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, there was found ready in the Far East, as a result of the
planting that had been done there, a supply that took care of the
sudden emergency.
A little more than ten years ago American business men began to
take an interest in the rubber plantations. They have shown
characteristic energy in the field, and the greatest single rubber
plantation in the world is owned by an American company, the
United States Rubber Company. This plantation is on the island of
Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, one of the best governed
colonies in the East. On this island is an orchard of rubber
trees, as beautifully laid out and as well cared for as any
orchard of fruit trees in our own country. For seventy square
miles, an area as large as the District of Columbia, the orderly
ranks of trees fill the gently rolling landscape, every inch of
which is weeded as carefully as a garden. It takes twenty thousand
employees to care for the trees, which number more than 5,000,000.
On this plantation the science of growing rubber trees has been
brought to a perfection known nowhere else in the world. Groups of
botanists, chemists and arboriculturists study constantly tree
diseases, methods of increasing the yield, and the other problems
of growing fine trees that will produce high grade rubber. Here,
by experiment and inspection, the secrets of the rubber tree are
being brought to light, so much so that growers look to this
plantation for leadership in methods of rubber culture. This great
project so far from American soil and in a field so new gives a
thrill of pride to the Americans visiting Sumatra on their way
around the world.