Planting the World

John Duncan’s health was deteriorating and on 14 January 1788, less than a month after sending his final consignment to Banks with Kincaid, he was granted sick leave to return to London.[34] By then, Alexander Duncan, his younger brother, was already in Canton having been given permission to leave Calcutta, where he was serving in the East India Company’s medical establishment, to visit his ailing brother. Alexander immediately completed his brother’s outstanding consignment of more Yu lans, and promised to fulfil the remaining instructions.[35]

John Duncan was back in London several months later and contacted Banks at the earliest opportunity. He told him about his having had to leave Canton and that his brother, Alexander, was now acting as the factory’s surgeon, the supercargoes there having insisted that he stay on. Banks agreed to use his influence with the East India Company to make Alexander’s position a permanent one. Banks wrote to Thomas Morton, the Secretary to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, asking him ‘to confer a favor of no small matter’.[36] This was not how appointments were normally made – the medical service in Calcutta decided on who would be the surgeon at Canton – but though the process was delayed, in the end, John Duncan and Joseph Banks got their way and Alexander Duncan got the appointment.[37]

Duncan started collecting directly for Banks in late 1788 and continued to do so for about eight years. In his very first letter to Banks, dated 6 December 1788, Duncan proudly told Banks that he had more Yu lans – the last ones he had sent he was sure would not have made it – and seeds of the red and white water lily. All of the specimens were in good shape but to give them the best chance of surviving the voyage back he entrusted the consignments to two passengers, one of them probably Henry Lane, a supercargo, who was returning to London on the Talbot; and another, a Mr Turnly who was to be on the Minerva. Duncan was taking the precaution of spreading the risk and enhancing the chances of survival by trusting passengers to care for the plants, and using two different ships. In all of his attention to plants, Duncan did not forget a present – a ‘Box of Souchon, called here Powchong Tea’ – for Lady Banks.[38]

When he read the letter, Banks might well have concluded that Alexander Duncan was going to be more enterprising in collecting plants than his brother had been. He and another ‘Gentleman’ (a Mr Mieron), Duncan told Banks, had already ‘engaged a Chinese’ to bring him specimens of the much-sought-after lacquer tree from the interior. Banks would have been right in his assessment. In the next trading season, Banks learned that Duncan had befriended Consequa, one of the Hong merchants and a nephew of Puankhequa I, and had discussed aspects of Chinese botany with him.[39] Like many other Hong merchants, Consequa had a garden in Henan (Honam), the island on the other side of the Pearl River from the East India Company factories, but Consequa’s would become one of the most elaborate in Canton.[40] With his connections both inside and outside Canton, Consequa would be the vital and desperately sought-for link to the Chinese countryside.

In all his dealings with John Duncan, Banks, though grateful for what he had collected and sent, must have been frustrated that he could not convey specific requests to him. Duncan had already excused himself for not knowing much botany and therefore would not have been able to identify any particular plant Banks might have wanted. It is for this reason that Duncan’s consignments consisted of the easily obtainable magnolia, peony and water lily. Banks had a very clear idea of the kind of plants he wanted from China – those that were not already growing in Kew or anywhere else in England.

Even though Alexander Duncan was no better at botany than his brother, this ceased to matter so much because by the end of 1789 he had received from Banks a remarkable quarto, ‘The Book of Chinese Plants’.[41]

The person responsible for it was Banks’s old friend James Lind, with whom he had last travelled to Iceland in 1772 and who was now physician-in-ordinary to the royal household in Windsor.[42] Lind, like many medically trained men of the time, practised his profession on East India Company ships and, beginning in 1766, he went to Canton. He was back in Canton in late 1779 or early 1780.[43] By then, apparently, he had learned enough Chinese to able to write characters and to translate some words.[44] He also collected Chinese books.[45]

In 1789, Lind was visiting Soho Square and at some point began work on an extraordinary project, what he called ‘A Catalogue of such Chinese and Japonese [sic] plants whose Chinese characters are known and are botanically described’ and ‘to shew which of them have been introduced into His Majesty’s botanic Garden at Kew’.[46]

