27. Seven years later, in 1845, he married Harriette They may have married in Muthill, near Crieff in Perthshire, where Henry Wickham’s brother-in-law, Alexander Lendrum (1811-1890) was a minister of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Much family lore seems to have passed down through the Lendrums, especially since Henry and Violet Wickham would not have children. It was presumably through the Lendrums that Edward Valentine Lane would collect much of the undocumented stories of Wickham’s adventures. Since Wickham’s mother and father married before statutory registration was enacted in Scotland, there seems to be no record of their wedding. Campbell, Anthony. “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham, a Genealogy” (self-published, Jan. 30, 2005), p. 3.

27. By then, the Wickhams were firmly ensconced in the country Information on Hampstead Heath and Haverstock Hill came from the following sources: “Genuki: Hampstead History, Description and History from 1868 Gazetteer,” http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/Hampstead/HampsteadHistory-html; “Finchley Road and Haverstock Hill,” www.gardenvisit.com/travel/london/finchleyroadhaverstockhill.html; and “Genuki: Middlesex, Hampstead,” http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/Hampstead/index.html. Development at Haverstock Hill and Hampstead Heath appears to have progressed in a surprisingly modern manner; a landowner would divide his estate into parcels, and then speculators would build houses, or at least a couple of models, and promote the advantages of living in the healthy suburbs. Details are found on the following Web sites: “Hampstead: Social and Cultural Activities/British History Online,” www.british-history.ac.uk report.asp?compid-22645; “Hampstead: Chalcots/British History Online,” Ibid.; “Hampstead—MDX ENG,” http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alan/family/G-Hampstead.html; and “Genuki: Hampstead History,” http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/Hampstead/HampsteadHistory.html.

27. Several rich courtesans built retirement homes Dan Cruikshank, “The Wages of Sin,” in BBC Online-History, www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/zone/georgiansex.shtml.

27. “open and airy slope of Hampstead”Lancet, Nov. 5, 1881, quoted in “Sanitation, Not Vaccination the True Protection Against Small-Pox,” www.whale.to/vaccine/tcbbl.html.

28. “occupied by the very lowest class of society” Pamela K. Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 92.

28. “wretched houses with broken windows [and] starvation in the alleys” Dickens is quoted in Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body, p. 92.

28. Hampstead was an urban center in itself “Genuki: Hampstead History,” http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/Hampstead/HampsteadHistory.html.

29. due to give birth in the summer John Joseph Edward Wickham, the third of the children of Henry and Harriette Wickham, was born in Croydon, Surrey, in 1850, according to the Census of 1871. Quoted in Campbell, “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham,” pp. 6 and 14, ff42.

29. 25 Fitzroy Road in Marylebone The 1871 census is quoted in Campbell, “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham,” pp. 5-6.

29. “set up a not very successful millinery business in Sackville Street” Edward V. Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part I,—Ancestry and Early Years” p. 15. Lane is the only historian to write at length about Wickham, and this in a nine-part series spanning his life, in 1953-54, in a trade journal called the India Rubber Journal. Unfortunately, according to the fashion of the time, he did not cite sources. It is obvious that much of his material came from Wickham’s two works and also from Violet Wickham’s memoir. Much that is quoted, however, was probably gotten from surviving extended family. Lane was writing thirty years after Wickham’s death, so although he neglects to say it, there still would have been people around who knew him personally.

30. the case of a destitute, seventy-two-year-old milliner Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London: Pluto Press, 2001, first published in Great Britain in 1903), p. 134. The economics of millinery are discussed in Helena Wojtczak’s Women of Victorian Sussex—Their Status, Occupations, and Dealings with the Law, 1830-1870, reviewed on the page “Female Occupations C19th Victorian Social History” at www.fashion-era.com/victorian_occupations_wojtczak.htm.

30. Henry Alexander, deprived of a father’s guidance Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: I—Ancestry and Early Years,” p. 16.

30. “The Rape of the Glances” Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 62-65.

31. The voices of critics rose with it Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (London: Penguin, 1971, first published 1921), p. 119.

31. “the working bees of the world’s hive” Asa Briggs, Victorian People (London: B. T. Batsford, 1988), p. 41.

31. “industry and skill, countries would find a new brotherhood” Briggs, Victorian People, p. 41.

31. “a vegetable wonder” Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Ballantine, 1998), p. 72.

31. entire fortunes were spent on forty rare tulips Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Harmony, 1980, first published in 1841 and 1852), pp. 90-91.

32. “thegreatestday in our history” Strachey, Queen Victoria, p. 121, quoting The Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, pp. 317-318.

33. “strange and neglected races” Journalist Watts Phillips’ The Wild Tribes of London is quoted in John Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 122.

33. “a clash of contest, man against man” Charles Booth, Charles Booth’s London, Albert Fried and Richard Ellman, eds. (London: Hutchinson, 1968), p. 37.

33. “there is a bitter struggle to live” Charles Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. 207.

Chapter 2: Nature Belongs to Man

34. the explorers of this period were seen as self-effacing, duty-driven civil servants Robert A. Stafford, “Scientific Exploration and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Porter, ed., vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 307.

36. “chills the heart, and imparts a feeling of loneliness” MacGregor Laird and R.A.K. Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa by the River Niger, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1837), vol. 1, p. 181.

36. died at a rate of three hundred to seven hundred per thousand Philip D. Curtin, “The White Man’s Grave: Image and Reality, 1780-1850,” Journal of British Studies, vol. 1 (Nov. 1961), p. 95.

37. during Victoria’s reign it was the most powerful antimalarial medicine known to man Quinine is coming back into favor with the recent increase of new strains of malaria resistant to the more widely produced synthetic drugs.

37. Cinchona belongs to the Rubiaceae Cinchona gets its name from the legend of the Countess of Chinchón, which was later shown to be suspect, since her actual stay in Peru did not correspond with the period described in the legend. However, romance often wins out over fact, especially when an angel of mercy is involved. The spelling of her name, Chinchón, and the tree’s (cinchona) have been confused ever since, especially by the English, as we shall see. The legend is recounted in Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon (New York: Viking, 1990), pp. 260-61; and Charles M. Poser and George W. Bruyn, An Illustrated History of Malaria (New York: Parthenon, 1999), p. 78.

37. the mountainous forests of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia A few members of the species live in the mountainous regions of Panama and Costa Rica, but the alkaloid content of their bark is not as high as in the Andes.

38. “with every necessary for men’s wants” T. W. Archer’s Economic Botany, a highly influential book for its time and one that seemed to echo Kew’s vision of its mission, is quoted in Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 198.

39. “waltz through life in a dream” Botanist Gustav Mann is quoted in Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 233.

39. “the very existence of [tropical] colonies as civilized communities” Ibid., pp. 233-234.

39. “to prevent the utilization of the immense natural resources” Benjamin Kidd is quoted in Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 233.

40. “the Mother Country in everything that is useful” William J. Bean, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Historical and Descriptive (London: Cassell, 1908), p. xvii.

40. “the founding of new colonies” Ibid.

40. By 1854, Hooker could boast Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 195.

41. “essential to a great commercial country” Ibid.

41. In 1830, Britain imported 211 kilograms Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 220.

41. Brazil was becoming the world center Ibid., p. 169.

41. “in Jamaica and the East Indies” Thomas Hancock is quoted in “On Rubber,” Gardener’s Chronicle, vol. 19 (1855), p. 381.

41. “render any assistance in his power to parties disposed to make the attempt” Ibid.

41. shrink less during transport Water in cured latex tends to dry out during shipment, often at substantial rates. Such shrinkage occurred as much as 15-20 percent in “Pará fine,” but up to 42 percent in other species or coarser grades.

42. “gutta-percha” Although India rubber and gutta-percha were often used as interchangeable terms, thus confusing everyone, the Scientific American of January 22, 1860, called gutta-percha “similar, though inferior” to the Amazon breed. The two shared many physical characteristics when vulcanized, and both gums had a chemical composition of seven-eighths carbon to one-eighth hydrogen, but gutta-percha also contained oxygen, while “Pará fine” did not. Given enough moisture, warmth, and time, especially during shipping, unvulcanized gutta-percha would deteriorate rapidly, growing discolored, then brittle, and finally turn to powder.

42. The Dutch were already mounting a campaign to secure and control cinchona In 1853-54, the Dutch in Java moved first: Justus Charles Hasskarl, superintendent of the Buitzenzorg Garden, traveled to South America in disguise to collect seeds.

43. “irritatingly destined for high office” Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 264.

43. “My qualifications for the task” Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 262; Donovan Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Introduction of the Cinchona Tree Into British India, 1861,” Geographical Journal, vol. 128 (Dec. 1962), p. 433.

43. he showed a keen understanding Donovan Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Introduction of the Cinchona Tree Into British India, 1861,” p. 433.

43. “double forcing house” Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 208.

44. “narrow-minded jealousy” Donovan Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Introduction of the Cinchona Tree into British India, 1861,” p. 434.

45. “all the clerks in public offices are changed in every revolution” Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Introduction of the Cinchona Tree into British India, 1861,” p. 435.

46. “Its consistency is that of good cream” Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, Alfred Russel Wallace, ed., 2 vol., (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1908), vol. 1, pp. 50-51.

47. “It is a vulgar error that in the tropics the luxuriance of the vegetation” Alfred Russel Wallace’s Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (London, 1853), quoted in Roy Nash, The Conquest of Brazil (New York: AMS Press, 1969, originally published 1926), pp. 385-386.

47-48. “How often have I regretted that England” Richard Spruce is quoted in Peter Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood: A History of Rubber (Sydney, Australia: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1979), p. 31.

48. “Die, you English dog” Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, p. 465.

49. “But during the night . . . they all got gloriously drunk and burst their balls” Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, p. 196.

50. “Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for India has entrusted the Hon. Richard Spruce” Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 256.

50. “very able and painstaking” Clements Markham’s description of Robert Cross is quoted in Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 256.

50. “Matters are in a very unsettled state here” Spruce is quoted in Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen, South America Called Them: Explorations of the Great Naturalists (New York: Knopf, 1945), p. 289.

50. “I find reason to thank heaven” Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 258.

51. “that withers every thing it meets” Edward J. Goodman, The Explorers of South America (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 291.

51. “See how that man is laughing at us?” The tale told to Spruce by the pilgrim is recounted in Von Hagen, South America Called Them, p. 288.

Chapter 3: The New World

53. “I have been wandering by myself” Charles Darwin is quoted in Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 252.

53. “the good and soft smell of flowers and trees” Christopher Columbus is quoted in Jose Pedro de Oliveira Costa, “History of the Brazilian Forest: An Inside View,” The Environmentalist vol 3, no. 5 (1983), p. 50.

53. “lovely but sinister temptress called Xtabay” Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), p. 81.

54. “his many drawings with pen and ink” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: I—Ancestry and Early Years,” p. 15.

54. “traveling artist” The 1871 census is quoted in Campbell, “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham,” pp. 5-6.

54. “in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness that lot” Lord Palmerston is quoted in Briggs, Victorian People, p. 98.

54. “Of all the sources of income, the life of a farmer is the best” Cicero’s De officiis is quoted in Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 264.

55. “typical of his generation, when the pioneering spirit, fired by a desire” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: I—Ancestry and Early Years,” p. 16.

55. “if anyone stated that he was six-feet tall” Ibid., p. 16.

55. “unbounded energy” and “easy-going indolence” Ibid.

55. “that neither Mouth, Nose, Eyes” Nicholas Rogers, “Caribbean Borderland: Empire, Ethnicity, and the Exotic on the Mosquito Coast,” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 26, no. 3 (Fall 2002), pp. 117-138.

56. British presence in NicaraguaA Document of the Mosquito Nation: document signed Feb. 19, 1840, between Robert Charles Frederic, King of the Mosquito Nation, and Great Britain aboard HMS Honduras, with notes. Introduction by S. L. Canger, Royal Commonwealth Society Collection: GBR/0115/RCMS 240/27.

56. The British in Latin America brought not only guns and money but such ideas Alan Knight, “Britain and Latin America,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Porter, ed., vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 125.

56. “prepossessing . . . crowned with umbrella-shaped trees of great size” Henry Alexander Wickham, Rough notes of a journey through the wilderness from Trinidad to Para, Brazil, by way of the great cataracts of the Orinoco, Atabagao, and Rio Negro (London: W.H.J. Carter, 1872), p. 144.

56. “handsome butterfly” Ibid.

57. “altogether a very uninteresting place . . . in the most approved fashion” Ibid., p. 146.

57. “numerous and beautiful, varying from the size of a bat” Ibid., p. 145.

57. “a noise like a kettle-drum” Ibid.

57. “perfectly bewildered” Ibid., p. 146.

58. “concoctions of feathers, chopped and tortured into abnormal forms” Asa Briggs, Victorian People (London: B. T. Batsford, 1988), p. 271, quoting “Mrs. Hawers,” the Victorian fashion critic and author of The Art of Beauty (1878), The Art of Dress (1879), and The Art of Decoration (1891).

59. “Brother mule, I cannot curse you” “Moravian Civic and Community Values,” http://moravians.org.

59. “The little chief seemed to take a great fancy to me” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness, p. 149.

59. The first king, known only as Oldman . . . or assassinated by a “Captain Peter Le Shaw” From “Mosquitos, A Brief History,” www.4dw.net/royalark/Nicaragua/mosquito2.htm.

61. “Bowing my head, I stepped across the little trench” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness, p. 165.

61. “lay down and rose again with the sun” Ibid., p. 164.

61. “Left alone . . . I soon found” Ibid.

61. “exceedingly difficult . . . the feathers usually fly off in a cloud” Ibid., p. 167.

61. “strong cup of tea . . . never a greater source of enjoyment than on such an occasion” Ibid., p. 165.

62. “It was a long time before I became used” Ibid., pp. 165-66.

62. “knowing that they are easily killed” Ibid., p. 166.

62. “myriads of minute cockroaches” Ibid., p. 172.

62. “was so unendurable” Ibid., pp. 172-73.

62. “much injured, as they lay helplessly in their hammocks” Ibid., p. 172.

62. “peculiar aversion to wet . . . mouthfuls of water at the head of the column” Ibid., pp. 171-72.

62. “filliped it off ” Ibid., p. 172. In the 1980s, zoologist Kenneth Miyata was collecting moths in western Ecuador when one of these ants dropped down the neck of his shirt and stung him four times. “Each sting felt as if a red hot spike was being driven in. My field of vision went red and I felt woozy.” After an hour of “burning, blinding pain,” Miyata endured a sore back and lymph nodes in his armpit so painfully swollen that he was unable to move his arm for two days. Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America (New York: Scribner’s, 1984), p. 108.

