CHAPTER 2
NATURE BELONGS TO MAN
A new hero was taking shape during Henry’s childhood: the explorer—the astronaut or rock star of his day.
Throughout the Victorian Age, the Crown funded scientific exploration linked directly to its imperial interests, which the public saw as an expression of culture. Exploration was an act of intervention that altered the fate of one nation while increasing the knowledge, resources, or power of the other. The explorer was the first agent in Western Europe’s conquest of “uncivilized” lands, where it was presumed that no law or truth existed. If a missionary, the explorer brought Christian light to the darkness; if a scientist, he spread knowledge among the ignorant. Residents of the periphery, however, did not always share that high-minded vision. They tended to see him as an agent of exploitation, the vanguard of an invasion—a spy.
By the late eighteenth century, exploration was a proven path to power and riches. The Spanish Conquest was the prime example. The Enlightenment’s appetite for new facts provided new reason for discovery, and although all Europe participated, Britain maintained the highest level of exploration throughout the nineteenth century. By midcentury, the popular image of the British explorer had begun to evolve. Already a symbol of reason’s spread, he now became a celebrity. The great explorations of 1790-1830 had been maritime coastal reconnaissances to produce the celebrated Admiralty Charts, and explorers of this period were seen as self-effacing, duty-driven civil servants whose sole motive was the collection of information for the charts to make sea travel safer. The new explorer who emerged during Henry’s childhood was a larger-than-life character whose exploits acted out personal ambitions and public fantasies.
There was no better example of this than Sir Richard Burton, after whom Henry would model his personal style. In 1853, dressed as the fictitious Sufi physician “Sheik Abdullah,” Burton joined the Egyptian hajj to Mecca; although he was not the first Christian to enter the holy city in disguise, his 1855-56 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Medina and Mecca was the most detailed. Success led him to a legendary quest—the discovery of the source of the White Nile. An initial foray in 1855 ended with his camp ambushed, one companion killed, and a second—John Hanning Speke—wounded, while Burton himself was pierced through the cheek with a javelin. In 1856, Speke and Burton set out again and by February 1858, the two reached Lake Tanganyika, one of the Central African “Great Lakes” thought to be the source of the Nile. With Burton paralyzed by malaria, Speke went on to locate Lake Victoria and proclaim it the Nile’s origin. By then the mismatched pair hated one another. They disagreed over Speke’s claim, initiating the great controversy that proved irresistible to chroniclers and which ended finally in September 1864 with Speke’s death, by accident or suicide, a day before the two were to debate the question at the Royal Geographical Society.
Suddenly the explorer was a central hero in an escape fantasy that gripped the British isles, a champion who trod the earth’s wild places and interpreted what he saw through English eyes. Newspapers and journals were filled with the adventures of Burton and Speke, as they were with David Livingstone’s expedition up the Zambezi River in 1857-63. A new theme crept in. Since the new explorer was in the vanguard of a culture whose science and technology were clearly superior to that of “unscientific races,” his very arrival seemed to prove England’s right to rule these newly explored lands. “Natural theology,” the Christian belief that nature existed for man’s improvement, was already a given; now it was one short step to the conviction that the West was destined to master nature and remake the world.
Henry came of age when explorers’ journals were bestsellers. There was something otherworldly about an explorer’s description of an unknown land, such as the passage where early explorer MacGregor Laird confessed that the stillness of Sierra Leone’s forests “chills the heart, and imparts a feeling of loneliness which can be shaken off only by a strong effort.” The quest to fill the spaces on the map became a journey deep inside the mind. Balancing this was an obsessive adherence to the grinding reality of exploration. Meticulous instructions from scientific societies called for daily readings of instruments, regular updates of maps, the careful preservation of specimens, a daily weather log, and observations of native customs, language, population, resources, and trade. The explorer was expected to be leader, emissary, hunter, observer, collector, scientist, mapmaker, and artist. He was told to make frequent notes and leave nothing out, a fail-safe in case he should be murdered. Events less final than homicide could also ruin an expedition: Precious equipment got destroyed, compasses were lost, instruments split from the heat, thermometers calibrated for English weather burst in the desert clime.
