Jordan Goodman - Planting the World

On 12 September, the two ships met at a familiar anchorage in Moloka’i. Once provisioning for the next leg of the voyage was completed, the ships left Hawaii on 30 September and arrived in Macao on 12 November 1788, a little over two years since leaving England.[64]

The furs, almost two thousand of them, did not sell as well in Canton as Colnett had predicted, but the return, at just over £20,000, nevertheless justified the outlay.[65] Colnett did better than any of his predecessors in the Pacific Northwest, so much so that the original plans were altered substantially.[66] John Etches, Richard Cadman Etches’s brother, and the Prince of Wales supercargo, the merchant responsible for the sale of the ship’s cargo, decided to join forces with another fur-trading scheme headed by a group of private traders in Canton. The decision was taken that the Princess Royal would remain behind in Canton and join three other ships for the next season and that the Prince of Wales would return to England.[67]

Now under the command of James Johnstone, previously the ship’s chief mate and a close friend of Menzies’s (they had been together on HMS Assistance in the eastern Atlantic), the Prince of Wales set sail for England from Macao on 1 February 1789 – Charles Duncan having relinquished command of the Princess Royal because of ill health was returning home as a passenger, as was Menzies. After stopping briefly at Sumatra, where Menzies collected some fine plants, and St Helena, the Prince of Wales anchored off the Isle of Wight on 14 July 1789 and was back on the Thames several days later.[68]

What had Menzies accomplished? Without a plant list to consult, it is impossible to be precise, but it has been estimated that Menzies collected in the region of one hundred plants.[69] This may not seem a lot, but given that many of the specimens were new to European botany the figure is much more impressive than it sounds. Banks was, of course, a recipient of both dried plants and seeds, but so were other renowned botanists.[70] Professor Daniel Rutherford, John Hope’s successor at Edinburgh, got seeds and dried plants from the ship’s major calling places; as did James Edward Smith, the President of the newly founded Linnean Society of London.[71]

When he returned to London, Menzies spent a lot of time at Soho Square to try to make sense of his collection, comparing the specimens with those in Banks’s herbarium and supported by the vast textual and illustrative material in the library.[72]

With the return of Menzies from his circumnavigation, Banks’s interest in the Pacific fur trade faded. His relationship with Menzies, however, would soon enter a new and more extensive phase: a second and longer circumnavigation.

While it was a minor part of the Pacific Northwest story from Banks’s point of view, during the time Menzies was in the Pacific, China moved centre stage into Banks’s life.

Banks had been thinking about China for some time. The country’s botany was of enormous interest to the West. With a population of 300 million and a landmass the size of the European continent, China had a storehouse of botanical riches hardly known in Europe. By the mid eighteenth century, Chinese plants were growing in several royal and private gardens across Europe, but the numbers and varieties were insignificant when compared to what Europeans believed remained beyond their reach.[1]

As Banks knew, Europeans were not free to go where and when they wanted in China. The Qianlong Emperor, who ascended the throne in 1735, was responsible for many of the restrictions, especially as they applied to Europeans wishing to trade. In 1757, the so-called Canton System came into force, whereby most European merchants became confined to Canton.[2] They were allowed to remain there for only part of the year, known as the trading season, normally from October through to March – during the break between the end of the southwest monsoon and the beginning of the northeast monsoon.[3] In Canton, the European merchants, better known as supercargoes, traded under the umbrella of their respective national East India Companies, and lived in factories, buildings that were rented out to them by the resident Hong (Chinese) merchants.[4] More than thirteen such factories, sited on the banks of the Pearl River and separated from the rest of Canton, were allocated to the foreign merchants.[5] The Europeans and the Hong, who generally did not speak each other’s languages, were obliged to do business with the help of a corps of Chinese middlemen, known as the linguists, who spoke a kind of pidgin English.[6] No women were allowed in the factories. When the trading season was over, the supercargoes typically moved to Macao, often joining their families, where they awaited the beginning of the next cycle.[7]

Restrictions on movement had a direct bearing on what Europeans knew of Chinese natural history. Banks was well aware of this. When, for example, in 1768, he was preparing for the epic voyage on HMS Endeavour , Thomas Falconer, a classical scholar who knew an impressive amount of natural history, warned him that he would learn hardly anything about Chinese botany in Canton. ‘The Europeans’, Falconer commented, ‘have but little communication with the Natives, & none beyond the suburbs of Canton. You will have a better yield at Batavia if you stop there, as our China Ships sometimes do.’[8]

Banks’s knowledge of Chinese natural history, especially its botany, was second to none.[9] In his own library he had virtually everything written by Europeans about China’s natural history, much of it contained in compilations of letters sent home from Jesuit missionaries based at the imperial court in Peking.[10] The titles spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Michael Boym’s early Flora Sinensis ; through to the thirty-four-volume Lettres édifiantes et curieuses , compiled and published between 1703 and 1776 by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, a French Jesuit historian, the contents of which provided the most comprehensive European understanding of China in the eighteenth century; and finally to the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, etc. des Chinois , a multi-volume work, a collaboration between French academicians, missionaries and two Chinese students who lived in France where they studied western science.[11] Banks particularly valued this compendium, especially its third volume, published in 1778, which contained the section on Chinese plants and trees.

Though highly esteemed, these compilations had one very important limiting factor: the information they contained was derived from secondary sources. But this was not true of Banks’s primary source on far-eastern botany, Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amœnitatum exoticarum ( Exotic Pleasures ), published in 1712, a first-hand botanical treatise of the oriental world by a European botanist. Kaempfer trained as both a physician and a naturalist. After several years travelling to Russia and modern-day Iran he joined the Dutch East India Company as physician, and, in 1690, he was posted to the Company’s factory in Nagasaki, Japan, and began applying his training to the field of Japanese natural history.

For two years Kaempfer administered to his Dutch patients, finding as much time as possible to botanise locally: as a physician he was allowed on the mainland where he continued his botanical researches. When, in 1695, he returned to Europe, he settled down in his Westphalian hometown to organise his herbarium and his botanical notes from all of his travels. The result of the latter exercise was the publication in 1712 of the illustrated Amœnitatum exoticarum . Kaempfer died four years later.[12]