63. “I know of nothing so suggestive of reflection” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness, p. 168.

63. “Great First Cause of all . . . broke the unusual stillness” Ibid.

63. Spaniards from Honduras Marc Edelman, “A Central American Genocide: Rubber, Slavery, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Guatusos-Malekus,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1998), vol. 40, no. 2, p. 358.

63.Castilla elastica,the main source of latex in Nicaragua The British naturalist Thomas Belt said that the trees died after tapping because the harlequin beetle (Acrocinus longimanus) laid eggs in the cuts, and the grubs bored “great holes through the trunks.” Thomas Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua (London: Edward Bumpus, 1888, first published 1874), p. 34.

64. “leaving none alive to tell the tale” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 159.

64. “their decidedly light apparel” Ibid., p. 158.

64. “scrupulous honesty” Ibid., p. 217.

64. “remembering probably that I was but a stranger from some distant land of barbarism” Ibid., p. 202.

64. “I am sure if some of those who condemn Indians as a lazy race” Ibid., p. 215.

64. “Temple himself was nearly black” Ibid., p. 181.

65. “poised in psychological uncertainty . . . on the margin of each but a member of neither” Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), p. 1.

65. “a contrast to the quiet of the Indian part of the encampment . . . leaving the Blewfields trader, his son, and myself alone” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, pp. 181-82.

66. “being thirsty without hunger” Ibid., p. 200.

66. “driving their covered ways” Ibid., p. 201.

66. “go with me into the interior” Ibid., p.198.

67. “they continued on their journey north” Ibid., p. 206.

67. “As it was Christmas week, he went to a dance in the evening” Ibid.

67. “disgusting process” Ibid., p. 189.

68. “just before dawn . . . I heard the crying of the women” Ibid., p. 207.

68. “and I heard the rattle of their paddles while it was yet dark” Ibid.

68. “creeping down the steep bank” Ibid.

68. “looked quite pale and complained that he felt very sick” Ibid., p. 208.

69. “wild, matted tangle of flowering vines” Ibid., p. 194.

69. “our oaks, elms, and beeches stand out” Ibid.

69. “[A]t all the other places we passed the Indians had fled” Ibid., pp. 210-211.

69. “a view of great extent and beauty” Ibid., p. 224.

70. “Temple and I saw enough to convince us” Ibid.

70. “were cooking at a stove what looked more like beefsteak” Ibid., p. 226.

70. “took me to his room . . . where a dinner of beefsteak and bread was already on the table” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 227. A good overview of the history of the Cornish miners in Latin America can be found in “The Cornish in Latin America,” www.projects.ex.ac.uk/cornishlatin/anewworldorder.htm; Alan Knight, “Britain and Latin America,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Porter, ed., vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 127.

71. “I recognized him at once” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 229.

72. “we passed Kissalala” Ibid., p. 244.

72. “The missionary standing, book in hand” Ibid., p. 262.

72. “the Moskito men were very superior in war” Ibid.

72. “I was surprised to meet one day, near Temple’s lodge” Ibid., p. 282.

73. “[T]he captain loudly deplored the falling off of the warlike spirit” Ibid., p. 284.

73. “It was a strange sight” Ibid., p. 285.

74. “The mountains behind Porto Bello looked very beautiful” Ibid.

74. “racing to and fro” Ibid.

74. “I walked along this line one day for some distance” Ibid., p. 286.

Chapter 4: The Mortal River

75. “the very rocks are robed in the deepest green” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 3.

75-76. Great Show of Singing and Talking Birds From “Canaries, Singing, and Talking Birds,” Illustrated London News, Feb. 15, 1868, www.londonancestor.com.

76. “all that many Creoles enjoyed along its banks” Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Confederate Exiles in Venezuela (Tuscaloosa, AL: Confederate Publishing Co., 1960), p. 31.

76. only 12,978 settled in Venezuela Ibid., p. 32.

77. “the main purpose of his journey was to study the rubber trade” Edward V. Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part II—A Journey Through the Wilderness,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 125 (Dec. 12, 1953), p. 17.

77. “a young Englishman who accompanied me” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 4.

77. Lane called him a sailor Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part II—A Journey Through the Wilderness,” p. 16.

78. “self-respecting British prig” Howard Wolf and Ralph Wolf, Rubber: A Story of Glory and Greed (New York: Covici, Friede, Publishers, 1936).

78. “What a difference there is in the appearance of the boat’s crew from an English man-of-war” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 3.

78. “a very fine specimen of a West Indian soldier” Ibid., p. 4.

78. “Our little craft, about the size of a Margate lugger, was well manned” Ibid, p. 9.

78. “had traversed the Spanish main” Ibid., p. 10.

78. “One hardly expects to find such a pitch of education” Ibid.

78. “where the greener water of the sea” Ibid., p. 6.

79. “paddling as for dear life” Ibid., p. 7.

79. “possess the knowledge of an ointment” Ibid., p. 8.

79. “rough-paved, but clean streets” Ibid., p. 16.

80. “and a more villainous-looking collection of different types of men I think I never beheld” Ibid., p. 21.

80. “one of the last of the southern settlers who came two years before” Ibid., p. 19.

80. 8,000-10,000 former Confederates Lawrence F. Hill, “The Confederate Exodus to Latin America, Part I,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2 (October 1935), p. 103.

81. “a gold and diamond country . . . other commercial agricultural products” Charles Willis Simmons, “Racist Americans in a Multi-Racial Society: Confederate Exiles in Brazil,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 67, no. 1, p. 35.

81. “the fingers of Manifest Destiny pointed southward” Simmons, “Racist Americans in a Multi-Racial Society: Confederate Exiles in Brazil,” p. 35.

81. “the sphere of human knowledge . . . merely incidental” John P. Harrison, “Science and Politics: Origins and Objectives of Mid-Nineteenth Century Government Expeditions to Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 35, no. 2 (May 1935), pp. 187-192.

81. Price Grant Frank J. Merli, “Alternative to Appomattox: A Virginian’s Vision of an Anglo-Confederate Colony on the Amazon, May 1865,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 94:2 (April 1986), p. 216; and Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Confederate Exiles in Venezuela (Tuscaloosa, AL: Confederate Publishing Co., 1960), p. 56.

82. “was not blessed with a particularly amiable temper” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, pp. 21-22.

82. “I believe exercise is even more essential” Ibid., p. 16.

82. “A shock from an eel would send a bather” Ibid., p. 20.

83. “I cannot remember ever having received a more terrible shock” Humboldt is quoted in Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 234.

83. “poor Rogers was stuck by araya” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 20.

83. “who was quite motherly to Rogers” Ibid., p. 22.

83-84. “for picking up, and caring for stray chicks of doubtful pedigree” Ibid.

84. “It was most amusing to see what pride they took in being British subjects” Ibid.

84. “fast little native-built lancha” Ibid., p. 24.

84. “I proposed exploring the Caura” Ibid.

85. “the jingling of little bells” Ibid., p. 31.

85. “There does not appear to be much actual fighting” Ibid., p. 34.

85. “a feeling of giddy faintness” Ibid., pp. 37-38.

85. “I began taking doses of quinine and drinking plentifully cream of tartar water” Wallace is quoted in Redmond O’Hanlon, In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 3.

86. “to the brink of the river” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 38.

86. “good natured Barbados woman” Ibid., p. 42.

86. “did not fear as to the result” Ibid.

87. “declaring himself unwell . . . I was much disappointed” Ibid., p. 45.

87. “At this, the height of the rainy season, little or no land is to be met with” Ibid., p. 46.

87. “gave forth their peculiar mewing cry” Ibid., p. 47.

87. “[O]nce it has embraced the trunk of a forest tree” Ibid., p. 50.

88. “stands self-supported, a great tree” Ibid.

89. “They were very noisy” Ibid., p. 56.

89. “When one is unwell, it is especially unpleasant. . . . the ball drilled a hole through the body, and continued its way” Ibid., pp. 57-58.

89. “pitchy-dark” Ibid., p. 59.

89. “wanted to take me home with him” Ibid., p. 60.

90. “I managed to control my legs. . . . I did not remember anything until the fever lessened” Ibid., p. 61.

91. “myriads of fireflies sparkled like gems” Ibid., p. 67.

91. “a pair of ferocious moustaches” Ibid., p. 68.

91. “dreaded Guahibos” Ibid., p. 67.

92. “Shortly after the separation of Venezuela from the mother country” Richard Spruce is quoted in Redmond O’Hanlon, In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 32.

92. “an unpleasant air of mortality” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 69.

92. “their faces being covered with black spots” Ibid.

92. “Whilst I gazed into the tomb” Ibid., p. 72.

93. “It is singular . . . that these people endeavour” Ibid., p. 77.

93. “I was sorry to see Castro bend his bright toledo” Ibid., pp. 76-77.

93. “with a stupid grin” Ibid., pp. 79-80.

93. “good-looking matron” Ibid., p. 78.

94. “It is a wonder that these simple people do not even more seclude themselves” Ibid.

95. “The air was heavy with the odour of the flowers” Ibid., p. 83.

95-96. “We found that the whole of the inhabitants had been seized by a kind of mania” Ibid., p. 88.

96. “decidedly stupid” Ibid., p. 93.

97. What exactly had he done? There are many descriptions of the work of the rubber tapper, from Richard Spruce, Henry Bates, and Alfred Wallace to contemporary commentators, but the most painstaking in his observation seems to have been Algot Lange, The Lower Amazon: A Narrative of Exploration in the Little Known Regions of the State of Para, on the Lower Amazon, etc. (New York: Putnam’s, 1914), pp. 51-60. Like Wickham, Lange collected rubber himself, so one can imagine his boredom as he turned the paddle dipped in latex and began to count the number of times he moved his shoulder and rotated his wrist as he turned the heavy rubber-spit over the smoking fire.

99. “shut out from the rest of the world” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 91.

99. “watch the cold shadows of night gradually creep up from the water” Ibid.

99. Psychologists have suggested thatplace,as a force Laura M. Fredrickson and Dorothy H. Anderson, “A Qualitative Exploration of the Wilderness Experience as a Source of Spiritual Inspiration,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 19 (1999), p. 22.

99. “elvish littleti-timonkeys.” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 94.

Chapter 5: Instruments of the Elastic God

100. “The constant irritation . . . caused my hands and feet to swell” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 92.

100. “not so painful as I had anticipated” Ibid., p. 101.

100. “the pangs of thirst he will suffer after such a gorge of salt fish” Ibid.

101. “The first time I felt them, I could not imagine what on earth” Ibid., p. 98.

101. “Edible. . . . Good to eat, and wholesome to digest” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (Toronto: Coles, 1978, first published 1881), p. 34.

102. “[E]ach time the fit of nausea returned, I became quite powerless” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 103.

102. “but the sun was too powerful . . . the remainder of my strength fast failing” Ibid., p. 104.

102. “I remember little of what passed” Ibid.

102-3. “For five days I was delirious . . . and cups of creamy coffee” Algot Lange, In the Amazon Jungle: Adventures in Remote Parts of the Upper Amazon River, Including a Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians (New York: Putnams, 1912), p. 283.

103. “the voice of the forest . . . the murmuring crowd of a large city” Ibid., pp. 283-284.

103. “I saw myself engulfed . . . a place of terror and death” Ibid., pp. 289-290.

103. “It is almost something unbelievable to those who do not know the jungle” Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror-space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Terror,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:3 (1984), p. 483, quoting P. Francisco de Vilanova, introduction to P. Francisco de Iqualada, Indios Amazonicas: Colección Misiones Capuchinas, vol. VI (Barcelona, 1948).

104. “he found several vultures calmly awaiting his death” Edward V. Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part II—A Journey Through the Wilderness,” p. 18.

104. “I recollect one afternoon. . . . I think I never felt so grateful for anything” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 104.

105. “the little pale man of the forest” Ibid.

105. “the sure precursor of evil” Ibid. The tale of the vengeful spirit is also related in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 1., trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975, first published in France as Le Cru et le Cuit, 1964, Librairie Plon), p. 264.

105. The Prayer of the Dry Toad Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1981, first published 1951), trans. John and Doreen Weightman, p. 363.

105. “In so remote a situation . . . there must be a mine of gold in that direction” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 109.

106. “unable to work for some time past” Ibid., p. 111.

106. “helplessly sick” Ibid., p. 115.

106. “on the cool and limpid water of the Black River” Ibid., p. 123.

106. “very suggestive of a return to civilization” Ibid., p. 138.

107. “Nothing has been discovered which would even be a substitute” Thomas Hancock, Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-Rubber Manufacture in England (London: Longman, 1857), p. iii.

107. “the ultimate hard currency of exchange” “Blood for Oil?” London Review of Books, April 21, 2005, p. 12.

108. “The introduction of the invaluablecinchonasinto India” James Collins, “On India Rubber, Its History, Commerce and Supply,” Journal of the Society of Arts, vol. 18 (Dec. 17, 1869), p. 91.

109. in some cases, as high as 13.7 percent Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 210.

109. “it was necessary to do for the india-rubber and caoutchouc-yielding trees” Clements Markham is quoted in Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 12.

109. “When it is considered that every steam vessel afloat” Clements Markham is quoted in John Loadman, Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber—A Modern Marvel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 83.

110. except for some woolen stockings and an “antiglare eyeshade” Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 59.

111. “It will be long before I cease to hear her voice in the garden” Hooker is quoted in “Jos. D. Hooker: Hooker’s Biography: 4. A Botanical Career.” www.jdhooker.org.uk. A good overview of Joseph Hooker’s life is also included in Faubion O. Bower, “Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker,1817-1911,” in Makers of British Botany: A Collection of Biographies by Living Botanists, ed. F. W. Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), p. 303.

111. “nervous and high-strung . . . impulsive and somewhat peppery in temper” “Jos. D. Hooker: Hooker’s Biography: 4. A Botanical Career.” www.jdhooker.org.uk.

111. “not recreational . . . rude romping and games” Ibid.

112. “in a very dilapidated condition” William Scully’s Brazil; Its Provinces and Chief Cities (London, 1866), p. 358, and Franz Keller’s The Amazon and Madeira Rivers (Philadelphia, 1840), p. 40, are both quoted in E. Bradford Burns, “Manaus 1910: Portrait of a Boom Town,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, vol. 7, no. 3 (1965), p. 412.

113. “What has happened? . . . Rubber has happened!” Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 269.

113. In the province of Pará alone Lucille H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979), p. 147.

115. “of every variety, from silks and satins to stuff gowns” Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz, A Journey in Brazil (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), p. 280.

