by Joe Jackson
So Henry decided to confide only in Violet and the boy. In February, they paddled upriver for two or three days to “the country house of an Englishman who lived there nearly all his life and was almost more Brazilian than English.” The house was near Boim, a trading village on the west bank of the Tapajós, about midway up the mouth-bay, to the north of Aveiro. “We were in great danger once from a squall that came up suddenly,” Violet recalled, “but I scarcely realized the danger and so got more ‘kudos’ for pluck than I perhaps deserved.”
February to March was the period during which hevea’s trilobed seeds began to ripen on the tree. By early March, the three were ensconced in the Englishman’s sitio on the Tapajós; they apparently used it as a base for collecting. Henry “left me there,” said Violet, “while he and the boy went off into the woods to collect the seeds, returning on Saturdays to start again on Monday, also buying all that were brought to him.” On March 6, he wrote Hooker that “I am now collecting Indian Rubber seeds in the ‘ciringals’ of the river being careful to select only the best quality. I am carefull [sic] packing them. I hope soon to leave with a large supply for England.”
Less than a month later, on April 1, 1876—apparently before anyone saw Henry’s note—Clements Markham penned a note to Hooker informing him that the secretary of state was sending Robert Cross to the Amazon to collect hevea.
Cross was a veteran of the cinchona expedition and always eager to return to South America. On one of his later trips, he forwarded to Markham a small bag of caucho seeds, and this helped convince Markham that Cross was the man for the job. Markham’s note to Hooker said the gardener was granted four hundred pounds “to cover all expenses and include remuneration.” Before he left, Cross was to call upon the old and ailing Richard Spruce for advice. Hooker was also to provide the gardener with a letter of introduction to Wickham. If the two should meet, Wickham would essentially relinquish control of the hevea project. Cross’s orders were the closest thing in writing to an admission that London no longer trusted Henry.
For two and a half months, from early March to mid-May, Henry collected alone with the boy and bought seeds directly from Indian and caboclo collectors, as Markham and Spruce had done with cinchona. This would not be enough for the huge quantity he’d need to make a profit and insure germination. What has never been emphasized is that by now Henry knew the Tapajós region well enough that he could more narrowly target his search, and he maximized his take by buying from middlemen.
The heart of his search lay in the highlands behind Boim. The source of the seeds would become a matter of economic consequence fifty years later when Henry Ford entered the picture, but Henry Wickham was never circumspect. As early as 1902, he wrote that “their exact place of origin was in 3 degrees of south latitude . . . in the forest covering the broad plateaux dividing the Tapajos from the Madeira rivers.” Henry headed due west to the highlands behind Boim, which stretch west for fifty miles and rise 250-300 feet above the river plain. Throughout his account, Henry reiterated one point: The best seeds were found in the highlands, not at the water’s edge.
However, 3° S latitude covers a lot of territory and does not begin to explain how he gathered an abundance of seeds. The answer lay in the village of Boim and its history, which is forgotten by all but a few. Boim was the oldest village in this part of the Amazon Valley, founded on March 9, 1690, a few days before Santarém. Like Santarém, it had been a Jesuit mission established at an Indian village, and in 1841 a new church dedicated to St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order and patron saint of soldiers and spiritual retreats, was built on the sandy bluff overlooking the Tapajós’ wide mouth-bay.
Boim’s location beneath the high plateau was important, but more important for Henry was its infrastructure. Four families of Sephardic Jews had come to the village from Morocco in the mid-1800s and set up trading houses. Indians and caboclos from up and down the river and deep within the interior came to their posts with all manner of goods, but the region’s specialties were rubber and Brazil nuts, then called Pará nuts. So successful were the trading houses of Cohen, Serique, Azulay, and one other, whose name is now lost, that for its time, though Santarém might have been better known to the outside world due to its more obvious location at the joining of the Amazon and Tapajós, Boim was more important commercially. Oceangoing freighters heading back to Europe from Manaus would anchor in the mouth-bay, where they were met by nimble Portuguese sailboats loaded with jungle goods.
Like the confederados, seringuieros, and Britons, the Sephardic Jews in the Amazon were one more instance of the nineteenth-century reshuffling of “marginal men” to the most forgotten places of the world. Boim’s four trading families had come from Tangiers in Morocco: they stopped briefly in French Guiana, then dropped south to Pará, where a synagogue was founded in 1824. In Pará, Jewish merchants called themselves klappers, or “door knockers,” who peddled their goods door to door. Soon the market grew tight, and the best chance to make a living lay in filling a canoe with a stock of goods and setting off into the endless Amazon. “One must take great care in the jungle on entering, for one gets lost easily,” wrote veteran trader Abraham Pinto. “Some travel with a compass, others are guided by the sun, for at times one cannot see anything because of the great height of the trees. It is best to mark the trees with an ax, or by breaking the branches, indicating the path so you can return.”
