Planting the World

What happened next is unclear but, on 7 September, Menzies told Banks that he had been appointed surgeon to the expedition and was expecting to sail soon.[44] Menzies was the perfect candidate: he had served on naval vessels, had studied with John Hope, knew his plants and the Linnaean system well. He even had a highly glowing reference from his old teacher.[45]

Did Banks recommend him or was it Hope? Menzies’s letter to Banks, unfortunately, reveals nothing.[46] All we can be certain of is that Menzies did ask Banks to intervene with Etches to allow him more freedom to collect on the voyage and that Etches agreed; and that Menzies visited Soho Square on 27 September while Banks was at Revesby to offer some more plants from Halifax (including an orchid, which Jonas Dryander, Banks’s librarian, thought superb) and presumably to acquaint himself with Banks’s Pacific collection.[47]

Though Menzies kept predicting an early departure, in fact, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal did not leave the English coast until 16 October 1786.[48] On 16 November, when the ships were in the Cape Verde Islands, Menzies wrote his first letter to Banks. He thanked him for writing to Etches to give him more freedom to collect than was originally stated because ‘the west coast of N. America presents to me a new & an extensive field for Botanical researches … & I can assure you that I shall lose no Opportunity in collecting whatever is new, rare or useful.’[49] Menzies emphasised that his confidence was supported by experience: before he had left for the voyage, William Aiton at Kew had shown him a specimen of Houstonia caerulea (popular name little or azure bluet) which he had raised from seed sent to him from Nova Scotia, the implication being that if he could do it once he could do it again and again.[50]

The ships would be heading for Cape Horn before entering the Pacific. Colnett had planned to stop at what was then called Staten Island, but which now has the name of Isla de los Estados, and which lies about twenty miles off the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego. His instructions were to land Samuel Marshall, a naval lieutenant, and the son of Captain Samuel Marshall, whom Colnett had befriended in Cowes, with a party of fifteen men, to establish a sealing settlement.[51] Menzies was going to take this opportunity to collect specimens of Drymis winteri (then referred to as Wintera aromatica and popularly known as Winter’s bark), from which an anti-scurvy medicament could be prepared – its properties were first noted by Captain John Winter, after whom the plant is named, in 1578, and reiterated forcefully by Hans Sloane in 1693. (Banks, who had seen the plant when he was in Tierra del Fuego on the Endeavour, had specifically asked for it to be collected.)[52]

On 17 November, the day after Menzies wrote his letter, the ships continued their voyage, passing from the hot and humid tropics to the squally and snowy South Atlantic. On 26 January 1787, the ships anchored in New Years Harbour, Staten Island, almost in the exact same spot as the Resolution when it was there – with Colnett – in 1775. While the main task – landing the sealing party – was proceeding, Menzies lost no time botanising.

As the ships were about to depart, Menzies wrote to Banks. The weather had not been kind ‘in this wild and inhospitable clime’ but he had managed to make several excursions and find many plants that were not listed in Linnaeus. Of equal, if not greater importance, Menzies was delighted to have found the Wintera aromatica growing everywhere and in flower – ‘This beautiful tree … loads the circumambient Air with a most pleasing aromatic Odor.’[53] Menzies had collected and potted some twenty young plants and, as he had no possibility of keeping them alive during his voyage, he was assured by Lieutenant Marshall that he would take them back to England on the relief ship that was to be sent from London for the party, together with seeds which he would collect for Menzies.[54]

Menzies carefully told Banks that though the plants were addressed to him, he was to send some of them to John Hope in Edinburgh. Menzies did not know that two days before he arrived in Cape Verde, Hope had died in Edinburgh – when Menzies did finally learn of Hope’s death, he referred to him as ‘my best and only friend’.[55] The plants fared just as badly, as it turned out. The Duke of York, the relief ship owned by Etches, left on 21 April 1787 for Staten Island but, on 11 September, while at New Years Harbour it went down. The crew and the sealing party were all saved as they managed to leave in boats, but the plants went down with the ship.[56]

