having to hide from pursuing gunboats—added to his original account it appears that Wickham was trying to make his actions more exciting than they were in fact. The Ayapua Boat Museum (Museo Barco Historicos) in Iquitos, Peru calls his actions "the greatest act of biopiracy in the 19th century, and maybe in history", citing that the seeds were never properly recorded on the ship's manifest and that the resulting plantations in Asia deflated the rubber boom in South America. The museum also claims that he was specifically paid by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to collect the seeds. He accompanied the seeds to the Royal Botanic Gardens, from where seedlings were dispatched to British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), British Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) and Singapore, (though the latter was not used for rubber), Africa, Batavia in Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta in Indonesia), and other tropical destinations, thus dooming the Amazon rubber boom. Economic impact Rubber plantations in Asia proved to be more efficient and outproduced those in Brazil and Peru. This was because the Asian rubber plantations were organized and well-suited for production on a commercial scale, whereas in Brazil and Peru the process of latex gathering from forest trees remained a difficult extractive process: rubber tappers worked natural rubber groves in the southern Amazon forest, and rubber tree densities were almost always low as a consequence of high natural forest diversity. Experiments in cultivating rubber trees in plantations in the Amazon showed them to be vulnerable to South American rubber tree leaf blight fungus and other diseases and pests—essentially limiting South American rubber production to hunting-gathering rather than agriculture. In spite of decades of research in selecting highly productive and disease resistant rubber trees, many commercial rubber trees throughout the world are descended from the seeds Wickham took to Joseph Dalton Hooker in London. In Brazil, Wickham is labeled as a "bio-pirate" for his role in smuggling the rubber seeds that broke the South American monopoly. References Further reading External links Henry Wickham biography - at International Rubber Research & Development Board 1846 births 1928 deaths Botanists active in South America 19th-century British botanists Knights Bachelor