There was also a growing realization among Britons that the tropics were the “white man’s grave.” During Henry’s childhood, this meant West and Central Africa, but as the century progressed, it included any equatorial place loaded with “primitive tribes,” burning heat, miasmic swamps, swarms of insects, and miles of treacherous jungle. Much of the image was false: The maximum temperature in West Africa and the Amazon Basin rarely surpassed the maximum midsummer heat of the American Midwest, while jungles were often the home of sedentary agrarian people who were far from primitive and who for centuries had slashed and burned the underbrush to carve out farms. The image did have one real basis in fact, and that was disease. European newcomers to the African coast died at a rate of three hundred to seven hundred per thousand during their first year. After that, the mortality rate dropped to 80-120 per thousand, but that was still far higher than any cholera pandemic sweeping through the European capitals. West Africa alone was stocked with sleeping sickness, Guinea worm, yaws, bilharzia, dysentery. The principal culprits were spread by mosquito, and an individual’s chance of living a year without being bitten were nearly nonexistent. In some areas, the average number of infected bites per year per person was a hundred or more. There was no escape from malaria or yellow fever.
Of the two, malaria was the oldest, deadliest in number of deaths, and most pervasive. Yellow fever was self-limiting, since the parasite either killed its victim in five to seven days or allowed a complete recovery that brought with it a lifelong immunity. Not so with malaria. It struck, lingered, then returned repeatedly, teasing its victim, slacking off before rolling back like a scalding wave. Anyone who ventured into its domain saw others die around them before they, too, succumbed to debilitating headaches, chills, and fevers. Physicians prescribed general bleeding as a cure: 20-50 ounces of blood taken at the fever’s onset, then more for a total that could exceed 100 ounces. Since the body contains about 180 ounces of blood, and anemia is one of malaria’s most common symptoms, the loss of so much blood could be fatal. The common treatment with mercurous chloride (calomel), was no better. Malaria is dehydrating; since calomel is a purgative, it intensified the loss of fluid. The two treatments administered together sent many to an early grave.
Only one thing quelled the fever, a bitter alkaloid in the red bark of a tree. That tree grew in only one place on Earth, along the east slope of the Andes near the source of the Amazon—a place that, for most Europeans, seemed like the dark side of the moon.
Although quinine is best known today as a bitter taste in tonic water, during Victoria’s reign it was the most powerful antimalarial medicine known to man. It came from the bark of the evergreen cinchona tree, native only to South America. Cinchona belongs to the Rubiaceae, or madder family, which includes gardenia, bluet, bedstraw, coffee, and the ipecac (ipecacuante) shrub. There are nearly sixty-five species of cinchona, and most prefer the mountainous forests of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. They grow in a narrow belt between 22° S latitude and 10° N latitude at 3,000-6,000 feet above sea level, an area characterized by high humidity and frequent heavy rain. Only four of the species contain an alkaloid content in the bark of their roots or stems high enough to be any use to man: the highest concentrations were thought to exist in the cascarilla roja, or “red-bark tree.” Quinine’s preparation had been the same for centuries: Cascarillos uprooted the tree, beat loose the bark, and peeled it off by hand. The dried bark was then ground into powder or infused in water.
In 1859, the London journals began to chronicle Britain’s two-year quest to smuggle cinchona from the Andes. That there was something different about this incursion was apparent from the beginning. Most British expeditions claimed discovery and the furtherance of science as their purpose, but the cinchona affair was an unabashed imperial endeavor swaddled in justifications ranging from free trade to the good of mankind. If the single source of this life-giving drug were being mismanaged to the point of extinction, argued colonial authorities, didn’t the world’s most powerful nation have a moral obligation to plant seeds elsewhere? When cascarillos felled cinchona during collection, they pulled up young trees with no thought of replanting or conservation. The world’s only defense against malaria might go the way of the dodo. Theft in such a case would be a humanitarian act. Global thievery was a small price to pay if millions were saved. Left unsaid was the fact that malaria’s defeat would end the deathwatch of the “white man’s grave” and leave the tropics open for colonization.
