is
Excellency, I had given orders to the captain of the ship to keep
up steam, having ventured to trust His Excellency would see his
way clear to furnishing me with immediate dispatch. An interview
most polite, full of mutual compliments in the best Portuguese
manner, enabled us to get under way as soon as the captain had got
the dinghy hauled aboard."

Can you imagine Wickham's sigh of relief as his vessel, with its
freight of perishable treasure, steamed out of port, and began the
long journey to England?

CHAPTER 5

PLANTATION DEVELOPMENT

The transporting of the rubber seeds from the Brazilian forests to
England was only the first step in Wickham's project. The real
test was still to come. The seeds were planted in the famous
Botanical Gardens of Kew, and on August 12, 1876, the several
thousand seedlings which had been raised from them were packed in
special cases and shipped to Ceylon on the other side of the globe
for the final and most important stage of the experiment.

How long the next five years must have seemed to the anxious
Wickham, for it was that long before the first rubber tree
flowered in the gardens at Heneratgoda, sixteen miles from
Colombo, where the trees had finally been planted. In this year,
1881, experiments in tapping began, and it was plain that
Wickham's dream was to be realized.

From these few trees, so carefully tended in their youth, has
sprung the whole rubber industry of Ceylon and the Far East.
Wickham must indeed have been proud to see the plantations
spreading from Ceylon to Malaya, where rubber was eagerly taken up
by planters who were despairing of ever making a living out of
coffee, and later to Sumatra and Java and Borneo. To-day rubber
plantations cover an area of over 3,000,000 acres, with a yearly
output of almost 360,000 tons, or about ten times the average
yearly output of "wild rubber."

There is a curious coincidence in the fact that Wickham got his
idea about planting rubber trees in India at about the same time
that men in America began to experiment with the horseless
carriage. You may never have stopped to think of it, but
mechanical experts say that without rubber pneumatic tires,
automobiles could never have become the fine, swift vehicles they
are. It was a wonderful thing that when in the early part of this
century the automobile industry suddenly burst forth with a demand
for rubber so great that Brazil could never have hoped to supply
it,