Planting the World

Masson referred on many occasions to the beauty of the plants he and Thunberg encountered but, apart from mentioning that he obtained specimens of what he called geraniums, stapelias and ericas near the end of the journey, he failed to specify what else he had collected.[26]

While they were in Cape Town during 1774, Thunberg and Masson met Lady Anne Monson, the highly accomplished botanist and collector, who was on her way from England to Calcutta with her husband, a colonel who was returning to Bengal to serve on the supreme council.[27] She, Thunberg and Masson frequently went botanising together in the surrounding countryside.[28]

After only a few weeks these delightful excursions came to an end. Lady Monson continued her voyage to Calcutta on the Pacific, an East India Company ship. On 29 September 1774, Thunberg and Masson decided to strike out into the interior again. They headed out of town in a northeastern direction to an area they had never visited before. This time they took in mountains and desert, plotting a circular route that took them to a point around three hundred and fifty miles north of Cape Town before swinging to the southeast and eventually to the southwest back to Cape Town, which they reached on 29 December 1774.

Thunberg must have been a real inspiration for Masson: highly educated and one of Linnaeus’s own students – a mine of up-to-date botanical information and an intrepid traveller, not just an accomplished gardener like Aiton. For his education as a travelling botanist, collecting in unfamiliar terrain, Masson could have had no better teacher than Thunberg.

Thunberg’s departure for Batavia, his ultimate destination, on 2 March 1775, may have convinced Masson to leave as well. He left the Cape sometime towards the end of March but before that Masson met Anders Sparrman. Sparrman, born in Sweden in 1748, was another student of Linnaeus’s, who had first arrived at the Cape on 12 April 1772 to study the region’s natural history.[29] His plans, however, were put on hold when he met the Forsters and was invited to join them on the Resolution on its Pacific voyage.[30] The Resolution, having dropped Masson off at the end of October, now collected Sparrman before setting off for the Pacific less than a month later on 22 November 1772. There is no evidence that Masson and Sparrman met at this time.[31] It was only when Sparrman came back to the Cape on 22 March 1775 on the Resolution’s return voyage to England from the Pacific that the pair are known to have met.[32]

Masson was back in London in either July or August 1775.[33] He had been sending seeds and living plants to Kew from the Cape, but now on his return, he had much more to show.[34] Solander was at Kew, where Masson had gone back to live, on Saturday, 26 August and reported to John Ellis, his close friend and fellow botanist, that he had just seen Masson ‘with a great cargo of new plants … a glorious collection’.[35]

Solander did not give many details about the collection but the antiquary Richard Gough alerted his friend and fellow antiquary the Reverend Michael Tyson that Masson had brought home a great variety of new species of plants from the Cape of Good Hope, ‘which grew and blowed at sea’.[36] Tyson, himself, then went to Kew to see Masson and was amazed by what he found: totally new species of heather, protea, geraniums, and an undisclosed number of dried varieties.[37] Tyson spoke of more than two hundred examples of just two species but when Masson wrote to Linnaeus at the end of December 1775, his first letter to ‘the Father of Botany’, introducing himself as having been employed ‘some years past, by the King of great Brittain, in collecting of Plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew’, and remarking that he had made two trips into the interior with his student Thunberg and had met Sparrman, he announced that he had ‘added upwards of 400 new species to his Majesties collection of living plants’.[38]

What no one mentioned was that Masson had also collected a magnificent plant known by its popular name as the bird-of-paradise flower but which, when it arrived at Kew in 1773, was given the name Strelitzia reginae, in honour of Queen Charlotte, Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.[39] It is likely that Thunberg directed him to this plant since he had already come across it on his first journey to the interior.[40] This may have been Banks’s favourite plant:[41] certainly, when, in 1795, it came to putting together a substantial gift of plants for Catherine II, Empress of Russia, among many Cape plants collected by Masson, Strelitzia reginae, which Banks described as ‘one of the most rare, & certainly … one of the most beautiful plants in Europe’, headed the list of plants chosen.[42] Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that Masson collected the first specimen of the cycad Encephalartos altensteinii, which was at Kew in 1775, and which, in 2009, was re-potted: it is believed to be the oldest living pot plant in the world.

