by Joe Jackson
Was Henry a smuggler, aided by his government, a modern freebooter or privateer? The British Empire had a history of this, especially when the target was a Latin regime. This point of law, both in its letter and wider spirit, would generate plenty of heat in the ensuing years, especially in the first third of the twentieth century, when the quest by governments to control rubber was as frenzied as today’s similar frenzy for oil. Interpretations of Henry’s act shifted with the times and political, economic, and environmental winds. In 1913, the year Brazil lost its world monopoly in rubber to Great Britain, O. Labroz and V. Cayla of Brazil claimed that authorities were aware of Wickham’s plans, but this seems an exercise in saving face for their nation. In 1939, the U.S. Department of Commerce sought from Brazil a report on the circumstances surrounding Wickham’s exploit, and the reply from Pará pointed out that, since no one foresaw the possibility of establishing hevea plantations elsewhere, no law then existed that specifically prohibited the export of seed. Henry’s theft could be seen as a triumph of the imagination. The Brazilian report came as world war loomed on the horizon. Ford’s empire on the Tapajós was already established, and Brazil hoped for vast forest plantations—and a second boom in rubber due to the world’s strategic needs. As the century progressed and Brazil finally understood that the richness of the Amazon Valley required federal management, Roberto Santos, Brazil’s premier historian of the Amazon, asserted that even in the absence of specific regulations, no one had the right “to appropriate the goods of others when there is a sure owner or a defined jurisdiction.” Critics scoffed that Santos seemed to possess “some higher vision of property, of nature constituting a national patrimony,” yet this was exactly the consensus that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which produced a convention entitling nations to a share of the profits from substances yielded by their flora and fauna and which led directly to today’s stringent regulations against biopiracy. It all started with Henry, at the Customs House in Pará. According to contemporary definitions, Henry Wickham and his wife were smugglers who acted at the behest of more highly placed smugglers—who believed they acted in the name of empire.
And so Henry, Violet, and their precious seeds sailed from the Amazon, never to return. Although a cliché, this is truly a case of sailing into history. They steamed past the huge floating lighthouse on the shallows of Bragança. They vanished into an Atlantic that, on this voyage, would be calm and blue. Henry took the hatches off the hold storing his open-air crates of seeds. He made sure they were secure on lines fore and aft, swinging in the breeze, safe from the ship’s rats in the hold. He dealt with changes in climate as they crossed the equator. He was something of a mother hen. But Violet saw him more peaceful than he’d been in a long, long time. Henry reasonably thought he’d earned his stripes and the empire would be grateful. Henceforth, he said, life would be easy. Little did he know that his trials—and those of patient, practical Violet—had only just begun.
PART III
THE WORLD
I will work harder.
—Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
CHAPTER 10
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Henry delivered his seeds nearly three months to the day after Alexander Graham Bell made his first successful telephone call. Ten days before the seeds arrived, a train called the Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco, eighty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes after leaving New York. Henry delivered his seeds in the year that Dr. Nikolaus Otto and his assistant, Gottfried Daimler, built the first successful internal combustion engine to run on a four-stroke cycle. Each was a harbinger of the forces that would make rubber, from 1880 to 1910, the world’s most market-sensitive and sought-after “new” commodity. Nevertheless, delivery of the seeds received scant notice in the press, overshadowed in Britain by the “Eastern question” and in the United States by the massacre at the Little Big Horn.
He certainly arrived like a conquering hero. The Amazonas docked at Lisbon, Le Havre and, finally, Liverpool on June 10, 1876, but Henry couldn’t wait. He and Violet left Captain Murray at Le Havre with a promise of repayment, then crossed the channel and hitched a ride to London carrying a small bag of seeds. Henry arrived at Kew by hansom cab at 3 A.M. on June 14.
