CHAPTER 8

THE SEEDS

Henry might feel alone, but for the first time in his life he was about to be used by a higher power: Kew. He’d be turned into a tool, and he encouraged the conversion. If Henry and Violet had any hope, it came from halfway around the world.

The change began with publication. In early 1872, Henry received word that his book was ready to hit the London bookstands. His Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness would never be a hit like Livingstone’s or Burton’s journals, but the book did include Henry’s sketches of jungle life, and one sketch in particular proved important: his drawing of the leaf, seed, and seed pod of Hevea brasiliensis. This drawing, more than anything else, would be the key to Henry’s future.

Word that he was an author seems to have filled Henry’s sails. This was still early, when he could dream that his small plot in Piquiá-tuba would someday be a huge plantation and he, a feudal lord. He apparently informed Drummond-Hay of his “success” on the Tapajós, but more important, in March 1872, he contacted Joseph Hooker at Kew. In a letter from Santarém, he told the director that his house was on “a spur just off from the forest covered table highlands S. of Santarem which occupy the triangle formed by the junction of the Tapajos with the Amazon.” He always described his holdings in strategic terms: a triangle of land guarding all approaches; a view from the heights commanding his ancestral lands. “The waters of both rivers, islands and estuaries are taken into the view by new home,” he wrote. He was, in essence, the lord of all he surveyed, and thus in position to send valuable specimens to Kew. Though Hooker did not bother to reply, Henry was buoyed by his own confidence. He followed up the first letter with a package filled with tubers and palm seeds.

If Henry did one thing right during those disastrous years 1871-74, it was to maintain this correspondence with London. He apparently sensed that his best chance to succeed in the Amazon lay in some alliance with Kew. That he set his sights on Hooker suggests that the salesman in him sought ascendancy. He thought he could be a planter, but his real talent lay in self-promotion. In Hooker, he identified the one man who could salvage this tropical wreck he’d created and perhaps give it meaning. As he had with young Watkins and then James Drummond-Hay, Henry placed all his faith in one man.

And Hooker did take notice. Sometime in 1872-73, he read Henry’s book and spotted his sketch of hevea. Although there was by now plenty of anecdotal evidence linking hevea to “Pará fine,” not even Spruce had made the absolute botanical determination that Hevea brasiliensis was the sought-after Grail. Along came this badly organized book in which an obscure and cocky Englishman not only observed the collection of rubber but engaged in its tapping and curing. The drawing of the leaf, seed, and seed pod was a first. It convinced Hooker (and soon enough, Clements Markham) that Henry could identify hevea in the wild, not an easy thing to do in the chaos of the rain forest. Henry had always fancied himself a budding artist. The irony would be that the importance of his work lay far outside the art world.

Yet as important as this and related drawings would be to Henry’s fate, they also contained a level of mystery that symbolizes so much of his career. Henry’s simple, shaded drawing of hevea’s “leaf and fruit” assured Hooker that he knew his business, and his descriptions of rubber tapping on the Orinoco established his reputation as a rubber expert, the latest in the fortuitous line of “men on the spot” on whom the empire’s fortunes so often depended. But how well did he know his business? Although it could not have been known in London at the time, it has since been demonstrated that Hevea brasiliensis did not grow so far north. Henry and his assistants must have been tapping another variety on the Orinoco. An accompanying sketch depicted the removal of the entire bark of the trunk, a practice never reported in the Amazon among myriad travelers’ accounts and one that would kill a tree. “His drawings of the leaf and seeds, if they did indeed represent H. brasiliensis, must have been of specimens found along the Amazon on his journey home,” perhaps during his brief stop at Santarém, mused environmental historian Warren Dean. Hooker innocently put himself in the same position as Henry’s family—placing his faith in one who was considerably less knowledgeable than he supposed.

But Hooker did know that another cinchona coup would help him politically. Three decades had passed since Charles Goodyear patented vulcanization, and each year industry discovered more uses for this nonconductive, waterproof, elastic material. The wars in Crimea, the American South, and the Franco-Prussian War proved its strategic and even geopolitical necessity. Shoes with vulcanized soles fused to canvas uppers and called “brothel creepers” were a big hit in the United States. In Great Britain, they became known as plimsolls. In 1870, B. F. Goodrich founded a rubber factory in Akron, Ohio; in 1871, Continental Kautschuk und Gutta Percha Co. started in Hanover, Germany; in 1872, Italy entered the race with G. B. Pirelli and Co. In 1849, when Spruce first came to Santarém and scoured the jungle for caoutchouc, the U.S. price for rubber was three cents a pound. In 1872-73, the price hovered around sixty cents and showed every indication of rising. Great Britain knew its power rested on ships, but ever since the first battle of ironclads in March 8-9, 1862, between the Monitor and Merrimac, the Age of Sail was inevitably transforming into the Age of Steam. With it came a change in raw materials, from timber and hemp to coal and steel—and rubber.

