The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Two long and futile journeys began in August and September 1876, both dogged by disaster, both forgotten on the far side of the world. The first one involved Henry’s seeds. A month before the Wickhams sailed for Queensland, 1,919 of Henry’s seedlings were packed in 38 Wardian cases, placed in the care of Kew gardener William Chapman, and stowed aboard the P&O steamship Duke of Devonshire, bound for Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The P&O Company had caused a revolution in sea transport: Their ships arrived in port as scheduled, something previously unknown. Yet they also insisted on prompt payment of freight charges; otherwise, the cargo was not released from the hold. When the Duke of Devonshire arrived safely at Colombo on September 13, the captain would not release the seedlings to the director of Kew’s botanic garden at Peradeniya, because the India Office had failed to pay the fees. Word was telegraphed to London, and three days later the fees were paid. Of the original shipment of 1,919 seedlings, approximately 1,700 survived, thanks primarily to gardener William Chapman’s ministrations and the fact that an enraged Clements Markham expedited the payment back in London.

  The next batch was not so lucky. On August 11, 1876, the India Office sent one hundred seeds to Singapore. These were not accompanied by a gardener and also got held up for nonpayment of freight. This time, every seed died. Kew and the India Office kept trying, and by the end of 1876, Kew had distributed 2,900 plants to its branch gardens in the Far East, to collectors in the British Isles, and small lots to other British colonies.

  On November 22, 1876, Robert Cross returned from the Amazon, bearing with him 1,080 sickly hevea seedlings from the swamps around Pará and sixty Ceará rubber plants, known as Manihot glaziovii, which produced an inferior grade of rubber. Kew only kept four hundred of Cross’s struggling hevea and gave the rest to commercial nurseryman William Bull. By spring 1877, Bull reported that only fourteen of these still lived, while Kew admitted that twelve hevea plants from Cross’s mission had managed to survive.

  Although Cross’s rubber seeds were sickly, he did write a March 1877 report that would have enormous consequence for the British rubber industry. Because he collected hevea on the islands and in the swamps around Pará, he assumed that the best place for its growth would be in the hottest parts of India, a conclusion in direct contradiction to Wickham’s. “The flat, low lying, moist tracts, subject to inundation, shallow lagoons, water holes, and all descriptions of mud accumulations, miry swamps and banks of sluggish streams and rivers, will be found best” for hevea, he wrote. Although Wickham would contest this opinion for decades, no one listened. Cross was a trained expert; Henry was not. Since Henry had been dismissed by Kew, everyone thought him wrong. Cross’s mistaken observations ensured that those who tried growing hevea in the 1870s and 1880s did so in some of the most miserable, disease-ridden landscapes in the world.

  Robert Cross’s opinions, the result of his training and judgment, helped delay the beginning of the British rubber monopoly by decades. In 1881, when Cross was hired by the India Office to supervise the growth of cinchona and rubber in the Nilgiri Hills, hevea was not catching on with planters. It grew more slowly than Castilla and Ceará, an important point for those hoping to turn a quick profit. The easy availability of Asian varieties like Ficus elastica also worked against the choice of hevea. Due to his experience with the sickly plants of Pará, Cross tended to agree and paid more attention to the development of Ceará and Castilla. Hevea would grow untapped in Kew’s branch gardens and untried by Eastern planters for years.

  For the next two decades, the British cultivation of hevea stalled. Wickham’s trees and their offspring were sent to Ceylon, Singapore, and Malaya, but also to more inhospitable environments like the Dutch East Indies, Indochina, and other foreign regions. Because the trees were slow-growing, planters were not interested in tending them, even when Kew gave them away for free. Yet these were the decades, 1880-1910, when the three great developments dependent on rubber—electricity, bicycles, and automobiles—increased its worldwide demand at a rate that nearly doubled production every five, then every three years.

  Early electrical systems were terrifying. On Manhattan’s Pearl Street, in the world’s first domestic lighting system, exposed, uninsulated wires were the norm, with horrible consequences for linesmen and children. Thanks to the insulating properties of rubber, commercial lighting was in wide use by the 1880s, though domestic use would not catch up for another four decades. By 1880, “submarine telegraph wires” spread all over the globe from London, the most famous being the Channel Cable from Dunkirk to Dover and the Transatlantic Cable from Cornwall to New Brunswick. Electrical traction made possible subways in London, Paris, and New York, while in scores of other cities, cable cars became the norm.