Hooker was an insomniac, and each night he would recite poetry to himself as he lay in his upper-story bedroom in the redbrick Georgian mansion overlooking Kew. He’d nearly fallen asleep when suddenly there was a rattle at his window. He jumped up, pulled apart the white curtains and spotted a lone figure beneath the chestnut trees fringing his yard. He couldn’t believe his eyes: The rude fellow seemed to be tossing pebbles at the glass.
When Hooker opened the window and snapped for the impertinent man to stop, the stranger stepped from the shadows and shouted something about seeds. Hooker rushed downstairs in his nightshirt and threw open the door. The nighttime skulker, who wore a wide tropical hat and clutched a Gladstone bag to his chest, introduced himself as Henry Alexander Wickham. The name rocked Hooker back on his heels. He led him to a study littered with rare floral prints and Wedgewood medallions and asked him what was in the bag.
“A sample of the rubber seeds you requested. Seventy thousand, altogether.” Henry launched into his tale and the amazed director had to find a chair.
One witness was William Turner Thiselton-Dyer, the assistant director at Kew. In time, he would be Hooker’s son-in-law and his successor as director. By then, he’d gained a reputation for pomposity, but during his first years as Hooker’s assistant, he served as a buffer between the prickly director and the rest of the world.
The jungle adventurer descended on Kew like a bolt: the curved lane before Kew was paved in brick, and the hansom cab could be heard clattering from a block away. The last time they’d heard from Wickham was four months earlier. They assumed he’d messed up or missed the fruiting season again, and so no longer took him seriously. Robert Cross had already started on his collecting mission to Pará. He was somewhere in transit between a final visit to Richard Spruce in Scotland and his ship, docked in Liverpool, soon bound for Brazil. In the excitement over Henry’s arrival, Cross was forgotten entirely. He’d leave Liverpool on June 19, and arrive in Pará on July 15. He literally crossed paths with the Amazonas in port and probably watched it unload.
“Not even the wildest imagination could have contemplated” the results of Henry’s arrival, Thistelton-Dyer recalled. Hooker ordered a special night-goods train down to Liverpool, and by June 15, all seventy thousand seeds were sown in a vast greenhouse called the “seed-pit” and placed in the care of R. Irwin Lynch, a veteran foreman of the tropical department. Given Kew’s history with hevea, Lynch was worried, as was Thiselton-Dyer, who checked the greenhouse several times. “We knew it was touch and go,” the latter recalled, “because it was likely the seeds wouldn’t germinate. I remember well on the third day going into the propagating house . . . and seeing that by good luck the seed was germinating.” An unsigned internal memo still found in Kew’s archives and dated July 7, 1876 spelled out Henry’s triumph: “70,000 seeds of Hevea brasiliensis were received from Mr. H. A. Wickham on June 14th. They were all sown the following day, and a few germinated on the fourth day after.”
Those seeds that sprouted did so quickly. Hevea’s germination usually occurs three to twenty-five days after planting, but the first sprouts poked above the soil on June 19, on the fourth day. Henry must have hovered over the planting trays like a worried mother; this was not just his future at stake, but a vindication of every disastrous decision he’d made. After planting, the seeds absorb moisture, going from less than 13 percent liquid to about 50 percent in a matter of hours. The process, called imbibition, is rapid once it starts. The rubber seed swells and ruptures its nutmeg-colored skin. The sudden infusion of water dissolves gibberellic acid, a plant hormone in the endosperm very similar to steroids. It turns on genes in nuclear DNA that trigger hydrolysis of the seed’s large starch reserves. The starch turns into suga
r, and, with the help of this built-in fuel, the first radicle soon emerges from the shell. The first pair of leaves usually appears within eight days.
By July 7, more than 2,700 of the seeds had germinated and been potted. According to the unsigned memo, “Many hundreds are now 15 inches long and all are in vigorous health.” The fact that 2,700 germinating seeds represented a mere 3.6 percent of the total shipment did not seem cause for criticism—it was, after all, 2,700 more rubber plants than Kew had ever grown in its greenhouses before.