115. Power reigned in the warehouses Henry C. Pearson, The Rubber Country of the Amazon; A Detailed Description of the Great Rubber Industry of the Amazon Valley, etc. (New York: India Rubber World, 1911), pp. 94-95.

115. “Get rich, get rich!” they cried Richard Collier, The River that God Forgot: The Story of the Amazon Rubber Boom (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 20.

Chapter 6: The Return of the Planter

119. Crisóstavo wrenched a rubber empire from the forest Michael Edward Stanfield, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), pp. 26-28.

120. The São Paulo Railway Company, Ltd., operated a railway J. Fred Rippy, “A Century and a Quarter of British Investment in Brazil,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, 6:1 (Summer 1952), pp. 87-88.

121. Englishmen bought stock in Brazilian mines, banks Ibid., p. 83.

121. but in Latin America especially he often found himself thrust D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (Hamden, CT.: Archon Books, 1971), p. 16.

121. “lower in dignity” Ibid., p. 1.

122. One consul in Siam Ibid., p. 19.

123. “The labour of extracting rubber is so small” James Drummond-Hay’s report is included in Henry Wickham’s Rough Notes, pp. 294-296.

123. “The rubber-bearing country is so vast” Ibid., p. 296.

123-24. It was one of the few excursions he’d made off the boat Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 2. Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies, Wolverhampton, England, in the records of the Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Company (Great Britain) Ltd., ref. DB-20/G/6. The only mention of Henry’s stop is in Violet’s diary, written decades later. She notes in passing that Henry had met a “few American backwoods people . . . on a previous journey.” In Henry’s account, there is no mention of this; it is as if Santarém never existed.

124. “I have come to the conclusion” Henry Wickham, Rough Notes, p. 138.

124. “in remembrance of the many kindnesses” Ibid., frontispiece. Interestingly and ironically, the connection doesn’t end there. The Wickhams and the Drummond-Hays would be in time distantly related by marriage. Edward Drummond-Hay’s brother-in-law was Thomas Gott Livingstone, and in 1880, Livingston’s daughter Frances married Henry Wickham’s first cousin, the Rev. Alexander G. H. Lendrum. In Anthony Campbell, “The Descendants of Benjamin Wickham,” p. 4.

124. Her name was Violet Case Carter Many accounts give her name as Violet Cave, but this is a mistake that seems traceable to Edward Lane’s articles of the 1950s and to a group photo in Santarém in 1875. She appears in the 1871 Census as “Violet C. Carter” (age 21, born London), resident at 12 Regent Street with her parents William H. J. Carter (age 55, born London, bookseller) and Patty Carter (age 46, born London). Source: 1871 Census of London, published online by Ancestry.com.uk, citing the 1871 Census of London, National Archives, Kew, RG10/133, ED 2, folio 30, page 17.

125. set up his shop at 12 Regent Street Today 12 Regent Street is the site of the Economist Bookstore.

126. Family lore suggests that Carter also subsidized many of Henry’s future adventures Edward V. Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham—III: Santarem,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 125 (Dec. 26, 1953), p. 18.

126. “Born within the sound of Bow Bells” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 1.

126. “To be married is, with perhaps the majority of women, the entrance into life” W.G. Hamley, “Old Maids,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 112 (July 1872), p. 95, quoted in Pat Jalland and John Hooper, eds. Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain, 1830-1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1986), p. 126.

126. “The general aim of English wives” E. J. Tilt, Elements of Health and Principles of Female Hygiene (London, 1852), pp. 258-261, quoted in Jalland and Hooper, Women from Birth to Death, p. 124.

126. the “good wife” of Proverbs Proverbs 31:23.

127. “The sense of national honour, . . . pride of blood” Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century,” in Gender and Empire, Philippa Levine, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 46. Hall quotes Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (London, 1861), p. 675.

127. A wife embodied the moral standards Beverly Gartrell, “Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?” in The Incorporated Wife, Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, eds. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 165-185; Deborah Kirkwood, “Settler Wives in Southern Rhodesia: A Case Study,” in The Incorporated Wife, pp. 143-164.

127. “tenderly preserve them, as the plantation of mankind” Samuel Solomon, A Guide to Health, 66th edition (1817), p. 131, in Jalland and Hooper, eds. Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain, 1830-1914, p. 32.

128. “of independent means” The Census of 1871, quoted in Anthony Campbell, “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham, a Genealogy.”

129. “was very like being dropped into deep water never having learned to swim” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 1.

129. “a singular winged parasitical insect of a disgusting appearance” C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and its Tributaries (London: Edward Stanford, 1878), pp. 9-10.

130. “They should be nearly square . . . soon lulling you off ” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 1.

130. the Amazon stretches approximately 4,000-4,200 miles Michael Goulding, Ronaldo Barthem and Efrem Ferreira, The Smithsonian Atlas of the Amazon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2003), p. 23.

131. the Amazon could supply in two hours all the water used by New York City’s 7.5 million residents each year Ibid., p. 28. The rationale is this: New York City consumes about 1.1 billion gallons daily, or nearly 4 trillion gallons a year.

131. The valley itself . . . relentless, uncomprehendingthing The scope of the Amazon and the Amazon Basin are almost unimaginable, but the descriptions and statistics on it are from the following sources: Harald Sioli, “Tropical Rivers as Expressions of their Terrestrial Environments,” in Tropical Ecological Systems, Frank Golley and Ernesto Medina (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975), pp. 275-288; Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971); John Melby, “Rubber River: An Account of the Rise and Collapse of the Amazon Boom,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 22, no. 3 (Aug. 1942), pp. 452-469; P. T. Bauer, The Rubber Industry, A Study in Competition and Monopoly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948); Goulding, Barthem, and Ferreira, The Smithsonian Atlas of the Amazon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2003).

132. “We had a few people traveling with us 2nd class” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 1.

132. “had received tidings that beyond the city of Quito” Von Hagen, South America Called Them, p. 5.

133. “It was here that they informed us of the existence of the Amazons” Gaspar de Caraval, The Discovery of the Amazon: According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents, introduction by José Toribio Medina, trans. Bertram T. Lee (New York: American Geographical Society, 1934), p. 177.

133. what the Indians themselves called theParanáquausú,or “Great River” William L. Schurz, “The Amazon, Father of Waters,” National Geographic (April 1926), p. 445.

133. An estimated 332,000 people lived in this region, up from 272,000 a decade ago Arthur Cesar Ferreira Reis, “Economic History of the Brazilian Amazon,” in Man in the Amazon, Charles Wagley, ed. (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1974), p. 39.

134. “left us a north-east despoiled of its very rich forests” José Pedro de Oliveira Costa, “History of the Brazilian Forest: An Inside View,” Environmentalist, vol. 3, no. 5 (1983), p. 51.

134. Between 1500 and 1800, the Americas sent to Europe £300 million in gold Edward J. Rogers, “Monoproductive Traits in Brazil’s Economic Past,” Americas, vol. 23, no. 2 (October 1966), p. 133.

Chapter 7: The Jungle

137. Some Santarém trading houses had branches Herbert H. Smith, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast (New York: 1879), p. 118.

137. “Sixty thousand bows can be sent forth from these villages alone” Jesuit Father Mauricio de Heriarta’s “Description of the State of Maranhão, Pará, Corupá, and the River of the Amazons” (1660) is quoted in Smith, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast, p. 171.

137. “that is the cause why they are feared of the other Indians” Ibid.

138. They danced before the doors of the principal citizens Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, ch. 8 (New York, 1864), www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/sci/earthscience/TheNaturalistontheRiverAmazon.

138. “All children were born free . . . a child sitting on their hip on the other side” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 2.

139. “all made their house keeping (sic) money by sending out their slaves” Ibid.

139. “no cases of gross cruelty tho’ you could often hear thepalmatoregoing” Ibid., p. 1.

139. “a little Indian boy who had been given to H to bring up” Ibid., p. 5.

140. “of an English pleasure ground” Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, Alfred Russel Wallace, ed., 2 vols. (Cleveland, OH.: Arthur H. Clark, 1908), p. 66.

140. “I had not gone far when my English saddle turned around” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 2.

141. “beset with hard spines” Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, ch. 8 (New York, 1864), www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/sci/earthscience/TheNaturalistontheRiverAmazon.

141. “undertook the most toilsome journeys on foot to gather a basketful” Ibid.

142. “a world of eternal verdure and perennial spring” Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (Jackson, MI.: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), p. 26.

142. “lean, hard men with their wives” Roy Nash, The Conquest of Brazil (New York: AMS Press, 1969, originally published 1926), p. 152; Mark Jefferson, “An American Colony in Brazil,” Geographical Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (April 1928), p. 228.

143. where diamonds had been found years earlier David Afton Riker. O Último Confederado na Amazõnia (Brazil, 1983), p. 112. David Afton Riker is the son of the original David Riker (see page 167). He placed at the end of his own story his father’s handwritten memoirs of his days as a pioneering confederado.

143. “we would never grow quite as they were” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 2.

143. “white stockings and legs . . . a damper on my ideas of finery” Ibid.

143. “Alas . . . I have grown as utterly careless” Ibid.

143. Until 1997 . . . the plateau was as it had been in Henry’s day Steven Alexander, owner of Bosque Santa Lucia, an educational and botanical preserve that contains the area of the old confederado site, said that he has counted 200 species of tree in the preserve’s 270 acres. All information about Piquiá-tuba comes from an interview with Alexander on his preserve on October 9, 2005.

144. Whywerethere so many trees? Peter Campbell, “Get Planting” (a review of The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter, by Colin Tudge), London Review of Books, Dec. 1, 2005, p. 32.

144-45. “the deafening clamour of frogs” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.

145. “not only weakening them . . . their combs as white as the rest of their bodies” Ibid., p. 5.

145. “bathed in blood” Ibid.

145. “other spots of electricity” Ibid., p. 4.

145. the jaguar and the three men Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, pp. 122-123.

146. Here on the Tapajós . . . and her breasts beneath her arms Algot Lange, The Lower Amazon: A Narrative of Exploration in the Little Known Regions of the State of Para,

on the Lower Amazon, etc. (New York: Putnam’s, 1914), pp. 427-428.

146. Henry Bates had come to know one named Cecilia Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, ch. 8.

147. “fertile field” Lange, The Lower Amazon, p. 361.

147. “till it looks like a gigantic green fringe” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 2.

147. “While green it was pretty” Ibid.

147. “started off early in the morning” Ibid., p. 3.

148. “I get it burning, put on sauce pan” Ibid.

148. “as tired, hot, and unrefreshed as before” Ibid.

148. “attack the legs of bathers near the shore” Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, ch. 9.

148. “ ‘temporary’ went on extending” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 3.

149. “to save time with coming and going” Ibid.

149. “and soon left us one after another” Ibid.

149. an older man, as Violet suggests, though his age is unrecorded Ibid.

150. “If she handled the morning ‘clinics’ and other encounters” Deborah Kirkwood, “Settler Wives in Southern Rhodesia: A Case Study,” in The Incorporated Wife, Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, eds. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 151.

150. “[A] readiness to interest herself in the health” Ibid.

150. But more than by labor, Henry was defeated by the soil Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971), p. 18.

150. A 1978 study of absorption showed that 99.9 percent of all calcium 45 Carl F. Jordan, “Amazon Rain Forests,” American Scientist, vol. 70, no. 4 (July-Aug. 1982), pp. 396-397.

151. Soon afterward, the second, more terrible crisis Information on the deaths of Henry Wickham’s party comes from three sources: Henry Wickham, “Graves in the Confederate Cemetery” (a drawing); Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 3; Anthony Campbell, “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham,” p. 3.

152. “We alone of the original party picked up” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 3.

Chapter 8: The Seeds

153. “a spur just off from the forest covered table highlands” The March 1872 letter from Wickham to Hooker is quoted in Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, pp. 13-15.

154. he followed up The date of the package to Kew is uncertain. Ibid., p. 13.

155. “His drawings of the leaf and seeds” Ibid., p. 15.

156. “a Mr. Wickham, at Santarem, who may do the job” Ibid., p. 13.

156. “with the view of afterwards sending the young plants out to India” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew. Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter May 7, 1873, from India Office to Director of Kew, J.D. Hooker, inquiring into possibility of sending Hevea plants to India after raising them from seeds at Kew,” file folder 2.

156. “I have a correspondent at Santarem on the Amazon” Ibid., “Reply Hooker to India Office, May 15, 1873. Reply to May 7th letter,” file folder 4.

156. But both letters were apparently misplaced Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 15.

157. “quite fresh and in a state for planting” Ibid., p. 13.

157. Since Farris had two thousand seeds, the Empire paid about twenty-seven dollars W. Gordon Whaley, “Rubber, Heritage of the American Tropics,” Scientific Monthly, vol. 62, no. 1 (Jan. 1946), p. 23.

157. “I thought it important to secure them at once” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew. Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Clements Markham to J.D. Hooker, June 2, 1873, regarding the purchase by James Collins of 2000 Hevea seeds from a ‘Mr. Farris’ of Brazil,” file folder 5.

157. the U.S. and French consulates had already made a bid Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 13.

157. “Is that all you managed to shoot?” Farris’s tale to Lord Salisbury is recounted in F. W. Sadler, “Seeds That Began the Great Rubber Industry,” Contemporary Review, vol. 217, no. 1257 (Oct. 1970), pp. 208-209.

157. “I would like to take this opportunity to place on official record” Ibid.

157-58. “a gross attempt to impose . . . an utterly worthless report on Gutta Percha” Ibid.

158. “glad to accept your offer to put me into communication” Ibid.

158. “The Consul at Para has written to say” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew. Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter, Markham to J. D. Hooker. Sept. 23, 1873,” file folder 9.

159. “obtain any quantity that may be necessary at small expense” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 15.

159. “I have just received a letter from H. Majesty Consul at Para enquiring” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham in Santarem to Hooker, Nov. 8, 1873,” file folder 10.

160. He’d absorbed that portion of the Portuguese character known assaudade Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Portuguese Heritage: Adaptability,” in G. Hervey Simm, ed., Brazilian Mosaic: Portraits of a Diverse People and Culture (Wilmington, DE.: Scholarly Resources, 1995), pp. 31-32.

160. “In a radiant land” Paulo Prado, “Essay on Sadness,” in Simm, Brazilian Mosaic, p. 19.

160. “The moon is rising, Mother, Mother!” Prado, “Essay on Sadness,” in Simm, Brazilian Mosaic, pp. 19-20.

161. there are two local Curuás from which to choose If this is not enough, there is a third Curuá, but it would have been inaccessible to Henry and Violet. The Amazon’s last major tributary before it meets the sea is the Xingu River; this drops south into the forest where it is fed by the Iriri River, and this third Curuá is the Iriri’s main tributary. Since this is hundreds of miles from Santarém, it is impossible that this could be Wickham’s Curuá.

