The Thief at the End of the World Read online

  Yet from the outset, the venture seemed plagued by troubling missteps and unchallenged assumptions. Those in Santarém familiar with Boa Vista knew the surrounding jungle as some of the most undesirable terrain in Pará, a landscape of deep ravines, sandy soil, and steep, rocky slopes, geography inimical to growing rubber trees. A seasoned agronomist like LaRue should have seen the place for what it was, but instead he praised Boa Vista, and rumors of a kickback began to taint the venture. More baffling than this was the fact that, to oversee the work, Ford had hired not an agronomist but a company man versed in the assembly line and factory floor. As the Lake Ormoc began its sixty-mile trip up the Tapajós to Boa Vista, the mercury edged into the nineties, making life miserable for the cool-weather Michigan managers on board. It was quickly discovered that the captain had miscalculated their passage. Although a vessel of four hundred tons like the Lake Ormoc could travel a thousand miles up the Amazon at any time of year, passage on the smaller Tapajós was seasonal: Its water level could rise and fall as much as forty feet between the wet and dry season. In December, Fordlandia was outside the dry-season limit for oceangoing freighters.

  But that problem was easily fixed: It was simply a matter recalculating draft, child’s play for engineers, and so they returned to Santarém to reload everything on smaller river steamers. During the delay, Ford’s managers discussed the planting, and those they’d hired as guides and translators began to grow concerned. These Americans planned to clear-cut the forest, burn out the underbrush and bulldoze everything flat, as if they were building a factory instead of preparing the land for a vast grove of trees. By clear-cutting the landscape, Ford would deplete that thin layer of soil and nutrients upon which the tropical forest depended, and every Amazonian knew through generations of experience that the forest itself was the weather engine creating rain. By cutting down the trees in hopes of introducing a machinelike predictability, Ford might very well create a desert instead.

  Finally there was a problem that no one truly understood. The storied source of the valuable rubber known as “Pará fine” was Hevea brasiliensis (hereafter simply called hevea, unless the name of the genus or species is meant). It is a sixty- to one-hundred-foot giant of the spurge family (Euphorbiaceae), which grew naturally in only one place on earth—a wide swath of forest running in an east-west ellipse along the Amazon. Most Amazonians knew that hevea was a jungle tree that could not survive on open land exposed to long dry spells and pelting rain. A greater threat was microscopic, a blight that hit the young trees once their branches reared up and reached to one another in an unbroken canopy. Those who’d seen traces of this “rust” on their small plantations tried warning the Ford managers: Perhaps the young trees should be planted far apart; perhaps the primary forest surrounding Boa Vista should not be leveled, nor the thin layer of humus and fungus forming the topsoil scraped away. But the company men did not listen. Conditions out here were so blessed, they said, that even if they stood hevea’s branches in the ground, they would “take root almost without fail.” What were the fears of some backwater planters against the genius of Henry Ford?

  The Brazilians shrugged their shoulders and said nothing more, but in private they laughed among themselves. It soon became obvious that Ford intended to run Fordlandia by remote control from Dearborn. His managers, who knew nothing of tropical plants or the rain forest, would not listen to those who did. What could one do with such people?

  And so Ford’s minions reloaded their equipment and started up the river again. They steamed past the high sandstone bluffs lining the Tapajós. A beaked freshwater dolphin occasionally leaped beside the curling wake of the bow. About twenty miles upriver they passed the tiny village of Aveiro, a long, narrow town with the jungle on its doorstep; before that Boim, on the opposite shore, its white church to St. Ignatius greeting visitors as they climbed the riverbank. Nearby stood the abandoned trading houses of Jewish merchants who’d come from Morocco at the beginning of the Rubber Boom. So many people and nationalities came together in this lonely stretch of jungle: Britons, Indians, former Barbadoan slaves, displaced Confederates from the American Civil War, and caboclos, Spanish priests and killers—and now one of the richest men in the world. There were ironies in such meetings. Even here, Ford’s hatred of Jews was infamous, but many of the seeds that formed the British monopoly were purchased from these Jewish merchants, who’d bought them in turn from the Indians deep in the jungle. Now Ford was bringing the fruit of those smuggled seeds back. The world was a very small place, especially in the tropics. Everything came full circle, if you lived long enough. On this river, though, that was never assured.

