TheThiefattheEndoftheWorld

Early in 1876, David Riker and his sister began to hear odd snatches of conversation as the Wickhams talked at night on the veranda. The two young confederados were supposed to be asleep; what they heard wasn’t for their ears. “After supper the family would unite,” he wrote, “and I could hear them talking and discussing about a trip up the Tapajos.” The journey was a secret, never discussed before the two boarders. But if Wickham tried to keep his plans secret from the locals, he made them abundantly clear to Hooker in a letter dated January 29, 1876:

Dear Sir:

I am just about to start for the “ciringa” district in order to get you as large a supply of the fresh India Rubber seeds as possible. The season of the fall of the fresh (seeds) now commencing—I think it will be safest to avoid the European frost. I will therefore dispatch them with every care as soon as They can safely go.

An urgency surfaced in Wickham’s dispatches that wasn’t present previously. Perhaps he sensed a loss in faith by Hooker and Markham. The events of 1875-76 do, in fact, suggest that conclusion. Hooker was an easily irritated man, and Henry quibbled about everything: payment, method of shipment, when to collect seeds. The director was unused to impertinence. It would be easy to weary of this troublesome man in the Amazon. Henry Wickham was just another adventurer down on his luck; he was not a professional trained at Kew. After the letter of April 1875, the suspicion arose that Henry might not be the man for the job.

A class structure existed in Victorian science just as it did in greater society. A botanist like Hooker was finely attuned to matters of professional status, sensitive to the hierarchy within the field. An ordinary collector, like Henry, existed at the bottom of the botanical world. As Joseph Banks, the patron saint of English botany, had written, “[T]he collectors must be directed by their instructions not to take upon themselves the character of gentlemen, but to establish themselves, in point of board and lodging, as servants ought to do.”

In fact, London had explored other means for bagging hevea. Less than a month after Henry’s disappointing letter of April 1875, Markham interviewed Bolivian trader Ricardo Chávez, probably through the aid of Consul Green. Soon afterward, Chávez moved up the Madeira River with two hundred Moxos Indians to the remote jungle town of Carapanatuba. The Bolivian was a patrão of the new corporate order, with a tight fist on costs and a mobile labor force that tapped, cured, and moved on. By locating on the Madeira, he’d entered a region that swallowed lives blithely, a road to the wild state of Rondonia and the disputed Acre territory, thought to be the greatest untapped rubber reserve in the world. Chávez collected rubber at the eastern tip of this wilderness, no doubt probing for some yet-undetected black lode. When he returned from Carapanatuba, he called upon Consul Green and said he had nearly five hundred pounds of rubber seed ready for shipment. On May 6, 1875, Green wrote that the four barrels of seed were on the way.

But when the barrels arrived in London on July 6, 1875, everything went wrong. Markham was not present to oversee the handoff. He’d left on May 29 with the Naval Arctic Expedition to Greenland and didn’t return until August 29, exceeding his leave by a month. His star was falling in the India Office. The 1874 appointment of Sir Louis Mallet as Permanent Under Secretary of State in charge of the India Office put an end to that informal environment in which Markham dreamed up new schemes. Soon after his arrival, Mallet complained about the “laxity” that had been “allowed to grow up in this office”; a civil servant’s personality “should be vigorously and systematically suppressed,” he decreed. If Markham had been present to shepherd Chávez’s shipment, he might have had another cinchona coup. Instead, the clerk who received the barrels did not know what to do and cast around for advice. Ten days after their arrival, on July 16, 1875, he sent a few seeds to Hooker. The director immediately shot back a requisition, but by then the barrels were on their way to India. When they were unpacked, the seeds were useless—rancid or dead. The same India Office that grew incensed about paying £10 for Collins’s services was now forced to pay £114 to Chávez, plus the price of freight to India, for four barrels of rotten seeds.

Henry did not know how close he’d come to dodging the bullet that would have ended his schemes—twice, in fact, first with Farris and now Chávez, and he was saved only because the seeds rotted when shipped overseas. He did not suspect the intra- and interdepartmental politics that would have such bearing on his future. But by January 1876, he sensed that any more delays on his part would be fatal to his prospects, and so, Violet wrote, “once again we started by boat” up the Tapajós mouth-bay. There was greater secrecy this time: “[H]e decided to collect himself though not in the neighborhood,” she said. In addition to Henry and Violet, their party included the “little Indian boy who had been given to (Henry) to bring up, as is very common there.” Taking the family was good camouflage. Those who knew him would assume Henry was off on another quixotic hunt for the perfect site of a plantation.

Why this need for secrecy? Although no restrictions existed in 1876 prohibiting hevea’s export, South American officials still resented the cinchona theft. Something as valuable as rubber could be tied up in red tape if a canny official realized what was happening. Such a delay would kill Henry’s hopes as the seeds turned rancid and died.