162. “the very head-quarters” C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and its Tributaries (London: Edward Stanford, 1878), p. 249.

162-63. “every fragment of food . . . and stung with all his might” Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon (New York, 1864), ch. 9, p. 14. The book is available in its entirety at www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/sci/earthscience/TheNaturalistontheRiverAmazon. According to contemporary travel writer Herbert H. Smith, “As late as 1868 the town was still nearly deserted.” Herbert H. Smith, Brazil, The Amazons and the Coast (New York: 1879), p. 241. Smith quotes the traveler Sr. Penna: “This settlement . . . is a very beautiful and pleasant place, but without inhabitants because of the formigas de fogo. A primary school has been created here by law, but no one has profited by it, because no lives there.”

163. “once more made a hole in the primeval forest to put his house in” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 3.

163. “nature’s flophouses for the outcasts” William Sill, “The Anvil of Evolution,” Earthwatch, Aug. 2001, p. 27.

164. He was becoming, in effect, acaboclo Emilio F. Moran, “The Adaptive System of the Amazonian Caboclo,” in Charles Wagley, ed., Man in the Amazon (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1974), pp. 136-159; and Edward C. Higbee, “The River Is the Plow,” Scientific Monthly, June 1945, pp. 405-416.

165. “He stripped his shirt up” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.

165. “and then I have said all there is to be said for it” Ibid.

166. “which measured forty-two feet in length” Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, ch. 9, p. 11.

166. “The father and his son went . . . to gather wild fruit” Ibid. Author’s note. I never saw an anaconda on the Tapajós, but I did see a huge one once on the Rio Napo north of Iquitos in Peru, and after that I’d never discount such tales of attacks on small children. I was in the middle of the stream, trying to paddle one of the flat-bottomed dugouts; since I was used to the more deeply keeled canoes used on North American rivers, my dugout was essentially tracing a big circle in the water using the weight of my body as the fulcrum. I was alone on the river, around a bend from my camp, when suddenly the forest around me grew very quiet and I thought I heard a plunk! I looked down and underwater, directly beneath the dugout, an enormous anaconda glided past. I cannot even begin to imagine how big that thing was: I am sure I would exaggerate. I stopped paddling, and sat still, and stopped breathing—and for the first time in my life knew what people mean when they say their “heart stopped in their throat.” The snake just kept going and going; it seemed to have no beginning or end. Later I would recognize that otherness, that impossibility of proportion, as the essence of monstrosity, and also realized that out here I counted, at best, as a hearty meal. There are no verified stories I know of that show anacondas attacking and swallowing human adults, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that fact at the moment: I slid my paddle from the water without a drip (as I’d learned in Boy Scouts, in case I ever became an Army Ranger—fat chance, there!); I held it in both hands before me, like a club. I had one of those strange and sudden out-of-body experiences where I observed myself from above, as if from a spy satellite: me, holding the flimsy, ineffective paddle; the snake, going on and on a few feet down. All it had to do was rise a couple of inches and brush the canoe, and I’d be over the side and in his element with him. I wasn’t a father yet and hadn’t really thought about such matters, but it suddenly popped into my head that This line of Jacksons ends right here. I guess I can be proud of the fact that I didn’t panic and start thrashing about, which probably would have gotten the monster’s attention, but other than that I felt like a truly helpless idiot, and part of me hoped that nobody was around to watch when the snake swallowed me whole. Let people wonder what happened to me: at least there’d be some mystery. But nothing happened, of course, and when the snake finally passed, I sat quietly a little longer then gently dipped my paddle back in the water and found I’d discovered the trick to maneuvering the damn canoe after all. Not that it mattered—I never went alone on the river in one of those dugouts again.

166. The house was never finished Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham—III: Santarem,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 125 (Dec. 19, 1953), p. 18.

166. “nitrate pulse” Moran, “The Adaptive System of the Amazonian Caboclo,” p. 145.

166. “a horticulturist, a rubber collector, a hired hand” Ibid.

167. “My boarded floor had been taken up” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.

167. “Casa-Piririma” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham—III: Santarem,” p. 19.

167. “as disgusted as the others” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 4.

167. Mercia Jane Ferrell from West Moors, Dorset We know very little about the ill-fated Mercia Jane Ferrell besides her brief, anonymous mention in Violet’s diary; her place of birth and age in the Census of April 3, 1871; and Henry’s drawing of the wooden cross above her grave, the only time her name is mentioned in the various annals of Wickham’s time in the Amazon.

168. “I was just delited” David Bowman Riker’s “Handwritten Narrative” appears in an Appendix in O Último Confederado na Amazõnia (The Last Confederate in the Amazon), by his son David Afton Riker, (Brazil, 1983), pp. 112 ff. David B. Riker knew the Wickhams, said he was the first person to plant rubber on the Amazon, and planted the first rubber tree for Henry Ford in Forlandia.

168. “Father put Virginia and myself in school” Ibid.

168. “ride out in to the country” Ibid., p. 384.

169. “It is already very late” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter dated Oct. 15, 1874, Wickham at Piquiatuba, near Santarem, to Hooker, regarding transport of seeds,” file folder 14.

169. “I reopen this in order to add” Ibid.

169. “With reference to Mr. Wickham’s proposal to raise young India Rubber plants” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter dated October, 1874, Markham to Hooker,” file folder 12.

170. “any amountof seeds at the same rate—£10 for 1000” Royal Botanic Gardens- Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter, Markham to Hooker, Dec. 4, 1874,” file folder 13.

170. The secretary of state soon authorized Wickham Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 16.

170. “once more each struggled on alone” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.

171. “She stayed with me till her death” Ibid., p. 4.

171. “I received a few other (seeds) from an up-river trader” Royal Botanic Gardens- Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter Wickham at Piquiatuba, Santarem, to Hooker, April 18, 1875, regarding the fact that it is too late in the season to collect seed,” file folder 15. According to historian Warren Dean, Wickham also sent a package of seeds soon after this that reached the India Office on September 9, 1875; they were “duly paid for,” but failed to germinate. There is also no record today in Kew of their arrival. Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 16.

172. “Should you have opportunity of recommending me” Ibid.

Chapter 9: The Voyage of the Amazonas

173. “After supper the family would unite” Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis; the Taking of Rubber Seeds out of the Amazon,” p. 384.

173. “I am just about to start for the ‘ciringa’ district” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham at Piquiá-tuba to Hooker, Jan. 29, 1876,” file folder 17.

174. “[T]he collectors must be directed” Roy MacLeod, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris series, vol. 15 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 179.

174. By locating on the Madeira, he’d entered a region that swallowed lives blithely The Acré was a huge chunk of rain forest between Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. Wars were fought over it, and corruption and slavery occurred in its depths that rivaled anything committed in the name of gold or oil. By 1870, Brazilian rubber prospectors had penetrated its darkness; by 1875, steam navigation had penetrated 1,228 miles up the Madeira. But three miles above the old town of Santo Antonio (now Porto Velho), the Madeira was broken by 19 cataracts and rapids formed by the meeting of the Brazilian Shield and the Amazonian planície. For more than 250 miles the river was unnavigable, and trading vessels hauled up and down in backbreaking portages made no more than three round trips a year. By 1872, the American journalist and speculator George Church had persuaded investors that a 225-mile railroad set east of the rapids was the way into this “Garden of the Lord.” He raised £1.7 million in bonds backed by the Brazilian government, set up the Madeira-Mamoré Railway Company, and in 1872 sent out his first crew of British engineers. Their boats sank. Caripune Indians attacked. Fever-plagued crews plunged through the forest in an ill-fated effort to flee. Workers died from disease and the heat. The rain forest was so dense that surveyors could only measure a few feet ahead. By 1873, the project was over, and in London the company’s stock tumbled from 68 to 18 points on the Exchange. Remaining workers abandoned their job sites when they heard their employer went bankrupt, leaving equipment to rot. British financial assessors reported that “the region is a welter of putrefaction where men die like flies. Even with all the money in the world and half its population, it is impossible to finish this railway.” By 1876, however, the Brazilian government had subsidized the company in a desperate bid to link the international rubber port of Pará with the Acré, and Church was back in Philadelphia, recruiting more men.

174. Markham was not present to oversee the handoff Donovan Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Geographical Department of the India Office, 1867-1877,” Geographical Journal, vol. 134 (Sept. 1968), p. 349.

174. “laxity . . . vigorously and systematically suppressed” Ibid., p. 351.

175. The same India Office that grew incensed Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 16.

175. “once again we started by boat” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.

175. “[H]e decided to collect himself . . . as is very common there” Ibid.

176. “a minor who had been unlawfully taken” Smith, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast, p. 128.

176. “the country house of an Englishman . . . got more ‘kudos’ for pluck than I perhaps deserved” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.

176. February to March was the period Edward V. Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), p. 651.

176. “left me there . . . while he and the boy went off into the woods” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.

176. “I am now collecting Indian Rubber seeds in the ‘ciringals’ ” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham to Hooker, March 6, 1876,” file folder 19.

177. Cross was a veteran of the cinchona expedition William Cross, “Chronology: The Years Robert Cross Spent at Home and Abroad,” http://scottishdisasters.tripod.com/robertmckenziecrossbotanicalexplorerkewgardens; also, e-mail interview with William Cross on April 3, 2006. William Cross is the descendant of Robert Cross and maintains an exacting and informative website on the often overlooked Kew gardener.

177. “to cover all expenses and include remuneration” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Henry Wickham to Hooker, March 6, 1876,” file folder 18.

177. “their exact place of origin was in 3 degrees of south latitude” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” India-Rubber and Gutta-Percha Trades Journal, vol. 23 (Jan. 20, 1902), p. 81. David Riker would later head to the same area when prospecting for seeds for the Ford plantation. Wickham “made several trips by boat to Boim,” Riker said during the Ford era, adding that the seeds for Britain’s Asian plantations hailed from there. In the 1960s, environmental historian Warren Dean interviewed Julio David Serique, whose father had been a patrão in Boim when Wickham arrived and who confirmed Riker’s words. William Schurz, whose 1925 Rubber Production in the Amazon Valley influenced Henry Ford’s decision to open Fordlandia, interviewed a “Moyses Serique” of the same family. “Boim is the first place on the Tapajoz in which wild Hevea is found,” Schurz discovered in his own explorations, “and it is not probable that Wickham went further up the river.” Not probable, he said, because estradas were already being worked in the area and further up the river a “weak” species of Hevea that produced an inferior grade of rubber began to predominate. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis; the Taking of Rubber Seeds out of the Amazon,” p. 384; Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 17; William L. Schurz, Rubber Production in the Amazon Valley, Department of Commerce: Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925), p. 133.

178. Boim was more important commercially A general overview of the Jewish migration to the Amazon can be found in several excellent articles: Ambrosio B. Peres, “Judaism in the Amazon Jungle,” in Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from Their Expulsion in 1497 through Their Dispersion, Israel J. Katz and M. Mitchell Serels, eds. (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 2000), pp. 175-183; Susan Gilson Miller, “Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, Harvey E. Goldberg, ed. (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 190- 209; “Brazil,” Encyclopedia Judiaca, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Macmillan, 1971), and “Morocco,” ibid., vol. 12; and “Sephardic Genealogy Resources; Indiana Jones Meets Tangier Moshe,” www.orthohelp.com/geneal/amazon.htm.

178. Boim’s four trading families had come from Tangiers in Morocco Interview, Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, October 21, 2005.

178. “One must take great care in the jungle on entering” Quoted in Miller, “Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in the Late Nineteenth Century,” p. 201.

179. one of the owners of the “Franco & Sons” cattle ranch C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and its Tributaries (London: Edward Stanford, 1878), p. 251.

179. “that the people who annually penetrate into these forests” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” pp. 81-82.

179. the ancient sites covered in a deep, stiff Indian black earth Interview, Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, Oct. 21, 2005.

179. “a circumference of 10 ft. to 12 ft. in the bole” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” p. 81.

179. “I daily ranged the forest” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 50.

180. “the bark is thickly coated with growths of moss, ferns, and orchids” Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” p. 81.

180. “out of seventeen varieties” William Chauncey Geer, The Reign of Rubber (New York: Century, 1922), p. 73.

180. The black-bark version was said to yield more latex C. C. Webster and E. C. Paardekooper, “The Botany of the Rubber Tree,” in Rubber, C. C. Webster & W. J. Baulkwill, eds. (Essex, UK: Longman, 1989), pp. 60-61.

180. Now in his sixties, he’d had the stump of the Mother Tree pointed out to him Interview, Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, Oct. 21, 2005.

180. as seven men barely stretched their arms around it, standing fingertip to fingertip Was the Mother Tree as big as Cohen said? One rule for measuring girth is that a man’s reach is about the same length as his height. Given that the average Amazon Indian or caboclo was five feet six inches, seven men circling the tree would give a circumference of 38.5 feet. This gives a radius of 6.13 feet, and doubling that, a diameter of 12.26 feet. This is a big tree, but not unheard of. General Sherman, the giant sequoia in California acknowledged until recently to be the world’s largest living tree, has a diameter of 102 feet and a height of 362 feet, or about the size of a thirty-six-story building. The maximum height usually listed today for hevea in the Amazon is 30 meters, but heights of 40 meters, or about 130 feet, were said to exist, if never confirmed, in the virgin forests of Wickham’s day.

181. “[D]uring times of rest, I would sit down and look into the leafy arches above” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) with an Account of Its Introduction from the West to the Eastern Tropics (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1908), pp. 50-51.

181. of the same design as those found along the Amazon today Interview, Elisio Eden Cohen, Boim, Oct. 21, 2005. Also, see the photo of the basket woven by Herica Maria Cohen, fourteen, daughter of Elisio Eden Cohen. It is the same design as those used by Wickham and by Indians and caboclos for centuries. The only difference in Wickham’s baskets is that they would have been larger.

181. “I got the Tapuyo village maids” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 51.

183. “first of the new line of Inman line steamships” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, pp. 47-48; and John Loadman, Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber—A Modern Marvel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 89-91. Loadman’s detective work on the Amazonas is the best yet, uncovering sailing records and crew manifests that were previously unknown. Built in 1874 by A. Simey and Co. for the Liverpool & Amazon Royal Mail Steamship Company and registered in 1875, everything about the Amazonas was new. She sailed almost immediately under the E. E. Inman flag. Henry said this was its inaugural voyage, but in this he seems mistaken: She’d originally sailed from Liverpool on December 24, 1875, arrived in Pará on January 19, 1876, continued on to Manaus, and was home in Liverpool on March 14.

