The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Soon, Henry’s reality merged with strange dreams. His memories mixed with hallucinatory incidents that are not recorded in his journal, but they were apparently passed down to family. He’d been unconscious, how long he did not know, and when he awoke “he found several vultures calmly awaiting his death,” Edward Lane recorded. One was especially close, bolder than its fellows. Henry stared back for an instant at the pale, unblinking eyes, the crepuscular, warty head. How he loathed these birds—their shuffling, rustling walk, their croaks and carrion smell. The memory of the Indian catching one on a hook flashed before him. He laughed and lunged convulsively, grabbing its beak and greasy feathers in his paws. His laughter carried across the silent rancho as he ripped out feathers and thrust them through the bird’s nostrils as the Indian had done. The vulture resembled a music hall comedian, the feathers sticking from the holes in its beak like outlandish mustachios. He flung the bird from him and collapsed on the bed. The unlucky vulture limped to its companions, who were frightened by this strange, demented apparition and flew croaking into the air.

  He was saved by Rojas Gil and his wives. “I recollect one afternoon, as I lay prostrate and incapable of moving, and part of my back bared to the swarms of sand-flies . . . a woman of Rojas’ entered, and seeing my condition, she passed her cool soft hands gently over my burning brow and back, brushing away the plagues.” He never recorded her name, but he always remembered the moment: “It is singular what an impression the slightest mark of kindness and human sympathy makes on one in such an extremity. . . . Although unable to thank her, I think I never felt so grateful for anything.”

  The anonymous savior reported Wickham’s condition, for soon Rojas took Henry to his rancho, where the air wasn’t so close and there was a slight breeze. Another neighbor helped, tapping Henry’s trees while he was unable, feeding him gaurapo, the heated juice of sugarcane, the only thing he could keep down. Although they bathed and cleaned his wounds, they already considered him doomed, for he’d seen the curupira, “the little pale man of the forest” who appeared to those foolish enough to wander alone under the green canopy. The curupira rose from the dark, twisted roots lacing the undergrowth. He was the deep sound in the forest that had no explanation, the shadow at the edge of one’s vision that was “the sure precursor of evil to the unlucky beholder, if not of his death.” The souls of those who died at the hands of the curupira wandered forever in the forest. Survivors left part of themselves beneath the canopy and were never the same.

  There was a belief among the Indians of the Upper Rio Negro and Orinoco that the best cure for the curse of the curupira was the Prayer of the Dry Toad. One day Henry heard some strange incantations near him, but he drifted in and out of consciousness and would never know more. The Prayer of the Dry Toad was attempted only as a last resort, and few Europeans were ever allowed to witness its power. A large cururu toad was buried in the ground up to its neck and forced to eat glowing coals. “Peace will come to me in the dust of the earth,” the shaman muttered as he buried the squirming creature in the dirt. “You guardian angels, stay with me always, and Satan will not have the strength to seize me.” A week later, the toad had vanished, burned from inside by the fire. In its place a three-branched tree was said to sprout, each branch a different color: white for love, black for mourning, red for despair.

  Henry survived but was left weak and helpless and spent all of March recuperating. The fever waxed and waned, but never as virulently as in those first few days, when he feared he’d lost his mind. He tried to spare others the same travail. One day he returned from a short walk in the forest and found “a French gentleman in my lodge.” The Frenchman was journeying up the river to La Esmeralda, the last large mission on the Orinoco and gateway to the Casiquiare. He wanted to go past the tiny outposts of Ocamo and Manaco to the great peak of Duida in the Serra Parima range. “In so remote a situation all Europeans appear as countrymen,” Henry said, trying to dissuade this apparition from his suicidal plan. He was heading alone into Yanomami country, something few travelers lived to describe. But the Frenchman was adamant, “having determined in his mind that there must be a mine of gold in that direction.” Henry had nearly lost his life and knew what such dreams of El Dorado did to a man. Henry begged him to turn back, tried to tell him of the disease, vipers, and starvation that awaited him. But the Frenchman laughed and said he would return in a month and they would “have a raid” on the bars together. Henry’s visitor paddled up the river, waving one last time as he slipped out of sight. He never returned in a “month or less,” and as far as anyone knows, never came back at all.