Though the intention was to sail to Hawaii, which Cook had visited in January 1778, Colnett decided to go straight for Nootka Sound.[57] The decision certainly meant that Colnett would be arriving at his destination sooner than anticipated but, on the other hand, the long sea voyage was bringing on scurvy. Everyone was thankful that on 5 July 1787, after about five months at sea, the coastline of Vancouver Island was sighted: the next day they were visited by several canoes bearing a few furs.[58]

From now on the season and the weather would dictate the expedition’s plans. The general idea was to begin at Nootka Sound and move northward along the coast, trading as much as possible. But progress turned out to be slow as the ships were in poor shape. After sailing along Vancouver Island, they set course for the Queen Charlotte Islands where they anchored for two weeks during the second half of August 1787. Colnett, fearing more damage to the ships, sailed across the strait – Hecate Strait – that separated the islands from the coast, and he made base on an island which Menzies named for his London patron – Banks Island. There they remained for almost three months to repair the damage, by which time, as Colnett remarked, winter had definitely closed in: ‘the Country half cover’d from the summits of its hills to the water’s Edge with snow’. On 19 November, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal departed the Pacific Northwest to spend the winter in Hawaii.[59]

However, the time there did not go well: violent confrontations soured relations and trade. Colnett must have been anxious to leave and, on 13 March 1788, full of provisions and now with three Hawaiians on board, who wished to join the voyage, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal headed back to the Pacific Northwest.[60] They arrived safely in April.

For the next three or four months both ships traded, one southward and the other northward with the intention of meeting at any one of several predetermined points. This never happened, but thanks to the information that was left in letters in the safe-keeping of Haida chiefs on the coast, Colnett knew that Charles Duncan, in command of the Princess Royal, was safe. Within a day of each other, on 17 and 18 August 1788, both ships left the coast for Hawaii with their cargo of pelts, the Princess Royal having out-performed the Prince of Wales.[61]

All along, Menzies had been botanising whenever he could and had found many plants that were new to western science, including a variety of penstemon with large lavender to purple flowers, that was named in his honour.[62] He continued to collect specimens, whenever he could, some of them which were new to Europe such as the trailing raspberry (Rubus pedatus), and Sanguisorba menziesii, a plant with grey-green leaves and red flowers, in the shape of bottlebrushes.[63]

The first part of the expedition was now over. It was time to realise the proceeds of the venture, to sell the pelts in Canton during the trading season which would begin in October.

On 12 September, the two ships met at a familiar anchorage in Moloka’i. Once provisioning for the next leg of the voyage was completed, the ships left Hawaii on 30 September and arrived in Macao on 12 November 1788, a little over two years since leaving England.[64]

The furs, almost two thousand of them, did not sell as well in Canton as Colnett had predicted, but the return, at just over £20,000, nevertheless justified the outlay.[65] Colnett did better than any of his predecessors in the Pacific Northwest, so much so that the original plans were altered substantially.[66] John Etches, Richard Cadman Etches’s brother, and the Prince of Wales supercargo, the merchant responsible for the sale of the ship’s cargo, decided to join forces with another fur-trading scheme headed by a group of private traders in Canton. The decision was taken that the Princess Royal would remain behind in Canton and join three other ships for the next season and that the Prince of Wales would return to England.[67]

Now under the command of James Johnstone, previously the ship’s chief mate and a close friend of Menzies’s (they had been together on HMS Assistance in the eastern Atlantic), the Prince of Wales set sail for England from Macao on 1 February 1789 – Charles Duncan having relinquished command of the Princess Royal because of ill health was returning home as a passenger, as was Menzies. After stopping briefly at Sumatra, where Menzies collected some fine plants, and St Helena, the Prince of Wales anchored off the Isle of Wight on 14 July 1789 and was back on the Thames several days later.[68]

