Henry_wickham

For the British politician (1800-1867), see Henry Wickham Wickham.

Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (1846 – 1928) was an explorer, plant collector and planter. He was responsible for gathering 70,000 seeds from the rubber-bearing tree, Hevea brasiliensis, in the Manaus area of Brazil in 1876. Thus, in a certain sense, he was the first renowned bio-pirate to be granted official benefits by an illegal colonial act, in the nineteenth century. He was almost single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the Amazon rubber boom. He exported the seeds to Malaysia, and it was soon learned that diseases that impacted rubber trees in the Amazon did not exist in Asia. British owned rubber plantations in Asia were much more efficient and outproduced Brazil. This was because the plantations run in Asia were organized and well suited for exploration in commercial scale whereas in Brazil the process of latex gathering from the trees remained difficult for it has been maintained in a primitive basis: workers were to find the trees in the middle of the amazon forest, and that was no easy task.

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