Banks, too, was delighted with Masson’s collection, ‘a profusion of Plants unknown till that time to the Botanical gardens in Europe’.[43] In his estimation, ‘by means of these, Kew Gardens has in great measure attained to that acknowlegd superiority which it now holds over every similar Establishment in Europe; some of which, as Trianon, Paris, Upsala, etc., till lately vyed with each other for pre-eminence, without admitting even a competition from any English Garden.’

Masson’s second assignment, also authorised by Sir John Pringle, was to collect for Kew on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, and the Canaries, and in the British West Indies.[44] It is likely that Banks and Solander once again had a hand in deciding where Masson should go: they had both been to Madeira in 1768 on the Endeavour’s outward voyage and, during their stay from 12 to 18 September, had collected many plants that they brought back with them in 1771.[45]

Masson left for Madeira on 19 May and arrived there on 5 June 1776.[46] Around this time, Pringle, who was by now George III’s Physician Extraordinary, in addition to being President of the Royal Society, no longer had time for Kew.[47] Banks took over. He arranged Masson’s finances, sent him instructions and supplies, and, in return, Masson sent Banks plants and seeds and letters.[48]

In what might have been his first letter to Banks, dated 28 July 1776, Masson noted that he hadn’t yet explored very much of the island but he believed he had already found some new plants. He had about fifty plants for Banks and some seeds for Aiton.[49] Apart from that he said little: he remained a man of few words for the next thirty years.

Masson would have arrived well equipped to explore the botany of the Atlantic islands, especially Madeira and the Canaries. The islands’ plants were well represented in Sloane’s herbarium at the British Museum.[50] Both island groups were a common stopover for British ships, both naval and East India Company vessels, on their way into the South Atlantic. It was where they stocked up with wine and fresh fruits for the next part of the voyage. Those who were interested in botany helped themselves to the local flora. There was a good, if small, selection of plants from the area already growing at Kew.[51]

From the summer of 1776 until the summer of 1779, Masson stayed and collected in the Atlantic region – seeds for Aiton and plants for himself and Banks.[52] Madeira was the base where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t travelling. The itinerary he followed during this period began with a stay in Madeira which lasted for almost a year until May 1777; this was followed by a trip to the Azores, not planned originally but which Charles Murray, the British Consul in Funchal, who found Masson very convivial, convinced him he should visit.[53] Masson stayed in the Azores from late May 1777 to early December 1777, during which time he visited the islands of São Miguel and Faial – Johann and Georg Forster had collected on Faial between 14 and 19 July 1775 on the final homeward stretch of Cook’s second voyage, and might have discussed this with Masson – and São Jorge;[54] Masson left the Azores in December for the Canaries, via Madeira, and remained there until early October 1778, and from there he travelled back to Madeira, where he stayed until May 1779.[55]

Because of a lack of plant lists, it is not possible to give a definite account of the shipments, but about one thousand plants, many of them new to European science, would probably be close to the mark. Collecting was not a problem. Masson went well off the beaten track where there was plenty to be found.[56] What was difficult was shipping his collections back to England. The problem, as he said himself, was that while he was in the islands the American revolutionary war was in progress on the other side of the Atlantic. American cruisers were present but not British naval vessels. He had to use whatever shipping was available: a Dutch ship on one occasion; on another a French brig on its way to Dunkirk with a stop at Portsmouth, and even a British privateer making its way back to Plymouth.

However the difficulties of this trip were as nothing when compared to those of his next destination, the West Indies.[57] Masson left Madeira sometime in the early part of 1779 for Barbados. What happened then is unknown, but at some time he went from there to Grenada, where he became embroiled in the war between Britain and France, France by this time fighting on the American side. The French assaulted and captured the island from the British in the early part of July 1779.[58] Masson was, in Banks’s words, ‘call’d upon to bear arms in its defence, which he did, & was taken prisoner’.[59] When he was finally released, he made his way to St Eustatius, a Dutch Leeward Island, between St Kitts and St Martin.

