How rubber escaped the Amazon

By Darrell Laurant

Published: April 4, 2008

Joe Jackson’s book “The Thief at the End of the World:  Rubber, Power and the Seeds of Empire” was born at a dinner party.

“I had some people over, and one of them was a botanist,” recalled Jackson, who will be signing copies of his book at Givens Books this Saturday (1-3). “He asked me what I was working on for my next book, and I said, ‘Give me an idea.’ And he said, ‘You ought to write about Henry Wickham.’”

Based on that conversation and some additional research, the Virginia Beach-based writer became intrigued.

“Turns out Wickham was maybe the first bio-pirate,” Jackson said, “a sort of real life Captain Ahab. I’ve always been fascinated with people who were obsessed.”

Wickham’s obsession was rubber, which at the time was grown only in the Amazon jungle. Through some oversight, Great Britain had neglected to add that part of the world to its empire, but the British government saw the vast potential in rubber and asked Wickham to travel to Brazil in 1873 and collect – er, steal – as many seeds as he could for later replanting in British colonies like Malaya.

Somehow, despite a marked lack of success in any previous endeavor, Wickham pulled it off. He escaped not with a handful of seeds, like Jack and the Beanstalk, but 70,000.

Which was good, Jackson wrote, because less than 2,000 actually sprouted. As it turned out, that was enough, and the British coup (which infuriated the Amazonans) set off a worldwide rubber rush.

Even Henry Ford got into the act, purchasing a tract of Amazon jungle the size of Connecticut and calling it Fordland.

“It was a disaster,” Jackson said of Ford’s venture. “He lost millions – today, it would have been billions.”

What Ford failed to realize was that there was a reason why rubber trees were usually found spaced out in the jungle.

“There was a kind of fungus that would fly in from the jungle and prey on rubber trees,” Jackson said. “When Ford planted all his trees close together, it allowed one infestation to spread.”

While researching his book, Jackson visited Fordland, marveling at “all these worker’s cottages, a Midwestern factory town transplanted in the jungle, that were just sitting there decaying.”

A former police reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, Jackson spent 10 days on the Amazon doing research, traveling via “a boat that was like the African Queen.”

So was he menaced by piranhas? Anacondas? Jaguars?

“Nothing like that,” Jackson said, “but I did have one scary experience.”

He had discovered an old farmhouse that was supposed to have been the meeting place for four of Brazil’s leading botanists at one time. As he approached it, he said, “I saw these big patches of mold on the walls. As I got closer, I saw that the mold appeared to be moving. I credited that to a little heat stroke.”

Just as he reached the house, Jackson said, “I heard this droning sound that was almost deafening. And literally thusands of wasps rose up out of the grass and hovered around me. That’s when I realized that the mold patches were more wasps. The entire interior of the house was one big nest.”

Fortunately for Jackson, he said, “the wasps seemed as affected by the heat as I was. They just hovered there, and I backed off slowly and took my photos from a safe distance.”

One of the things that interested Jackson was that the language used to describe rubber at the turn of the 20th century was very similar to that now used in connection with oil.

“Henry Ford even said, ‘We need to wean ourselves away from foreign rubber,’” Jackson said.

As for Henry Wickham, his bio-pirate gig fail to earn him acceptance among the elite scientists of England (“He was of a lower class,” Jackson explained), so he spent the rest of his life traveling the world in search of another success that never came.

“He dragged his poor wife along everywhere with him,” Jackson said. “It’s interesting, because both of them kept journals, and her take on things was very different than his.”

The last straw was when Wickham left his long-suffering spouse marooned on a Pacific island – supposedly inhabited by a cannibal tribe – for 19 days.

“After that, she left him,” Jackson said.