The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Two

So Henry did not dangle on the gallows at Tyburn, in the end, nor did his father lose his position at Kew. The Whittakers were miraculously reprieved, and Henry was merely exiled, sent away to sea, dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks, to discover what the world would make of him.

It was 1776, and Captain Cook was about to embark on his third voyage around the world. Banks was not joining this expedition. Simply put, he had not been invited. He had not been invited on the second voyage, either, which had rankled him. Banks’s extravagance and attention-seeking had soured Captain Cook to him, and, shamefully, he had been replaced. Cook would be traveling now with a humbler botanist, somebody more easily controlled—a man named Mr. David Nelson, who was a timid, competent gardener from Kew. But Banks wanted a hand in this journey somehow, and he very badly wanted to keep an eye on Nelson’s botanical collecting. He didn’t like the idea of any important scientific work being done behind his back. So he arranged to send Henry on the expedition as one of Nelson’s hands, with instructions that the boy watch everything, learn everything, remember everything, and later report everything back to Banks. What better use of Henry Whittaker than to implant him as an informer?

Moreover, exiling Henry to sea was a good strategy for keeping the boy away from Kew Gardens for a few years, while allowing a safe distance in which one could determine exactly what sort of person this Henry might become. Three years on a ship would offer ample opportunity for the boy’s true temperament to emerge. If they ended up hanging Henry on the yardarm as a thief, murderer, or mutineer . . . well, that would be Cook’s problem, wouldn’t it, not Banks’s. Alternatively, the boy might prove himself at something, and then Banks could have him for the future, after the expedition had kicked some of the wildness out of him.

Banks introduced Henry to Mr. Nelson as such: “Nelson, I would like you to meet your new right hand, Mr. Henry Whittaker, of the Richmond Whittakers. He is a useful little fingerstink, and I trust you will find—when it comes to plants—that he knowed it all beforehand.”

Later, privately, Banks gave Henry some last advice before he dispatched the boy to sea: “Every day that you are aboard, son, defend your health with vigorous exercise. Listen to Mr. Nelson—he is dull, but he knows more about plants than you ever will. You shall be at the mercy of the older sailors, but you must never complain about them, or things will go badly for you. Stay away from whores, if you don’t want to acquire the French disease. There will be two ships sailing, but you’ll be on the Resolution, with Cook himself. Never put yourself in his way. Never speak to him. And if you do speak to him, which you must never do, certainly do not speak to him in the manner in which you have sometimes spoken to me. He will not find it as diverting as do I. We are not similar, Cook and I. The man is a perfect dragon for protocol. Be invisible to him, and you will be happier for it. Lastly, I should tell you that aboard the Resolution, as with all His Majesty’s ships, you shall find yourself living amongst an odd cabal of both rogues and gentlemen. Be clever, Henry. Model yourself upon the gentlemen.”

Henry’s deliberately expressionless face made it impossible for anyone to read him, so Banks could not have realized how strikingly this final admonition was received. To Henry’s ear, Banks had just suggested something quite extraordinary—the possibility of Henry’s someday becoming a gentleman. More than a possibility, even, it may have sounded like a command, and a most welcome command at that: Go forth in the world, Henry, and learn how to become a gentleman. And in the hard, lonely years that Henry was about to spend at sea, perhaps this casual utterance of Banks’s would grow only greater in his mind. Perhaps it would be all he ever thought about. Perhaps over time Henry Whittaker—that ambitious and striving boy, so fraught with the instinct for advancement—would come to remember it as having been a promise.

Henry sailed from England in July of 1776. The stated objectives of Cook’s third expedition were twofold. The first was to sail to Tahiti, to return Sir Joseph Banks’s pet—the man named Omai—to his homeland. Omai had grown tired of court life and now longed to return home. He had become sulky and fat and difficult, and Banks had grown tired of his pet. The second task was to then sail north, all the way up the Pacific coast of the Americas, in search of a Northwest Passage.

