One name rules the high seas of seed theft: Henry Wickham, the most devastatingly effective agriculture pirate of all time.
Roughly 135 years before Chinese nationals crawled through Iowa cornfields to swipe biotech secrets, or raided rice samples in Kansas and Arkansas, or snatched digital treasure from the mouth of Monsanto in Missouri—Wickham outdid them all.
He singlehandedly collected, pilfered, and delivered the keys of empire. In 1876, Wickham emerged from deep Brazilian jungle with a cache of stolen rubber seeds and triggered a seismic shift in global rubber production. Wickham’s seeds essentially destroyed the Amazonian rubber boom and became the foundation of new production which still dominates the rubber industry today—a total market expected to reach $88 billion by 2035.
Welcome to the sticky-fingered escapades of agriculture’s forgotten bio-pirate.
Lock, Stock, and Barrel
Rubber was a flirt in the early 1800s, showing plenty of skin to industrialists, but always breaking hearts in the end. The mercurial latex, derived from the milky sap of rubber trees, was prone to melt in heat or crack in cold temperatures. However, rubber was about to become riches and unclog a bottleneck of mechanization.
Enter inventor Charles Goodyear and a magical dab of sulfur to ensure rubber stability in all weathers, via the process of vulcanization in 1844. Goodyear never made a dime off his discovery, but he rocketed the planet into the rubber realm and elevated a peculiar substance to a manufacturing wonder. No rubber, no modern industrial age.
Following Goodyear’s breakthrough recipe, Brazil’s Amazon Valley became the world’s sole source of high-quality rubber from 1850 to 1913, obtained via the tapping of towering Hevea brasiliensis, the finest rubber trees on earth.
Latex is generated by approximately 10% of all plants, but only rubber trees, especially Hevea, bleed latex in sufficient quality and quantity. Brazil had a rubber monopoly. Lock, stock, and barrel. Harvest, send downriver, and sell, baby, sell, to a hungry export market that could never get enough of the milky product.
However, the British Empire wanted a piece of the action, or rather, all the action. Instead of buy, why not grow? Or cheaper yet, steal? As in, bag some of Brazil’s seeds, get outta Dodge, and transport the load 8,500 miles east to the far side of the Empire for planting in Sri Lanka and Singapore, thus collapsing Brazil’s entire rubber monopoly.
England had beaucoup expectations to expect seed heist success. Why? Lessons learned from stolen fever trees.
Game of Thieves
Malaria ranks high among history’s stone-cold killers, once exacting annual death tolls in the millions. (Presently, mosquito-borne malaria kills 500,000+ annually.) In the 1800s, the go-to medical treatment for malaria was a dose of quinine, derived from the bark of cinchona or “fever” trees, a species found in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and banned from export. Fever bark was among the world’s hottest commodities.
In 1861, Richard Spruce risked life and limb at the order of the Royal Botanic Gardens and smuggled 100,000 dried cinchona seeds and 637 seedlings over the Andes to the port of Guayaquil, and shipped the haul to England for successful planting in India. Spruce’s purloined seeds shattered the Andes region’s quinine monopoly and rocketed the British up the quinine ladder. (Great Britain quickly lost top-tier quinine status when Charles Ledger smuggled a particularly high-quinine variety of cinchona seeds out of Bolivia in 1865, and sold the load to the Dutch.)
A decade beyond Spruce, the international scramble was on for Hevea rubber tree seeds. Elbows were sharp. The Americans and French were ready to slap cash on the barrelhead for viable seeds—no questions asked.
In 1873, under the guise of a hunting trip, Charles Farris steamed out of Brazil, carrying two stuffed crocodiles. Despite the appearance of standard taxidermy, the crocs were packed with 2,000 rubber tree seeds—each specimen up to 1.5” in length (typically, slightly smaller than a pecan), 2-4 grams in weight, and mottled brown in color. However, after transfer to England and later to India, only 12 of Farris’ seeds germinated, and all seedlings died. No dice.
Next man up? Bolivia’s Ricardo Chavez, a mercenary who slipped four barrels (500 lb.) of Hevea through a Brazilian port and across the Atlantic Ocean, only for the entire shipment to ruin on English docks. Total loss. No germination.