Lind had worked out that he could cross-reference the Chinese plants mentioned in Kaempfer’s Amœnitatum exoticarum and in the Bencao gangmu, China’s most important compendium of materia medica (Banks owned a copy), with the Chinese drawings in his library (probably those that came from John Bradby Blake) and the Chinese plants actually growing in Kew, which he would know thanks to William Aiton’s newly published Hortus Kewensis.[47] The result of this exercise was an inventory of precisely those plants that were not growing in Kew and for which Lind, with the help of his sources, could supply Chinese characters and possibly even a drawing. Lind could identify around one hundred and fifty plants that fell into this category.

‘The Book of Chinese Plants’ that Duncan received from Banks in late 1789 was compiled from Lind’s inventory. Each page had a coloured illustration of a Chinese plant that was not then growing in England together with its Chinese characters. In the corner of each page there were several crosses added to convey how much Banks wanted an individual plant: four, the highest number, signified that the plant was unknown in the West and was a must: one, the lowest number, signified that the plant was known but had never been seen in its living state.[48] The purpose of the Book was to make plant collecting in Canton more focused and efficient. It took the guesswork out of collecting and did not require the collector to know Chinese: the plant’s Chinese name could be shown to its provider for identification; and the illustration would be used for verification.

Duncan immediately put the Book to work. The characters were not always accurate, but the drawings made all the difference.[49] In his next couple of letters to Banks, Duncan prided himself on getting seventeen plants, which appeared in the Book, including the Chinese flat peach.[50]

It didn’t matter now that Duncan did not know Linnaean nomenclature because this book dispensed with it. Once he had a specimen, he simply described it in a letter, using Banks’s own words, and then referred to it by its romanised Chinese name and its corresponding Chinese characters, which were inserted into the letter by someone who could write Chinese. One such plant, which Duncan called Tsu-lung-tsow and which he described as having ‘Leaves in form of Tancard with a lid’, was the pitcher plant, Nepenthes mirabilis.[51] Duncan entrusted it to the ship’s commander Captain Brodie Hepworth, who had previously brought Banks botanical specimens from China and whom he recommended as someone who cared for plants. Duncan told Hepworth that even though it might look to him as though the plant was dead on arrival, it could be pruned and might revive. The plant survived the voyage and was one of the first carnivorous plants to grow at Kew.[52]

Banks had asked Duncan to return the book to him but Duncan insisted that he still needed it. On 23 January 1790, Duncan placed ten new plants, which he had found from the book, on the General Elliott, about to leave Canton for London. Robert Drummond, the ship’s captain, was known to pay plants the attention they deserved and Duncan was hopeful that they would survive the voyage.

The book, Duncan told Banks, had done its magic. Twelve more plants from the book and a box containing flat peach trees, which Banks had especially wanted, were ready for shipment. This time, Duncan had entrusted part of the consignment to Captain Edward Cumming of the Britannia, because, as he put it, ‘he always keeps his Plants in the Balcony’, a safer place than most on a ship.[53]

Captain Cumming was also returning the book to Banks. No sooner had it left, than Duncan asked Banks to send it back to him so that he could continue collecting from it. By the time the trading season opened in the autumn of 1792, it was back in Canton.[54] It would leave Canton again in March 1794. Up to this point, the book had crossed from London to Canton and back four times, a total distance of nearly one hundred thousand miles and about one and a half years at sea. But its voyages were not yet over.

