by Joe Jackson
Henry’s toxic reach extended to all things financial. What had started with Violet and his immediate family mushroomed to hundreds of investors buying thousands of shares. It wasn’t stock fraud so much as misplaced faith and bad planning. Something had happened when Henry and Violet sequestered themselves on the Conflicts: Henry’s rubber seeds were beginning to be noticed. He emerged reborn from the South Pacific without even knowing it. His name was a force; it seemed as good as gold.
Henry’s star had risen because of time, panic, and disease. A coffee blight spread through the Eastern plantations in an unstoppable wave. Since the 1840s and the elimination of the ancient kings, coffee had ruled Ceylon as mahogany ruled British Honduras. The only thing that mattered was the price of coffee on the stock exchange and Mincing Lane, a short and dingy street where an enormous business in all kinds of tropical produce was enacted weekly. Rubber, tea, coffee, cocoa, gutta-percha, spices—all were spread on long tables in dark salesrooms along the streets or off narrow passages in dim warehouses. Every week the brokers mounted the rostrum at the Commercial Sales Room with their clerks, always known as “Charlie,” and bargained from eleven to five. Attempts were made to introduce other crops in the East—sugar, tea, cotton, and finally rubber—but all failed when set beside coffee.
In 1869, the first signs of blight appeared, described as an orange-red splotch on the leaves. In a land where there was no autumn, the rolling hills of coffee burned with spots of autumnal color, but no one really paid heed. The selling price of coffee and its estates rose to record highs on Mincing Lane; astronomical sums were asked and paid. By 1876, the year Henry arrived at Kew with his stolen hevea, it was obvious that nothing could stop the blight, and in 1879 the ruin became complete. During those three years, as planters cast around in panic for a replacement, Henry’s seedlings arrived at Heneratgoda Gardens in Ceylon. But speed of harvest was of primary essence to the planters, and several rubber species in addition to hevea were sampled. Ultimately the Ceylonese planters chose Ceará rubber, since it matured much faster than hevea.
The problems with Ceará took a decade to understand. It did not thrive in the climate and grew bushy, taking up too much space in ratio to its financial return. It was killed by continual rain. Planters who’d invested in Ceará lost badly; a few had sown hevea, but most who remained planted cinchona and tea. Hundreds of Britons were ruined and went back to England. The more enterprising went to Malaya to start again with coffee. They shrugged when they saw hevea trees flourishing in the Singapore Gardens. They’d washed their hands of rubber, they said.
Yet the coffee blight had spread throughout East Asia, and in Malaya, hevea’s role as a replacement crop was handled differently. In 1888, Henry Ridley, a young protégée of Joseph Hooker, was headed to his new post as director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens when he passed through Ceylon. He observed the techniques used there for tapping rubber and was given 11,500 descendants of Henry’s seeds. He stuffed them in gunnysacks, and most survived the 1,500-mile journey. In Malaya, he devoted most of his energy for the next twenty-four years to experimenting on and proselytizing hevea—only hevea—so much so that his work assumed a missionary flavor. Malayan planters called him Rubber Ridley, or Mad Ridley when his back was turned.
When he arrived in Singapore, twenty-two hevea trees grew at the garden. He planted the 11,500 seeds from Ceylon, experimented with new methods of tapping and coagulation, investigated plant diseases, and became famous for stuffing rubber seeds in the pockets of anyone who he thought might plant them. In later years, Ridley claimed most major discoveries for himself, but in truth his enthusiasm was the key factor, and by the end of the 1890s, an informal troop of botanists, gardeners, planters, and tappers had worked in tandem to resolve most of the mystery surrounding Wickham’s tree. Planting in swampy ground proved to be a mistake, as Wickham had preached, but spacing 135 trees per acre permitted the most rapid growth, not the 40-tree-per-acre maximum that Wickham claimed. When Ridley proved that a tree could be tapped seven years after first planting, hevea began to look like a money crop—and for the planters, that was the most important consideration.
