The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Like many wanderers, Henry dreamed of a South Seas paradise, especially after hearing Captain Hill’s stories of white beaches, carefree people, and cool trade winds. But the reality was antipodal, and Henry would have caught a glimmer of this during his disastrous years in Queensland. On most of these islands, explorers found that tribal warfare and cannibalism were not only part of life but a central part of some tribes’ religions. In the Louisiades, cannibalism was a reality, and the hatred left over from the raids of the blackbirders assured that Europeans were sometimes the meals.

  Since Henry employed Kanakas on his farm on the Herbert River, he would have heard the bloody tale in 1878 of W. B. Ingham, a popular but unsuccessful Herbert River cockatoo farmer much like him. Ingham had turned beachcomber and bêche-de-mer fisher after his farm went bankrupt. Bêche-de-mer, better known today as sea slug or sea cucumber, was a profitable delicacy in China. As a police official pointed out, the “business is a dirty one but profitable, and seems to possess attractions for the lowest class of whites and Manilla [sic] men, who have no scruples whatever in dealing with their black employees.” One dove over the side of a boat into shark-infested lagoons to pluck the mollusks from the coral, and employers cared little about their divers’ exhaustion or fear. The Queensland government hired Ingham to cruise around the islands and gather information about the fisheries, and in December 1878, a group of Ingham’s “boys” threw him overboard as they floated off an island in the Louisiades. Ingham laughed at their high spirits and swam back to the boat. As he grasped the thwarts to pull himself up, his “boys” cut off his hands, then pulled him aboard to finish the job.

  Ingham was so popular around the Herbert River that the main township was named after him. His death gave natives a demonic cast, reinforced two years later when parties of Chinese and European bêche-de-mer fishers were found similarly murdered. Several of these victims were brought to Queensland for burial, and their condition was so gruesome that Australians demanded that Great Britain annex New Guinea and the surrounding islands to protect peaceful fishermen.

  Now Henry came to a place that no European had settled. On March 5, 1895, he signed a twenty-five-year lease at the rate of one pound per annum under British New Guinea’s Crown Lands Ordinance. In return, he’d grow sponge, cultivate pearl oysters, and harvest coconuts for copra. A clause gave him the right to purchase the Conflicts during the term of the lease. The terms were his most favorable yet, and he arranged it as he had in British Honduras—by making friends with the colonial governor, Sir William Macgregor, whose Handbook of Information for Intending Settlers in British New Guinea he’d read during his two years in London following the failure in Belize. Henry recruited Kanaka help from the surrounding islands, built a trading store and crude barracks on the central island of Itamarina, and cleared land for a plantation on Panasesa, one of the outside ring of islands looking west toward New Guinea.

  Sometime between March 1895 and April 1896, he almost lost his land again over contractual details. According to a tale told to distant relatives, he’d overlooked a clause in his lease that stated that any unplanted island could be designated a reserve for islanders traveling in the area. A friendly trader told him that the government yacht Merrie England was on its way to his central island with just that purpose in mind. Henry and his Kanaka workers hopped in canoes and catamarans, paddled across the lagoon to his coconut plantation on Panasesa, loaded up on coconut seed, and spent the night by torchlight planting Itamarina. Shortly after dawn the Merrie England docked and officials confronted Henry. He showed them that Itamarina was, indeed, planted with coconut and was therefore exempt from the law.

  The affair apparently stuck in the craw of the Port Moresby officials, for in April 1896, Governor Macgregor visited the Conflicts during his annual island tour to check on Wickham again. He found him ensconced on Itamarina, living in an open shed. He’d apparently seen worse on the islands, for he did not seem surprised. Henry had already started changing his plans, Macgregor wrote:This gentleman has been making trial of the sponges found in the vicinity. He turns out a promising looking article, but its market value has not yet been ascertained. Recently he has been giving his attention to the planting of coconut trees—of which he has already put in several thousand.

  He did not mention Violet, so in all likelihood she had not yet arrived. She lingered in London for a year, then came in late spring or early summer 1896. She found her husband in the Itamarina shed, surrounded by piles of black sponges. Henry’s initial response was one of shock; nothing was prepared. Three quarters of the shed was “roughly ceiled to make a loft or sleeping place reached by a rough ladder, about half the lower story floored in native fashion, a few inches from the ground, with split cane. Here I remained some months while a more permanent house was built on a neighboring island,” she said.