Clements Markham saw this more clearly than others. In 1870, he’d awakened to the need for rubber after James Collins’s article compared its procurement to the theft of cinchona. In 1871-72, as Henry launched the plans that set in motion both personal and regional disaster, Markham began pushing his own designs. He appointed Collins to draft an even more focused report comparing the utility of the various known species of rubber-bearing tree. Collins’s report favored hevea over castilla, gutta-percha, or Ficus elastica, even though all the others were better understood scientifically and more easily acquired. Markham needed little further urging. Armed with the report, he enlisted the Duke of Argyll, Secretary of State for India, and Lord Granville, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, into his scheme. On May 10, 1873, Collins’s report was forwarded to James Drummond-Hay in Pará with the request to find someone willing to collect the seeds. The letter mentioned “a Mr. Wickham, at Santarem, who may do the job.”

A year after his first, unacknowledged letter to Hooker, Henry was getting attention. On May 7, 1873, three days before the official instructions were sent to Pará, Markham asked Hooker for advice. He informed Hooker of the Foreign Office orders to Drummond-Hay “to take steps to obtain a supply of seeds of the Hevea,” then asked whether the seeds should be sent to Kew first “to be raised there, with the view of afterwards sending the young plants out to India.” Eight days later, on May 15, Hooker said growing the seeds at Kew was a capital idea. He added:

I have a correspondent at Santarem on the Amazon who is engaged in the business of rubber collection and I will write to him for particulars as to the mode of growth of the tree and the methods of collecting from it. I will also beg him to send to Kew a considerable quantity of the seeds.

A flurry of attention was being directed at Henry that May 1873, but he would not hear of it for another six months. In nearly simultaneous letters, Hooker wrote to Henry, while James Drummond-Hay was told by the Foreign Office to roust Wickham from the jungle and give him the news. But both letters were apparently misplaced, and the actors had changed. Drummond-Hay had left Pará for Valparaiso; although a promotion, the move was accelerated by his interference in local politics. The new consul was Thomas Shipton Green, manager of the Pará branch of Singlehurst & Brocklehirst, a London export firm. In the confusion, the letters would not surface for five months, in September.

While everyone waited, rubber seeds from an unexpected source materialized in London, thanks to the tireless James Collins. Collins had written many letters to rubber collectors around the globe, including Charles Farris of Cametá in Brazil, a town about sixty miles south of Pará. On June 2, 1873—while Henry’s commissions from Kew and the Foreign Office languished in some diplomatic limbo—Farris arrived in London to recuperate from fever, and he brought with him a packet of rubber seeds “quite fresh and in a state for planting,” Collins said. Markham got busy when he heard. He set a price for the seeds—£2.10 per pound—and told Collins to buy every one. Since Farris had two thousand seeds, the Empire paid about twenty-seven dollars. “I thought it important to secure them at once,” Markham told Hooker, “and deliver them to you with as little delay as possible.” For once there were no bureaucratic quibbling, probably because, as Markham added, the U.S. and French consulates had already made a bid. It was an effective warning of the intentions of the other world powers, and two days later the seeds were sown at Kew.

Farris later told Lord Salisbury how he’d sneaked the seeds from Brazil. As he was leaving, customs officials entered his cabin and saw that he had a couple stuffed crocodiles with him. “Is that all you managed to shoot?” they asked. “It was a very disappointing trip,” Farris replied. As soon as the ship left the harbor, Farris locked the door, slashed open the crocodiles, and revealed the two thousand seeds.

But they were not as fresh as Farris claimed. Only twelve germinated. Kew kept half for study, and on September 22, 1873, sent the others to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Calcutta. Despite the best efforts of the staff, every seedling died.

With this disappointment, Collins stepped from the picture. He’d be cursed by his pursuit of rubber, as were so many others. There would be no recognition of his work. The record of his contribution exists only because he was never paid. In 1878, he sent a second bill and a lengthy memo to the India Office asking for ten pounds for his services. He was clearly bitter about being pushed aside, and wrote: “I would like to take this opportunity to place on official record that if any honour be due for being the first person through whose instrumentality live plants of the Pará Indian rubber tree have been introduced into India, that honour is undoubtedly due to me.” But he’d padded his ten pounds by a middling amount, and that sealed his fate. There was no greater sin in the parsimonious Victorian system than waste, and Collins had cheated by a couple pounds. Undersecretary Louis Mallet rejected the request. He accused Collins of “a gross attempt to impose on the Secretary of State,” and added that he’d “already succeeded in obtaining £80 from this office for an utterly worthless report on Gutta Percha.” There was no mention that this was the report rating hevea superior to gutta-percha and no mention that Collins’s inquiries got the ball rolling on procuring the tree. By now, Collins was unemployed. In a few more years, he’d be broke and alcoholic. In 1900, he died in poverty.

