The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  It is collected by force; the soldiers drive the people into the bush. If they will not go, they are shot down, and their left hands cut off and taken to the Commissaire. . . . [T]hese hands, the hands of men, women and children, are placed in rows before the Commissaire who counts them to see that the soldiers have not wasted cartridges. The Commissaire is paid a commission of about 1 d. a lb. on all the rubber he gets. It is therefore in his interest to get all the rubber he can.

  In 1896, the British consul recounted how he’d been sitting with the commissaire in the Upper Congo one evening when a group of “sentries” passed, fresh from their pursuit of escapees. The sergeant held aloft a necklace of human ears to illustrate the results of the hunt; the commissaire congratulated his subordinate on a job well done.

  Free trade became publicly equated with evil. It had been the battle cry for civilizing the Congo, but now, in the name of profit, mass murder was condoned. Immediately after Leopold took over, the missionary Holman Bentley exulted, “The most rigid injunctions enforcing free trades, absolute religious liberty and freedom of worship are guaranteed. We cannot fail to see the hand of God in this result.” Within fifteen years, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declared profit the True God:[I]t is the call to brutality which comes from above; the urgent call for rubber, more rubber, higher dividends, at any price of native labour and native coercion, driving the local agents on to torture and murder. . . . Is there anywhere any shadow of justification for the hard yoke which these helpless folk endure? Again we turn to the Treaty which regulates the situation. ‘All the Powers . . . pledge themselves to watch over the preservation of the native populations and the improvement of their moral and material conditions of existence.’ And this pledge is headed, ‘In the name of Almighty God.’

  The key to exposing the situation in the Congo was British diplomat Roger Casement’s forty-page white paper, written for the government in 1903. Casement’s grim tales of murder, mutilation, abduction, and beatings by soldiers of Leopold’s Congo Administration were so incendiary that the British government tried to keep it secret; it was only released in 1904 after a struggle. Casement’s investigations confirmed the horrific accounts of missionaries and journalists. The difference was that he took names. In one instance, he wrote, “Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the lake district:One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. . . . In both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.

  The climax came in 1908 when international pressure forced Belgium to wrest the Free State from the private ownership of King Leopold, but by then the damage was done. During the fifteen years of Leopold’s stewardship, the population in the Congo Free State dropped from 25 million to 10 million—15 million dead for approximately 75,000 tons of rubber. That equalled one life per every 5 kilograms, a little more than the amount used in one automobile tire.

  In 1907, similar evils came to light on the Upper Amazon. The Putumayo is a vast area around a river of the same name, which runs through territory that was disputed between Peru and Colombia; the river joins the Amazon near the western border of Brazil. In many ways, the revelations about this “Devil’s Paradise” were merely part of a larger continuum. During the Boom of 1890-1912, small wars of conquest erupted throughout the Amazon, but now the conquerors were rubber men. The Boom struck the Indian tribes their most destructive blow since the arrival of the Jesuits. Slavers rounded up entire tribes and forced them to work on rubber plantations. When some rose up and killed their masters, massacres and atrocities exploded on both sides.

  What made the Putumayo different was its extreme isolation. There was no competition or ameliorating influence when the family of rubber baron Julio Cesar Araña established its empire. Although many latex-bearing trees grew in the Putumayo, the main source was Castilloa elastica, a tree that is destroyed during tapping. Unlike the long-term process involved with hevea, the production of caucho from Castilloa was quick, efficient, and designed for maximum profit. Since a tapper destroyed one tree and proceeded to the next, production could go on all year—an assembly line of rubber more in keeping with modern demands. As a British Select Committee charged with judging the atrocity would later note, “The insatiable desire to obtain the greatest production in the least time and with the least possible expense was undoubtedly one of the causes of the crime.”