The midcentury belief that a nation could appropriate for itself another’s vegetable resources did not occur in a vacuum, especially if clothed in the garments of religion. Natural theology had long assumed that everything in nature existed for man’s use and instruction: Natural riches, scattered to the ends of the earth, were not for one people alone and should be available to all. J. H. Balfour’s 1851 Phytotheology argued that God’s orderly plan was reflected in the structure and function of plants. T. W. Archer’s 1853 Economic Botany claimed that God had clothed the Earth “with every necessary for men’s wants,” and even rubber, with its remarkable versatility, was used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as a prime example of God’s affection for man. The transfer of plant species from one part of the world to another was nothing new. The Spanish Conquest had opened Europe up to what has since been called the “Colombian exchange.” Wheat, grapes, lettuce, cabbage, apples, peaches, mangoes, bananas, alfalfa, and many other crops crossed the Atlantic in one direction or the other. Most important was maize, which thrived in the drier soils of southern Europe, the Balkans, and West Africa, and the white potato, which fed the poor throughout industrial Europe. After the First Opium War of 1839-1842, a plant collector named Robert Fortune brought two thousand tea plants and seventeen thousand seeds out of China and transplanted them in the sprawling Indian plantations around Darjeeling. It was obvious that transplanted crops could make British settlers rich and their colonial administrations solvent: The Ceylon coffee crop, for example, was worth £500,000 in 1850 and would be worth three times that in just another decade. Cocoa showered riches on Trinidad; sugar, on the colonies in the Caribbean. In Burma, officials urged the enclosure and protection of teak; in British Honduras, mahogany companies ran the colony.
The reality of plant transfer was not at issue. What emerged with the 1859 cinchona theft was a new rationale. The Earth was a treasure house that had to be managed: Nature belonged to man to harvest and “improve.” This was especially true in the tropics, where vegetable riches ran rampant but were also wasted and destroyed. By the Victorian era, when the British Empire had endowed its expansion with a moral flavor, the idea had new urgency. Not only the conquest of nature was at stake but the course of the future. Conservation sometimes meant saving environments from those who lived in them. At best, natives could be educated; at worst, they must be expelled. The “Profligate Native” became a common theme of empire, often rephrased as “the labor problem,” used as a justification for the right to intervene. In Cameroon, reservoirs of palm oil were being wasted because the African laborers “waltz through life in a dream with their heads wrapped in clouds too deep to receive the instructions given to them,” complained botanist Gustav Mann. To colonial governor Sir Charles Bruce, “the very existence of [tropical] colonies as civilized communities required the intervention of capital and science of European origin.” To Benjamin Kidd in his 1898 The Control of the Tropics, the native had no right “to prevent the utilization of the immense natural resources which they have in charge.” This certainly applied to the profligate Andeans killing off the world’s shrinking stock of quinine. The motive was as old as Babylon. The world’s riches were up for grabs. Only the justifications changed.
Every great theft demands a mastermind, and he requires the machine to help launch his schemes. In the case of cinchona and rubber, the usual genesis was reversed. The great machine came first, awaiting its machinator.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was that great machine. Formed from two adjoining pleasure gardens of the Hanoverian kings, Kew was given new life in 1841 as a state institution. Funded by Parliament and charged to aid “the Mother Country in everything that is useful in the vegetable kingdom,” its mandate was to be the nerve center for “the many gardens in the British colonies and dependencies, such as Calcutta, Bombay, Saharanpur, Mauritius, Sidney, and Trinidad, whose utility is wasted for want of unity and central direction.” Although its beauties were open to the public, its true role was that of research and development, providing scientific aid to the empire’s vast plantation economy—a mission considered crucial for “the founding of new colonies” and the maintenance of their economies. To succeed in such an endeavor, a walking encyclopedia of botany was needed at the helm. The man selected for this, William Jackson Hooker, was Regis Professor at the University of Glasgow, director of the Glasgow Botanic Garden, founder and editor of several botanical journals, and one of the few professional botanists of the time. He was also politically savvy, transforming the new state institution into a world center for “economic botany,” closely tying the young science of botany with the rising fortunes of empire.
Hooker wasted no time in making the Royal Botanic Gardens indispensable. Soon after his appointment on April 1, 1841, he established a Museum of Economic Botany at Kew. This acted as a clearinghouse for global seed transfers, shuffling plants throughout the empire as the economic possibilities presented themselves. By 1854, Hooker could boast that not a day passed without investors, planters, or administrators coming to Kew for information about the useful woods, fibers, gums, resins, drugs, and dyestuffs awaiting exploitation in their chosen wilderness. By 1855, he felt confident enough to claim that Kew was “essential to a great commercial country.” By the extent and nature of her power, Great Britain sat in the crossroads of Providence; Kew was there, Hooker said, to organize and improve the bounty from the four corners of the globe.