  The doomed Frenchman was the last straw. By Good Friday, Henry admitted it was time to end their plans. Ramón’s leg was so bad that he’d been “unable to work for some time past.” They had no need to fast for Lent, since they’d been starving for so long. The waters rose in April. They caught electric eels on the submerged estradas, which meant tapping the trees was certain suicide. By the end of April, he decided to abandon the camp and push upriver to the Casiquiare, but when he tried on April 28, only little Manuel and Ramón remained. All the others had left or drifted into the forest, and Rogers never returned from his last trip for supplies. They were all desperately weak and “helplessly sick.” The best they could do was drift back on the current to San Fernando de Atapabo.

  He returned to that village, took the portage south through the jungle, and, sometime in May 1870, finally reached the Rio Negro. He lingered there, a shell of his former self, recuperating in the village of Maroa “on the cool and limpid water of the Black River” that would take him to the sea.

  That August he drifted down the Rio Negro in a trading lancha owned by his friend Andreas Level. The journey took most of the month. The deep, lifeless river winds nearly 1,550 miles through stunted campana forests, past hundreds of islands and white sand beaches that emerge in low water. The water itself is a black tea brewed through the sandy soil. Henry’s journals lack detail here. He was exhausted and felt lucky to be alive.

  The Rio Negro ends where it meets the Amazon at Manaus. Two English-built steamers were anchored there, looking “very suggestive of a return to civilization.” It was September 3, 1870, and he’d been on some tropical river in this vast continent for one year, eight months, and thirteen days. Henry gasped at the size of the city. He’d forgotten that Manaus, once the fabled site of El Dorado, had become the modern equivalent. When it came to black rubber, this was the center of the world.

  In Manaus, Henry entered a land where people were growing rich, fabulously rich, off rubber. It was the beginning of what investors in New York and London called the Rubber Age. Henry arrived four years before rubber began to be applied to telegraph wires and transatlantic cables, but even as early as 1860, it had become obvious to Thomas Hancock that with the discovery of vulcanization, rubber would be the world’s most useful plastic: “Nothing has been discovered which would even be a substitute,” he said. A threat to its free access would be a threat to Great Britain’s national interests; its control was “the ultimate hard currency of exchange.”

  In the decade after Hancock’s pronouncement, rubber had become essential for war. In addition to its many uses in railroads and steam engines, military catalogues of the era show new designs using rubber for shoes and boots, blankets, hats, coats, pontoon boats, bayonet guards, tents, ground sheets, canteens, powder flasks, haversacks, and buttons. Rubberized silk was used for military balloons. War also created a boom in reconstructive surgery using hard rubber teeth, nose pieces, and custom-molded prosthetics. Now the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War was in its early stages, and all of Europe watched. Even in the early campaigns it became evident that victory would depend on rapid mobilization of troops by the fastest means possible. That was the railroad, which depended on rubber.

  By the time Henry drifted from the wilderness, Hevea brasiliensis was the Holy Grail. Like the Grail, no one knew exactly where it could be found. Did it grow along rivers, where t
he first trees were encountered, since the seeds had the ability to float, or further back in the rain forest, on higher ground? Hevea did not grow in pure stands, like trees in temperate climates, but was sown through the forest at the rate of two or three trees per acre, as if someone had scattered them from cloud level like a giant Johnny Appleseed. Locating the trees and working the twisting estrada to collect that daily cup of latex was too slow and inefficient for modern demands. Why had no one tried to domesticate something this valuable, as Hancock had suggested in 1850?

  Actually, someone had, but his early efforts were ignored. In 1861 and 1863, the Brazilian explorer and botanist João Martins da Silva Coutinho wandered through the rubber lands. By the end of his journeys, he recommended to the governor of Pará that, instead of depending upon the whim of nature, rubber plantations should be grown. His suggestion was considered foolhardy. The forest was bountiful. Why mess with a good thing? Soon, a package of rubber seeds was sent anonymously (probably by Silva Coutinho) to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where they were sown. Federal authorities recognized a windfall, if their provincial representatives did not; nevertheless, their efforts seemed focused on attracting foreign investors.

