The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  But Collins’s bad luck was Henry’s good fortune. If Charles Farris’s seeds had thrived, Kew could have abandoned Wickham to his own devices. When, then, did the dispatches from Hooker and the Foreign Office resurface and Henry finally receive his marching orders? It had be sometime in the late summer of 1873, a year after Henry’s mother died. On July 23, 1873, Harriette Jane Wickham wed Frank Pilditch and John Wickham wed Christine Pedley at a double ceremony in the British Consulate in Pará, probably officiated by Consul Green. At that time, the consul failed to mention rubber, and so the letters were still lost. By September 1873, this was rectified.

  Since Hooker’s letter to Henry apparently no longer exists, we can only surmise its contents from Henry’s giddy reply. The director seemed purposefully vague, and told Henry that an official commission from the Foreign Office awaited him at the consulate in Pará. Hooker’s letter filled him with joy and hope. He assured the director that he was “glad to accept your offer to put me into communication with the partie you refer to in your letter,” a conspiratorial tone that saturated his memories of this period. More important, Kew’s commission became a way to justify his every wrong turn. It gave his life meaning and gave his imagination a boost. He was no longer Henry Wickham, deluded dreamer, but Henry Wickham, a spy in the enemy’s camp, Agent of the Crown.

  It also gave him the confidence to bargain for terms. By mid-September, Henry finally spoke with Consul Green, so that by September 23, Markham told Hooker that:The Consul at Para has written to say that Mr. Wickham proposes to establish a nursery of India rubber trees, and then to ship them direct to England . . . he says that in this way a large number of healthy young plants would be secured of uniform size and hardiness. The locality will be on the right bank of the Amazon . . . where he is now making a plantation of coffee. He of course asks for a remuneration for the time and care required. How would you advise us to answer?

  Six days later, Consul Green told the Foreign Office that he’d asked Wickham for a cost estimate. Henry warned him that hevea seeds were highly perishable: The pods contained oil that quickly turned rancid. He thought it more practical to start a nursery on his farm and forward the young sprouts to Kew when they were hardier. Green apparently thought the idea expensive. He offered in his dispatch to “obtain any quantity that may be necessary at small expense,” in effect proposing to undercut Henry.

  But the Farris affair demonstrated hevea’s fragility, and Henry’s suggestion to let the seeds sprout, then ship them in portable greenhouses called “Wardian cases” had merit. He seemed to realize that his suggestion was opposed by the parsimonious Foreign Office, for on November 8, a month and a half later, he appealed directly to Hooker:I have just received a letter from H. Majesty Consul at Para enquiring at what price I would supply government with the seeds (per hundred-weight) of the Indian Rubber tree for introduction into India. Having considered the matter I submit the following suggestions. I am now making a plantation of coffee &c on the right coast of the Amazon, above the mouth of the River Curvá and below the town of Santarem. I would be willing with government assistance to establish a nursery for raising plants from the ciringa [sic] seed. I think the locality where I am now making my plantation would be admirably suited for the purpose. The navigable Amazon would enable the plant at once be placed aboard a vessel without need of further removal or transplanting. The plants could be grown from the seeds to a sufficiently hardy size in the native air before being removed and by this means a large number of healthy plants could be secured. . . . My experience of the ciringa tree gained by working them in the forests of the Upper Orinoco de Venezuela caused me think this the best plan for their successful introduction into India. On the other hand I doubt if the scheme of introducing them by the seed would succeed owing to the very oily nature of the beans which would be likely to become rancid in short time.

  No one acknowledged Henry’s proposal for another eight months, until July 1874. Eight months seemed a lifetime for a man like Henry. By then, his life had once again shifted. By then, he counted himself lucky to be alive.

  Henry had two masters now: his craving for success and the “spymaster” at Kew. Sometime in late 1873-early 1874, Henry and Violet loaded their belongings in a curiara and struck out from Santarém. If anyone watched from the bank, it would never occur to them to see Henry as a spy. Violet didn’t, and she knew him better than anyone.

