Jordan Goodman - Planting the World

Banks had asked Duncan to return the book to him but Duncan insisted that he still needed it. On 23 January 1790, Duncan placed ten new plants, which he had found from the book, on the General Elliott , about to leave Canton for London. Robert Drummond, the ship’s captain, was known to pay plants the attention they deserved and Duncan was hopeful that they would survive the voyage.

The book, Duncan told Banks, had done its magic. Twelve more plants from the book and a box containing flat peach trees, which Banks had especially wanted, were ready for shipment. This time, Duncan had entrusted part of the consignment to Captain Edward Cumming of the Britannia , because, as he put it, ‘he always keeps his Plants in the Balcony’, a safer place than most on a ship.[53]

Captain Cumming was also returning the book to Banks. No sooner had it left, than Duncan asked Banks to send it back to him so that he could continue collecting from it. By the time the trading season opened in the autumn of 1792, it was back in Canton.[54] It would leave Canton again in March 1794. Up to this point, the book had crossed from London to Canton and back four times, a total distance of nearly one hundred thousand miles and about one and a half years at sea. But its voyages were not yet over.

Duncan was not a botanist, as he himself admitted; he didn’t know the Linnaean system and it was Banks’s book of Chinese plants that made any kind of sensible collecting possible in China.[55] Even so, the activity of collecting remained difficult. Though Alexander Duncan knew most of the Hong merchants, did business with them, visited their gardens and took botanical advice from them, he felt very much at their mercy. He often remarked to Banks that they did not deal with him squarely, that they delayed in getting the plants he asked for. He also accused them of ‘chicanery’, and of deliberately frustrating his collecting activities. The lacquer tree was a case in point. In early February 1790 Duncan wrote to Banks expressing his frustration that he would probably never get a specimen of it. As he remarked: ‘Whether its from the policy of the Country, or other causes, I cannot find out, but we are always disappointed, by flattering evasive answers.’[56] Duncan’s own explanation of the paucity of botanical specimens and information was that it was down to ‘the jealous nature of the Chinese’.[57]

The interaction between the Chinese and Duncan may not have been easy or always fruitful but these problems were nothing compared to the anxiety he must have felt when the returning East India Company ships brought Banks’s yearly letter. It would only be at this point, many months after the plants were sent, that Duncan would learn of their fate. He wouldn’t have been any too hopeful when he opened Banks’s letter. Duncan did everything he could to increase the plants’ chances of survival: he tried to contract with sympathetic captains, those who knew some botany, or some, like Captain Cumming, who kept the plants in protected spaces; he used ship’s surgeons as often as he could and even passengers; and he tried to spread the risk by dividing his collections among several ships. Even so, Duncan estimated that nine out of the ten plants sent from Canton died on the returning voyage.[58]

The sea was not kind to plants. They needed the right amount of light and water to survive anywhere, ships included. But on ships, where space was at a premium, there was no satisfactory place to keep them. In respect of access to light and the absence of sea spray – salt was the plant’s real killer – the main deck was the best place. But this was also where the ship’s animals roamed – dogs, cats, goats, sheep and rats – who particularly enjoyed digging up soil. Plants needed to be in special containers to protect them from these destructive visitors. Then there was the issue of water. This was the ship’s scarcest resource and the quantity available was monitored to the last drop. It would take a courageous captain to water the plants before watering the crew. The plants, therefore, depended on rain water, not too much, not too little and at the right time.[59]

Added to this was the fact that the shipping routes in the Canton trade were some of the longest in the commercial world – six months from Canton to London was not unusual; and the ships passed through several climatic zones – temperature, rainfall, pressure and wind speed varying tremendously – as they worked their way from the South China Sea to the North Atlantic.

When, at the other end of the chain, Banks received bad news from an East India Company ship’s captain, freshly returned from Canton, he would not have been surprised, but very frustrated. As a case in point, James Glegg, the surgeon of the East India Company ship, the Earl of Mansfield , to whom John Duncan entrusted two pots, one containing the ‘Canton Mou dan ’ and another containing a water lily, explained to Banks what had gone wrong on the return voyage. On 4 December 1787, when he arrived in Portsmouth, Glegg wrote to Banks with the sad news that the water lily, which he had kept in his cabin, had died because water had been rationed to half a pint of water per day. The other plant, ‘a beautiful shrub I had in my own Cabbin, and by begging and borrowing water, I persevered well, when it spread its Branches in a vine like manner, and with the Flowers on it was very pleasing; but alas! When off the Cape of Good Hope, a heavy Sea broke into the port of my Cabbin and entirely filled the jar in which your plant was, from which it faded fast.’[60] Glegg pointed out that the plant under the care of the ship’s commander also died, even though it was well watered.[61] The sad truth was that most plants did not survive the voyage.

One of Duncan’s largest and one of his last shipments to Banks came in March 1794. The plants were very beautiful, Duncan excitedly told Banks, and he hoped that the ‘tedious passage does not destroy’ them. For this shipment, he took the usual precautions, and in addition he put the finest plants in charge of James Main, who was returning home on the Triton ship. Main had been in Canton since the Triton arrived in December 1793 collecting for Gilbert Slater, a wealthy gentleman, with strong East India Company connections, and with a great desire to provide Chinese plants for his large garden near Leyton, to the east of London.[62] Slater had already introduced several Chinese plants to England, including a semi-double crimson rose and the white-petalled Camellia japonica .

Duncan had managed to get four tree peonies from Henry Browne, chief of the East India Company supercargoes, from northern China. Main was now in charge not only of Slater’s collection but also of two of the four tree peonies from northern China: Duncan was excited by the prospect of its arrival in London – ‘I am in great hopes, the Moutan (tree paeony) will honor you, with some of its beautiful Flowers the ensuing season,’ adding that, ‘It is astonishing as any thing I have ever met, to see how that King of Plants, delights in a Cold Air – and on the contrary how it droops by the heat.’[63]

Though Main’s track record in sending plants back to Slater was not unlike Duncan’s own, Duncan felt, nevertheless, that having Main travel with the plants would lead to the very best outcome. It was not to be.

On 23 September 1794, Main was back in London, now working for Archibald Thomson’s nursery in Mile End. He didn’t go into details at this stage but simply reported that the news was not good.[64] Three of the four plants in his charge had died. Most of the damage, Main later explained to Banks, happened before the voyage was half over. He didn’t know why. He had had ten years’ experience as a gardener and had even taken with him a set of instructions about how to care for plants at sea that Banks had drawn up for a different voyage. As Main put it: ‘Transporting plants from China, is Attended by difficulties, not generally thought of …’[65] The final coup de grâce , as far as the plants were concerned, was delivered in the Channel when the Triton was run down by a British naval ship. The ensuing crash, when the mast toppled onto the deck, flattened most of the plants that had survived the climatic ordeals.[66]