What had Menzies accomplished? Without a plant list to consult, it is impossible to be precise, but it has been estimated that Menzies collected in the region of one hundred plants.[69] This may not seem a lot, but given that many of the specimens were new to European botany the figure is much more impressive than it sounds. Banks was, of course, a recipient of both dried plants and seeds, but so were other renowned botanists.[70] Professor Daniel Rutherford, John Hope’s successor at Edinburgh, got seeds and dried plants from the ship’s major calling places; as did James Edward Smith, the President of the newly founded Linnean Society of London.[71]

When he returned to London, Menzies spent a lot of time at Soho Square to try to make sense of his collection, comparing the specimens with those in Banks’s herbarium and supported by the vast textual and illustrative material in the library.[72]

With the return of Menzies from his circumnavigation, Banks’s interest in the Pacific fur trade faded. His relationship with Menzies, however, would soon enter a new and more extensive phase: a second and longer circumnavigation.

While it was a minor part of the Pacific Northwest story from Banks’s point of view, during the time Menzies was in the Pacific, China moved centre stage into Banks’s life.

4

1782: The Brothers Duncan in Canton

Banks had been thinking about China for some time. The country’s botany was of enormous interest to the West. With a population of 300 million and a landmass the size of the European continent, China had a storehouse of botanical riches hardly known in Europe. By the mid eighteenth century, Chinese plants were growing in several royal and private gardens across Europe, but the numbers and varieties were insignificant when compared to what Europeans believed remained beyond their reach.[1]

As Banks knew, Europeans were not free to go where and when they wanted in China. The Qianlong Emperor, who ascended the throne in 1735, was responsible for many of the restrictions, especially as they applied to Europeans wishing to trade. In 1757, the so-called Canton System came into force, whereby most European merchants became confined to Canton.[2] They were allowed to remain there for only part of the year, known as the trading season, normally from October through to March – during the break between the end of the southwest monsoon and the beginning of the northeast monsoon.[3] In Canton, the European merchants, better known as supercargoes, traded under the umbrella of their respective national East India Companies, and lived in factories, buildings that were rented out to them by the resident Hong (Chinese) merchants.[4] More than thirteen such factories, sited on the banks of the Pearl River and separated from the rest of Canton, were allocated to the foreign merchants.[5] The Europeans and the Hong, who generally did not speak each other’s languages, were obliged to do business with the help of a corps of Chinese middlemen, known as the linguists, who spoke a kind of pidgin English.[6] No women were allowed in the factories. When the trading season was over, the supercargoes typically moved to Macao, often joining their families, where they awaited the beginning of the next cycle.[7]

Restrictions on movement had a direct bearing on what Europeans knew of Chinese natural history. Banks was well aware of this. When, for example, in 1768, he was preparing for the epic voyage on HMS Endeavour, Thomas Falconer, a classical scholar who knew an impressive amount of natural history, warned him that he would learn hardly anything about Chinese botany in Canton. ‘The Europeans’, Falconer commented, ‘have but little communication with the Natives, & none beyond the suburbs of Canton. You will have a better yield at Batavia if you stop there, as our China Ships sometimes do.’[8]

Banks’s knowledge of Chinese natural history, especially its botany, was second to none.[9] In his own library he had virtually everything written by Europeans about China’s natural history, much of it contained in compilations of letters sent home from Jesuit missionaries based at the imperial court in Peking.[10] The titles spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Michael Boym’s early Flora Sinensis; through to the thirty-four-volume Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, compiled and published between 1703 and 1776 by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, a French Jesuit historian, the contents of which provided the most comprehensive European understanding of China in the eighteenth century; and finally to the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, etc. des Chinois, a multi-volume work, a collaboration between French academicians, missionaries and two Chinese students who lived in France where they studied western science.[11] Banks particularly valued this compendium, especially its third volume, published in 1778, which contained the section on Chinese plants and trees.

Though highly esteemed, these compilations had one very important limiting factor: the information they contained was derived from secondary sources. But this was not true of Banks’s primary source on far-eastern botany, Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amœnitatum exoticarum (Exotic Pleasures), published in 1712, a first-hand botanical treatise of the oriental world by a European botanist. Kaempfer trained as both a physician and a naturalist. After several years travelling to Russia and modern-day Iran he joined the Dutch East India Company as physician, and, in 1690, he was posted to the Company’s factory in Nagasaki, Japan, and began applying his training to the field of Japanese natural history.