One problem with which Ridley struggled was a better way of tapping. By the end of the 1890s, he’d disseminated methods that proved superior than those of the Amazon. A new knife modeled on the farrier’s gouge replaced the seringuiero’s faca. It excised thin slices of bark from the trunk, and repeated excisions of the same portion of bark increased the latex flow. It was found that trees could be tapped on alternate days throughout the year, instead of during a six-month season. Annual yields of more than two pounds per tree were possible, with yields increasing as trees matured. The coagulation of latex with acetic acid proved to be more efficient for curing rubber than the toilsome method of smoking. When samples of acid-coagulated rubber were sent to Mincing Lane, they received grades that equaled the best smoked rubber from Brazil.
Hevea seeds were sent all over the world—to Selangor in Malaya, Malacca, British Borneo, India, Burma, German East Africa, Portuguese Mozambique, and Java. In 1883, five seedlings wrapped in brown paper and bound for the Buitzenzorg Botanical Gardens in the Dutch East Indies aboard the German paraffin carrier ship Berbice were suddenly caught in the fire and ash of Krakatoa’s volcanic eruption. The Berbice hid behind an island for two days, and despite lightning strikes to the ship and volcanic dust covering the deck “at least eight English thumbs deep,” both ship and seeds survived.
In the British colonies of Ceylon and Malaya, vast fields of hevea eventually covered the land, but the juggernaut took time to build. In 1898, the first commercial seed was sold in Ceylon, while Malaya registered its first commercial sale of “plantation rubber”—145 kilograms for £60. That same year, the Amazon sold 25,355 tons. A drop in the price of coffee paired with a sharp rise in that of rubber convinced the remaining hold-outs that hevea was their future. By 1905, these early groves still yielded no more than 230 tons of rubber, but seedlings were being planted on a tremendous scale. In 1905, nearly fifty thousand acres of rubber were planted in Malaya; in 1906, that figure doubled.
Much of this could be attributed to Ridley, but like his mentor Joseph Hooker, Rubber Ridley was a prickly, combative man. His jealous insistence that all advancements were through his effort alone tends to cloud the record today. Like Hooker, Ridley was reedy and slim, wound tight as a spring. According to one acquaintance, he had “little regard for those who did not share his views on botanical matters.” He was, to say the least, single-minded. He carried rubber seeds in his pockets and would thrust a handful on a guest with the cryptic assurance, “These are worth a fortune to you.” Once, as a friend discussed purchasing a grave plot, Ridley gave him a handful of seeds and admonished, “Never mind your body, man, plant these instead!”
As early as the 1890s, Ridley was echoing Hooker’s prejudices—that Wickham was an amateur and that the foundations of the Eastern rubber industry lay in the seeds Robert Cross brought from Brazil, not Wickham’s. In his old age, when Wickham had been knighted for his services and Ridley had not, when Wickham was called “the father of the rubber industry” and Ridley merely its mad shepherd, his tone turned condescending. “I looked on him as a ‘failed’ planter who had been lucky in that for merely traveling home with a lot of seeds had received a knighthood and enough money to live comfortably in his old age,” Ridley said from his pensioned retirement home in Kew.
The statement, famous in its time, was a mix of truth and untruth, but most telling was its heavy-handed rancor. When Wickham entered the battle with Ridley, he was never so personal. He disparaged abandoning smoke-cured rubber in favor of that doused with coagulants “like junket” and baked like “toffee in vacuum driers.” He decried the “fallacy” of planting more than forty trees per acre and ridiculed the new methods of tapping trees. Letter followed letter to newspaper editors: he identified himself as “sometime commissioner for the introduction of the Pará (Hevea) Indian Rubber Tree for t
he Government of India.” A favorite pose was to stand in the back of a meeting of rubber planters, “almost with the air of looking down paternally on his ‘children’ who were talking about ‘his rubber,’” one acquaintance said. “He conveyed this idea in a general and benevolent way, never in an officious or assertive one.” He’d played the role of Amazon planter and British spy; now he played the wise grandee. Even after Violet left the Conflicts and his finances barely sputtered along, he played that part and played it well. It was all he had.
The first time that Wickham seemed aware of the new attention paid to hevea was in 1901. Violet had been gone for two years; there is no evidence that they corresponded. Henry always focused on his next big discovery. This was the year he haunted the London investment firms and eventually descended on the Allens, his distant family. On September 3, 1901, he visited Kew, perhaps remembering the day of his sole triumph, almost exactly twenty-five years ago.