Brazilian officials were also sensitive to slights by the Great Powers, and Santarém was a site on the Amazon where such showdowns occurred. The famous case of Allie Stroop had played out just before Henry arrived. When a confederado died after arrival, he left his young daughter an orphan. On his deathbed he begged friends to send the girl back to family in the United States, but he was too poor to afford a ticket for her. The other Americans had cared for her for more than a year when a U.S. government ship appeared on the river on a survey mission. The captain offered to take her home for free, and everyone praised his charity. But when the ship reached Pará, the American consul was summoned by the government to give up “a minor who had been unlawfully taken from the jurisdiction of the Orphan’s Court at Santarem.” When the Captain refused to give up the girl, Brazilian authorities delayed his ship in port until extracting a promise that he’d deliver the girl personally to her relatives. The Americans had neglected through ignorance to take the proper legal steps; the judge in the case knew all the parties, and there was wide talk in town of what the confederados planned. But no officer of the Santarém court came forward to mention the necessary legal steps, and the judge would not back down. If an international incident could be made out of a charitable act, there was no telling the consequences of being caught in an act of smuggling.

So Henry decided to confide only in Violet and the boy. In February, they paddled upriver for two or three days to “the country house of an Englishman who lived there nearly all his life and was almost more Brazilian than English.” The house was near Boim, a trading village on the west bank of the Tapajós, about midway up the mouth-bay, to the north of Aveiro. “We were in great danger once from a squall that came up suddenly,” Violet recalled, “but I scarcely realized the danger and so got more ‘kudos’ for pluck than I perhaps deserved.”

February to March was the period during which hevea’s trilobed seeds began to ripen on the tree. By early March, the three were ensconced in the Englishman’s sitio on the Tapajós; they apparently used it as a base for collecting. Henry “left me there,” said Violet, “while he and the boy went off into the woods to collect the seeds, returning on Saturdays to start again on Monday, also buying all that were brought to him.” On March 6, he wrote Hooker that “I am now collecting Indian Rubber seeds in the ‘ciringals’ of the river being careful to select only the best quality. I am carefull [sic] packing them. I hope soon to leave with a large supply for England.”

Less than a month later, on April 1, 1876—apparently before anyone saw Henry’s note—Clements Markham penned a note to Hooker informing him that the secretary of state was sending Robert Cross to the Amazon to collect hevea.

Cross was a veteran of the cinchona expedition and always eager to return to South America. On one of his later trips, he forwarded to Markham a small bag of caucho seeds, and this helped convince Markham that Cross was the man for the job. Markham’s note to Hooker said the gardener was granted four hundred pounds “to cover all expenses and include remuneration.” Before he left, Cross was to call upon the old and ailing Richard Spruce for advice. Hooker was also to provide the gardener with a letter of introduction to Wickham. If the two should meet, Wickham would essentially relinquish control of the hevea project. Cross’s orders were the closest thing in writing to an admission that London no longer trusted Henry.

For two and a half months, from early March to mid-May, Henry collected alone with the boy and bought seeds directly from Indian and caboclo collectors, as Markham and Spruce had done with cinchona. This would not be enough for the huge quantity he’d need to make a profit and insure germination. What has never been emphasized is that by now Henry knew the Tapajós region well enough that he could more narrowly target his search, and he maximized his take by buying from middlemen.

The heart of his search lay in the highlands behind Boim. The source of the seeds would become a matter of economic consequence fifty years later when Henry Ford entered the picture, but Henry Wickham was never circumspect. As early as 1902, he wrote that “their exact place of origin was in 3 degrees of south latitude . . . in the forest covering the broad plateaux dividing the Tapajos from the Madeira rivers.” Henry headed due west to the highlands behind Boim, which stretch west for fifty miles and rise 250-300 feet above the river plain. Throughout his account, Henry reiterated one point: The best seeds were found in the highlands, not at the water’s edge.

However, 3° S latitude covers a lot of territory and does not begin to explain how he gathered an abundance of seeds. The answer lay in the village of Boim and its history, which is forgotten by all but a few. Boim was the oldest village in this part of the Amazon Valley, founded on March 9, 1690, a few days before Santarém. Like Santarém, it had been a Jesuit mission established at an Indian village, and in 1841 a new church dedicated to St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order and patron saint of soldiers and spiritual retreats, was built on the sandy bluff overlooking the Tapajós’ wide mouth-bay.

Boim’s location beneath the high plateau was important, but more important for Henry was its infrastructure. Four families of Sephardic Jews had come to the village from Morocco in the mid-1800s and set up trading houses. Indians and caboclos from up and down the river and deep within the interior came to their posts with all manner of goods, but the region’s specialties were rubber and Brazil nuts, then called Pará nuts. So successful were the trading houses of Cohen, Serique, Azulay, and one other, whose name is now lost, that for its time, though Santarém might have been better known to the outside world due to its more obvious location at the joining of the Amazon and Tapajós, Boim was more important commercially. Oceangoing freighters heading back to Europe from Manaus would anchor in the mouth-bay, where they were met by nimble Portuguese sailboats loaded with jungle goods.

