Jordan Goodman - Planting the World

In fact, Koenig did not go to work for the East India Company, but instead, in February 1775, the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the local Indian ruler who had a strong interest in natural history and who had already had a European as his personal physician, offered Koenig a job as a naturalist.[12]

Though he was freer to pursue his interests than he had been with the Tranquebarians, Koenig was financially no better off working for the Nawab, because it seems that the latter was in very serious debt to his creditors in the East India Company and could hardly manage to pay his naturalist at all. Koenig was naturally desperate to leave this situation, and the Nawab discharged Koenig from his employ at the end of 1777.[13] Relying entirely on the good will of friends and contacts back in England, Koenig continued collecting, but time was running out. In July 1778, he wrote to the East India Company begging them to hire him as their naturalist; or, as he put it, their ‘Natural Historian’ with a view to ‘compile a Natural History of this Country’ on Linnaean principles.[14]

Koenig’s appeal was successful. It was the first time that the East India Company had hired a naturalist. Probably, unknown to Koenig, on the other side of the world, Banks, just recently elected President of the Royal Society, recommended his appointment.[15]

Koenig now had financial security and, even better, the opportunity to travel. Over the next few years, he visited present-day Thailand, the Spice Islands, Sri Lanka, Calcutta and Tranquebar. Throughout this whole period, he collected plant specimens and sent them to his many correspondents in Europe, particularly Solander and Banks.[16]

In early 1785, Koenig was transferred to Calcutta, the main site of the East India Company’s interests in Bengal, a major upward step in his career, but while collecting his possessions from Tranquebar and Madras to take to his new destination, he began feeling unwell and, on 26 June, he died from dysentery in Kakinada, between Madras and Calcutta. On 6 June, knowing he was dying, Koenig drew up his will: he bequeathed all his papers and specimens to Banks.[17]

Koenig had been a key person in Banks’s botanical world, the first to send him specimens from India, but there were others in Banks’s inner circle of naturalists. One of these was Patrick Russell who had spent more than twenty years in Aleppo, mostly working for the Levant Company as its physician.[18] Bringing with him a large consignment of specimens from Syria, Russell arrived in London sometime after 1772 and soon after became acquainted with both Solander and Banks, who studied his collection with great interest. Early in 1782, Russell headed for India and in August, he arrived in Vizagapatam, north of Madras, accompanying his younger brother who had been appointed to the East India Company as a chief administrator. Earlier in June of the same year, as they were making their way up the coast of India, Russell had met Koenig in Tranquebar and they immediately became fast friends.[19] Not long after Koenig’s death, Russell was offered and accepted the post of Company Naturalist in his place.[20]

Another naturalist was William Roxburgh. Born in 1751, Roxburgh had studied medicine and botany in Edinburgh.[21] His medical career began on East India Company ships but in early January 1776 he decided on a different path. After several months of travel, he arrived in Madras and at the end of May 1776, he was appointed assistant surgeon at Fort St George. At some point after this, certainly before early 1779, Roxburgh met Koenig in Madras and they, too, became close, closer even than Russell and Koenig.[22] Through Koenig, Roxburgh came indirectly under the influence of Linnaeus and he and Koenig botanised together whenever they could over the next few years. In fact, it was while visiting Roxburgh that Koenig died.

It is very likely that Koenig introduced Roxburgh to Banks for it was Banks who wrote to Roxburgh first asking him to collect plant specimens for him.[23] This letter initiated a long correspondence between Banks and Roxburgh which lasted almost thirty years, during which time Roxburgh kept Banks fully informed of the increasing European knowledge of Indian botany.

When, in July 1778, Koenig petitioned the Madras Council of the East India Company to appoint him as their first naturalist, he referred them to the two surgeons, Gilbert Pasley and James Anderson, of the Madras Medical Board, who ‘from their own extensive knowledge are able to form a proper Judgement of my capacity’.[24]

Anderson was the junior of the two men. Born in Long Hermiston, Scotland, in 1738 and educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Anderson, like so many other Scots, began his medical career serving on East India Company ships. He arrived in Madras in 1765 where he joined the Madras Medical Board as the Company’s assistant surgeon.[25] He rose through the ranks and at the time of Koenig’s petition he was in the post of Surgeon General.[26] He had also just begun work on a botanical garden on a piece of waste land that the Company had granted him.[27]

Anderson’s career continued to blossom, and in April 1786 he reached the highest rank, that of Physician General. In the same year, on 3 December, he wrote to Joseph Banks from Madras, the letter which Banks received in May 1778, the receipt of which we learned of at the beginning of the chapter.[28]

Anderson was reporting that he had found cochineal insects attached to a grass which, in this part of India, was fed to horses. He had examined the insect with the help of a magnifying glass and it was consistent with its description in the scientific literature: Anderson was referring to the publications of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, famous for his development of the microscope and the first to investigate the structure of the insect using the instrument; to Hans Sloane and the Abbé Guillaume Raynal, both of whom had written on cochineal; and especially to René Antoine de Réaumur, whose magisterial, encyclopaedic natural history of insects contained a definitive account of cochineal.[29]

Anderson claimed that he had observed the insects and noted that ‘multitudes of the young are daily issuing forth of a red colour with six legs and two Antennae: some have wings and are said to be males’: and that he had ‘macerated them in water and spirits of Wine, and find it communicates to both a colour equal to the Cochineal of Mexico’.

Banks may not have been particularly interested in cochineal at that time but he would have instantly recognised the importance of Anderson’s find.

Cochineal is a scale insect which, when crushed and treated, produces a brilliant red liquid. It had been used in Mexico and Peru as a dyestuff for almost two thousand years.[30] It first arrived in Spain in the 1520s as a consequence of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and by the end of the sixteenth century it was the most sought-after red dyestuff in Europe.[31] Producing a startlingly beautiful and vibrant colour never seen before, cochineal was worth its weight in gold and anyone who knew anything about it knew its value.[32]

Anderson impressed Banks even more when he revealed that not only had he planted a small piece of ground with the grass but that he had set out ‘1000 Opuntia Plants for the purpose of cultivating them in the Mexico way’.

This was an important point because it was well known, especially from Réaumur’s extensive discussion of it, that in Mexico the female cochineal insect, which produced the red dye, fed and lived its entire life on a variety of Opuntia , a genus in the cactus family and commonly called prickly pear or nopal.[33] Réaumur wrote about how the Mexicans had domesticated the cochineal insect and were harvesting them from the nopal (cactus) plants which were grown in plantations, called nopalries. The work was intensive and strictly regulated by the seasons. The resulting dye was far superior to and more intense than the one derived from wild cochineal.[34]