by Sarah Rose
From the fiercest of tea skeptics, Wallich became one of Indian tea’s most avid champions. Together with Falconer, he took lengthy trips to explore and map Darjeeling after the company seized it as a “gift” from the rajah of Sikkim and annexed it to India. Wallich dedicated scarce ground in the Calcutta garden to tea seedlings. After collecting land data from the vast network of surgeons employed in the remotest parts of India, he came to believe wholeheartedly in the future profitability and sustainability of a tea economy on the subcontinent. He conducted a survey among company surgeons to research the most likely places to establish tea estates, and in the end chose the gardens under the care of his former pupil, Falconer: Saharanpur, in the high-altitude Himalayas, would be the site of the tea-growing experiment.
Falconer, then a young man, was a keen supporter of the tea project and may have been the first to plant tea seed in the Himalayas. In those trials the seed was of very poor quality, having been smuggled out of Canton where even indigent Chinese peasants resented such a paltry drink. Falconer persisted and ultimately produced what looked and tasted to him like a fair facsimile of the Chinese original. The question remained, however, whether Indian tea would catch on in England.
In January 1839 the news that Indian tea from Assam had arrived in London set British imaginations on fire. Connoisseurs considered it at the very least a curiosity, but it might possibly prove to be a great prize. All the major London tea merchants as well as the press were in attendance at the Mincing Lane auction where it was introduced. The event reflected a general uneasiness, even a low-level panic, about the stalemate in the Orient because it took place just prior to the First Opium War between Britain and China.
The night before the auction, the Indian tea was brought before tea inspectors, men whose noses and tongues dictated the blends and tastes of British tea drinkers. Their assessment found the Indian tea leaves to be dark and leathery, their brew bitter, and their aroma heavy. Even with those marks against it, however, the Indian tea was declared “of reasonable quality.”
First on the block were “chops” (cases) of the finest quality teas. In heated bidding the first round of tea fetched record prices. The atmosphere was electric, and with each successive lot, the prices escalated as the crowd worked itself into a bidding frenzy.
Finally the hammer went down on the last lot of Indian tea, the chops of the very lowest quality, the filler and twigs of broken, damaged leaves. This last, inferior lot fetched a higher price than the earlier, superior teas, a staggering 34 shillings per pound (roughly $168).
Those in the room recognized the sale for what it was: an outbreak of tea hysteria. The desire for Indian tea, fueled by its novelty and the looming threat of open hostilities in the coming First Opium War, would not be extinguished, though it would take another twenty years to bring it about.
In 1847, Nathaniel Wallich decided to retire at the age of sixty-one. This opened up the Calcutta post for a successor, and there was no better choice than Falconer, who had been named a fellow of the Royal Society in 1845 and had earned a medal from the Geological Society of London. To add to Falconer’s honors, the company named him professor of botany at the Calcutta Medical College. Although the directors of the East India Company thought that Wallich—who had nearly thirty years of service to the company—was grossly overpaid, the Honourable Board elected to continue his inflated salary for Falconer, so important was the post of horticulturalist to India.
It is likely that the Himalayan tea experiments were on Falconer’s mind in March 1849 as he made his way back from the experimental fields in Calcutta to the caretaker’s cottage in the garden—past native orchids in full bloom, past the artificial mound that his mentor had hastily constructed so as to show off some trees he had collected in the Himalayas, and past a great and ancient banyan with almost two hundred prop roots spanning nearly an acre. Falconer walked past the peaceful ornamental lakes toward the corpse-strewn banks of the Hooghly beyond. The breeze reeked, as it always did, of sewage.
He knew that this season’s tea planting would be another disappointment, for there were still not enough seeds available for it to be truly profitable. Falconer must have privately wondered if Fortune was on a fool’s errand; transporting seeds from the most far-flung provinces of China might well be beyond the capacity of even the most skilled botanist. But it was more than just the fate of Fortune’s mission that vexed Falconer; it was also the personnel problem in the Himalayas. He was already having doubts about the man who had taken over from him in Saharanpur, a young botanist named William Jameson. Even if the Himalayas received enough imported seeds and saplings, as well as Chinese manufacturers to teach tea making and packing skills, it seemed increasingly unlikely to Falconer that Jameson would be up to the task of managing the project properly.
10
Saharanpur, North-West Provinces, June 1849
Calcutta, the seat of British rule in India, was orderly and tame by comparison to India’s remoter regions. Whereas Calcutta’s Botanic Garden was well cultivated and manicured and generally civilized, the Himalayan gardens of Saharanpur were lush and wild and founded on a site that had formerly been an old Rohilla garden. (The Rohillas were Pashtun invaders from Afghanistan who had once commanded Northern India and built themselves luxurious pleasure palaces in the hills.)