  Violet was forty-six; her tanned and increasingly grizzled husband, fifty. Did Henry think they could go on like this indefinitely? Twenty-five years ago he strode into her father’s shop on Regent Street, and she’d been swept away. Boundless energy and confidence leaked from every pore. He’d been to the jungle, twice, and nearly died, but he always bounced back. Like a rubber ball. Her friends laughed, and all she could do was shake her head and laugh along. It was true. You simply couldn’t keep Henry Wickham down.

  There’d never been a question that he loved her: He’d swim a shark-infested lagoon to be with her, live unconcerned in squalor until her arrival, then gaze around ashamed of his surroundings, and spend backbreaking hours just to make her comfortable. She loved him for that: loved him for his hopeless optimism despite the string of failures, for his naïve confidence that someday, if he just worked harder, he would prevail. His life wouldn’t make sense otherwise. But as much as he loved her, he loved his craving more. With each new failure, he’d become more intractable, convinced that his was the only way. Decoyed by the mirage, he’d gone too far, and she’d gone with him. Henry’s strength might be unending, but hers had limitations. They’d tilted together at Henry’s windmills for a quarter of a century, and with sadness she began to realize, as she gazed at Henry standing abashed among his stinking, blackened sponges, that she’d been defeated by this man.

  She held on for another two and a half years, watching Henry bounce from scheme to scheme. First there were sponges, but their farming was more than Henry bargained for. They were gathered by two men in a dinghy diving from the side or using iron hooks attached to ten-to-twelve-foot poles. When the dinghy was full, they returned to the island and spread the sponges on a table in the sun for several days to allow the black gelatinous membrane covering the sponge to die and dry. Their house and stores on Itamarina always had a dead-fish smell, which never went away. After a few days in the sun, the sponges were placed in an enclosed “sponge kraal,” where they were washed by lapping water for another six days. They were beaten with sticks until the decayed outer cover dropped off. Then and only then did they resemble the amber-colored sponges that Violet knew from London’s stores. Greek sponge brokers sailed among the islands. They arranged his sponges into lots, keeping some and rejecting many. The automatic costs kicked in—½ percent for “wharfage,” five percent for “brokerage,” two percent for “drayage”—a total of 7½ percent for taking a sponge, and carting it away, and selling it. Henry decided sponging was unprofitable, so he went to the next best thing.

  This was planting coconut palms, from which he sold copra, dried coconut meat used as a source of coconut oil. Ripe coconuts were split with a machete and laid out in the sun to dry, then the meat was scraped out and dried again on raised platforms to protect it from land crabs. This was pulverized with rollers, steamed and pressed at about 6,500 pounds per square inch. High-quality copra yielded about 60-65 percent coconut oil. What remained was called coconut oil cake and used as livestock feed. Since Henry could hire Kanaka farmers for five to ten shillings a month, he thought he could turn a profit, but the copra brokers took their percentag
es just like the sponge merchants, and Henry moved on to bêche-de-mer.

  The sea slug was abundant in his lagoon and fetching high prices in China as an aphrodisiac, but Henry’s divers were very slow. He tried breeding oysters for mother-of-pearl shell, growing papaya trees and cardamom plants, and harvesting hawksbill turtles, but the only time his workers caught them was when they came ashore to lay eggs. “Then they turn it on its back and a half a dozen or so haul it home with songs of triumph such as I suppose they have used for their human captives,” Violet wrote, showing her lack of patience for the Louisiades and their people. “They make a fire on its breast plate and kill and cook it at the same time.”