Hooker was not the first to see rubber’s importance to the empire: that honor may have gone to the industrialist Thomas Hancock. By the 1850s, it was becoming obvious that vulcanization was transforming rubber from a natural oddity to a world commodity. In 1830, Britain imported 211 kilograms of raw rubber; by 1857, that figure jumped to 10,000 kilograms, a 4,700-percent increase in a quarter century. Even more telling was the fact that Brazil was becoming the world center for supply. In 1827, the nation exported 69 metric tons of rubber, an amount exploding to 1,544 tons annually from 1851 to 1856. Hancock began to worry that Brazil might someday cease to provide the quantities of rubber that Britain was beginning to require. Rubber was a jungle product, extracted from secret groves in the rain forest by methods no European understood. There was no way to predict annual supply; Hancock knew that the price would increase as the world demanded more. The market needed a prod. In 1850, Hancock proposed creating rubber plantations “in Jamaica and the East Indies” to William Hooker. The director, in turn, promised Kew’s resources and vowed to “render any assistance in his power to parties disposed to make the attempt” to move the rubber tree from Brazil to some friendly territory within the British Empire.
Thus, Kew first turned its attention to rubber in the same year that Henry Wickham’s father died. Its interest in caoutchouc paralleled Henry’s coming-of-age. Unlike cinchona, however, a major mystery prevailed. Industrialists like Hancock had determined that “Pará fine” was the most durable rubber on the market, able to withstand more punishment and shrink less during transport than any other variety. But no one knew what it came from or where. The Amazon Basin was huge and uncharted; accurate maps did not exist; rubber suppliers kept the locations of their rubber stands secret or lied about the source, calling everything “Pará fine” to drive up the price. Rubber went by such names as seringa rubber, India rubber, “Pará fine,” and now a new term, siphonia, which perplexed everyone. Experts added to the confusion, bringing rubber-producing plants to Kew from throughout Latin America, often in a deteriorated state. They brought Castilla elastica and its cousins from Central America; three kinds of Hevea from the Amazon and Orinoco valleys; the Ceará rubber tree, Manihot glaziovii; and a Brazilian species of Sapium. They confused seringa with Castilla and were lost regarding the ranges of separate species of Hevea. There were alternate sources from other continents, since each nation had an interest in proclaiming its rubber the best in the world. Botanists found Kickxia, Funtumia elastica, Landolphia, Clitandra, and Carpodinus in Africa; Ficus elastica in India and Burma; and “gutta-percha” from the leaves of the towering Isonandra tree in Borneo, the Malay peninsula, and Ceylon. For a long time, “gutta-percha” and “India rubber” were interchangeable. As rubber became essential, only one thing was certain. Confusion reigned.
Such was not the case with cinchona. Its taxonomy was settled. Collectors knew what they were looking for. Although never parsed so finely, it made a certain sense to smuggle cinchona before attempting the same with rubber: In order to solve the mystery of rubber, one needed to survive the tropics and its great assassin, malaria. In order to do this, one needed a reliable supply of quinine.
There was also imperial demand. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in Bengal and North India catalyzed Great Britain just as the French Revolution transformed France and September 11, 2001, changed the United States. The world was a dangerous place, the homeland surrounded by deadly plots and enemies. In such a world, the best defense was a preemptive offense, and this meant sending British troops, administrators, and their dependents to the empire’s malarial possessions around the world. The Dutch were already mounting a campaign to secure and control cinchona. Quinine was more than a drug. It was a fetish: a symbol of the power of science to control an unruly world.
Into this tumult stepped the caper’s mastermind. Clements R. Markham was a handsome fellow, with a broad forehead, muttonchops, and pale, distant eyes—one of those eminent Victorians who seemed “irritatingly destined for high office,” a biographer said. In time he would be knighted, made president of the Royal Geographical Society, and write forty-four books, most on South America, but in 1859 he was a thirty-year-old junior clerk in the India Office, recently decommissioned from the Royal Navy. Most of his seven-year service was spent sailing off the American coasts, and he still dreamed of the tropics. On April 5, 1859, Markham proposed in a letter to Sir James Hogg, Chairman of the Revenue for the Judicial and Legislative Committee of the Council of India, that cinchona seeds could be stolen by an Englishman and replanted in the plantations of northern India. “My qualifications for the task,” he wrote, “consisted in a knowledge of several parts of the chinchona [sic] region and of the plants, an acquaintance with the country, the people, and their languages, both Spanish and Quichi.” He maintained that past attempts to collect seeds had failed because the work had not been assigned to someone who was “really interested” in the project, like him. Perhaps most importantly, he showed a keen understanding of the parsimonious nature of British bureaucracy by offering to undertake the project for his current salary of £250 annually, plus expenses.
