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Home , Castilla elastica, Henry Wickham (explorer), Hevea brasiliensis

The that Changed Richard Evans Schultes the World in One Century

I can assure you that on that 14th of June ( 1875)( use of their product had been made any- when Mr. Wickham arrived at Kew m a hansom where in the Eastern Hemisphere. When cab with his precious bags of seeds, not even the Columbus arrived in the West Indies, he wildest could have its imagmation contemplated noted that the natives were a result.... playing game in which rubber balls were employed, but - Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer the rubber for these balls came not from Kew Bulletm (1912/, p. 65 but from elastica, of the fig History is usually written in the context of family. or Yet it political, social, religious changes. As early as 1755, King John of Portugal well be written from the of view might point tried to foster a rubber industry in Belem do of the effects that have had on the de- Para at the mouth of the Amazon River: of mankind and civilization. velopment rubber shoes were manufactured for export It is safe to that no of say smgle species to Portugal, but the quality was so poor that in the short of 100 so has, space years, the industry did not prosper. The process of utterly altered lifestyles around the globe as vulcanization, which has made rubber the Hevea a member of the brasihensis, spurge useful product that it is now, had not yet family, which today is the source of 98 per- been discovered. cent of the world’s . Stop for a After Goodyear discovered vulcanization and to life without moment try imagine in the 1830s, rubber became a product with rubber! ever-increasing uses in the industrializing The introduction of this Amazonian tree nations, and demand for it increased at a ver- from the wild and its domestication in the tiginous rate. The only source was the wild 19th century was the work of the British bo- stands of Hevea - especially H. brasiliensis

the Botanic - tamcal gardens, especially Royal hidden away in the dark corners of the Gardens at Kew, and is unquestionably the vast Amazon forests. The demand for rubber most outstanding example of the value of in Europe and the United States rapidly be- such institutions in life on earth. bettering came so great that production from forest in Rubber-yielding and vines grew trees rose from 31 tons in 1827 to 2607 tons no the Old World, yet, curiously, significant in 1856. This dramatic increase was accom- plished by the virtual enslavement of whole tribes of Indians. Tapping the trees in the A group of rubber tappers bringing m therr daily jungles for four or five months a year, away harvest of from forest trees m the Amazo- from their agricultural lands and sources of man region of Colombia. R. E. Schultes photo. 4

Natural distribution of Hevea andH. brasihensis. Hevea became known to the scientific community when in 1775 the French nourishment, falling prey to tropical dis- botanist J. B. C. F. Aublet described the eases and malnutrition, and often suffering genus from material collected in French from exposure, mistreatment, torture, or Guiana. He not only described the genus and even assassination if they did not bring in its first species, H. guianensis, but detailed enough rubber, they were being extermi- the native method of exploiting it for rubber nated by this forest industry, directed and appended numerous ethnobotanical data primarily by unscrupulous "rubber-barons" on the use of the seeds by the natives as food. who resided in the cities of Manaos and Twenty-six years later, K. L. Willdenow, a Iquitos, usually in sumptuous luxury. German botanist, described a second The modern age of rubber had its begin- species, H. brasiliensis, from material col- nings in 1876, a "rubber revolution" that lected at the mouth of the Amazon River. was the consequence of an incredible series Subsequent botanical exploration of the of sometimes fortuitous events. Amazon Valley - notably that carried out 5