  The 1890s would be the decade of the bicycle. The seven million bicycles found worldwide in 1895 used most of the world’s rubber, a boom that would not have occurred if not for the invention of the “pneumatic rubber tyre.” Although there had been bicycles previously, they rode on solid rubber tires. These were puncture-resistant, a boon on roads where nails were frequently shed from horseshoes, but they lacked suspension, were hard to steer, and were an unpleasant ride. This changed by the late 1890s. The market was flooded with steel tubes, ball bearings, variable speed gears, and high-quality chains. Above all else, it was flooded with replaceable rubber tires and inner tubes, mass-produced in the factories of Dunlop in Birmingham, England; Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand, France; and Pirelli in Milan, Italy. The bicycle was cheap and popular. People suddenly had a means of freedom that had been unknown.

  The first decade of the new century was the first decade of the automobile, and all the components of the bicycle were put to use. The United States made few cars in 1895, but fifteen years later it produced two hundred thousand—more than the rest of the world. By 1920, there would be 12 million cars registered in the United States, and approximately 2 million built that year. More than half were Henry Ford’s Model Ts.

  Henry Wickham was not part of this. Kew’s rejection cut deep. He’d defined his hopes through rubber; his success gave meaning to his jungle ordeal. Except for Violet, hevea—and the triumph it represented—was his one great love. Now it had been stripped from him, and like a jilted lover, he grew bitter.

  For the next twenty years, Henry wandered in self-imposed exile at the far edges of the British Empire. He dragged Violet with him to some of the most inhospitable and dangerous environs in the world. He never wrote of his motives, but his actions spoke for themselves. While the rest of the world grew rich off rubber, he embarked on a quest to succeed as a pioneer planter who discovered the next miracle crop. When he returned to the center of empire, he would do so in triumph. He’d be important again.

  The quest began in Queensland. Violet never said in her memoirs how they chose such a place, but in 1872, agents promoting emigration to Queensland began to spread throughout the British Isles. They pitched it as a land of riches. Magic lantern shows of beautiful scenery accompanied a barrage of success stories: the discovery of gold in Gympie in October 1867, in Cape York Peninsula in May 1869, and in Charters Towers in 1872. Tin mines in the Stanthorpe district seemed inexhaustible. Sugarcane was farmed in the north and the south. Railways spread west from the seaports. There was no shortage of jobs for the workman, while land for the squatter, or “pastoralist,” sold at ten pounds per 80 acres. The small towns springing up in the bush were just like those back home, with schools, newspapers, musical unions, and cricket clubs. The Immigration Act of 1872 offered free passage to laborers, but Henry and Violet paid their own way, since they traveled first-class to their new home.

  As with most advertisements for paradise, much was left unsaid. The agents did not mention the floods and crop failures or the fact that whites and “aboriginals” were still engaged in a vicious racial war. It has been estimated that from 1840 to 1901, the violence in the Australian frontier claimed the lives of 2,000-2,500 whites and 20,000 aborigines; estimates vary on the decline
of the native population, but historians believe it may have dropped from a high of one million in 1788 to 50,000 in 1890. In the year of Custer’s Last Stand, Henry and Violet entered a 678,000-square-mile battleground that was more like the American West than the tropical jungle from which they’d just hailed.

  Henry entered a stage filled with racial hatreds unlike anything he’d encountered in Latin America. There he’d been part of a sheltered class. As an Englishman, he symbolized such ideals as progress and liberty. In Australia, he was one of the colonizers. The cycle of hostility and reprisal started as settlers invaded aboriginal hunting grounds; then it swept across the continent as pastoralists destroyed aboriginal communities and drafted survivors into the alien roles of stockmen, native police, or maids. For each attack there was retribution, often during the yearly corroborees in which young warriors were initiated into the rites of manhood.