For two years Kaempfer administered to his Dutch patients, finding as much time as possible to botanise locally: as a physician he was allowed on the mainland where he continued his botanical researches. When, in 1695, he returned to Europe, he settled down in his Westphalian hometown to organise his herbarium and his botanical notes from all of his travels. The result of the latter exercise was the publication in 1712 of the illustrated Amœnitatum exoticarum. Kaempfer died four years later.[12]

Banks’s copy in the British Library still bears the annotations of Daniel Solander in which he noted the ‘new’ Linnaean names for Kaempfer’s plants.[13] The fifth part of the book is dedicated to Japanese plants and Kaempfer describes each plant in a manner that would have warmed Banks’s botanical heart: Kaempfer ‘placed the various parts of the plant under the botanist’s knife’, beginning with the root and following through eventually to the seed.[14] While Kaempfer covered a wide range of plants – those bearing fruit and nuts and those valued for their flowers – he singled out four plants for special mention and attention: the paper mulberry tree, the musk seed, a creeper and, most importantly, Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. The plants in this section of Kaempfer’s book, though Japanese, were indigenous to China and their names were written out in Chinese characters.

Besides printed books about Chinese natural history, Banks also had a vast stock of illustrated material. Some of it accompanied texts, such as Boym’s, Kaempfer’s and Pierre Joseph Buc’hoz’s recently published Herbier, a collection of Chinese medicinal plants that were growing in China and in European gardens.[15] In addition Banks also had manuscript drawings of Chinese plants, without textual information, especially a collection made in Canton in the early 1770s by a Chinese artist working in collaboration with John Bradby Blake, one of the East India Company’s supercargoes, and his English-speaking Chinese assistant, Whang at Tong.[16]

If, by the time Banks had finished poring over his books and drawings, he still wanted to know more Chinese botany, he could leave his library in Soho Square and stroll over to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, where, as President of the Royal Society, he held the office of Trustee. In this privileged position he could examine yet another and earlier collection of texts and images of Chinese and Japanese plants that had formerly belonged to Sir Hans Sloane.

Sloane, who was President of the Royal Society from 1727 to 1741, was an avid collector of natural history objects, books and manuscripts. When he died in 1752, he donated his vast collection, which also included the Chinese plant specimens in James Petiver’s herbarium, and Kaempfer’s entire natural history collection, to the British nation.[17] In the following year, Sloane’s bequest became the first collection to form the British Museum.

When Banks had finally reached the limit of experiencing Chinese plants through text and image, in his own and Sloane’s collection, he could always go to the royal gardens in Kew and see thriving examples of the real thing. Plants from China had been arriving in London from the 1720s, sometimes ending up in private gardens and nurseries and sometimes at the Chelsea Physic Garden. By 1789 when William Aiton, the head gardener at Kew, published his Hortus Kewensis, as many as one hundred different plants from China were growing there.

As he approached the gardens, Banks’s mind would have been focused on China as soon as the 163-foot Pagoda slowly came into view. Built by the architect Sir William Chambers between 1761 and 1762 – Chambers also built Somerset House, where the Royal Society was housed from 1780 – it was designed both to be looked at and to be looked out from: ‘from the top you command a very extensive view on all sides in some directions upwards of some forty miles distance, over a rich and variegated country.’[18]

All this was well and good. London’s institutions and Banks’s library and herbarium were exceptional when it came to information about China’s natural history, but it was no substitute for collecting living plants from their natural habitat. How to do this was not obvious: only the East India Company, with limited personnel, had access to Canton. And then, out of the blue, a possibility appeared.