  In 1867, Brazil sent Silva Coutinho to the Universal Exposition in Paris, where he was made chairman of the jury evaluating rubber samples from around the world. He demonstrated that Brazilian hevea was in all ways superior, and he estimated the costs of plantation production in a report published the next year.

  One person who noticed was James Collins, curator of London’s Museum of the Pharmaceutical Society. Collins had been reading reports by Amazon travelers and corresponding with them for years. He haunted the London docks, inspecting rubber shipments to learn more about the several species from which it was derived. In 1868, after reading Silva Coutinho’s report, Collins published an article in Hooker’s Journal revealing what he’d learned. He followed this next year in the prestigious Journal of the Society of Arts with the more detailed “On India-Rubber, Its History, Commerce and Supply.” This article painted a history of all things rubber and quoted everyone from Juan de Torquemada, chronicler of the Spanish Conquest, to la Condamine, Bates, and Richard Spruce.

  Two things impressed Collins. As Silva Coutinho proved, the world’s best source of rubber was the elusive Hevea brasiliensis. And shouldn’t it be possible to grow rubber in the empire’s extensive East Asian plantations? For the first time in print, he made the obvious connection: “The introduction of the invaluable cinchonas into India has been attended with marvelous success.” If that smuggling expedition had been a success, why not do the same with rubber?

  The years had been kind to Clements Markham since his adventures in Peru. In 1870, he was forty, married, in charge of the India Office’s Geographical Department, and secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. He was one year away from being knighted, three years away from his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He’d attained everything envisioned by his driving ambition, and more was on the way.

  However, the cinchona affair had not proved the unqualified triumph that it was popularly portrayed as. In 1865, Charles Ledger, a British adventurer who’d smuggled alpacas from Peru to Australia, showed up in India with the best variety of cinchona ever seen. Ledger had collected his plants in Bolivia, the very place avoided by Markham, and he brought with him C. ledgeriana, a hitherto unknown yellow-bark variety whose quinine content proved more concentrated than any other species—in some cases, as high as 13.7 percent. But Markham was absent from the India Office when Ledger arrived, and no other British official would touch the new plants, unwilling to rock the boat. Ledger left in disgust and sold his superior seeds to the rival Dutch, who bought all twenty thousand and planted them in Java. By 1870, the Dutch East Indies had begun to compete with Great Britain, and by the end of the 1880s, the Dutch would corner the world market in quinine, limiting England’s variety to local sale.

  In the decade since he’d smuggled red-bark cinchona from the Andes, one gets the impression that Clements Markham had grown restless and bored. It is hard to imagine his not rising to the challenge of Collins’s article. In 1870, Markham decided “it was necessary to do for the india-rubber and caoutchouc-yielding trees what had already been done with such happy results for the cinchona tree.” The empire had only one choice if it wanted to remain a Great Power:When it is considered that every steam vessel afloat, every train and every factory on shore employing steam power, must of necessity use India-rubber, it is hardly possible to overrate the importance of securing a permanent supply, in connection with the industry of the world.

  Markham envisioned vast rubber plantations stretching across India, and he had more influence now than a decade earlier, when he’d been an obscure functionary. He knew that the India Office was always on the lookout for potential export crops of significant commercial value. And he had a highly placed friend.

  Joseph Dalton Hooker had been appointed Kew’s director five years earlier, effective immediately after his father’s death in 1865. Few seemed bred for the sinecure like the younger Hooker: his father’s home at Wood-side Crescent, within walking distance of the Gardens, had a museum and herbarium; he grew up in an environment where plants arrived for study from all corners of the globe. As a student, his first thesis concerned three new species of moss. His first scientific voyage, in 1839, was as assistant surgeon and botanist aboard the HMS Erebus in Sir John Clark Ross’s four-year voyage to Antarctica.