183. Crew records suggest a complement of thirty-two men Loadman, Tears of the Tree, p. 90.

183. “The thing was well-done” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 48.

184. “occurred one of those chances, such as a man has to take at top-tide” Ibid., pp. 48-49.

185. “This suggests that the rapid charter [of theAmazonas] was to beat” P. R. Wycherley, “Introduction of Hevea to the Orient,” The Planter, Magazine of the Incorporated Society of Planters (March 1968), p. 130. According to Wycherley, Wilkens wrote in the September 1940 issue of the RRI Planters’ Bulletin that Brazilian authorities told Henry he “would not” be able to export the seeds; in the December 1967 issue of the Planter, he said they told him he “might not” be able to. By then, Wilkens himself was getting up in years; thus, the truth may be clouded by the fuzzy memories of both Wickham and Wilkens.

186. there is no mention of rubber seeds in the cargo manifest Loadman, Tears of the Tree, p. 90.

186. “When [Henry] had collected and packed” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.

187. “What seems most likely . . . is that Wickham managed to persuade” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 19.

187. John Joseph Wickham, his wife Christine, and son Harry Interview with Anthony Campbell via e-mail, April 3, 2006, from his own genealogical research.

187. widower of Henry’s sister Harriette Jane Anthony Campbell, “Descendants of Benjamin Wickham, a Genealogy” (self-published, Jan. 30, 2005).

187. “slung up fore and aft in their crates” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 53.

188. “crabbed and sore . . . so as not much to heed Murray’s grumpiness” Ibid.

188. “It was perfectly certain in my mind” Ibid.

188. “a straight offer to do it; pay to follow result” Ibid., p. 47.

188. “a number of Brazilians had been much amused” Austin Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 67.

188. “an obstacle of appalling magnitude” Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, p. 281.

188. “a friend in court” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 53.

189. “quite [entered] into the spirit of the thing” Ibid., pp. 53-54.

189. a commoner named Ulrich Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 19.

190. The evening was pleasant and cordial Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, p. 67.

190. “I could breathe easy” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 54.

190. “Products destined for Cabinets of Natural History” The Brazilian customs regulations are quoted in Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 19.

191. “hardly defensible in international law” Loadman, Tears of the Tree, p. 92.

192. Madagascar never made a dime “Living Rainforest: Cancer Cured by the Rosy Periwinkle,” www.livingrainforest.org/about/economic/rosyperiwinkle.

192. O. Labroz and V. Cayla of Brazil claimed that authorities Ibid.

193. “to appropriate the goods of others” Ibid., p. 21.

193. “some higher vision of property” Ibid., p. 22.

Chapter 10: The Edge of the World

197. Hooker was an insomniac Richard Collier, The River That God Forgot: The Story of the Amazon Rubber Boom (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 35-36.

198. he’d leave Liverpool on June 19 Robert Cross listed the dates of his departure from Liverpool and arrival in Pará in his report on the Investigation and Collecting of Plants and Seeds of the India Rubber Trees of Pará and Ceara and Balsam of Copaiba, completed in Edinburgh on March 29, 1877. Excerpts from his report are included in William Cross, “Robert McKenzie Cross: Botanical Explorer, Kew Gardens: Chronology: The Years Robert Cross Spent at Home and Abroad,” http://www.scottishdisasters.tripod.com/robertmckenziecrossbotanicalexplorerkewgardens.

198. “Not even the wildest imagination could have contemplated” Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, p. 68.

198. a vast greenhouse called the “seed-pit” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IV—Kew” (Dec. 26, 1953), p. 8.

198. placed in the care of R. Irwin Lynch “R. Irwin Lynch,” Journal of the Kew Guild, vol. 4, no. 32 (1925), p. 341. Lynch, foreman of the tropical department, was an “Old Kewite,” trained by his grandfather, “himself an Old Kewite,” and joined the staff as a student gardener in 1867 at the age of seventeen.

199. “We knew it was touch and go” Sir William Thiselton-Dyer quoted in Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, p. 68.

199. “70,000 seeds ofHevea brasiliensiswere received from Mr. H. A. Wickham” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, Unsigned note, July 7, 1876, file folder 20.

199. “Many hundreds are now 15 inches long and all are in vigorous health” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, Ibid.

200. “made some experiments in planting” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 24.

200. “as if to underscore his ignorance of botany” Ibid.

200. On August 20, 1876, TheEvening Heraldran a short story Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Evening Herald, Aug. 20, 1876, describing growth of seeds at Kew,” file folder 43.

200. “Mr. Wickham seems to have taken very great pains with the seeds” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 24.

200. “I have had a long conversation with Mr. Wickham” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IV—Kew,” p. 6.

201. “we have no knowledge of his horticultural competence” Ibid.

201-2. “I did not mean to suggest my taking entire charge of the plants” Ibid.

202. “dishonourable” Donovan Williams, “Clements Robert Markham and the Geographical Department of the India Office, 1867-1877,” Geographical Journal, vol. 134 (Sept. 1968), p. 350.

202. “comply with official rules, or go” Ibid, p. 351.

202. “the Malay Peninsula is most likely to combine the climactic conditions required” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IV—Kew,” p. 7.

202. “I have known trees, grown in the open” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, p. 58.

203. “What is more . . . its coffin bore the wrong name” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IV—Kew,” p. 7.

203. though £740 according to a memo by Hooker Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 24. This letter, dated June 24, 1876 and addressed to Clements Markham, introduced Wickham “who has been collecting seeds for you. He has brought 74,000 which have all been planted,” thus implying that, according to the agreement, he would be paid £740.

203. “though Kew authorities advocated it” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 5.

204. The P&O Company had caused a revolution in sea transport Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, p. 69.

204. an enraged Clements Markham expedited the payment back in London The affair of the Duke of Devonshire is a good example of British bureaucracy at its worst and of Clements Markham’s frustrations with the India Office’s new regime. When H. K. Thwaites, Director of the Peredeniya Gardens, telegraphed for help, Markham was called in. He spent the next week carrying the freight documents from desk to desk, all the way to the detested Louis Mallet himself, provoking some comments about the “new bureaucracy” that probably hastened his departure the following year. Thistelton-Dyer was drawn in, and on September 18, 1876, Markham raged to him in a letter about all the “fatuous processes” needed to gain approval for even the smallest expenses. “Bad as the senseless routine was before,” he lamented, “it has become much worse since Sir Louis Mallet and Lord Salisbury have been here.” His frustration and disgust were obvious, and he did little to hide them. More instructive, however, was Markham’s detailed list of a penny-pinching requisition process that discouraged new initiatives and effectively stifled change. The payment of a simple freight bill, which at best should require an invoice and payment, took ten steps drawn out over thirty days. Markham called it nothing more than “the ordinary circumlocution:

Aug. 18—I sent down request for sanction to pay freight.
22—Sir L. Mallet sends to Lord Salisbury.
29—Lord Salisbury sends it to a c’tee of Council.
Sept. 7—The c’tee sent it back to Sir L. Mallet.
9—Sir L. Mallet sent it to the Council.
10—The Finance C’tee sent it back.
11—Sir L. Mallet sent it to the Council.
14—The Council sanctioned the payment.
15—It was sent back to me.
16—It was paid.

Markham ended the tale by remarking that this letter was “not official, or you would not get it for a month.” The released seeds were planted in Colombo, and by 1880, about three hundred of them were still alive. Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Markham to Thiselton-Dyer, Sept. 18, 1876,” file folder 59.

204. while Kew admitted that twelve hevea plants from Cross’s mission had managed to survive As sickly as Cross’s hevea specimens were, they became the center of a controversy that still rages among historians. On June 11, 1877, Kew sent twenty-two hevea to Singapore that may or may not have come from Cross’s trees.

Taken together, the number of trees sent to India and the Far East totaled several hundred more than the sum of Wickham’s and Cross’s collections combined. The only explanation, reasoned historian Warren Dean, was that “there had been some propagation through cuttings,” the phenomenon whereby detached plant parts can regenerate missing roots, stems, and leaves to form complete new plants. This is good news for centers of economic botany like Kew, for one isn’t shackled to seed production, and growing stock can increase geometrically. Yet when Kew sent out shipments, they never kept records of these cuttings. No one knows which came from Wickham’s seeds and which came from Cross’s young trees. This is important, if only to illustrate the spite growing around Wickham, as well as the fate of those who serve. By the 1920s, when Great Britain controlled the world rubber market, Wickham was honored, Cross forgotten, and experts took sides. People asked, Who really started the plantation rubber industry? Was it Wickham, with his more robust seeds from the highlands behind Boim and his greater number of seedlings? Or Cross, whose sickly seedlings from the swamps around Pará may or may not have constituted the June 1877 batch of trees to Singapore, said to form the backbone of the vast Malayan rubber plantations?

The intricacies of the Cross vs. Wickham debate are so arcane that it’s tempting to ignore it altogether, yet to do so ignores Cross’s contributions and sidesteps one reason historians tend to dislike Wickham. It also ignores the pedigree of the anti-Wickham chorus hailing from Kew, whose records in this respect are so contradictory as to be self-canceling. Some documents state that the Singapore batch came from Wickham’s trees, others from Cross’s, and the confusion over cuttings just muddies the water. In time, the debate turned into a culture war. While businessmen and planters favored Wickham, Kew’s botanists echoed Joseph Hooker’s prejudice and bet on Cross, a member of the club. Although the bulk of seeds shipped around the world came from Henry’s stock, the debate turned on an unsubstantiated statement by Henry N. Ridley, Hooker’s protégée and director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, that the 1877 Singapore shipment came from Cross’s trees. Thiselton-Dyer—also in the Hooker camp—supported Ridley. However, when one checks the numbers, one must admit that by this point the Cross and Wickham stocks were so intermingled by cuttings and loose record keeping as to be inseparable. An observation by early rubber planters that they noticed “an extraordinary variety in their trees” supports such mixing.

The pedigree of Cross’s seeds was much different from Wickham’s. He did not penetrate the interior, as had Wickham, but stayed close to Pará. He left Liverpool on June 19, 1876, the same day that the first of Henry’s seeds began to sprout in Kew’s seed pit, and arrived at Pará on July 15. He set to work, replanting, tending, and packing his 1,080 specimens. He collected most of his rubber from the swamps and flood plains surrounding the city, which put his opinions on hevea’s natural habitat in direct opposition to Henry’s. Consul Green helped him as he had Henry, rendering him “every assistance possible.” He embarked on the Paraense of the Liverpool Red Cross Line, collected his sixty specimens of Ceará rubber when the ship stopped at the Brazilian port of Fortaleza, and returned to England on November 22, 1876.

The distribution of Wickham’s and Cross’s plants was pieced together and cross-referenced from six primary sources, each of which leave out some detail but all of which seem to agree chronologically: John Loadman, Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber—A Modern Marvel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Austin Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987); William Chauncey Geer, The Reign of Rubber (New York: Century, 1922); Edward Valentine Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IV—Kew,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 125 (Dec. 26, 1953), pp. 5-8; and Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), pp. 649-656.

The Cross vs. Wickham debate will probably never be solved. As stated in the text, Ridley and Thiselton-Dyer made statements that would suggest Cross’s trees as the source of the British rubber monopoly, but both are suspect: Thiselton-Dyer because he would do little to contradict Hooker, and Ridley because he actively disliked Wickham and made several disparaging statements throughout his life to try to diminish Henry’s importance. There also seemed some jealousy at play—Henry would be knighted, but Ridley was not. In 1914, David Prain, who became Kew’s director after Thiselton-Dyer’s retirement in 1905, questioned “whether a single plant brought back by Cross ever became fit to send” anywhere in Asia. He could not find “any entry in our archives that could be so interpreted.” (Dean, 28) Prain’s statement is also interesting because he was the first director not related by blood or marriage to the Hooker and William Thiselton-Dyer family circle. Warren Dean seemed to concur with Prain, stating that “evidently, the Wickham selection provided the overwhelming genetic stock for the spread of cultivation in the British colonies” (Dean, 27), but even he was intrigued by the mystery and indulged in speculation. John Loadman, the most recent of the long line of rubber historians, clearly sides with Cross after some meticulous detective work, calling Cross, not Wickham, the “father of the rubber plantation industry”—yet even he admits that “in spite of all the detailed records kept by Kew, one piece of information is missing, and that is the source of those . . . seedlings” (Loadman, 94).

205. “The flat, low lying, moist tracts, subject to inundation” Royal Botanic Gardens- Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, Robert Cross, “Report on the Investigation and Collecting of Plants and Seeds of the India-rubber Trees of Para and Ceara and Basalm of Copaiba (March 29, 1877),” file folders 78-93. p. 7.

205. Robert Cross’s opinions Cross fared little better than his trees. His treatment at the hands of the British government was as bad that of the original hevea prophet, James Collins. By 1881, Cross was forty-seven, stricken like Spruce with debilitating bouts of malaria, and had applied repeatedly for a medical pension. In 1882, he dared to publicize in the South of India Observer that the Indian cinchona plantations had lost the empire £2 million when compared to the Dutch plantations, and he revealed for the first time the debacle of Charles Ledger’s rejected Bolivian yellow-bark trees. The revelations were not appreciated in the higher levels of government. Joseph Hooker launched an investigation, which revealed nothing about Ledger’s offer but discredited the work in India on hybrid varieties of cinchona—the work that Cross supervised. In a letter to Markham dated July 21, 1882, Cross lamented the fact that his revelations had created so much ill will against him. Some people even blamed him for the depreciation of the Indian cinchona plantations and called for his hide. Although he was eventually exonerated of Hooker’s allegations, his career was ruined. Soon afterward, according to the Nilgiri Express, he was working at Nilamur overseeing the growth of some new rubber trees when “in reply to some overtures made in his behalf to the Secretary of State, a telegram was received. What the purport of this telegram was we know not, but its contents so disgusted [Cross], that he shook the dust off his feet and departed to seek fresh fields and pastures new.” By 1884, Cross had left the service entirely and retired on a £40 annuity. At night, he sweated through malarial dreams in his cottage in Edinburgh, and slept with a gun beneath his pillow that he’d used in Ecuador to fend off snakes and thieves. William Cross, “Robert McKenzie Cross: Botanical Explorer, Kew Gardens: Chronology: The Years Robert Cross Spent at Home and Abroad,” p. 6 of 7; Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports 5: Madras-Chinchona, 1860-97, “Letter from Robert Cross to Clements Markham, July 21, 1882,” file folder 131 and 132. The article in the Nilgiri Express and an account of Cross’s last years in his cottage are carried in William Cross, “Robert McKenzie Cross: Botanical Explorer, Kew Gardens—Last Years at West Cottage Torrance of Campsie,” p. 2, www.scottishdisasters.tripod.com/robertmckenziecrossbotanicalexplorerkewgardens.

