The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  And so the quest began. Thomas Edison tested 2,300 different plants in his search for a high-quality domestic rubber. He focused on Mexican guayule, a twiggy, knee-high shrub that is a distant cousin of the sunflower, then turned his attention to a new strain of goldenrod that yielded 7 percent rubber. But both were inferior to hevea, and the research ended with Edison’s death in 1931. Harvey Firestone sent his son to Liberia, where plantations were started that met with modest success but nothing that could meet the demands of the auto industry. Plantations were begun in the Philippines but never on a grand scale. Filipino leaders feared that a giant American industry on the islands would act as a deterrent to independence. Hoover sent scouting expeditions to South America. And Henry Ford began to dream of vast rubber fields in the Amazon.

  Henry Wickham stood on the sidelines as the feeding frenzy grew, an iconic observer of what he’d started, amazed by the stupendous fortunes—none of which he shared. From 1913, when the British plantations took over, until 1922, the United States alone had imported 2.7 billion pounds of rubber for $1.16 billion. It was an inconceivable figure, beyond Henry’s greatest imagining, and in all that time, he told acquaintances, he hadn’t made a dime from his stolen seeds.

  That was not quite true. He had been paid his £700 bounty—not a fortune, but enough to take him to Queensland. In 1911, the British Rubber Growers’ Association and the Planters’ Association of Ceylon and Malaya presented him with a check for one thousand pounds, a small annuity, and a silver salver at London’s Second International Rubber Exhibition. That year he made his last trip out east. He was photographed leaning against the largest rubber tree in Ceylon, a giant planted in 1876 from his seeds at Heneratgoda Gardens, which yielded 371 pounds of rubber from 1909 to 1913. He wore a khaki jacket and white Captain’s hat. The V’s of the herringbone scars crept up the tree like chevrons. Henry rested his hand against the trunk like an old friend.

  After that, he was poor, frightfully poor, spending most of his time at the Royal Colonial Club, surrounded by fellow imperialists, each spinning their separate tales. Somehow the annual payment of three hundred pounds from the Conflicts dried up. He ventured out to promote arghan and piquiá, but these efforts were hideous failures. He was sixty-eight when the Great War started; he joined the City of London National Guard, where he was one of his battalion’s crack shots, a skill he’d learned potting birds in Nicaragua. On June 3, 1920, he was made Knight’s Bachelor on the King’s fifty-fifth birthday “for services in connexion with the rubber plantation industry in the Far East,” according to a brief notice tucked far back in The Times.

  He was now Sir Henry Wickham, and around this time he began embellishing his legend for anyone who cared to listen. At an unspecified date after his knighthood he told a reporter for The Planter that, “The first natural seeds of the rubber tree to be brought to Britain from South America were loaded by stealth in a small steamer under the nose of a gunboat which would have blown us out of the water had her commander ever suspected what we were doing!” Not could blow them out of the water, but would, as if what Henry did was espionage at its most ruthless, as if both sides engaged in a deadly game of resource management and the stakes were paid in lives. By then he was eighty-three. It was a detail he’d never revealed before, the final flourish to the imperial legend that probably turned more scholars against him than any others. No one likes a blowhard, especially an old blowhard. But could it have been true?

  The idea of a Brazilian gunboat lingering off Boim is a little farfetched, since in 1876 the Brazilian Navy was stretched thin, assigned to major ports along the Atlantic coast and on the Amazon. That means, however, that one could have been at anchor in Pará, and that Henry eyed her as the Amazonas passed by. In 1876, the Brazilian Navy had seventy vessels of war, including nine steam launches; of those, fifteen were ironclad and fifty-five were wooden vessels. They carried 72 rifled guns, 65 smooth-bore guns, an aggregate power of 11,188 horsepower, and a compliment of 338 officers commanding 1,122 enlisted men. One of the navy’s principal duties was to uphold customs regulations in the shipping lanes. Such a gunboat could have blown the Amazonas out of the water, but consider the consequences: such an action taken against Brazil’s principal foreign investor would not bode well for business, foreign relations, or the career of the gunboat’s commanding officer.