Henry’s hardships began instantly. He was housed belowdecks, with the hen coops and the barrels. Poultry and goats complained all around him, but he did not complain. He was bullied, scorned, harmed by grown men with salt-scaled hands and anvils for wrists. The older sailors derided him as a freshwater eel, who knew nothing of the severities of ocean travel. On every expedition there were men who died, they said, and Henry would be the first to die.

They underestimated him.

Henry was the youngest, but not, as it soon emerged, the weakest. It was not much less comfortable a life than the one he had always known. He learned whatever he was required to learn. He learned how to dry and prepare Mr. Nelson’s plants for scientific record, and how to paint botanicals in the open air—beating away the flies who landed in his pigments even as he mixed them—but he also learned how to be useful on the ship. He was made to scrub every crevice of the Resolution with vinegar, and forced to pick vermin from the bedding of the older sailors. He helped the ship’s butcher to salt and barrel hogs, and learned how to operate the water distillation machine. He learned how to swallow his vomit, rather than displaying his seasickness for anyone’s satisfaction. He rode out tempests without showing fear to the heavens or to any man. He ate sharks, and he ate the half-decomposed fish that were in the bellies of sharks. He never faltered.

He landed at Madeira, at Tenerife, at Table Bay. Down in the Cape, he encountered for the first time representatives of the Dutch East India Company, who impressed him with their sobriety, competence, and wealth. He watched the sailors lose all their earnings at gaming tables. He watched people borrow money from the Dutch, who seemed not to gamble themselves. Henry did not gamble, either. He watched a fellow sailor, a would-be counterfeiter, get caught cheating and be whipped senseless for his crime—at Captain Cook’s command. He committed no crimes himself. Rounding the Cape in ice and wind, he shivered at night under one thin blanket, his jaws clattering so hard he broke a tooth, but he did not complain. He kept Christmas on a bitterly cold island of sea lions and penguins.

He landed in Tasmania and met naked natives—or, as the British called them (and all copper-colored people), “Indians.” He watched Captain Cook give the Indians souvenir medals, stamped with an image of George III and the date of the expedition, to mark this historic encounter. He watched the Indians immediately hammer the medals into fishhooks and spear tips. He lost another tooth. He watched the English sailors not believe that the life of any savage Indian had any account at all, while Cook tried futilely to teach them otherwise. He saw sailors force themselves on women they could not persuade, persuade women they could not afford, and simply buy for themselves girls from their fathers, if the sailors had any iron to trade for flesh. He avoided all girls.

He spent long days on board the ship, helping Mr. Nelson draw, describe, mount, and classify his botanical collections. He had no particular feelings of affection for Mr. Nelson, though he wished to learn everything that Mr. Nelson already knew.

He landed in New Zealand, which looked to him precisely like England, except with tattooed girls whom you could buy for a few handfuls of penny nails. He bought no girls. He watched his fellow sailors, in New Zealand, purchase two eager and energetic brothers—aged ten and fifteen—from their father. The native boys joined the excursion as hands. They had wanted to come, they indicated. But Henry knew the boys had no idea what it would mean to leave their people. They were called Tibura and Gowah. They tried to befriend Henry, because he was closest to their age, but he ignored them. They were slaves and they were doomed. He did not wish to associate with the doomed. He watched the New Zealand boys eat raw dog meat and pine for home. He knew they would eventually die.

He sailed to the verdant, tufted, perfumed land of Tahiti. He watched Captain Cook be welcomed back to Tahiti as a great king, as a great friend. The Resolution was met by a swarm of Indians, swimming out to the ship and calling Cook’s name. Henry watched as Omai—the Tahitian native who had met King George III—was received at home first as a hero and then, increasingly, as a resented outsider. He could see that now Omai belonged nowhere. He watched the Tahitians dance to English hornpipes and bagpipes, while Mr. Nelson, his staid botanical master, got drunk one night and stripped down to the waist, dancing to Tahitian drums. Henry did not dance. He watched Captain Cook order that a native man have both his ears shorn off at the temples by the ship’s barber, for twice having stolen iron from the Resolution’s forge. He watched one of the Tahitian chiefs try to steal a cat from the Englishmen, and receive a lash of a whip across the face for his troubles.

