On June 14, 1876, at 3am, 30-year-old Henry Wickham threw pebbles at the bedroom windows of Joseph Hooker, the director of Kew Gardens. Wickham had just arrived from Brazil and was too excited by his cargo to wait until a more suitable time. He had smuggled 70,000 seeds of Hevea brasiliensis (the rubber tree) from the Amazon valley, the only place where they grew. The rubber from these plants was the best in the world - and was used in British factories to make everything from machine belting and tubing to rainproof coats and plimsolls. Essential to industrialisation and the growing consumer societies, it was almost as important to the Victorian economy as oil is today.

Three months after Wickham's night-time visit, almost 3,000 seedlings were dispatched to British colonial gardens in Sri Lanka and Singapore. Thirty-seven years later, in 1913, the rubber harvested from them and their descendants flooded the world market, destroying the Brazilian monopoly in a single year and making Britain the world's leading rubber-producing nation.

Wickham's story has been told before in books on plant hunters, rubber and the Amazon (most recently in John Hemming's Tree of Rivers), but The Thief at the End of the World is the first full-length biography of this quixotic man. And whereas previous accounts have concentrated on the smuggling of the seeds, the American journalist Joe Jackson is able to tell a more intimate story, thanks largely to the discovery of Wickham's wife's long-lost diaries. As such the title of the book is misleading, as this is not just about rubber.

Nor, indeed, was Wickham strictly a “thief”, for there was no Brazilian law at the time that prohibited the export of seeds. It was Wickham himself who spun much of the legend of the “theft”, casting himself as a maverick hero. Jackson convincingly shows that Wickham did not smuggle the seeds out of the country “under the nose of a gunboat”, but instead spirited them past the Brazilian authorities (whom he worried might have confiscated them) by claiming to be carrying “exceedingly delicate botanical specimens” (dried plants for scientifically used herbaria were never scrutinised by custom officers). According to Jackson, today's strict worldwide regulations against biopiracy “started with [Wickham][, at the Customs House in Para”.

Jackson is a gifted storyteller who shows that there is much more to Wickham than the famous “theft”. Naive, credulous and stubborn, he first “stumbled into the jungle” on a trip to Nicaragua in search of exotic feathers for the milliners in London. “He began in typical fashion,” Jackson writes, “with little preparation”, taking neither a map nor any medical equipment. Moving on to Venezuela in search of his fortune, he promptly got lost, almost died of malaria, and couldn't pay for his passage back to London.

Undaunted, he next tried to carve a rubber plantation out of the rainforest. For days he paddled up the Orinoco until he found a remote area covered with the right trees. He began tapping them (he was the first Englishman to learn the craft), but within a

few weeks the transcendent beauty of the lush rainforest turned into a claustrophobic death trap. His malaria flared up again, maggots fed on him and botfly larvae crawled under his skin. Eventually he took to his canoe and let the river current carry him back to civilisation.

Jackson's narrative is at its best when following Wickham from one disaster to the next. A year after his adventures in Venezuela he convinced his new wife, mother, sister and a few in-laws to leave London to settle in the Brazilian rainforest. Within three years, half the party was dead and Wickham was ruined once again. When a third attempt to create a plantation collapsed, he decided on the bold strategy of smuggling rubber-tree seeds to Kew. And, for once in his life, everything went to plan: he found the “perfect trees”, bought huge amounts of seeds from the locals, it did not rain (which would have spoilt the harvest), and, before he had even decided how to transport his half a ton of seeds packed in 50 baskets, a gleaming ocean liner with empty holds materialised out of nowhere.

Jackson describes the smuggling of the seeds as the tragic apex of Wickham's life, for he was cheated by Hooker of the job of overseeing their transportation to the colonial gardens - a Kew-trained gardener was sent instead. For the next two decades, Wickham “wandered...at the far edges of the British Empire” - from Australia and Honduras to Papua New Guinea and the Conflict Group islands (“a place that no European had settled”).

The Thief at the End of the World elegantly weaves Wickham's tribulations into the broader context of the empire. His chase to find a golden crop mirrors the quest of the British government and Kew Gardens (the storehouse of the empire) to use botany for the nation's profit and as an engine of colonial growth. And although Wickham never made the fortune he had dreamt of, he did become famous - he was knighted in 1920, and called the “father of the rubber industry”.

The Brazilians were rather more caustic about him, describing him “the executioner of Amazonas”, but Jackson shows that Wickham's endeavour was an elemental part of the colonial economy - encouraged both by the government and the director of Kew. And Britain, it is worth remembering, was not the only country involved in this botanical pillage. Brazil itself was culpable: its largest export is coffee, grown from the descendants of seeds that were stolen from the French a century before Wickham was born.

The Thief at the End of the World by Joe Jackson
Duckworth £20 pp430

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy