Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (29 May 1846 – 27 September 1928) was a British explorer. He was the first person to smuggle a large, viable shipment of Brazilian rubber seeds to the British Empire. The British had long planned to create rubber plantations in Southeast Asia, and the plantations resulting from the seeds Wickham smuggled out of Brazil expanded the rubber industry and broke Brazil’s monopoly, bringing about the end of the Amazon rubber boom.

Smuggling of rubber seeds

Wickham took about a year to collect rubber seeds from commercial rubber groves in Brazil after having been commissioned due to his presence in Brazil. Historian Warren Dean notes that it would have been odd for a British expat to collect so many seeds in broad daylight using local labour without local authorities having been aware of it. In fact, he had the permission of the rubber grove operators where he sourced his seeds.

The Ayapua Boat Museum (Museo Barco Historicos) in Iquitos, Peru calls his actions "the greatest act of biopiracy in the 19th century, and maybe in history", citing that the seeds were never properly recorded on the ship's manifest and that the resulting plantations in Asia deflated the rubber boom in South America. The museum also claims that he was specifically paid by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to collect the seeds.

He accompanied the seeds to the Royal Botanic Gardens, from where seedlings were dispatched to British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), British Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) and Singapore, (though the latter was not used for rubber), Africa, Batavia in Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta in Indonesia), and other tropical destinations, thus dooming the Amazon rubber boom.

Economic impact

Rubber plantations in Asia proved to be more efficient and outproduced those in Brazil and Peru. This was because the Asian rubber plantations were organized and well-suited for production on a commercial scale, whereas in Brazil and Peru the process of latex gathering from forest trees remained a difficult extractive process: rubber tappers worked natural rubber groves in the southern Amazon forest, and rubber tree densities were almost always low as a consequence of high natural forest diversity. Experiments in cultivating rubber trees in plantations in the Amazon showed them to be vulnerable to South American rubber tree leaf blight fungus (Pseudocercospora ulei) and other diseases and pests—essentially limiting South American rubber production to hunting-gathering rather than agriculture.

In spite of decades of research in selecting highly productive and disease resistant rubber trees, many commercial rubber trees throughout the world are descended from the seeds Wickham took to Joseph Dalton Hooker in London.

In Brazil, Wickham is labeled as a "bio-pirate" for his role in smuggling the rubber seeds that broke the South American monopoly.

References

Further reading

  • Henry Wickham biography - at International Rubber Research & Development Board