He watched Captain Cook light fireworks over Matavai Bay, to impress the natives, but it only frightened them. On a quieter night, he saw the million lamps of heaven in the skies over Tahiti. He drank from coconuts. He ate dogs and rats. He saw stone temples littered with human skulls. He climbed up the treacherous avenues of rock cliffs, beside waterfalls, gathering fern samples for Mr. Nelson, who did not climb. He saw Captain Cook struggle to keep order and discipline among his charges, while licentiousness reigned. All the sailors and officers had fallen in love with Tahitian girls, and each girl was reputed to know a special secret act of love. The men never wanted to leave the island. Henry withheld from the women. They were beautiful, their breasts were beautiful, their hair was beautiful, they smelled extraordinary and they inhabited his dreams—but most of them already had the French disease. He held out against one hundred fragrant temptations. He was ridiculed for this. He held out nonetheless. He was planning something bigger for himself. He concentrated on botany. He collected gardenias, orchids, jasmine, breadfruit.

They sailed on. He watched a native in the Friendly Islands have his arm cut off at the elbow, on Captain Cook’s orders, for having stolen a hatchet from the Resolution. He and Mr. Nelson were botanizing on those same islands when they were ambushed by natives, who stripped them of their clothes, and—far more injuriously—stripped them of their botanical samples and notebooks, as well. Sunburned, nude, and shaken, they returned to the ship, but still Henry did not complain.

With care, he observed the gentlemen on board, appraising their behaviors. He imitated their speech. He practiced their diction. He improved his manners. He overheard one officer tell another, “As much of a contrivance as the aristocracy has always been, it still constitutes the best check against mobs of the uneducated and the unreflecting.” He watched how the officers repeatedly bestowed honor upon any native who resembled a nobleman (or, at least, who resembled some English idea of a nobleman). On every island they visited, the Resolution’s officers would single out any brown-skinned man who had a finer headpiece than the others, or who wore more tattoos, or who carried a bigger spear, or who had more wives, or who was borne upon a litter by other men, or who—in the absence of any of these luxuries—was simply taller than the other men. The Englishmen would treat that person with respect. This would be the man with whom they would negotiate, and upon whom they would bestow gifts, and who, sometimes, they would pronounce “the king.” He concluded that wherever English gentlemen went in the world, they were always looking for a king.

Henry went turtling, and ate dolphins. He was eaten by black ants. He sailed on. He saw tiny Indians with giant shells in their ears. He saw a storm in the tropics turn the skies a sickly green color—the only thing that had ever visibly frightened the older sailors. He saw the burning mountains called volcanoes. They sailed farther north. It got cold again. He ate rats again. They landed on the west coast of the continent of North America. He ate reindeer. He saw people who dressed in furs and who traded in beaver pelts. He saw a sailor tangle his leg in the anchor chain and be pulled overboard to die.

They sailed farther north still. He saw houses made of whale’s ribs. He bought the hide of a wolf. He collected primroses, violets, currants, and juniper with Mr. Nelson. He saw Indians who lived in holes in the ground, and who hid their women from the English. He ate salted pork studded with maggots. He lost another tooth. He arrived at the Bering Strait and heard beasts howling in the Arctic night. Every dry item he owned became soaked, and then iced. He watched his beard grow in. Sparse as it was, it still collected icicles. His dinner froze to his plate before he could eat it. He did not complain. He did not want it reported back to Sir Joseph Banks that he had ever complained. He traded his wolf hide for a pair of snowshoes. He watched Mr. Anderson, the ship’s surgeon, die and be buried at sea in the dreariest prospect a man could ever imagine—a frozen world of constant night. He watched sailors volley rounds of cannon fire at sea lions on shore, for sport, until there was not a creature left alive on that beach.