He was received graciously by William Thistelton-Dyer, who’d succeeded his temperamental father-in-law. The director seemed fascinated by the old wanderer’s adventures as they walked along Kew’s planted paths. Henry still limped from the wound to his foot, so they moved slowly. No doubt several gardeners and botanists came up to shake his hand. Thistelton-Dyer described Ridley’s work in Malaya and suggested he take a look for himself when he returned to the South Seas.
The next day, on September 4, 1901, Henry thanked the director for his kindness:Dear Sir Thistleton-Dyer:
Turning over what you said to me in the path-ways yesterday about the Hevea descendants, now in 3rd or 4th generation from those I introduced for the good of India, was glad to hear that after the question of their cultivation had remained in a state of suspended animation since the ’seventies they shall have at last been taken in hand.
Had those thousands of healthy young plants which were so well brought forward at Kew from my original introduction from the Amazon Valley been properly set out under suitable conditions, the ports of India would before this time have obtained very large returns therefrom. Now however as it seems nothing has been taken in hand, I hope you will use your best influence to avoid crowning error from planting out on unsuitable lands.
A very general error seems to obtain that swampy or wet land is the fitting locality.
This seems to have arisen from the “explorers” of a few weeks naturally in going up the rivers in boats would observe a group of these trees scattered along the margins. Whereas the true forests of the “Para” Indian rubber lies back in the high lands, and those commonly seen by the canoe traveler are but ill grown trees which have sprung up from seed brought down by freshets from the highlands—as matter of fact—the whole of those brought to Kew for the Indian Government were from large trees in the forest and were got away back in the forest on the broad plateau betwixt the Tapajos and the Madeira Rivers.
Perhaps it would be as well if I tried a talk at the India Office—if you think it would do any good? Who did you say was the right man to see?
Very faithfully yours,
H. A. Wickham
PS: If you should find occasion, will you kindly make my kind regards acceptable to Dr. Joseph Hooker?
When he visited the India Office, he was treated with respect. Bureaucrats valued his opinions. His 1876 report on rubber was dredged up: The handwriting was his, not Robert Cross’s, they discovered.
For the next few years he crisscrossed the oceans—London to the Conflicts, Conflicts to New Guinea, once again to London, then back again. During this time he started the rubber plantation in New Guinea, where all his “practical” techniques for planting, tapping, and curing rubber would fail. At least once, in 1905, he visited the rubber fields in Singapore, then crossed to Ceylon.
He must have been amazed: The industry spawned by his stolen seeds had grown geometrically. In 1905, Ceylon was still the world leader for total acres planted in rubber, but within two years the Malay Peninsula would jump ahead. In all, some 5.32 million trees were growing in the colonies in 1905, about 56 million by 1910.
These were fantastic numbers, perhaps not as fantastic as the number of virgin trees said to lie deep in the Amazon, but these were real trees, scientifically tamed and chained to man’s schedule. The Malay Peninsula stretched hundreds of miles south from what was then the Siamese border to the equator, a vast humid region of jungle, wild elephants, tribesmen, snakes, rice fields, tin mines, and now endless rows of hevea. Rubber was grown on British and Chinese estates and Asian small-holdings all along the western coast, field after field of bleeding trees fronting the Straits of Malacca. One reason for Malaya’s jump-start was that a huge labor pool already existed for tin. By 1905, the Straits Settlements were known as the “melting pot” of Asia, with an industrial army of Europeans, Japanese, Tamils, Hindus, South Sea Islanders, and millions of Chinese.
Those who planted rubber in the 1890s were rich men by 1905; after that, they only grew richer. They strolled around Singapore in their golf brogues, white socks with clocks, khaki trousers, khaki tutup coats and terai hats sitting well back on the head. The future looked good for them.
