The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Four

Six years later, Henry Whittaker was a rich man on his way to becoming richer still. His cinchona plantation was thriving in the Dutch colonial outpost of Java, growing as happily as weeds in a cool, humid, terraced mountain estate called Pengalengan—an environment nearly identical, as Henry knew it would be, to both the Peruvian Andes and the lower Himalayas. Henry lived on the plantation himself and kept a careful eye on this botanical treasure trove. His partners in Amsterdam were now setting the global prices for Jesuit’s bark, and reaping sixty florins for every hundred pounds of cinchona they processed. They couldn’t process it fast enough. There was a fortune to be made here, and the fortune was made in specifics. Henry had continued to refine his orchard, which was protected now from cross-pollination with lesser stock, and was producing a bark both more potent and more consistent than anything coming out of Peru itself. Furthermore, it shipped well, and—without the corrupting interference of Spanish or Indian hands—was judged by the world as a reliable product.

The colonial Dutch were now the world’s biggest producers and consumers of Jesuit’s bark, using the powder to keep their soldiers, administrators, and workers free from malarial fever all over the East Indies. The advantage that this gave them over their rivals—particularly over the English—was quite literally beyond calculation. With determined vengefulness, Henry made an effort to keep his product out of British markets entirely, or at least to drive up the price whenever Jesuit’s bark found its way to England or her outposts.

Back at Kew, and far behind the game now, Sir Joseph Banks did eventually attempt to cultivate cinchona in the Himalayas, but without Henry’s expertise the project lagged. The British were expending wealth, energy, and anxiety growing the wrong species of cinchona at the wrong altitude, and Henry, with cold satisfaction, knew it. By the 1790s, numberless British citizens and subjects were dying every week of malaria in India, lacking access to good Jesuit’s bark, while the Dutch pushed forward in rude health.

Henry admired the Dutch and worked well with them. He effortlessly comprehended these people—these industrious, tireless, ditch-digging, beer-drinking, straight-speaking, coin-counting Calvinists, who had been making order out of trade since the sixteenth century, and who slept peacefully every night of their lives with the certain knowledge that God wished for them to be rich. A country of bankers, merchants, and gardeners, the Dutch liked their promises the same way Henry liked his (that is to say, gilded with profit), and thus they held the world captive at steep interest rates. They did not judge him for his rude manners or his aggressive ways. Very soon Henry Whittaker and the Dutch were making each other quite stupendously wealthy. In Holland, there were people who called Henry “the Prince of Peru.”

By now, Henry was a rich man of thirty-one years, and it was time for him to orchestrate the remainder of his life. To begin with, he had the opportunity now to start his own business concerns, wholly separate from his Dutch partners, and he combed through his options with care. He had no fascination with minerals or gemstones, because he had no expertise in minerals or gemstones. Likewise with shipbuilding, publishing, or textiles. It would be botany, then. But which sort of botany? Henry had no desire to enter the spice trade, although there were famously large profits to be made in it. Too many nations were already involved in spices, and the costs of defending one’s product from pirates and competing navies defeated the gains, as far as Henry could see. He also had no respect for either the sugar or the cotton trades, which he found to be insidious and costly, as well as intrinsically bound to slavery. Henry wanted nothing to do with slavery—not because he found it morally abhorrent, but because he regarded it as financially inefficient, untidy, and expensive, and controlled by some of the most unsavory middlemen on earth. What really interested him were medicinal plants—a market upon which nobody had yet fully capitalized.

So, medicinal plants and pharmacy it would be.

Next, he had to decide where he should live. He owned a fine estate in Java with a hundred servants, but the climate there had sickened him over the years, bestowing upon him tropical diseases that would periodically throw his health into havoc for the rest of his life. He needed a more temperate home. He would cut off his arm before he ever again lived in England. The Continent did not appeal: France was filled with irritating people; Spain was corrupt and unstable; Russia, impossible; Italy, absurd; Germany, rigid; Portugal, in decline. Holland, though favorably disposed toward him, was dull.

The United States of America, he decided, was a possibility. Henry had never been there, but he had heard promising things. He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia—the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn—a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone—except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage.

Before he settled anywhere, however, he wanted to be fitted up with a wife, and—because he was not a fool—he wanted a Dutch wife. He wanted a clever and decent woman with the least possible frivolousness, and Holland was the place to find her. Henry had indulged himself at times with prostitutes over the years, and had even kept a young Javanese girl on his estate in Pengalengan, but now it was time to take on a proper wife, and he recalled the advice of a sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before, “To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”

So he sailed back to Holland to pick one. He chose quickly and calculatingly, plucking a wife from a respectable old family, the van Devenders, who had been custodians of the Hortus botanical gardens in Amsterdam for many generations. The Hortus was one of the foremost research gardens in Europe—one of the oldest links in history between botany, scholarship, and trade—and the van Devenders had always managed it with honor. They were not aristocrats by any means, and certainly not rich, but Henry did not need a rich woman. The van Devenders were, however, a premier European family of learning and science—and that he did admire.