by the British botanist Richard Spruce - forest circuit, then return to his shack and continued to add new species to the genus, begin the long process of coagulating the which now comprises 10 species and three latex. Large balls of rubber were formed by varieties. pouring the latex little by little over a pole that was rotated in smoke from an in- Not all of the species yield a latex capable rising of producing rubber: only H. guianensis, verted funnel. H. benthamiana, andH. brasihensis have The death knell for this primitive industry sufficient caoutchouc to give a usable rub- was sounded when the era of scientifically ber ; and of these, H. brasiliensis supplies the managed plantation practices began in 1876, best product. the year that rubber seeds were first germi- nated successfully in the Royal Botanic Gar- When m 1823 a Scot, Charles Macintosh, dens at Kew. The domestication of the rub- discovered that rubber would dissolve in ber tree served civilization in two ways. naphtha, it acquired many new uses, leading First, it provided an abundance of high to the establishment of factories in England, qual- rubber at low without which France, and the United States. These fac- ity cost, many of our advances in tories failed, however, because the product great industry, medicine, domestic and still became sticky in the heat and brittle in appliances, transportation the cold. would have been impossible. Second, when plantations finally came into full production This was overcome in 1839 when problem in the second decade of the 1900s, the forest a Bostonian, Charles Goodyear, discovered industry was all but obliterated, with the re- vulcanization, a process that greatly altered sult that thousands of native tappers were the of rubber and physical properties liberated from the intolerable and inhuman changed the history of the significance of exploitation to which they had been sub- this vegetal product and its effect on human jected for nearly 100 years. And, undoubt- life. It led to new and hitherto immediately - edly, whole tribes e.g., the Witotos of the unexpected applications and a host of new northwestern Amazon, a truly noble race of industries. It also the "rubber sparked Indians - were saved from virtual extinc- boom" of the then the source Amazon, only tion. of natural rubber: from the South production Domestication of the rubber tree occurred American forests rapidly increased. at the time the British were seeking new of wild rubber is a difficult Exploitation crops for their tropical colonies. The intro- and The frustratmg operation. natives, living duction of the quinine-bark tree into the season under such abom- during tapping from the Andes had just been highly success- inable conditions, produced a poor-quality ful. Sir Clements Markham, who had di- The latex was laden product. frequently rected the introduction of that tree, was with bark, dirt, and stones and adulterated convinced that the rubber tree could be de- with other since often the rubbers, tappers veloped as a plantation crop that would be a were if did not punished they procure stipu- good substitute for the coffee crop, which a lated quotas. Furthermore, each individual fungal disease had almost exterminated in had to labor from dawn or until predawn Asia. He had Mr. James Collins prepare a noon to 100 or fewer trees in his nearly tap summary of what was then known about 6

Parts of , the rubber tree. the Amazon, and he fully supported Mark- ham’s view concerning the future of Hevea rubber. Collins wrote: "In 1870, I came to cultivation. the conclusion that it was necessary to do Several earlier attempts had been made to for the caoutchouc-producing tree what had introduce Hevea seed from , in 1873 already been done with such happy results and 1875. None were successful. Hevea for the cinchona (quinine) tree." Sir Joseph seed, its latex rich in sugars, quickly fer- Hooker, director of , knew of ments in the heat of the tropics, and the em- Spruce’s discoveries and studies of Hevea in bryo is killed. But success eventually came. 7

Seeds ofHevea brasiliensis. R. E. Schultes photo. transport, Wickham resolved somehow to surmount this difficulty. Then a fortuitous An Englishman, , who event happened! In 1876 a steamboat from had spent many years living near the Ama- England had sailed up the Amazon laden zon and Orinoco and who in 18 72 had pub- with cargo; it found no return load. "I de- lished a book on his travels in tropical South termined," Wickham wrote, "to plunge for America, had previously sent seeds of Hevea it. I had no cash on hand. The seed was even to Kew with no success. Fully realizing that then beginning to ripen. I knew that Capt. earlier shipments had failed because of slow Murry must be in a fix, so I wrote chartering 8 9

the ship." Wickham sent out his Indians to collect the seed and pack it properly m wicker baskets. The ship raced downstream from Santarem, 400 miles up the Amazon, and called in at customs in Belem at the river’s mouth. Customs officials, told of the delicacy of the plants "for delivery to Her Britannic Majesty’s own Royal Botanic Gar- dens of Kew," immediately, and with intel- ligence unusual among bureaucratic officials, dispatched the ship, which steamed off to England. All of the earlier shipments had been sent on sailing vessels. The few days saved by using a steamboat ensured successful ger- mination in Kew’s hothouses. Of the 70,000 seeds, 2800 germinated - a rate of 4 percent, astonishingly high for Hevea, even in the field. Young trees from this introduction were sent to Ceylon, where several of the original trees still are living in botanical gardens. From Ceylon some went to and Nicholas one ot his other parts of the empire in the tropics. The Henry Ridley examining early experiments in tapping systems of Hevea domestication of this which has in one tree, brasihensis, . Photograph courtesy of century so drastically changed life around Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, Kuala the world, would not have been possible Lumpur. without a chain of botanical gardens and a far-sighted director at Kew like Hooker. In Brazil stories are rife concerning the and fail to realize that Brazil’s major agricul- British "seed steal." At that time Brazilian tural industries are based on plants intro- law permitted the exportation of seeds, and duced from foreign countries: coffee (origi- collection and exportation were carried out nally from Abyssinia), rice (from India), openly. Many Brazilians are persuaded to be- sugar (from ), soybeans (from lieve that rubber seeds were "stolen" or China), jute (from India), cacao (from Co- "smuggled" out of the country, however, lombia and Ecuador). In fact, most of the world’s principal plantation crops are pro- duced in regions far from their original homes. The oldest tree of Hevea brasihensis in Malaysia, When the Brazilians realized that the from one of nine seeds planted in 1877. Photo- graph courtesy of Rubber Research Institute of British plantation efforts were to be success- Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. ful, they prohibited further exportation of 10

