Earle’s specialty was a condition called a hydrocele, a swelling of the testicle sometimes caused by injury and often involving intense pain. Hosack would be the first to perform Earle’s revolutionary treatment for it in the United States. Most hydroceles required surgical intervention, although Earle also saw hydroceles that had been burst open by falls from horseback or as they bounced against saddles. Of the available treatments, he shrank from the “exquisitely painful” process of slicing off the hydrocele, as well as from the “horror” of searing it with caustic. Instead, he punctured the testicle with a sharp, tubular trocar in order to drain the fluid. Then he injected the testicle with a mixture of alcohol and water. Earle performed this innovative procedure many times in the early 1790s. In March 1792, for example, he was summoned to treat a Frenchman who had just fled the Revolution for England. When the man disrobed, Earle saw he was suffering from a hydrocele “larger considerably than his head,” which he had managed to keep hidden under his clothes by bandaging it backward between his thighs. Earle pierced the inflamed testicle with his trocar and siphoned out more than six pints of blood-tinged water. On another occasion Earle injected the hydrocele of an Indian servant boy who had been brought for treatment by his master. He also drained “clear straw coloured fluid” from an unlucky man with two hydroceles—one on each side. Hosack memorized Earle’s methods for treating hydroceles, to take back with him to the United States.
HOSACK FOUND ANATOMY and surgery irresistible, almost godlike, but all that year he also continued to study botany. At the Brompton Botanic Garden, Hosack had so deeply impressed William Curtis with his drive and talent that in the fall of 1793, just after their summer together, Curtis nominated him as a Foreign Member of an exclusive society for natural history.
The Linnean Society of London operated from an elegant townhouse on Great Marlborough Street that belonged to its president, James Edward Smith. Smith and some friends had founded the Linnean Society in the 1780s to safeguard Carl Linnaeus’s collections, which Smith had purchased with the help of his wealthy father. (The spelling Linnean was in honor of the title Linnaeus received upon being ennobled by the Swedish king for his services to science: Carl von Linné.) Hosack, on the strength of Curtis’s nomination, was officially elected a Foreign Member of the Linnean Society in December 1793, about seven months after he had arrived in London. Finding himself welcomed into a luminous circle of scientific camaraderie, he was surprised and delighted by the hospitality Britons seemed willing to show their erstwhile foes. Hosack quickly became just as devoted to daily study at the Linnean Society as he had been at the Brompton garden.
Linnaeus, in his will—which he grandly called the “Voice from the grave to her who was my dear wife”—had with complete justice declared his trove of specimens to be “the greatest the world has ever seen.” The crates Smith had received in October 1784 from Sweden included approximately fifteen thousand plants. British botanists were elated that they could consult specimens that had been labeled by Linnaeus himself, which would help them pinpoint the Linnaean names of unknown specimens in their own collections. More exciting still was the prospect of clapping eyes on many exotic species that British botanists had previously encountered only in books. In short order the Royal Society had unanimously elected Smith a Fellow, and over the next decade, Smith had climbed ever closer to the pinnacle of British botany. After he was engaged to teach botany to Queen Charlotte and her daughters Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth, one of his friends jokingly called him the “King of Botany.”
Smith was just ten years older than Hosack, and the two men forged a warm friendship. They would correspond for the rest of their lives, with Hosack later sending many London-bound friends to meet Smith, among them a young Washington Irving. But Hosack felt humble and nervous in the presence of another member of the Linnean Society: Sir Joseph Banks. In 1768, at the age of twenty-five, following botanical studies at the Chelsea Physic Garden, the handsome and wealthy Banks had flung himself headlong into natural history. He had abandoned a hopeful young woman and a comfortable London life for three years’ passage aboard Captain James Cook’s Endeavour. Banks had almost single-handedly burnished botany with heroism and glamour while pursuing plant specimens across the globe. On the day of Hosack’s birth, he had been sailing through the South Pacific. He had nearly been shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef before returning home laden with species of flora and fauna Britain had never seen. Even the grumpy Linnaeus had sung his praises, while King George III placed him at the head of the botanical collections at Kew Palace. In 1778, the Royal Society of London elected Banks president, a position of scientific glory he had held for fifteen years by the time Hosack arrived in London.
