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Wickham won the honor for smuggling seventy thousand rubber-tree seeds to England in 1876. He was acting at the behest of Clements R. Markham, a scholar-adventurer with considerable experience in tree bootlegging. As a young man, Markham had directed a British quest in the Andes for cinchona trees. Cinchona bark was the sole source of quinine, the only effective antimalaria drug then known. Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, which had a monopoly, zealously guarded the supply, forbidding foreigners to take cinchona trees. Markham dispatched three near-simultaneous covert missions to the Andes, leading one himself. Hiding from the police, almost without food, he descended the mountains on foot with thousands of seedlings in special cases. All three teams obtained cinchona, which was soon thriving in India. Markham’s project saved thousands of lives, not least because Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia were running out of cinchona trees—they had killed them by stripping the bark. Riding the success to the position of director of the India Office’s Geographical Department, Markham decided to repeat with rubber trees “what had already been done with such happy results for the cinchona trees.” British industry’s dependence on rubber was leaving the nation’s prosperity in the hands of foreigners, he believed. “When it is considered that every steam vessel afloat, every railway train, and every factory on shore employing steam power, must of necessity use india-rubber,” Markham argued, “it is hardly possible to over-rate the importance of securing a permanent supply.” Glory would attach to those who secured that supply. In the early 1870s Markham let it be known that Britain would pay for rubber seeds. When the seeds arrived, they would be sown at the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew in southwest London, and the successful seedlings dispatched to Britain’s Asian colonies. Two separate hopeful adventurers sent batches of rubber seed. Neither batch would sprout. Wickham became the third to try.

Henry Wickham (Photo credit 7.5)

Rubber was Wickham’s exit from his failing manioc plantation in Brazil. Cannily eliciting Markham’s promise that the India Office would buy every rubber seed he sent, Wickham sought the help of his neighbors in collecting them. His plantation was located in Santarém, four hundred miles from the river’s mouth, a rubber town built atop a Jesuit mission built atop a native city. It was also the biggest center of ex-Confederates in the Amazon. With the aid of Confederate families, Wickham gathered seventy thousand seeds, enough to pay for passage back to Britain for himself and his wife. (He left behind, apparently without warning, his brother and his family, as well as his widowed brother-in-law.) To judge by the frigid reception he received in London, the India Office had not expected to be billed for three-quarters of a ton of rubber seeds. Nor were they overly happy that only 2,700 germinated—evidence, suggested the environmental historian Warren Dean, that Wickham and his associates scrambled through the forest in a hot-brained hurry, grabbing seeds from the ground without consideration for their viability.

Today Wickham is reviled in Brazil. Tourist guides refer to him as the “prince of thieves,” a pioneer of what has come to be called “bio-piracy”; the leading economic history of Amazonia denounces his actions as “hardly defensible in the light of international law.” At a literal level this claim is untrue; Brazil then had no bio-piracy laws. Nor is there any evidence that anyone tried to stop Wickham. The British were hardly secretive—London newspapers trumpeted Markham’s quest for rubber. And authorities in Santarém surely were aware that an English madman was packing up cases of rubber seeds. In any case Brazilians themselves have not hesitated to import exotic species. The nation’s primary agricultural exports today are soybeans, beef, sugar, and coffee. Not one is native to the Americas.4

More important, the transport of useful species out of their home environments has been a boon to humankind. The quinine supply