Edith A. Browne

When the Para seedlings were ready to be transplanted into the open, India could not afford to adopt them. So the majority of them were sent to Ceylon, and small batches to Burma, Java, and Singapore. The West Indies, too, were given a few to experiment with, but the seeds had been obtained specially for the purpose of introducing Para rubber into the East, so naturally the seedlings were nearly all distributed throughout the Eastern Tropics.

Most of the seedlings that went to Ceylon were planted in the Botanic Gardens at Heneratgoda, near Colombo, which were specially opened in the low-country region as an experimental centre of rubber cultivation. A few of them, however, were given a home in the island’s world-famous Gardens at Peradeniya, in the up-country neighbourhood of Kandy. The plants at Heneratgoda flowered for the first time in 1881, at the age of five; those at Peradeniya did not flower until 1884.

(1) CEARA RUBBER TREE IN CEYLON. Page64

(2) PARA RUBBER TREES, 27 MONTHS OLD, CEYLON. Page65

From photographs in the Ceylon Section of the Imperial Institute, by permission

There are differences of opinion as to the career of the seedlings which went to Singapore. It is known that as early as 1880, some Hevea trees were in flower at Perak, a mid-region of the Malay Peninsula, and that in 1881 some of those in the Botanic Gardens at Singapore, in the south of the Peninsula, bore fruit. These trees may have been reared from Kew seedlings; or they may have been grown from cuttings of the young trees at Peradeniya, sent over to Singapore in 1877; or, again, they may have been transplanted one-year-olds from Ceylon. In any case, Heveas in the Malay Peninsula were yielding seed as early as their near relatives in Ceylon. And it is the seed supply of these two countries that has brought into existence the numerous and vast rubber plantations that now occupy a very large area of the Eastern Tropics.

For quite a long time rubber-growing was generally looked upon as a new hobby for botanists, and anyone who prophesied a commercial future for plantation rubber was dubbed a crank. Meanwhile, enthusiasts on the staff of the Botanic Gardens in Ceylon and Malaya continued to ride their hobby-horse, in that they devoted earnest attention to the new specimens that had been placed under their care. As soon as possible they began to take cuttings from the Hevea trees, and in 1878 no less than five hundred rooted plants were sent from Ceylon to British Burma and Madras. Then came the time when the trees began to furnish a good supply of seeds. By 1886, both Ceylon and Malaya were in a position to begin distributing seeds among other countries that wanted to experiment in rubber cultivation, and in the course of the next few years supplies were sent to Queensland, Java, Fiji, Borneo, East Africa, and Jamaica. But in most cases the packages went to botanists—with an odd exception or two, planters and business men in general would have nothing to do with rubber cultivation.

Presently, the planters in the Malay Peninsula found themselves in a very desperate position. They had been growing coffee, and doing splendidly with the crop, but conditions now conspired to cut down their profits to such an extent that their only chance of not being utterly ruined was to give up competing in the coffee market. In despair they began to plant Hevea. This change only took place as recently as 1895. And still the planters of Ceylon could afford to laugh at the idea of anyone trying to make money out of rubber-growing—they were doing well with their tea.

The pioneers in Malaya had a very hard struggle to keep their heads above water whilst their rubber-trees were growing. They had to wait five years before they could begin tapping, and few indeed were the people with sufficient faith in what the harvest would be to advance them any money for working expenses.

Came the day when motor-cars got so far beyond being a fashionable craze that people began to realize they would soon be a necessary means of locomotion in this age when everyone is in such a hurry. Rubber tyres were going to be so much used in the near future, said someone to somebody else, that it looked as if we should want more rubber than was being supplied from the forests. The idea spread, and by 1898 a few more people had become enthusiastic about rubber cultivation—larger areas were put under Hevea in Malaya, and rubber planting was begun in Ceylon, even though tea-growing was paying so well. By 1899 it had been proved that Hevea trees would yield marketable rubber; in this year the first cultivated Para rubber, prepared from the trees planted in Perak, was sold in the London market at 3s. 10d. per pound.

But it was not until about 1905 that money was at all freely forthcoming for rubber cultivation. Hitherto the planter who had wanted to turn his estate into a company, because he lacked means for its upkeep and development, could only hope for support from private friends. Now that there was an actual output of plantation rubber from the East, the great financiers who had looked upon any prophecy of such a supply as a fairy tale began to think that it was worth while to risk money in an enterprise which gave such sound promise of yielding extraordinarily large profits. The amount of money that was now available for rubber-growing gave scope for a considerable development of the industry. The acreage under Hevea was increased on the existing estates in Malaya, and jungle was cleared for the opening up of new estates; in Ceylon, Hevea was planted on a large scale among the flourishing tea-bushes, and rubber-planting was seriously undertaken in the commercial spirit in other parts of the Eastern Tropics, also in tropical lands of the West.

As yet, however, the public had not awakened to the money-making possibilities of rubber cultivation. At last, in the spring of 1910, they suddenly “discovered” plantation rubber. Some of the companies owning Eastern estates which had been planted up with Hevea in 1905, or earlier, had paid to their shareholders in 1909 interest amounting to 80, 165, even 300 per cent., and tongues will very quickly wag into fame an industry that yields such enormous profits. Also, the price of rubber was going up, and people began to talk about the large number of new uses to which the material was being put. It was now widely believed that there would be such a shortage of rubber in the near future that the supply would fetch famine prices, and consequently the value of rubber shares would rise by leaps and bounds. The fact that some people thought they stood to make money by a judicious purchase of shares in certain estates, about the working of which they had some knowledge, was now quite sufficient to persuade people who had never given a moment’s serious attention either to the industry in particular or to speculation in general that they could quickly make a fortune by investing in any so-called Rubber Company. Whilst these ideas were spreading like wildfire, the price of rubber was going up and up, until at last, in the spring of 1910, the moment came when a feverishly excited public made that historic run on rubber shares which is known as the “Rubber Boom.”