  So the threat probably never existed, and if it did, the threat was primarily in Henry’s mind. It shows that he knew what he was doing and that he may have felt guilty, knowing what his transplanted seeds could do to the livelihoods of his old friends. He’d brooded over the fact that he’d left the tattered remnants of his family back in Santarém without so much as a good-bye. It speaks to legend as well. The idea of duplicity was essential to his aura: without danger, there would be no triumph; without sleight of hand, no battle of wits was involved. Henry told his tale in his club among the retired servants of Empire. His victory over the natives, and thus the harsh world outside Britain, was more by wit than by force. It was the stuff of imperial legend, a confirmation of national and moral superiority while civilizing the world.

  By then, no one remained to dispute Henry’s tweaks to his legend. The adopted Indian boy disappeared after Queensland. Violet and Henry had been separated for over twenty years. After leaving the Conflicts, she dropped from the records almost as totally as the adopted boy. According to family, she moved to Bermuda to be near friends and kin, but that is all we know. She inherited with Henry’s knighthood the title of Lady, and she would have liked the measure of respect it brought in her small colony of friends. But it would have turned her thoughts to Henry, and those memories would be sad. Rubber had made him a disappointed man who’d driven her away. We know they loved each other. There are secrets we’ll never know, but she’d stood by him through the worst, and he’d loved her so recklessly that he swam a shark-filled channel in the middle of the night just to be with her. He was often a fool, but he was her fool, and for all his faults, he remained brashly, outrageously charming. Now he was simply a character, a bitter, comical figure with a mane of white hair and a walrus mustache who railed against the newfangled developments of the Malayan rubber growers whose pockets he had lined.

  He was penniless, while his seeds made billions. If Victoria had ruled for him on the Temash River, perhaps there would have been a modicum of justice, but she’d ruled for the rulers and sent Henry on his doomed quest in the South Seas. Henry kept his financial straits to himself, reluctant to relinquish his fierce pride. But in 1923, his situation must have reached that point where he simply could not go on. His former brother-in-law, Frank Pilditch, lived in London, and his brother John lived in Texas as a cattle rancher, but he’d left them to their own fates when he’d shipped out on the Amazonas, and he could not turn to them now. That year he must have revealed his desperation to Quincy Tucker, an American who’d prospected for rubber in the Bolivian wilderness and who’d met Wickham in September 1908 at the International Rubber Exposition in London. Tucker revealed Henry’s plight to Fordyce Jones, Wickham’s closest friend and owner of the Reliance Rubber Company Ltd., the world’s largest manufacturer of “molded seamless hot water bottles.” The two tracked down a strange American savior to ride over the hill like the cavalry.

  Edgar Byrum Davis was odd even by American standards. An oversized block of a man with a wistful smile and a mystical faith in his own greatness, Davis made and lost several fortunes before striking oil in Texas, the fortune that made his name. He’d made his first million as an officer and stockholder in the Charles A. Eaton Shoe Company of Massachusetts, then had a nervous breakdown and commenced an around-the-world voyage, which depleted his funds. In 1907, during his travels, he became interested in rubber and tried to convince the United States Rubber Company to start their own Far Eastern plantations, but the officers would not listen until 1909. Davis was made vice president in charge of plantations and given $1.5 million for development. Though paid only twelve thousand dollars ann
ually, he wrote into his contract a codicil that he’d be paidpercent of the company’s value in excess of its investment when the plantation reached full production. In 1913, he was rich again, and switched his attention to oil.

  In March 1921, Davis started the United North and South Oil Company and came to Luling, Texas, convinced that God directed him to deliver Texans from cotton, the one-crop economy that ruled their lives. He spent $600,000 drilling the first six wells, and not a drop of oil was found. Creditors took his furniture; banks refused to renew his loans. In despair, he sought out Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” who would go into a trance and see the most remarkable things. Although most of Cayce’s pronouncements were failures, enough were successful that by 1922 he had a legion of believers. In a trance, Cayce described an underground geological structure that Davis believed lay beneath the 126-acre farm of Rafael Rios outside Luling. He called it Rafael Rios No. 1. On August 9, 1922, the same day his bank returned a $7.40 check marked “insufficient funds,” the rotary drill at Rafael Rios ground away at 2,100 feet and struck oil. He had, in fact, opened up an oil field that was 12 miles long and 2 miles wide, and which by December 1924 was pumping 43,000 barrels a day. His wistful smile grew wider as oil rained on his suit. The Lord, through Edgar Cayce, had made Davis rich for a third time.