rubber tree that now yield more than 3000 pounds, and, with a recently developed chemical treatment of the bark, some clones may almost double that amount. Many names of major importance are connected with the historical accomplish- ment of domesticating a wild tree of the humid Amazon. These include Aublet, Spruce, Macintosh, Goodyear, and Wick- ham, mentioned earlier. But Wickham and two others - Ridley and Cramer - were perhaps all-important in the creation of the great plantation industry that supplies the world with more than 98 percent of its natural rubbers. Wickham, who lived to a venerable old age, was rightfully knighted in the late 1920s for his part in the creation of the rubber industry. Henry N. Ridley was appomted director of the Botanic Gardens in Singapore in 1888. It was my unexpected good fortune in 1950 to spend several days chatting with Ridley in Trunk of Hevea brasihensis with hypertrophied his 95th year. He lived near Kew Gardens due to former mth machadmho growth tapping and was overjoyed to review some of his ax") m the Amazon of Brazil. P. Alvim ("httle his his successes in the photo. hopes, trials, early history of rubber in the Far East with a young botanist who was studying the nu- merous species and their ecotypes in the rubber seeds, and that prohibition held until wild in . It was during these very recently. Consequently, the vast rubber personal exchanges that I reahzed that Rid- plantation system of the Old World was ley was in fact one of the major founders of based primarily on these original seeds, our modern rubber plantation industry. which were collected from a single locality When Ridley took up his position, he and from a single (and not the most promis- found only nine original trees and some 1000 ing) ecotype of Hevea brasiliensis. It is be- young plants left from the original introduc- lieved that the 70,000 seeds came from 26 tions to the Malay Straits in 1877. He im- original trees. In view of this, the enormous mediately raised 8000 more plants from seed improvement m the commercial rubber tree imported from Ceylon. These trees, from the in the space of 100 years seems incredible. original Wickham stock, became the mother The earliest plantation set out in Ceylon trees of much of the rubber that eventually yielded 400-450 pounds of dry rubber per covered a large portion of Malaya. acre per year; there are new clones of the Next Ridley began his celebrated experi-

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channel, avoiding injury to the cambium, since in Hevea all of the latex-bearing ves- sels are external to the cambium. He began with the well-known herring-bone method and recommended infrequent tapping to allow the trees to rest. Eventually, he learned that more frequent tappings would not harm the tree and abandoned the herring-bone system and cut in slopes from right to left, since cuts in this direction were shown to give higher yields. Among numer- ous other discoveries, he experimentally showed the advantages of tapping done in the morning rather than the afternoon. Ridley’s advances, perhaps more than any other, assured success of the Asiatic planta- tion mdustry. By 1897 all tapping in Asia was based on Ridley’s scheme of reopening the wound. The sudden increase in world demand for rubber further stimulated re- search into efficient and higher-yielding tap- ping techniques, in all aspects of which Rid- Pieter J. S. Cramer (left). The identity of the other ley took part. His experiments led even- man is unknown. The tree is one of the original tually to the spiral system of tapping, which Wickham trees in the , Ceylon. today is nearly universal in plantation prac- Photograph courtesy of Dr. O. S. Pires, Rubber tice. Research Institute of Srt Sm Lanka, Agalwatta, made another contribu- Lanka. Ridley significant tion to the rubber mdustry of the future in his campaign to establish rubber as a planta- tion crop. A series of events led him to this: ments on tapping methods. At that time a serious fall in the world price of tea, the trees in the Amazon were slashed according devastating fungal disease of Coffea arabica, to a great variety of makeshift techniques, and poor results with cacao. Another factor frequently to the detriment of the tree. The was the increasing use of the automobile; most prevalent method mvolved the use of automobile tires gradually became the the "machadmho" - a small ax used to greatest smgle consumer of the product. Rid- make deep incisions in vertical lines up and ley seized the opportunity, and soon planters down the trunk, causmg eventually enor- were establishing rubber. mous hypertrophied tumors, which later Again it was my good fortune in 1950, prevented efficient tapping. when Dr. P. J. S. Cramer was retired in Ridley tried cuttmg off very thin layers of Utrecht, Holland, to spend three days chat- the bark with a sharp knife in a sloping ting with oude Piet ("old Pete"), as the uni- 12 13

