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Person

Henry Wickham

A man with a neatly combed hairstyle and a full beard, dressed in formal attire including a dark suit, white shirt, and bow tie, sits against a plain background.

English adventurer (1846-1928) who in 1876 collected roughly seventy thousand seeds of Hevea brasiliensis from the Tapajos river in Brazil and shipped them to Kew Gardens, declaring them as botanical specimens to evade Brazilian export restrictions. The seedlings raised at Kew were sent to Ceylon and Malaya, founding the Asian plantation industry that within a generation broke Brazil's monopoly on natural rubber and collapsed the Amazon rubber economy.

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