But Collins’s bad luck was Henry’s good fortune. If Charles Farris’s seeds had thrived, Kew could have abandoned Wickham to his own devices. When, then, did the dispatches from Hooker and the Foreign Office resurface and Henry finally receive his marching orders? It had be sometime in the late summer of 1873, a year after Henry’s mother died. On July 23, 1873, Harriette Jane Wickham wed Frank Pilditch and John Wickham wed Christine Pedley at a double ceremony in the British Consulate in Pará, probably officiated by Consul Green. At that time, the consul failed to mention rubber, and so the letters were still lost. By September 1873, this was rectified.

Since Hooker’s letter to Henry apparently no longer exists, we can only surmise its contents from Henry’s giddy reply. The director seemed purposefully vague, and told Henry that an official commission from the Foreign Office awaited him at the consulate in Pará. Hooker’s letter filled him with joy and hope. He assured the director that he was “glad to accept your offer to put me into communication with the partie you refer to in your letter,” a conspiratorial tone that saturated his memories of this period. More important, Kew’s commission became a way to justify his every wrong turn. It gave his life meaning and gave his imagination a boost. He was no longer Henry Wickham, deluded dreamer, but Henry Wickham, a spy in the enemy’s camp, Agent of the Crown.

It also gave him the confidence to bargain for terms. By mid-September, Henry finally spoke with Consul Green, so that by September 23, Markham told Hooker that:

The Consul at Para has written to say that Mr. Wickham proposes to establish a nursery of India rubber trees, and then to ship them direct to England . . . he says that in this way a large number of healthy young plants would be secured of uniform size and hardiness. The locality will be on the right bank of the Amazon . . . where he is now making a plantation of coffee. He of course asks for a remuneration for the time and care required. How would you advise us to answer?

Six days later, Consul Green told the Foreign Office that he’d asked Wickham for a cost estimate. Henry warned him that hevea seeds were highly perishable: The pods contained oil that quickly turned rancid. He thought it more practical to start a nursery on his farm and forward the young sprouts to Kew when they were hardier. Green apparently thought the idea expensive. He offered in his dispatch to “obtain any quantity that may be necessary at small expense,” in effect proposing to undercut Henry.

But the Farris affair demonstrated hevea’s fragility, and Henry’s suggestion to let the seeds sprout, then ship them in portable greenhouses called “Wardian cases” had merit. He seemed to realize that his suggestion was opposed by the parsimonious Foreign Office, for on November 8, a month and a half later, he appealed directly to Hooker:

I have just received a letter from H. Majesty Consul at Para enquiring at what price I would supply government with the seeds (per hundred-weight) of the Indian Rubber tree for introduction into India. Having considered the matter I submit the following suggestions. I am now making a plantation of coffee &c on the right coast of the Amazon, above the mouth of the River Curvá and below the town of Santarem. I would be willing with government assistance to establish a nursery for raising plants from the ciringa [sic] seed. I think the locality where I am now making my plantation would be admirably suited for the purpose. The navigable Amazon would enable the plant at once be placed aboard a vessel without need of further removal or transplanting. The plants could be grown from the seeds to a sufficiently hardy size in the native air before being removed and by this means a large number of healthy plants could be secured. . . . My experience of the ciringa tree gained by working them in the forests of the Upper Orinoco de Venezuela caused me think this the best plan for their successful introduction into India. On the other hand I doubt if the scheme of introducing them by the seed would succeed owing to the very oily nature of the beans which would be likely to become rancid in short time.

No one acknowledged Henry’s proposal for another eight months, until July 1874. Eight months seemed a lifetime for a man like Henry. By then, his life had once again shifted. By then, he counted himself lucky to be alive.

Henry had two masters now: his craving for success and the “spymaster” at Kew. Sometime in late 1873-early 1874, Henry and Violet loaded their belongings in a curiara and struck out from Santarém. If anyone watched from the bank, it would never occur to them to see Henry as a spy. Violet didn’t, and she knew him better than anyone.