  The scandal began in the northwest Amazon boomtown of Iquitos with a series of articles in the muckraking newspaper La Sanción. Editor Benjamín Saldaña Rocca accused the Casa Arana of systematically employing terror and torture against its native work force for higher profits. The Indians worked day and night; they were starved and sold at market. They were beaten, mutilated, tortured, and killed as punishment for “laziness” or the amusement of bored overseers. Women and girls were raped, the elderly were killed when they could no longer work, and children’s brains were bashed out against trees. Moreover, Arana registered his Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in London, thus linking Britain, the world’s leading antislavery nation, with a firm that was enslaving Indians.

  La Sanción did not circulate outside Iquitos, however, and it would take American adventurer Walter E. Hardenburg to bring the story to the world. In 1907, while drifting through the Putumayo, he ended up in a gun battle between Peruvian and Colombian rubber traders. He was nearly killed, and a friend from upriver died. Hardenburg was taken prisoner by the Casa Arana and for the next few months taught English in Iquitos in an attempt to earn his passage home. During his stay, he read the paper’s allegations and collected further horrors on his own.

  When Hardenburg arrived in London, he contacted Rev. John H. Harris, secretary of the Quaker-sponsored Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. Harris sent him to the crusading London magazine Truth, which carried Hardenburg’s article under the title “The Devil’s Paradise: A British Owned Congo.” The reference to the Congo stung badly, but it was apt. Arana owned 8 million acres on the Putumayo. His 1,500 armed section chiefs and their 600 hired gunmen were paid only by commission on the amount of rubber they sent downstream, thus ensuring systematic brutality. Worse, Arana had manipulated the British cult of free trade like a maestro, equipping his company with a tame set of British directors who allowed easy access to London funding. This was a British company involved in the evil. Even its Barbadian overseers were British subjects.

  Now the story circulated worldwide, not just in a remote part of the Amazon. Hardenburg’s account was even more horrific than that in La Sanción. The Huitoto, Boras, Andokes, and Ocainas were flogged till their bones showed. They were denied medical treatment, left to die, then eaten by the company’s dogs. They were castrated. They were tortured by fire, by water, by being tied head-down, and by crucifixion. Their ears, fingers, arms, and legs were lopped off with machetes. Managers used them for target practice and set them afire with kerosene on the Saturday before Easter as human fireworks for the Saturday of Glory. Whole tribal groups were exterminated if they failed to produce sufficient rubber. At one point, a manager called for hundreds of Indians to gather at his station.

  He grasped his carbine and machete and began the slaughter . . . leaving the ground covered with over 150 corpses, among them men, women, and children. Bathed in blood and appealing for mercy, the survivors were heaped with the dead and burned to death, while the manager shouted, “I want to exterminate all the Indians who do not obey my orders about the rubber that I require them to bring in.”

  The climax of Hardenburg’s story focused on that crucial moment when Indians brought rubber in from the forest to be weighed. The Indians were so terrified by their treatment that if the scale
did not register the required ten kilos, they threw themselves on the ground to await punishment. Then the manager or his lieutenant

  advances, bends down, takes the Indian by the hair, strikes him, raises his head, drops it face downward on the ground, and after the face is beaten and kicked and covered with blood, the Indian is scourged. This is when they are treated best, for often they cut them to pieces with machetes.

  Those who fought back had their limbs hacked off, then were thrown alive into the fire. In the rubber station of Matazas, Hardenburg said, “I have seen Indians tied to a tree, their feet about half a yard above the ground. Fuel is then placed below, and they are burnt alive. This is done to pass the time.”

  Once more, Roger Casement was sent in by the British Government. Once more, he confirmed the accounts, with more details. Of the 1,600 Indians he saw on his 1910 journey, 90 percent showed scars from being flogged. Beating wasn’t enough: The lash was combined with near-drowning, “designed,” Casement wrote, “to just stop short of taking life while inspiring the acute mental fear and inflicting much of the physical agony of death.” Casement heard of little boys who watched as their mothers were beaten for “just a few strokes” to make them better workers. When Casement asked a Barbadian whether he knew it was wrong to torture Indians, he replied “that a man might be a man in Iquitos, but ‘you couldn’t be a man up there.’ ”

  Casement’s report led to commissions. The Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company was dissolved and an order issued for Arana’s arrest. By now the rubber baron had escaped to Iquitos, where he was untouchable, even hailed for bringing prosperity to that remote land. When the company resumed business, it cut back on the overt bloodshed but retained flogging as a motivator, a practice that remains on the river today. From 1900 to 1912, the Putumayo’s total output of four thousand tons of rubber cost the lives of thousands of Indians. The population dropped by at least thirty thousand.