  One can never be too careful on the Amazon. Lives can be forgotten, swallowed by the forest. Pride is a calamitous misstep. Visions of riches shed their luster in an instant, transforming suddenly into fatal dreams.

  I came to the Amazon in October 2005, tracking the remnants of two such dreams. One was Henry Ford’s. Fordlandia still stands along the river, a sparsely inhabited ghost town. I chugged up the Tapajós in a boat little bigger than the African Queen. The dusty streets are empty save for a few farmers and their children; the old water tower overlooks the river, but the FORD, INC. logo was painted over long ago. To many, such ruins seemed incomprehensible, so pervasive was Ford’s myth—the man who never failed. Approaching the huge, deserted pier that still thrusts into the Tapajós, one cannot help but remember the signatory lines from Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Ford’s metropolis in the jungle never materialized as he saw it. The marching rows of hevea have long rotted away, replaced by secondary forest. The scrubbed white hospital devoted to combating tropical disease sits empty on the hillside, patient records strewn across the concrete floor. Ford dreamed of ten thousand residents. Today there are 150 at best, clinging to a red-dust hillside facing the wide Tapajós. Behind them, the jungle creeps closer each day.

  The second dream I chased was Henry Wickham’s, and his is the stranger tale. It is the story of how one man—likeable, if prone to bombast; determined, if not particularly talented or wise—pulled off one of the most successful and far-reaching acts of biological piracy in world history, and of the personal costs it entailed. Where experts failed at the task, this amateur, who’d stumbled into the jungle after gaudy feathers for the “ladies’ hat trade,” succeeded in smuggling a species of plant thought incapable of growth anywhere but in the Amazon to the British plantations of Malaya and Ceylon. He did so, he boasted, in sight of a Brazilian gunboat, loading the seeds at night aboard a commandeered Liverpool-to-Manaus freighter stripped of its cargo by unscrupulous officers. There was always an air of the fantastic to Wickham’s exploits, an extravagant blend of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lord Dunsany, and even today, historians seem uncertain what to make of him. Was he a patriot or an opportunist, a visionary or an extraordinarily lucky buffoon? A 1976 article in the Times of London linked his presence in Santarém to deliberate Victorian espionage. A British cruise-boat tourist recently claimed that Wickham had smuggled rubber seeds in the false soles of his shoes. For all the fanciful portrayals, the fact remains that in May 1876 he secretly loaded seventy thousand rubber seeds into the hold of the ocean-bound Amazonas and accompanied them to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Though only two thousand would germinate, these saplings changed the world.

  The story of the exploitation of rubber is the story of the Amazon itself. No other river on Earth compares to this continent-bisecting waterway and its countless tributaries. No other has such a history of fortune hunting and attempted conquest. The Amazon drains an area of 2.72 million square miles; although the Mississippi-Missouri river is longer, it drains little more than half the same area. All the rivers of Europe constitute barely a trickle to this flood. It is a congress of rivers; during the rainy season a vast reservoir forms that reaches four hundred to five hundred miles in width and drains more than a third of South America. The river and its branches incl
ude ten thousand miles of navigable waterway. Land travel is nearly impossible, though plenty have tried.

  It is extraordinarily easy to get lost forever in such a land, yet a fascination with the rain forest cannot be denied. Perhaps it is the realization that, in a heartbeat, life can switch from sensational beauty to the sweet breath of death and decay. A whole host of biblical nasties lie in wait for the unwary: amoebic and bacillary dysentery, yellow and dengue fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. There are places in the Amazon experiencing a plague of vampire bats, where entire families catch rabies. There is river blindness, transmitted by blackflies and caused by worms that migrate to the eyes. The giant catfish is said to chomp off swimmers’ feet, while a miniature catfish, the candiru, or “toothpick fish,” swims up the stream of uric acid released by bigger fish, then lodges in the gills or cloaca with the help of some sturdy, sharp spines. It does the same to humans unwise enough to use the river as a urinal. Drawn by the nitrogen in urine, the candiru swims up the urethra like an eel, then sets its spines.

