The Signature of All Things

(this was a mere hobby idea ofhis), but nobody as yet was listening. He was working to build a forty-foot-tall telescope for the astronomer William Herschel, who was desirous of discovering new comets and planets. But most of all, Banks wanted balloons. The French had balloons. The French had been experimenting with lighter-than-air gases, and were sending up manned flights in Paris. The English were falling behind! For the sake of science and national security, by God, the British Empire needed balloons.
    So Banks, that day, was not in a mood to listen to Henry Whittaker’s assertion that what the British Empire really needed were cinchona plantations in the midrange altitudes of the Indian Himalayas—an idea that did not further in any manner the causes of cotton, spices, comet hunting, or ballooning. Banks’s mind was cluttered and his foot ached like the devil and he was irritated enough by Henry’s aggressive presence to disregard the entire conversation. Here, Sir Joseph Banks made a rare tactical error—an error that would ultimately cost England dearly.
    But it should be said that Henry, too, made tactical errors that day with Banks. Several of them in a row, in fact. Showing up unannounced was the first error. Yes, he had done it before, but Henry was no longer a cheeky lad, in whom such a lapse in decorum could be excused. He was by now a grown man (and a large man, at that) whose insistent hammering at the front door carried a suggestion of both social impudence and physical threat.
    What’s more, Henry arrived at Banks’s doorstep empty-handed, which a botanical collector must never do. Henry’s Peruvian collection was still on board the ship from Cadiz, safely docked in harbor. It was an impressive collection, but how could Banks have known that, when all the specimens were out of sight, hidden away on a distant merchant ship, concealed in ox bladders, barrels, gunnysacks, and Wardian cases? Henry should have brought something to personally place in Banks’s hands—if not a cutting of cinchona roja itself, then at least a nicely flowering fuchsia . Anything to get the old man’s attention, to soften him into believing that the forty pounds a year he’d been pouring into Henry Whittaker and Peru had not been squandered.
    But Henry was not a softener . Instead, he verbally hurled himself at Banks with this blunt accusation: “You are wrong, sir, to merely study the cinchona when you should be selling it!” This staggeringly ill-considered statement accused Banks of being a fool, while simultaneously befouling32 Soho Square with the unpleasant taint of trade —as though Sir Joseph Banks, the wealthiest gentleman in Britain, would ever personally need to resort to commerce.
    To be fair to Henry, his head was not entirely lucid. He had been alone for many years in a remote forest, and a young man in the forest can become a dangerously unfettered thinker. Henry had discussed this topic with Banks so many times already in his mind that he was impatient now with the actual conversation. In Henry’s imagination, everything was already arranged and already successful. In Henry’s mind, there was only one possible outcome: Banks would now welcome the idea as brilliant, introduce Henry to the proper administrators at the East India Company, clear all permissions, secure all funding, and proceed—ideally by tomorrow afternoon—with this ambitious project. In Henry’s dreams, the cinchona plantation was already growing in the Himalayas, he was already the glitteringly wealthy man whom Joseph Banks had once promised he might become, and he had already been welcomed as a gentleman into the embrace of London society. Most of all, Henry had allowed himself to believe that he and Joseph Banks already regarded each other as dear and intimate friends.
    Now, it is quite possibly the case that Henry Whittaker and Sir Joseph Banks could have become dear and intimate friends, except for one small problem, which was that Sir Joseph Banks never regarded Henry Whittaker as anything more than an ill-bred and thieving little toiler, whose only purpose in life was to be wrung dry of usefulness in the service of his betters.
    “Also,” said Henry, while Banks was still recovering from the assault upon his senses, his honor, and his drawing room, “I believe we should discuss my nomination to the Royal Society of Fellows.”
    “Pardon me,” Banks said. “Who on earth has nominated you to the Royal Society of