At first, their role in the rubber trade was primarily that of small-time middleman, exchanging knives, cloth, and cooking pots for balls of smoked latex, which they then exchanged for more barter goods with the Pará aviadors. Some became a mixture of aviador and patrão themselves, a niche filled by the trading houses in Boim. As the young men grew wealthy, they’d return home—one of the owners of the “Franco & Sons” cattle ranch at the mouth of the Cupari graced the front of his house with two ornamental palms he’d taken as seeds from Tangiers. They traded with anyone who stopped. Henry’s insistence on seeds instead of balls of rubber might seem eccentric, but numerous transplants bought seed to start plantations; the confederados on the opposite shore did the same. Neither they nor their Indian suppliers realized that by selling to Henry, they ordained their own ruin.
Henry collected fast, in every way available—from the Boim houses, by purchase, by his own hand. A number of commentators have argued that the speed with which he worked eliminated quality control and that he could not insure the provenance of his seeds, yet all the seeds and latex gathered in the Sephardic houses came from the highlands behind Boim. A mule trail led directly west from town up a gradual sandy slope; after two miles this turned into a plateau covered with jungle and some rubber, but not of the same quality as on the higher plateau farther in. After six miles, Henry and the boy started up a long incline called the Serra de Humayta, which finally opened into the high plateau three hundred feet above the river. Here the jungle was heavy but open; it had a light degree of undergrowth and very few palms, plus a climate so unusually dry “that the people who annually penetrate into these forests for the season’s working of the rubber have to utilize certain lianas [water-bearing vines] for their water supply since none is to be obtained by surface-well sinking,” Henry wrote. The plateau covered 1,600 square miles, or over a million acres, but Henry apparently headed for the ancient sites covered in a deep, stiff Indian black earth similar to the soil found atop the pyramidal hills near Santarém. This soil was so fertile that farmers from Boim would hike the long distance to grow their crops in it, and it was here that Henry sought his trees.
The center of their collecting was a village named Agumaita, or “Highlands,” about seven to nine miles into the plateau. The hevea trees there were large and straight, attaining, Henry said, “a circumference of 10 ft. to 12 ft. in the bole.” Working with as many Tapuyo Indians as he could hire on short notice, “I daily ranged the forest, and packed on our backs in Indian pannier baskets as heavy loads of seeds as we could march down under.” Like the majo
rity of tropical trees, hevea’s bark was gray on the surface. To check whether or not a tree was really hevea, he’d scrape it clean to reveal a bark that resembled the “colour of a light bay horse’s coat.” Such cleaning took time, but was essential, for in humid regions like this “the bark is thickly coated with growths of moss, ferns, and orchids.” The tree’s own flowers were small and green or creamy yellow; the young green leaves secreted a nectar around which honeybees buzzed.
Whether by design or luck, Henry collected the best seed available. These were perfect trees. Their silvery trunks, much like a poplar’s, soared aloft for one hundred feet. On the upper branches grew small, three-lobed leaves with undersides of silvery white, giving way at the tip to green, sweet-smelling flowers. A later study revealed that “out of seventeen varieties, (Henry) chose seeds from the black, or best grade of tree,” said William C. Geer, former vice president of the B. F. Goodrich Company. Tappers distinguished between types of tree by color—the black-, red-, and white-bark type, distinguished by the color of the hard bark beneath the periderm. The black-bark version was said to yield more latex and a better-quality rubber than the red or white, but more important than that for Henry was the fact that Agumaita was said to be the home of the “mother tree,” a gargantuan seed producer growing straight from the black earth and surrounded by her progeny—giants in their own right if not standing by this leviathan.
It sounds too good to be true, a fantastic tale harking back to myths of a Mother Tree believed by many Amazon tribes. But there may have been at least one tree that epitomized the one in the story. There is a witness, at least of its remains. Elisio Eden Cohen, author, historian, and Boim’s postmaster, is also the scion of one of the old Sephardic houses. Now in his sixties, he’d had the stump of the Mother Tree pointed out to him when still a child. It was in the heights above Boim, surrounded by its descendants, growing from the black earth as the stories said. Cohen watched as seven men barely stretched their arms around it, standing fingertip to fingertip. “The mother tree had died,” he said, “because of the caboclo practice of using kerosene when cutting into the bark to get latex. The kerosene made the latex flow more freely and in greater amounts,” but by rubbing it into the wound, the tappers “killed the tree over time.”
Such a cathedral of trees took Henry’s breath away. “[D]uring times of rest, I would sit down and look into the leafy arches above,” he said, “and as I gazed, became lost in the wonderful beauty of the upper system overhead.” It was the same transcendent experience he’d experienced in the rubber forest of the Orinoco, but it was also an extremely dangerous time to gather seeds. The fruit of the rubber tree was a three-chambered nut like a horse chestnut. Each segment contained a speckled seed resembling a slightly flattened nutmeg. As the seeds ripened, the outer envelope dried and tensed until it burst with the sound of a pistol shot. The rich, oily seeds exploded from the pods, flying outward sixty to one hundred feet before dropping to the ground.
