The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Three

Henry arrived in Lima after nearly four months at sea. He found himself in a town of fifty thousand souls—a struggling colonial outpost, where Spanish families of rank often had less to eat than the mules that pulled their carriages.

He arrived there alone. Ross Niven, the leader of the expedition (an expedition, by the way, that had consisted entirely of Henry Whittaker and Ross Niven), had died along the way, just off the coast of Cuba. The old Scot should never have been allowed to leave England in the first place. He was consumptive and pale and raising up blood with every cough, but he had been stubborn, and had hidden his illness from Banks. Niven had not lasted a month at sea. In Cuba, Henry had penned a nearly illegible letter to Banks, offering news of Niven’s death, and expressing his determination to continue on with the mission alone. He did not wait for a reply. He did not wish to be called home.

Before Niven died, though, the man had usefully bothered to teach Henry a thing or two about the cinchona tree. Around 1630, according to Niven, Jesuit missionaries in the Peruvian Andes had first noticed the Quechua Indians drinking a hot tea made of powdered bark, to cure fevers and chills brought on by the extreme cold of high altitude. An observant monk had wondered whether this bitter powdered bark might also treat the fevers and chills associated with malaria—a disease that did not even exist in Peru but which, in Europe, had forever been the murderer of popes and paupers alike. The monk shipped some cinchona bark to Rome (that sickeningly malarial swamp of a city) along with instructions for testing the powder. Miraculously, it turned out that cinchona did indeed interrupt the path of malaria’s ravages, for reasons nobody could understand. Whatever the cause, the bark appeared to cure malaria entirely, with no side effects except lingering deafness—a small price to pay to live.

By the early eighteenth century, Peruvian bark, or Jesuit’s bark, was the most valuable export from the New World to the Old. A gram of pure Jesuit’s bark was now equal in value to a gram of silver. It was a rich man’s cure, but there were plenty of rich men in Europe, and none of them wanted to die of malaria. Then Louis XIV was cured by Jesuit’s bark, which only drove up prices steeper. Just as Venice grew rich on pepper and China grew rich on tea, the Jesuits were growing rich on the bark of Peruvian trees.

Only the British were slow to recognize the value of the cinchona—mostly owing to their anti-Spanish, anti-Papist prejudice, but also because of a lingering preference for bleeding their patients, rather than treating them with queer powders. In addition, the extraction of medicine from the cinchona was a complicated science. There were some seventy varieties of the tree, and nobody knew exactly which barks were the most potent. One had to rely on the honor of the bark collector himself, who was usually an Indian six thousand miles away. The powders one often encountered as “Jesuit’s bark” in London pharmacies, smuggled into the country through secret Belgian channels, were largely fraudulent and ineffective. Nonetheless, the bark had at last come to the attention of Sir Joseph Banks, who wanted to learn more about it. And now—with the merest hint of potential riches—so did Henry, who had just become the leader of his own expedition.

Soon Henry was moving through Peru like a man goaded by the tip of a bayonet, and that bayonet was his own furious ambition. Ross Niven, before dying, had given Henry three sound pieces of advice about traveling through South America, and the young man wisely followed them all. One: Never wear boots. Toughen up your feet until they look like the feet of an Indian, forsaking forever the rotting embrace of wet animal hide. Two: Abandon your heavy clothing. Dress lightly, and learn to be cold, as the Indians do. You’ll be healthier that way. And three: Bathe in a river every day, as the Indians do.

That constituted everything Henry knew, aside from the fact that cinchona was lucrative, and that it could be found only in the high Andes, in a remote area of Peru called Loxa. He had no man, map, or book to further instruct him, so he solved it on his own. To get to Loxa, he had to endure rivers, thorns, snakes, illness, heat, cold, rain, Spanish authorities, and—most dangerous of all—his own team of sullen mules, ex-slaves, and embittered Negroes, whose languages, resentments, and secret designs he could only begin to guess at.

Barefoot and hungry, he pushed on. He chewed coca leaves, like an Indian, to keep up his strength. He learned Spanish, which is to say that he stubbornly decided that he could already speak Spanish, and that people could already understand him. If they could not understand him, he shouted at them with increasing force until they did. He eventually reached the region called Loxa. He found, and bribed, the cascarilleros, the “bark cutters,” the local Indians who knew where the good trees grew. He kept searching, and found even more hidden groves of cinchona.