To accomplish the task, he suggested a pairing of the India Office and Kew. The India Office, caretaker of Britain’s “crown jewel” among colonies, certainly had the power to see such a project to fruition, and Kew had the know-how. When presented with the idea, William Hooker hopped aboard without any apparent hesitation, laying the groundwork for a successful partnership between Kew and the India Office that would last for decades. Hooker must have immediately sensed the advantages: With cinchona, Kew entered a wider circle of colonial officials, merchants, and planters than had ever been possible. Within a year, the tight-fisted Treasury was granting funds to Kew for such projects as a “double forcing house” for seed germination, money that had not been previously available. Aligning one’s fortunes with India was a wise course for the future.
Markham’s plan of attack was three-pronged. The cinchona region followed the curve of the Andes for about one thousand miles. Since this was too much for one group to handle, he suggested three. Markham and Kew gardener John Weir would tackle the southern region—Bolivia’s province of Caravaya and southern Peru—where the “yellow-bark” version, or C. calisaya, flourished. The “gray-bark” species (C. nitida, C. micrantha, and C. peruviana) grew in the center section, the forests of northern Peru, where collection was entrusted to G. J. Pritchett, an English expatriate. Penetration into the Ecuadorian highlands where the “red-bark” species flourished was entrusted to Kew gardener Robert Cross and Richard Spruce, who’d been collecting new plants in South America since 1849. Except for Spruce, who was still in the jungle, all would train at Kew in the fine points of collecting and preserving cinchona; each group was budgeted £500 and was to complete its mission within a year. The greatest obstacle, Markham feared, would be the “narrow-minded jealousy” of those South American officials who might object to their nation’s loss of an important source of revenue.
In December 1859, Markham left London and spent a month in Lima organizing supplies and planning strategy. Revolution was in the air. Seven thousand Peruvians had died in uprisings since 1853, and in Bolivia, coups and civil war had dominated life since that country’s independence from Spain in 1809. At least in Peru a British smuggler could call on the British minister or vice consul if he got into trouble. In Bolivia, there were no sympathetic representatives of the Union Jack. Not surprisingly, Markham skipped Bolivia and confined his search to the southern Peruvian province of Caravaya.
On March 6, 1860, Markham and Weir headed into the interior, struggling up the Caravayan Andes into a fantastic country of volcanoes and some of the deepest canyons in the world. Andean condors soared above the clouds and valleys. It seemed prehistoric, and on the last leg of the journey they ascended seven thousand feet in 30 miles to the mountain town of Sandia, where they began collecting seedlings and seeds.
But Sandia was not a friendly town. A certain Don Martel, ex-colonel in the Peruvian army, heard of Markham’s intentions and told inhabitants to do what they could to stop him. On May 6, the mayor of Quiaca ordered that any estranjero inglés seen in the area should be arrested. Since the mayor had no real authority, he depended on hired guns. Desertions and mutiny plagued Markham’s company. He grew desperate to defend his plants if necessary. At one point he brandished a pistol whose damp powder rendered it useless, but the bluff succeeded. He needed to escape with what few seeds he’d already collected, so he sent Weir north as a decoy and struck south over the mountains to the coast. The mules burdened with the seeds seemed determined to do what the Peruvian officials had not. Several times they nearly rolled off the narrow paths into the deep ravines. Yet Markham somehow got the plants to Islay, where he rejoined Weir.
Now he entered the web of Latin bureaucracy. At Islay, the superintendent of the customs house refused Markham’s request to ship his four bundles of seeds to England unless he first produced a signed order from the minister of finance in Lima. This was bad news. The previous president had issued a decree forbidding any export of cinchona, but the order had never passed outside Lima. Perhaps the finance minister did not have a copy, he hoped. Since “all the clerks in public offices are changed in every revolution,” most officials had no more than two or three years’ tenure. If he could bluff his way through the layers of rival officialdom, he might still escape, and if there was one thing Markham understood, it was the tangled ways of politics.
Markham got lucky. The president was “a rough, illiterate, though shrewd and valiant Indian,” who cared only for the strength of his army; he’d appointed as finance minister a former colonel of horse who knew little about customs regulations. Markham bribed and threatened the man, and the order was signed. On May 23, 1860, he watched his precious seeds stowed onto a steamer for London and sail away.