Henry was transformed, not by success but by failure. Up to his mother’s death, his dream had been for personal glory. Afterward, however, we hear a new note: “All for the Empire.” He’d become a true believer in the British doctrine of world transformation, that nature’s secrets could be secured and replanted—all for the improvement of man, the empire and her queen. But for all Henry’s stated allegiance to England, he’d become Brazilian in the way he viewed life and the world. He’d absorbed that portion of the Portuguese character known as saudade. The term is untranslatable, a sadness of character that could only be known as longing—but a longing for what, Violet did not understand.

Longing was an intricate part of life on this river: the rivermen believed in miracles and in the stroke of luck, and the latter was Henry’s personal god. “In a radiant land there lives a sad people,” wrote Brazilian writer Paulo Prado, and this was indeed a melancholy land. Violet heard it in the dip of the paddle in the river at twilight, in the songs of the canoemen as they passed by. One of their most common songs was very wild and pretty: its refrain was “Mother, Mother,” and told of the endless gloomy forests, the rivers and channels that echoed of monkeys and birds:

The moon is rising, Mother, Mother!
The moon is rising, Mother, Mother!
The seven stars are weeping, Mother, Mother!
To find themselves forsaken, Mother, Mother!

As the song faded in twilight, Violet imagined she and Henry were the last souls on earth.

There is some question today about their destination. Henry mentioned the River Curvá, but no such place exists. Some point to the Curuá, but there are two local Curuás from which to choose. The best known is the largest, a wide waterway about fifty miles west of Santarém that feeds into the Amazon from the north bank, but Henry and Violet would have been paddling against a strong current, and there were no substantial reserves of hevea on the north shore. By now Henry would have known this and focused his attentions on rubber lands.

The second choice is the Curuá du Sul, a small stream about twenty miles downriver from Santarém. The primary evidence is a note in Violet’s diary citing their stay with a “Mr. And Mrs. R—,” managers of a Brazilian plantation situated at the mouth of the river. At that time, the confederado Romulus J. Rhome and his wife managed the plantation of Cel. Miguel Antônio Pinto Guimarães, the Baron of Santarém—the same baron who’d hosted Wallace, Spruce, and Bates in 1849. Rhome was the only Confederate to be immediately successful. He arrived with lots of money, entered into partnership with the baron, and managed Taperinha as a sugarcane plantation. They built a still and distilled rum from sugarcane juice. Taperinha sits back from the Amazon on the short, scimitar-shaped Rio Maica, then called the Rio Ayaya; the Curuá du Sul feeds into this not far away.

Despite its tempting elegance, this answer has problems too. Violet said they were “several days” on the river after leaving Santarém, and Taperinha is no more than a day away by canoe. Henry was abysmal with directions and places, as shown by his disorientation in Nicaragua. Moreover, colonials commonly garbled Indian place names when transcribing them phonetically. The Curuá sometimes came out in travelers’ accounts as the Cuvari, which mutated into the Cupari or Cupary. This confusion suggests a third destination, one that fits more neatly into Violet’s descriptions and makes better sense when one considers Henry’s goal.

Historians of science generally think that Wickham’s hunt for rubber occurred along the Tapajós. By 1873-74, it was thought that the best grade of “Pará fine” came from this region, yet the source remained a mystery. Did it come from the east bank, near the town of Aveiro? Across the river on the west bank, from the trading town of Boim? Or deeper up the river past the future jungle empire of Henry Ford? Beyond Aveiro there is, in fact, a tributary called the Cupari River: set back from its mouth sat a huge plantation and cattle ranch owned by “Francisco Bros. and Co.,” which employed, over the years, a succession of expatriate British and American managers. A twenty-four-hour paddle up the Cupari brought one to a village of Mundurucú Indians, as described in Violet’s diary. Beyond this lay the cataract dividing the upper river from the lower (also mentioned in Violet’s diary), and past that, rumors of virgin rubber land. Most convincing of all, the Cupari lay across the Tapajós from Boim, upon which so much of Henry’s legend would turn.

Thus, a strong case can be made that this was the young couple’s destination. If so, they paddled south along the east bank of the Tapajós. For twenty miles they followed the high rocky coast, the red sandstone cliffs rising 100-150 feet, waves bursting with a roar against the perpendicular stone walls. The summit was carpeted with luxuriant green forest. Palm-thatched cottages nestled in the hollows. The climate grew more humid—a heavy shower fell once or twice a week, with interludes of melting sunshine and gleaming clouds. By night the rains returned, followed by a chill.