Ever the orchardman’s son, Henry quickly realized that most of the cinchona trees were in poor condition, sick and overharvested. There were a few trees with trunks as thick as his own midsection, but none any bigger. He began to pack the trees with moss, wherever the bark had been removed, to allow them to heal. He trained the cascarilleros to cut the bark in vertical strips, rather than killing the tree by horizontally banding it. He severely coppiced other sick trees, to allow for new growth. When he became sick himself, he kept on working. When he could not walk from illness or infection, he had his Indians tie him to his mule, like a captive, so he could visit his trees every day. He ate guinea pigs. He shot a jaguar.

He stayed up in Loxa for four miserable years, barefoot and cold, sleeping in a hut with barefoot and cold Indians, who burned manure for heat. He continued to nurse the cinchona groves, which legally belonged to the Spanish Royal Pharmacy, but which Henry had silently claimed for his own. He was far enough back in the mountains that no Spaniard ever interfered with him, and after a time the Indians weren’t bothered by him, either. He gleaned that the cinchona trees with the darkest bark seemed to produce a more potent medicine than the other varieties, and that the newest growth produced the most powerful bark. Heavy pruning, therefore, was advisable. He identified and named seven new species of cinchona, but most of them he considered useless. He focused his attention on what he called cinchona roja—the red tree, the richest. He grafted the roja onto the root stock of more sturdy and disease-resistant varieties of cinchona in order to produce a higher yield.

Also, he thought a great deal. A young man alone in a high and distant forest has plenty of time to think, and Henry formulated grand theories. He knew from the late Ross Niven that the trade in Jesuit’s bark was bringing in ten million reales a year to Spain. Why did Sir Joseph Banks want him to merely study this product, when they could be selling it? And why must production of Jesuit’s bark be limited to this inaccessible region of the world? Henry remembered his father’s teaching him that every plant of value in human history had been hunted before it was cultivated, and that hunting a tree (like climbing into the Andes to find the blasted thing) was far less efficient than cultivating it (like learning how to grow it elsewhere, in a controlled environment). He knew that the French had tried transplanting the cinchona to Europe in 1730, and that they had failed, and he believed he knew why: because they didn’t understand altitude. One cannot grow this tree in the Loire Valley. Cinchona needed high, thin air and a humid forest—and France didn’t have such a place. Nor did England. Nor Spain, for that matter. This was a pity. One cannot export climate.

During four years of thinking, though, this is what Henry came up with: India. Henry was willing to bet that the cinchona tree would thrive in the cold, damp Himalayan foothills—a place Henry had never been, but which he had heard about from British officers when he was traveling in Macao. Moreover, why not grow this useful medicinal tree closer to malarial locations themselves, closer to where it was actually needed? Jesuit’s bark was in desperate demand in India, to combat debilitating fevers in British troops and native laborers. For now, the drug was far too costly to give to common soldiers and workers, but it needn’t remain so. By the 1780s, Jesuit’s bark was being marked up some two hundred percent between its source in Peru and its European markets, but most of that expense was due to the costs of shipping. It was time to stop hunting this tree and start cultivating it for profit, closer to where it was needed. Henry Whittaker, now twenty-four years old, believed he was the man to do it.

He left Peru in early 1785, carrying not only notes, an extensive herbarium, and samples of bark packed in linen, but also bare root cuttings and some ten thousand cinchona roja seeds. He brought home some capsicum varieties, too, as well as some nasturtiums and a few rare fuchsias. But the real prize was the cache of seeds. Henry had waited two years for those seeds to emerge, waiting for his best trees to put out blossoms untouched by frost. He’d dried the seeds in the sun for a month, turning them every two hours to keep them from growing mold, and had wrapped them in linen at night to protect them from dew. He knew that seeds rarely survived ocean voyages (even Banks had failed at carrying seeds home successfully from his travels with Captain Cook), so Henry decided to experiment with three different packing techniques. He packed some of the seeds in sand, embedded others in wax, and kept the rest loose in dried moss. All were stuffed in ox bladders to keep them dry, and then wrapped in alpaca wool to hide them.