versity students affectionately called him. We reviewed the initial introduction of Hevea stock to the from the British Malay Straits - material derived from the original Wickham seeds - and his early successful efforts to introduce from South America seeds of several other species of Hevea for eventual genetic studies. He told me about the difficulties he experienced in attempting to convince commercial de- velopers that the planting of seeds (instead of using clonal material) was not the best way of establishing plantations of rubber trees. In these three days we experienced a remark- able camaraderie based on our very divergent experiences with Hevea, and I acquired an abiding understanding of the difficulties en- countered by these pioneers: Ridley and Cramer. When the Dutch had established a planta- tion crop from material originating in Penang, Malaysia, Cramer carried out the Plaque commemorating Sir Henry Wickham’s first variation analyses on Hevea brasilien- successful introduction of seeds of Hevea sis. These early studies indicated that the brasihensis from the Amazon m 1876. Photo- of the Rubber Research Institute is variable, with graph courtesy species extremely especially of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. respect to yield of latex, an important com- mercial consideration. Through his analyses Cramer demonstrated the impossibility of predicting yield of rubber from plantations in Cramer a method established on seed material, mainly be- Later, 1918, patented of budwood from cause of cross pollination. He predicted that marketing high-yield vegetative selection, cloning, and generative cloned trees, which ad infinitum would pro- vide the basis of material. He also selection or breeding would lead to im- plantation provements in yield. All his predictions invented the Testatex knife, patented in This has a vertical proved true. Cramer’s studies led to the 1931. knife series of eventual vegetative reproduction of high- V-shaped blades, and when pressed into the yielding, clones, which today is basic to all stem or trunk of young nursery plants mea- rubber-plantation practice. sured the length of the "drip" of the exuding latex, thereby indicating yield potential long before the trees matured at seven years. The famous Colombian Eu- Letter to the author from Henry N. Ridley m his author Jose 95th year. stacio Rivera wrote one of the great novels of 14

A modem plantation of Hevea brasiliensis in Malaysia. Photograph courtesy of Rubber Re- search Institute of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. 15s 166

Latin America on life on the Amazon during Wilson, C. M. 1943. Trees and Test Tubes : The Story of the rubber boom. The title, La Voragine (The Rubber New York: Henry Holt. Woodroffe, J. F., and H. H. Smith. 1915. The Rubber In- Vortex), refers to the belief that the jungle dustry of the Amazon and How Its Supremacy mysteriously swallows up the rubber tap- Can Be Maintained. : John Bale, Sons, and Danilson. pers. One magnificent passage describes the Wycherley, P. R. 1968. "Introduction of Hevea to the almost fearful of the rubber tree in worship Orient." The Planter (Kuala Lumpur), 44: 127- those days: "I have been a rubber tapper. I 37. am a rubber tapper. I have lived in the muddy swamps in the solitude of the forests with my crew of malaria-ridden men cutting the bark of the trees that have white blood like that of the gods."" If we consider the changes for the good of mankind that "white blood" brought about when the rubber tree was finally domesticated, perhaps we might agree that it was actually blood of the gods!

Selected Readings Bangham, W. N. 1945. "Rubber Returns to Latin Amer- ica." InNew Crops for the New World, edited by C. M. Wilson. New York: Macmillan. Barlow, C. 1978. The Natural Rubber Industry. Selangor, Malaysia: Oxford University Press. Collier, R. 1968. The Rmer that God Forgot. London: Collins. Dijkman, M. J. 1951. Hevea: Thirty Years of Research m the Far East. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press. Drabble, J. H. 1973. Rubber in Malaya 1876-1922: The Genesis of the Industry. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Oxford University Press. Hardenburg, W. E. 1912. The Putumayo: The Dev~l’s Paradise. London: T. Fisher Unwm. Polhamus, L. G. 1962. Rubber: Botany, Production and UtW zation. New York: Interscience Pubhshers. Schultes, R. E. 1977a. "Wild Hevea: An Untapped Source of Germ Plasm." Joumal of the Rubber Research Institute of Sm Lanka, 54: 227-57. . 1977b. "The Odyssey of the Cultivated Rubber Tree." Endeavour (New Series) 1 (314~: 133-38. . 1970. "The History of Taxonomic Studies m Hevea."Regnum Vegetabile, 71: 229-93. Singleton-Gates, P., and M. Girodias. 1959. The Black Richard E. Schultes is jef frey professor of biology andd Diames of Roger Casement. New York: Grove director of the Botanical Museum of Harvard Umver- Press. sity.