“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.”William Styron (b.1925)

The Thief at the End of the World

By

Joe Jackson

Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire

The Rubber Industry has been and continues to this day to be one of the dominant industries of this world. In the late 1800’s it was the “oil industry” of its day. It was actually started in the early 1800’s, however, it wasn’t until the Civil War in the United States that production and usage of rubber rose to significant levels. Think shoes, boots, hats, coats, pontoon boats, tents, haversacks, and railroads. The next boost to rubber production was the Franco Prussian War in 1870 to 1871. As with many businesses, wars provided the impetus for its rise.

The original source of the world’s rubber was the Amazon in Brazil and was a product of trees in the Amazonian forests. These trees were amongst many other species of trees in these forests and were hundreds of feet apart. To tap the rubber from these trees was an arduous process. England ended up dominating the rubber business for many years because of its Indonesian plantations where they had rows of rubber trees planted only several feet apart and laborers could easily go from one tree to another. The trees in these plantations came from seeds in the Amazon. They were the result of one of the largest examples of bio-piracy in the world. They were the result of one man, Henry Wickham.

Henry grew up in England in the 1850’s when world explorers were the “rock stars” of the day. He was the son of a struggling widower, and his childhood was not an easy one. During these hard times he would fantasize about being an explorer. He was exposed to the many “new” uses of rubber during the “Great Exhibition” of 1851. This was where Charles Goodyear spent $30,000 (a huge amount of money in that day) to exhibit and display the results of his new process of vulcanization.

All of this had great impact on young Henry Wickham. As a young man Henry traveled to Brazil to search out and learn everything he could about this wonderful substance. He was convinced that his future was in rubber. Henry traveled into the Amazon, was subject to hardship, disease, wild animals, snakes and everything you might associate with traveling in a tropical jungle in the mid 1800’s. He almost lost his life more than once. A significant part of Joe Jackson’s book is his descriptions of Henry’s travails in the Amazonian jungles. In May of 1876, Henry emerged from these jungles with 70,000 seeds for rubber trees. He smuggled these to the Kew Gardens in England, where they were planted and out of these 70,000 seeds approximately 2,800 germinated. These seeds were the genesis of England’s domination of the rubber trade which began in the early 1900’s.

One of the main ironies of this story is that Henry received virtually no credit for these accomplishments until late in his life. For years, he was not only, not recognized for his achievements, but was ignored by the establishment he worked so hard for. Finally, he received some overdue recognition, was granted a knighthood and a modest stipend. This, while many others had become fabulously wealthy many years before.

Mr. Jackson’s style of writing can be arduous if you do not have a genuine interest in his subject. If you do (which I do), it is a fascinating read. You feel that you are in the jungle with Henry, and Mr. Jackson’s detail is nothing short of amazing. This is a story of monumental implications which were the result of one man’s monumental efforts.