Unfortunately, the admiration was not mutual. Jacob van Devender, the current patriarch of the family and of the Hortus (and a masterful hand at growing ornamental aloes), knew of Henry Whittaker and did not like what he had heard. He knew that this young man had a history of thieving, and also that he had betrayed his own country for profit. This was not the sort of conduct of which Jacob van Devender approved. Jacob was Dutch, yes, and he liked his money, but he was not a banker, not a speculator. He did not measure people’s worth by their piles of gold.

However, Jacob van Devender had an excellent prospect of a daughter—or so Henry thought. Her name was Beatrix, and she was neither plain nor pretty, which seemed just about right for a wife. She was stout and bosomless, a perfect little barrel of a woman, and she was already rolling toward spinsterhood when Henry met her. To most suitors’ tastes, Beatrix van Devender would have appeared dauntingly overeducated. She was conversant in five living languages and two dead ones, with an expertise in botany equal to any man’s. Decidedly, this woman was not a coquette. She was no ornament of the drawing room. She dressed in the full spectrum of colors that one associates with common house sparrows. She nursed a hard suspicion of passion, exaggeration, and beauty, putting her confidence only in that which was solid and credible, and always trusting acquired wisdom over impulsive instinct. Henry perceived her as a living slab of ballast, which was precisely what he desired.

As for what Beatrix saw in Henry? Here, we encounter a slight mystery. Henry was not handsome. He was certainly not refined. In all truth, there was something of the village blacksmith about his ruddy face, his large hands, and his rough manners. To most eyes, he appeared neither solid nor credible. Henry Whittaker was an impulsive, loud, and bellicose man, who had enemies all over the world. He had also become, in the past years, a bit of a drinker. What respectable young woman would willingly choose such a character for a husband?

“The man has no principles,” Jacob van Devender objected to his daughter.

“Oh, Father, you are most grievously mistaken,” Beatrix corrected him dryly. “Mr. Whittaker has many principles. Just not the best variety of them.”

True, Henry was rich, and thus some observers speculated that perhaps Beatrix appreciated his wealth more than she let on. Also, Henry aimed to take his new bride to America, and perhaps—the local wags gossiped—she had some shameful secret reason to leave Holland forever.

The truth, however, was simpler: Beatrix van Devender married Henry Whittaker because she liked what she saw in him. She liked his strength, his cunning, his ascendency, his promise. He was rough, yes, but she was no dainty blossom herself. She respected his bluntness, as he respected hers. She understood what he wanted of her, and felt certain that she could work with him—and perhaps even manage him a bit. Thus, Henry and Beatrix quickly and straightforwardly formed their alliance. The only accurate word for their union was a Dutch word, a business word: partenrederij—a partnership based on honest trade and plain dealing, where tomorrow’s profits are a result of today’s promises, and where the cooperation of both parties equally contributes to prosperity.

Her parents disowned her. Or it may be more precise to say that Beatrix disowned them. They were a rigid family, the whole lot of them. They disagreed over her alliance, and disagreements among van Devenders tended to be eternal. After choosing Henry and leaving for the United States, Beatrix never again communicated with Amsterdam. Her last glimpse of her family was of her young brother, Dees, ten years old, weeping at her departure, pulling at her skirts, crying, “They are taking her away from me! They are taking her away from me!” She uncurled her brother’s fingers from her hem, told him to never again shame himself with public tears, and walked away.

Beatrix brought with her to America her personal maidservant—an immensely competent young washbasin of a woman named Hanneke de Groot. She also procured from her father’s library a 1665 edition of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, and a most valuable compendium of Leonhart Fuchs’s botanical illustrations. She sewed dozens of pockets into her traveling dress, and filled each pocket with the Hortus’s rarest tulip bulbs, all swaddled protectively in moss. She brought along, as well, several dozen blank accounting ledgers.

She was already planning her library, her garden, and—it would appear—her fortune.

Beatrix and Henry Whittaker arrived in Philadelphia in early 1793. The city, unprotected by walls or other fortifications, consisted at that time of a busy port, a few blocks of commercial and political interests, a conglomerate of farming homesteads, and some fine new estates. It was a place of expansive, generative possibility—a veritable alluvial bed of potential growth. The First Bank of the United States had opened there just the year before. The entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was at war with its forests—and its denizens, armed with axes, oxen, and ambition, were winning. Henry bought 350 acres of sloping pastures and unmolested woodland along the west bank of the Schuylkill River, with the intention to add more land as soon as he could acquire it.

Henry had originally planned to be rich by the age of forty, but he had driven his horses so hard, as the expression went, that he had arrived at his destination early. He was only thirty-two years old, and already had money banked up in pounds, florins, guineas, and even Russian kopecks. He aimed to become even wealthier still. But for now, upon his arrival in Philadelphia, it was time to put on a display.

