by Joe Jackson
159. “obtain any quantity that may be necessary at small expense” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 15.
159. “I have just received a letter from H. Majesty Consul at Para enquiring” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham in Santarem to Hooker, Nov. 8, 1873,” file folder 10.
160. He’d absorbed that portion of the Portuguese character known assaudade Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Portuguese Heritage: Adaptability,” in G. Hervey Simm, ed., Brazilian Mosaic: Portraits of a Diverse People and Culture (Wilmington, DE.: Scholarly Resources, 1995), pp. 31-32.
160. “In a radiant land” Paulo Prado, “Essay on Sadness,” in Simm, Brazilian Mosaic, p. 19.
160. “The moon is rising, Mother, Mother!” Prado, “Essay on Sadness,” in Simm, Brazilian Mosaic, pp. 19-20.
161. there are two local Curuás from which to choose If this is not enough, there is a third Curuá, but it would have been inaccessible to Henry and Violet. The Amazon’s last major tributary before it meets the sea is the Xingu River; this drops south into the forest where it is fed by the Iriri River, and this third Curuá is the Iriri’s main tributary. Since this is hundreds of miles from Santarém, it is impossible that this could be Wickham’s Curuá.
162. “the very head-quarters” C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and its Tributaries (London: Edward Stanford, 1878), p. 249.
162-63. “every fragment of food . . . and stung with all his might” Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon (New York, 1864), ch. 9, p. 14. The book is available in its entirety at www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/sci/earthscience/TheNaturalistontheRiverAmazon. According to contemporary travel writer Herbert H. Smith, “As late as 1868 the town was still nearly deserted.” Herbert H. Smith, Brazil, The Amazons and the Coast (New York: 1879), p. 241. Smith quotes the traveler Sr. Penna: “This settlement . . . is a very beautiful and pleasant place, but without inhabitants because of the formigas de fogo. A primary school has been created here by law, but no one has profited by it, because no lives there.”
163. “once more made a hole in the primeval forest to put his house in” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 3.
163. “nature’s flophouses for the outcasts” William Sill, “The Anvil of Evolution,” Earthwatch, Aug. 2001, p. 27.
164. He was becoming, in effect, acaboclo Emilio F. Moran, “The Adaptive System of the Amazonian Caboclo,” in Charles Wagley, ed., Man in the Amazon (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1974), pp. 136-159; and Edward C. Higbee, “The River Is the Plow,” Scientific Monthly, June 1945, pp. 405-416.
165. “He stripped his shirt up” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.
165. “and then I have said all there is to be said for it” Ibid.
166. “which measured forty-two feet in length” Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, ch. 9, p. 11.
166. “The father and his son went . . . to gather wild fruit” Ibid. Author’s note. I never saw an anaconda on the Tapajós, but I did see a huge one once on the Rio Napo north of Iquitos in Peru, and after that I’d never discount such tales of attacks on small children. I was in the middle of the stream, trying to paddle one of the flat-bottomed dugouts; since I was used to the more deeply keeled canoes used on North American rivers, my dugout was essentially tracing a big circle in the water using the weight of my body as the fulcrum. I was alone on the river, around a bend from my camp, when suddenly the forest around me grew very quiet and I thought I heard a plunk! I looked down and underwater, directly beneath the dugout, an enormous anaconda glided past. I cannot even begin to imagine how big that thing was: I am sure I would exaggerate. I stopped paddling, and sat still, and stopped breathing—and for the first time in my life knew what people mean when they say their “heart stopped in their throat.” The snake just kept going and going; it seemed to have no beginning or end. Later I would recognize that otherness, that impossibility of proportion, as the essence of monstrosity, and also realized that out here I counted, at best, as a hearty meal. There are no verified stories I know of that show anacondas attacking and swallowing human adults, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that fact at the moment: I slid my paddle from the water without a drip (as I’d learned in Boy Scouts, in case I ever became an Army Ranger—fat chance, there!); I held it in both hands before me, like a club. I had one of those strange and sudden out-of-body experiences where I observed myself from above, as if from a spy satellite: me, holding the flimsy, ineffective paddle; the snake, going on and on a few feet down. All it had to do was rise a couple of inches and brush the canoe, and I’d be over the side and in his element with him. I wasn’t a father yet and hadn’t really thought about such matters, but it suddenly popped into my head that This line of Jacksons ends right here. I guess I can be proud of the fact that I didn’t panic and start thrashing about, which probably would have gotten the monster’s attention, but other than that I felt like a truly helpless idiot, and part of me hoped that nobody was around to watch when the snake swallowed me whole. Let people wonder what happened to me: at least there’d be some mystery. But nothing happened, of course, and when the snake finally passed, I sat quietly a little longer then gently dipped my paddle back in the water and found I’d discovered the trick to maneuvering the damn canoe after all. Not that it mattered—I never went alone on the river in one of those dugouts again.
166. The house was never finished Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham—III: Santarem,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 125 (Dec. 19, 1953), p. 18.
