You call it botany, I call it empire-building

Joseph Banks, 18th-century planthunter extraordinaire, did his best to keep Britain on top, finds Clement Knox

TPLANTING THE WORLD by Jordan Goodman 560pp, William Collins, £25, ebook £14.99

he year 1779 was difficult for British sailors. The American War of Independence had engulfed the world. American commanders had raided the British Isles and American squadrons ranged across the Irish Sea. The French were assembling an enormous Armada to invade Britain, while across the Atlantic, France’s ally Spain was poised to wreak chaos on British interests in the Caribbean. In the midst of all this, Captain Cook set out on his third voyage around the world.

The HMS Resolution and the HMS Discovery were not engaged in military activity, but could not expect much mercy if they stumbled across an enemy privateer on the high seas. By 1779, the voyage had been at sea for many months. But it was that year, with the naval war intensifying, that the Americans did something remarkable. Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, issued a letter to Captain Cook to present to American vessels in the event he was detained.

Franklin’s letter explained that Cook’s mission was “an Undertaking truely [sic] laudable in itself ” as it served the common human endeavour to expand the knowledge of the natural world “to the Benifit [sic] of Mankind in general”. Franklin asked American commanders to look upon Cook and his crew not as enemies. but “as common Friends to Mankind”.

Jordan Goodman’s remarkable new book – Planting the World: Joseph Banks and his Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany

– suggests that Franklin’s utopian cosmopolitanism might have been misplaced. Plants emerge from his fascinating tale not as innocent parties, but as participants in the great imperial machinations of their day. The plantsmen that obsessed over them served masters more interested in power than petals. Towering above the seemingly innocent world of botany, exploration, and science was the clash of imperial powers that defined the period between the Declaration of Independence and the defeat of Napoleon.

That period almost exactly corresponds to Joseph Banks’s tenure as President of the Royal Society. Banks joined Captain Cook’s first voyage upon the HMS

Endeavour as a young man, but after 1773 never went to sea again. In 1778 he was elected President of the Royal Society, a position he held until his death in 1820. From his London residence in Soho Square, Banks stage-managed the onward march of British science over four decades. His role as an impresario of exploration and international scientific exchange was unparalleled. He left behind an archive of 20,000 letters. In influence, his only rival was the Prussian geographer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt (who inevitably was also a friend).

Banks’s story is well known. Goodman’s focus is instead on those intrepid botanists and gardeners Banks sent out across the known and unknown world to bring back samples for the Royal Garden at Kew. Banks was the engine behind this hunt for botanical treasures, for it was he who dealt with the ministers and bankers and merchants in London, and who used his voluminous contacts book to try and smooth the way for future voyages.

Even so, he emerges from Goodman’s narrative as a rather frustrated figure. He made ambitious plans and then had to sit around and wait to see what came of them. In one letter, he described the “long & tedious state of Suspense, more intolerable to me than the hardship and fatigue of traversing the wildest Desert” that was his more or less permanent condition.

Invariably, things went wrong. A fair portion of Planting the World deals with the two-decade attempt by Banks to piggyback on the various efforts by British merchants to open up the Chinese trade. Banks was always scheming to have his agents included on such missions, at times with success. But almost all his plans came to naught. One 1806 return voyage killed the “Peculiarly Curious and ancient Dwarf

Tree” gifted to him by a Chinese merchant. Upon its return the dead plant was sent to Frogmore House to be gazed upon by Princess Charlotte. Such were the fruits of years of planning.

The most disturbing example of how Banks’s botanical knowledge was married to the exigencies of capital and empire was the case of the breadfruit. The breadfruit was native to Tahiti, a place Banks had visited as a young man. It was a nutritious, hardy plant, well adapted to growing in dry environments with a minimum of human care. On the other side of the world, West Indian slave owners believed the breadfruit might solve the problem of what to feed their slaves.

Traditionally, planters had

imported food from North America rather than grow it on their land so they could maximise the space available for sugar cultivation. During the Revolutionary Wars, the shortcomings of this system had become apparent. With supply lines cut, the sugar islands starved. Around 15,000 slaves perished in Jamaica alone. By

1785, pressure was mounting on the British government to bring the breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean. British slave owner Matthew Wallen declared that “the King ought to send a Man of War a Botanist & Gardener for the Plants we want”.

The government turned to Banks, who arranged for David Nelson to be chief botanist aboard HMS Bounty, captained by William Bligh. In October

1788, the Bounty arrived at Tahiti and Nelson spent several months preparing “1,015 breadfruit plants in 774 pots in the cabin and 63 tubs and boxes on the deck” for transport to the Caribbean. In April 1789, the Bounty set sail from Tahiti. A few weeks later, the crew mutinied, Bligh and Nelson were abandoned, and the breadfruit thrown overboard. When, after an epic voyage, Bligh returned home, he was sent out again to bring the breadfruit across the world. This time he succeeded. In the event, the enormously expensive attempt to transplant the Tahitian breadfruit to Jamaica was a complete waste of time: the slaves refused to eat it.

The tale of the breadfruit is one of dozens of stories that populate Goodman’s excellent account of how botany tangled with empire and capitalism in the late 18th century. To his credit, he doesn’t overstate the significance of Banks’s collectors’ work, preferring to let the stories speak for themselves. What emerges is a vision of Banks and his collectors wound like jungle creepers around the trunks of history.

The botanists themselves were mainly solitary obsessives uninterested in money (Goodman quotes from a wonderful letter from Banks to one of his protégés in which he warns him that “I do not know there is any trade by which less money has been got than by that of Botany”). But the plants they ferried across the world could make and break empires.

Clement Knox is the author of Strange Antics (William Collins)