  This was when Fordyce Jones and Quincy Tucker caught up with him. Davis would have known about Wickham during his days with U.S. Rubber in Sumatra. He might have seen the old man as a spiritual twin. There was something very American about Wickham’s saga of repeated failure punctuated by the lucky strike—success wasn’t a matter of intelligence, or even common sense, but faith, as Davis liked to proclaim. Davis promised Fordyce Jones and Quincy Tucker that if he “made a killing in oil,” Henry would be comfortable the rest of his days.

  In June 1926, Davis made that killing, selling his leases at Luling for $12 million. He went on an orgy of charitable giving, holding a picnic in Luling for 35,000 locals, giving employees 25 to 100 percent of their salaries as bonuses, giving away millions more. In 1926, he sent Henry a check for five thousand pounds, quickly followed by another thousand pound check from other American oil kings.

  Henry had just turned eighty when Davis wrote his check. He seemed set for life, and more money rolled his way. It was apparently the result of international jealousy, if not simple shame. Some of the planters in Malaya remembered Davis, and the memories weren’t pleasant ones. While Davis worked for U.S. Rubber, some British and Dutch planters made wealthy by rubber’s high price gloated that “America is paying the bills.” Their “cocksure attitude that America is left at the post only acts as spurs to my determination to secure for our company and America their just share of this good thing,” Davis later said. His frustration with British rubber interests apparently turned to disgust when, in 1922, he met with a group of openly hostile London investors during a meeting in which he proposed a $250 million company formed to absorb a number of small British and Dutch rubber companies. When he suggested that American capital might be raised to support the undertaking, the financiers saw it as an American attempt to break the British monopoly during the start of the Stevenson price-fixing plan. When they voted him down, Davis exploded: “If you men think you are doing the best for the industry by merely consulting what seems to be your own immediate interest in a blind or near-sighted patriotism, you are wrong.”

  When it came to rubber, there was no love lost on either side of the Atlantic, and now the Americans were saving Wickham, “the father of the British rubber industry,” whom the Britons had ignored for so long. Soon afterwards, the governments of the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States gave Henry a check for eight thousand pounds in recognition for his services to rubber.

  He was well off for the first time in his life, as well off as he’d been as a child on Haverstock Hill. He should have been at peace, but one wonders. The world praised him, but the praise was never enough. The craving never ends.

  He did not have long to enjoy the money or accolades. Four months after his eighty second birthday, on Monday, September 24, 1928, he suddenly fell ill. His condition deteriorated, and he passed away quietly three days later, on Thursday, September 27, “of senile decay.” He’d always believed he was descended from William of Wykeham, the medieval bishop of Winchester, and asked to be buried at the Hampshire village of Wickham. Although the belief was probably mistaken, his wish was fulfilled.

  Violet fell ill within a month of him. She was in London and heard of his sickness. There is some suggestion that Henry knew she was in town. But both were too weak to make the trip and reunite. They’d parted over Henry’s insatiable attempts for a second success and Violet’s unending loneliness in the world’s worst places. They’d loved each other deeply, but rubber and the madness and greed it spawned finally came between them. Both died alone.

  On the day after his death, Henry’s obituary ran inside the Times:

  Sir Henry Alexander Wickham . . . was the man who, in the face of extraordinary difficulties, succeeded in smuggling seeds of the Hevea tree from the Upper Amazon, and so laid the foundation of the vast plantation rubber industry. Looking every inch a pioneer, broad-shouldered and heavily built, with an extraordinarily long and wavy moustache, his physical strength was as great as his resolution. To these qualities he owed his escape from the many adventures which he encountered in his wanderings. In conversation he was most entertaining, and his stories were not only interesting but also instructive.