After two or three days they’d come to Aveiro, the small straggling village at the head of the mouth-bay, where the Tapajós narrows to two and a half miles in width and the river is dotted with rocky islands. The town sat on a high bank and resembled a ghost town. The church was moldy and dilapidated; many of the houses seemed deserted. A primary school had been built by royal decree, but there were few children in town.

The people had been driven away. Aveiro was said to be “the very headquarters” of formigas de fogo, fire ants, and visitors landed at their peril. In 1852, Henry Bates visited Aveiro. A few years earlier the village had been completely abandoned due to the scourge, and people were only then moving back. The ground beneath town was perforated with their nests, the houses overrun. The ants disputed “every fragment of food” with the inhabitants and destroyed clothing due to their taste for starch. Food was stored in baskets suspended from the rafters, the cords soaked in balsam, their only known deterrent. The legs of chairs and cords of hammocks were similarly smeared to give the residents some rest. The sting was like a red-hot needle: “They seem to attack persons out of sheer malice,” Bates wrote. “If we stood for a few moments in the street, even at a distance from their nests, we were sure to be overrun and severely punished, for the moment an ant touched the flesh, he secured himself with his jaws, doubled in his tail, and stung with all his might.” Even now, Aveiro had a melancholy air.

Eight miles south of Aveiro, Henry and Violet came to the Cupari River, and here Henry turned. He’d heard that wild hevea grew deep within the interior. The Cupari was no more than a hundred yards wide at the mouth, but very deep. The walls of forest rose a hundred feet on either side. Silence closed around them. Another ten miles and both sides of the river turned hilly. Another river joined from the east, and they came to a plantation owned by one of the old Portuguese lords. Houses occurred at such rare intervals that hospitality was freely extended to the passing stranger.

Henry left Violet with the American manager as he paddled on: another twenty-four hours up the river past the lower falls, on to where the channel was only forty yards wide, and up to a tribe of Mundurucú Indians who, it was said, still warred with their neighbors. The climate was more humid than on the Tapajós—the air was heavy with moisture, and showers were frequent here. He stopped and, wrote Violet, “once more made a hole in the primeval forest to put his house in.”

If Henry and Violet were in the margins of civilization at Piquiá-tuba, here they were on the very margins of the margins, what sociobiologist E. O. Wilson called a “marginal environment,” a nightmare habitat of limited food, water, or other resources, where no one willingly chose to live. Marginal environments were “nature’s flophouses for the outcasts” but were important because the harsh conditions forced species to adapt quickly or die. Wilson studied tropical ants and noticed that when marginal colonies grew tough enough, they invaded the lush, comfortable world of the privileged ants and drove them into exile, turning the old guard into castaways. The baked sandy plains around Aveiro were a good example. There the fire ant had endured the wilderness until it conquered the town itself, and today it has successfully invaded Central and North America, driving farther north each year.

Henry and Violet were becoming marginal too. In fact, it was hard to escape how many human castaways lived out here. The confederados were a perfect example, most unable to fit in anywhere, though a few—the Rikers, Rhomes, Mendenhalls, Vaughans, and Jenningses—hung on by the skin of their teeth and would one day be among the richest families in Santarém. So, too, the escaped slaves from Barbados discovered a new life as fishermen and woodcutters on the north bank of the Amazon. The Indian tribes Henry encountered—the Woolwá and Miskitos in Nicaragua, the Mundurucú and Tupi-Guarani on the Tapajós, the embattled and mystical Maya on the Yucatan Peninsula—though decimated by disease and pushed back into the forest by settlement or conquest, also fought to survive. Jewish traders plied the rivers, and Henry heard of trading houses in Boim founded by families of Sephardic Jews from Morocco and Tangiers. On the Orinoco, he’d encountered Venezuelans in hiding and the children of Jesuit priests who’d died long ago.

For the next thirty years, strange tales of such people filtered from the headwaters of small rivers like the Cupari. Some subjects of legend were marooned by a price on their head; others were driven by an inner need to reject civilization forever. In Colombia, at the end of the Isamá tributary of the Rio Negro, it was said that a Corsican killer who’d escaped Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana had enslaved a settlement of fugitives and created a rubber empire. Up the equally remote Uapés, explorer Gordon MacCreagh found a black strongman who ruled his water highway long after the Rubber Boom had died. His Indian slaves had fled up the inaccessible creeks; his palace of tile, lathe, and plaster crumbled with decay. His patent mechanical band had frozen with rust and no longer played. He lived in a former rubber shed surrounded by his remaining loyal subjects—the extended families of his several wives.