He saw the land the Russians called Elaskah. He helped make beer out of spruce pine, which the sailors hated, but it was all they had to drink. He saw Indians who lived in dens not one degree more comfortable than the dwellings of the animals they hunted and ate, and he met Russians, stranded at a whaling station. He overheard Captain Cook remark of the leading Russian officer (a tall, handsome blond man), “He is clearly a gentleman of good family.” Everywhere, it seemed, even in this dismal tundra, it was important to be a gentleman of good family. In August, Captain Cook gave up. He could find no Northwest Passage, and the Resolution was already blocked in by cathedrals of icebergs. They reversed course and headed south.

They barely stopped until they reached Hawaii. They ought never to have gone to Hawaii. They would have been safer starving in the ice. The kings of Hawaii were angry, and the natives were thieving and aggressive. The Hawaiians were not Tahitians—not gentle friends—and moreover, there were thousands of them. But Captain Cook needed fresh water, and had to remain in port until the holds were once more filled. There was much looting by the natives and much punishment by the English. Guns were fired, Indians were wounded, chiefs were appalled, threats were exchanged. Some of the men said that Captain Cook was unraveling, becoming more brutal, exhibiting more theatrical temper tantrums, and more enraged indignation, at every theft. Still, the Indians kept stealing. It could not be permitted. They pried the nails right out of the ship. Boats were stolen, and weapons, too. More guns were fired and more Indians were killed. Henry did not sleep for days in vigilance. Nobody slept.

Captain Cook struck out on land, wishing for an audience with the chiefs, to appease them, but he was met instead by hundreds of furious Hawaiians. Inside of a moment, the crowd became a mob. Henry watched as Captain Cook was killed, pierced through the breast by a native spear and clubbed over the head, his blood mixing with the waves. In one instant, the great navigator was no more. His body was dragged away by natives. Later that night, as a final insult, an Indian in a canoe threw a chunk of Captain Cook’s thigh on board the Resolution.

Henry watched the English sailors burn the entire settlement in retribution. The English sailors could scarcely be held back from murdering every Indian man, woman, and child on the island. The heads of two Indians were severed and put on pikes—and there would be more of this, the sailors promised, until Captain Cook’s body was returned for decent burial. The next day, the rest of Cook’s corpse arrived on the Resolution, missing his vertebrae and feet, which were never recovered. Henry watched as the remains of his commander were buried at sea. Captain Cook had never spoken a word to Henry, and Henry—who had followed Banks’s advice—had never let himself be seen by Cook. But now Henry Whittaker was alive, and Captain Cook was not.

He thought they might return to England after this disaster, but they did not. A man named Mr. Clerke became captain. They still had their mission—to try again at the Northwest Passage. When summer returned, they sailed back north once more, into that awful cold. Henry was pelted with ash and pumice from a volcano. Every fresh vegetable had long ago been consumed, and they drank brackish water. Sharks followed the ship, to dine off the slop from the latrines. He and Mr. Nelson recorded eleven new species of polar duck, and ate nine of them. He saw a giant white bear swim past the ship, paddling with lazy menace. He watched Indians tie themselves into small canoes covered with fur, and navigate the waters as if they and their boats were one animal. He watched the Indians run on the ice, pulled by their dogs. He watched Captain Cook’s replacement—Captain Clerke—die at age thirty-eight, and be buried at sea.

Now Henry had outlived two English sea captains.

They gave up once more on the Northwest Passage. They sailed to Macao. He saw fleets of Chinese junks, and again encountered representatives of the Dutch East India Company, who seemed to be everywhere in their simple black clothes and humble clogs. It appeared to him that everywhere in the world, somebody owed money to a Dutchman. In China, Henry found out about a war with France, and a revolution in America. It was the first he had heard of it. In Manila, he saw a Spanish galleon, loaded, it was said, with two million pounds’ worth of silver treasure. He traded his snowshoes for a Spanish naval jacket. He fell ill from the flux—they all did—but he survived it. He arrived in Sumatra, and then in Java, where, once more, he saw the Dutch making money. He took note of it.

They rounded the Cape one last time and headed back to England. By October 6, 1780, they were safely returned to Deptford. Henry had been gone four years, three months, and two days. He was now a young man of twenty years. During the entirety of the journey, he had acquitted himself in a gentlemanly manner. He hoped and expected that this would be reported of him. He’d also been a zealous observer and botanical collector, as instructed, and was now prepared to divulge his account to Sir Joseph Banks.

