by Sarah Rose
Fortune knew that the success of his green tea undertaking was still far from assured at this point. No matter how splendid the seedlings appeared in Shanghai, they might not be able to withstand the dual stresses of both winter and overseas travel, despite the protection of the Wardian case. Moreover, winter is a dangerous time for seeds and shrubs; they become dormant and require special coddling. A good gardener with a nose for frost can take a draft of the night air and tell whether or not plants will face any danger or require swaddling in rice sacks and rags until the sun melts the frost.
Fortune ordered a local glazier and ironworker to construct eleven glazed cases in which to pack his many thousand seedlings. The saplings were perhaps a year old, many much younger, fragile plants with weak and underdeveloped roots. But at least Fortune felt he could rely on his own previous experience of shipping plants by this method. His earlier trip to China had relied heavily on such cases, and the results had left no doubt in his mind as to their efficacy.
The tea seeds presented a different problem. The East India Company had notoriously failed to transport them successfully from China to India over the course of the preceding ten years. In one early shipment, before the widespread use of the Wardian case, all the seeds that had been collected in Canton arrived in the Himalayas dead, delaying the tea-planting timetable for an entire season and incurring huge losses. The tea gardens of the Himalayas remained too small to be profitable largely because of the dearth of quality seeds available, a situation that the specimen plants alone would not alter. From seed to shrub takes six years. If Fortune’s efforts failed in 1849, the whole enterprise would once again be delayed a year.
The timing of his harvest was not propitious, however. Typically, the Chinese pick tea seeds in autumn and store them over the winter in baskets of sand until they can be planted in the spring. According to this schedule, Fortune had been late by a month or two in harvesting his seeds, although it seemed reasonable to assume that they would still be viable. However, by the time they arrived in India, the spring planting season would be over. They would arrive in the Himalayas during the monsoon weather when torrents of rain would wash away a gardener’s best efforts. These seeds could not be planted until the fall; they would have to stay fresh for over a year, and tea seeds do not keep well.
It was also unclear to Fortune how best to transport the seeds. Standard shipping procedures called for them to be wrapped in paper or cloth sacks. He had earlier been given advice by Dr. William Jameson, the young superintendent of the experimental Himalayan plantations; he had suggested that Fortune try both methods. Fortune was especially thorough in following this advice: He shipped the seeds from four different regions in two different ways. One was a coarse bag containing four paper packages of seeds, and the other was a box of earth mixed with seeds from each region. A third portion of each of the varieties of seeds was kept behind to be sown and grown in Shanghai and then sent out to India once they had germinated into hardier seedlings. Fortune knew that tea seeds were very fragile; they spoiled easily, becoming either waterlogged or dried out in response to the slightest atmospheric change. He might have noticed that many of the seeds from his early collection had not germinated when replanted in the makeshift hothouses of Dent’s garden. The best strategy, it seemed, would be to send so great a quantity of seeds that even if most failed, there would still be more than enough to populate the new tea plantations of India.
Fortune sought out Chinese gardeners for their wisdom on the best procedure to store and transport tea seeds. Seeking advice from a native was a daring course for a European in China, not least because the Chinese were reputed to boil or poison tea seeds so that “the floral beauties of China would not find their way into other countries.” But Fortune, ever the scientist, boldly approached an old seed dealer, a celebrated merchant named Aching.
“What is the substance you put in the seeds?” Fortune asked regarding the white ashy matter surrounding them, a mixture that many Europeans thought might be crematorial remains.
“Burnt lice,” the old gardener replied.
“Burnt what?” Fortune said, and laughed.
Aching, in his faulty pidgin, repeated, “Burnt lice,” this time with “all the gravity of a judge.”
“S’pose I no mixie this seed. Worms makie chow-chow he.” The ashes were to prevent maggots; the moist climate of China made packed seeds particularly vulnerable to infestation as well as rot. Fortune determined that the old gardener was telling the truth, and there can be little doubt that he experimented with packing green tea seeds in the ashes of burnt rice.
Day after day and into the night, until dusk made it too difficult to dig and the falling temperature turned his fingers numb, Fortune worked on his green tea collections. Thoughts of failure dogged him as he toiled in the mud, but he was a thorough man, and routine calmed him. He made a catalog of each plant and seed: where it was collected and in which case it was sent. He requested equal assiduousness in others. “It will be of great importance if [seeds and saplings] are carefully received and forwarded to their destination,” Fortune wrote to the gardeners on the subcontinent. It will “also be very desirable to have a report made upon the condition of the plants and seeds when they arrive in India, which report could be sent to me for my guidance with regard to the number which it will be necessary to collect.”
Fortune planned to escort the tea as far as Hong Kong to be certain of its care while in China. “We have no vessel from this place [Shanghai] to Calcutta direct and as any delay or inattention at Hong Kong might prove fatal to the plants I think it much better not to risk committing the [tea] to the care of any person not fully acquainted with such matters.” The ignorance of stevedores could destroy Fortune’s cargo as easily as weather and the vicissitudes of transplantation.