The region was temperate and hilly and had ample rainfall, and every living thing seemed to thrive in the nourishing Himalayan soil. Tigers, panthers, and lynxes roamed the rhododendron forests like creatures from fairy tales. Celebrated Rajput warriors, dressed in red silks and wearing handlebar mustaches, bred magnificent horses in the mountains near Saharanpur. Because Saharanpur was located on the border between the Persian and Asian horticultural zones, plants from both regions flourished there. Although it was a horticultural paradise, gardening there was not always easy on a white man. “A mens sana in corpore sano [healthy mind in a healthy body] is absolutely necessary to resist this dreadful climate: the work is very hard, the sun a terrible enemy; there are many comforts wanting, scarcely any society, and in his daily habits a man has to exercise an enormous amount of self-denial and discretion if he wishes to retain good health,” wrote a tea planter. To the Britons committed to building a tea industry there, Saharanpur was remote, its heat oppressive, and the living conditions primitive. “To these discomforts add one more—an unquenchable thirst that is ever present, but is particularly noticeable after severe exertion, when the desire to drink . . . is painful to a degree. This insatiable thirst is the great curse of the climate, and has accounted for many good men who have gone under the matti [earth].” These hardships notwithstanding, the large tracts of land and rainy climate should have made Saharanpur the ideal home for the first transplanted Chinese tea.
But first the plants would have to get there in something like the condition in which Fortune had shipped them. As it turned out, neither they nor the seeds had an easy trip.
Having personally accompanied the seedlings to Hong Kong, Fortune sent them seaward. But luck was not on his side. Although the shipment was intended for Calcutta, for some reason it was diverted to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). Fortune’s shipment could not have been the primary cargo: ten thousand tea seeds filled only five gallons and took up at most five crates when packed separately in bags of sand. Fortune’s thirteen thousand seedlings were in glass cases, but the fate of a few botanic specimens were likely of little concern to a captain who had more pressing priorities. It is entirely possible the ship was delayed by bad weather or made an extra stop to offload higher-paying cargo. Those were the glory days of shipping under sail, and merchantmen frequently made unplanned dockings for any number of reasons—repair, re-negotiation of contracts, barter, or bad planning.
After completing whatever business took it to Ceylon, the ship reversed course and made its way east again toward the port of Calcutta. Upon arrival it fell to Hugh Falconer to assume or delegate responsibility for Fortune’s cargo and then to transport i
t to its ultimate destination in the Himalayas. He collected the shipment, signing for it just after the spring holiday of Holi on March 23—two full months after the plants had set sail from China. (In two months a fully rigged tea clipper could sail halfway from Hong Kong to London around the Horn of Africa.) Even with the unexpected delay, Ward’s cases should have guaranteed that the plants would still be alive and healthy as long as the cases were kept in sunlight and sealed from salt spray.
Upon receiving the shipment, Falconer was careful to do nothing to disturb the cases, much as he might have liked to open one and investigate its contents. He contented himself with peering into the terraria. As far as Falconer could tell, all looked to be in order; the plants would take care of themselves. He left the cases outdoors, shaded from the worst of the sun.
Within a few days of their reaching Calcutta, Falconer ordered the cases to be loaded onto a steamer that was traveling up the Ganges bound for Allahabad, halfway up-country from Calcutta to the North-West Provinces. It was there, apparently, on April 12 that an official at the highest levels of local government, whose name has since been forgotten, did the very worst thing he could have: He opened the cases. It was certainly an understandable impulse. Motivated by a desire to ascertain the condition of the precious cargo, the official, or one of his underlings, broke the seals. He even reported to his superiors that the plants inside were doing well.
The transfer to another vessel in Allahabad took longer than expected. There was a drought that year, so the Ganges was low, which meant the seedlings could not be shipped by steamer upriver to the company gardens in the Himalayas until the rains came with the first summer monsoon, still six weeks away. Nonetheless, the tea plants, according to a report, were tended to by gardeners and in good condition.
The last leg of the long trip up the mountains to the Saharanpur experimental tea gardens was made first by steamer and then by oxcart. In the Himalayas, Fortune’s tea would be met by William Jameson of the company’s botanical outpost there.
High in the mountains Fortune’s newly arrived tea was received and inspected. The results were disastrous. Only one thousand of the thirteen thousand seedlings remained alive, and the survivors were covered with fungus and mold. The glass cases had the stale reek of rot. The success rate of Fortune’s first shipment of tea stood at a pathetic 7 percent. Gamely, Jameson did what he could to rescue the plants, picking out and discarding the dead ones, nursing the barely living ones, and ordering the Saharanpur malis to replant the few robust specimens in the fertile mountain soil. Even after these steps had been taken, however, the survival rate of Fortune’s first shipment dropped to a mere 3 percent.
The fate of the seeds was even more disheartening. “The result has been an entire failure, not one seed having germinated. I lately removed a number of seeds from the beds to ascertain their condition and invariably found them to be rotten,” Jameson wrote.
Despite spending an entire year of planning, collecting, packing, and hoping, Fortune had done nothing whatsoever to advance the cause of tea in India. He had made no contribution to the nursery stock of the Himalayan tea experiment. What should have been a triumph, the culmination of his first year of tea hunting, was a catastrophe of wasted energy and worthless tea stock.