  North Queensland, where Henry and Violet were headed, was still home to various hatreds. Carl Lumholtz, a Norwegian anthropologist who spent thirteen months on the Herbert River in 1882-83, met a farmer who boasted that when he killed a black, he cremated the body to destroy the evidence. Kidnapping was more common than slaughter—so common, according to the 1884 Queensland Figaro, that “There is nothing extraordinary in it.” In 1892, a former prospector wrote that many of the aboriginal women and children found on sheep and cattle ranches between Normanton and Camoweal were kidnapped in slave raids: “These children are brought in and tied up . . . and if they manage to get away and are caught, God help them.” As late as 1901, there was a “mutual understanding” throughout the area that “a runaway black child could be hunted and brought back,” one observer said.

  The Wickhams left on September 20, 1876, aboard the barque Scottish Knight for the three-month, sixteen-thousand-mile emigrant run. These trips could be nightmarish, plagued by shipwreck, lengthy becalming, starvation, and epidemics of contagious disease, but by the standards of the day, their voyage was uneventful and pleasant enough, it seemed. They traveled first-class with the Indian boy and a nine-year-old English serving girl whom Violet’s father had no doubt once again secured. Henry tended to his coffee plants packed in their greenhouses, while Violet observed the small society of hopeful strangers thrown together in cramped quarters. The single men were berthed forward, single girls aft, and married couples amidships as a buffer against wanton immorality. The ship’s doctor assumed responsibility and “supreme authority” over the emigrants. He delivered babies, performed one or two successful operations, enforced cleanliness, intercepted love letters between fore and aft, and acted as chaperone. The latter duty was doomed to failure. One newly married couple was so ardent they were dubbed Romeo and Juliet. Several weddings took place, Violet wrote, “in spite of the restrictions on board.”

  They arrived in mid-December 1876 at Townsville in North Queensland. In addition to Kew’s gift of Liberian coffee, Henry brought from the Amazon some Brazilian tobacco, and his real hope was to cultivate the leaf on a huge scale. It seemed that his timing was perfect. An outbreak of rust had attacked the sugarcane crop during 1874-75; then in early 1876, the corn crop was wiped out by an unknown scourge that rotted the cobs. On July 6, 1877, he bought 160 acres for £20 in the Herbert River country near Cardwell, then four months later added another 596 acres for £149. In 1881, he bought 300 acres for £225, for a total holding of 1,056 acres.

  By so doing, he overextended himself. It cost about £110 to set up a 160-acre farm, while fencing, required by law, cost £40 per 160 acres. It is safe to say that within four years he used up his £700-£740 payment from Kew for the rubber seeds, and was in debt for at least £100. He put himself in the hands of the storekeeper-banker, or “gombeen man.” There were so many farm failures in the 1880s and 1890s that the gombeen man raised his commissions. The average interest rate paid by a farmer like Henry was 35 percent.

  “Dear Land,” as they called it, cursed farmers in Australia and proved extremely expensive. One of the nation’s great scandals in the second half of the nineteenth century was the failure of tens of thousands of farmers to make a living from their holdings after years of slaving away. By 1880, Henry had ten acres of land planted with various crops and a garden, but his dreams lay in five acres planted with tobacco. He dried and cured the leaf himself. He invited local storekeepers to inspect his crop, and they “assured him if he could produce that quality, he could find a ready sale” anywhere in Queensland, Violet wrote. It seemed a vindication of his earlier failures, but by then his costs had edged past his income and he’d never enter the black again. He was a “cockie,” or “cockatoo farmer,” a term of derision for the small, struggling landholder. The Herbert River was sugarcane country, and there were very few cockies around like him.

  But Henry was also a novelty, and by 1877 word had filtered out of his adventures on the Amazon. A neighboring sugar planter invited him to stay until he got settled, and Henry reciprocated by planting most of Kew’s Liberian coffee—possibly the first such coffee in that region—on his host’s land. Since his holding was well-timbered, “once more there was the old work of cutting down the site for the house,” Violet wrote. He built a rustic log cabin “which rather amused his neighbors, as here in Australia things were far more civilized” and people lived in light-frame houses. Once more, they lurched from catastrophe to catastrophe.

