by Sarah Rose
The Fortunes had been married for nearly ten years by then, but owing to long periods of separation and to misfortune, they had only two children: John Lindley, named for Fortune’s friend and botanical mentor, was four years old; Helen Jane was seven. Helen was already growing into a young lady, her mother’s pride and comfort when Fortune was in China, while John Lindley chased after her, pleading for attention. But there had recently been a death in the family: Agnes, named for Fortune’s mother, had passed away at less than a year old. She was bright and cheerful, an easy baby to love, and was the first child to be born at the Physic Garden. Her loss was a keen blow to both parents.
If his wife was an essential linchpin in Fortune’s life and career, he recorded little about their private life together. Although he has left ample documentation of his time at the Physic Garden—what he built and spent, planted and reaped—no personal memories remain from his time in London. In his published work on China he could present whatever face he chose to the world and fully control the message he delivered. At home in England he would be exposed to close scrutiny, so in his typically taciturn way he gave others as little information as possible by which they could judge him.
It is unclear why Fortune was so silent on his domestic life, given that he portrayed himself as such a lively character abroad. Perhaps the quotidian details of his life seemed too confined compared with his adventures in China. The Middle Kingdom at the Center of the World, the greatest research laboratory he had ever known, still called to him. It is also possible that his habitual secrecy arose from his sense of shame about his past. It was not just that Fortune’s beginnings were humble but also that he could not rise above the common but telling discrepancy in the parish records of his birth. Robert Fortune was born on September 16, 1812, but his parents, Thomas and Agnes (née Ridpath), had only married on June 24, 1812. The condition of his mother, seven months pregnant, would hardly have gone unnoticed as she walked to the altar in a small town in rural Scotland. As Fortune rose to prominence as a public figure, the details of his date of birth would be altered—from 1812 to 1813—perhaps to preserve a semblance of propriety.
It was on May 7, 1848, that Dr. John Forbes Royle paid a momentous visit to the Physic Garden. By then an old man, Royle was among the most esteemed figures in botany and was professor of materia medica at Kings College, London. He was closely acquainted with Lindley, Fortune’s mentor, and a member of the prestigious Royal Society and the Linnaean Society. Although he had hosted eminent guests in the past, Fortune was nonetheless pleased to receive a man such as Royle and the compliment his appearance implied.
Royle had come to see Fortune on behalf of the East India Company, as their horticultural adviser, to discuss the subject of tea. Also a Scot, Royle had grown up with the company and was practically raised in it, having attended its military academy at Addiscombe. He went to India in 1819 and, upon discovering the joys of botany, declined his military commission to become a surgeon, being eventually placed in charge of the botanic gardens at Saharanpur in northern India. Royle’s recommendations in Illustrations of the Botany and Other Branches of Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains and An Essay on the Productive Resources of India led the company to establish an entire department devoted to botanical concerns. Royle’s knowledge of the growing capacities of the Himalayan range was unmatched by any other botanist. He believed, along with Hardinge, that tea could very profitably be grown there.
Royle and Fortune walked together to the far wall of the garden to examine one of the new greenhouses. Royle, who had not been to the subcontinent for many years, admired the glass gleaming in the sunlight. These warm environs hinted at a skill that the East India Company required. Fortune, on his trip to China, had become an early expert in a new technology. As previously mentioned, it was called the Wardian or Ward’s case and is known today as a terrarium. Portable glass houses such as this would change the growing patterns of the planet.
Prior to about 1840, plants were poor travelers, and plant exchange between the colonies of Great Britain was difficult and often impossible. Seeds and live cuttings from abroad spent months on a ship, crossing the equator at least once and often twice on their way back to England or elsewhere. Sailors were not trained as gardeners, and plants consequently did not travel well under their supervision. Fresh water was scarce on a long sea voyage and was not easily surrendered to exotic flora. Often stowed on deck in direct sunlight, the plants were also exposed to corrosive sea spray. If they were stowed belowdecks, away from the sun, they died the slow death of deprivation. It was a rare and hardy specimen that could survive an ocean voyage.
But Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward of London had changed all that with a series of papers that attracted the attention of professional naturalists. In the late 1830s, Ward had made a catalyzing discovery: In a closed bottle where he kept a hawk moth chrysalis, he saw seeds germinating on a piece of common mold. The seeds had been sealed in the bottle the summer before, were kept warm and protected, and had not been touched since then. Without opening it Ward transferred the bottle to a window ledge and took careful note of further developments. Within four years the seeds had sprouted into a fern and some common grass.
Born in 1791, Ward was the son of a doctor and was raised in the docklands of London. The sailors who frequented his father’s practice must have awoken in the boy a taste for the faraway and exotic. At his own request Ward set sail for Jamaica at the age of thirteen, and although the harsh life of a sailor quickly palled for him, the tropics continued to fascinate him. Like so many other travelers, he would become a botanist, an herbalist, and a man of medicine.
