In 1923, Brazil’s rubber monopoly deflated. With lightning speed, tycoons, speculators, traders, and prostitutes packed their bags and left town, reducing Manaus to a weedy backwoods. And the opera house? The theater’s annexes became storage areas for rubber, and the stage was used for indoor soccer games!

The Kidnapping That Killed the Rubber Boom and Stopped the Opera

In 1876, Henry Wickham, a young English adventurer, devised a scam that punctured Brazil’s rubber boom. With the help of Indians, he “kidnapped” 70,000 prime Hevea brasiliensis seeds gathered from the Amazonian forest, loaded them aboard a steamer, and smuggled them past Brazilian customs on the pretext that they were “rare plant samples for Queen Victoria.” He nursed them on the boat crossing the Atlantic and raced them by special chartered train to the greenhouses of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England, where the seedlings sprouted a few weeks later. From there, they were shipped to Asia and were planted in the swampy soil of Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula. By 1912, the seedlings had grown into disease-free rubber plantations, and by the time those trees began to produce latex, says one source, “Brazil’s rubber boom [had gone] forever bust.”