Despite their great divide in station and age, Banks was very kind to Hosack, who would later write Banks thanking him for his generosity “when I was a youth and totally unworthy.” How thrilling for Hosack to be able to tell his father, who had once borrowed a book about Captain Cook’s travels from the library in New York, that he was regularly socializing with Cook’s most famous travel companion. Hosack listened with particular attentiveness to Banks’s remarks on botany and one day heard him say something that made a lasting impression: “Even an imperfect dried specimen is preferable to the best painting.”
In the spring of 1794, as the days grew longer and the first hints of green appeared in London’s parks, Hosack began following Smith’s public botany lectures at the Linnean Society, given on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. At other times, Hosack studied on his own in the collections, and so it was that he came to be standing one day before three strange-looking green cabinets in the library on Great Marlborough Street. Each was taller and thinner than a coffin, and each was fronted with double doors.
For centuries, botanists had bound their dried, mounted specimens in books. This system privileged physical convenience over scientific logic, because when new specimens were collected, they had to be filed separately from fellow members of their genus or simply shoved loose between the relevant pages. More vexing still, when revolutionary thinkers—above all Linnaeus himself—came along and upset the very principles underlying natural classification, collectors whose specimens were bound in volumes found themselves hopelessly stuck in the past. The three cabinets now facing Hosack were Linnaeus’s own solution to the problem. Each shelf corresponded to a single class of plants in his sexual system, and on each shelf lay piles of unbound herbarium sheets. Each of these sheets, in turn, was mounted with just a single specimen. Many had been annotated in Linnaeus’s own hand. Less than a year after Hosack had first looked into the mysteries of botany with Curtis as his guide, he was standing before the shrine of its high priest.
For four months he studied the Linnaean specimens. They looked brittle and faded compared to the plants he had beheld in full flower at Brompton, but with a little effort he could conjure up their living colors in his mind’s eye. The breadth of the collection was astonishing—thousands of plants from Russia, Lapland, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Grenada, Germany, Java, China, India, Egypt, Arabia, Siberia, Anatolia, Palestine, Persia, and many other countries and regions. Some of the sheets were decorated with intricate, hand-drawn vases from which the real stems of the attached specimens appeared to rise. On other sheets, round whorls of petals had subsided into the most delicate of fans, and flattened bulbs clung sheerly to the paper, their filaments trailing like watery tentacles. As he worked his way through the piles of specimens, he traveled down the valleys and over the mountains of a whole planet. Then, months before he boarded the ship that would take him back across the Atlantic, Hosack suddenly found himself home again. Linnaeus’s green-painted cabinets contained many plants native to North America.
Linnaeus had never been to America, but his prize student, Pehr Kalm, had. From 1748 to 1751, by order of the Swedish Academy of Science, Kalm had ranged from Philadelphia up through New Jersey and New York to Canada in search of medicinal, agricultu
ral, and commercial plants. He returned to his elated teacher in Uppsala with hundreds of specimens, many of which later made their way to the Linnean Society. As Hosack studied the Linnaean specimens, he could not have missed the careful letter “K”—for Kalm—written by Linnaeus at the bottoms of dozens of the sheets. Kalm’s travels meant that Linnaeus’s collection contained many specimens of plants that Hosack would have seen growing up on Manhattan, from the grandest oaks to the plainest grasses. Other collectors, especially John Bartram in Pennsylvania and Mark Catesby in the Carolinas, had also contributed North American plants to Linnaeus, either directly or via his British correspondents.