Like the confederados, seringuieros, and Britons, the Sephardic Jews in the Amazon were one more instance of the nineteenth-century reshuffling of “marginal men” to the most forgotten places of the world. Boim’s four trading families had come from Tangiers in Morocco: they stopped briefly in French Guiana, then dropped south to Pará, where a synagogue was founded in 1824. In Pará, Jewish merchants called themselves klappers, or “door knockers,” who peddled their goods door to door. Soon the market grew tight, and the best chance to make a living lay in filling a canoe with a stock of goods and setting off into the endless Amazon. “One must take great care in the jungle on entering, for one gets lost easily,” wrote veteran trader Abraham Pinto. “Some travel with a compass, others are guided by the sun, for at times one cannot see anything because of the great height of the trees. It is best to mark the trees with an ax, or by breaking the branches, indicating the path so you can return.”

At first, their role in the rubber trade was primarily that of small-time middleman, exchanging knives, cloth, and cooking pots for balls of smoked latex, which they then exchanged for more barter goods with the Pará aviadors. Some became a mixture of aviador and patrão themselves, a niche filled by the trading houses in Boim. As the young men grew wealthy, they’d return home—one of the owners of the “Franco & Sons” cattle ranch at the mouth of the Cupari graced the front of his house with two ornamental palms he’d taken as seeds from Tangiers. They traded with anyone who stopped. Henry’s insistence on seeds instead of balls of rubber might seem eccentric, but numerous transplants bought seed to start plantations; the confederados on the opposite shore did the same. Neither they nor their Indian suppliers realized that by selling to Henry, they ordained their own ruin.

Henry collected fast, in every way available—from the Boim houses, by purchase, by his own hand. A number of commentators have argued that the speed with which he worked eliminated quality control and that he could not insure the provenance of his seeds, yet all the seeds and latex gathered in the Sephardic houses came from the highlands behind Boim. A mule trail led directly west from town up a gradual sandy slope; after two miles this turned into a plateau covered with jungle and some rubber, but not of the same quality as on the higher plateau farther in. After six miles, Henry and the boy started up a long incline called the Serra de Humayta, which finally opened into the high plateau three hundred feet above the river. Here the jungle was heavy but open; it had a light degree of undergrowth and very few palms, plus a climate so unusually dry “that the people who annually penetrate into these forests for the season’s working of the rubber have to utilize certain lianas [water-bearing vines] for their water supply since none is to be obtained by surface-well sinking,” Henry wrote. The plateau covered 1,600 square miles, or over a million acres, but Henry apparently headed for the ancient sites covered in a deep, stiff Indian black earth similar to the soil found atop the pyramidal hills near Santarém. This soil was so fertile that farmers from Boim would hike the long distance to grow their crops in it, and it was here that Henry sought his trees.

The center of their collecting was a village named Agumaita, or “Highlands,” about seven to nine miles into the plateau. The hevea trees there were large and straight, attaining, Henry said, “a circumference of 10 ft. to 12 ft. in the bole.” Working with as many Tapuyo Indians as he could hire on short notice, “I daily ranged the forest, and packed on our backs in Indian pannier baskets as heavy loads of seeds as we could march down under.” Like the majority of tropical trees, hevea’s bark was gray on the surface. To check whether or not a tree was really hevea, he’d scrape it clean to reveal a bark that resembled the “colour of a light bay horse’s coat.” Such cleaning took time, but was essential, for in humid regions like this “the bark is thickly coated with growths of moss, ferns, and orchids.” The tree’s own flowers were small and green or creamy yellow; the young green leaves secreted a nectar around which honeybees buzzed.

Whether by design or luck, Henry collected the best seed available. These were perfect trees. Their silvery trunks, much like a poplar’s, soared aloft for one hundred feet. On the upper branches grew small, three-lobed leaves with undersides of silvery white, giving way at the tip to green, sweet-smelling flowers. A later study revealed that “out of seventeen varieties, (Henry) chose seeds from the black, or best grade of tree,” said William C. Geer, former vice president of the B. F. Goodrich Company. Tappers distinguished between types of tree by color—the black-, red-, and white-bark type, distinguished by the color of the hard bark beneath the periderm. The black-bark version was said to yield more latex and a better-quality rubber than the red or white, but more important than that for Henry was the fact that Agumaita was said to be the home of the “mother tree,” a gargantuan seed producer growing straight from the black earth and surrounded by her progeny—giants in their own right if not standing by this leviathan.

It sounds too good to be true, a fantastic tale harking back to myths of a Mother Tree believed by many Amazon tribes. But there may have been at least one tree that epitomized the one in the story. There is a witness, at least of its remains. Elisio Eden Cohen, author, historian, and Boim’s postmaster, is also the scion of one of the old Sephardic houses. Now in his sixties, he’d had the stump of the Mother Tree pointed out to him when still a child. It was in the heights above Boim, surrounded by its descendants, growing from the black earth as the stories said. Cohen watched as seven men barely stretched their arms around it, standing fingertip to fingertip. “The mother tree had died,” he said, “because of the caboclo practice of using kerosene when cutting into the bark to get latex. The kerosene made the latex flow more freely and in greater amounts,” but by rubbing it into the wound, the tappers “killed the tree over time.”