Even so, his triumph turned to failure. Although the seeds made it to Kew, one case of seedlings fell into the sea en route to India. The remaining plants baked in temperatures topping 107° F when the ship experienced engine failure on the Red Sea. When the cases arrived in India, the saplings were rushed to the cool Nilgiri hills in the north and quickly replanted, but it was too late. By December 1860, every plant had died.
The bad luck continued. When the gray-bark seeds arrived from the central region, their alkaloid content proved to be too weak for any medical use. England’s hopes were pinned to the group in the north, headed by a very sick man.
Richard Spruce was already a legend, at least in the small world of botany. In 1849, he’d traded the safe English life of a mathematics teacher for the risky one of collecting South American plants. A decade later, he’d traveled ten thousand miles by river, identified thousands of plants, compiled the world’s most complete collection of mosses, and written a glossary of twenty-one Indian languages. He was restless, gangly, thin, and dark. When it came to Hooker’s requests, he didn’t seem capable of saying no. In 1846, after spending ten months collecting mosses in the Pyrenees, Spruce was approached by Hooker, who asked if he’d live a similar life of discomfort in the New World in Kew’s employ. Spruce readily accepted. He trained at Kew in tropical botany from 1848 to 1849, and on June 7, 1849, embarked from Liverpool to Brazil.
Along with the naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry W. Bates, whom he met in Santarém, Spruce was a new breed of explorer. Previous wanderers, like la Condamine, had their own wealth to support them or were sponsored by a government, like Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle. Spruce lived on a shoestring, earning his slender keep by selling his collections, often for threepence a specimen, often for less—and sometimes for nothing should the dried specimens spoil en route to Kew. His mandate from Hooker was to discover new plants that could be of use to the Empire, and a major part of that commission was to solve the mystery of “Pará fine.” There were hundreds of species of rubber-bearing plants in the Amazon Valley, and every region called their rubber “Pará fine.” Did it come from the Maceranduba, the cow-tree, so called because of its copious secretions of a sweet latex that Spruce called a “drinkable milk”? He spotted several trees near Pará and mixed the latex with his coffee. “Its consistency is that of good cream,” he reported, “and its taste perfectly creamy and agreeable.” Or was the source a tree yet undiscovered, waiting in the green fastness like some wondrous Sangreal?
It was an impossible task for any one man. Over five hundred species of plant flow with a milky latex that can produce rubber. They belong to several botanical families, in several different genera, distributed throughout the earth. All are united by the milk in their veins, an elastic latex, which, strictly speaking, is any mixture of organic compounds produced in lactifers, the cells or strings of cells that form tubes, canals, and networks in various plant organs. The latex flowing in these tubes varies in composition from species to species, but each is an emulsion loaded with hydrocarbons and mixed with other compounds, including alkaloids, resins, phenolics, terpenes, proteins, and sugars. While most have elastic properties, some, like the opium latex of the poppy, are prized for different qualities. No one truly understands the function of latex in the wild. While many botanists believe latex has evolved as a defense against herbivores, since it usually gives the plant a bitter taste, others think that lactifers have developed as a conduit for waste, that lactifers are the sewage system of the plants and latex the liquid manure.
On October 8, 1850—while four-year-old Henry Wickham was just facing life without a father—Spruce began a solitary canoe journey that took four years and covered eight thousand miles of river. Hooker, his mentor, saw the Amazon as a huge warehouse for economic use, a wilderness to be plumbed and tamed. It was a common idea among naturalists, a fresh twist on El Dorado. Their precursor was the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose 1799-1800 journey up the Orinoco River in what today is Venezuela verified a legendary link between the Orinoco and Amazon river systems. Humboldt envisioned thriving cities and a great civilization amidst the intertwined creepers and flooded river plains. Spruce’s friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, was just as enthusiastic: “It is a vulgar error that in the tropics the luxuriance of the vegetation overpowers the efforts of man,” he wrote in 1853. Just the opposite: The growing season never stopped, the climate was favorable to agriculture, and a man could produce in six hours of work “more of the necessities and comforts of life than by twelve hours’ daily labor at home.” Two or three families might convert the virgin forest into “rich pasture and meadow land, into cultivated fields, gardens, and orchards,” within three years, he asserted.
Spruce did not share Hooker’s vision. He preferred an Amazon in its pristine state, an opinion unusual for its time. “How often have I regretted that England did not possess the magnificent Amazon valley instead of India,” he wrote in his journal:
If that booby King James I, instead of putting Raleigh in prison and finally cutting off his head, had persevered in supplying him ships, money and men until he had formed a permanent establishment on one of the great American rivers, I have no doubt that the whole American continent would have been at this moment in the hands of the English race.