205. that nearly doubled production every five, then every three years Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Wealth: Four Plants That Made Men Rich (London: Macmillan, 2003), p. 134.

206. More than half of these were Henry Ford’s Model Ts Hobhouse, Seeds of Wealth, p. 131.

207. They pitched it John R. Millburn and Keith Jarrott, The Aylesbury Agitator: Edward Richardson: Labourer’s Friend and Queensland Agent, 1849-1878 (Aylesbury, Queensland, Australia: Buckingham County Council, 1988), pp. 28-31. Archives of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

207. the violence in the Australian frontier claimed the lives “Statistics of Wars, Oppression and Atrocities in the Nineteenth Century,” http://users.erol.com/mwhite28/wars19c.htm.

208. Carl Lumholtz, a Norwegian anthropologist Carl Lumholtz’s Among Cannibals (London, 1890), is quoted in G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queens to 1920 (Sydney: Australian National University Press, 1970), p. 95.

208. “There is nothing extraordinary in it” The Queensland Figaro is quoted in Raymond Evans, “ ‘Kings’ in Brass Crescents: Defining Aboriginal Labour Patterns in Colonial Queensland,” in Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920, Kay Saunders, ed. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 196.

208. “These children are brought in and tied up” Ibid., p. 196.

208. “a runaway black child could be hunted and brought back” Ibid., p. 199.

209. “in spite of the restrictions on board” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 6.

209. his real hope was to cultivate the leaf Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part V—Pioneering in North Queensland” (Jan. 2, 1954), p. 17.

209. It cost about £110 J. C. R. Camm, “Farm-making Costs in Southern Queensland, 1890-1915,” Australian Geographical Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (1974), p. 177.

209. “Dear Land,” as they called it Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 165-167. The Crown Land Act of 1868 and the Homestead Act allowed the selection of 80- to 160-acre homesteads, and records show that about 3 million acres were taken. But about half of this went to 267 people, which translated into vast sugar plantations and, in the north, cattle ranches.

209. “assured him if he could produce that quality” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 7.

210. “once more there was the old work of cutting down the site for the house” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 7.

210. “which rather amused his neighbors” Ibid.

210. “When the dew was off I set fire to it” Ibid.

210. “Saddles, flour, etc., might have been saved” Ibid., p. 9.

210. “leaked the whole way” Ibid., p. 10.

211. “Rain does not express it” Ibid., p. 9.

211. “After having burnt out, it seemed necessary for me to try the water cure” Ibid., p. 10.

211. “I fell asleep” Ibid.

212. “cutting off the leaves and young shoots . . . even on the other side of the creek” Ibid., p. 9.

212. farmers discovered that if they could get the victim drunk on rum Charles H. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland: An Eight Year’s Experience in the Above Colony, with Some Account of Polynesian Labour (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), pp. 146-147.

212. “You may imagine I slipped out of it as quickly and quietly as I could” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 9.

213. “The fowls are just having bad dreams” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 8.

213. “Directions for Tobacco Growing and Curing in North Queensland” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part V—Pioneering in North Queensland,” p. 17.

213. “I did not need anyone with me” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 8.

213. “though I expect I considerably scandalized those neighbors” Ibid.

214. a number of government commissions The regulations enacted for Kanaka labor can be found in the following sources: Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part V—Pioneering in North Queensland,” pp. 17-18; G. C. Bolton, Planters and Pacific Islanders (Croydon, Victoria, Australia: Longman’s, 1967), pp. 22-23; G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queens to 1920 (Sydney: Australian National University Press, 1970), pp. 79-83; “Queensland Sugar Industry,” MacKay Mercury, Sept. 25, 1878; and the Royal Commonwealth Society Archives, Cuttings of the Queensland Sugar Industry, GBR/0115/RCMS 294.

214. “The Kanaka is at best a savage” “The Labour Question,” The Queenslander, May 14, 1881. Royal Commonwealth Society Archives, Cuttings of the Queensland Sugar Industry, GBR/0115/RCMS 294.

214. “A favorite device . . . was to hold up two or three fingers” Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, p. 79.

214. “breaking in” Ibid.

215. From 1883 to 1885, nearly seven thousand people were kidnapped or duped Kay Saunders, “The Workers’ Paradox: Indentured Labour in the Queensland Sugar Industry to 1920,” in Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834-1920, Kay Saunders, ed. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 226.

215. “The chief Magistrate of the district” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 7.

215. “[W]e found them trustworthy” Ibid., pp. 7-8.

216. “I have often wondered . . . whether it was not a plot” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part V—Pioneering in North Queensland,” p. 19.

216. “probably little more than sufficient for the fares home” Ibid.

Chapter 11: The Talking Cross

217. “agreed to join a friend in journeying to British Honduras” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 126 (Jan. 9, 1954), p. 17.

217. “I let him go back some six months in advance” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 11.

218. a world record The James Stafford’s passage across the Pacific was a record for sailing ships that would stand until 1995.

218. the origin of Belize City Sir Eric Swayne, “British Honduras,” Geographical Journal, vol. 50, no. 3 (Sept. 1917), p. 162; John C. Everitt, “The Growth and Development of Belize City,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (May 1986), p. 78.

219. logwood sold for about £100 a ton Swayne, “British Honduras,” p. 162; David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), p. 150. Cordingly puts the trade in perspective. Logwood was profitable, but not the most profitable trade of the time. During the same period, the colonies of Virginia and Maryland were together exporting seventy thousand hogs-heads of tobacco annually worth £300,000 each year. “Log cutting was always a minor industry carried on by a few hundred ex-seamen and pirates in a remote corner of the globe,” Cordingly said (p. 150), but in British Honduras at the time, it was the only game in town.

219. By 1705, the British shipped most of their logwood from the Belize River area According to a government report, some 4,965 tons of logwood were exported to England from 1713 to 1716 at no less than £60,000 per annum. By 1725, the production had increased to 18,000 tons a year.

219. mahogany exports climbed to twelve thousand tons Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600-1914, A Case Study in British Informal Empire (London: Associated University Presses, 1989), p. 103.

220. the white population dropped from 4 percent in 1845 to 1 percent in 1881 Everitt, “The Growth and Development of Belize City,” p. 93, file folder 85.

220. “monied cutters” Ibid., p. 90.

221. the colony’s treasury, which had a £90,000 surplus Everitt, “The Growth and Development of Belize City,” p. 96. Actually, the public works improvements that cast Goldsworthy as the villain had been conceived before he arrived. Known as the Siccama Plan of 1880, named after Baron Siccama, the engineer who devised it, this was a comprehensive and ambitious scheme for municipal improvements that proposed filling in low-lying lots, increasing water-storage facilities, building a pier, and dredging the canals, which had not been cleaned since the 1860s. It is easy to see why the government had a surplus. It had never addressed these major problems, which ran quickly through the surplus when the Siccama Plan was begun. Because of the controversy, the plan was abandoned, and Belize returned to its old pattern of squalor and decay through the rest of the century.

221. “never for one moment ceased to be a friend of the least reputable portion” Wayne M. Clegern, British Honduras, Colonial Dead End, 1859-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 80, quoting the October 4, 1890 Colonial Guardian.

221. The governor was fond of the rubber thief Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 17.

221. Goldsworthy may have prayed that he’d never have to return When he left the Colonial Offices at Government House, he received a military salute from an honor guard, but as his barge steered past the breakwater, the crowd collected there hissed and jeered. Goldsworthy responded with a “sardonic” gesture, and that unleashed a storm. Some women and children tried to throw stones from the roadside, but the police prevented that, so they rushed into the lagoon, plucked rocks from the bottom and began chucking them at the barge. The crew of the barge pulled for all their worth to escape being pelted; when they reached the steamer, a lighter passed and on it a citizen held up a white banner with the words “Catfish Still Uneaten” in red letters, a reference to Goldsworthy’s comment that “he’d make the people eat catfish before he was done with them.” The steamer took an hour to get under way: the crowds at the wharf jeered and hooted; the lighter circled and circled, dipping its flag. Clegern, British Honduras, Colonial Dead End, 1859-1900, p. 78, quoting the October 23, 1886, Colonial Guardian.

221. “Whether it was simply a matter of completing a routine tour of duty” Ibid., p. 80.

222. “A friend and I persuaded him to take a Government post” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 12.

222. Henry did a little of everything National Archives, Kew, Honduras Gazette, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1893. CO 127/6,7, & 8: Honduras Gazette, May 7, 1887, p. 78; Honduras Gazette, Dec. 17, 1887; Honduras Gazette, May 12, 1888, p. 81; Honduras Gazette, Dec. 15, 1888, p. 215; Honduras Gazette, May 4, 1889, p. 75.

222. In 1890, he became inspector of forests Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 17.

222. “Being in contact with the Governor I was invited” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 11.

223. “Mr. Wickham is a large-framed idealist, dreamy, sympathetic” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 17.

224. “I believe [Peck’s] errand to be somewhat fanciful” National Archives, Kew, Colonial Office: British Honduras, Register of Correspondence, 1883-1888, CO 348/10. Despatch No. 5: “Mission of Mr. J. B. Peck of New York to British Honduras,” Sir Roger Goldsworthy, January 17, 1888. What follows is the text of Goldsworthy’s dispatch to the Foreign Office, showing his amusement and naming Wickham as the dig’s watchdog:

Sir:

I have the honor to inform you that a schooner-rigged yacht the “Maria” arrived at this port in the 28th Ultimo from New York, in charge of a Mr. John Benjamin Peck, said to be a special Treasury agent of the United States.
On the day of his arrival the mails from America brought news that Mr. Peck’s journey to Belize, though supposed to be in search of hidden treasure, was in reality connected with some filibustering expedition against the neighboring friendly republic of Honduras.
Mr. Peck’s action, on arrival, in endeavouring to enter into a business agreement with the Belize Estate and Produce Company in relation to his intention to search for treasure on lands belonging to that company and his subsequent steps to secure my approval, subject to such conditions as I might wish to impose, appeared sufficient proof to me, apart from the visit of two Customs House officers on board the “Maria” to ascertain whether he was armed, that Mr. Peck’s object was seemingly what he represented it to be, and that there was, at least at present, no hostile intentions to be apprehended.
I informed the Consuls of Guatemala and Honduras accordingly, letting them understand that any news I might receive contrary to these convictions should be at once communicated to them, and they have expressed themselves gratified by the courtesy shown to their governments by my action.
I enclose a copy of the agreement that I entered into with Mr. Peck in the event of his finding another “Solomon’s Mines” and you will observe that it has been drawn up so as to meet the possible case of treasure trove being found on Crown Lands when I would claim the whole on behalf of the Crown under the common law of England, subject to surrender in part or whole under subsequent arrangement—Mr. Wickham accompanies the expedition on behalf of the Government as a precautionary measure.
I enclose herein copy of a despatch which I have addressed to Sir Lionel Sackville, British Minister at Washington.

I have the honor to be, Sir,
Your most obedient, humble servant,
Roger Tuckfield Goldsworthy, Governor

224. eight hundred thousand dollars in gold specie A list of shipwrecks along the Belizean coast is found in “Overview of Belizean History,” www.ambergriscaye.com/fieldguide/history2.html.

224. An iron human skeleton Lindsay W. Bristowe, Handbook of British Honduras for 1891-1892, Comprising Historical, Statistical and General Information Concerning the Colony (London: William Blackwood, 1891), p. 46.

224-25. “[Henry] believes they really were on the spot” . . . with all hands during a gale Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 18; Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 18.

225. “[W]ild tales are told of men” Swayne, “British Honduras,” p. 167.

225. jumped in the channel and swam home Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 18. Author’s note: Lacking Violet’s thoughts, I asked my wife, Kathy, what her response would be. “Being gone a night is a lot better than dead,” she replied.

225. “Strange as it may seem in a colony so old” J. Bellamy, “Report on the Expedition to the Corkscrew Mountains,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, vol. 11, no. 9 (Sept. 1889), p. 552. Original in Royal Geographical Society Archives, JMS/5/73.

226. “congested state of the mother country” Ibid.

226. “impossible . . . to recover lost ground” Swayne, “British Honduras,” pp. 164-165.

226. “Mr. Wickham continued the ascent” Bellamy, “Report on the Expedition to the Corkscrew Mountains,” p. 549.

226-27. “the final ascent became in sensation very like crawling over the edge of a great sponge” Bristowe, Handbook of British Honduras for 1891-1892, p. 24.

227. “returning with the good news of his success” Bellamy, “Report on the Expedition to the Corkscrew Mountains,” p. 549.

227. “having recovered sufficient breath” Ibid., p. 550.

227. “During the night one of the Carib porters” Ibid.

228. In 1850, the Mayan insurgents were on the brink of defeat Information on the Caste War of the Yucatán, Chan Santa Cruz, and the Talking Cross comes from a variety of sources: Nelson A. Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); “Chan Santa Cruz,” www.absoluteastronomy.com; “Caste War of the Yucatan: Information from Answers.Com,” www.answers.com; “Northern Belize—The Caste War of the Yucatan and Northern Belize,” www.northernbelize.com; “Historic Folk Saints,” http://upea.utb.edu/elnino/researcharticles/historicfolksainthood.html; J. M. Rosado, “A Refugee of the War of the Castes Makes Belize His Home,” The Memoirs of J. M. Rosado, ed. Richard Buhler, Occasional Publication No. 2, Belize Institute for Social Research and Action, (Belize: Berex Press, 1977); Archives of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London; Swayne, “British Honduras,” p. 164; Jennifer L. Dornan, “Document Based Account of the Caste War,” www.bol.ucla.edu/~jdornan/castewar.html; Jeanine Kitchel, “Tales from the Yucatan,” in www.planeta.com/ecotravel/mexico/yucatan/tales; “Statistics of Wars, Oppression and Atrocities in the Nineteenth Century,” http://users.erol.com/mwhite28/wars19c.htm, quoting “Correlates of War Project,” www.correlatesofwar.org.

228. The Talking cross was not God Himself, but Santo Jesucristo, God’s intermediary Spanish “testimonials” from the Cross were written for the Chosen. The most famous and important promised that the whites would lose and the People of the Cross would win.

229. “We are . . . a people living under our own laws” National Archives, Kew, Colonial Office: British Honduras, Register of Correspondence, 1883-1888, CO 348/10. Despatch No. 11, Enclosure 2: “A Statement by the Santa Cruz Indians,” January 8, 1888.