  Still, I told myself, if I kept my eyes open, watched where I stepped, took my malaria pills, and didn’t pee in the pool, the chances were better than even that I’d return home unscathed. Such are the dangers of hubris: Just when I thought I’d tamed the jungle, the ordinary taught me otherwise.

  Monuments are not well marked in the Amazon: They are quickly covered by underbrush or succumb to mold, termites, and decay. In 1849, three of the era’s preeminent naturalists converged on Santarém, drawn by tales of hevea and other forest wonders. Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and Richard Spruce were invited to a private estate named Sitio de Taperhina on the nearby Rio Ayaya to pursue their investigations. Their journal descriptions of hevea set off a rush that would be as frenzied as the one then occurring at Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Wickham may have lingered here too; his wife’s memoirs suggest that he may have been nursed back to health in the sugarcane plantation when he nearly died. The old house was still said to stand, and so my guide, some friends, and I took a Land Rover as far as we could into the primary forest, then split up when the path forked. I took my walking stick for snakes, but forgot two other essentials—my hat and water bottle.

  One does not mess with the sun along the equator: It beats down from straight overhead instead of the more forgiving oblique angle in the temperate zones. Heat exhaustion comes quickly, especially when coupled with dehydration and exertion; dizziness and nausea, if unheeded, can lead to heatstroke and seizure. I knew this from experience, but under the green shade of the canopy the hat did not seem necessary. As for the water—hey, I would not be long.

  But the path went on, steepening from the jungle plateau to the river plain below, and when I found Taperhina I was overjoyed. Until that moment, there’d been no problem: It was on the return trip up the escarpment to get the others that my troubles began. There is a good reason why Amazonians dive indoors for midday siestas. Halfway up the slope, I felt dry and woozy; three quarters up, I saw spots, so I found a patch of shade. When everyone appeared, we headed back downhill.

  I took a rest, found some shade, and drank some water, then decided to photograph the famous ruin, maybe look inside. But one’s judgment doesn’t always return as fast as one’s sense of physical well-being. As I stepped close to the house, I noticed what seemed to be huge spots of mold clinging to the adobe walls. As I checked the angle through my camera’s viewfinder, a strange thing happened. The mold spots began to move.

  I must still be dizzy, I thought, lowering the camera. But the mold crawled and contracted, and as I placed my foot on the first step, a drone rose around me. In the field before the house, a swarm of red-and-black hornets rose like mist from the grass and hovered.

  The possibility of an aerial assault by hornets does wonders to focus one’s attention. I realized in that second that the old house was a gigantic nest, that the crawling mold was hundreds of hornets tracing arabesques on the walls. Inside, there were probably thousands, if not millions, clinging to each other like glistening fruit, and that vision drove all further thoughts of exploration straight from my mind. Luckily, the hornets seemed as doped by the sun as I had been earlier: They hung in the air as I retraced my steps, then the drone diminished, and they sank to the grass again. I was more than happy to snap pictures from afar with a telephoto lens.

  Incursions into the Amazon region have a habit of repeating this pattern, stopped dead in their tracks by the sudden, unexpected, and mundane. Wickham and Ford both considered themselves instruments for the spread of empire, but the practice was far more bitter than the theory. Slack dry-season currents meant stagnant air and fetid water; the main difference between regions was judged by the prevalence of death and fever. Hookworm enfeebled the populace so much that in the 1940s Pará recorded an 80-percent prevalence rate, while in neighboring Amazonas, 96.4 percent of the population was infected. During the same period in Pará, leprosy claimed two thousand victims. With death-dealing insects and disease came new details of daily life that drove Europeans to the limits of sanity: a steam-bath atmosphere in which biscuits sprouted a whiskerlike mold, salt dissolved into sludge, and sugar turned into syrup. Guns that were loaded overnight could not be fired the next day, as gunpowder loaded into canisters liquefied.