He departed the ship, received his wages, found a ride to London. The city was a filthy horror. The year 1780 had been a dreadful one for Britain—mobs, violence, antipapist bigotry, Lord Mansfield’s home burned to the ground, the Archbishop of York’s sleeves torn from his clothing and thrown in his face right on the street, prisons broken open, martial law—but Henry knew none of this, and cared about none of it. He walked all the way to 32 Soho Square, straight to Banks’s private home. Henry knocked on the door, announced his name, and stood ready to receive his reward.

Banks sent him to Peru.

That would be Henry’s reward.

Banks had been rather dumbfounded to discover Henry Whittaker standing at his door. Over the past few years, he had nearly forgotten about the boy, though he was too clever and too polite to reveal this. Banks carried a staggering amount of information in his head, and a good deal of responsibility. He was not only overseeing the expansion of Kew Gardens, but also supervising and funding numberless botanical expeditions all over the world. Hardly a ship arrived in London during the 1780s that did not carry a plant, a seed, a bulb, or a cutting on its way to Sir Joseph Banks. In addition, he held a place in polite society, and kept his hand in every new scientific advancement in Europe, from chemistry to astronomy to the breeding of sheep. Put simply, Sir Joseph Banks was an overoccupied gentleman, who had not been thinking about Henry Whittaker during the past four years quite as much as Henry Whittaker had been thinking about him.

Nonetheless, as he began to recall the orchardman’s son, he permitted Henry entry into his personal study and offered him a glass of port, which Henry refused. He bade the boy to tell him all about the journey. Of course Banks already knew that the Resolution had safely arrived in England, and he had been receiving letters from Mr. Nelson along the way, but Henry was the first live person Banks had encountered straight off the ship, and so Banks welcomed him—once he’d remembered who the boy was—with penetrating curiosity. Henry spoke for nearly two hours, in full botanical and personal detail. He spoke with more liberty than delicacy, it must be said, which made his account a treasure. By the end of the narrative, Banks found himself most deliciously informed. There was nothing Banks loved more than knowing things that other people did not realize he knew, and here—long before the official and politically polished logs of the Resolution would be made available to him—he already knew all that had occurred on Cook’s third expedition.

As Henry spoke, Banks grew impressed. Banks could see that Henry had spent the past few years not so much studying as conquering botany, and that he now had the potential to become a first-rate plantsman. Banks would need to keep this boy, he realized, before someone else filched him away. Banks was a serial filcher himself. He often used his money and éclat to pinch young men of promise away from other institutions and expeditions, and to bring them into the service of Kew. Naturally, he had lost some young men over the years, as well—lured away to safe and lucrative posts as gardeners at wealthy estates. Banks would not lose this one, he decided.

Henry may have been ill-bred, but Banks did not mind an ill-bred man, if he was competent. Great Britain produced naturalists like flaxseed, but most of them were blockheads and dilettantes. Meanwhile, Banks was desperate for new plants. He would gladly have embarked on expeditions himself, but he was nearing fifty years old and suffering awfully from gout. He was swollen and pained, trapped most hours of the day in his desk chair. So he needed to dispatch collectors in his stead. It was not as simple a task as one might think, to find them. There were not as many able-bodied young men as one might hope—young men who wanted to earn wretched salaries in order to die of the ague in Madagascar, or be shipwrecked off the Azores, or assaulted by bandits in India, or taken prisoner in Grenada, or simply to vanish forever in Ceylon.

The trick was to make Henry feel as though he were already destined to work for Banks forever, and not to give the boy any time to ponder things, or to have someone warn him off, or to fall in love with some saucily dressed girl, or to make his own plans for his future. Banks needed to convince Henry that the future was prearranged, and that Henry’s future already belonged to Kew. Henry was a confident young fellow, but Banks knew that his own position of wealth, power, and fame gave him the advantage here—indeed, gave him the appearance, at times, of being the hand of divine providence itself. The trick was to use the hand unblinkingly and swiftly.