  Henry was transformed, not by success but by failure. Up to his mother’s death, his dream had been for personal glory. Afterward, however, we hear a new note: “All for the Empire.” He’d become a true believer in the British doctrine of world transformation, that nature’s secrets could be secured and replanted—all for the improvement of man, the empire and her queen. But for all Henry’s stated allegiance to England, he’d become Brazilian in the way he viewed life and the world. He’d absorbed that portion of the Portuguese character known as saudade. The term is untranslatable, a sadness of character that could only be known as longing—but a longing for what, Violet did not understand.

  Longing was an intricate part of life on this river: the rivermen believed in miracles and in the stroke of luck, and the latter was Henry’s personal god. “In a radiant land there lives a sad people,” wrote Brazilian writer Paulo Prado, and this was indeed a melancholy land. Violet heard it in the dip of the paddle in the river at twilight, in the songs of the canoemen as they passed by. One of their most common songs was very wild and pretty: its refrain was “Mother, Mother,” and told of the endless gloomy forests, the rivers and channels that echoed of monkeys and birds:The moon is rising, Mother, Mother!

  The moon is rising, Mother, Mother!

  The seven stars are weeping, Mother, Mother!

  To find themselves forsaken, Mother, Mother!

  As the song faded in twilight, Violet imagined she and Henry were the last souls on earth.

  There is some question today about their destination. Henry mentioned the River Curvá, but no such place exists. Some point to the Curuá, but there are two local Curuás from which to choose. The best known is the largest, a wide waterway about fifty miles west of Santarém that feeds into the Amazon from the north bank, but Henry and Violet would have been paddling against a strong current, and there were no substantial reserves of hevea on the north shore. By now Henry would have known this and focused his attentions on rubber lands.

  The second choice is the Curuá du Sul, a small stream about twenty miles downriver from Santarém. The primary evidence is a note in Violet’s diary citing their stay with a “Mr. And Mrs. R—,” managers of a Brazilian plantation situated at the mouth of the river. At that time, the confederado Romulus J. Rhome and his wife managed the plantation of Cel. Miguel Antônio Pinto Guimarães, the Baron of Santarém—the same baron who’d hosted Wallace, Spruce, and Bates in 1849. Rhome was the only Confederate to be immediately successful. He arrived with lots of money, entered into partnership with the baron, and managed Taperinha as a sugarcane plantation. They built a still and distilled rum from sugarcane juice. Taperinha sits back from the Amazon on the short, scimitar-shaped Rio Maica, then called the Rio Ayaya; the Curuá du Sul feeds into this not far away.

  Despite its tempting elegance, this answer has problems too. Violet said they were “several days” on the river after leaving Santarém, and Taperinha is no more than a day away by canoe. Henry was abysmal with directions and places, as shown by his disorientation in Nicaragua. Moreover, colonials commonly garbled Indian place names when transcribing them phonetically. The Curuá sometimes came out in travelers’ accounts as the Cuvari, which mutated into the Cupari or Cupary. This confusion suggests a third destination, one that fits more neatly into Violet’s descriptions and makes better sense when one considers Henry’s goal.

  Historians of science generally think that Wickham’s hunt for rubber occurred along the Tapajós. By 1873-74, it was thought that the best grade of “Pará fine” came from this region, yet the source remained a mystery. Did
it come from the east bank, near the town of Aveiro? Across the river on the west bank, from the trading town of Boim? Or deeper up the river past the future jungle empire of Henry Ford? Beyond Aveiro there is, in fact, a tributary called the Cupari River: set back from its mouth sat a huge plantation and cattle ranch owned by “Francisco Bros. and Co.,” which employed, over the years, a succession of expatriate British and American managers. A twenty-four-hour paddle up the Cupari brought one to a village of Mundurucú Indians, as described in Violet’s diary. Beyond this lay the cataract dividing the upper river from the lower (also mentioned in Violet’s diary), and past that, rumors of virgin rubber land. Most convincing of all, the Cupari lay across the Tapajós from Boim, upon which so much of Henry’s legend would turn.