  Years later, an Indian tribesman would tell a reporter for the Viennese newspaper Neus Wiener Tagblatt that, “Rubber has taken the blood, the health, and the peace of our people.” Tribes entered into debt and could never get out. Those who ran were beaten; those who didn’t died. “Liquor consoled us, helped us to forget our troubles. The debt remained.”

  This was the world that Henry would not confront in his island hideaway. In early 1899, Violet could no longer bear the hermit’s life and told him he must choose between her and his self-destructive dreams. He chose, and Violet left. After all the wandering, hardship, and danger, he could not see, or admit, how good a friend she’d been. In fact, she’d been his only constant friend. She left and eventually settled in Bermuda, never to see him again.

  For a short while longer, he stayed in the Conflict Islands. He seemed to realize that, with Violet gone, he could no longer run his “plantation” alone. Soon after her departure, he left for London, seeking a new partner in his schemes. But no one was as patient as Violet. After four months of negotiation he agreed, in June 1899, to transfer all interest to the financial firm of L. F. Sachs of London. Sachs paid him £15,000 for the title and property, and Henry retained his post as resident manager, with payment of 10 percent of profits in addition to his salary. He returned to the Conflicts with a “Dr. Jameson,” an expert on fisheries from the Science College of South Kensington. Henry was in charge of copra, Dr. Jameson in charge of pearl-shell.

  But all did not go well. He quarreled with Jameson, and a final argument was so heated that the scientist left, declaring to Sachs that they could not be reconciled. In fact, the whole deal with Sachs had fallen through. In 1901, Henry returned to London and throughout the year tried to find a buyer for the islands, or at least someone to provide extra capital. In 1902, he returned to the Conflicts with a “Captain Holton” and three others, including Arthur Watts Allen, a distant cousin by marriage.

  Allen was twenty-three, a freshly minted Cambridge graduate inspired by Henry’s exotic tales. In August 1902, Henry borrowed money from Allen’s family to finance his trading schemes, apparently with the caveat that he take young Arthur along. In his memoirs, written near the end of his life, Allen describes the beginning, at least, as an idyllic South Seas cruise. With the investment from the Allens, Henry was able to buy the freighter he’d always dreamed about. He filled the Arthur with trade goods like rice, bolts of calico, and Jews’ harps, which his Papuan laborers loved. He brought staple foods, oakum for caulking decks, one hundred machetes, and a deep sea diver’s suit with a hand-operated air pump and a complete set of hoses, all to reenergize his plans to harvest sponge, mother-of-pearl, and bêche-de-mer. They repaired and improved the houses on Itamarina and Panasesa. In addition to coconuts, he tried to cultivate bananas and papayas. In the evening, Henry sat on the deck, smoking pipefuls of trade tobacco as he regaled young Allen with tales of his travels, including that of the rubber theft. Henry’s personality was unique, exhibiting an “absence of aggressiveness,” Allen would write. “He envied nobody, coveted nothing, lived simply and frugally.”

