Henry Wickham (explorer)

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

With 20 years was Wickham bird hunters and collectors spring in Nicaragua, then he got a job as a forest officer in British Honduras. From there he moved into the Brazilian jungle, and tried as a planter in Santarém on the Rio Tapajós. His travelogues moving Joseph Hooker, the Director of Kew Gardens, for an order to Wickham to bring seeds of the rubber tree to England. In 1876, Wickham collected 70,000 rubber seeds in Brazil, which he exported as orchid seeds to London.

In London grew in the greenhouses of Kew Gardens zoom 2000 rubber seedlings were shipped to Malaysia. Only eight of these rubber plants reached their destination, thrived there but good. Just 20 years later revealed that Malaysian exports 90 percent of the rubber needs of the world. The new acreage plunged the rubber barons in the Amazon region in economic crises and there finished the rubber boom. The alien trees in Southeast Asia had no natural enemies such as fungi and insects, and gave higher yields than the rubber trees in the Amazon.

1920 Wickham was knighted for his services to the rubber culture. He had traveled to many countries and over again established rubber plantations and advise growers. In Brazil, Wickham is considered Biopirat since he broke through the Brazilian rubber monopoly with its export of rubber seeds.