Duncan was not a botanist, as he himself admitted; he didn’t know the Linnaean system and it was Banks’s book of Chinese plants that made any kind of sensible collecting possible in China.[55] Even so, the activity of collecting remained difficult. Though Alexander Duncan knew most of the Hong merchants, did business with them, visited their gardens and took botanical advice from them, he felt very much at their mercy. He often remarked to Banks that they did not deal with him squarely, that they delayed in getting the plants he asked for. He also accused them of ‘chicanery’, and of deliberately frustrating his collecting activities. The lacquer tree was a case in point. In early February 1790 Duncan wrote to Banks expressing his frustration that he would probably never get a specimen of it. As he remarked: ‘Whether its from the policy of the Country, or other causes, I cannot find out, but we are always disappointed, by flattering evasive answers.’[56] Duncan’s own explanation of the paucity of botanical specimens and information was that it was down to ‘the jealous nature of the Chinese’.[57]

The interaction between the Chinese and Duncan may not have been easy or always fruitful but these problems were nothing compared to the anxiety he must have felt when the returning East India Company ships brought Banks’s yearly letter. It would only be at this point, many months after the plants were sent, that Duncan would learn of their fate. He wouldn’t have been any too hopeful when he opened Banks’s letter. Duncan did everything he could to increase the plants’ chances of survival: he tried to contract with sympathetic captains, those who knew some botany, or some, like Captain Cumming, who kept the plants in protected spaces; he used ship’s surgeons as often as he could and even passengers; and he tried to spread the risk by dividing his collections among several ships. Even so, Duncan estimated that nine out of the ten plants sent from Canton died on the returning voyage.[58]

The sea was not kind to plants. They needed the right amount of light and water to survive anywhere, ships included. But on ships, where space was at a premium, there was no satisfactory place to keep them. In respect of access to light and the absence of sea spray – salt was the plant’s real killer – the main deck was the best place. But this was also where the ship’s animals roamed – dogs, cats, goats, sheep and rats – who particularly enjoyed digging up soil. Plants needed to be in special containers to protect them from these destructive visitors. Then there was the issue of water. This was the ship’s scarcest resource and the quantity available was monitored to the last drop. It would take a courageous captain to water the plants before watering the crew. The plants, therefore, depended on rain water, not too much, not too little and at the right time.[59]

Added to this was the fact that the shipping routes in the Canton trade were some of the longest in the commercial world – six months from Canton to London was not unusual; and the ships passed through several climatic zones – temperature, rainfall, pressure and wind speed varying tremendously – as they worked their way from the South China Sea to the North Atlantic.

When, at the other end of the chain, Banks received bad news from an East India Company ship’s captain, freshly returned from Canton, he would not have been surprised, but very frustrated. As a case in point, James Glegg, the surgeon of the East India Company ship, the Earl of Mansfield, to whom John Duncan entrusted two pots, one containing the ‘Canton Mou dan’ and another containing a water lily, explained to Banks what had gone wrong on the return voyage. On 4 December 1787, when he arrived in Portsmouth, Glegg wrote to Banks with the sad news that the water lily, which he had kept in his cabin, had died because water had been rationed to half a pint of water per day. The other plant, ‘a beautiful shrub I had in my own Cabbin, and by begging and borrowing water, I persevered well, when it spread its Branches in a vine like manner, and with the Flowers on it was very pleasing; but alas! When off the Cape of Good Hope, a heavy Sea broke into the port of my Cabbin and entirely filled the jar in which your plant was, from which it faded fast.’[60] Glegg pointed out that the plant under the care of the ship’s commander also died, even though it was well watered.[61] The sad truth was that most plants did not survive the voyage.

One of Duncan’s largest and one of his last shipments to Banks came in March 1794. The plants were very beautiful, Duncan excitedly told Banks, and he hoped that the ‘tedious passage does not destroy’ them. For this shipment, he took the usual precautions, and in addition he put the finest plants in charge of James Main, who was returning home on the Triton ship. Main had been in Canton since the Triton arrived in December 1793 collecting for Gilbert Slater, a wealthy gentleman, with strong East India Company connections, and with a great desire to provide Chinese plants for his large garden near Leyton, to the east of London.[62] Slater had already introduced several Chinese plants to England, including a semi-double crimson rose and the white-petalled Camellia japonica.