Such a cathedral of trees took Henry’s breath away. “[D]uring times of rest, I would sit down and look into the leafy arches above,” he said, “and as I gazed, became lost in the wonderful beauty of the upper system overhead.” It was the same transcendent experience he’d experienced in the rubber forest of the Orinoco, but it was also an extremely dangerous time to gather seeds. The fruit of the rubber tree was a three-chambered nut like a horse chestnut. Each segment contained a speckled seed resembling a slightly flattened nutmeg. As the seeds ripened, the outer envelope dried and tensed until it burst with the sound of a pistol shot. The rich, oily seeds exploded from the pods, flying outward sixty to one hundred feet before dropping to the ground.

The sound of the shot signaled a race of life and death on the forest floor. The base of the massive trunk would be littered with seeds, and like the tree in Genesis, a serpent lay coiled nearby. The pop of the seeds drew the rodent agouti to the feast, and the venomous jararaca, or fer-de-lance, the most common venomous snake in Amazonia, awaited a feast of its own. Seed collectors must be watchful at such times. Each bite of the snake’s fangs packs an extraordinary amount of potent yellow venom, and the snake is quick to strike. Every female has sixty to eighty young, all with their deadly machinery in good working order. At that time, there was no known antidote for the venom—one bite, and death was assured.

So they worked, crawling up the heights like a line of carpenter ants, scrambling through the brush at the sound of each shot, then stumbling back down the escarpment, weighted down like stone-bearing slaves. Back at Henry’s base, the village women wove large, open baskets of the same design as those found along the Amazon today:

I got the Tapuyo village maids to make up open-work baskets and crates of split Calamus canes for receiving the seed, first, however, being careful to have them slowly dried on mats in the shade, before they were put away with layers of wild dried banana leaf betwixt each layer of seed; knowing how easily a seed so rich in a drying-oil becomes rancid or too dry, and so losing all power of germination. Also I had the crates slung up to the beams of the Indian lodges to ensure ventilation.

This was where Henry’s jungle experience came in handy. Everyone knew hevea’s propensity for going rancid, but no one had figured out a way to prevent that from happening. If Kew and the India Office had sent along the portable greenhouses as Henry had requested, the problem would have been solved. But Henry’s masters were parsimonious to a fault, and the fact that they would send such Wardian cases with Robert Cross bespeaks their distrust of an outsider.

Thus, Henry was left to his own devices against unfavorable odds. Rubber seeds contain linamarin, a glucose derivative, which provides the energy boost needed for germination. Linamarin is a toxic compound also found in cassava, the principal root crop along the Amazon. Unless dried, soaked in water, then rinsed or boiled, cassava is a certain last meal—of cyanide. As the linamarin decomposes by hydrolysis during storage, it produces hydrocyanic acid (HCN), a colorless, poisonous solution of hydrogen cyanide in water that smells like bitter almonds and is better known as prussic acid. Hydrocyanic acid is also explosive and is used in many industrial processes. Although there are no reports of exploding rubber seeds, it is easy to see why they decompose so quickly once water takes hold. A heavy deluge would have destroyed Henry’s cache, either causing his seeds to germinate early or begin the unstoppable rot. It was still the rainy season, so he had every reason to worry. But for once he got lucky and somehow avoided the storms, probably because he collected in these drier highlands. When Henry got the seeds down to the river, he dried them gently in the air, packing them between banana leaves to soak up excess oil, and left them swinging from the rafters in the cooling river breeze—the only expedient possible to stave off a build-up of moisture that would lead to early germination or mold. His precautions were exacting and ingenious, exhibiting an understanding of rubber for which he was never credited.

By mid-May he’d collected seventy thousand seeds, an incredible number, considering all the odds against him. It seemed to assure success—if he could keep them alive. But the very quantity created a new problem. The historian John Loadman calculated in his book Tears of the Tree that the seeds weighed three quarters of a ton. Add to that the weight of banana leaves and pannier baskets, and the gross weight was nearly one and a half tons. Based on volume, Loadman estimates as many as fifty hemispherical baskets with a diameter of twenty inches suspended from the rafters. Henry must have gazed at them, hanging up like bells, and realized he had a problem.

How was he going to get this huge load home?

The jungle had a way of coming up with solutions when least expected, and in this case salvation materialized in the form of an ocean liner. It moored in the middle of the river off Santarém, and the captain invited the local planters aboard.

The ship was the SS Amazonas, “first of the new line of Inman line steamships—Liverpool to the Alto-Amazon direct.” This was her second voyage, both times under the command of George Murray, an Inman captain in his midthirties. The previous run suggested that she put in at Pará in mid-April 1876 and returned there in the second week of May. Crew records suggest a complement of thirty-two men: two deserted or did not show at port during the first few days of sailing, but they were replaced in Lisbon; no grog was allowed onboard, but other than that records did not indicate dissension or trouble. Release documents showed that the crew was paid in full when they returned from the Amazon on June 2, 1876: no crew member seemed missing, but officers were neither mentioned nor named.