229. “When I arrived there he had just lost the sight of one eye” William Miller, “A Journey from British Honduras to Santa Cruz, Yucatan, with a map,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, vol. 11, no. 1 (Jan. 1889), p. 27. The handwritten copy of this article, with changes and a map, are preserved in the Archives of the Royal Geographical Society, London, JMS/5/74: received July 1888.

229. “[T]he governor, fearing a raid by the Santa Cruz Indians” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 18.

230. The Cross sat in the center in profound darkness Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan, p. 266. The description of the Ceremony of the Cross is culled from the accounts of several witnesses over the years.

231. “Alas . . . back came [Henry’s] old longing for plantation life” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 11.

231. Five houses were located on the Temash River British Honduras, Report and Results of the Census of the Colony of British Honduras, taken April 5th, 1891 (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1892), p. 11. Archives of the Institute of Colonial Studies, University of London.

231-32. “as the man who brought the rubber seeds from the Amazon” National Archives, Kew, Colonial Office and Predecessors: British Honduras, Original Correspondence 1744-1951, “Mr. H. A. Wickham’s Temash Concession, (Pleadings in court case),” 1892. CO 123/200.

232. “value to the extent of $10,000 to consist of India Rubber trees” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 19.

232. In 1889-90, fever swept through Belize Bristowe, Handbook of British Honduras for 1891-1892, pp. 30-31.

232. “maliciously fabricating false reports to the detriment of the colony” Ibid., p. 33.

232. “as nearly as possible died” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 11.

232. “He lived contentedly enough” Ibid., p. 12.

233. the editor was ordered to pay court costs Bristowe, Handbook of British Honduras for 1891-1892, p. 33.

233. the sale or lease of land to small settlers like Henry Swayne, “British Honduras,” p. 170.

233. his account books showed a monthly balance between $13 and $47.96 Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 18.

234. His replacement, Sir C. Alfred Maloney, made twelve thousand pounds Bristowe, Handbook of British Honduras for 1891-1892, p. 13.

234. “honest men, as a rule, [kept] aloof ” Clegern, British Honduras, Colonial Dead End, 1859-1900, p. 80, quoting the Colonial Guardian of October 4, 1890.

235. “great and rare experience” National Archives, Kew, Colonial Office and Predecessors: British Honduras, Original Correspondence 1744-1951, “Mr. H. A. Wickham’s Temash Concession, (Pleadings in court case).”

235. In 1892, Victoria had been on the throne for fifty-five years Hector Bolitho, ed., Further Letters of Queen Victoria: From the Archives of the House of Brandenburg-Prussia, trans. Mrs. J. Pudney and Lord Sudley (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1971, first printed 1938), pp. 259-261.

235. Victoria understood perfectly the importance of her colonies Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (London: Penguin, 1971, first published 1921), pp. 236-242.

236. “Let Justice be done. Victoria R. & I” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VI—Pioneering in British Honduras,” p. 19.

Chapter 12: Rubber Madness

237. on September 7, the courts awarded him $14,500 in damages” National Archives, Kew, Colonial Office and Predecessors: British Honduras, Original Correspondence 1744-1951, “State of Wickham’s Case,” 1893. CO 123/281.

237. A hurricane hammered the colony that summer National Archives, Kew, Colonial Office and Predecessors: British Honduras, Original Correspondence 1744-1951, “Damage Caused by Gale,” 1893. CO 123/204.

237. “His keen analytical mind and authoritarian manner” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VII—The Conflict Islands and New Guinea,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 126 (Jan. 16, 1954), p. 10.

238. “appalling roughness . . . I have encountered nowhere such difficulties as in New Guinea” Henry O. Forbes, “British New Guinea as a Colony,” Blackwoods Magazine, vol. 152 (July 1892), p. 85.

238. “great and salubrious ‘Treasure Island’ ” Ibid., p. 82.

238. on the island of Samarai Arthur Watts Allen, “The Occupational Adventures of an Observant Nomad,” an unpublished memoir written by Allen and kept in the care of David Harris and Jenepher Allen Harris. The author has not seen the book, which is apparently uncopied and in fragile shape, but the Harrises described its contents in detail in an e-mail message dated December 30, 2006.

239. “like the Cocos Islands, in the Indian Ocean” J. Douglas, “Notes on a Recent Cruise through the Louisiade Group of Islands,” Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia, Victorian Branch, vol. 5, part 1 (March 1888), p. 55.

239. The islands varied in size The description of the islands and central lagoon is found in “The Conflict Islands,” www.conflictislands.net.

239. “business is a dirty one but profitable” Quoted in Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, p. 141.

240. Sir William Macgregor “MacGregor, Sir William,” www.electricscotland.com.

240. According to a tale told to distant relatives Arthur Watts Allen, “The Occupational Adventures of an Observant Nomad,” Chapter 1.

241. “This gentleman has been making trial of the sponges” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VII—The Conflict Islands and New Guinea, ” p. 8.

241. “roughly ceiled to make a loft or sleeping place” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 12.

242. First there were spongesThe Sponging Industry, A booklet of the Exhibition of Historical Documents held at the Public Records Office (Nassau, Bahamas: Public Records Office, 1974), Archives of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

242. This was planting coconut palms, from which he sold copra “Coconuts and Copra,” www.msstarship.com/sciencenew.

243. “Then they turn it on its back” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 12.

243. “not a locality where anyone would, or could, work Mother-of-Pearl” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VII—The Conflict Islands and New Guinea, ” p. 9.

244. “During the whole time of my sojourn there” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 12.

244. “We expected to be respected, have privileges, be superior” Colonist Judy Tudor is quoted in James A. Boutilier, “European Women in the Solomon Islands, 1900-1942: Accommodation and Change on the Pacific Frontier,” in Rethinking Women’s Roles: Perspectives from the Pacific, Denise O’Brien and Sharon W. Tiffany, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 181; also, Chilla Bulbeck, Staying in Line or Getting Out of Place: The Experiences of Expatriate Women in Papua New Guinea 1920-1960:

Issues of Race and Gender (London: Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1988), Working Papers in Australian Studies, no. 35.

244. “shaped like the claws of a crab” Basil H. Thomson, “New Guinea: Narrative of an Exploring Expedition to the Louisiade and D’Entrecasteaux Islands,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, vol. 11, no. 9 (Sept. 1889), p. 527.

244. “I did not come in contact with their family life” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 12.

245. “boy-proof ” sleeping rooms, enclosed in heavy chicken wire Bulbeck, Staying in Line or Getting Out of Place, p. 8.

245. “a few Government weatherboard buildings” Forbes, “British New Guinea as a Colony,” pp. 91-92.

245. “we woke to find our boys had gone off with one of the boats” Violet Wickham, “Lady Wickham’s Diary,” p. 13.

246. cannibal tales served as an “agenda” Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 28-29.

246. As late as 1901, the missionary James Chalmers Diane Langmore, “James Chalmers: Missionary,” in Papua New Guinea Portraits: The Expatriate Experience, ed. James Griffin (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press, 1978), p. 24.

247. North American rubber imports jumped . . . half of all the rubber produced in the world Michael Edward Stanfield, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), pp. 20-21.

247. £14 million in rubber that came down the Rio Negro Collier, The River that God Forgot, p. 18.

248. “I ought to have chosen rubber” Ibid., p. 19.

248. The “trade gun” became notorious Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, pp. 139-140.

249. an estimated 131,000-149,000 men were tapping from 21.4 million hevea trees Bradford L. Barham and Oliver T. Coomes. “Wild Rubber: Industrial Organisation and the Microeconomics of Extraction During the Amazon Rubber Boom (1860-1920),” Journal of Latin American Studies (Feb. 1994), vol. 26, no. 1, p. 41.

249. the average tapper produced about 1,750 pounds a year Charles H. Townsend, Report on the Brazilian Rubber Situation (Belterra, Pará, Brazil, May 17, 1958), p. 3. Other sources estimated that, based on a 100-day season, the average tapper would harvest 550-660 pounds of rubber (Barham and Coomes, “Wild Rubber,” p. 45); J. Oakenfull, Brazil in 1912 (London: Robert Atkinson, 1913), p. 189.

249. A January 1899 report by the U.S. Consul in ParáU.S. Consular Reports, vol. 59, no. 220 (Jan. 1899), p. 70.

249. Death rates as high as 50 percent were recorded Barham and Coomes, “Wild Rubber,” pp. 10, 36ff.

250. “400 tame Mundurucu Indians” Barbara Weinstein, “The Persistance of Precapitalist Relations of Production in a Tropical Export Economy: The Amazon Rubber Trade, 1850-1920,” in Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson, ed., Proletarians and Protest: the Roots of Class Formation in an Industrializing World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 2-3.

250. “model, prosperous plantation” Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), p. 28.

250. “I have made enough to live well on” Ibid.

251. in 1884, he planted rubber, and by 1910, this had grown J. T. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis; the Taking of Rubber Seeds out of the Amazon,” Economic Botany 22 (Oct-Dec., 1968), p. 384; Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, pp. 28-29.

251. Tapajós Pará Rubber Forests Ltd. National Archives, Kew, “Articles of Association, Tapajós Pará Rubber Forests Ltd.,” BT 31/8165/59032.

251. an economic expansion so rapid and comprehensive William Schell Jr., “American Investment in Tropical Mexico: Rubber Plantations, Fraud, and Dollar Diplomacy, 1897-1913,” Business History Review, vol. 64 (Summer 1990), p. 223.

252. Journalists were hired to write copy that sold confidence instead of value Schell, “American Investment in Tropical Mexico,” p. 223.

252. A monthly investment of $5-$150 assured an annual income of $500-$5,000” Ibid., p. 224, quoting “Why Do You Remain Satisfied?”—an advertisement for the Mexican Development and Construction Co. of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in Modern Mexico (1901).

252. the Peru Pará Rubber Company, with a reported capital of $3 million John Melby, “Rubber River: An Account of the Rise and Collapse of the Amazon Boom,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 22, no. 3 (Aug. 1942), p. 465.

252. Lucille Wetherall, who, like thousands of others, lost her life savings Ibid., p. 227. 252. enriched the state’s treasury by as much as £1.6 million annually Collier, The River that God Forgot, p. 21.

253. the city’s per capita diamond consumption Collier, The River that God Forgot, p. 26.

253. The leading stores catering to women bore French names Burns, “Manaus 1910: Portrait of a Boom Town,” p. 403.

254. Every Sunday, the Derby Club held horse races Robin Ferneaux, The Amazon: The Story of a Great River (New York: Putnam’s, 1969), pp. 151-155.

254. Another paid four hundred pounds for a ride in the city’s only Mercedes Benz Collier, The River that God Forgot, p. 17.

254. 133 rubber firms and buyers Burns, “Manaus 1910: Portrait of a Boom Town,” p. 415. Although 133 people and firms bought and sold rubber in Manaus, ten of these dominated the market. They are listed here in order of the amount of rubber they exported in 1910:

254. “clear vision, incomparable energy, and extraordinary activity” Ibid., p. 416.

255. “a crusade worthy of this century of progress” Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood, p. 54.

256. “It is collected by force; the soldiers drive the people into the bush” Ibid.

256. “The most rigid injunctions enforcing free trades” Ibid.

256. “[I]t is the call to brutality which comes from above” Ibid, pp. 55-56.

257. “One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off ” From “Atrocities in the Congo: The Casement Report, 1903,” http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien.

257. That equalled one life per every 5 kilograms, a little more than the amount used in one automobile tire Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood, p. 56.

258. “The insatiable desire to obtain the greatest production in the least time” Ibid., p. 64.

259. “He grasped his carbine and machete and began the slaughter” Walter E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo, the Devil’s Paradise (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), p. 260.

260. “advances, bends down, takes the Indian by the hair” Ibid., p. 236.

260. “I have seen Indians tied to a tree, their feet about half a yard above the ground” Ibid.

260. “designed . . . to just stop short of taking life” Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Terror,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 26, no. 3 (1984), p. 477. Taussig quotes Roger Casement’s report, “Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in the Putumayo District,” House of Commons Seasonal Papers, Feb. 14, 1912 to March 7, 1913, vol. 68, p. 35.

260. mothers were beaten for “just a few strokes” to make them better workers Ibid, p. 477, quoting Casement’s report, p. 17.

260. “that a man might be a man in Iquitos, but ‘you couldn’t be a man up there’ ” Ibid., p. 478, quoting Casement, p. 55.

261. “Rubber has taken the blood, the health, and the peace of our people” Louis Mosch, “Rubber Pirates of the Amazon,” Living Age, vol. 345 (Nov. 1933), p. 223.

261. Allen was twenty-three Allen, “Occupational Adventures.”

Chapter 13: The Vindicated Man

263.maki Henry Wickham, “The Introduction and Cultivation of the Hevea in India,” India-Rubber and Gutta-Percha Trades Journal, vol. 23 (Jan. 20, 1902), p. 82.

263. He invented a machine for smoke-curing latex Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IX—Closing Years,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 126 (Jan. 30, 1954), p. 6.

263. He invented a three-bladed tapping knife Ibid., p. 5.

263. “most valuable,” “quick-growing” tree Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VIII—Piqui-Á and Arghan,” India Rubber Journal, vol. 126 (Jan. 23, 1954), p. 7.

263. “of at least equal magnitude to that of Pará rubber” Ibid.

264. the Irai Company Ltd. Ibid., p. 9.

264. “Its salt-water-resisting qualities are remarkable” Ibid.

264. “there would be sufficient demand in Lancashire alone to take up the production” “Arghan Company, Limited. Commercial Value of the Fibre,” Times (London) , April 4, 1922, p. 20.

264. “All of us know what a good thing he has done for this country” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part VIII—Piqui-Á and Arghan,” p. 9.

266. He observed the techniques used there for tapping rubber Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, pp. 30-31.

267. “at least eight English thumbs deep” Simon Winchester, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 (London: Viking, 2003), p. 223.

268. “little regard for those who did not share his views on botanical matters” D.J.M. Tate, The RGA History of the Plantation Industry in the Malay Peninsula (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 201.

268. “Never mind your body, man, plant these instead!” O. D. Gallagher, “Rubber Pioneer in his Hundredth Year,” Observer (London), June 20, 1955; also, Henry N. Ridley, “Evolution of the Rubber Industry,” Proceedings of the Institution of the Rubber Industry, vol. 2, no. 5 (Oct. 1955), p. 117.

268. “I looked on him as a ‘failed’ planter” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IX—Closing Years,” p. 7.

268. “like junket . . . toffee in vacuum driers” Wolf and Wolf, Rubber: A Story of Glory and Greed, p. 162.