It would take an entire season for the tea shipment to reach India, and another few months before a letter would arrive from the botanists there informing Fortune whether or not the shipments had been successful. He had no way of knowing where he might be when that important letter arrived—perhaps in the middle of his next trip, to the black tea districts. What would happen if his green tea failed entirely? If the first delivery died or if there were adjustments to be made, he would not even know about it until he returned to Shanghai. He might have to repeat his entire green tea-collecting trip.
In the letter accompanying his first shipment, Fortune added humbly, “I shall be grateful to receive any instructions which you may think it necessary to give me . . . addressed to the care of Mssrs Dent who will forward them to me.”
It had been nine months since he had received instructions from India’s botanic gardeners on what seeds to collect. Fortune communicated frequently with Her Majesty’s consuls in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and they had orders to be helpful to him. But there had been no news out of India House in London and nothing further from the subcontinent: no instructions, no suggestions, no acknowledgment of his task at all.
9
Calcutta Botanic Garden, March 1849
Whereas March in England saw gardeners clearing dead winter undergrowth to make way for the arrival of bulbs and perennials, March in India was alive with full tropical majesty. Nothing in the exuberant botanic garden of Calcutta resembled the timidity of an English spring; the seasons here went from hot to wet and then back again. March was still considered “the cold weather,” but as one traveler wrote, “In India ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.” The holiday of Holi was upon India, celebrated by marauding gangs of young men who doused strangers with cold water as the year marked its turn toward pitiless summer.
Hugh Falconer was reddening in the sun as he walked through Calcutta Botanic Garden in March 1849, surveying rows of tea seedlings that his malis, or gardeners, were busy transplanting and pruning. A burly, barrel-ches
ted Scotsman, Falconer was director of the garden, which was the country’s de facto department of agriculture. Falconer concentrated on horticultural networking and policy making, on “improving” the agriculture of India and fixing the “unaccountable discrepancy” between the richness of the country’s soil and the poor quality of its agricultural products. Economically valuable plants such as teak, tobacco, coffee, and indigo were shipped to Calcutta, the capital of colonial India, from all over the empire for distribution within India. Falconer was an East India Company man in the middle of his career, but Calcutta’s tough climate had aged him prematurely. He had already been home to England once on sick leave, although he was only forty-one years old. It had not become as hot yet as it would be in the months to come, and although the monsoon would bring some relief, it was at the cost of continual deluges that would fill the city’s streets, turning the sewers into rivers to the sea. It was enough to make a man like Falconer wonder whether he had chosen his career well.
But he was needed in Calcutta as he awaited a shipment of plants and seeds from China on which the company was desperately depending. The tea the malis were currently cultivating in the Calcutta garden was of little consequence compared to what was due to arrive any day. The Calcutta tea was good enough for experiments on planting depth and pollination but was not suitable for drinking; it came from native Assam stock, tasted bad, and was ill-suited for the high-altitude company gardens in the Himalayas.
Fortune’s seeds would be placed under Falconer’s care. Falconer, like most naturalists of Great Britain, was self-reliant and systematic, accustomed to working alone and to being right—much like Fortune. He was a surgeon and a dedicated East India man, and as good a custodian for Fortune’s tea seeds as he could wish to have. Falconer believed tea was crucially important to the future of the company, that the garden at Calcutta was at the crux of India’s tea project, and that his legacy as superintendent depended on the success of this scheme. Fortune and Falconer, two gardeners, were of one mind when it came to the need to steal tea from China.
The Calcutta Botanic Garden itself was a magnificent sight: “Trees of the rarest kinds, from Nepal and the Cape, Brazil and Penang, Java and Sumatra, are gathered together in that spot. The mahogany towers there and the Cuba palms form an avenue like the aisle of some lofty cathedral. Noble mango trees and tamarinds are dotted about the grassy lawns; and there are stately casuarinas around whose stems are trained climbing plants. There are plantains of vast size and beauty from the Malay Archipelago, and giant creepers from South America. The crimson hibiscus and scarlet passion-flower dazzle the eye, and the odour of the champak and innumerable jessamines [sic] float upon the breeze,” said a visitor.
Located on the west bank of the Hooghly, the garden stood just opposite and around a bend in the river from Fort William, the high-walled seat of the East India Company administration in India. It was as much a park as a laboratory, a place for picnic lunches to keep the hustle and chaos of Calcutta at a civilized distance. “Every step is a surprise,” acclaimed one visitor. Observed another, “The Botanic Gardens would perfectly answer to Milton’s idea of Paradise, if they were on a hill instead of a dead flat.” Covering three hundred acres just below the city, the company’s garden, like other colonial imports to India, was noted for the “order and neatness of every part, as well as with the great collection of plants from every quarter of the globe.” It was one part of Calcutta to which Kipling’s epithet—“this God-forgotten city”—seemed not to apply.
The Botanic Garden dated from the early days of botanical imperialism, around 1786, when a gardening-obsessed infantry-man suggested to the government that a site for the study of India’s flora might prove useful—and profitable—to the shareholders of the company. Initially directed to introduce nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, peppers, and breadfruit into the subcontinent, the gardeners of India discovered that Calcutta was a poor home for equatorial species and an even worse place to grow many valuable trade goods.