Ward was also an obsessive. For years after the chance discovery of the seeds in the bottle, he experimented with glass, seeds, and mold, taking careful notes of his observations. Whatever plant he chose to raise in a glass container thrived. (The song-birds he included in these experiments did not, however.) His herbarium grew to include twenty-five thousand specimens, and still he kept testing. Ward was the first to recognize a fact that had previously been unimagined: Plants can survive for years kept in a sealed, well-lit environment without water. He had a series of glass boxes made, kept airtight with putty and paint. He was stumbling upon the missing piece of a vexing puzzle: how to keep plants alive during long, arduous ocean transits.
Ward witnessed and documented a process that was simple and self-sustaining: During sunlight hours, plants use moisture from the soil in combination with carbon dioxide to photosynthesize. At night they emit oxygen and release water vapor, which condenses in the cool night air against the glass and drips back down to moisten the soil. The moisture is almost indefinitely retained, so plant life in such containers is effectively self-perpetuating.
For professional plant hunters the implications of Ward’s discovery were revolutionary. Previously, there were few ways to show anyone a live foreign plant—no good, reliable method for taking it any great distance for study existed. A naturalist could examine plants by killing them, by digging up a specimen and drying or pressing it. Or he could attempt an artistic rendering. To preserve live specimens, the traveling botanist’s job was one continuous gamble. Which seeds would stay fresh and which become waterlogged in wet sea air? Which seedlings were robust enough to transit the tropics as well as the northern zones? Before the Wardian case, the foreign plants that grew in Britain were those few hardy varieties whose seeds and seedlings could withstand extremes of temperature.
Now for the first time in history, naturalists would be able to preserve plant life ex situ.
In 1834, when Ward was in the middle of his experiments, a ship docked in England on a return trip from Hobart, Tasmania, with several of the new glass cases on board. Despite the range of climates the ship had traversed—several winters and summers in one crossing and many thousands of miles, with sea spray and salt air buffeting the boxes the entire way—the plants arrived intact. Such was the excitement engendered by Ward’s discovery that ships bearing
his cases were soon launched to the far corners of the world.
“To sum up all,” Ward wrote of his experiments, “in every place there is light, even in the centre of the most crowded and smoky cities, plants of almost every family may be grown.”
Ward’s discovery had enormous economic ramifications for the empire. For instance, the bark of the Peruvian chinchona produces the alkaline quinine. This tree could now be transplanted to the subcontinent, and locally produced quinine could be used to treat the malaria that plagued the British soldiers of India and Burma. Brazilian rubber trees, raised by seed at Kew Gardens, could be replanted on the hospitable island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and generate a new source of revenue. Entire industries could germinate in Ward’s glass cases. Even hobby gardens were taking on a different look as hardy small specimens of trees from abroad, such as the cherry and the flowering crab apple, were liberating the gardener from the tyranny of lavish annual bedding schemes grown from seed. The fashionable horticultural enthusiasts of Britain, including Prince Albert, eagerly prepared for an influx of millions of new plants. And the East India Company was ready to wager that the Wardian case could help them transport the finest Chinese tea plants and seeds to India.
Royle and Fortune spent a long afternoon in the garden talking about the Wardian case, the Physic Garden, China, and Fortune’s brilliant book. China held a special place in the imagination of plant hunters, for it was an entire nation of gardeners. Unlike much of the world undergoing Britain’s program of colonization, China was, to the British mind, almost civilized. The Chinese had cultivated passions and refinement, poetry, music, and philosophy; above all China had a reverence for gardens. Mandarins displayed their status by building winding gardens among fish-ponds, stone bridges, and pavilions in which to meditate on Confucius. Chinese peasants knew how to grow their own food and how to forage for wild edibles. China’s geography also promised a bonanza for plant hunters. An enormous country with a variety of hardiness zones, from temperate to tropics to tundra, and vast changes in topography, it was an unparalleled natural showcase for genetic variation and natural selection.
The grandfather of British botany, Sir Joseph Banks, had viewed China as the Holy Grail of plant hunting. Banks had arranged for a gardener to attend Britain’s very first diplomatic delegation to the Chinese emperor in Peking in the late eighteenth century. A gardener could “never fail of learning something, if he can be brought into contact with his brethren in Pekin,” Banks wrote. He sent a blanket appeal to all Englishmen in China, amateurs and experts, diplomats and sailors, for plants that were “either useful, curious, or beautiful” and requested they bring these home in any way possible.
Banks’s notion of the botanical bounty of China was largely based on rumor and supposition, given that there was so little information available from anywhere but the southernmost port of Canton. He nevertheless asked for specific details regarding the Chinese method of dwarfing trees—or bonsai, as we now know it as practiced in Japan. Among the plants that Banks hoped would be collected were various azaleas, the Moutan tree peony, the lychee, the longan nut, economically valuable plants such as tea bushes, and hardwoods such as oaks. Britons in China were also asked to investigate Chinese methods of turning human waste, or “night soil,” into fortifying garden manure. England, with its rapidly growing population and lack of a working sewerage system, had a surfeit of human excrement. The introduction of this particular Chinese technology could help turn a public health nightmare into a productive boon for industrial Britain.
“To leave behind a once scarce and curious plant under the mistaken idea of its being a common one will be a source of vexation forever afterwards if the circumstance happens to be discovered,” Banks threatened.