The future for the indentured coolie laborer was another matter. Recruited primarily from the Tamil of South India, they served under a debt peonage system akin to that practiced on the Amazon and in Queensland. Tamil labor was in place when the plantations blossomed with coffee or tea. Between 1844 and 1910, some 250,000 indentured Indian laborers entered Malaya. During that time, their living conditions barely changed—low wages and isolation, accommodations on the rubber estates in “line rooms,” and staples purchased on credit from the planter. From the planter’s viewpoint, the system kept costs down. The Selangar Journal, a trade magazine for Malayan planters, noted thatCoolies lines, each room 12 ft. by 12 ft., can be built for dollars 25 to dollars 30 a room. Double lines—i.e., lines two rooms broad each facing on to a fixed feet verandah—will be found more economical than the long single lines, besides being dear to the heart of gregarious coolies. Not more than six coolies should be put into each room, but the planter need have no apprehensions on the subject of mixing the sexes as the Tamil coolie is most philosophical in this respect, a young unmarried woman not objecting in the least to reside with a family or even to sharing her quarters, if necessary, with quite a number of the opposite sex.
“Tamils are . . . cheap and easily managed,” enthused the author of “Life on a Malayan Rubber Plantation.” Although they worked hard for a capable “ganger,” or shift boss, “the main task is suppressing their conversation. Off work they like drugs, and fight among themselves.” A life of debt peonage on a rubber plantation, the writer concluded, “is a pleasant one.”
Maybe so, for planters. In 1906, the future seemed rosy enough to convene East Asia’s first Rubber Congress at the Perideniya Gardens in Ceylon. Results of pioneer plantings were reported, as were the best methods of tapping trees. Even at that early date, plantation rubber was beginning to catch the eye of industrialists in the West because of its low rate of impurity. While the best Brazilian rubber contained 16-20 percent foreign matter, plantation rubber contained less than 2 percent.
But the real attraction at the Rubber Congress was Henry, who’d received an invitation. In 1906, he was sixty. He’d been told never to return to the Conflict Islands, and he was sweating out his rubber experiments in New Guinea, yet another failed wilderness venture. He emerged from the jungle like some ancient warrior, and the planters treated him like a star. “The father of the rubber industry,” they said. He’d refined his image: Instead of buttons on his coats, he used silver links. His tie was inserted through a nautilus shell. He carried a walking stick attached to his wrist by a rubber thong. His most prominent vanity was his walrus moustache: It was waxed and hung beneath his jaw, or was curled at the ends. “Mr. Wickham is no longer a young man,” wrote the Ceylon Observer of May 1906, “[H]is grey hair, grizzled mustache and eyebrows, and sun-tanned face and hands bear witness to long exposure to s
un and air. But he is upright and alert, and keen as many a young man who has not gone through his experiences.” Said another: “Wickham never sermonized; he just talked.” It was his debut as a legend, and he talked a lot, it seems.
Three months later, on August 10, 1906, Wickham wrote a letter in a spiky hand from his club at the Royal Colonial Institute on Northumberland Avenue in London, a place that was becoming his home. The letter was addressed to Joseph Hooker, now eighty-nine and retired. Henry was still convinced that Hooker had been his champion, and no one had ever bothered to inform him otherwise.
Dear Sir:
Having learned your address from the present director of Kew, will you permit me to congratulate you on the now, at last, after so long delays, development in systematic cultivation of the hevea (Para) Indian Rubber: remembering, as I do, your foresight and initiative in securing the free hand enabling me to bring away the original stock on which it is founded, from the forests of the Alto-Amazon. Permit me to remain,
Ever faithfully yours,
H. A. Wickham
This is apparently the last letter Henry wrote to Hooker, who died five years later. As with his very first, Joseph Dalton Hooker did not deign to reply.
In 1908, Wickham published his second book, On the Plantation, Cultivation, and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, dedicated to “My Fellow Planters and Foresters.” Claiming that he alone of all British planters and foresters had working experience with rubber in its native habitat, he railed against the new-fangled methods of tapping and curing. He spun his tale of the Amazonas and gave, for the first time, an account of the deception that allowed him to steal seventy thousand hevea seeds. “I was at that time, as one before my time—as one crying in the wilderness,” he wrote. The idea of “cultivating” a “jungle forest tree” was seen as “visionary” and ridiculous. Time had proved him right, but the cycle was repeating with piquiá and arghan, and he was growing old.