166. “nitrate pulse” Moran, “The Adaptive System of the Amazonian Caboclo,” p. 145.
166. “a horticulturist, a rubber collector, a hired hand” Ibid.
167. “My boarded floor had been taken up” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.
167. “Casa-Piririma” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham—III: Santarem,” p. 19.
167. “as disgusted as the others” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.
167. Mercia Jane Ferrell from West Moors, Dorset We know very little about the ill-fated Mercia Jane Ferrell besides her brief, anonymous mention in Violet’s diary; her place of birth and age in the Census of April 3, 1871; and Henry’s drawing of the wooden cross above her grave, the only time her name is mentioned in the various annals of Wickham’s time in the Amazon.
168. “I was just delited” David Bowman Riker’s “Handwritten Narrative” appears in an Appendix in O Último Confederado na Amazõnia (The Last Confederate in the Amazon), by his son David Afton Riker, (Brazil, 1983), pp. 112 ff. David B. Riker knew the Wickhams, said he was the first person to plant rubber on the Amazon, and planted the first rubber tree for Henry Ford in Forlandia.
168. “Father put Virginia and myself in school” Ibid.
168. “ride out in to the country” Ibid., p. 384.
169. “It is already very late” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter dated Oct. 15, 1874, Wickham at Piquiatuba, near Santarem, to Hooker, regarding transport of seeds,” file folder 14.
169. “I reopen this in order to add” Ibid.
169. “With reference to Mr. Wickham’s proposal to raise young India Rubber plants” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter dated October, 1874, Markham to Hooker,” file folder 12.
170. “any amountof seeds at the same rate—£10 for 1000” Royal Botanic Gardens- Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter, Markham to Hooker, Dec. 4, 1874,” file folder 13.
170. The secretary of state soon authorized Wickham Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 16.
170. “once more each struggled on alone” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.
171. “She stayed with me till her death” Ibid., p. 4.
171. “I recei
ved a few other (seeds) from an up-river trader” Royal Botanic Gardens- Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter Wickham at Piquiatuba, Santarem, to Hooker, April 18, 1875, regarding the fact that it is too late in the season to collect seed,” file folder 15. According to historian Warren Dean, Wickham also sent a package of seeds soon after this that reached the India Office on September 9, 1875; they were “duly paid for,” but failed to germinate. There is also no record today in Kew of their arrival. Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 16.
172. “Should you have opportunity of recommending me” Ibid.
Chapter 9: The Voyage of the Amazonas
173. “After supper the family would unite” Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis; the Taking of Rubber Seeds out of the Amazon,” p. 384.
173. “I am just about to start for the ‘ciringa’ district” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham at Piquiá-tuba to Hooker, Jan. 29, 1876,” file folder 17.
174. “[T]he collectors must be directed” Roy MacLeod, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris series, vol. 15 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 179.
174. By locating on the Madeira, he’d entered a region that swallowed lives blithely The Acré was a huge chunk of rain forest between Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. Wars were fought over it, and corruption and slavery occurred in its depths that rivaled anything committed in the name of gold or oil. By 1870, Brazilian rubber prospectors had penetrated its darkness; by 1875, steam navigation had penetrated 1,228 miles up the Madeira. But three miles above the old town of Santo Antonio (now Porto Velho), the Madeira was broken by 19 cataracts and rapids formed by the meeting of the Brazilian Shield and the Amazonian planície. For more than 250 miles the river was unnavigable, and trading vessels hauled up and down in backbreaking portages made no more than three round trips a year. By 1872, the American journalist and speculator George Church had persuaded investors that a 225-mile railroad set east of the rapids was the way into this “Garden of the Lord.” He raised £1.7 million in bonds backed by the Brazilian government, set up the Madeira-Mamoré Railway Company, and in 1872 sent out his first crew of British engineers. Their boats sank. Caripune Indians attacked. Fever-plagued crews plunged through the forest in an ill-fated effort to flee. Workers died from disease and the heat. The rain forest was so dense that surveyors could only measure a few feet ahead. By 1873, the project was over, and in London the company’s stock tumbled from 68 to 18 points on the Exchange. Remaining workers abandoned their job sites when they heard their employer went bankrupt, leaving equipment to rot. British financial assessors reported that “the region is a welter of putrefaction where men die like flies. Even with all the money in the world and half its population, it is impossible to finish this railway.” By 1876, however, the Brazilian government had subsidized the company in a desperate bid to link the international rubber port of Pará with the Acré, and Church was back in Philadelphia, recruiting more men.
174. Markham was not present to oversee the handoff Donovan Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Geographical Department of the India Office, 1867-1877,” Geographical Journal, vol. 134 (Sept. 1968), p. 349.
174. “laxity . . . vigorously and systematically suppressed” Ibid., p. 351.
175. The same India Office that grew incensed Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 16.
175. “once again we started by boat” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.
175. “[H]e decided to collect himself . . . as is very common there” Ibid.
176. “a minor who had been unlawfully taken” Smith, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast, p. 128.