On his own China trip Fortune had effectively fulfilled Banks’s directives nearly sixty years after they were issued. But had he left important plants behind? Although he journeyed widely in his first three years, visiting places no Briton had ever been, he traveled mainly from treaty port to treaty port. He had done at least as much collecting in the markets of Chinese cities as he had in the fields. Fortune and Royle marveled at the fact that the Chinese interior, even after Fortune’s assiduous collecting, was still essentially untouched and ripe for exploration.
Now Royle had a proposition to make: Would Fortune be willing to return to China in the employ of the East India Company as a tea hunter?
The company’s terms would be very generous. In contrast to his current salary of £100 a year, what a starting clerk was paid in the city, Fortune would receive £500 per annum (about $55,000 today), which was equivalent to the wages of a man who had worked in a trusted position for twenty-five years. His passages out and home would be paid, as well as all other travel expenses—including the cost of cargo shipped between China and London. Cargo space was precious to the plant hunter; although the goods he would carry home amounted to little more than market produce, transporting them was the single greatest expense incurred in any botanical exploration. Every novel and curious plant had to compete with the profitable teas and silks also vying for the limited space available to hire, and the prices on stowage were raised accordingly.
But the most magnanimous term of the company’s offer was simply that Fortune’s remit was so narrow: He was being engaged only to collect tea. The property rights to all the other plants he collected—the ornamentals, grasses, seeds, seedlings, flowers, fruits, ferns, and bulbs—would be Fortune’s alone. With such generous conditions it would be possible for him to start collecting on his own account and to sell samples at auction for potentially vast profits.
As the gardening obsession of Great Britain grew, a softer, romanticized “English landscape” became fashionable. In country estates, vistas were plotted, lakes were dug, and hills were arranged. These new artificial tableaux demanded rare specimen plants to enhance them. While Fortune regarded such gardening fashions as trivial, he cannily recognized the potential of the company’s proposal for his own personal advancement. The gardens of Britain were changing: Auction rooms were filling up with plants from abroad. Competitive amateurs and experts were bidding up prices on the exotics brought back by plant prospectors. If Fortune could go back to China as a collector and actually sell his discoveries, as so many of his contemporaries in other parts of the empire were doing, he could become a rich man.
He would give it due consideration, he told Royle.
As the eminent doctor left, Fortune stood at the wall near the iron gate, looking at the climbing pale pink roses, budding but not quite in bloom. The English rose of legend had originated in Persia and had come to the British Isles only a few hundred years before, but China had been cultivating roses for centuries. Only fifty years earlier an accidental cross-pollination between the two varieties produced what is known today as our common garden rose: long flowering, sweetly scented, hardy, and low growing. It is said there were no deeply colored roses in England before the introduction of the China rose; the War of the Roses could have had no true red rose for a symbol, only a pale pink one. The pedigree of England’s roses was only one example among many in Fortune’s Physic Garden of how flowers from the East had hybridized and changed the plants of the West.
Elsewhere in the garden Asian favorites flourished: The lilac came from Persia, the tulip from Turkey, and citrus from South-east Asia. And thanks to Fortune himself, flowering camellias had come to England from China.
But what the company had now requested of him was a much bigger undertaking than simply collecting. Fortune would have to steal samples of one of the world’s most economically valuable plants, keep them healthy, and arrange for their successful transplantation on another continent. It was the most formidable task a botanist had ever faced.
He would have to speak to Jane.
Barely one week later a letter arrived from East India House.
To Mr Robert Fortune
Botanic Gardens Chelsea
Sir,
With referen
ce to the communications with Dr Royle on the part of the Court of Directors of the East India Company has held with you upon the subject of your proceeding to China for the purpose of obtaining plants and seeds of the best descriptions of tea from the most desirable localities and of conveying them under your own charge from thence to Calcutta and eventually to the Himalayas . . . I am commanded by the Court to acquaint you that they accept the offer of your services and that they will expect you to be ready to proceed to China not later than the 20th of June next.
The Court will grant you a salary of Five Hundred Pounds per annum to commence from the date of your embarkation and to cease on your return to this country. They will provide you with a free passage to China and you will be entitled to a free passage on your return to England. The court will also defray all your travelling charges and other expenses which you may incur in India and China in procuring and conveying plants and seeds and in otherwise carrying out the objects contemplated by the Court in view to extend the cultivation of tea in the hill tracts of the North West Provinces of India.
As it is of importance that you should arrive in China as early in the Autumn as possible a passage will be procured for you in one of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s vessels in order that you may proceed in the most expeditious manner.
East India House,
17th May 1848
4
Shanghai to Hangzhou, September 1848
A flat-bottomed boat was moored in a snaking, stinking canal one day’s sail out of Shanghai. The boat was small, no more than 40 feet long, a floating home belonging to a seagoing family of brothers and their wives. The family shared the labor and meager profits of conveying cargo and travelers, illicit or otherwise, through China’s coastal network of waterways and canals. It was a creaky junk, unremarkable in the environs of Shanghai except for its current group of passengers.