  Long before OPEC, Wickham’s biopiracy handed Britain the first worldwide monopoly of a strategic resource in human history, yet the government he served—from his spymaster, Joseph Hooker, Director of Kew Gardens, to Queen Victoria herself—found him distasteful. He never partook of the riches he brought to his masters. The Wickhams called themselves pioneer planters, but in reality they lived as exiles from empire like that other, more famous couple whose taste of forbidden fruit doomed them to wander the earth’s far places for the rest of their lives.

  Few modern fables demonstrate so lucidly the means by which an individual affects the course of history—and then the consequences that lurch out of control. Rubber became an end in itself, and the horrors committed in its name were the unintended byproduct of the quest for a greater good. Henry Wickham saw his theft as an act of both patriotic and personal salvation. Henry Ford tried to tip the global scales back in favor of the United States and hoped to do so by building a mini-America in the jungle. Both became parables of the use and misuse of nature in the quest for power.

  Today, the ruins prevail. Fordlandia rots among the trees. Wickham got his wish, but not in the way he planned. Rubber brought him honors and fame, but his celebrated seed snatch rained economic apocalypse upon the Amazon. Rubber destroyed his friends and family and killed everything he loved.

  She wanted me to tell her what I did at first when I came out here; what other men found to do when they came out—where they went, what was likely to happen to them—as if I could guess and foretell from my experience the fates of men who come out here with a hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons—no reason but restlessness—who come, and go, and disappear!

  —Joseph Conrad, “The Planter of Malata”

  PART I

  THE NEED

  Men are estranged from what is most familiar, and they must seek out what is in itself evident.

  —Heracleitus

  CHAPTER 1

  THE FORTUNATE SON

  Later, when his schemes lay in ruin, all the lives lost and loves departed, he would sit in his club in London among the other old imperialists, embellish his sole victory, and call it justified. By then, the legend of Henry Wickham had become iconic, his deception for queen and country part of imperial lore. His lined and sunburned face stared from the newspapers and magazines toward the vague distance, his white shock of hair floating in a nimbus around his oversize head. Detractors claimed he was coarse and self-serving, nothing more than an opportunist who’d been in the right place at the right time. To others, he was an embarrassing reminder of the empire’s rapacity. But these were minority reports, out of touch with popular opinion. By living as
long as he had at the ends of the earth, he wore the prestige of the unknown like a medal. He was a force, and forces scoff at analysis. They simply are.

  Joseph Conrad knew men like him, and the cost of their ambition. “I will tell you what I believe,” he wrote in his 1913 novella “The Planter of Malata,” a tale some said was modeled after Wickham and his last failed venture. “I believe that when your heart is set on some object, you are a man that doesn’t count the cost to yourself and others.” But one suspects that Henry knew the cost too well. Photos snapped of him in his triumph show a man who looks distant and somehow unsatisfied. The old cravings still reign uppermost, whether in London tweed or white drill suit as he poses beside a sixty-foot rubber tree. He never seems at peace. There was one portrait given to his niece shortly after he was knighted, a private photo never meant for dissemination. For once the expression is soft. He lowers his prominent chin and doesn’t glower. He is relaxed, and descendants insist they can detect the faint shadow of a smile.

  If so, it is touched with rue.

  Two moments of peace stand recorded in the long life of Henry Alexander Wickham. One was in the jungle. The earlier was in a tamer place—the hills and spacious meadows of Hampstead Heath in North London, his first home.

  Henry was born on Friday, May 29, 1846, in Grove Cottage, Haverstock Hill, four miles northwest of St. Paul’s dome in London. It was a good time to be alive—if you were English, one of the “middling” classes, and part of the club. Today’s Britain has been called “a crowded island where towns and cities rub up against one another like rocks in an old stone wall.” Although the island had not yet reached that point, London was growing fast, spreading like an oil slick to absorb the ancient surrounding villages, a foretaste of things to come. For midcentury writers, London had no beginning or end—it was a “province covered with houses,” “a state”; it was Gargantua, absorbing and excreting vast quantities of people and goods. All the world was here, or at least her glories: raw sugar from the West Indies, tea and silk from China, hides and skins from Patagonia, rubber from Brazil.