By the second month, however, little signs began to show that Henry rubbed Joseph Hooker the wrong way. In addition to rubber, Henry brought with him other plants he thought might have value, including seeds of the piquiá tree. He described these to Hooker in a note, suggesting their possible use. He tried to cast himself as an amateur botanist in hopes of accompanying the rubber seeds to Ceylon, as he’d mentioned in the April 1875 letter, but amateur botanists were a breed of human that Hooker despised. Henry wrote that he’d “made some experiments in planting” rubber that could be valuable. Time would prove him right, but Hooker was not sold. The director coolly noted the Latin names of Wickham’s specimens in the margins “as if to underscore his ignorance of botany and Kew’s already perfect familiarity with them.”
On August 20, 1876, the Evening Herald ran a short story on the seeds. The young sprouts were said to cover “a space about 300 square feet, closely packed together. A number began to grow almost immediately, and many within a few days reached a height of 18 inches.” Special cases had been built for their shipment to Ceylon, Burma, and Singapore. The program, described as a success, could only have been reported with Hooker’s approval, but nowhere was there mention of Henry’s role—not even his name.
About the same time that he was being stonewalled by Hooker, Henry approached Clements Markham. The hero of cinchona generally tried to play fair by those who’d aided him in his imperial intrigues, and he now tried to do the same for Henry. Twice in July 1876, while the young sprouts were growing, he mentioned to Hooker by memo that “Mr. Wickham seems to have taken very great pains with the seeds,” a reproachful hint that Henry deserved a fair measure of gratitude. Hooker was not swayed; he replied that he doubted Henry’s abilities. Perhaps Hooker counted on Cross’s efforts, although no word had come back from the veteran Kew gardener. In a July 19 letter, Markham was especially adamant:I have had a long conversation with Mr. Wickham, who is willing to accept employment in connection with the introduction of caoutchouc cultivation into India, either by making further collection of seeds in the Amazon Valley or by taking out plants to India (Ceylon and Singapore), and giving advice about sites, etc., and the establishment of plantations. . . . I am inclined to recommend that Mr. Wickham should be employed to take the caoutchouc plants out. . . . He might be instructed to see them established at Peradenia and at Singapore, to put himself in communication with the Madras Government and the Chief Commissioner of British Burma, and to give the benefit of his knowledge and experience as regards the selection of sites in Tenasserim and Malobar, etc. Will you kindly tell me what you think about this?
Markham’s letter is interesting for several reasons. First, Henry had made an incredible concession: He’d return to the Amazon to hunt for more seeds. The tropics had nearly killed him twice. It killed his sister and mother, and he could only avoid its grasp so long. But he saw himself completely wed to hevea, wrapped in its embrace as though by the strangler fig, matapalo. He’d do whatever was needed to maintain that claim.
Secondly, Markham had observed Wickham at length and thought he knew his strengths. Rather than a botanist, he saw Henry as rubber’s advance man. Planters were a conservative lot. At that moment they were doing well with coffee and tea. More necessary than any gardener was the presence of a loud and brash promoter, a shoe that fit Wickham perfectly. British bureaucracy was a lumbering beast. Markham hated it, dreamed of ways to outflank it, and worried that government intractability would strangle all that was creative in reams of orders and obfuscation. His letter laid out Henry’s proposed marching orders: See to the seeds’ safe establishment in Ceylon and Singapore, then hound the colonial governors until, in exasperation, they agreed to give rubber a try. He so believed in his insight that he was willing to push Hooker for an answer: “Will you kindly tell me what you think of this?”—a remarkably direct request, considering the dry and uncommitted flavor of Victorian bureaucracy.
