The Signature of All Things

the ice, pulled by their dogs. He watched Captain Cook’s replacement—Captain Clerke—die at age thirty-eight, and be buried at sea.
    Now Henry had outlived two English sea captains.
    They gave up once more on the Northwest Passage. They sailed to Macao. He saw fleets of Chinese junks, and again encountered representatives of the Dutch East India Company, who seemed to be everywhere in their simple black clothes and humble clogs. It appeared to him that everywhere in the world, somebody owed money to a Dutchman. In China, Henry found out about a war with France, and a revolution in America. It was the first he had heard of it. In Manila, he saw a Spanish galleon, loaded, it was said, with two million pounds’ worth of silver treasure. He traded his snowshoes for a Spanish naval jacket. He fell ill from the flux—they all did—but he survived it. He arrived in Sumatra, and then in Java, where, once more, he saw the Dutch making money. He took note of it.
    They rounded the Cape one last time and headed back to England. By October 6, 1780, they were safely returned to Deptford. Henry had been gone four years, three months, and two days. He was now a young man of twenty years. During the entirety of the journey, he had acquitted himself in a gentlemanly manner. He hoped and expected that this would be reported of him. He’d also been a zealous observer and botanical collector, as instructed, and was now prepared to divulge his account to Sir Joseph Banks.
    He departed the ship, received his wages, found a ride to London. The city was a filthy horror. The year 1780 had been a dreadful one for Britain—mobs, violence, antipapist bigotry, Lord Mansfield’s home burned to the ground, the Archbishop of York’s sleeves torn from his clothing and thrown in his face right on the street, prisons broken open, martial law—but Henry knew none of this, and cared about none of it. He walked all the way to 32 Soho Square, straight to Banks’s private home. Henry knocked on the door, announced his name, and stood ready to receive his reward.
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    B anks sent him to Peru.
    That would be Henry’s reward.
    Banks had been rather dumbfounded to discover Henry Whittaker standing at his door. Over the past few years, he had nearly forgotten about the boy, though he was too clever and too polite to reveal this. Banks carried a staggering amount of information in his head, and a good deal of responsibility. He was not only overseeing the expansion of Kew Gardens, but also supervising and funding numberless botanical expeditions all over the world. Hardly a ship arrived in London during the 1780s that did not carry a plant, a seed, a bulb, or a cutting on its way to Sir Joseph Banks. In addition, he held a place in polite society, and kept his hand in every new scientific advancement in Europe, from chemistry to astronomy to the breeding of sheep. Put simply, Sir Joseph Banks was an overoccupied gentleman, who had not been thinking about Henry Whittaker during the past four years quite as much as Henry Whittaker had been thinking about him.
    Nonetheless, as he began to recall the orchardman’s son, he permitted Henry entry into his personal study and offered him a glass of port, whichHenry refused. He bade the boy to tell him all about the journey. Of course Banks already knew that the Resolution had safely arrived in England, and he had been receiving letters from Mr. Nelson along the way, but Henry was the first live person Banks had encountered straight off the ship, and so Banks welcomed him—once he’d remembered who the boy was—with penetrating curiosity. Henry spoke for nearly two hours, in full botanical and personal detail. He spoke with more liberty than delicacy, it must be said, which made his account a treasure. By the end of the narrative, Banks found himself most deliciously informed. There was nothing Banks loved more than knowing things that other people did not realize he knew, and here—long before the official and politically polished logs of the Resolution would be made available to him—he already knew all that had occurred on Cook’s third expedition.
    As Henry spoke, Banks grew impressed. Banks could see that Henry had spent the past few years not so much studying as conquering botany, and that he now had the potential to become a first-rate plantsman. Banks would need to keep this boy, he realized, before someone else filched him away. Banks was a serial filcher himself. He often used his money and