Englishman Henry Alexander Wieckham left the Amazon on a chartered ship carrying 70,000 seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, one of the most productive natural rubber trees. In June 1876, he arrived at the home of botanist Joseph Hooker, curator of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, near London. A few days later, they managed to germinate the seeds. These were the progenitors of over 1,900 rubber tree seedlings that would be sent to Asia, primarily to Ceylon and then to Malaysia. In 1896, the first Malaysian rubber arrived in London. By 1907, the British had ten million rubber trees planted on ten thousand hectares of land in Ceylon and Malaysia. The rubber, or latex, was also used as chewing gum (in Spanish, gum is called chicle, from an Aztec word). It seems that chewing gum is a very ancient, prehistoric practice. In New England, Native Americans chewed the hardened sap of the Norway spruce, a habit later adopted by European settlers. The Mayans in Mexico chewed the latex of sapodilla (chicle), which was introduced to the United States by General Antonio Lopex de Santa Anna, the conqueror of the Alamo. A chicle-based gum became the basis of a chewing gum distributed to U.S. Army soldiers during World War II to keep them alert, along with chocolate, also of American origin. Both were used to prevent smokers from revealing their positions to enemy snipers at night.
