The British government hires Henry Wickham in…

The British government hires Henry Wickham in 1876 to begin transporting seeds of the Brazilian Para rubber tree to be germinated in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, then shipped as saplings to Ceylon, Malaysia and Singapore: these are to become the ancestors of ninety percent of the late-twentieth century world’s rubber production.

The ensuing decades of research in selecting highly productive and disease resistant rubber trees notwithstanding, many commercial rubber trees throughout the world today are descended from the seeds Wickham took to Joseph Dalton Hooker in London.

Wickham is labeled as a "bio-pirate" in Brazil, for his role in stealing the rubber seeds that broke the Brazilian monopoly.

No Brazilian law would have prevented Wickham's collection of the seeds in 1876, but he may have misrepresented his cargo as dead botanical material destined for the herbarium in order to obtain an export license in Belém.

Wickham was born in Hampstead, north London; his father, a solicitor, died when young Wickham was only four years old.

He had traveled at age twenty to Nicaragua in the first of several trips to Latin America and South America.

Returning to England, he had married Violet Carter, whose father will publish Wickham's later 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, had been published by W. H. J. Carter in 1872.

He had eventually taken the entire family to Santarém, Brazil, where his mother, sister Harriette, and the mother-in-law to his brother John had all died by 1876.