The Signature of All Things

word to the boy, dictated:
    “Sir Joseph Banks, having been pleased to recommend you to the Lord Commissioners of His Majesty’s Botanic Gardens at Kew, et cetera, et cetera . . . I am commanded by their Lordships to acquaint you that they have been pleased to appoint you, Henry Whittaker, as a collector of plants for His Majesty’s garden, et cetera, et cetera . . . for your reward and remuneration and for your board, wages and tracking expenses, you will be allowed a salary of forty pounds a year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . . .”
    Later, Henry would think that this had been an awful lot of et cetera s for forty pounds a year, but what other future did he have? There was a florid scratching of pens, and then Banks was lazily waving the letter in the air to dry, saying, “Your task, Henry, is the cinchona tree. You may know of it as the fever tree. It is the source of Jesuit’s bark. Learn all you can about it. It’s a fascinating tree and I’d like to see it more deeply studied. Make no enemies, Henry. Protect yourself from thieves, idiots, and miscreants. Take plentiful notes, and be sure to inform me in what sort of soil you find your specimens—sandy, loamy, boggy—so we can try to cultivate them here at Kew. Be tight with your money. Think like a Scot, boy! The less you indulge yourself now, the more you can indulge yourself in the future, when you have made your fortune. Resist drunkenness, idleness, women, and melancholy; you can enjoy all those pleasures later in life, when you are a useless old man like me. Be attentive. Better if you don’t let anyone know that youare a man of botany. Protect your plants from goats, dogs, cats, pigeons, poultry, insects, mold, sailors, saltwater . . .”
    Henry was listening with half an ear.
    He was going to Peru.
    On Wednesday next.
    He was a man of botany, on assignment from the King of England.

Chapter Three
    H enry arrived in Lima after nearly four months at sea. He found himself in a town of fifty thousand souls—a struggling colonial outpost, where Spanish families of rank often had less to eat than the mules that pulled their carriages.
    He arrived there alone. Ross Niven, the leader of the expedition (an expedition, by the way, that had consisted entirely of Henry Whittaker and Ross Niven), had died along the way, just off the coast of Cuba. The old Scot should never have been allowed to leave England in the first place. He was consumptive and pale and raising up blood with every cough, but he had been stubborn, and had hidden his illness from Banks. Niven had not lasted a month at sea. In Cuba, Henry had penned a nearly illegible letter to Banks, offering news of Niven’s death, and expressing his determination to continue on with the mission alone. He did not wait for a reply. He did not wish to be called home.
    Before Niven died, though, the man had usefully bothered to teach Henry a thing or two about the cinchona tree. Around 1630, according to Niven, Jesuit missionaries in the Peruvian Andes had first noticed the Quechua Indians drinking a hot tea made of powdered bark, to cure fevers and chills brought on by the extreme cold of high altitude. An observant monk had wondered whether this bitter powdered bark might also treat the fevers and chills associated with malaria—a disease that did not even exist in Perubut which, in Europe, had forever been the murderer of popes and paupers alike. The monk shipped some cinchona bark to Rome (that sickeningly malarial swamp of a city) along with instructions for testing the powder. Miraculously, it turned out that cinchona did indeed interrupt the path of malaria’s ravages, for reasons nobody could understand. Whatever the cause, the bark appeared to cure malaria entirely, with no side effects except lingering deafness—a small price to pay to live.
    By the early eighteenth century, Peruvian bark, or Jesuit’s bark, was the most valuable export from the New World to the Old. A gram of pure Jesuit’s bark was now equal in value to a gram of silver. It was a rich man’s cure, but there were plenty of rich men in Europe, and none of them wanted to die of malaria. Then Louis XIV was cured by Jesuit’s bark, which only drove up prices steeper. Just as Venice grew rich on pepper and China grew rich on tea, the Jesuits were growing rich on the bark of Peruvian trees.
    Only the British were slow to recognize the value of the cinchona—mostly owing to their anti-Spanish, anti-Papist