchouc, the U.S. price for rubber was three cents a pound. In 1872-73, the price hovered around sixty cents and showed every indication of rising. Great Britain knew its power rested on ships, but ever since the first battle of ironclads in March 8-9, 1862, between the Monitor and Merrimac, the Age of Sail was inevitably transforming into the Age of Steam. With it came a change in raw materials, from timber and hemp to coal and steel—and rubber.

  Clements Markham saw this more clearly than others. In 1870, he’d awakened to the need for rubber after James Collins’s article compared its procurement to the theft of cinchona. In 1871-72, as Henry launched the plans that set in motion both personal and regional disaster, Markham began pushing his own designs. He appointed Collins to draft an even more focused report comparing the utility of the various known species of rubber-bearing tree. Collins’s report favored hevea over castilla, gutta-percha, or Ficus elastica, even though all the others were better understood scientifically and more easily acquired. Markham needed little further urging. Armed with the report, he enlisted the Duke of Argyll, Secretary of State for India, and Lord Granville, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, into his scheme. On May 10, 1873, Collins’s report was forwarded to James Drummond-Hay in Pará with the request to find someone willing to collect the seeds. The letter mentioned “a Mr. Wickham, at Santarem, who may do the job.”

  A year after his first, unacknowledged letter to Hooker, Henry was getting attention. On May 7, 1873, three days before the official instructions were sent to Pará, Markham asked Hooker for advice. He informed Hooker of the Foreign Office orders to Drummond-Hay “to take steps to obtain a supply of seeds of the Hevea,” then asked whether the seeds should be sent to Kew first “to be raised there, with the view of afterwards sending the young plants out to India.” Eight days later, on May 15, Hooker said growing the seeds at Kew was a capital idea. He added:I have a correspondent at Santarem on the Amazon who is engaged in the business of rubber collection and I will write to him for particulars as to the mode of growth of the tree and the methods of collecting from it. I will also beg him to send to Kew a considerable quantity of the seeds.

  A flurry of attention was being directed at Henry that May 1873, but he would not hear of it for another six months. In nearly simultaneous letters, Hooker wrote to Henry, while James Drummond-Hay was told by the Foreign Office to roust Wickham from the jungle and give him the news. But both letters were apparently misplaced, and the actors had changed. Drummond-Hay had left Pará for Valparaiso; although a promotion, the move was accelerated by his interference in local politics. The new consul was Thomas Shipton Green, manager of the Pará branch of Singlehurst & Brocklehirst, a London export firm. In the confusion, the letters would not surface for five months, in September.

  While everyone waited, rubber seeds from an unexpected source materialized in London, thanks to the tireless James Collins. Collins had written many letters to rubber collectors around the globe, including Charles Farris of Cametá in Brazil, a town about sixty miles south of Pará. On June 2, 1873—while Henry’s commissions from Kew and the Foreign Office languished in some diplomatic limbo—Farris arrived in London to recuperate from fever, and he brought with him a packet of rubber seeds “quite fresh and in a state for planting,” Collins said. Markham got busy when he heard. He set a price for the seeds—£2.10 per pound—and told Collins to buy every one. Since Farris had two thousand seeds, the Empire paid about twenty-seven dollars. “I thought it important to secure them at once,” Markham told Hooker, “and deliver them to you with as little delay as possible.” For once there were no bureaucratic quibbling, probably because, as Markham added, the U.S. and French consulates had already made a bid. It was an effective warning of the intentions of the other world powers, and two days later the seeds were sown at Kew.

  Farris later told Lord Salisbury how he’d sneaked the seeds from Brazil. As he was leaving, customs officials entered his cabin and saw that he had a couple stuffed crocodiles with him. “Is that all you managed to shoot?” they asked. “It was a very disappointing trip,” Farris replied. As soon as the ship left the harbor, Farris locked the door, slashed open the crocodiles, and revealed the two thousand seeds.

  But they were not as fresh as Farris claimed. Only twelve germinated. Kew kept half for study, and on September 22, 1873, sent the others to
the Royal Botanic Gardens in Calcutta. Despite the best efforts of the staff, every seedling died.

  With this disappointment, Collins stepped from the picture. He’d be cursed by his pursuit of rubber, as were so many others. There would be no recognition of his work. The record of his contribution exists only because he was never paid. In 1878, he sent a second bill and a lengthy memo to the India Office asking for ten pounds for his services. He was clearly bitter about being pushed aside, and wrote: “I would like to take this opportunity to place on official record that if any honour be due for being the first person through whose instrumentality live plants of the Pará Indian rubber tree have been introduced into India, that honour is undoubtedly due to me.” But he’d padded his ten pounds by a middling amount, and that sealed his fate. There was no greater sin in the parsimonious Victorian system than waste, and Collins had cheated by a couple pounds. Undersecretary Louis Mallet rejected the request. He accused Collins of “a gross attempt to impose on the Secretary of State,” and added that he’d “already succeeded in obtaining £80 from this office for an utterly worthless report on Gutta Percha.” There was no mention that this was the report rating hevea superior to gutta-percha and no mention that Collins’s inquiries got the ball rolling on procuring the tree. By now, Collins was unemployed. In a few more years, he’d be broke and alcoholic. In 1900, he died in poverty.