Although tropical farming failed there, it was not a total loss as a laboratory. Indeed, the garden became central to the program of global plant exchange and commerce for the East India Company. The garden “has fortunately always been a pet with the respective governments of India; and, in consequence, considerable outlays have, from time to time, been made, to keep it in the most perfect order and efficiency. To enable travellers, and others, to avail themselves, as much as possible, of the [benefits] of this establishment, the superintendent has a supply of seeds and roots always ready for those who may apply for them,” wrote Dr. Royle, senior botanist of the East India Company, who had originally hired Fortune for the China tea assignment. On the banks of the Hooghly exotic specimens were bred, cataloged, and numbered, recorded for history and puzzled over for trading purposes. Under Falconer the Calcutta garden was the crucial nexus for information and plant exchange among the smaller company gardens in the Indian provinces. Seeds and saplings were shared, native Indian plants were sent to gardeners all over the world, and new ideas were reported and discussed. India was an extremely collegial place to do science.
The broader aim of the Calcutta garden was to connect the natural glories of the British Empire to Kew Gardens in England. Kew was the center of botanical research for the entire world; all seeds, shrubs, specimens, and herbaria were forwarded from the empire’s outposts to Kew’s gardeners, the ultimate arbiters of horticulture. Practically speaking, however, Kew’s centrality was secondary to botanists in the field who were busy improvising their way around the world, cataloging and describing every living thing, and trying to make new plants grow. Developing plant-based industries on foreign soil was the stated aim of company botanists, a task they accomplished with unparalleled skill. The Calcutta gardens introduced teak and mahogany for the timber trade, distributed hardy grains to feed India’s famished peasants, and conquered malaria with quinine produced from the bark of the South American chinchona tree.
Falconer had come to the directorship of the gardens as the successor of Dr. John Forbes Royle, the company’s senior botanist. Royle had first appointed the fledgling Falconer his deputy in exploring the Himalayas and, within two years, named him to the position of superintendent at the Saharanpur Botanic Gardens in the Eastern Himalayas.
Falconer was skilled and erudite, a botanist but also an avid if amateur paleontologist. He was the first to articulate the evolutionary theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which holds that sexually reproducing species will show long periods of stasis for most of their fossil record, but when evolution does occur, it appears to happen rapidly and all at once. While working in the Himalayas, Falconer discovered one of the first fossilized monkey skulls—a fact noted by Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. On home leave to Britain in the middle of his Indian career, Falconer shipped to the British Museum an incredible five tons of fossil bones embedded in their rock matrices.
Falconer and Royle both strode in the footsteps of India’s great naturalist Nathaniel Wallich, the man who might properly be called the founder of Indian tea.
For more than thirty years Wallich, a Dane, was the leading botanical authority on the subcontinent and oversaw the Calcutta garden. He “left his country young, and has devoted his life to natural history and botany in the East. His character and conversation are more than usually interesting; the first all frankness, friendliness, and ardent zeal for the service of science; the last enriched by a greater store of curious information,” wrote an acquaintance. Wallich was probably one of the first Europeans to taste Indian-grown tea, although he didn’t realize it at the time.
There had been ongoing debates in the early half of the nineteenth century among botanists over whether any tea existed naturally in India and, if so, what it looked like. Wallich, who joined the company in 1817, was initially a skeptic and rejected the possibility. Since he was the leading botanist in India, his opinion was definitive, and thus he nearly scuttled the success
of Indian tea from the outset.
When the East India Company annexed Assam Province, next to Burma, to the rest of its British possessions in 1824, two brothers, Robert Bruce and C. A. Bruce, an ex-army businessman and tea merchant, respectively, went to the new territory looking for trading opportunities. There they found what they believed were tea plants growing wild on the hillsides. They spoke to natives, who steeped a brew from the leaves and chewed them to relax. The Bruces transplanted some seedlings to a private garden and sent samples to Wallich.
He steeped some of the dried leaves, tasted the golden brew, looked again at the accompanying sample of whole leaves of the same plant, and dismissed the lot as just another unremarkable evergreen. How could it be tea? reasoned Wallich. The area where these leaves came from was at sea level, while everyone knew that Chinese tea grew only in higher, mountainous regions. Seven years later another set of Assam samples, these from an Indian army lieutenant, were brought to Wallich’s attention, and he once again refused to confirm the existence of native Indian tea plants.
But as the company’s position looked increasingly insecure in the Orient, pressure mounted to find a way to grow tea elsewhere. With the East India Company monopoly in China nearing its end in 1834, the governor-general of India established a committee in Calcutta to further investigate the possibility of growing tea in the British dominions there. Wallich, a conservative, was as much a follower as an ideas man and was easily influenced by popular sentiment. With political pressure being applied by the company to find a viable way to produce tea in India, he was finally encouraged to admit that the leaves he had been sent were actually tea leaves—that, in fact, tea was native to India. With heavy prompting by the company and encouraged by the presence of his protégé, Falconer, Wallich finally took the risk in favor of scientific discovery.