It had happened to Hosack at Brompton, too—this encounter with American plants. Among his medicinals, for example, Curtis was growing American native species such as great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) and white vervain (Verbena urticifolia). When Hosack had walked the country lanes of his Manhattan boyhood, they had been right there all along. Now, in London, his thoughts bounced constantly from botany to surgery and back to botany. Were plants or lancets, he wondered, the better approach to treating illness? While he studied at the Linnean Society that year, Hosack was continuing his anatomical research and writing a paper on the musculature of the eye. He dissected the eyeballs of fish, sheep, rabbits, oxen, and humans, pulling apart the viscous material in search of tiny muscles. He experimented on himself as well, fixing one eyeball open with a speculum oculi and pressing hard on it as he held objects up at varying distances. “By what power,” he asked, “is the eye enabled to view objects distinctly at different distances?” He concluded—contrary to the theory put forth in a Royal Society paper the previous year—that it was not a set of muscles embedded in the lenses that was responsible for the ability to see clearly at different distances. Instead, he argued, the answer lay in the external muscles of the eye, which he also praised for allowing humans to convey their emotions. People so often remarked upon Hosack’s own large, expressive eyes, which sometimes signaled impatience but at other times warmth or excitement.
Banks suggested that Hosack submit the paper to the Royal Society, and it was accepted. Because Hosack was not a Fellow, however, one of his professors presented it for him on May 1, 1794. Banks, as president of the Royal Society, sat on a raised dais at the front of the society’s sumptuous hall in Somerset House, with an enormous golden mace resting on the table before him. The Fellows were ranged in rows facing Banks as they listened to Hosack’s paper. Soon it would be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Hosack had soared to the heights of British science in his one year in London, and he wasn’t yet twenty-five years old. Decades later, an eminent American physician would credit this paper with first making Hosack’s name “widely known on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Girded with this triumph and all he had learned in Edinburgh and London, Hosack finally felt ready to return home. After two years away, he would sail back to the United States as a vastly more skilled physician and one of the best-trained Americans in Linnaean botany. He packed his books, papers, and clothing—and very likely new medicines and surgical tools, too. His British friends sent him off with a flourish. Smith gave him a set of specimens from Linnaeus’s own collections, duplicates that he could spare without damaging the integrity of the Linnean Society’s holdings. It was a touching expression of his faith in Hosack’s promise as a botanist. And not long before Hosack left London, he was nominated for promotion in the Linnean Society from Foreign Member to Fellow. This had never been done before—making a foreigner a full-fledged Fellow—but Hosack would have to leave London without knowing his fate. The Fellows of the Linnean Society wouldn’t be assembling for the vote until later in the summer.
He would sail on an American ship named the Mohawk. Captain Howard Allen had sailed her over to England that spring, arriving in early May 1794 at Dover. In London, Captain Allen had met with merchants, seen to it that their cargo was stowed aboard, and purchased supplies for his crew and passengers. By late June, all was ready. Hosack boarded, got settled into his berth, and looked over the ship that would be his home for the next six weeks. She had been fashioned of pine and iron the previous year in the shipyards at Hudson, New York. Like other ships of her class, the Mohawk probably had two decks, three masts, and square-rigged sails.
The Mohawk was one of the first American vessels to leave London since John Jay had arrived in mid-June to conduct a delicate diplomatic mission with Great Britain. Copies of Jay’s initial dispatches regarding his negotiations with the British government were on board. “Kiss our little ones for me,” Jay had written to his wife on May 12 before embarking at New York to the salute of cannonfire and the cheers of the immense crowds gathered on the Battery to wish him well. In the fall of 1793, the British had made an official policy of seizing American vessels on the West Indies trade route. When this news had reached the United States in March 1794, long-simmering tensions had threatened to boil over into war.
Meanwhile, the British were struggling to dominate Revolutionary France on the high seas—especially after the young artillery commander Napoleon Bonaparte helped expel the British fleet from the French port of Toulon in December 1793. The British, desperate for manpower, were hauling American sailors from their ships and conscripting them into the Royal Navy. With tempers flaring, Congress appropriated funds in late March 1794 for American seaports to gird themselves against potential British attacks. In May, President Washington sent Jay to London as a special envoy in an effort to defuse the tension. Governor George Clinton soon took the precaution of ordering “all Vessels of War belonging to Foreign Nations” to drop anchor at least a mile south of Governors Island, putting New York City beyond the reach of incoming cannonfire.
