The Signature of All Things

bringing in ten million reales a year to Spain. Why did Sir Joseph Banks want him to merely study this product, when they could be selling it? And why must production of Jesuit’s bark be limited to this inaccessible region of the world? Henry remembered his father’s teaching him that every plant of value in human history had been hunted before it was cultivated, and that hunting a tree (like climbing into the Andes to find the blasted thing) was far less efficient than cultivating it (like learning how to grow it elsewhere, in a controlled environment). He knew that the French had tried transplanting the cinchona to Europe in 1730, and that they had failed, and he believed he knew why: because they didn’t understand altitude. One cannot grow this tree in the Loire Valley. Cinchona needed high, thin air and a humid forest—and France didn’t have such a place. Nor did England. Nor Spain, for that matter. This was a pity. One cannot export climate.
    During four years of thinking, though, this is what Henry came up with: India. Henry was willing to bet that the cinchona tree would thrive in the cold, damp Himalayan foothills—a place Henry had never been, but which he had heard about from British officers when he was traveling in Macao. Moreover, why not grow this useful medicinal tree closer to malarial locations themselves, closer to where it was actually needed? Jesuit’s bark was in desperate demand in India, to combat debilitating fevers in British troops and native laborers. For now, the drug was far too costly to give to common soldiers and workers, but it needn’t remain so. By the 1780s, Jesuit’s bark was being marked up some two hundred percent between its source in Peru and its European markets, but most of that expense was due to the costs of shipping. It was time to stop hunting this tree and start cultivating it for profit, closer to where it was needed. Henry Whittaker, now twenty-four years old, believed he was the man to do it.
    He left Peru in early 1785, carrying not only notes, an extensive herbarium, and samples of bark packed in linen, but also bare root cuttings andsome ten thousand cinchona roja seeds. He brought home some capsicum varieties, too, as well as some nasturtiums and a few rare fuchsias . But the real prize was the cache of seeds. Henry had waited two years for those seeds to emerge, waiting for his best trees to put out blossoms untouched by frost. He’d dried the seeds in the sun for a month, turning them every two hours to keep them from growing mold, and had wrapped them in linen at night to protect them from dew. He knew that seeds rarely survived ocean voyages (even Banks had failed at carrying seeds home successfully from his travels with Captain Cook), so Henry decided to experiment with three different packing techniques. He packed some of the seeds in sand, embedded others in wax, and kept the rest loose in dried moss. All were stuffed in ox bladders to keep them dry, and then wrapped in alpaca wool to hide them.
    The Spanish still held the monopoly on cinchona, so Henry was now officially a smuggler. As such, he avoided the busy Pacific coast and traveled east, overland across South America, carrying a passport that identified him as a French textile merchant. He and his mules and his ex-slaves and his unhappy Indians took the thieves’ route—from Loxa to the river Zamora, to the Amazon, to the Atlantic coast. From there he sailed to Havana, then to Cadiz, then home to England. The return voyage took a year and a half in total. He encountered no pirates, no noteworthy storms, no debilitating illness. He lost no specimens. It wasn’t that difficult.
    Sir Joseph Banks, he thought, would be pleased.
----
    B ut Sir Joseph Banks was not pleased, when Henry met up with him again, back in the comforts of 32 Soho Square. Banks was merely older and sicker and more distracted than ever. His gout was tormenting him terribly, and he was struggling with scientific questions of his own design, which he considered important to the future of the British Empire.
    Banks was trying to find a way to end England’s dependence on foreign cotton, and had thereby dispatched plantsmen to the British West Indies, who were working—unsuccessfully, thus far—on growing cotton there. He was also trying, also unsuccessfully, to break the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade by growing nutmeg and cloves at Kew. He had a proposal before the king to turn Australia into a penal colony