The Romance of Rubber | Page 5

finally came into the hands of Sir Joseph Hooker, the Director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, near London. So interested did he become that he called Wickham's plan to the attention of the Government of India, and finally Wickham was commissioned to take a cargo of rubber seeds to England, so that his idea might be tried out.
This commission was more difficult than one might think, and all of Wickham's faith and perseverance were needed to carry it out. Indeed for a time it seemed hopeless, principally because the seeds so quickly dry up and lose their vitality that they must be planted very soon after being gathered.
But Wickham watched his opportunity, and finally he was able to charter a ship in the name of the Indian Government. About a third of the way up the Amazon River he placed in her hold several thousand carefully packed seeds of the Hevea Braziliensis, or rubber tree. Let Wickham, himself, tell how he surmounted the next difficulty:
"We were bound to call in at the city of Para as the port of entry, in order to obtain clearance papers for the ship before we could go to sea. Any delay would have rendered my precious freight quite valueless and useless. But again fortune favored. I had a 'friend at court' in the person of Consul Green, who went himself with me to call on the proper official, and supported me as I presented to His Excellency 'my difficulty and anxiety, being in charge of, and having on board a ship anchored out in the stream, exceedingly delicate botanical specimens, especially designated for delivery to Her Britannic Majesty's own Royal Garden of Kew. Even while doing myself the honor of thus calling on His Excellency, I had given orders to the captain of the ship to keep up steam, having ventured to trust His Excellency would see his way clear to furnishing me with immediate dispatch. An interview most polite, full of mutual compliments in the best Portuguese manner, enabled us to get under way as soon as the captain had got the dinghy hauled aboard."
Can you imagine Wickham's sigh of relief as his vessel, with its freight of perishable treasure, steamed out of port, and began the long journey to England?

CHAPTER 5
PLANTATION DEVELOPMENT
The transporting of the rubber seeds from the Brazilian forests to England was only the first step in Wickham's project. The real test was still to come. The seeds were planted in the famous Botanical Gardens of Kew, and on August 12, 1876, the several thousand seedlings which had been raised from them were packed in special cases and shipped to Ceylon on the other side of the globe for the final and most important stage of the experiment.
How long the next five years must have seemed to the anxious Wickham, for it was that long before the first rubber tree flowered in the gardens at Heneratgoda, sixteen miles from Colombo, where the trees had finally been planted. In this year, 1881, experiments in tapping began, and it was plain that Wickham's dream was to be realized.
From these few trees, so carefully tended in their youth, has sprung the whole rubber industry of Ceylon and the Far East. Wickham must indeed have been proud to see the plantations spreading from Ceylon to Malaya, where rubber was eagerly taken up by planters who were despairing of ever making a living out of coffee, and later to Sumatra and Java and Borneo. To-day rubber plantations cover an area of over 3,000,000 acres, with a yearly output of almost 360,000 tons, or about ten times the average yearly output of "wild rubber."
There is a curious coincidence in the fact that Wickham got his idea about planting rubber trees in India at about the same time that men in America began to experiment with the horseless carriage. You may never have stopped to think of it, but mechanical experts say that without rubber pneumatic tires, automobiles could never have become the fine, swift vehicles they are. It was a wonderful thing that when in the early part of this century the automobile industry suddenly burst forth with a demand for rubber so great that Brazil could never have hoped to supply it, there was found ready in the Far East, as a result of the planting that had been done there, a supply that took care of the sudden emergency.
A little more than ten years ago American business men began to take an interest in the rubber plantations. They have shown characteristic energy in the field, and the greatest single rubber plantation in the world is owned by an American company, the United States Rubber Company. This plantation is on the island of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, one of the best governed