Enter Henry Wickham. Hard as hickory, a lean 30 years old, stout chin, raven hair, and backed by a pirate’s audacity.
Into the Big Empty
In northern Brazil, beyond the city of Santarem in the state of Para, Wickham bounced into the interior, temporarily taking residence with a group of ex-Confederate soldiers and their families who had left the American South following the Civil War to seek fortune in Brazil. Precisely how he found the best Hevea trees and obtained pods is a cloudy tale.
(For a deep dive on Wickham’s exploits, see Joe Jackson’s superb account: The Thief at the End of the World)
Starting in 1875, he bought and/or collected a hoard of Hevea seeds, packed them in banana leaves, and by mid-May 1876, had 70,000 seeds ready for transport. Wickham’s ability to weave the logistics required in drying, packing, hiding, and shipping the trove—estimated to weight 1.5 tons—was a herculean feat.
As described by Jackson: When Henry got the seeds down to the river, he dried them gently in the air, packing them between banana leaves to soak up excess oil, and left them swinging from the rafters in the cooling river breeze—the only expedient possible to stave off a build-up of moisture that would lead to early germination or mold. His precautions were exacting and ingenious, exhibiting an understanding of rubber for which he was never credited.
By mid-May he’d collected 70,000 seeds, an incredible number, considering all the odds against him. It seemed to assure success—if he could keep them alive. But the very quantity created a new problem. The historian John Loadman calculated in his book Tears of the Tree that the seeds weighed three quarters of a ton. Add to that the weight of banana leaves and pannier baskets, and the gross weight was nearly one and a half tons. Based on volume, Loadman estimates as many as 50 hemispherical baskets with a diameter of 20” suspended from the rafters.
There was no explicit Brazilian law banning the export of Hevea seeds, but Wickham twisted an export license, describing his intent to transport “delicate botanical specimens.” Possibly doling out bribes to protect the cache, he loaded 70,000 seeds on the Amazonas steamer, and slipped away from Brazilian shores, docking in Liverpool on June 10, 1876, with a historic haul of Hevea seeds. Wickham had just torn the heart out of Brazil’s rubber monopoly.
Hands and Hijinks
Fostered by meticulous care, 2,000-plus of Wickham’s seeds germinated. Planted in Sri Lanka and several other Far East countries, they became the fuel of Great Britain’s rubber engine.
By 1913, Britain’s towering, mature Hevea trees—thanks to Wickham’s subterfuge—pumped out liquid money, describes Jackson: For sixty-three years, the Amazon Valley owned the world market in rubber, but then the bubble broke, as so many do. The Amazon Rubber Boom turned into a bust in one short year. In 1913, the rubber from 70,000 seed smuggled from Brazil and planted in Britain’s Asian plantations flooded the market, outselling the more expensive ‘wild’ rubber and tossing it from the stage.
The plunge was precipitous. In 1900, Brazil’s Amazon Valley met 95% of the global rubber market. By 1928, the same year Henry Wickham died at 82, the Amazon met a mere 2.3% of global demand.
Ironically, as Brazil’s rubber star dimmed, Henry Ford saw opportunity. By the 1920s, Ford was weary of paying foreign rubber suppliers to feed his bustling business. For $125,000, he bought 2.5 million acres (roughly the size of Connecticut) of raw Amazon in northwest Brazil along the Tapajos River in the Brazilian state of Para, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in modern currency equivalency to carve out Fordlandia—a rubber plantation town. Ford’s venture, a utopia of sorts, was shuttered in the 1940s.
Over 150 years beyond the sleight of hand and hijinks of Henry Wickham, the seismic consequences of agricultural espionage are clear. One man; one theft; one giant shift in history. Beware the bio-pirate.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Stealing the Farm: China Continues Raid of US Agriculture by Theft and Agroterror
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
Georgia Watermelon Heist Explodes into Epic Night of Pandemonium
Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Cold-Busted: Frozen Deer Decoy Nabs Poachers and Cocaine in Spectacular Sting
Sticky Fingers: USDA Fraudster Steals $200M in Stunning Scam