John Duncan was born in Brechin, Scotland in 1751 and after completing his medical studies he began working as a surgeon on board East India Company ships sailing to India and China. In late winter 1782, he was returning to China, this time as the East India Company’s resident surgeon in Canton. Accompanying him on board the Morse, was William Henry Pigou, who was going back as the East India Company’s Chief of the Council of Supercargoes.[19] Their destination was Canton, where the English were the major presence among the foreign traders.[20] It is not clear which of the two men knew Banks but they jointly wrote a letter to him from Rio de Janeiro dated 31 May 1782, en route to Canton. In it they informed Banks that they were sending him a few specimens of plants, birds, insects and other examples of natural history from Rio de Janeiro, where they had been since late April; and that once they got to Canton, for where they were leaving the following day, they would be happy to collect there on his behalf. Both Pigou and Duncan excused themselves for not being ‘sufficiently acquainted with the Study of Botany’ and, therefore, could do little more than collect.[21]

Banks wrote back to Pigou and Duncan on 10 August 1782 to thank both men for their collections. He was pleased with them and took up their offer of collecting for him in Canton.

Pigou and Duncan were in Canton in early October 1783 and began collecting immediately when they read Banks’s letter. In early December, as the Morse was preparing to leave for England, they sent Banks a box of shells, some fish from Macao in a jar, a Chinese magnolia in a pot; and a ‘Wanghee’, a species of bamboo, which they told Captain Henry Wilson, who was returning on the ship as a passenger, that he should deliver ‘Dead or Alive’.[22] Other plant specimens, including another Chinese magnolia in a pot, were despatched on the Northumberland, another East India Company ship leaving Canton around the same time.[23]

Duncan settled easily into Canton, even going into business with the Hong merchants.[24] Banks seemed to warm to him very quickly and lobbied successfully on his behalf with the directors of the East India Company to raise his salary by £200 per year. In return, Duncan did what he could to find the plants that Banks wanted sent to England. Some were easy to get – the Yu Lan, or Chinese magnolia, and water lilies, for example. Most likely Duncan got the specimens from one of the city’s nursery gardens, three miles upstream from where the European and American trading companies had their factories. The nursery mostly supplied the local Chinese market but it also sold flowering plants in pots, fruit trees and seeds to foreign buyers.[25] A later visitor to the nursery left a vivid description of its layout and colours. ‘Camellia with double white red & variegated flower, also a single variety with a rose Colord flower … Yulan, a species of Magnolia with White Red & variegated Flowers, the two last not [seen]; Azalea indica, Daphne indica … Chrysanthemum indicum double red, white, flesh Colord, & orange Colord. This plant is used by the Chinese Ladies as an ornament for the head.’ There were also pots with fruit trees and pots planted with dwarf trees.[26]

Whether Duncan found anything new when he visited the nursery was a matter of luck. One of the plants which was on Banks’s most wanted list – ‘among our greatest desiderata’ – the mountain or tree peony, Mu dan in Chinese, Paeonia suffruticosa, as it is known in western botany, both men knew had to be obtained through personal contacts, specifically among the Hong merchants, since the plant grew to the north of Canton where the climate was more like England.[27] On 4 April 1787, Duncan wrote to Banks to say that he had managed to get an example of it ‘from a Merchant as a present’.[28]

Duncan didn’t say which merchant but it is most likely to have been one of the Hong merchants. Duncan had good connections with these men, including Puankhequa I, the city’s chief merchant, as he had had business dealings with them.[29] The Mu dan that Duncan had received was, he remarked, the true Mu dan: highly prized, very expensive and ‘so difficult to procure’ – only Hong merchants would have had access to these plants; they grew far to the north.[30] As it turned out, the Mu dan example survived the voyage to England, but succumbed to its first English winter in Kew.[31]

Duncan continued to collect for Banks and managed to get two more specimens of the Yu lan. These he sent with John Kincaid, a surgeon with the East India Company at Madras, who was returning home as a passenger via Canton.[32] When, at the end of June 1788, Kincaid was safely back in London, he had to tell Banks the sad news that the two plants had not survived the voyage; but that two fans, which Duncan was sending as presents to Dorothea and Sarah Sophia Banks, were as good as new.[33]