Henry Whittaker named his property White Acre, a play on his own name, and immediately set to work building a Palladian mansion of lordly dimensions, far more beautiful than any private structure the city had yet seen. The house would be stone, vast, and well balanced—graced with fine east and west pavilions, a columned portico to the south, and a broad terrace to the north. He also built a grand carriage house, a large forge, and a whimsical gatehouse, as well as several botanical structures—including the first of what would eventually be many freestanding hothouses, an orangery modeled after the famous structure at Kew, and the beginnings of a glasshouse of staggering scope. Along the muddy bank of the Schuylkill—where only fifty years earlier Indians had gathered wild onions—he built his own private barge dock, just like the ones at the fine old estates along the Thames.

The city of Philadelphia was, for the most part, still living frugally in those days, but Henry designed White Acre as a brazen affront to the very notion of thrift. He wanted the place to pulse with extravagance. He was not afraid to be envied. Indeed, he found it bloody good sport to be envied, and good business, too, for envy drew people near. His home was designed not only to appear grand from a distance—easily seen from the river, sitting lofty and high upon its promontory, coolly overlooking the city on the other side—but also to express richness with every minute detail. Each doorknob would be brass, and all the brass would gleam. The furniture came straight from Seddon’s of London, the walls were hung with Belgian paper, the china plate was Cantonese, the cellar was stocked with Jamaican rum and French claret, the lamps were hand-blown in Venice, and the lilacs around the property had first bloomed in the Ottoman Empire.

He allowed rumors of his wealth to spread unchecked. As rich as he was, it did not hurt for people to imagine him even richer. When neighbors started whispering that Henry Whittaker’s horses had their hooves shod in silver, he permitted them to continue believing it. In fact, his horses’ hooves were not shod in silver; they were shod in iron, just like everyone else’s horses, and what’s more, Henry had shod them himself (a skill he had learned in Peru—on poor mules, using poor tools). But why should anyone know that, when the rumor was so much more pleasing and formidable?

Henry understood not only the allure of money, but also the more mysterious allure of power. He knew that his estate must not merely dazzle, but also intimidate. Louis XIV used to take visitors on walks through his pleasure gardens not as an amusing diversion, but as a demonstration of force: every exotic flowering tree and every sparkling fountain and all the priceless Greek statuary were all just a means to communicate a single unambiguous message to the world: You would not be advised to declare war against me! Henry wished White Acre to express that same sentiment.

Henry also built a large warehouse and factory down by the Philadelphia harbor, for the receiving of medicinal plants from all over the world: ipecac, simarouba, rhubarb, guaiacum bark, china root, and sarsaparilla. He entered into partnership with a stalwart Quaker pharmacist named James Garrick, and the two men immediately began processing pills, powders, ointments, and tonics.

He started his business with Garrick not one moment too soon. By the summer of 1793, a yellow fever epidemic was battering Philadelphia. The streets were choked with corpses, and orphans clung to their dead mothers in the gutters. People died in pairs, in families, in clusters of dozens—heaving out sickening rivers of black sludge from their gullets and bowels on their way to death. Local physicians had decided that the only possible cure was to violently purge their patients even further, through repeated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, and the best-known purgative in the world was a plant called jalap, which Henry was already importing in bales from Mexico.

Henry himself suspected that the jalap cure was bogus, and he refused to let anyone in his household take it. He knew that Creole doctors down in the Caribbean—far more familiar with yellow fever than their northern counterparts—treated patients with a less barbarous prescription of restorative liquids and rest. There was no money to be made, however, in restorative liquids and rest, while there was a great deal of money to be made in jalap. This is how it came to pass that, by the end of 1793, one-third of the population of Philadelphia had died of yellow fever, and Henry Whittaker had doubled his wealth.

Henry took his earnings and built two more glasshouses. At Beatrix’s suggestion, he started cultivating native American flowers, trees, and bushes for export to Europe. It was a worthy idea; America’s meadows and forests were filled with botanical species that looked exotic to a European eye, and could easily be sold overseas. Henry had grown weary of sending his ships out of the Philadelphia harbor with empty holds; now he could make money on both ends. He was still earning a fortune out of Java, processing Jesuit’s bark with his Dutch partners, but there was a fortune to be made locally, too. By 1796, Henry was dispatching collectors into the Pennsylvania mountains to gather ginseng root for export to China. For many years to come, in fact, he would be the only man in America who ever figured out how to sell something to the Chinese.

By the end of 1798, Henry was filling his American greenhouses with imported tropical exotics, as well, to sell to new American aristocrats. The United States economy was in steep and abrupt ascent. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both had opulent country estates, so everyone wanted an opulent country estate. The young nation was suddenly testing the limits of profligacy. Some citizens were getting rich; others were falling into destitution. Henry’s trajectory soared only upward. The basis of every one of Henry Whittaker’s calculations was “I shall win,” and invariably he did win—at importing, at exporting, at manufacturing, at opportunism of all kinds. Money seemed to love Henry. Money followed him around like a small, excited dog. By 1800, he was easily the richest man in Philadelphia, and one of the three richest men in the Western Hemisphere.

So when Henry’s daughter Alma was born that year—just three weeks after the death of George Washington—it was as though she were born to a new kind of creature entirely, such as the world had never before seen: a mighty and newly minted American sultan.