Behind the gentlemanly façade of the East India Company there were often hidden rivalries and simmering tensions, and within the Indian network of company gardeners this friction often centered on the cultivation of tea. The “smaller” gardens on the subcontinent were only so in relative terms: By square mileage, the experimental tea gardens in the Himalayas occupied more ground than was available to the Calcutta Botanic Garden. But the Calcutta garden bore the imprimatur of colonial authority, and in the hierarchy of the company, authority must always be respected. As the superintendent of Calcutta, Falconer issued his orders, and the provincial gardeners were expected to follow them. William Jameson, superintendent at Saharanpur, was one such gardener.
Both Falconer and Jameson were Scottish; both were surgeons and naturalists; both had studied under the finest scientific minds of Scotland; both were in the employ of the company on the subcontinent; both took a keen, almost proprietary interest in the fate of the tea experiment. But there the similarities ended.
Young Jameson was a great deal less professionally polished than Falconer and something of a bumbler. While other naturalists in the medical corps were mapping uncharted territories and unraveling natural history puzzles, Jameson found himself inadvertently imprisoned in Peshawar for trespassing. He did not rise to prominence on the broad sweep of his learning or on his imagination but through a dogged navigation of colonial hierarchy and, most likely, thanks to a nepotistic thumb on the scale. Jameson’s uncle, Robert Jameson, was a celebrated professor of geology and an expert on India, a peer to Wallich and Falconer and the teacher of Charles Darwin. William Jameson was sufficiently politically savvy to ride his uncle’s coattails.
Jameson was prone to answering every official letter at interminable length. He issued elaborate protocols and detailed orders for matters that had never before needed such painstaking attention. The skills that may have enabled him to thrive in a bureaucracy were hardly transferable to botany, however. Jameson wrote pamphlets in which he held forth on the theory of garden design, the state of the weather, the political situation in China (where he had never been), and the preferred methods for planting each and every species under cultivation. Although exhaustive, his recommendations were seldom followed by his superiors and often completely ignored.
Jameson ran the Himalayan tea gardens as if they were a factory, concerning himself mostly with the management of men and resources. His letters to the government are as thoroughly worked out as any contemporary business plan, full of details about size and scale, and what the profit per acre could be if he only had the manpower and assets.
The government was eventually compelled to chide Jameson, asking him to be more measured in his enthusiasms: “As it is evidently the wish of the Honourable the Court of Directors that the experiment should be conducted on the most liberal scale the Lieutenant Governor is pleased to sanction your proposal as to the extent of operations to be ultimately reached. It is evident however that some time must elapse before you can employ to advantage so large an establishment as you propose. You will be careful not to extend your establishment till you have the means of fully and profitably employing them.”
Although management and business planning were valuable skills, they tended to distract Jameson from his botanical studies. Plants grew poorly under his care, and whatever zeal he had for the subject was continually undermined by his lack of botanical knowledge and failure to investigate any given problem thoroughly. In his eager rush to document everything and gain approval from his superiors, Jameson erred in his science. He had been employed as a chief gardener even though he had devoted himself to studying zoology and geology. Reading Jameson’s ponderous declarations on the anatomy of tea is a little like listening to a parish organist’s recital of Beethoven—the notes are in the right place, but the music sounds wrong. The natural beauty of the piece is lost.
Jameson’s scientific mistakes were many, costly, and easily avoidable. For instance, he accepted as holy writ that the tea plants were of two different species even though the relevant studies had been done within the confines of a laboratory in London by people who had never studied the plant in situ and Fortune, meanwhile, had published his findings contradicting the matter. Although there were tea plants to experiment on in his very own Himalayan garden, Jameson accepted out-of-date hearsay and received wisdom without ever doing any further study of his own. He accordingly designed the vast company gardens around a single, easily correctable misconception.
It was not simply that Jameson was often wrong but that even in the face of a self-evident truth he stubbornly continued to hold the opposite position. Although the Chinese workers in his gardens told him that green and black tea were the products of the same
plant, he disregarded their greater knowledge. Even worse, he was actually killing the tea plants. In the Himalayan gardens he set aside flat lands for tea and used flood irrigation on them—a system he used for years despite the chronically sickly appearance of the overwatered plants in the swampy fields. Had he used his power of observation, Jameson might have deduced that tea would in fact do better in rugged, sloping terrain. The roots of Camellia sinensis need good drainage; otherwise the bushes become waterlogged and moldy and can’t produce healthy young buds. Fortune had already published work on tea cultivation in China after his first trip, but Jameson seems to have paid no heed whatsoever to the science of his day.
Most damagingly, Jameson was not aware of the science that was the basis for the Wardian case. “They have received water all the way from Allahabad and had it not been for this circumstance there would not have been so many plants alive,” wrote Jameson to his superiors, knowing—as all company men did—that his assessment would find its way to Falconer, who was predictably outraged. (All communications were public unless explicitly indicated to be off the record, and even then the Revenue Department was notoriously careless with information.)
It was not entirely Jameson’s ineptitude—or that of the men who followed his instructions—that had decimated the consignment. “Many of the panes of glass in the cases, too, were broken,” he recorded and, ever the dutiful company man, naturally issued a dispatch on the matter.