Planting the World

Banks repeated that in New South Wales Smith should collect plants for the King’s Garden, and these he was to place in the same pots he went out with, and send them back with the Guardian, whenever the ship was ready to sail. For himself, he wanted Smith to look out for and collect seeds and dried specimens, with flowers and fruit, to dry them and place them between paper sewn into a book. Smith was asked to share all these instructions with George Austin, the other gardener.

On 15 July, Riou took Smith and Austin’s instructions to the ship, which was waiting in Portsmouth. He told Banks that as far as he was concerned, the coach was the King’s property and that he would be treating it as such.[46]

The plants, fruit trees, herbs and vines, many of them from Kew, some from Banks’s own garden and some from the nursery of Ronalds in Brentford, began to be loaded onto the Guardian in early July and continued in anticipation of an early sailing date.[47] At the same time, all of the other non-perishable supplies for the colony – clothes, hats, shoes, needle and thread, cloths and blankets, sugar, currants, pearl barley and sundry medicines – were placed on board. ‘We are excessively deep, nay too deep I fear to carry a Single Cow for the Cape,’ Riou commented.[48]

On 7 September Smith wrote to Banks assuring him that all the plants were on board and in good shape but that Austin, who was suffering from a swelling in his legs, was not. The sailing date had been announced as the next day. Riou had assured Smith that he was taking the business of the plants as seriously as he did the ship itself. Banks heard from Riou that he was very pleased with Smith: ‘he behaves in ye most attentive quiet, & but best manner, I wish only that all of the Superintendants [sic] had been men of his disposition.’[49]

It was looking good. As planned, on 8 September 1789, the Guardian left the anchorage in Spithead and headed towards the Cape. There were 124 people on board: 88 men in the ship’s company, 9 Superintendents of Convicts, including Smith and Austin, who were travelling to New South Wales to fill various posts in the colony, 2 other passengers, and 25 convicts with sentences varying from 7 years to life and who had been selected because they had special practical skills.[50]

After a short stop at Tenerife, where Riou bought about 2000 gallons of wine for the colony, the Guardian anchored in Table Bay at the Cape, on 24 November. Riou had previously reported to Banks from Tenerife that despite the fact that most of the plants had already spent almost three months on board, they were doing well. Now, in the Cape, Riou asked Smith to prepare a report on how the plants had fared on the Atlantic part of the voyage. Despite the most attentive of care, almost 20 per cent of the botanical cargo had either perished or was expected to do so.[51] The herbs fared worst – ‘the death of the herbs’, Smith told Banks, ‘is owing to the heat we had in crossing the line, as we was a week nearly becalm’d, and then it was exceeding hot, on the 13th of Octr the Thermometer ran to 104 degrees high, which was too hot for any English herbs to live in.’[52]

Riou, following Banks’s orders in case of disaster, asked Smith to replace as many of the plants as he could and add to the list any plants which he could only get in Table Bay and which he thought would do well in New South Wales. Smith turned immediately for advice to Francis Masson, Banks’s collector who was still at the Cape. Plants were bought and seeds too, mostly from the garden of Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon, commander of the Dutch garrison and an excellent botanist and gardener; and Riou went on his own spending spree for live animals – bulls, cows, stallions, fowl of all kinds, rams, ewes, boars and rabbits.[53] To accommodate this menagerie, Riou dismounted almost all of the guns and built stalls on both sides of the main deck and coops for all the fowl on the quarter deck. ‘With [the livestock] and an addition to all culinary Fruits of this Country amounting to about 150 Trees in number we were in a situation to be a most comfortable sight to Governor Phillip,’ Riou jotted down in his notebook.[54]

On 11 December 1789, the Guardian sailed out of Table Bay for the final leg of its voyage to Port Jackson.

Almost a fortnight later, by which time the Guardian had sailed more than 2000 kilometres to the southeast of the Cape, Riou spotted a large iceberg. Two boats were despatched from the ship to collect ice to supplement the fresh water taken on at the Cape. The animals were in need of hydration. The boats had hardly returned when a thick fog set in and the ship continued its course believing that the iceberg was being left behind. Instead, buffeted by winds from all directions, they were heading straight for it. Suddenly, out of the fog, Riou saw ‘a body of ice full twice as high as our masthead, showing itself through the thickest fog I ever witnessed’. The ship seemed to stick to the ice and then the rudder tore away. Riou ordered the decks to be cleared of cattle, guns and gun-carriages; the spare anchors and everything else from below that could be thrown overboard were jettisoned. It was in vain. The water kept flooding the ship and the pumps were overwhelmed. Riou offered those on board the chance to take to the launch and four smaller boats to save themselves.[55] Forty men, including four convicts, went in the boats and fifteen others, led by Thomas Clements, the Guardian’s master, went in the launch.

Riou, the remaining crew, the five Superintendents of Convicts, and twenty convicts, sixty-one people in total, or about half of the total number who had sailed on the Guardian from England, stayed with the ship. Miraculously, they managed to keep it afloat and steer whatever was left of it northwest. Almost two months to the day after the Guardian hit the iceberg, a floating mass of timbers was spotted in the sea outside Table Bay. Whalers were sent out to help the wreck to safety.

Those who stayed with the Guardian were lucky to be alive.[56] The convicts, Riou told the Admiralty, had behaved so helpfully, working the pumps day and night, and so he had promised them he would do whatever was in his power to pardon them.[57] William Grenville, the Home Secretary, who had the power to do this, agreed with Riou. The twenty convicts were put on the Neptune and the Scarborough, two of the convict transport ships of the Second Fleet that arrived at the Cape on 13 April 1790. Six either died on the voyage to New South Wales or shortly after. Governor Arthur Phillip pardoned the remaining fourteen convicts – though they had to remain within the confines of the settlement until their sentences had expired, they were free men.[58]

Those who went on the launch, fifteen in total, also survived. A French merchant ship from Mauritius chanced upon the boat in the middle of the ocean on 3 January, and took the castaways to the Cape.[59] Some of the survivors went back to London taking passage on East India Company ships that were returning from China, and it was with their arrival in London on 23 April 1790 that the news of what had happened in the Southern Ocean on Christmas Eve was first made public.[60]

Smith and Austin were both on one of the smaller boats. They and their thirty-eight compatriots didn’t survive. Nor did the ninety-three pots of plants.

Captain George Tripp had commanded HMS Grampus on the voyage along the African coast to search for a suitable site for a new penal colony with HMS Nautilus. He was instructed by the Admiralty on 8 October 1790 to sail HMS Sphinx as quickly as possible to the Cape.[61] He was ordered to pick up Riou and bring him back home, and what remained of HMS Guardian that had not been sold off. By 15 May 1791 Riou was back in London. In addition to bringing the ship’s figurehead and some guns and shot, Riou had been given a consignment of plants from Francis Masson for Banks.[62] There were two boxes of seeds and bulbs and ‘a large growing plant of Strelitzia alba’, all for Kew.[63] Named after Augusta, Princess of Wales and mother of King George III, the person most responsible for bringing Kew into the Georgian era, this Strelitzia was the second species of this genus introduced by Masson, the first, in 1773, being the Strelitzia reginae. Banks was very pleased to hear of Riou and his courage, and thanked him for the plants, especially the Strelitzia alba.[64]

Though Riou’s voyage was a disaster there was one piece of good news. The plant cabin Banks had had built for the Guardian had worked. Almost all of the fruit trees and plants, Riou told him, were still alive when the ship came to grief. This information encouraged Banks to believe that he had solved the problem of moving live plants across the globe.[65]

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