  Thus, a strong case can be made that this was the young couple’s destination. If so, they paddled south along the east bank of the Tapajós. For twenty miles they followed the high rocky coast, the red sandstone cliffs rising 100-150 feet, waves bursting with a roar against the perpendicular stone walls. The summit was carpeted with luxuriant green forest. Palm-thatched cottages nestled in the hollows. The climate grew more humid—a heavy shower fell once or twice a week, with interludes of melting sunshine and gleaming clouds. By night the rains returned, followed by a chill.

  After two or three days they’d come to Aveiro, the small straggling village at the head of the mouth-bay, where the Tapajós narrows to two and a half miles in width and the river is dotted with rocky islands. The town sat on a high bank and resembled a ghost town. The church was moldy and dilapidated; many of the houses seemed deserted. A primary school had been built by royal decree, but there were few children in town.

  The people had been driven away. Aveiro was said to be “the very headquarters” of formigas de fogo, fire ants, and visitors landed at their peril. In 1852, Henry Bates visited Aveiro. A few years earlier the village had been completely abandoned due to the scourge, and people were only then moving back. The ground beneath town was perforated with their nests, the houses overrun. The ants disputed “every fragment of food” with the inhabitants and destroyed clothing due to their taste for starch. Food was stored in baskets suspended from the rafters, the cords soaked in balsam, their only known deterrent. The legs of chairs and cords of hammocks were similarly smeared to give the residents some rest. The sting was like a red-hot needle: “They seem to attack persons out of sheer malice,” Bates wrote. “If we stood for a few moments in the street, even at a distance from their nests, we were sure to be overrun and severely punished, for the moment an ant touched the flesh, he secured himself with his jaws, doubled in his tail, and stung with all his might.” Even now, Aveiro had a melancholy air.

  Eight miles south of Aveiro, Henry and Violet came to the Cupari River, and here Henry turned. He’d heard that wild hevea grew deep within the interior. The Cupari was no more than a hundred yards wide at the mouth, but very deep. The walls of forest rose a hundred feet on either side. Silence closed around them. Another ten miles and both sides of the river turned hilly. Another river joined from the east, and they came to a plantation owned by one of the old Portuguese lords. Houses occurred at such rare intervals that hospitality was freely extended to the passing stranger.

  Henry left Violet with the American manager as he paddled on: another twenty-four hours up the river past the lower falls, on to where the channel was only forty yards wide, and up to a tribe of Mundurucú Indians who, it was said, still warred with their neighbors. The climate was more humid than on the Tapajós—the air was heavy with moisture, and showers were frequent here. He stopped and, wrote Violet, “once more made a hole in the primeval forest to put his house in.”

  If Henry and Violet were in the margins of civilization at Piquiá-tuba, here they were on the very margins of the margins, what sociobiologist E. O. Wilson called a “marginal environment,” a nightmare habitat of limited food, water, or other resources, where no one willingly chose to live. Marginal environments were “nature’s flophouses for the outcasts” but were important because the harsh conditions forced species to adapt quickly or die. Wilson studied tropical ants and noticed that when marginal colonies grew tough enough, they invaded the lush, comfortable world of the privileged ants and drove them into exile, turning the old guard into castaways. The baked sandy plains around Aveiro were a good example. There the fire ant had endured the wilderness until it conquered the town itself, and today it has successfully invaded Central and North America, driving farther north each year.

  Henry and Violet were becoming marginal too. In fact, it was hard to escape how many human castaways lived out here. The confederados were a perfect example, most unable to fit in anywhere, though a few—the Rikers, Rhomes, Mendenhalls, Vaughans, and Jenningses—hung on by the skin of their teeth and would one day be among the richest families in Santarém. So, too, the escaped slaves from Barbados discovered a new life as fishermen and woodcutters on the north bank of the Amazon. The Indian tribes Henry encountered—the Woolwá and Miskitos in Nicaragua, the Mundurucú and Tupi-Guarani on the Tapajós, the embattled and mystical Maya on the Yucatan Peninsula—though decimated by disease and pushed back into the forest by settlement or conquest, also fought to survive. Jewish traders plied the rivers, and Henry heard of trading houses in Boim founded by families of Sephardic Jews from Morocco and Tangiers. On the Orinoco, he’d encountered Venezuelans in hiding and the children of Jesuit priests who’d died long ago.

  For the next thirty years, strange tales of such people filtered from the headwaters of small rivers like the Cupari. Some subjects of legend were marooned by a price on their head; others were driven by an inner need to reject civilization forever. In Colombia, at the end of the Isamá tributary of the Rio Negro, it was said that a Corsican killer who’d escaped Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana had enslaved a settlement of fugitives and created a rubber empire. Up the equally remote Uapés, explorer Gordon MacCreagh found a black strongman who ruled his water highway long after the Rubber Boom had died. His Indian slaves had fled up the inaccessible creeks; his palace of tile, lathe, and plaster crumbled with decay. His patent mechanical band had frozen with rust and no longer played. He lived in a former rubber shed surrounded by his remaining loyal subjects—the extended families of his several wives.

  Henry simply was not ruthless enough to build this kind of empire. He took Indian workers with him up the Cupari, but he could manage them little better than his English laborers. Soon, as previously, he worked alone. He was becoming, in effect, a caboclo, a backwoods jungle peasant who owned his land until someone more powerful took it away. He acquired a taste for guarana and acai juice, lined his bureau drawers with the aromatic forest leaves and dried fruit called xeros, ate Amazon turtle, manioc, rice, beans, bananas, plantains, oranges, pineapples, fish, chicken, and eggs. His principal means of transportation was by dugout canoe. Twice a month he visited the barracão, or trading post, for supplies. Except for the company of Violet, Henry was a solitary man.

  And it nearly killed him, the closest he’d come to death since his fever on the Orinoco. While clearing the forest, he lost his grip on his ax and he nearly chopped off his foot. “He stripped his shirt up and bound his foot and started off for the Indian village some miles away as fast as he could go,” Violet wrote. By the time he reached the village, he was in shock from loss of blood: “Everything turns black and down he went,” she said. A man working nearby saw him fall and ran for help. The Indians carried him to the village in a hammock, then manned a canoe and “brought him to the plantation where I was.” But he survived, thanks to the ministrations of the American manager and his wife, and when strong enough to stand, he hobbled back to the jungle.

  This time Violet went with him, first to an empty lodge in the Mundurucú village, then with her husband. Henry thought “he could make a pretty place of it in time.” He burned the brush to clear it back and dammed the stream for water power. But Violet thought otherwise. The stream was a nice
place for a bath, “and then I have said all there is to be said for it,” she claimed. “I know few things less beautiful than a new plantation. The trunks and stems of trees lying about all black with fire.”

  There were new torments here she hadn’t encountered before. Chiggers, ticks, centipedes, and scorpions abounded. She especially hated chiggers, the way they deposited their bags of eggs in her toes. The eggs had to be extracted before the digit became infected and grew as large and pulpy as an overripe plum. And there were snakes. On the Cupari, the most notable was the sucuruju, or anaconda. The serpent was abundant in this river. It lived to a great age and reached tremendous size. Bates saw one that was eighteen feet nine inches long and sixteen inches round at the widest part of its body—and this was considered small. He measured the skin of one that was twenty-one feet in length and two feet in girth, and heard of some “which measured forty-two feet in length.” Natives in this region believed in a monster water serpent called Mai d’agua, the “mother of the water.” Forty-two foot anacondas were monsters in their own right, and he repeated the tale of the sucuruju that “was once near making a meal” of a ten-year-old boy:The father and his son went . . . to gather wild fruit, landing on a sloping sandy shore, where the boy was left to mind the canoe while the man entered the forest. . . . While the boy was playing in the water . . . a huge reptile of this species stealthily wound its coils around him, unperceived until it was too late to escape. His cries brought the father quickly to the rescue, who rushed forward, and seizing the Anaconda boldly by the head, tore his jaws asunder.

  Although Violet never came face to face with such a beast, the sucuruju were notorious for their depredations of livestock—and especially liked her chickens.