The sound of the shot signaled a race of life and death on the forest floor. The base of the massive trunk would be littered with seeds, and like the tree in Genesis, a serpent lay coiled nearby. The pop of the seeds drew the rodent agouti to the feast, and the venomous jararaca, or fer-de-lance, the most common venomous snake in Amazonia, awaited a feast of its own. Seed collectors must be watchful at such times. Each bite of the snake’s fangs packs an extraordinary amount of potent yellow venom, and the snake is quick to strike. Every female has sixty to eighty young, all with their deadly machinery in good working order. At that time, there was no known antidote for the venom—one bite, and death was assured.
So they worked, crawling up the heights like a line of carpenter ants, scrambling through the brush at the sound of each shot, then stumbling back down the escarpment, weighted down like stone-bearing slaves. Back at Henry’s base, the village women wove large, open baskets of the same design as those found along the Amazon today:I got the Tapuyo village maids to make up open-work baskets and crates of split Calamus canes for receiving the seed, first, however, being careful to have them slowly dried on mats in the shade, before they were put away with layers of wild dried banana leaf betwixt each layer of seed; knowing how easily a seed so rich in a drying-oil becomes rancid or too dry, and so losing all power of germination. Also I had the crates slung up to the beams of the Indian lodges to ensure ventilation.
This was where Henry’s jungle experience came in handy. Everyone knew hevea’s propensity for going rancid, but no one had figured out a way to prevent that from happening. If Kew and the India Office had sent along the portable greenhouses as Henry had requested, the problem would have been solved. But Henry’s masters were parsimonious to a fault, and the fact that they would send such Wardian cases with Robert Cross bespeaks their distrust of an outsider.
Thus, Henry was left to his own devices against unfavorable odds. Rubber seeds contain linamarin, a glucose derivative, which provides the energy boost needed for germination. Linamarin is a toxic compound also found in cassava, the principal root crop along the Amazon. Unless dried, soaked in water, then rinsed or boiled, cassava is a certain last meal—of cyanide. As the linamarin decomposes by hydrolysis during storage, it produces hydrocyanic acid (HCN), a colorless, poisonous solution of hydrogen cyanide in water that smells like bitter almonds and is better known as prussic acid. Hydrocyanic acid is also explosive and is used in many industrial processes. Although there are no reports of exploding rubber seeds, it is easy to see why they decompose so quickly once water takes hold. A heavy deluge would have destroyed Henry’s cache, either causing his seeds to germinate early or begin the unstoppable rot. It was still the rainy season, so he had every reason to worry. But for once he got lucky and somehow avoided the storms, probably because he collected in these drier highlands. When Henry got the seeds down to the river, he dried them gently in the air, packing them between banana leaves to soak up excess oil, and left them swinging from the rafters in the cooling river breeze—the only expedient possible to stave off a build-up of moisture that would lead to early germination or mold. His precautions were exacting and ingenious, exhibiting an understanding of rubber for which he was never credited.
By mid-May he’d collected seventy thousand seeds, an incredible number, considering all the odds against him. It seemed to assure success—if he could keep them alive. But the very quantity created a new problem. The historian John Loadman calculated in his book Tears of the Tree that the seeds weighed three quarters of a ton. Add to that the weight of banana leaves and pannier baskets, and the gross weight was nearly one and a half tons. Based on volume, Loadman estimates as many as fifty hemispherical baskets with a diameter of twenty inches suspended from the rafters. Henry must have gazed at them, hanging up like bells, and realized he had a problem.
How was he going to get this huge load home?
The jungle had a way of coming up with solutions when least expected, and in this case salvation materialized in the form of an ocean liner. It moored in the middle of the river off Santarém, and the captain invited the local planters aboard.
The ship was the SS Amazonas, “first of the new line of Inman line steamships—Liverpool to the Alto-Amazon direct.” This was her second voyage, both times under the command of George Murray, an Inman captain in his midthirties. The previous run suggested that she put in at Pará in mid-April 1876 and returned there in the second week of May. Crew records suggest a complement of thirty-two men: two deserted or did not show at port during the first few days of sailing, but they were replaced in Lisbon; no grog was allowed onboard, but other than that records did not indicate dissension or trouble. Release documents showed that the crew was paid in full when they returned from the Amazon on June 2, 1876: no crew member seemed missing, but officers were neither mentioned nor named.
Henry’s version was more dramatic than anything suggested by the crew manifest and ship records, since it hinged on shipboard intrigue. At first, the ship’s appearance on the rive
r had all the hallmarks of Henry’s Orinoco fever dreams. Here was the apex of oceanic technology, right outside tiny Santarém. The liner sounded its great whistle, and the ship’s boats came off with their uniformed officers—including two gracious “supercargos,” or cargo-masters—inviting Santarém’s ragged elite aboard. “The thing was well-done,” Henry recalled. They rowed out at night under the shadow of the massive ship, dressed out in blue lights. They were served a sumptuous supper in the wood and brass saloon, the congenial Captain Murray presiding. Violet no doubt thought she’d died and gone to heaven, as if she’d returned home to London to one of the fancy restaurants her father had taken her to in Covent Garden or Regent Square.