  It seemed a dreamlike state, a paradise painted so long ago in Nicaragua when Captain Hill played the same role to the captivated young Wickham. But once again, there were problems. We do not know the details, only the results. Things were not as idyllic as young Allen described, and at the end of the year, a deal was finally made. Henry would receive three hundred pounds annually—provided he leave his appropriately named island paradise and never show his face there again.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE VINDICATED MAN

  Henry wandered after his expulsion from the Conflicts, trying to prove his relevance, failing repeatedly. He would latch onto a forest product, promote it as the newest natural wonder, attract a few investors, and run aground. He made several attempts to buy back the Conflicts through direct offer and government intervention, but he was rebuffed every time. He bought ten thousand acres in Mombiri, the northeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, and discovered a forest vine that seemed to produce a good quality rubber. He also found a large rubber tree related to Ficus elastica that the natives called maki. Neither proved equal to hevea. At Mombiri he planted 650 acres of hevea at “half-chain intervals,” or about forty trees per acre, and tested ideas about its growth that he’d mulled over through the years. He invented a machine for smoke-curing latex but only built thirteen and exported one. He invented a three-bladed tapping knife, but none ever sold. The land proved unwelcome in Mombiri for hevea, and in 1912, he sold out, with yet another great loss of money.

  During this time he promoted piquiá, the tree that grew in abundance in the highlands behind Santarém. In 1876, shortly after his arrival with the seventy thousand rubber seeds, he’d written Hooker about this “most valuable,” “quick-growing” tree, whose nut produced a “pure fat or butter.” His sample sat forgotten in Kew’s museum for forty years. Now he tried to respark interest at Kew, estimating that an acre of piquiá would yield up to one-half ton of fat, a product, he claimed, that could prove “of at least equal magnitude to that of Pará rubber.” Kew did not comment, but obtained the leaf and seeds and identified piquiá as Caryocar villosum, a tree that grew in much of tropical South America. In 1918, as the Great War ended, Henry founded the Irai Company Ltd., with a partner, Joseph Cadman, a man twenty-five years his junior whom he’d met through a planters’ society. Cadman invested £20,000, and with that Henry’s company set up two experimental piquiá plantations in Malaya. Although Irai struggled along for a decade, the yields from piquiá were far lower than Henry had predicted and the production costs higher. In 1929, one year after Henry’s death, the company dissolved.

  There was arghan, a fiber plant known in British Honduras and Brazil as silk grass, which he promoted at the same time as piquiá. Later identified as Colombian pita fiber, or Bromelia magdalemae, each plant had twenty to forty leaves, each leaf ten feet high and four inches wide. Arghan’s true identity was kept secret after the managing director of the Belfast Ropework Company said, “Its salt-water-resistin
g qualities are remarkable and its tensile strength is abnormal, giving a breaking strain of more than 50 per cent over that obtained in the finest Italian hemp or the best flax.” A manager for the textile company of Hoyle and Smith told the Times that “there would be sufficient demand in Lancashire alone to take up the production for a long time to come.” Arghan, the Times concluded, “had now become one of the greatest commercial factors in the history of Great Britain.” By November 1919, the Arghan Co. Ltd. was formed with £40,000 seed money, this raised to £100,000 by 1922. Abraham Montefiore, a Jewish financier from Germany, was chairman; Henry was named technical adviser. In a general meeting of investors in 1922, Montefiore made this tribute to Wickham:All of us know what a good thing he has done for this country in giving us the rubber plantation industry, but many of you may not know that he is possessed of a knowledge of tropical agriculture and forestry that is simply amazing, and you find that allied with almost undue modesty generally. He is so filled up with knowledge that he has not time for anything else. He has also given what we very strongly believe is going to be another great, and perhaps even a still greater industry than rubber to the country. I am certain there is no other man living with whom we would have embarked our reputation and capital. I think that is the greatest compliment we can pay him.

  For all the public optimism, the company was in dire straits. By the following year, the firm, whose investors envisioned thirty thousand acres of miracle grass growing in Malaya, owned fewer than seven thousand young plants in a nursery covering half an acre. A company director and botanist set out for British Honduras and came back with twenty-five thousand seedlings and several ounces of seed, but there was an even more vital problem to contend with—how to take the tough sheathing off the leaves. It proved too time-consuming and costly to decorticate arghan, and no mechanical salvation was ever devised. In September 1924, two years after the glowing tributes to Henry, the Arghan Co. Ltd. went bankrupt, and its investors lost everything.