He paid dearly for this love of the wild. Soon after setting out, he contracted malaria; its visitations would progressively weaken him. On the Rio Negro, he stumbled into a planned Indian massacre of two Portuguese merchant families: Where the old hatreds lingered, a white skin was the reminder of slavers. He survived the night when the Indians realized they were outgunned—and that they, not the Portuguese, would be slaughtered. Farther up the Negro, he fell into a fever: he hired an old “Zamba” woman named Carmen Reja to nurse him. Unfortunately for Spruce, she hated foreigners too. During the malarial attacks, he was plagued by violent sweats, an unquenchable thirst, and difficulty breathing. He was convinced that death was only hours off and gave instructions on what to do with his plants and how to contact Hooker. Then he collapsed in apathy on his hammock, waiting for death to come. During such times, Carmen Reja left the house for hours, hoping to find him dead when she returned. In the evening, after lighting his lamp and leaving a jug of water within reach, she filled the house with friends and spent the night abusing him, calling him names and crying, “Die, you English dog, that we may have a merry watch-night with your dollars!”
Even with such punishment, Spruce tried to find the source of “Pará fine.” By 1855, he was nearly convinced that the answer lay in a soaring giant with a peculiar three-lobed seed. He first noticed the tree growing close to the river or rising from the floodplain. It arrested the eye: The lower trunk was thick, dark, and warty, the upper trunk and crown so light that it seemed to shine. The medium-sized leaves were trisected evenly, glowing a beautiful light green. For ten to twelve feet above the ground, the trunk was often striated with the cuttings of the seringuiero, or rubber tapper, thin welts from which wept a pale stream of latex like blood. In an 1855 article for Hooker’s Journal of Botany, Spruce would be the first botanist to accurately describe the techniques of rubber tapping. He mentioned the climbing price of rubber, a sign for him of rising demand. He described a village ball game he’d witnessed two years earlier: The balls were made of India rubber, and he asked the players to save two or three for him after the game. “But during the night,” he wrote, “they all got gloriously drunk and burst their balls.”
The tree that he suspected is now called Hevea brasiliensis, and a cross-section shows why it was so prized. Unlike other rubber sources, its large lactifers lay just underneath the inner bark. Because of this, it could be tapped repeatedly without cutting deep into the cambial layer, producing a steady flow of latex, high in both quality and quantity, for decades. A towering tree, quite common in the steamy Amazon Valley, it seemed an infinitely renewable resource, a well that would never run dry. It healed its cuts and continued to drip latex like the “tree of life” of Indian tales. And when it died, another could always be found down the next jungle path or up the next tributary.
Hevea seemed the logical source of “Pará fine,” and when Spruce wrote Hooker of his suspicions, the director asked that he send back some suitable seeds. If germinated in Kew’s greenhouses, they could be grown and classified, once and for all solving the taxonomic mystery. Spruce sent several specimens, but the oil in the seedpods turned rancid so quickly that they never survived the sea voyage, a misfortune that doomed every British attempt to procure the valuable seeds for the next two decades.
By 1859, Richard Spruce was tired. He’d collected thirty thousand specimens for Kew, including two thousand new flowering plants. He’d come closer than anyone to solving the enigma of “Pará fine.” He’d served his country well, but the decade took its toll. He suffered miserably from malaria and had nearly been killed by natives. That he’d lasted at all spoke to his intelligence, good sense, and good luck, but many wondered how much longer he might hold on. He was nearing the Amazon’s headwaters, his final present to himself before leaving South America forever. Then, just when he thought he had the right to call it quits, he got a letter from London drafting him for Markham’s scheme:
Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for India has entrusted the Hon. Richard Spruce, Esq., with the commission to procure seeds and plants of the Red Bark Tree which contains the chemical ingredient known as quinine.
To be so entrusted was an order, and he had no choice: The letter directed him to proceed to Ecuador, collect money at Guayaquil from the British Consul, then head inland to gather cinchona. Then and only then could he come home—with cinchona seeds.
Spruce would be joined by the “very able and painstaking” Kew gardener Robert Cross, a Scotsman who carried an umbrella in the jungle to ward off the sun, rain, and deadly reptiles. They were to meet in Guayaquil. The fact that Ecuador was in the midst of revolution didn’t register with the planners. “Matters are in a very unsettled state here, and preparations for war with Peru resound on every hand,” Spruce wrote in his journal. “Recruiting—forced contributions of money and horses—people hiding in the forest and mountains to avoid being torn from their families—scarcity and dearness of provisions.”
