The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

For all of Henry’s hard work, he failed again. The house was never finished. The new attempt at planting coffee was abysmal. Although the hevea growing on the Cupari proved disappointing, in all likelihood he heard of the massive stands of rubber on the west bank of the Tapajós, across the river at Boim. His timing was bad: burning off forest and underbrush for new fields is best done in October, followed immediately by coivara, or clearing the largest trees not consumed by fire. It is important to do this before the rainy season. In tropical soils it seems there is a “nitrate pulse,” which occurs in the first two weeks of the rains. Nitrate is the most useful form of nitrogen for plants, and if the pulse is ignored by farmers, the yields will be disappointing.

  As much as Henry adopted the caboclo’s life, he never seemed to learn the central lesson: The caboclo was not a man of one vocation. To survive in the jungle, he was forced to be a little of everything, said anthropologist Emilio Morani: “a horticulturist, a rubber collector, a hired hand, a canoe-paddler, a cowboy, a collector of Brazil nuts, a fisherman, and he often earns a living from several of these pursuits simultaneously.” Surviving in the Amazon meant tapping into every available resource, just like the white threads of fungus that drained everything organic that fell to the forest floor. Henry did one thing—planting—while searching for rubber. He never hired himself out, never collected or sold anything other than rubber. He was a specialist, not a generalist, and so, in this marginal environment, he failed.

  In summer or fall of 1874, Henry and Violet returned to their starting point. The confederados sprinkled around Santarém were failing, too, and decided to solve their labor problems by forming a commune and working together in the fields. When Henry heard this, he joined again, but when they returned to Piquiá-tuba, their old house had been cannibalized. “My boarded floor had been taken up and used” for another house, Violet wailed. Half of Violet’s baggage never returned from the Cupari; it seemed to disappear into the trees. They struggled on, clearing a nearby plot of land, building a new house, one “more comfortable than any” of their previous attempts, raised above the ground, with boarded floors and an adjoining kitchen. Maybe Henry was finally getting the hang of this pioneer life, and as if to christen this third attempt, they dubbed the house “Casa-Piririma”—the house of the Piririma palm.

  Violet’s father sent out another family of laborers to work for them but they, like the first group, soon grew “as disgusted as the others and went to those members of the party [now living in Santarém] who had made themselves comfortable at our expense,” Violet complained. What did she mean? Had the party pooled their funds in London, then refused to divide the money equally when the majority moved back to Santarém, leaving Henry and Violet not only alone but penniless? Was it simply a statement of her feelings of anger and abandonment? She never says, nor does Henry, but the Wickham family became one more casualty of the jungle, and the estrangement was too wide to bridge. At least Violet’s father still stood by them. He sent with the unidentified family a thirteen-year-old serving girl named Mercia Jane Ferrell from West Moors, Dorset, who stayed in the jungle with Violet as her only female companion for about a year.

  During this period, young David Riker entered their lives. Riker’s mother had come to Santarém with the first wave of confederados, but she could not stand the privation. In 1872, she took David and his younger sister, Virginia, back home to Charleston, South Carolina, but they all returned in 1874. “I was just delited and asked Mother to buy me a gun,” he wrote in his memoirs: “She bought me a mussel loader and on our arrival I took to the woods and became a real good woodsman.” By now his education was falling behind: “Father put Virginia and myself in school in town with the Wickham family who had opened a school to teach English.” Henry’s brother and sister lived in a house paved with red bricks on Quinze de Agusta in Santarém. While Harriette Jane “taught English at their house to a few children or rather young ladies,” her husband, Frank Pilditch, taught English in peoples’ houses around town. Henry’s brother, John, was often sick. Though David Riker’s father lived and farmed at Piquiá-tuba with the other confederados, David Riker and his sister boarded in the Wickham house. As they lay in bed, the young Rikers could hear them talking at night after supper on the veranda.

  During this time, Riker first encountered Henry and Violet, who alternately lived in the new house at Piquá-tuba and with the rest of the family in Santarém. Henry was a mystery to the youth. He was “soft easy speaking, of a lonesome melancholy aspect.” Sometimes he would get a wistful look on his face, mount his horse, and “ride out in to the country.” Everyone assumed he was still looking for new plantation sites, still unable to abandon his visions of glory, even after they’d crashed so often. By then, however, he was either collecting rubber seeds or scouting out new stands of trees.

  The negotiations for smuggling resumed when Henry returned to Santarém. In July 1874, Markham told Joseph Hooker that the India Office was willing to pay Wickham £10 for a thousand seeds, and Hooker passed this on to Henry in a letter dated July 29, 1874. Henry responded nearly three months later. He was gracious but pointed out that it would be too expensive for him to collect so few seeds. He still hadn’t found the legendary trees of which he’d heard so much. Collecting seeds meant disappearing back down the Tapajós and into the jungle for an appreciable amount of time. Instead, he offered his own plan:It is already very late to procure Indian Rubber seeds this season but if possible I will send you some with my best care. Although the sum offered by the government appears sufficiently liberal you will perceive that it will not pay me to go into the better districts to collect them in small quantities but if I may be guaranteed an order for a large number I am prepared to collect them fresh in the best localities and dispatch them to you direct during the ensuing season. In such case, would you wish me to make any observations as to localities of growth, soil, etc.?

  He put the letter away for a couple of days, and on October 19, 1874, added a postscript:I reopen this in order to add that, as the seed rapidly begins to shoot and spoil, I would be willing to take the parcel of fresh seed myself to Para and deliver it into the care of the Liverpool steamer about to sail that it might have the advantage of traveling (in) his cabin and under his care.