There he found some respite from the conflict and island-hopped, taking in St Kitts and Nevis but found that the people there were unsupportive of his efforts: ‘a philosopher’, he wrote, ‘is [a] monster of nature to the people in this part of the world’.[60] He then headed to Saint Lucia, where rains and an impenetrable forest kept his botanising to a minimum, but he was still able to put together a small collection of thirty plants for Banks. Then things went from bad to worse: in the early days of October 1780, a deadly hurricane hit the island and Masson lost the entire collection he had with him at the time, his clothes and papers, and almost his life.[61]

Masson never gave up. Certainly the hurricane did not stop him. His next port of call was Jamaica. He had already been to six islands. We know that Masson was in Jamaica in March 1781 but not much more than that. He originally planned to try to get into central America from there but was unable to, presumably because of the continuing conflict. Instead, he finally made up his mind to return home and was back in London in November 1781.[62]

Where to go next was always the question for Masson. In December 1778, while he was still in Madeira, Masson had written to Linnaeus’s son, also called Carl (the great Linnaeus had died in early January of the same year) mentioning that he had been in touch with ‘Mr. De Visme’.[63] Indeed, just before he left Madeira for the West Indies, Masson had informed Banks that he was sending the Canary Islands collection to Lisbon to that same De Visme who would then forward it to Banks.[64] So, it is not surprising that in March 1783, Masson went to Lisbon where he met several of Banks’s acquaintances, including Gerard de Visme, who was a central figure in the English merchant community, and whom Banks had met in November 1766 on his way back to England from Newfoundland and Labrador on HMS Niger.[65]

De Visme had a garden in what is now Benfica, a suburb of Lisbon, and it would seem that he invited Masson to write up a catalogue of the plants that were growing there.[66] When he saw the garden, Masson was not particularly impressed by it or its owner – ‘he knows little or nothing of Botany or natural history’, Masson wrote to Banks, ‘but possessed a very great share of vanity and conceit.’[67] Masson declined to do the catalogue. For his part de Visme was very proud of his gardening achievements, reminding Banks that he had seen his garden in its infancy when he visited Lisbon almost twenty years earlier. De Visme claimed to Banks that the reason Masson did not undertake the catalogue was that ‘he has worn himself out with fatigue, in roving over wild grounds, & sands, in search of new productions … I expect he will add one, to ye martyrs of Botany.’[68]

If he was worn out, as de Visme wrote, Masson certainly hadn’t finished travelling for not only did he visit Lisbon, but also southern Spain, Gibraltar, North Africa and Madeira again, though the order is not clear. He was back in London by late 1784 or early 1785.[69]

Whenever he returned, Masson, as we have come to expect, was not one to stay put for very long and so, on 16 October 1785, he boarded the Earl of Talbot in Portsmouth, an East India Company vessel heading to the Cape. He arrived at Table Bay on 10 January 1786.[70] Though his reception does not seem to have been as warm as it had been the first time, and though he expressed a wish to be sent to Madras, where there was a vacancy as the East India Company’s naturalist (see Chapter 5), he remained at the Cape.[71]

Masson had been sent to the Cape a second time, as he told Thunberg, to collect living plants for Kew, as opposed to herbarium samples and seeds, from the mountains in the environs of the Cape.[72] He did not always follow his orders, as he confessed to Thunberg, but ventured further into the interior. Banks knew this as he paid Masson’s bills and though he disapproved of him not fulfilling his instructions, there was little he could do about it.[73] Masson also failed to follow his instructions exactly as to what he collected: he often sent seeds, herbarium plants and bulbs, as well as the living plants he had been sent to get.

It isn’t clear how long Masson intended to remain at the Cape but it appears that no time limit was placed on his stay. On several occasions he complained to Banks that he hadn’t heard from him in almost two years, and he feared that the letters destined for him had ended up in India or Canton as the East India Company convoys often decided to bypass the Cape. Masson carried on as if he had been instructed to stay. He had no problems collecting new and unusual plants – to Thunberg he mentioned heathers, amaryllis and protea, plant varieties he had collected before, but emphasised that he believed he had found more than twenty new species of Stapelia, which he was going to include in a monograph he was planning.[74] The problems that he did encounter were that he couldn’t always find a ship on which to send his plants back to Kew. It wasn’t that there were no ships in harbour but rather that the ones that came in on their way to England, especially from India, were often so crowded with passengers, that there was no room left for plants.