  All Henry needed, he told Violet, was more capital!—the mantra of his age. He’d steam back to London to sniff out investors, leaving Violet to manage affairs. He wanted a total of £22,000, added to his own personal investment of £2,000. With that he’d create his own trading empire in the South Seas. He’d build a steamer for £6,000 to haul cargo and passengers, plus a smaller one to collect exotic produce from the islands. He’d hire a hundred native workers, sailors for his ships, clerical workers, European overseers, scientific experts, and so on. His estimated profits on copra and pearl-shell would be £9,400 the first year, increasing to £26,100 by year three. The scheme would work, he promised, because nowhere else in the world did such conditions exist for raising mother-of-pearl. A South Sea investor named J. G. Munt heard Henry’s pitch and later described it as “nonsense.” The Conflicts were “not a locality where anyone would, or could, work Mother-of-Pearl for the reason that the tides or currents are far too strong,” he said. “What few shells are to be found are very inferior.”

  The one thing Henry did produce in abundance was loneliness, and Violet sampled that in full. “During the whole time of my sojourn there I never saw another white woman or left these two islands” of Itamarina and Panasesa, she wrote. Except for Henry, she had no more than perfunctory contact with anyone. Expatriate society was ultraconservative. Cut off from the exhilarating change of the city, the residents developed a siege mentality, which included more stringent and unbreakable barriers between whites and “blacks” than any she’d ever seen. Planters took for granted their “right” to exploit cheap labor while bestowing on them the joys of civilization. “We expected to be respected, have privileges, be superior,” one colonial woman in New Guinea later said.

  In return, we were the Rock on which such fragile structures as honesty, fair play, protectiveness, obligation were to be erected. Generally, we lived a life of natural apartheid, in which the native inhabitants went their way and we ours.

  This meant that Violet rarely saw Europeans with whom she could relate. Those she saw were sponge brokers and copra buyers. Her contact with islanders was superficial or distant. In calm weather, the natives would canoe between islands or, on larger trading missions, lash eight or nine canoes athwart, plant two sails “shaped like the claws of a crab,” and put in at island after island, collecting tons of sago and other goods. They’d pull into Itamarina when they wanted water or tobacco, or when becalmed.

  I did not come in contact with their family life or seen [sic] anything of the women, beyond the one or two who came ashore for water. They wore their hair in apparent ringlets, but when you get closer you see the ringlets are just matted locks. Their dress is composed of petticoats of cocoanut leaves bound round the waist. When they put on two or three of these skirts they look something like the old ballet girls. This is all except tightly fitting bracelets [woven] around the upper arm, in which they tuck anything they wish to carry, and perhaps a bead necklace. The men take pride in their appearance, they paint their faces and rub themselves with cocoanut oil and comb out their wool into most becoming, mop-like head dresses. Occasionally they shave it into eccentric shapes. They use bracelets like the women and put them to the same purpose, tie bracelets under their knees with hanging tossels of shells which rattle as they walk. They have a hole through the nose and when fully dressed wear a large crescent shaped piece of shell there. Both men and women have the ears pierced and stick all manner of things in them for ornaments.

  She did not participate in any society; she only observed. In places like Port Moresby and the Solomon Islands, a strange tension evolved, amounting to sexual hysteria. The 1926 White Women’s Protection Ordinance carried the death penalty for rape and attempted rape, but its passage seemed based more on rumors of interracial lust than objective reality. By the 1930s the fear mutated to the absurd—an islander could receive 100-150 lashes for an imagined lewd glance, while “boy-proof” sleeping rooms, enclosed in heavy chicken wire, were installed at government expense in all houses where white women lived. But here on the Conflicts there wasn’t even eye contact that could be misinterpreted, and Violet wasn’t the sort to indulge in that kind of lunacy. But she was susceptible to loneliness, and the hermit’s life did strange things to people.

  All she could do was stare to the west, where Port Moresby lay beyond the horizon. Maybe it was just as well she didn’t go. Although Port Moresby was dubbed “a quite civilized town” by promoters—a tropical London, with hotels, stores, reading rooms, and running water—in truth, said world traveler Henry O. Forbes, the town consisted of the original native village,a few Government weatherboard buildings, a residence or two for the officials, the mission station, one store, a three-celled jail, and the Government printing office—which was the hotel—dotted anyhow along a couple of miles of shore. The “water supply” is a dribbling discharge from a . . . pipe, conducted for some hundred yards. . . .

  Finally, she could take it no longer. One morning, “we woke to find our boys had gone off with one of the boats leaving only [Henry] and one Malay man to manage the large boat.” They took off after the thieves in the undermanned vessel, “and I was left alone for nineteen days not knowing but that they were wrecked, and wondering how many weeks or months before I would be rescued.”

