The Romance of Rubber | Page 5

own choosing so long as they chose places where the climate was
right."
For many years people only laughed at Wickham's great idea, but like
Goodyear he had faith enough to persevere. While in Brazil he planted
some rubber seeds to see what would happen. The seeds DID grow, and
the book which Wickham wrote about his idea and his experiments
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