Henry Wickham

Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (born May 29, 1846 in Hampstead , † September 27, 1928 ) was an English naturalist and economist.

At the age of 20 Wickham was a bird hunter and feather collector in Nicaragua , then he got a job as a forest clerk in British Honduras . From there he moved to the Brazilian jungle and tried his hand at planting in Santarém on the Rio Tapajós . His travel reports moved Joseph Hooker , the director of Kew Gardens , to an order from Wickham to bring the rubber tree seeds to England illegally. In 1876, Wickham collected 70,000 rubber seeds in Brazil , which he, wrongly declared as orchid seeds, exported to London against the Brazilian export ban .

In London, 2,000 rubber seedlings grew in the Kew Gardens greenhouses and were shipped to Malaysia . Only eight of these rubber plants made it to their destination, but thrived there. Just 20 years later, Malaysian exports covered 90 percent of the world's rubber needs. The new acreage plunged the rubber barons in the Amazon into economic crises and ended the rubber boom there . The non-native trees in Southeast Asia had no natural enemies such as fungi and insects and provided higher yields than the rubber trees in the Amazon region.

In 1920 Wickham was knighted as a Knight Bachelor for his services to rubber culture. He had traveled to numerous countries and repeatedly founded rubber plantations and advised planters. In Brazil, Wickham is considered a biopirate because he broke the Brazilian rubber monopoly with his export of rubber seeds.

In 1938 the Amazon adventure with René Deltgen in the leading role was filmed under the title " Kautschuk ".

Web links

ZDF: A momentous theft
History of Natural Rubber ( Memento from May 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

^ Clive Ponting: A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations . Penguin Books , New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-303898-6 , p. 183.
^ Toby & Will Musgrave: An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World . Cassell & Co , London 2007, ISBN 0-304-35443-0 , p. 173.

personal data
SURNAME	Wickham, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Wickham, Sir Henry Alexander (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English naturalist and economist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 29, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hampstead
DATE OF DEATH	September 27, 1928

[1] Clive Ponting: A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations . Penguin Books , New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-303898-6 , p. 183.

[2] Toby & Will Musgrave: An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World . Cassell & Co , London 2007, ISBN 0-304-35443-0 , p. 173.