Henry simply was not ruthless enough to build this kind of empire. He took Indian workers with him up the Cupari, but he could manage them little better than his English laborers. Soon, as previously, he worked alone. He was becoming, in effect, a caboclo, a backwoods jungle peasant who owned his land until someone more powerful took it away. He acquired a taste for guarana and acai juice, lined his bureau drawers with the aromatic forest leaves and dried fruit called xeros, ate Amazon turtle, manioc, rice, beans, bananas, plantains, oranges, pineapples, fish, chicken, and eggs. His principal means of transportation was by dugout canoe. Twice a month he visited the barracão, or trading post, for supplies. Except for the company of Violet, Henry was a solitary man.

And it nearly killed him, the closest he’d come to death since his fever on the Orinoco. While clearing the forest, he lost his grip on his ax and he nearly chopped off his foot. “He stripped his shirt up and bound his foot and started off for the Indian village some miles away as fast as he could go,” Violet wrote. By the time he reached the village, he was in shock from loss of blood: “Everything turns black and down he went,” she said. A man working nearby saw him fall and ran for help. The Indians carried him to the village in a hammock, then manned a canoe and “brought him to the plantation where I was.” But he survived, thanks to the ministrations of the American manager and his wife, and when strong enough to stand, he hobbled back to the jungle.

This time Violet went with him, first to an empty lodge in the Mundurucú village, then with her husband. Henry thought “he could make a pretty place of it in time.” He burned the brush to clear it back and dammed the stream for water power. But Violet thought otherwise. The stream was a nice place for a bath, “and then I have said all there is to be said for it,” she claimed. “I know few things less beautiful than a new plantation. The trunks and stems of trees lying about all black with fire.”

There were new torments here she hadn’t encountered before. Chiggers, ticks, centipedes, and scorpions abounded. She especially hated chiggers, the way they deposited their bags of eggs in her toes. The eggs had to be extracted before the digit became infected and grew as large and pulpy as an overripe plum. And there were snakes. On the Cupari, the most notable was the sucuruju, or anaconda. The serpent was abundant in this river. It lived to a great age and reached tremendous size. Bates saw one that was eighteen feet nine inches long and sixteen inches round at the widest part of its body—and this was considered small. He measured the skin of one that was twenty-one feet in length and two feet in girth, and heard of some “which measured forty-two feet in length.” Natives in this region believed in a monster water serpent called Mai d’agua, the “mother of the water.” Forty-two foot anacondas were monsters in their own right, and he repeated the tale of the sucuruju that “was once near making a meal” of a ten-year-old boy:

The father and his son went . . . to gather wild fruit, landing on a sloping sandy shore, where the boy was left to mind the canoe while the man entered the forest. . . . While the boy was playing in the water . . . a huge reptile of this species stealthily wound its coils around him, unperceived until it was too late to escape. His cries brought the father quickly to the rescue, who rushed forward, and seizing the Anaconda boldly by the head, tore his jaws asunder.

Although Violet never came face to face with such a beast, the sucuruju were notorious for their depredations of livestock—and especially liked her chickens.

For all of Henry’s hard work, he failed again. The house was never finished. The new attempt at planting coffee was abysmal. Although the hevea growing on the Cupari proved disappointing, in all likelihood he heard of the massive stands of rubber on the west bank of the Tapajós, across the river at Boim. His timing was bad: burning off forest and underbrush for new fields is best done in October, followed immediately by coivara, or clearing the largest trees not consumed by fire. It is important to do this before the rainy season. In tropical soils it seems there is a “nitrate pulse,” which occurs in the first two weeks of the rains. Nitrate is the most useful form of nitrogen for plants, and if the pulse is ignored by farmers, the yields will be disappointing.

As much as Henry adopted the caboclo’s life, he never seemed to learn the central lesson: The caboclo was not a man of one vocation. To survive in the jungle, he was forced to be a little of everything, said anthropologist Emilio Morani: “a horticulturist, a rubber collector, a hired hand, a canoe-paddler, a cowboy, a collector of Brazil nuts, a fisherman, and he often earns a living from several of these pursuits simultaneously.” Surviving in the Amazon meant tapping into every available resource, just like the white threads of fungus that drained everything organic that fell to the forest floor. Henry did one thing—planting—while searching for rubber. He never hired himself out, never collected or sold anything other than rubber. He was a specialist, not a generalist, and so, in this marginal environment, he failed.