  Violet kept her fears to herself in her memoirs, but they are not hard to surmise. She knew that Henry might have fallen prey to shipwreck, drowning, sharks, or the tide, and she already had admitted her awareness of local cannibalism. In most cases, cannibal tales served as an “agenda” for the Great Powers to annex new lands: Those engaged in cannibalism were less than human and needed saving from themselves. In the Louisiades and New Guinea, however, cannibalism was not an unreasonable fear. She’d have known about poor beachcombing Ingham during her ordeal in Queensland. As late as 1901, the missionary James Chalmers and eleven others were last seen rowing up a mangrove creek on a densely wooded island in the Gulf of Papua when they vanished from sight forever. Seven weeks later an expedition learned their fate: When the missionaries had entered a Goacribari village, they had been stabbed with cassowary daggers, beheaded, cut up, mixed with sago, and eaten the same day.

  Violet’s reaction when Henry finally returned was not recorded. But soon afterward, she gave her husband an ultimatum. It’s this place or me. I can’t live like this, she told him. He had to choose.

  Back at home, the newspapers called this the Rubber Age. The world was mad about rubber, and Henry was half mad that he’d never be involved. It was better to hide away.

  The bicycle craze had gripped the West during their time in British Honduras. Now, as they quarantined themselves in the Conflicts, the world entered the Age of the Automobile, the second great development to fuel the madness for rubber. Pneumatic tire design accompanied that of autos every step of the way, and soon the tires would be purchased by the millions. Rubber exports from the Amazon jumped from a yearly average of 9,386 metric tons in 1886-90 to 14,939 tons in 1891-95.

  By the time Violet was ready to call it quits in the Conflicts, the United States was on its way to being the world’s largest consumer of rubber. Ransom E. Olds cranked out thousands of cars each year. Henry Ford was nine years away from producing the first inexpensive Model T. By the turn of the century, the auto industry was becoming one of the wo
rld’s most complex and interlinked industries, with hundreds of interdependent parts, and rubber was a great reason for that success. Tire and tube manufacturers would consume 60-70 percent of the rubber sent to the United States. Five major tire and rubber companies emerged in the three decades after 1870. North American rubber imports jumped from 8,109 tons in 1880 to 15,336 in 1890. From 1875 to 1900, in keeping with its sudden, surprising ascendance as a world power, the United States consumed half of all the rubber produced in the world.

  And where were Henry’s seeds? Not only was he excluded from the profits, it was as if his seed theft had never occurred. It didn’t seem to matter. It was a failed enterprise that took the lives of his mother, sister, and others and seemed to illustrate the foolhardiness of dreams. By now, the story of Wickham’s hevea theft had filtered back to the Amazon, but not even the smallest ripple of worry spoiled the calm assurance of the Brazilian rubber men. They laughed at the early British attempts at domestication. The growers in Ceylon and Malaya who received the seeds soon after 1876 made a complete mess of their attempt to grow and tap rubber trees. “God has planted for us,” Brazilians boasted. If rubber trees were meant to grow in rows, God would have planted them that way. Statistics seemed to support their lack of concern. In the first year of the new century, four tons of plantation rubber from the East trickled into the market. That same year, exporters shipped 26,750 tons from wild trees.

  This was the belle époque of the Amazon, the decades from 1880 to 1910 that are still nostalgically called the Boom. By 1907, as many as five thousand new men a week flooded into the valley past Santarém. It was the biggest boom since the Klondike, a black gold bonanza that ignited the economies of Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. In 1906 alone, the £14 million in rubber that came down the Rio Negro paid off 40 percent of Brazil’s annual debt. It was said that 100- 300 million virgin rubber trees still existed in the unexplored forest, scattered across an area of two million square miles. Although that sounds like another dream of El Dorado, it was a fact that in each of those three decades, Brazilian output alone rose by ten thousand tons. The Amazon held the world’s only viable supply of hevea, no matter what the pathetic Wickham had done—and hevea was the gold standard now. Those who didn’t participate in the Boom were foolish. Even the great steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had lamented, “I ought to have chosen rubber” instead of steel.