But Hooker would not be moved. One gets the idea that he rarely changed his mind. There was something intractable in his makeup that wasn’t part of his father’s nature—an arrogance, as if convinced of his own botanical infallibility. In his July 20 reply to Markham, he explained that “we have no knowledge of his horticultural competence, in taking charge of cases or in selecting sites,” but in private he seemed enraged that Henry would appeal to another quarter. Considering the sudden defensive tone that appeared in Wickham’s letters of July 20 and August 1 to Hooker, there is good reason to believe the director lit into Henry with barely controlled rancor. He backpedaled. “I did not mean to suggest my taking entire charge of the plants. I made experiments in planting [rubber] on the Amazon. Now it appears to me that all the skill of the most trained gardener will not supply this information. I saw Mr. Markham today with regard to the Hevea; he merely said that you thought it expedient to send a gardener.”
Markham advised Henry to “await developments” while writing a memo to the India Office recommending that Wickham be posted to India under its own authority, not Kew’s. But Markham’s days were numbered. Under the irascible Louis Mallet, he no longer had the clout he once enjoyed. Even though Markham was instrumental in obtaining cinchona, even though he’d repeated the feat with rubber, Mallet saw him as a holdover from the days when the East India Company was filled with adventurers. Clements Markham was in no way reconciled with Mallet’s new vision of bureaucracy, where a prompt, daily appearance at the desk was a civil servant’s chief virtue. A year earlier, in September 1875, a public confrontation between Markham and Mallet got to the point where Markham demanded an apology from his superior for describing him as “dishonourable.” Mallet complained to Lord Salisbury, his superior, that “the time has come when he must be told very distinctly that he must . . . comply with official rules, or go.” Markham’s 1877 resignation was already inevitable in July and August 1876. Martinets would block the plans of both Markham and Wickham.
Henry had one last line of attack—to write a report describing everything he knew about hevea and prove that he was the man for the job. He advised that “the Malay Peninsula is most likely to combine the climactic conditions required for the Indian rubber tree of the Great Valley of South America,” a suggestion that would have saved the empire three decades of lost time and money if he’d been heeded. He cautioned that hevea grew more slowly under forest shade than in open plantation conditions: “I have known trees, grown in the open, seed abundantly after the third year.” Most important, he warned that just because rubber trees were first discovered by explorers on floodplains or along riverbanks did not mean that these were the best growing conditions. The best specimens were found on higher ground, back from the river. Later tests proved him right and showed that trees planted in soggy ground failed to develop an adequate root system.
Yet even that final bit of prophecy was doomed. Wickham’s report was buried in the files of the India Office, uncritiqued, unused. “What is more,” said Edward Lane, who unearthed the report in the 1950s, “its coffin bore the wrong name: An examination of the document proves that it is Wickham’s in handwriting, in style, and in content. Yet someone—presumably in the India Office, but possibly at Kew—has written underneath the title, ‘by Robert Cross?’ ”
The report would be as buried as the man. Henry was paid for his services—£700 according to most accounts, though £740 according to a memo by Hooker—but he’d outlived his purpose and become inconvenient. When the first shipment of seeds left for India
in August, he was not with them. Henry continued his petition to accompany the next shipment, but Kew washed its hands of him with a lie. He was told that “though Kew authorities advocated it, the depreciation in the value of silver” undercut his posting, Violet wrote. A sympathetic Kew gardener, most probably Irwin Lynch—described in Kew biographies as a decent sort who might have felt ashamed at the way his nation treated Henry—added to that final payment a Wardian greenhouse filled with 175 Liberian coffee seedlings.
Henry bore no grudge against Hooker, convinced for the rest of his life that the director and he were twin visionaries. He never realized that the director opposed his appointment to India or that he’d disparaged him as an uneducated opportunist, a prejudice that Kew factotums would echo for the rest of Henry’s days. Henry remained ever grateful to the irritable and duplicitous director, blaming his rejection on the India Office, never imagining that the permission to return with an unlimited number of seeds came from that very source. He never figured out that his best friend in the empire was not Joseph Hooker, but Clements Markham.
In mid-September 1876, unwilling to wait any longer for what he knew would be an official rejection, Henry, Violet, and the ever-anonymous Indian boy took a slow boat to Queensland, the case of Liberian coffee beside him. The official jungles of London had defeated him; he would return to the kind of wilderness that he understood.