Henry’s version was more dramatic than anything suggested by the crew manifest and ship records, since it hinged on shipboard intrigue. At first, the ship’s appearance on the river had all the hallmarks of Henry’s Orinoco fever dreams. Here was the apex of oceanic technology, right outside tiny Santarém. The liner sounded its great whistle, and the ship’s boats came off with their uniformed officers—including two gracious “supercargos,” or cargo-masters—inviting Santarém’s ragged elite aboard. “The thing was well-done,” Henry recalled. They rowed out at night under the shadow of the massive ship, dressed out in blue lights. They were served a sumptuous supper in the wood and brass saloon, the congenial Captain Murray presiding. Violet no doubt thought she’d died and gone to heaven, as if she’d returned home to London to one of the fancy restaurants her father had taken her to in Covent Garden or Regent Square.

The next morning the ship lifted anchor and headed upriver for Manaus, scheduled to load a hold full of rubber for transport back to Liverpool. “I then thought no more about the episode in rumination on any conceivable means of effecting my purpose with regard to getting out a stock of the Pará rubber tree,” Henry continued. It was an “unlooked-for” and pleasant diversion, nothing more.

But then, he said, “occurred one of those chances, such as a man has to take at top-tide or lose for ever”:

The startling news came down the river, that our fine ship, the “Amazonas,” had been abandoned, and left on the captain’s hands, after having been stripped by the two gentlemen supercargoes (our late hospitable entertainers!), and that without so much as a stick of cargo for return voyage to Liverpool. I determined to plunge for it. It seemed to present an occasion either “to make my spoon or to spoil the horn.” It was true that I had no cash on hand out there, and to realize on an incipient plantation, in such a place and situation, quite out of question. The seed was even then beginning to ripen on the trees in the Monte alto—the high forest. I knew that Captain Murray must be in a fix, so I wrote to him, boldly chartering the ship on behalf of the Government of India; and I appointed to meet him at the junction of the Tapajos and Amazon rivers by a certain date.

Henry redoubled his efforts, again crossing the Tapajós, climbing the path behind Boim into the high forest, trudging the seeds back down. “There was no time to lose,” he repeated like a mantra. He must have been a pain to live with, though Violet keeps mum.

Captain Murray was also a pain, or as Henry said, “crabbed.” In Manaus, his supercargoes had stripped the vessel, absconding with the incoming cargo. Instead of selling the cargo to buy a full hold of fresh-season rubber, they sold it off and vanished, and Murray waited on the Rio Negro until he finally grasped what had happened. He sent his ship’s officers into Manaus to search for the men, but they’d disappeared into the jungle. As he lifted anchor, he realized how completely he’d been duped; the Inman Lines might fire him for the debacle.

According to environmental historian Warren Dean, it was unnecessary for Henry to wait for an infrequent steamer like the Amazonas, since by the mid-1870s Santarém was visited every ten days by steamers from an English company and almost daily by steamboats owned by importers and local shippers. There was also a steam launch in Santarém owned by a Swiss resident who hired it out for the Pará run. But this is based on a misreading of Wickham’s motives and fears. If Henry was so worried about word of the seeds leaking out, Santarém—with its state officials and businessmen—would be the last place from which to ship them. Oceangoing ships already anchored in the mouth-bay of the Tapajós to trade at Boim. Henry, though vague in his account of the details, planned to meet the Amazonas within sight of the two rivers, not in sight of so public a place as Santarém.

There may have been real reason for such subterfuge, other than Henry’s paranoia and love of intrigue. Two articles written by International Society of Planters’ associate W. A. Wilken in 1940 and 1967 claimed that Wickham had been warned by Brazilian officials in Santarém not to export rubber seeds. Wilken met Henry in 1925, three years before he died. Henry related that in early 1876, when he’d started collecting the seeds, he’d been given permission by Brazilian authorities to collect and export hevea. But then, when the consignment was packed and ready for shipment—or at least nearing that state—the Brazilians reneged, telling him now that he “would not” or “might not” be allowed to ship them after all. “This suggests that the rapid charter [of the Amazonas] was to beat a possible change of mind among Brazilian officials,” Wilken posited.

It is easy enough to see what went through their minds. Santarém was a small place, and the Brazilian officials would have learned of Henry’s plans despite his best efforts at secrecy. At first, they probably thought nothing about the hapless Wickham sending a few seeds to London, but as they heard tales of his persistence, of his plans to start a nursery, or his requests for portable greenhouses, they no doubt remembered the cinchona fiasco in Peru. It was then they began to renege. Loading the seeds on the Tapajós, out of sight of Santarém and its resident officials, was the only chance he had to ship the seeds undetected.