Spruce arrived in Ecuador before Cross and began to climb the Andes from the Amazon Valley below. He followed the Rio Pastaza, which joined the Amazon in Northern Peru; he followed it up the gorges of the Ecuadorian Andes until halting at the town of Ambata, within sight of Mount Chimborazo, at 20,702 feet the highest peak in Ecuador. It was misty and cold, and he was struck by an attack of catarrh, a cough so violent that blood flowed from his mouth and nose. But he suddenly found himself in one of the most moss-laden places on the planet, and mosses, his first and greatest botanical passion, seemed to sooth all aches and pains. The penetrating drizzle created a glade out of some old Celtic romance, where the forest itself was moss-draped and lofty, and every rock and bush was shaggy and green. “I find reason to thank heaven which has enabled me to forget the moment of my troubles in the contemplation of a simple moss,” he said.
The idyll didn’t last. As he dragged himself up the heights, condors attacked. He sat on his mule above the Rio Pastaza, contemplating the fact that he could no longer feel his hands or feet and wondering whether death had finally caught up to him. He crossed an undulating plain swept by the paramero, a wind laden with frost “that withers every thing it meets.” Crosses sprouted from the rocks; a pilgrim appeared and said these were the graves of people who had died in the wind. When he was a boy, the pilgrim remembered, he’d crossed this plain with his father. When he spotted a grinning man sitting on an ice-sheathed rock, he told his father, “See how that man is laughing at us?”
“Silence, or say a prayer for his soul!” his father shouted over the paramero. “That man is dead.”
Robert Cross was having his own problems on the other side of Ecuador. He arrived in Guayaquil in May 1860 but immediately fell victim to fever, then could not proceed until the war abated. In July, he boarded a ship into the interior packed with troops and weapons. Two days south of Ambato, he found Spruce huddled beneath the huge snow-covered hulk of Chimborazo, where glaciers stood out like marble against the cerulean sky. Spruce had found the thickly-matted cinchona forests on the slopes beneath the glaciers. He’d camped at a place called Limón, little more than a collection of huts on stilts. For the next two months, this would be their base as they took thousands of cuttings, collected seedpods, and bought them from locals. Cross sowed a number in case the seeds did not survive the ocean voyage. As soon as they took root, caterpillars attacked, followed by waves of maroon-colored ants. By September, they’d collected one hundred thousand well-dried seeds. They built a sixty-foot square raft from twelve huge balsa logs, then floated down the white-water river until they reached Guayaquil on December 13, 1860. On January 2, 1861, Cross and 637 cases of cinchona embarked for London.
Spruce was ready to go home. He hoped to write his findings in the scientific journals and study his thousands of specimens in the peaceful environs of Kew. But soon after Cross departed, the Guayaquil bank in which he’d placed his savings (about seven hundred pounds, or six thousand dollars in today’s currency) promptly failed. He was forced to collect for another three years before earning enough to come home. By then, he was deaf in one ear and suffered partial paralysis of his back and legs. In May 1861, the Ecuadorian government outlawed the export of cinchona, but by then it was too late. England had already planted the seeds in India, a fact remembered bitterly by every Latin nation. The entire venture cost England £857, and by 1880, the government of India would reap thousands of pounds in annual income from Spruce’s cinchona, replanted in northern India and Ceylon. Markham, who’d say he’d broken no law by taking the seeds, would eventually become a lion of English society. By 1870, a lifesaving dose of quinine was being sold for “half a farthing” at village post offices throughout India.
The real winner was Kew. Thanks to the success of the cinchona expedition, the scale of Kew’s imperial work grew enormously. A new network of gardens was established in far-flung colonies. Colonial officials consulted Kew on an increasing range of questions. Hooker gained powers of patronage far beyond anything he’d dreamed.
Yet everyone touched by cinchona was not equally blessed. Pritchett, who smuggled the gray-bark variety to England in 1866, was too late to matter and is forgotten today. Markham’s partner, Weir, was crippled by disease and forced to live on his wife’s earnings. Cross suffered from malaria and slept with a gun beneath his pillow.
And Spruce, broken in health and denied a pension until 1877, lived the rest of his life in Yorkshire on one hundred pounds a year.