“Fine work,” Banks said, after Henry had relayed his stories. “You’ve done well. Next week I shall send you to the Andes.”

Henry had to think for a moment: What were the Andes? Islands? Mountains? A country? Like the Netherlands?

But Banks was talking forward, as though all were decided. “I’m funding a Peruvian botanical expedition, and it departs Wednesday next. You’ll be led by Mr. Ross Niven. He’s a tough old Scot—perhaps too old, if I may be candid—but he’s as hardy as anyone you’ll ever meet. He knows his trees and, I daresay, he knows his South America. I prefer a Scotsman to an Englishman for this sort of work, you know. They are more cold-minded and constant, more fit to pursue their object with relentless ardor, which is what you want in your man abroad. Your salary, Henry, is forty pounds a year, and although it is not the sort of salary upon which a young man can fatten his life, the position is an honorable one, which carries along with it the gratitude of the British Empire. As you are still a bachelor, I am certain you can make do. The more frugally you live now, Henry, the richer a man you will someday become.”

Henry looked as though he were about to ask a question, so Banks bowled him over. “You don’t speak Spanish, I suppose?” he asked, disapprovingly.

Henry shook his head.

Banks sighed in exaggerated disappointment. “Well, you’ll learn it, I expect. I’ll permit you to go on the expedition regardless. Niven speaks it, although with a comic burr. You’ll carry on somehow with the Spanish government there. They are protective of Peru, you know, and they are an annoyance—but it is theirs, I suppose. Though heaven knows I’d like to ransack every jungle in the place, given the chance. I do detest Spaniards, Henry. I hate the dead hand of Spanish law, impeding and corrupting all it encounters. And their church is ghastly. Can you imagine it—the Jesuits still believe that the four rivers of the Andes are the same four rivers of paradise, as mentioned in the book of Genesis? Think of it, Henry! Mistaking the Orinoco for the Tigris!”

Henry had no idea what the man was talking about, but he stayed silent. He had learned in the past four years to speak only when he knew that which he was speaking about. Moreover, he had learned that silence can sometimes relax a listener into thinking that one might be intelligent. Lastly, he was distracted, still hearing the echo of these words: The richer a man you will someday become . . .

Banks rang a bell, and a pale, expressionless servant entered the room, sat down at the secretary, and took out some writing paper. Banks, without another word to the boy, dictated:

“Sir Joseph Banks, having been pleased to recommend you to the Lord Commissioners of His Majesty’s Botanic Gardens at Kew, et cetera, et cetera . . . I am commanded by their Lordships to acquaint you that they have been pleased to appoint you, Henry Whittaker, as a collector of plants for His Majesty’s garden, et cetera, et cetera . . . for your reward and remuneration and for your board, wages and tracking expenses, you will be allowed a salary of forty pounds a year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . . .”

Later, Henry would think that this had been an awful lot of et ceteras for forty pounds a year, but what other future did he have? There was a florid scratching of pens, and then Banks was lazily waving the letter in the air to dry, saying, “Your task, Henry, is the cinchona tree. You may know of it as the fever tree. It is the source of Jesuit’s bark. Learn all you can about it. It’s a fascinating tree and I’d like to see it more deeply studied. Make no enemies, Henry. Protect yourself from thieves, idiots, and miscreants. Take plentiful notes, and be sure to inform me in what sort of soil you find your specimens—sandy, loamy, boggy—so we can try to cultivate them here at Kew. Be tight with your money. Think like a Scot, boy! The less you indulge yourself now, the more you can indulge yourself in the future, when you have made your fortune. Resist drunkenness, idleness, women, and melancholy; you can enjoy all those pleasures later in life, when you are a useless old man like me. Be attentive. Better if you don’t let anyone know that you are a man of botany. Protect your plants from goats, dogs, cats, pigeons, poultry, insects, mold, sailors, saltwater . . .”

Henry was listening with half an ear.

He was going to Peru.

On Wednesday next.

He was a man of botany, on assignment from the King of England.