In summer or fall of 1874, Henry and Violet returned to their starting point. The confederados sprinkled around Santarém were failing, too, and decided to solve their labor problems by forming a commune and working together in the fields. When Henry heard this, he joined again, but when they returned to Piquiá-tuba, their old house had been cannibalized. “My boarded floor had been taken up and used” for another house, Violet wailed. Half of Violet’s baggage never returned from the Cupari; it seemed to disappear into the trees. They struggled on, clearing a nearby plot of land, building a new house, one “more comfortable than any” of their previous attempts, raised above the ground, with boarded floors and an adjoining kitchen. Maybe Henry was finally getting the hang of this pioneer life, and as if to christen this third attempt, they dubbed the house “Casa-Piririma”—the house of the Piririma palm.

Violet’s father sent out another family of laborers to work for them but they, like the first group, soon grew “as disgusted as the others and went to those members of the party [now living in Santarém] who had made themselves comfortable at our expense,” Violet complained. What did she mean? Had the party pooled their funds in London, then refused to divide the money equally when the majority moved back to Santarém, leaving Henry and Violet not only alone but penniless? Was it simply a statement of her feelings of anger and abandonment? She never says, nor does Henry, but the Wickham family became one more casualty of the jungle, and the estrangement was too wide to bridge. At least Violet’s father still stood by them. He sent with the unidentified family a thirteen-year-old serving girl named Mercia Jane Ferrell from West Moors, Dorset, who stayed in the jungle with Violet as her only female companion for about a year.

During this period, young David Riker entered their lives. Riker’s mother had come to Santarém with the first wave of confederados, but she could not stand the privation. In 1872, she took David and his younger sister, Virginia, back home to Charleston, South Carolina, but they all returned in 1874. “I was just delited and asked Mother to buy me a gun,” he wrote in his memoirs: “She bought me a mussel loader and on our arrival I took to the woods and became a real good woodsman.” By now his education was falling behind: “Father put Virginia and myself in school in town with the Wickham family who had opened a school to teach English.” Henry’s brother and sister lived in a house paved with red bricks on Quinze de Agusta in Santarém. While Harriette Jane “taught English at their house to a few children or rather young ladies,” her husband, Frank Pilditch, taught English in peoples’ houses around town. Henry’s brother, John, was often sick. Though David Riker’s father lived and farmed at Piquiá-tuba with the other confederados, David Riker and his sister boarded in the Wickham house. As they lay in bed, the young Rikers could hear them talking at night after supper on the veranda.

During this time, Riker first encountered Henry and Violet, who alternately lived in the new house at Piquá-tuba and with the rest of the family in Santarém. Henry was a mystery to the youth. He was “soft easy speaking, of a lonesome melancholy aspect.” Sometimes he would get a wistful look on his face, mount his horse, and “ride out in to the country.” Everyone assumed he was still looking for new plantation sites, still unable to abandon his visions of glory, even after they’d crashed so often. By then, however, he was either collecting rubber seeds or scouting out new stands of trees.

The negotiations for smuggling resumed when Henry returned to Santarém. In July 1874, Markham told Joseph Hooker that the India Office was willing to pay Wickham £10 for a thousand seeds, and Hooker passed this on to Henry in a letter dated July 29, 1874. Henry responded nearly three months later. He was gracious but pointed out that it would be too expensive for him to collect so few seeds. He still hadn’t found the legendary trees of which he’d heard so much. Collecting seeds meant disappearing back down the Tapajós and into the jungle for an appreciable amount of time. Instead, he offered his own plan:

It is already very late to procure Indian Rubber seeds this season but if possible I will send you some with my best care. Although the sum offered by the government appears sufficiently liberal you will perceive that it will not pay me to go into the better districts to collect them in small quantities but if I may be guaranteed an order for a large number I am prepared to collect them fresh in the best localities and dispatch them to you direct during the ensuing season. In such case, would you wish me to make any observations as to localities of growth, soil, etc.?

He put the letter away for a couple of days, and on October 19, 1874, added a postscript:

I reopen this in order to add that, as the seed rapidly begins to shoot and spoil, I would be willing to take the parcel of fresh seed myself to Para and deliver it into the care of the Liverpool steamer about to sail that it might have the advantage of traveling (in) his cabin and under his care.

Henry may have thought that since he was the sole “man on the spot,” he was in a favorable position to bargain. Perhaps he finally faced the hard realities of his position and realized how desperately he needed funds. In any case, Hooker and the India Office seemed to grow peeved. In October, Markham sent Hooker a note suggesting that the top ranks of the India Office were growing tired of Henry’s demands:

With reference to Mr. Wickham’s proposal to raise young India Rubber plants and send them here in Wardian cases; Lord Salisbury says—“What would be the cost of sending a gardener to superintend the packing and transmission of a single batch?” “We need not pledge ourselves for more.” “If the experiment seemed likely to succeed, it might be repeated from time to time.” It seems to me that if this was done, the sending of the plants would answer.