  Their Australian disasters sprang from the elements and began immediately. On their land stood two empty thatch cottages. As Henry was raising the cabin, they moved into one of these. One morning Henry asked Violet to collect some grass. “When the dew was off I set fire to it so as to clean up around the house,” she wrote. She looked away for a moment and then, “to my horror, I saw that the fire had extended to the cottage and completely destroyed it.”

  They moved into the remaining cottage while Henry finished the house. Two years later, he repeated Violet’s error on a much grander scale. One Sunday in 1879, as he wandered around the farm, he noticed that the wind was blowing away from the house and decided to burn off a new clearing. No sooner was the stubble alight than a sudden gust blew a shower of sparks back on the roof of their new house; in a few minutes, the house was ablaze “end to end.” They lost everything—family letters, photos, even the sword that Henry’s warrior grandfather had carried with him on the Nile. “Saddles, flour, etc., might have been saved, being in an underground room,” Violet lamented, “but we forgot and simply” watched in shock until everything was reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes.

  They built anew, this time on the side of a hill. Instead of another log cabin, Henry built a shingle frame house two stories high in front, but backed into the hill face so that in the rear the roof stood at ground level. They used the lower floor as a kitchen. Henry dug an elaborate flue to carry smoke to the chimney, but it “leaked the whole way and spoiled everything in the bedroom . . . and the smoke circled in clouds around my head.” Henry built a new kitchen away from the house and added a new roof of overlapping sheets of corrugated iron. Although this eliminated the fire danger, it turned the house into an oven, while the drumming of rain on the metal roof during the frequent thunderstorms drove Violet crazy. “Rain does not express it,” she wrote. “Sheets of water falling on an iron box and you inside it is the most trying thing to the nerves I know.”

  Then the third disaster struck. In May 1881, the sky opened for a week. The rainfall was twelve inches, and the floods were the greatest since 1870. “After having burnt out, it seemed necessary for me to try the water cure,” Violet said. Henry was away on business for some weeks, and Violet was alone. She’d been watching a distant storm roll nearer when the gale perked up. The thick foliage on the plain whistled until the heavens opened and the torrent descended. This storm seemed more personal than most, more malevolent, for the wind crept under the iron roof and lifted and flapped the corrugated metal sheets with each new gust. She knew her roof would go soon: There was no stopping fate and the wind. There was something
either unflappable or fatalistic about her response. After all she’d been through with Henry, maybe it was a combination. The wind was blowing too hard to seek help, so “I fell asleep, dreaming that the house had capsized and was rolling down the hill in to the creek.” By morning the entire roof had blown off. Once again, everything they owned was ruined.

  To aborigines, this land was created in the Dreamtime, the time of Creation, made sacred by the lingering presence of spirits. To Violet, it was turning into a land of violent dreams. She’d gaze across the landscape and spot the whirlwinds marching steadily through the dust. There were small ones, their funnels measuring a hundred yards or less in diameter, and there were the giants that drew trees, henhouses, the roof of one’s house up in the vortex until it stalked too far and faded. There was a sameness to the land, just as on the Amazon, but there everything was saturated and soaked, while here the enemy of comfort was aridity. The Amazon was a massive beast that hissed as it passed. In Queensland, a river was a wide sandy bed with a shallow stream trickling through the center—or not even that, just dry, scorching sand with a water hole every two miles.

  There were as many dangers in Queensland, it seemed to Violet, as on the Amazon. There were scorpions and tarantulas, and alligators that hid in the salt marsh until you waded too close, then carried you off with a massive clack of the jaws. There were nine-inch green centipedes whose sting was so agonizing that you wished you were dead. Horses would walk to a fire and thrust their heads into the smoke for relief from flies and mosquitoes; two would stand head to foot and flip their tails, mutually keeping the pests away. Leaf-cutter ants destroyed crops, returning night after night and “cutting off the leaves and young shoots and carrying them off” to the nest. Nothing seemed to stop them, not even when Henry borrowed a blacksmith’s bellows and blew smoke and sulfur into the nests for hours. “You could see it issuing at different exits all over the plantation, even on the other side of the creek,” Violet wrote, but that night, the ants returned.