Not only is there no record of the Amazonas stopping in Santarém, there is no mention of rubber seeds in the cargo manifest, a point discovered by historian John Loadman. In fact, the bill of entry signed at the Liverpool Customs Office on June 12, 1876, has intriguing details. The Amazonas was not, in fact, empty when she got back home. She’d picked up a load of timber, “nuts,” “capini,” a resin used in varnish and perfume, and 171 cases of India rubber while still in port at Manaus. Either the tale of the supercargoes was false, or the Amazonas picked up the cargo on credit based on the strength of the Inman name. This was not unknown in the Amazon. Most of the rubber trade was handled on credit, and this would be the underlying cause of economic collapse in 1913. On the return trip at Obidos, she picked up “819 bags of Pará nuts”—Brazil nuts. Perhaps the line entry was convenient camouflage by Captain Murray once he understood what he was getting into; perhaps it was thought wiser not to mention the seeds at all.

Running counter to these doubts are two new sources: the village lore of Boim, and a casual line in Violet’s newly uncovered diary. According to Boim historian Elisio Cohen, the Amazonas anchored within sight of Boim and Wickham paddled out to meet her. This is not inconceivable: a trading vessel like the Amazonas would have been very aware of Boim’s trading houses, and Murray would have known how far up the mouth-bay he could safely steam at this time of year. Such an arrangement had the added advantage of secrecy—there was no possibility that the Amazonas could be seen in that location from Santarém.

Violet also addresses the mystery in a most casual way: “When [Henry] had collected and packed about 70,000 [seeds], we started for England on board the first steamer here.” No mystery at all to her: It was simply a matter of seizing the first opportunity. Henry himself in his March 6 letter to Hooker said, “I hope to leave with a large supply for England,” which suggests steamers stopped frequently below Boim. In any case, Henry, Violet, the adopted boy, and the seeds met the Amazonas at a given place and time, and they did so precipitately. They appeared as a speck on the water and Henry convinced a stranger to trust him in a desperate adventure, as he had done so many other times. “What seems most likely,” speculated Warren Dean, “is that Wickham managed to persuade the captain to accept himself, his wife, and their baggage on credit and that he later reimbursed the line with money the Indian Office paid for his seeds.”

What’s more shocking than Captain Murray’s decision to participate in Wickham’s risky scheme was the sudden manner in which Henry left behind his remaining family. Only Violet would have known what was up, and perhaps even she was not fully informed until the last minute that they were accompanying the seeds to London. She would have been overjoyed: She was finally leaving this hellish place and returning to her family. For the past five years, they’d gambled everything on a new life, and it had nearly killed them. Now they gambled again, betting everything on the seeds.

One can only imagine the shock to Henry’s surviving family when word drifted back that he and Violet had abandoned them. Henry, who’d led them into this tropical deathtrap, apparently did not offer them the chance to go home. The rift was complete, and the once close and hopeful family completely disintegrated, never to meet again. John Joseph Wickham, his wife Christine, and son Harry left the Amazon two years later. In 1878, he settled in Texas and became a cattle rancher. By 1881, Frank Pilditch, widower of Henry’s sister Harriette Jane, had settled with his parents in London, where he practiced again as a solicitor. In 1882, he married Alice Molson Symon, a woman about twenty years his junior, by whom he had at least five children. All that remains of the graves of the others are faded images in Henry’s sketch of the cemetery. The date is 1876. He was engaged in his desperate adventure when he made this last stop. The sketch was his only way to ask forgiveness and say good-bye.

Yet Henry’s problems did not end when he and the seeds boarded the Amazonas. The seeds were “slung up fore and aft in their crates in the roomy, empty forehold,” but Henry had little time to feel relieved. Captain Murray was “crabbed and sore from the experiences with his two rascally supercargoes,” but as Pará drew near, “I became more and more exercised and concerned with a new anxiety, so as not much to heed Murray’s grumpiness.” They were obligated to call at Pará to obtain official clearance before the Amazonas could lawfully put to sea. “It was perfectly certain in my mind that if the authorities guessed the purpose of what I had on board we should be detained under plea for instructions from the Central Government at Rio, if not interdicted altogether.” Any delay could increase the odds of his seeds beginning to germinate or decomposing to a rancid cyanide mush; once either process started, he was ruined. Good intentions were not enough in this venture: as he said himself, his understanding with Kew and the India Office was “a straight offer to do it; pay to follow result.”

As the Amazonas neared Pará, he shut and secured the hatches. Once in port, the ship showed no sign of loading any cargo. According to one historian, she was known to be without cargo; although the bill of entry shows otherwise, “a number of Brazilians had been much amused by the discomfiture afforded the Inman Line,” which suggests that something happened in Manaus, even if the details are still unclear. Papers were cleared; no inspection was required.