The Spanish still held the monopoly on cinchona, so Henry was now officially a smuggler. As such, he avoided the busy Pacific coast and traveled east, overland across South America, carrying a passport that identified him as a French textile merchant. He and his mules and his ex-slaves and his unhappy Indians took the thieves’ route—from Loxa to the river Zamora, to the Amazon, to the Atlantic coast. From there he sailed to Havana, then to Cadiz, then home to England. The return voyage took a year and a half in total. He encountered no pirates, no noteworthy storms, no debilitating illness. He lost no specimens. It wasn’t that difficult.

Sir Joseph Banks, he thought, would be pleased.

But Sir Joseph Banks was not pleased, when Henry met up with him again, back in the comforts of 32 Soho Square. Banks was merely older and sicker and more distracted than ever. His gout was tormenting him terribly, and he was struggling with scientific questions of his own design, which he considered important to the future of the British Empire.

Banks was trying to find a way to end England’s dependence on foreign cotton, and had thereby dispatched plantsmen to the British West Indies, who were working—unsuccessfully, thus far—on growing cotton there. He was also trying, also unsuccessfully, to break the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade by growing nutmeg and cloves at Kew. He had a proposal before the king to turn Australia into a penal colony (this was a mere hobby idea of his), but nobody as yet was listening. He was working to build a forty-foot-tall telescope for the astronomer William Herschel, who was desirous of discovering new comets and planets. But most of all, Banks wanted balloons. The French had balloons. The French had been experimenting with lighter-than-air gases, and were sending up manned flights in Paris. The English were falling behind! For the sake of science and national security, by God, the British Empire needed balloons.

So Banks, that day, was not in a mood to listen to Henry Whittaker’s assertion that what the British Empire really needed were cinchona plantations in the midrange altitudes of the Indian Himalayas—an idea that did not further in any manner the causes of cotton, spices, comet hunting, or ballooning. Banks’s mind was cluttered and his foot ached like the devil and he was irritated enough by Henry’s aggressive presence to disregard the entire conversation. Here, Sir Joseph Banks made a rare tactical error—an error that would ultimately cost England dearly.

But it should be said that Henry, too, made tactical errors that day with Banks. Several of them in a row, in fact. Showing up unannounced was the first error. Yes, he had done it before, but Henry was no longer a cheeky lad, in whom such a lapse in decorum could be excused. He was by now a grown man (and a large man, at that) whose insistent hammering at the front door carried a suggestion of both social impudence and physical threat.

What’s more, Henry arrived at Banks’s doorstep empty-handed, which a botanical collector must never do. Henry’s Peruvian collection was still on board the ship from Cadiz, safely docked in harbor. It was an impressive collection, but how could Banks have known that, when all the specimens were out of sight, hidden away on a distant merchant ship, concealed in ox bladders, barrels, gunnysacks, and Wardian cases? Henry should have brought something to personally place in Banks’s hands—if not a cutting of cinchona roja itself, then at least a nicely flowering fuchsia. Anything to get the old man’s attention, to soften him into believing that the forty pounds a year he’d been pouring into Henry Whittaker and Peru had not been squandered.

But Henry was not a softener. Instead, he verbally hurled himself at Banks with this blunt accusation: “You are wrong, sir, to merely study the cinchona when you should be selling it!” This staggeringly ill-considered statement accused Banks of being a fool, while simultaneously befouling 32 Soho Square with the unpleasant taint of trade—as though Sir Joseph Banks, the wealthiest gentleman in Britain, would ever personally need to resort to commerce.

To be fair to Henry, his head was not entirely lucid. He had been alone for many years in a remote forest, and a young man in the forest can become a dangerously unfettered thinker. Henry had discussed this topic with Banks so many times already in his mind that he was impatient now with the actual conversation. In Henry’s imagination, everything was already arranged and already successful. In Henry’s mind, there was only one possible outcome: Banks would now welcome the idea as brilliant, introduce Henry to the proper administrators at the East India Company, clear all permissions, secure all funding, and proceed—ideally by tomorrow afternoon—with this ambitious project. In Henry’s dreams, the cinchona plantation was already growing in the Himalayas, he was already the glitteringly wealthy man whom Joseph Banks had once promised he might become, and he had already been welcomed as a gentleman into the embrace of London society. Most of all, Henry had allowed himself to believe that he and Joseph Banks already regarded each other as dear and intimate friends.