176. “the country house of an Englishman . . . got more ‘kudos’ for pluck than I perhaps deserved” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.
176. February to March was the period Edward V. Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), p. 651.
176. “left me there . . . while he and the boy went off into the woods” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.
176. “I am now collecting Indian Rubber seeds in the ‘ciringals’ ” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham to Hooker, March 6, 1876,” file folder 19.
177. Cross was a veteran of the cinchona expedition William Cross, “Chronology: The Years Robert Cross Spent at Home and Abroad,” http://scottishdisasters.tripod.com/robertmckenziecrossbotanicalexplorerkewgardens; also, e-mail interview with William Cross on April 3, 2006. William Cross is the descendant of Robert Cross and maintains an exacting and informative website on the often overlooked Kew gardener.
177. “to cover all expenses and include remuneration” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham to Hooker, March 6, 1876,” file folder 18.
177. “their exact place of origin was in 3 degrees of south latitude” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” India-Rubber and Gutta-Percha Trades Journal, vol. 23 (Jan. 20, 1902), p. 81. David Riker would later head to the same area when prospecting for seeds for the Ford plantation. Wickham “made several trips by boat to Boim,” Riker said during the Ford era, adding that the seeds for Britain’s Asian plantations hailed from there. In the 1960s, environmental historian Warren Dean interviewed Julio David Serique, whose father had been a patrão in Boim when Wickham arrived and who confirmed Riker’s words. William Schurz, whose 1925 Rubber Production in the Amazon Valley influenced Henry Ford’s decision to open Fordlandia, interviewed a “Moyses Serique” of the same family. “Boim is the first place on the Tapajoz in which wild Hevea is found,” Schurz discovered in his own explorations, “and it is not probable that Wickham went further up the river.” Not probable, he said, because estradas were already being worked in the area and further up the river a “weak” species of Hevea that produced an inferior grade of rubber began to predominate. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis; the Taking of Rubber Seeds out of the Amazon,” p. 384; Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 17; William L. Schurz, Rubber Production in the Amazon Valley, Department of Commerce: Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925), p. 133.
178. Boim was more important commercially A general overview of the Jewish migration to the Amazon can be found in several excellent articles: Ambrosio B. Peres, “Judaism in the Amazon Jungle,” in Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from Their Expulsion in 1497 through Their Dispersion, Israel J. Katz and M. Mitchell Serels, eds. (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 2000), pp. 175-183; Susan Gilson Miller, “Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, Harvey E. Goldberg, ed. (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 190- 209; “Brazil,” Encyclopedia Judiaca, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Macmillan, 1971), and “Morocco,” ibid., vol. 12; and “Sephardic Genealogy Resources; Indiana Jones Meets Tangier Moshe,” www.orthohelp.com/geneal/amazon.htm.
178. Boim’s four trading families had come from Tangiers in Morocco Interview, Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, October 21, 2005.
178. “One must take great care in the jungle on entering” Quoted in Miller, “Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in the Late Nineteenth Century,” p. 201.
179. one of the owners of the “Franco & Sons” cattle ranch C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and its Tributaries (London: Edward Stanford, 1878), p. 251.
179. “that the people who annually penetrate into these forests” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” pp. 81-82.
179. the ancient sites covered in a deep, stiff Indian black earth Interview,
Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, Oct. 21, 2005.
179. “a circumference of 10 ft. to 12 ft. in the bole” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” p. 81.
179. “I daily ranged the forest” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 50.
180. “the bark is thickly coated with growths of moss, ferns, and orchids” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” p. 81.
180. “out of seventeen varieties” William Chauncey Geer, The Reign of Rubber (New York: Century, 1922), p. 73.
180. The black-bark version was said to yield more latex C. C. Webster and E. C. Paardekooper, “The Botany of the Rubber Tree,” in Rubber, C. C. Webster & W. J. Baulkwill, eds. (Essex, UK: Longman, 1989), pp. 60-61.
180. Now in his sixties, he’d had the stump of the Mother Tree pointed out to him Interview, Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, Oct. 21, 2005.
180. as seven men barely stretched their arms around it, standing fingertip to fingertip Was the Mother Tree as big as Cohen said? One rule for measuring girth is that a man’s reach is about the same length as his height. Given that the average Amazon Indian or caboclo was five feet six inches, seven men circling the tree would give a circumference of 38.5 feet. This gives a radius of 6.13 feet, and doubling that, a diameter of 12.26 feet. This is a big tree, but not unheard of. General Sherman, the giant sequoia in California acknowledged until recently to be the world’s largest living tree, has a diameter of 102 feet and a height of 362 feet, or about the size of a thirty-six-story building. The maximum height usually listed today for hevea in the Amazon is 30 meters, but heights of 40 meters, or about 130 feet, were said to exist, if never confirmed, in the virgin forests of Wickham’s day.
181. “[D]uring times of rest, I would sit down and look into the leafy arches above” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) with an Account of Its Introduction from the West to the Eastern Tropics (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1908), pp. 50-51.