  He told stories, all right: stories to everyone. To his mother, his siblings, his wife. To those who wanted to carve a future out of Nature; to those who invested thousands in his name. There were many like him in the world wanting to grow an empire. Rubber was the seed, the starting point, but like the waters of the Amazon, the stories and promises never ended.

  During his last days, he had a housekeeper who was also a trained nurse. Her name seems forgotten too. “She showed her heroism,” Quincy Tucker later wrote, “by remaining on the job without pay when his cash ran low.” He was supposed to be rich, but he’d run through his funds again. Whether the money went to creditors or more bad investments is uncertain today. No doubt the nurse listened to Henry’s tales of the jungle, about the obstacles that were placed in his path, and of the people who failed to trust him, but he’d proved himself right in the end. He was, after all, a vindicated man.

  Henry willed to her his house and furniture, and some shares in a Burmese rubber plantation he’d bought long ago. After all, no one could go wrong by investing in rubber. It was a necessity in this modern age. But the British government demanded inheritance taxes in cash, and she sold the house and furniture to pay the debt.

  And when she sold the rubber shares, they were worthless too.

  EPILOGUE

  THE MONUMENT OF NEED

  What was it about the jungle that robbed a man of his judgment and fueled the most grandiose dreams? In 1928, the year of Wickham’s death, it was Henry Ford’s turn. Like his predecessors, he saw the Amazon as a limitless, untapped treasure. Of all the schemes in progress to wean America from her dependence on foreign rubber, his seemed most likely to succeed. The deed to a 2.5-million-acre swath of land—four fifths the size of Connecticut—was signed, sealed, and delivered. All deemed necessary to conquer the jungle was loaded into the hold of the white Lake Ormoc and her barge Lake LaFarge. Someone from Ford’s legal department traveled to Pará and the Tapajós to review preliminaries. Ford was returning to where the rubber industry started, but he would do it better. Nothing could go wrong.

  Ford’s name inspired confidence. He had a compelling vision of a bright new age, and he aimed to spread it to every dark corner of the world. Mass production would create a world economy of wonders. Rising wages and falling prices would increase society’s buying power, and abundance would change the world. Scale models of cars, factories, and towns were designed in his headquarters and turned into reality whenever he saw fit. If Fordi
sm had conquered the jungles of American capitalism, it could subdue the Amazon.

  David Riker was sixty-seven when, in December 1928, the Lake Ormoc anchored outside Santarém, and Ford’s managers hired him as guide. By then, he’d built a large family estate overlooking the Tapajós. It was fashioned in the antebellum style of the Lower Mississippi Valley and built of wood in defiance of the white ants. A parrot squawked from its perch on the veranda. But this was nothing compared to the Lake Ormoc. The vessel had been refitted to serve as Fordlandia’s initial headquarters: a hospital, laboratory, and refrigeration unit were squeezed into its interior. The ship lay offshore like some industrial odalisque, awing the locals like the blue-lit Amazonas fifty-two years earlier.

  The birth of Fordlandia progressed with assembly-line efficiency. The little village of Boa Vista was a beautiful site: The shore mounted fifty feet above the clear river. The land rose as one progressed inland, the hills forested with towering, lovely trees—castanheira, or Brazil nut, Spanish cedar, uxy, and itauba. All were burned clear and bulldozed flat. In their place rose a modern suburb with rows of white, green-shuttered bungalows. The main street was paved and ran uphill. Residents collected well-water from spigots in front of their houses, while the American staff and few Brazilian managers enjoyed running water inside. Screens were installed in the windows to keep out mosquitoes. A modern hospital was staffed with tropical specialists and equipped to produce quinine. Schools for the children of workers and managers were staffed with teachers from Pará. There was a private club and pool in the “American village”; the caboclo workers had their own separate pool. The “Villa Brasiliena” boasted tailors, shops, bodegas, and a butcher; the smell of fried bread wafted from the bakery. Until the first tapping, scheduled for 1936, the sawmill would process and export hardwoods felled on the property. U.S. newspapers called it “The Miracle City of the Amazon.”