  Henry may have thought that since he was the sole “man on the spot,” he was in a favorable position to bargain. Perhaps he finally faced the hard realities of his position and realized how desperately he needed funds. In any case, Hooker and the India Office seemed to grow peeved. In October, Markham sent Hooker a note suggesting that the top ranks of the India Office were growing tired of Henry’s demands:With reference to Mr. Wickham’s proposal to raise young India Rubber plants and send them here in Wardian cases; Lord Salisbury says—“What would be the cost of sending a gardener to superintend the packing and transmission of a single batch?” “We need not pledge ourselves for more.” “If the experiment seemed likely to succeed, it might be repeated from time to time.” It seems to me that if this was done, the sending of the plants would answer.

  London elites had little tolerance for subordinates who demanded fair treatment—witness the fate of James Collins. Neither did they appreciate upstarts who presumed on their betters’ good graces. Henry was an opportunist and an outsider. The first could be explained as ambition, but not when combined with the second. He was not part of the club, and his nursery suggestion, for all its merits, was turned down.

  At the same time, however, they did relent on the issue of Henry’s pay. By December, Markham proposed letting Henry collect “any amount of seeds at the same rate—£10 for 1000.” The secretary of state soon authorized Wickham to collect 10,000 or more seeds at the £10 rate; Markham told Hooker that his office planned to give Wickham carte blanche and would pay him for all seeds he procured. Markham added: Pass the offer to Santarém.

  So dawned the New Year of 1875. It should have started well. Henry and Violet had a new house, in a commune, where all were said to be worki
ng together. Henry had his commission from London locked in at a generous rate. His letters exude confidence, as if he knows where thousands of the best seeds can be found. The return to Piquiá-tuba seems to have brought some reconciliation among the Wickhams. At least they were on good enough terms to sit together for a group photograph sometime during the early part of that year.

  Look closely at that photo, however, and hints of disaster filter through. By early 1875, the confederado commune was falling apart, and Violet would write, “once more each struggled on alone.” Henry’s crops were failing, and young David Riker remembered Henry disappearing into the bush without explanation: He was searching for seeds. Not just more, but the ones from perfect trees. His outward confidence when writing Kew was just a bluff: Yes, he could provide seeds in early 1875, but not those from the fabled source of “Pará fine.” He could not mention his fears. He’d adopted the image of the self-assured colonial adventurer, an image he would maintain in one form or another for the rest of his days. The image was his capital, a force to which others responded. In the family photo, he stares brazenly at the camera, a smirk on his lips, arms akimbo, with a dark mustache and untrimmed beard, and a sheath knife hanging from his belt. He looked vaguely like Sir Richard Burton and was certainly more striking than his conventionally dressed brother and brother-in-law. Violet sits before Henry, looking pale, wan, and sick. Frank Pilditch, the husband of Harriette Jane, seems vaguely amused. John Wickham stands proudly behind his wife Christine and one-year-old son Harry, born in Santarém in April 1874.

  Henry’s sister Harriette Jane is the sitting’s focal point, and her eyes command the lens. She is dark like Henry and forcefully attractive, with a long face and strong chin. She sits in the center of the group, clad completely in white. One suspects she was the one who started the English school and kept it going, not Violet, as Riker would write in his memoirs. But Harriette also slumps in her chair. There is fatigue in her face; her cheeks are drawn. She is like Henry, never admitting defeat, but unlike Henry she will not succumb indefinitely to illusion. Her mother has died; a worker she knew; Christine’s mother. She is tired, and there is a reason. Disease is on them again.

  Sometime in 1875-76, a second wave of sickness hit the Wickham group, and this time it took the young. The first to die was Mercia Jane Ferrell, Violet’s serving girl, age fourteen. Once again, Violet is laconic: “She stayed with me till her death” a year after her arrival, she reported; with that single statement one senses a deep loneliness. She is an exile like her husband, but without the attitude to shield her.

  Then Harriette Jane died, at age twenty-eight. No comment is made. Hers is simply one of the five graves Henry sketched on the cemetery hillside. Little, in fact, was ever said about her. But if Henry was the family’s imagination and heart, Harriette was the backbone. She was the “woman of independent means,” according to the 1871 census; she ran her mother’s shop on Sackville Street and ran the house in Marylebone. With her death, the family group began to splinter. Within a year, the band held together by her gravity would spin off to the farthest reaches of the globe, never to meet again.

  With his sister’s sickness and death, Henry finally seemed to realize a truth: This jungle would kill him if he stayed. On April 18, 1875, he wrote to Hooker from Piquiá-tuba, saying it was too late in the season to begin collecting rubber seeds. His tone was apologetic:I received a few other (seeds) from an up-river trader but when I got them they had already long shoots attached to them. There is now therefore nothing to be done but wait for next season’s fruit and I propose to go into a good locality early to collect and pack them myself for your order.

  With that blunt statement, the empire’s plans were delayed for yet another year. Then, uncharacteristically, Henry allowed a brief glimpse of his hopes:Should you have opportunity of recommending me for an appointment in selecting, planting and tending the young “ciringa” in the East, may I ask you to favor me with your influence?

  The seeds were not simply a way to make money—they were his means of escape. He’d seen too much death and failure on the Amazon. He was desperate to leave, and rubber was the key.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE VOYAGE OF THEAMAZONAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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