It was in Pará that the most fanciful accretions to Wickham’s tale occurred. Part of this can be laid on the imperial enthusiasms of later storytellers, but in a large measure Henry, his flawed memory, and his habit of bombast must take the blame. Although Pará was “an obstacle of appalling magnitude,” as one commentator described it, Henry did have “a friend in court”—Consul Thomas Shipton Green. The Honorary Consul had worked against Henry’s interests when setting up the failed shipment of seeds from the Bolivian patrão Ricardo Chávez and was probably involved in the disappointing attempt of Charles Farris to smuggle seeds in his crocodiles. But he’d also handled the correspondence between Wickham and London, and his ultimate duty lay not in his personal feelings but in advancing the interests of Great Britain. Nothing within Green’s sphere of influence was more important than obtaining a separate source of rubber for the empire, and he jumped at the chance when Wickham magically appeared. Green “quite [entered] into the spirit of the thing,” wrote Henry:

[He] went himself with me on a special call on the Barão do S_, chief of the “Alfandiga,” and backed me up as I represented “to his Excellency my difficulty and anxiety, being in charge of, and having on board a ship anchored out in the stream, exceedingly delicate botanical specimens specially designated for delivery to Her Brittanic Majesty’s own Royal Gardens of Kew.” Even while doing myself the honour of thus calling on his Excellency, I had given orders to the captain of the ship to keep up steam, having ventured to trust that his Excellency would see his way to furnish me with immediate dispatch.

In other words, Wickham and Green bluffed their way through, not exactly lying about the ship’s cargo, but not exactly telling the whole truth, either. To add weight to the request, they appealed in the name of Her Brittanic Majesty, as if the plants were to be set right before the throne. Queen Victoria’s name had clout in a country where Britain was the leading foreign investor.

There seems little question that the meeting with Pará’s officials took place, though again the details are misty. The only baron with the initial “S” who made his home at the time on the Amazon was the Baron of Santarém, a venerable old gentleman who’d been one of Henry’s neighbors and who, aware of recent history, would have been suspicious of the ruse. It was known, after all, that Wickham had wanted to be a rubber planter. Pará’s port director was a commoner named Ulrich. Green would have been there, since ships, customs, and ports were well within his scope of duties, and he soon would help Robert Cross in his own quest for seeds.

In the early 1900s, a story had credence that Henry also called on the governor while in Pará. Before leaving, he allegedly told Murray to raise anchor and move slowly downstream. It was a quiet social evening in the governor’s palace. Other guests were present, and Henry was well received. He was a known Amazon “character,” so he would have had entertainment value at such an affair. There was interest in town about the Amazonas’s closed hatches, and again Henry was said to have repeated his concern about the “delicate botanical specimens” destined for Her Majesty’s personal garden at Kew. If there was one thing to which Henry was always attuned, it was his audience and his effect upon them. He was a showman, and this touch of panache no doubt delighted the small group of Brazilian and Portuguese nobility. The evening was pleasant and cordial, and Henry took his leave in a spirit of goodwill. He boarded a cutter, made all speed to the Amazonas, joined her downriver, and put out to sea. “I could breathe easy,” he said. The seeds, and the Wickhams, were free.

The scene at the Customs House raises the question of whether or not Henry broke the law. His request was very specific: He was shipping “delicate botanical specimens” to Kew, an appeal based on Article 643 of the Brazilian Customs Regulations, which stated:

Products destined for Cabinets of Natural History, collected and arranged in the Empire by professors for this purpose expressly commissioned by foreign Governments or Academies, or duly accredited by the respective Diplomatic or Consular Agents, national or foreign, will be dispatched without opening the volumes in which they are encased, a sworn statement by the naturalist sufficing, and duties will be charged according to the value which he gives them, in accordance with a list in duplicate which he must present.

This is an extremely liberal regulation, one based on scientific trust, a quality that has disappeared amid current fears of biopiracy. The most generous interpretation that can be given is that, at best, Wickham and Green bent the law. True, the seeds were destined for Kew, but merely as a waypoint. And these seeds weren’t for study but were destined for Britain’s plantations in India and the Far East for purely commercial purposes. Their delivery to Kew and other Royal Gardens around the world was to sow the seeds and raise them to maturity, thus producing stock to sell to planters and commercial nurseries.

With Wickham a new idea was added: biopiracy. Minerals and metals can be guarded and sold by the countries in which they are mined, but crops can be grown elsewhere. Even if a plant’s original habitat occurs completely within a nation’s boundaries, it can still be sown in more favorable conditions. Markham’s cinchona coup was a prime example, but there have been hundreds of others. Pineapples, found in South America, did well in Hawaii. The failure in the 1840s of potatoes from Peru spelled disaster for Ireland in the Great Famine. The early Virginia colony, Zimbabwe, and scores of other countries would all depend upon tobacco revenue. Brazil itself has been both victim and victimizer. In 1747, the Brazilian adventurer Francisco de Melo Palheta charmed from the wife of a French governor in Arabia a sample of coveted coffee seeds, which remains today one of the nation’s most profitable exports. Although it was not expressly written that “whatever Victoria wants, Victoria gets,” the essence of colonialism for every Great Power was assured markets and expanded riches and resources. Henry knew he could be stopped by Brazil, since such tactical moves were part of the Great Game. But it never entered his mind that he might be doing anything wrong. When it came to plants, the whole world was open ground.