Now, it is quite possibly the case that Henry Whittaker and Sir Joseph Banks could have become dear and intimate friends, except for one small problem, which was that Sir Joseph Banks never regarded Henry Whittaker as anything more than an ill-bred and thieving little toiler, whose only purpose in life was to be wrung dry of usefulness in the service of his betters.

“Also,” said Henry, while Banks was still recovering from the assault upon his senses, his honor, and his drawing room, “I believe we should discuss my nomination to the Royal Society of Fellows.”

“Pardon me,” Banks said. “Who on earth has nominated you to the Royal Society of Fellows?”

“I am trusting that you will,” said Henry. “As reward for my work and my ingenuity.”

Banks was speechless for a long moment. His eyebrows, on their own accord, fled to the top of his brow. He drew a sharp breath. And then—most unfortunately for the future of the British Empire—he laughed. He laughed so heartily that he had to dab his eyes with a handkerchief of Belgian lace, which may very well have cost more than the house in which Henry Whittaker had been raised. It was good to laugh, after such a tiresome day, and he gave in to the hilarity with all his being. He laughed so hard that his manservant, standing outside the door, poked his head into the room, curious about this sudden explosion of merriment. He laughed so hard that he could not speak. Which was probably for the best, because even without the laughter, Banks would have encountered difficulty finding words to express the absurdity of this notion—that Henry Whittaker, who by all rights should have swung from the gallows at Tyburn nine years earlier, who had the ferrety face of a natural-born pickpocket, whose appallingly penned letters had been a real source of entertainment to Banks over the years, whose father (poor man!) had kept company with pigs—that this young bilker expected to be invited into the most esteemed and gentlemanly scientific consortium in all of Britain? What a good whacking bit of comedy was this!

Of course, Sir Joseph Banks was the much-loved president of the Royal Society of Fellows—as Henry well knew—and had Banks nominated a crippled badger to the Society, the Society would have welcomed the creature and minted it a medal of honor, besides. But to welcome in Henry Whittaker? To allow this impudent picaroon, this mackerel-backed shaver, this jack-weighted hob, to add the initials RSF to his indecipherable signature?

No.

When Banks began to laugh, Henry’s stomach collapsed upon itself and folded into a small, hard cube. His throat narrowed as though he were, at last, noosed. He shut his eyes and saw murder. He was capable of murder. He envisioned murder and carefully considered the consequences of murder. He had a long while to ponder murder, while Banks laughed and laughed.

No, Henry decided. Not murder.

When he opened his eyes, Banks was still laughing, and Henry was a transformed human being. Whatever youth had remained in him as of that morning, it was now kicked out dead. From that point forward, his life would be not about who he could become, but about what he could acquire. He would never be a gentleman. So be it. Sod gentlemen. Sod them all. Henry would become richer than any gentleman who had ever lived, and someday he would own the lot of them, from the floor up. Henry waited for Banks to stop laughing, and then he escorted himself from the room without a word.

He immediately went out into the streets and found himself a prostitute. He held her up against an alley wall and battered the virginity out of himself, injuring both the girl and himself in the process, until she cursed him for a brute. He found a public house, drank two jars of rum, pummeled a stranger in the gut, was thrown out in the street and kicked in the kidneys. There, now—it was done. Everything from which he had been abstaining over the last nine years, in the interest of becoming a respectable gentleman, it was all done. See how easy it is? No pleasure in it, to be sure, but it was done.

He hired a boatman to take him up the river to Richmond. It was nighttime now. He walked past his parents’ dreadful house without stopping. He would never see his family again—nor did he wish to. He sneaked into Kew, found a shovel, and dug up all the money he had left buried there at age sixteen. There was a fair bit of silver waiting for him in the ground, far more than he remembered.

“Good lad,” he told his younger, thieving, hoarding self.

He slept by the river, with a damp sack of coins as his pillow. The next day, he returned to London and bought himself a good-enough suit of clothes. He supervised the removal of his entire Peruvian botanical collection—seeds and bladders and bark samples all—from the ship that had come from Cadiz, and transferred it over to a ship heading to Amsterdam. Legally, the entire collection belonged to Kew. Bugger Kew. Bugger Kew until it bled. Let Kew come and find him.

Three days later, he sailed to Holland, and sold his collection, his ideas, and his services to the Dutch East India Company—whose severe and cunning administrators received him, it must be said, without a trace of laughter.