Duncan had managed to get four tree peonies from Henry Browne, chief of the East India Company supercargoes, from northern China. Main was now in charge not only of Slater’s collection but also of two of the four tree peonies from northern China: Duncan was excited by the prospect of its arrival in London – ‘I am in great hopes, the Moutan (tree paeony) will honor you, with some of its beautiful Flowers the ensuing season,’ adding that, ‘It is astonishing as any thing I have ever met, to see how that King of Plants, delights in a Cold Air – and on the contrary how it droops by the heat.’[63]

Though Main’s track record in sending plants back to Slater was not unlike Duncan’s own, Duncan felt, nevertheless, that having Main travel with the plants would lead to the very best outcome. It was not to be.

On 23 September 1794, Main was back in London, now working for Archibald Thomson’s nursery in Mile End. He didn’t go into details at this stage but simply reported that the news was not good.[64] Three of the four plants in his charge had died. Most of the damage, Main later explained to Banks, happened before the voyage was half over. He didn’t know why. He had had ten years’ experience as a gardener and had even taken with him a set of instructions about how to care for plants at sea that Banks had drawn up for a different voyage. As Main put it: ‘Transporting plants from China, is Attended by difficulties, not generally thought of …’[65] The final coup de grâce, as far as the plants were concerned, was delivered in the Channel when the Triton was run down by a British naval ship. The ensuing crash, when the mast toppled onto the deck, flattened most of the plants that had survived the climatic ordeals.[66]

Miraculously one of the tree peonies did survive it all, though only just. It had been kept in the ship’s stern gallery. As soon as possible, it was taken to Kew, becoming the first ‘Moutan’ in the King’s Garden.[67] Duncan had tried to get this plant to Banks for some time and at last it was accomplished.

During the trading season of 1794/95, Duncan had no live plants to send but instead, and in the way of compensation, he managed to lay his hands on what he described as ‘the most beautiful piece of workmanship I have ever sent home’. It was a present for Lady Banks – ‘an elegant Ivory Fan, with a Moutan painted in the centre, and a red and white water Lily, on the sides’.[68]

Captain Andrew Patton of the East India Company ship, Ocean, was entrusted with this singularly valuable cargo and it arrived back in London in late July 1795. In what could be one of the last letters that Banks wrote to Duncan, on 29 May 1796, Lady Banks insisted that her thanks to Duncan should take precedence over everything else. As Banks wrote, it was ‘the most beautifull Fan she has ever seen probably the most beautifull one that ever reached England at least it has been hitherto unrivalled wherever Lady Banks has exhibited it & that I can assure you was in as many places as she has visited’.[69]

In what reads like a farewell letter, Banks also assured Duncan of his great service to Kew – ‘we have since you have favored us with your assistance gaind many very elegant additions to the collection’. The ‘Moutan’, Banks wrote, was doing well. ‘We have I hope possessed ourselves of the proper mode of cultivating the Moutan … [it] has been kept cool all the winter & has this spring pushd out a head of leaves full two feet in diameter … the whole appearance of the Plant is far more healthy than it was when received.’[70] Knowing all about the problems of transporting plants by sea, Banks promised Duncan that in time for the next trading season he would send him a Kew-trained gardener to return with the plants he had collected. Banks commented that Main was over-confident and ‘took very few instructions’. The gardeners at Kew, on the other hand, were beginning to understand how to care for plants aboard ship.[71]

The Kew gardener never went to Canton. At the end of October 1796, Duncan may have performed his final botanical act when he collected plants, both economic and ornamental, for the East India Company’s botanic garden in Calcutta. He had still not learned the Linnaean system but he had learned about observing plants. His description of the plants he was sending was full and detailed.[72] Soon after, Duncan wound up his business affairs and left Canton, never to return.[73] In 1799 he bought a property near Arbroath, Scotland, but before that his services to botany were recognised when he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society on 19 April 1798.[74]

With Duncan’s departure, Banks was left without anyone to collect Chinese plants for him. A few years later, however, he did find someone who knew botany to go to Canton; and by that time, he had also devised an ingenious solution to the problem of moving living plants across vast ocean distances.

5

1786: The Madras Naturalists and Dreams of Oaxaca

In May 1787, Banks received a letter from India that amazed and excited him. It was from James Anderson, Physician General to the East India Company’s establishment in Madras. It told of a remarkable discovery he had made, which could substantially impact Britain’s trade with the rest of the world.