William Aiton, for whom Masson had been working for maybe thirty years, died at the beginning of February 1793 (William Townsend, his son, took over the duties at Kew) and, from this point on, the tone of Masson’s letters to Banks changed. He now began referring increasingly to wanting to return to England and by October 1794, he started settling his affairs in preparation for a return voyage. On 17 March 1795, fearing that he might get caught up in a possible conflict between Britain and the Netherlands, he found passage on a returning East India Company ship, taking his collection of living plants that he had been growing in his garden at the Cape with him, and was back in England in August of the same year.[75]

As far as one can tell from the few references he made to it in his correspondence with Banks, Masson’s botanical haul was substantial – about one half of the number of geraniums growing at Kew by 1795 had been introduced by Masson.[76] It is also clear that of all the plants he collected he was particularly proud of the Stapelia. As he told Thunberg, he intended to publish on this group and during the quiet periods at the Cape, Masson arranged his collection and began to draw the individual plants. He brought this work to fruition in 1796 when his monograph Stapeliae Novae, describing new species of Stapelia, was published in London. The book was dedicated to the King and contained descriptions of forty-one species, all laid out in proper Linnaean fashion, in Latin, and illustrated in colour.

‘Still enjoying, though in the afternoon of life, a reasonable share of health and vigour’ was how Masson described himself, aged mid fifties, in the dedication to his monograph.[77] He also added that he was ‘anxious to recommence my employment as a collector’.

‘I am ready to proceed to any part of the globe, to which your Majesty’s commands shall direct me. Many are the portions of it that have not yet been fully explore by Botanists.’ But where to? He had already been to the Cape twice, the islands of Madeira, the Canaries, the Azores and a number of West Indian islands.

Banks recognised that Masson was not done with travelling yet. ‘Masson … is Fat & Cheerfull’, he wrote to a mutual friend in Lisbon, ‘he has already got his Travelling notions Returned into his head he says he does not mean to Settle yet & if a good climate is Proposed to him will readily undertake a new voyage.’[78]

Banks knew just the place for Masson. It was Buenos Aires and its hinterland in which Banks was very interested. On 10 April 1796, Banks wrote to the Spanish Ambassador in London asking for permission to send Masson to collect seeds for Kew.[79] Masson, Banks emphasised, would keep himself to himself, not enquiring into the local political situation: he had been collecting for the King for near thirty years and he had conducted himself in an exemplary fashion.

There was no such trip, probably because several months later Spain sided with France and declared war on Britain. If Banks had set his sights in a general way on the far side of the Atlantic, any place there associated with Spain was now out of the question.

By the end of July 1797, he had decided to send Masson to North America, particularly Upper Canada. At the time Upper Canada, part of British Canada, consisted of what is now southern Ontario, and land which stretched westward following the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Superior until Lake Nipigon (west and north of here was the territory, called Rupert’s Land, ceded to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670): its European population, mostly recently arrived, stood at around 25,000.

Banks arranged the necessary paperwork.[80] A set of instructions (now sadly lost) was drafted, and letters of introduction from the Duke of Portland, the then Home Secretary, to the several governors in the British part of North America (Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) were drawn up in case Masson ventured into these jurisdictions. A few days later, Rufus King, the American Ambassador in London, provided letters of introduction for his new country, the United States, giving Masson a clear run to venture wherever his collecting instincts took him, even down the Mississippi River.

The canvas was enormous. Masson decided to start at New York and proceed from there, but the voyage there did not start well.[81] He left Gravesend in September 1797. Somewhere in the Atlantic near the Azores, the ship was intercepted by a French privateer, then shot at by a French pirate ship, which then took and kept the ship: Masson and several crew were put on a ship heading for Baltimore and then transferred to another ship which finally landed them at New Haven, Connecticut.

