Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (29 May 1846 – 27 September 1928) was a British explorer. He was the first person to successfully export a large, viable shipment of Brazilian rubber seeds to the British Empire. The British had long planned to create rubber plantations in Southeast Asia, and using Wickham's batch, the resulting plantations brought about the end of the Amazon rubber boom. Life 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 and South America. Returning to England, he married Violet Carter in 1871, 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. He would take the entire family to Santarém, Brazil, where his mother, sister Harriette, and the mother-in-law to his brother, John, would all die by 1876. Wickham was knighted in the 1920 Birthday Honours "for services in connection with the rubber plantation industry in the Far East." Smuggling of rubber seeds Wickham took about a year to collect rubber seeds from commercial rubber groves in Brazil after having been commissioned due to his presence in Brazil. Historian Warren Dean notes that it would have been odd for a British expat to collect so many seeds in broad daylight using local labour without local authorities having been aware of it. In fact, he had the permission of the rubber grove operators where he sourced his seeds. He falsely declared 70,000 seeds as "academic specimens", a term the Brazilians frequently used to classify dead animals or plants, not viable seeds. They arrived in London's Kew Gardens on June 15, 1876. Within a few weeks, only 2,700 of the 70,000 smuggled seeds had successfully germinated. They were sufficient to jump-start widespread cultivation in Southeast Asia. Thirty years after the fact, Wickham claimed in 1908 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. At the time, there was no law forbidding the export of seeds, although there was a requirement for an export licence, which Wickham obtained under false pretenses in Belém. From the embellishments—such as