Toward the end of June, less than a week after Jay had arrived in London, he was in the middle of writing a letter to his wife when word arrived that an American vessel would be sailing shortly for New York. Jay quickly drafted letters to both President Washington and Secretary of State Edmund Randolph—Jefferson had resigned on the last day of 1793—and entrusted copies to Captain Allen for transport aboard the Mohawk.
Hosack would be sharing the first-class accommodations with a group of men and several women, among them Americans who, like Hosack, were returning home after a polishing sojourn abroad. They had all led quiet lives, however, compared with the Englishman Thomas Law, who was thirty-seven years old when he boarded the Mohawk. Law had high cheekbones and a delicate mouth, all of which united to give him a dreamy appearance. Born to an important and wealthy family in Cambridge, England, he worshiped finance, poetry, adventure, and women, and he had spent his adult years in pursuit of them all. (Within a few years after arriving in the United States, Law would marry George Washington’s step-granddaughter Eliza Custis.) He was traveling on the Mohawk that summer with a companion, a military man named William Mayne Duncanson.
Law had the look about him of a man who could not reach for a quill pen without a fluttering of soft white cuffs. Duncanson cut a sharp figure of martial virility, and his heavy-lidded eyes gave him a haughty air. Like Law, Duncanson had spent time in northeastern India, and the two men may have begun their friendship there. Law was also traveling with at least one of his several illegitimate young sons, whose mother he had left behind in India. With such worldly, colorful men as Law and Duncanson at the table, dinner in the captain’s quarters would be a diverting affair, even if the food was the usual dessicated shipboard shoe leather. Captain Allen was by all accounts a warm and generous host.
As Hosack became better acquainted with his new companions, the captain guided the ship around the bulging belly of eastern England toward Newhaven, a town near Brighton on the southern coast. At that same moment, several dozen families from Sussex were floating on a barge down the River Ouse, also making for Newhaven, where they would board the Mohawk. The men on the barge were blacksmiths, carpenters, and other artisans who hoped to find work building the new capital city on the Po
tomac. They boarded the ship and settled into the steerage compartments—the sort of cabins notable only for their cupboard-size bunks, dirty mattresses, and fetid air. Now the Mohawk made for open sea.
Even aboard ship, Hosack could not tamp down his restless scientific curiosity. While they were still close to the coast of England, he attached a flaming wick to a cork, floated the cork in a basin full of water, and then lowered an empty wine decanter over it. He was trying to determine whether there was any basis for the conventional wisdom that ocean voyages were good for patients with consumption, and also for what he described as the “old German practice of placing consumptive patients in cowhouses where the air had lost a portion of its oxygene.” As the fire consumed the oxygen in the air, he measured the change in the height of the water inside the decanter and took careful notes. He planned to repeat his experiment when the Mohawk was halfway across the Atlantic—if they made it that far. They were, after all, sailing into a war zone. All that summer, French frigates had been chasing down and raiding British and American ships. Revolutionary France was desperate for food, dry goods, and military supplies, and the hold of the Mohawk was filled with wares that would warm the heart of any French admiral.
Three weeks into the voyage, Captain Allen and the passengers spotted an American ship in the distance. When the Mohawk hove to, they learned that she was the Industry, and that she had sailed from the mouth of the Delaware River en route to Denmark. Her captain shared news of a rumored British attack on General Anthony Wayne’s forces on the northern edge of the United States. For his part, Captain Allen could report on John Jay’s safe arrival in London and the opening of his negotiations with Britain. After a brief exchange with the Mohawk, the Industry continued on her way to Denmark, but she never made it. A week after crossing paths with the Mohawk, she was captured by a French Revolutionary frigate. The Industry thus joined the lengthening list of ships taken by the French that summer, seizures that American and British newspapers were tallying for their readers with hair-raising frequency. At any hour of the day or night, Hosack and his fellow passengers, too, might suddenly find themselves prisoners of French Revolutionary forces. The Mohawk’s crew members were also contending with the unnerving specter of impressment by the British navy. All eyes were on Jay’s negotiations in London, but it would be many months before Americans would learn whether they would succeed.
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