Masson arrived in New York during the final week of 1797, after a gruelling four months at sea.[82] He spent the winter in New York and then in the spring of 1798, following Banks’s instructions, he worked his way up the Hudson and the Mohawk River until he reached the American settlement of Oswego on the south shore of Lake Ontario. He was heading westward along the southern shore of the lake, for Niagara, in Upper Canada, one of the first places to be settled by those British colonists who had remained loyal to the Crown during the American revolution.[83] Masson arrived at the small town, which had at the beginning of July lost its status as Upper Canada’s capital to the town of York (soon to be renamed Toronto), directly opposite on the north shore of Lake Ontario. He botanised in the area but stayed in nearby Queenstown in the house of a ‘Mr Hamilton’ (Robert Hamilton, merchant and judge) who took him in as his guest because ‘being a new place there was no decent lodging to be got’.[84] Masson wanted to travel to Detroit, at the western end of Lake Erie, but got no further than Fort Erie at its eastern end where he waited in vain for favourable winds to take him down the lake. Summer was quickly drawing to an end. He took the boxes of seeds he had collected and made his way across Lake Ontario to York and from there eastward to the much larger, older and more-established town of Montreal, in Lower Canada, where he arrived on 16 October 1798.[85]

Within a day or so of arriving, Masson learned that a vessel was ready to sail to Quebec, further down the St Lawrence River and, from there, he hoped to find another one scheduled to cross the Atlantic to Europe. It was probably his last chance to send samples of his collecting activities before winter set in and the ports froze. Masson sent a box of plants and a bag of ‘Zizania’, wild rice, especially for Banks.[86]

For the next few years, Montreal was Masson’s base. It was a good choice. Not only did it send shipping to England either directly or by way of Quebec, but it was the headquarters of the North West Company, a fur trading business founded some fifteen years before Masson’s arrival by a group of enterprising Scots living in Montreal.[87] Each year some of the partners fanned out into what is now western Canada from their wintering base at Grand Portage (now in northern Minnesota), on Lake Superior, in search of beaver, and then in July they would return to their base where the partners from Montreal would be waiting for them to freight the cargo of furs back to the St Lawrence River.[88] Masson hoped to take advantage of this arrangement for his botanical purposes.

His hopes were realised.[89] During the summer of 1799, he travelled with the Montreal partners through southern Ontario to Georgian Bay, Lake Huron and finally Lake Superior to Grand Portage, Upper Canada, where the two sets of partners met. Here and on his travels Masson collected more than one hundred different varieties of seed. For his return trip to Montreal, he went back to Niagara where he collected examples of living plants, in order to send them to Banks from Quebec before winter closed in again.

In the following summer, Masson wanted to travel to Pittsburgh by way of Lake Erie but for some reason this did not happen.[90] Instead he returned to the northern Great Lakes and came back with another collection of living plants, including purple trillium.[91]

From what we can gather, Banks appeared to have been pleased with the collections he had received from Masson since his arrival in North America.[92] But then, two years later, Banks’s attitude to Masson appeared to have changed significantly. On 2 February 1802, Banks wrote to him saying that his collections had become disappointing, and that he was not venturing far enough to find new species. Banks had by then already received several hundred specimens, but many of them were not new.[93]

Then there is a three-year gap in the surviving records. It seems there must have been some discussion of Masson returning to London but he was intent on staying, remarking that he was in very good health and was hoping to travel further down the Gulf of St Lawrence to collect.[94] This was in May 1805.

By the end of the summer, Masson was clear that he was being recalled and though he continued collecting, including living plants during the summer, he did not seem to be disappointed to be leaving.[95] He intended to spend the winter in Montreal and then make his way home via New York in the following spring.

In the event, Masson did not come home. He died in Montreal on 23 December 1805 aged sixty-four. According to John Gray, a friend who was a Montreal attorney and merchant, with very close ties to the North West Company, Masson left few possessions: clothing, especially for the winter months, two maps, two journals, a few drawings, a tea pot and caddy. Gray specifically noted that alongside a small number of authoritative, Linnaean, botanical texts, was a copy, no doubt well-thumbed and annotated, of William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis, published sixteen years before, which told Masson precisely which plants were growing in the royal gardens.[96]