This is the first surviving letter from Anderson to Banks, but it is unlikely it was the first he sent, as it is entirely lacking the rather formal protocols used in introductory letters at that time. It is likely that someone else in Madras had previously introduced them.

Banks was already acquainted with most of the important European naturalists based on India’s Coromandel Coast, many of whom were sending him plant specimens. There was a flourishing natural-history network in the area, but the most likely candidate for making the connection was Johan Gerhard Koenig, who had become very close to Banks.

Koenig was born in what is now Latvia to German parents and trained as an apothecary in Riga. In 1748, at the age of twenty, he went to Denmark where he worked in several provincial pharmacies.[1] Though he learned something about plants during the time he studied materia medica in Riga, his serious education in botany began when he attended university in Uppsala during the years 1757–9, where he became a student of the already famous Carl Linnaeus. It was here that Koenig met and befriended Daniel Solander who had himself come under the spell of Linnaeus shortly after he had enrolled as a student in the university in Uppsala in 1750.[2]

In 1759, Koenig returned to Copenhagen where he took up an appointment as a hospital pharmacist.[3] Soon his career blossomed: he went on two botanical expeditions, the one to Iceland in 1764 being especially important; and he also obtained a medical degree.[4] No sooner had he earned his medical credentials in 1767, than Koenig’s life took another and dramatic turn when he was appointed to be the next doctor and botanical collector for the Lutheran Danish-Halle mission station based in Tranquebar, on the Coromandel Coast, nearly 300 kilometres south of Madras, where he arrived in early July 1768. The Danish East India Company was established there in 1620 and continued, though now trading under the name of the Asiatic Company, to use the town as its base. The missionaries, mostly Germans from Halle an der Saale, first arrived in Tranquebar in 1706, under the patronage of Frederick IV, the King of Denmark and Norway.[5]

Though the Tranquebar mission valued natural history very highly, Koenig didn’t get along with the missionaries: he found them too controlling and restrictive – for example, he was not allowed to send specimens anywhere other than Copenhagen.[6] Also, his salary was too low for him to travel much beyond Tranquebar and this obviously affected the range and quality of his botanical collections.

It seemed he was trapped but in 1774, and probably through the intervention of the Linnaean-minded community of naturalists in Copenhagen, he was able to leave Tranquebar and travel to Madras, the headquarters of the British East India Company on this stretch of the southeastern coast.

Madras was the Company’s second trading post in India and in 1640, with the building of Fort St George, it became an increasingly powerful commercial and political force in the region.[7] When Koenig arrived there he found that there were several British residents and visitors interested in natural history, among them Lady Anne Monson, who knew Solander and who we’ve already heard of when she met another one of Linnaeus’s students, Carl Peter Thunberg, at the Cape on her way to India.[8] At that time, Koenig could not have chosen a better place to pursue his interests in Indian botany.

One of the first things Koenig did, once free of the restrictions of the mission station, was to write a letter to Solander in which he included a sample of seeds he had collected between Tranquebar and Madras. Koenig had previously written to Solander without any botanical enclosures. Now he promised Solander that he could expect ‘beautiful and better examples’ in the future.[9]

In 1774, Solander, after returning from the voyage to Iceland with Banks, resumed his duties as the ‘Keeper of Natural and Artificial Productions’ at the British Museum. He was also busily working with Banks cataloguing the Endeavour’s natural-history collection and looking after his herbarium.[10] Koenig’s seeds would find their home in this collection.

In this same letter in which he promised seeds, Koenig made it known that he wanted help from Solander and Banks in getting him an appointment with the East India Company and, in return, he offered his services to the two men – ‘the approval of the Professor and Mr. Banks is desired and for this I offer my most beseeching prayers, and to gain this will be my chief effort.’[11]

In fact, Koenig did not go to work for the East India Company, but instead, in February 1775, the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the local Indian ruler who had a strong interest in natural history and who had already had a European as his personal physician, offered Koenig a job as a naturalist.[12]