Washington Post Book Review, March 30, 2008
An act of "biopiracy" 130 years ago enriched England and devastated Brazil.
By Jonathan Yardley
THE THIEF AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
By Joe Jackson
Viking. 414 pp. $27.95
On June 10, 1876, a self-styled explorer and adventurer named Henry
Wickham arrived at Liverpool with his wife, Violet, having sailed
from Brazil. He hastened to London and the offices of the Royal
Botanic Gardens, commonly known as Kew Gardens, where he immediately
presented the director, Joseph Dalton Hooker, with a sample of the
precious cargo he had brought: 70,000 seeds of "the valuable rubber
known as 'Parafine,' " its proper botanical name being Hevea
brasiliensis, or simply hevea, as Joe Jackson refers to it in The
Thief at the End of the World.
Wickham had committed, as Jackson writes in this excellent account of
his life and its lasting consequences, an act of "biopiracy." He had
stolen seeds native to the Amazon forest and made them available to
imperial Britain for planting in its Asian colonies. Jackson writes:
"Henry's theft was no different than that by scores of others before
him -- and yet, in a fundamental way, it was. He did not steal one
seed, or even a hundred; he stole seventy thousand. . . .Thirty-four
years after Henry's theft, the British rubber grown in the Far East
from Henry's seeds would flood the world market, collapsing the
Amazon economy in a single year and placing in the hands of a single
power a major world resource. In 1884, the state of Amazonas levied a
heavy export tax on rubber seeds, and in 1918, Brazil banned their
export entirely. By 1920, when Henry was being knighted and called
the 'father of the rubber industry' in Great Britain, Brazilians
dubbed him the 'executioner of Amazonas,' 'the prince of thieves,'
and called his theft 'hardly defensible in international law.' "
The effects of Wickham's theft were nothing short of stupendous.
Though it took a long time for his seeds to take root and begin to
produce rubber trees -- a period in which Wickham was scorned by
Britain's scientific establishment -- eventually "hevea seeds were
sent all over the world -- to Selangor in Malaya, Malacca, British
Borneo, India, Burma, German East Africa, Portuguese Mozambique, and
Java," and in 1913, just as World War I was about to begin -- with
the huge demand for rubber it would generate -- Britain's triumph was sealed:
"That year, the British plantations turned the corner and produced
47,618 tons of high-quality, acetate-cured rubber compared to
Brazil's 39,370 tons. In 1916, Brazil produced as much as ever, but
the game had now changed. In three more years, British plantations
would produce enough hevea to fill 95 percent of the world's need for
high-quality rubber. Such fantastic supply seemed unimaginable just a
few years earlier, and the price plummeted from the $3.06 high in
1910 to 66 cents per pound in 1915. By 1921, when Great Britain
controlled the world market, plantation rubber sold for 12-21 cents a pound."
Wickham's story is dramatic and interesting in and of itself, but
obviously its ramifications go far beyond its immediate details.
"Biopiracy," as Jackson says, at its core "is about power and its
imbalance -- the historical fact that poorer countries have been high
in resources, while richer nations want -- and can take -- what they
have." What Wickham did "became a symbol for every act of
exploitation visited on the Third World" and raised an issue that
probably never will be resolved: "Who owns the earth's riches?"
Though "current international law holds that nations own their
resources," common practice remains that "nature, and her
'improvement,' belongs to mankind," or, more bluntly, to whoever has
the power to control it.
Thus it is no small irony that Wickham, though hungry for fame at a
time when "the explorer was a central hero in an escape fantasy that
gripped the British isles, a champion who trod the earth's wild
places and interpreted what he saw through English eyes," was himself
not unduly avaricious and whiled away his last years "poor,
frightfully poor, spending most of his time at the Royal Colonial
Club, surrounded by fellow imperialists, each spinning their separate
tales." He was born in 1846 into a modestly prosperous family for
which everything changed with his father's sudden death four years
later, leaving his mother to support three small children through her
very marginal work as a milliner. Henry seems to have been a dreamy
boy who for a long time wanted to be an artist and showed some talent
at it, but he was determined to regain such status as his family had
lost and, like many in those days, thought that could be accomplished
in the Americas.
So in the summer of 1866, the 20-year-old Wickham headed for the
Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. Two years later he had found his way to
the Orinoco, working as a rubber tapper, aiming to set himself up on
a plantation and to enjoy all the prestige that a planter's life
entailed. He never really achieved that dream, there or anywhere
else, but he learned a great deal about rubber. He also learned a
great deal about tropical insects and tropical diseases, all of which
Jackson describes in vivid, mildly nauseating detail. On any number
of occasions Wickham could have died, but clearly he was a survivor,
perhaps in part because he inhabited his own universe. Many years
later he was deftly described as "a large-framed idealist, dreamy,
sympathetic, artistic, a great wanderer and naturalist in tropical
America, but not well qualified for official or commercial business."
More than anything, he was the right man at the right moment. He
arrived in South America at "the beginning of what investors in New
York and London called the Rubber Age." By 1860, "it had become
obvious . . . that with the discovery of vulcanization, rubber would
be the world's most useful plastic," employed in everything from
telegraph wires to transatlantic cables to railroads to any number of
essential applications in modern warfare. Between 1880 and 1910, "the
three great developments dependent on rubber -- electricity,
bicycles, and automobiles -- increased its worldwide demand at a rate
that nearly doubled production every five, then every three years."
Wickham was more an instrument of rubber's hegemony than a master of
it, but the rubber boom would not have taken place as it did without
him. No doubt someone else would have figured out how to smuggle
hevea seeds out of Brazil and into the arms of Mother England, but
Wickham was the one who pulled it off.
He had been in the jungle for a decade before he brought the seeds to
Kew. He had tried his luck in various places with mostly discouraging
results, but he declined to be discouraged. After yet another
failure, this one only a couple of years before he stole the seeds,
he became "a true believer in the British doctrine of world
transformation, that nature's secrets could be secured and replanted
-- all for the improvement of man, the empire and her queen." When
Kew found out about him and offered him a reward should he succeed in
bringing rubber seeds out of the jungle, he seems to have accepted
the assignment not so much in hopes of personal gain -- though he was
scarcely without such desire -- as from a peculiarly Victorian sense
of patriotism.
Wickham, like all the more celebrated explorer/adventurers of his
day, is a creature of the past. Big corporations now do the dirty
work of extracting the Third World's resources and delivering them
for the convenience of those of us in more privileged circumstances.
But his remains a cautionary tale, as Jackson well understands.
Exploitation is exploitation, no matter how it is done and by whom.
Trade agreements that open the United States and other major markets
to goods from poorer countries redress the balance to a degree, but
the wildly disproportionate consumption of the world's resources by
its richest countries continues, with no end in sight.
Jackson has made a first-rate book out of Wickham's story. A
freelance writer and former newspaper reporter who works out of
Virginia Beach, he has done a heroic amount of research, made a
coherent story out of a huge mass of material and identified the
larger themes that give the story its resonance. His writing is
lucid, occasionally vivid, and he brings to the enterprise a welcome
sense of humor, as well as, when it is useful, a sense of the
ridiculous. The Thief at the End of the World not merely is
informative and instructive, it also is immensely entertaining, an
attribute always to be welcomed.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