268-69. “sometime commissioner for the introduction of the Pará (Hevea) Indian Rubber Tree” Ibid., p. 161.

269. “almost with the air of looking down paternally on his ‘children’ ” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IX—Closing Years,” p. 7.

269. “Turning over what you said to me in the path-ways yesterday” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, Miscellaneous Reports: India Office: Caoutchouc I, “Letter from Wickham to Sir Thistleton-Dyer at Kew, Sept. 4, 1901,” file folder 131.

270. In 1905, Ceylon was still the world leader In 1905, Ceylon had 40,000 acres planted with hevea, while Malaya had 38,000; by 1907, Ceylon had 150,000 while Malaya had 179,227. Ceylon’s plantings stalled after that, totaling 188,000 acres in 1910, while Malaya’s acreage totaled 400,000. Herbert Wright, Hevea Brasiliensis, or Para Rubber: Its Botany, Cultivation, Chemistry and Diseases (London: Maclaren & Sons, 1912), p. 79. Wright traces the race between the two countries in the following table:

Malaya Takes Premier Position

It will be instructive to compare the planted acreages, under Hevea, in the two leading countries—Ceylon and Malaya:

271. By 1905, the Straits Settlements were known as the “melting pot” of Asia Frederick Simpich, “Singapore, Crossroads of the East: The World’s Greatest Mart for Rubber and Tin was in Recent Times a Pirate-Haunted, Tiger-Infested Jungle Isle,” National Geographic, March 1926, p. 241.

271. They strolled around Singapore in their golf brogues W. Arthur Wilson. “Malaya—Mostly Gay: All About Rubber: A Guide for Griffins,” British Malaya, February 1928, pp. 264.

271. Between 1844 and 1910, some 250,000 indentured Indian laborers Ravindra K. Jain, “South Indian Labour in Malaya, 1840-1920: Asylum, Stability and Involution,” in Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834-1920, Kay Saunders, ed. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p.162.

271. “Coolies lines, each room 12 ft. by 12 ft.” Ibid., p. 164, quoting the Selangar Journal of 1894.

272. “Tamils are . . . cheap and easily managed” T. L. Gilmour, “Life on a Malayan Rubber Plantation,” the Field; found in “Cuttings from the Field,” Royal Commonwealth Society Collection, GBR/0115/RCMS 322/11: Malaya.

272. “is a pleasant one” Ibid.

272. plantation rubber was beginning to catch the eye Randolph Resor, “Rubber in Brazil: Dominance and Collapse, 1876-1945,” Business History Review, vol. 51, no. 3 (Autumn, 1977), p. 349.

272. “Mr. Wickham is no longer a young man” Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), p. 653.

273. “Wickham never sermonized; he just talked” “Palia Dorai.” “The Early Days of Rubber: Memories of Henry Wickham,” British Malaya, vol. 14, no. 12 (April 1940), p. 243.

273. “Having learned your address from the present director of Kew” Royal Botanic Gardens-Kew, J. D. Hooker Correspondence, vol. 21, “Wickham to Hooker, Aug. 10th, 1906, London,” file folder 120.

273. “My Fellow Planters and Foresters” Henry Wickham, On the Plantation, Cultivation and Curing of Pará Indian Rubber, frontispiece.

273. “I was at that time, as one before my time—as one crying in the wilderness” Ibid., pp. 54-57.

274. In April 1910, it reached its peak at $3.06, and the world’s rubber consumers let out a howl In 1910, the Amazon accounted for over half of the world’s 83,000 tons of wild rubber, and almost all of it high-quality hevea. Africa and Mexico accounted for the rest, with much lower grades of rubber, while the British plantations of the East accounted for a mere 11,000 tons. Although the United States bought 30 percent of the Amazon’s rubber, Britain was still the best customer. In 1905-1909, the empire’s imports of Brazilian rubber far surpassed its other imports from that country; during that time, it shipped £32 million in rubber out of a total £45 million in imports from Brazil.

274. “The Rubber Market continued to astonish” Quoted in Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood, p. 58.

274. “It is a maddening revel of speculation” Ibid., pp. 58-59.

274. “New companies continue to be floated” Ibid., p. 59.

274. Banks in Pará Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, p. 159.

275. In the face of such need, it seemed . . . that rubber profits could only soar In 1910, for example, the rubber barons in Manaus were finishing up their biggest decade of export ever. They’d shipped some 345,079 tons of rubber abroad, 100,000 more than they’d shipped in the previous decade. In 1910 alone, 38,000 tons went to New York, Liverpool, Le Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp, the world’s principal markets. Sixty percent of the rubber sold in New York was Brazilian, and by 1915 the U.S. would buy six times more rubber than Great Britain, eight times more than France or Russia, and twelve times more than Italy or Germany. The price per pound reached its 1910 zenith in April when rubber sold for $2.90 a pound. The price dropped after that, but not enough to depress the market—the average price for 1910 would be $2.01 per pound, compared to the $1.60 average in 1909 and $1.18 in 1908. Bradford L. Barham and Oliver T. Coomes, Prosperity’s Promise: The Amazon Rubber Boom and Distorted Economic Development, Dellplain Latin American Studies, no. 34, David J. Robinson, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 32. Prices quoted from “India Rubber World and Electrical Trades Review” (Nov. 15, 1890; Nov. 1, 1900; Nov. 1, 1905; Nov. 1, 1910).

275. By 1912, the world had 1.085 million acres planted in rubber Herbert Wright, Hevea Brasiliensis, or Para Rubber: Its Botany, Cultivation, Chemistry and Diseases (London: Maclaren & Sons, 1912), p. 45. The following table gives a breakdown of where plantation rubber was grown in 1912:

Hevea from Wickham’s seeds was cultivated in East Asia. Elsewhere in the world, planters produced rubber from Castilloa, Ficus, Manihot, Landolphia, and Funtimia, but the quality of these types of rubber was never considered as high.

276. spent it all on grandiose palaces and payoffs to politicians Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 47.

276. “inexhaustible natural supplies” and the “unrivaled quality” of “Pará fine” Ibid.

276. “Yankee speculators” Ibid.

277. “English firm of gilt-edged bond folk” J. T. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis,” p. 383.

277. Sometimes those who remained tried to recapture the ostentatious dream The sources for this account of the Bust include:

Economic reasons for the Bust: Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, pp. 154-167; Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, pp. 36-52; James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber (New York: Harper, 1931), pp. 12-18; W. C. Holmes, “The Tragedy of the Amazon,” Rubber Age, vol. 9, no. 1 (April 10, 1921), pp. 11-16; John Melby, “Rubber River: An Account of the Rise and Collapse of the Amazon Boom,” pp. 452-469; Mason, Cauchu, the Weeping Wood, pp. 58-59.

Santarém and Boim: David Bowman Riker, “Handwritten Narrative,” in David Afton Riker’s O Último Confederado na Amazõnia (Brazil, 1983), pp. 111-129; Interview with Elisio Eden Cohen, postmaster and historian of Boim, Oct. 21, 2005.

Manaus: E. Bradford Burns, “Manaus 1910: Portrait of a Boom Town,” pp. 400-421; Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 151-156.

Iquitos: Harry L. Foster, “Ghost Cities of the Jungle,” New York Herald Tribune, Sunday magazine section, March 20, 1932.

Obidos: Eric B. Ross, “The Evolution of the Amazon Peasantry,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (1978), p. 215.

278. nations do not generally raise more than perfunctory complaints Bernard Porter, Britain, Europe, and the World, 1850-1986: Delusions of Grandeur (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 60.

278. “The fight for raw materials plays the most important part in world politics” Jacob Viner, “National Monopolies of Raw Materials,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 4 (July 1926), p. 585. Viner quotes Dr. Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, in an interview in the March 26, 1926 New York Times.

279. By the end of the war, American factories would churn out 3.9 million gas masks William Chauncey Geer, The Reign of Rubber (New York: Century, 1922), p. 309.

279. The face piece Ibid., p. 303.

279. Observers in balloons watched overhead Ibid., p. 312.

280. the United States imported 333.8 million pounds of rubber Harvey Samuel Firestone, America Should Produce Its Own Rubber (Akron, OH: Harvey S. Firestone, 1923), p. 5. Firestone quotes U.S. Department of Commerce records and the London Financier, respectively.

280. This meant that in two months alone, Ford required 78,800 sets of tiresFord Times, vol. 8, no. 10 (July 1914), p. 474.

281. by introducing the Stevenson Rubber Restriction Plan Voon Phin-keong, American Rubber Planting Enterprise in the Philippines, 1900-1930 (London: University of London, Department of Geography, 1977), p. 22.

281. “I am going to fight this law with all the strength that is in me” Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, p. 232.

282. That meant a $150 million increase “to the crude rubber bill to the United States for 1923” Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933 (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), p. 231.

282. “in the future Americans can produce their own rubber” Coates, The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, p. 233.

282. “the play an Olympian cast of characters” Ibid.

282. the United States alone had imported 2.7 billion pounds of rubber for $1.16 billion Firestone, America Should Produce Its Own Rubber, p. 5. Firestone is quoting U.S. Department of Commerce figures for 1922.

283. “for services in connexion with the rubber plantation industry in the Far East” “The King’s Birthday. First List of Honours. No Ministerial Dinner,” Times (London), June 3, 1920, p. 18. Also, London Gazette, June 4, 1920, second supplement, p. 6315.

283. “were loaded by stealth in a small steamer under the nose of a gunboat” “Death of Sir H. Wickham,” Planter, vol. 9, no 3 (1928), p. 85.

284. In 1876, the Brazilian Navy had seventy vessels of warThe Empire of Brazil at the Universal Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia e Lithographia do Imperial Insitituto Artistico, 1876), p. 144.

285. Edgar Byrum Davis was odd even by American standards The tale of Edgar B. Davis can be found in several sources: Robert Gaston, “Edgar B. Davis and the Discovery of the Luling Oilfield,” URL: www4.drillinginfo.com; “Handbook of Texas Online: Luling Oilfield,” www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook; “Handbook of Texas Online: Edgar Byrum Davis,” www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook; “Money from God,” Time (Sept. 2, 1935), www.TIME.com; Henry C. Dethloff, “Edgar B. Davis and Sequences in Business Capitalism: From Shoes to Rubber to Oil, a Review,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 60, no. 4 (Nov. 1994), pp. 829-830; James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber (New York: Harper, 1931), pp. 30-32; Frank Robert Chalk, The United States and the International Struggle for Rubber, 1914-1941 (Dissertation, Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1970), pp. 6-8.

286. “made a killing in oil” Quincy Tucker, “A Commentary on the Biography of Sir Henry Wickham,” sidebar to Edward Valentine Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” Rubber Age, vol. 73 (Aug. 1953), p. 653.

287. “America is paying the bills” Chalk, The United States and the International Struggle for Rubber, 1914-1941, pp. 7-8.

287. “If you men think you are doing the best for the industry” James Cooper Lawrence, The World’s Struggle with Rubber, p. 31.

287. “of senile decay” Lane, “The Life and Work of Sir Henry Wickham: Part IX—Closing Years,” p. 7.

288. the belief was probably mistaken, his wish was fulfilled Lane, “Sir Henry Wickham: British Pioneer; a Brief Summary of the Life Story of the British Pioneer,” p. 656.

288. “Sir Henry Alexander Wickham . . . was the man who, in the face of extraordinary difficulties” “Sir Henry Wickham. The Plantation Rubber Industry.” Times (London), Sept. 28, 1928, p. 19.

288. “She showed her heroism . . . by remaining on the job” Tucker, “A Commentary on the Biography of Sir Henry Wickham,” p. 653.

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

Epilogue: The Monument of Need

291. abundance would change the world Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003 (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 135, paraphrasing Arthur M. Schlesinger on “Fordism.”

292. Three of Riker’s sons Sources on Riker and the confederado descendants still remaining when Henry Ford arrived include: Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, pp. 107-113; J. T. Baldwin, “David Riker and Hevea brasiliensis,” pp. 383-384; James E. Edmonds, “They’ve Gone—Back Home!” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 4, 1941, pp. 30-47.

294. Ford’s vision of a protective, paternal industry The early years of Fordlandia are chronicled in the following sources: John Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs vol. 21, no. 2 (May 1979), pp. 261-276; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933, pp. 230-238; Joseph A. Russell, “Fordlandia and Belterra: Rubber Plantations on the Tapajos River, Brazil,” Economic Geography, vol. 18, no. 2 (April 1942), pp. 125-145; Mary A. Dempsey, “Fordlandia,” Michigan History Magazine, Jan. 24, 2006, www.michiganhistorymagazine.com/extra/fordlandia/fordlandia.html; Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, pp. 67-86; Coates, The Commerce in Rubber, pp. 232-235.

295. “A great business is really too big to be human” Quoted in Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” p. 276.

295. “They tried to do to these Brazilians what Northerners had always wanted to do to the South” Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, p. 111.

296. while corn flakes made them gag Sources describing the first Fordlandia riot include: Interview, Doña Olinda Pereira Branco, Fordlandia, Oct. 21, 2005; Galey, “Industrialist in the Wilderness: Henry Ford’s Amazon Venture,” p. 277; Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, pp. 111-112; Dempsey, “Fordlandia,” p. 5 of 9.

296. “In one night . . . the officials of the Ford Motor Company learned more sociology” Vianna Moog is quoted in Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, p. 112.

296-97. What happened to the immigrants after their dismissal remains a mystery Dempsey, “Fordlandia,” p. 5 of 9.

297. “I was really scared of them” Interview, Doña Olinda Pereira Branco, Fordlandia, Oct. 21, 2005.

298. “Practically all the branches of the trees throughout the estate . . . terminate in naked stems” Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, p. 77; also, Rubber Research Institute of Malaya, “Memorandum on South American Leaf Disease of Rubber” (Kuala Lumpur: Rubber Research Institute of Malaya, May 1948).

298. “Henry Ford has never yet seen one of his big plans fail” Roger D. Stone, Dreams of Amazonia (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 85.

298. “threatens not only the sane progress of the world” Quoted in Viner, “National Monopolies of Raw Materials,” p. 586.

300. “take from us our flora and fauna” Michael Astor, “Fears of Biopiracy Hampering Research in Brazilian Amazon,” Americas’ Intelligence Wire, Oct. 20, 2005.

300. “Brazil has lost the capacity to control its own resources” Ibid.

300. A few aging veterans from the Ford era still remain in the dusty town Interviews, Doña Olinda Pereira Branco and Biamor de Sousa Pessoa, Fordlandia, Oct. 21, 2005.

303. “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness” Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” p. 67.