London elites had little tolerance for subordinates who demanded fair treatment—witness the fate of James Collins. Neither did they appreciate upstarts who presumed on their betters’ good graces. Henry was an opportunist and an outsider. The first could be explained as ambition, but not when combined with the second. He was not part of the club, and his nursery suggestion, for all its merits, was turned down.

At the same time, however, they did relent on the issue of Henry’s pay. By December, Markham proposed letting Henry collect “any amount of seeds at the same rate—£10 for 1000.” The secretary of state soon authorized Wickham to collect 10,000 or more seeds at the £10 rate; Markham told Hooker that his office planned to give Wickham carte blanche and would pay him for all seeds he procured. Markham added: Pass the offer to Santarém.

So dawned the New Year of 1875. It should have started well. Henry and Violet had a new house, in a commune, where all were said to be working together. Henry had his commission from London locked in at a generous rate. His letters exude confidence, as if he knows where thousands of the best seeds can be found. The return to Piquiá-tuba seems to have brought some reconciliation among the Wickhams. At least they were on good enough terms to sit together for a group photograph sometime during the early part of that year.

Look closely at that photo, however, and hints of disaster filter through. By early 1875, the confederado commune was falling apart, and Violet would write, “once more each struggled on alone.” Henry’s crops were failing, and young David Riker remembered Henry disappearing into the bush without explanation: He was searching for seeds. Not just more, but the ones from perfect trees. His outward confidence when writing Kew was just a bluff: Yes, he could provide seeds in early 1875, but not those from the fabled source of “Pará fine.” He could not mention his fears. He’d adopted the image of the self-assured colonial adventurer, an image he would maintain in one form or another for the rest of his days. The image was his capital, a force to which others responded. In the family photo, he stares brazenly at the camera, a smirk on his lips, arms akimbo, with a dark mustache and untrimmed beard, and a sheath knife hanging from his belt. He looked vaguely like Sir Richard Burton and was certainly more striking than his conventionally dressed brother and brother-in-law. Violet sits before Henry, looking pale, wan, and sick. Frank Pilditch, the husband of Harriette Jane, seems vaguely amused. John Wickham stands proudly behind his wife Christine and one-year-old son Harry, born in Santarém in April 1874.

Henry’s sister Harriette Jane is the sitting’s focal point, and her eyes command the lens. She is dark like Henry and forcefully attractive, with a long face and strong chin. She sits in the center of the group, clad completely in white. One suspects she was the one who started the English school and kept it going, not Violet, as Riker would write in his memoirs. But Harriette also slumps in her chair. There is fatigue in her face; her cheeks are drawn. She is like Henry, never admitting defeat, but unlike Henry she will not succumb indefinitely to illusion. Her mother has died; a worker she knew; Christine’s mother. She is tired, and there is a reason. Disease is on them again.

Sometime in 1875-76, a second wave of sickness hit the Wickham group, and this time it took the young. The first to die was Mercia Jane Ferrell, Violet’s serving girl, age fourteen. Once again, Violet is laconic: “She stayed with me till her death” a year after her arrival, she reported; with that single statement one senses a deep loneliness. She is an exile like her husband, but without the attitude to shield her.

Then Harriette Jane died, at age twenty-eight. No comment is made. Hers is simply one of the five graves Henry sketched on the cemetery hillside. Little, in fact, was ever said about her. But if Henry was the family’s imagination and heart, Harriette was the backbone. She was the “woman of independent means,” according to the 1871 census; she ran her mother’s shop on Sackville Street and ran the house in Marylebone. With her death, the family group began to splinter. Within a year, the band held together by her gravity would spin off to the farthest reaches of the globe, never to meet again.

With his sister’s sickness and death, Henry finally seemed to realize a truth: This jungle would kill him if he stayed. On April 18, 1875, he wrote to Hooker from Piquiá-tuba, saying it was too late in the season to begin collecting rubber seeds. His tone was apologetic:

I received a few other (seeds) from an up-river trader but when I got them they had already long shoots attached to them. There is now therefore nothing to be done but wait for next season’s fruit and I propose to go into a good locality early to collect and pack them myself for your order.

With that blunt statement, the empire’s plans were delayed for yet another year. Then, uncharacteristically, Henry allowed a brief glimpse of his hopes:

Should you have opportunity of recommending me for an appointment in selecting, planting and tending the young “ciringa” in the East, may I ask you to favor me with your influence?

The seeds were not simply a way to make money—they were his means of escape. He’d seen too much death and failure on the Amazon. He was desperate to leave, and rubber was the key.