In fact, it’s doubtful that Henry would have backed off from his plan for any reason. He was not particularly ruthless, but neither did he overly concern himself with ethical issues. As he later said, he was a practical man. He was trying to survive the jungle, and this was his last way out of what had become a damnable place. His ethical guide, like his empire’s, was the Protestant ethic: “God helps those who help themselves.”

Henry’s theft was no different than that by scores of others before him—and yet, in a fundamental way, it was. He did not steal one seed, or even a hundred; he stole seventy thousand. Like the anaconda, the sheer size of the subject made one pay attention. Thirty-four years after Henry’s theft, the British rubber grown in the Far East from Henry’s seeds would flood the world market, collapsing the Amazon economy in a single year and placing in the hands of a single power a major world resource. In 1884, the state of Amazonas levied a heavy export tax on rubber seeds, and in 1918, Brazil banned their export entirely. By 1920, when Henry was being knighted and called the “father of the rubber industry” in Great Britain, Brazilians dubbed him the “executioner of Amazonas,” “the prince of thieves,” and called his theft “hardly defensible in international law.”

Biopiracy in its modern sense refers to the appropriation, without payment and usually by patent, of indigenous biomedical knowledge and genes by foreign corporations, institutions, or governments. The rosy periwinkle of Madagascar is often cited as a classic case in modern international law. Research into the plant was prompted in the 1950s by the periwinkle’s use in native medicine, and it resulted in the discovery of several biologically active chemicals—most notably, vincristine—that were instrumental in the fight against various childhood cancers. When pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly patented and marketed vincristine, it made billions, but Madagascar never made a dime. There was a complication, however. The locally known medical properties were not the same as those discovered by Eli Lilly, and when the company filed its patent, the flower had been replanted in numerous tropical countries. Since the researchers did not necessarily obtain local knowledge and plant samples from Madagascar, this muddied the legal claims.

In a looser sense, though, biopiracy is about power and its imbalance—the historical fact that poorer countries have been high in resources, while richer nations want—and can take—what they have. In that sense, Henry’s theft became a symbol for every act of exploitation visited on the Third World. The issues revolve around ownership rights. Who owns the earth’s riches? Current international law holds that nations own their resources, yet the counterargument is as old as Clement Markham’s for taking cinchona: Nature, and her “improvement,” belongs to mankind.

Was Henry a smuggler, aided by his government, a modern freebooter or privateer? The British Empire had a history of this, especially when the target was a Latin regime. This point of law, both in its letter and wider spirit, would generate plenty of heat in the ensuing years, especially in the first third of the twentieth century, when the quest by governments to control rubber was as frenzied as today’s similar frenzy for oil. Interpretations of Henry’s act shifted with the times and political, economic, and environmental winds. In 1913, the year Brazil lost its world monopoly in rubber to Great Britain, O. Labroz and V. Cayla of Brazil claimed that authorities were aware of Wickham’s plans, but this seems an exercise in saving face for their nation. In 1939, the U.S. Department of Commerce sought from Brazil a report on the circumstances surrounding Wickham’s exploit, and the reply from Pará pointed out that, since no one foresaw the possibility of establishing hevea plantations elsewhere, no law then existed that specifically prohibited the export of seed. Henry’s theft could be seen as a triumph of the imagination. The Brazilian report came as world war loomed on the horizon. Ford’s empire on the Tapajós was already established, and Brazil hoped for vast forest plantations—and a second boom in rubber due to the world’s strategic needs. As the century progressed and Brazil finally understood that the richness of the Amazon Valley required federal management, Roberto Santos, Brazil’s premier historian of the Amazon, asserted that even in the absence of specific regulations, no one had the right “to appropriate the goods of others when there is a sure owner or a defined jurisdiction.” Critics scoffed that Santos seemed to possess “some higher vision of property, of nature constituting a national patrimony,” yet this was exactly the consensus that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which produced a convention entitling nations to a share of the profits from substances yielded by their flora and fauna and which led directly to today’s stringent regulations against biopiracy. It all started with Henry, at the Customs House in Pará. According to contemporary definitions, Henry Wickham and his wife were smugglers who acted at the behest of more highly placed smugglers—who believed they acted in the name of empire.

And so Henry, Violet, and their precious seeds sailed from the Amazon, never to return. Although a cliché, this is truly a case of sailing into history. They steamed past the huge floating lighthouse on the shallows of Bragança. They vanished into an Atlantic that, on this voyage, would be calm and blue. Henry took the hatches off the hold storing his open-air crates of seeds. He made sure they were secure on lines fore and aft, swinging in the breeze, safe from the ship’s rats in the hold. He dealt with changes in climate as they crossed the equator. He was something of a mother hen. But Violet saw him more peaceful than he’d been in a long, long time. Henry reasonably thought he’d earned his stripes and the empire would be grateful. Henceforth, he said, life would be easy. Little did he know that his trials—and those of patient, practical Violet—had only just begun.