  It was with his second expedition, however, that Joseph Hooker began to make a name in botany. From 1848 to 1850, he trekked through the Himalayas in his spectacles and tartan jacket; he had no mountaineering equipment except for some woolen stockings and an “antiglare eyeshade” made from a veil by the wife of a friend. Like Robert Cross and his umbrella, there was something very English about Hooker: He dined on biscuits, tea, and brandy. His porters carried his solid-oak traveling desk and brass-bound ditty bag around moraines and glaciers. Neither he nor his companion, Dr. Thomas Thomson, ever got much sleep, since the yaks they used for pack animals would stick their heads into the tents and snort until they woke. By the time the journey was over, he and Thomson had traveled farther on Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain, than any European before them, and they returned with seven thousand specimens for Kew.

  The son’s career seemed blessed. In 1851, he married Frances Harriet, eldest daughter of Darwin’s professor at Cambridge. Hooker and Darwin grew close: in addition to championing Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species he followed Darwin’s suggestion about giving his wife chloroform during labor, as Darwin had done for his own wife, Emma. When Hooker’s six-year-old daughter died in 1867, he remembered that Darwin had suffered similar sadness a dozen years earlier with the death of his own daughter Annie and wrote, “It will be long before I cease to hear her voice in the garden, or feel her little hand stealing into mine.” His scientific reputation and personal connections were impeccable, and his father’s influence made his ascension to the directorship certain. William Hooker convinced the government that Kew had grown so much in scope that he needed an assistant, and on June 5, 1855, Joseph had been appointed the garden’s assistant director. As William approached the end of his life, he offered to leave his vast private herbarium to the nation if Joseph were appointed his successor.

  But even with such advantages, Joseph Hooker was notoriously “nervous and high-strung,” said his son-in-law; “impulsive and somewhat peppery in temper,” his good friend Darwin conceded. He was famous for hard work: by the end of his life, his list of publications would fill 20 pages; the gardens under father and son increased from 11 to 300 acres; there were 20 “glasshouses” containing over 4,500 living plants; the herbarium contained 150,000 species, allowing global comparisons between old and new species unequaled elsewhere. Even so, Joseph Hooker looked upon the world and saw enemies. At five feet eleven inches, he was tall, spare, and wiry; he scowls from under heavy bro
ws in every photograph, frown lines carved deep in his face. He took offense at so many things. He insisted that the garden’s main purpose was scientific and utilitarian, “not recreational,” and despised those holiday-goers entering his empire whose intentions were “mere pleasure” and “rude romping and games.” He resisted all attempts to extend visiting hours for the public and worried about the scientific standing of Kew and of botany in general. Botany was enormously popular among nonprofessionals, especially women, at a time when Victorian science was almost entirely inhabited by men. All these gardeners, flower painters, “rude rompers” diminished the status of his field.

  And there was a very real danger of losing it all. By 1870, Hooker had clashed several times with Acton Smee Ayrton, the first commissioner of the Office of Works, over attempts to cut public spending on scientific institutions. By 1872, their private war would become public when Ayrton proposed transferring Kew’s herbarium to a newer facility owned by Richard Owen, keeper of the natural history collection at the British Museum. What became known as the Ayrton Controversy would be extremely nasty and political: Ayrton wanted more control of Kew; Hooker was enraged by a bald threat; both sides marshaled their forces. By the general election of 1874, Hooker and his supporters succeeded in getting Ayrton voted out of office permanently.

  But even in 1870, Hooker could sniff what was in the wind. When Clements Markham appeared with his proposal, Hooker remembered well his father’s historic partnership with him, which had consolidated Kew’s place in the sciences and the empire. The transfer of rubber could be as defining for Joseph Hooker as the transfer of cinchona had been for his father. It would be a political coup.

  And so, as a broken Henry Wickham returned to civilization, the word went out in the small world of botanists and diplomats that somehow, by any means possible, the British Empire wanted mastery of the rubber stream.