Henry Wickham

Who was Henry Wickham?

Sir Henry Alexander Wickham was a British explorer. He later claimed in publicity that he was responsible for stealing about 70,000 seeds from the rubber-bearing tree, Hevea brasiliensis, in the Santarém area of Brazil in 1876. However there was, in fact, no law at the time forbidding their export and it would appear that Wickham was trying to make his actions more exciting than they really were. These seeds he accompanied to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, from where seedlings were dispatched to Ceylon, Malaya, Africa, Batavia, and other tropical destinations, thus dooming the Amazonian rubber boom.

Henry Wickham was born in Hampstead, north London. Wickham's father, a solicitor, died when young Wickham was only four years old. At age 20 he traveled to Nicaragua, the first of several trips to Latin America and South America. Returning to England, he married Violet Carter, whose father would publish Wickham's writings. His first book Rough Notes of a Journey Through The Wilderness from Trinidad to Pará, Brazil, by way of the Great Cateracts of the Orinoco, Atabapo, and Rio Negro, was published by W.H.J. Carter in 1872.