by Ed Douglas
Hooker’s attitude to the indigenous population was often arrogantly dismissive, typically so for his race and class, even among men of science. Like Falconer, he regarded the people of India as incapable of ruling themselves. If politics were threatening to thwart his ambitions then why shouldn’t he get involved himself? The chogyal’s ambassadors, Hooker wrote, had been chosen ‘for their insolence and incapacity’. The key figure blocking his progress was Tokhan Namgyal, the new chief minister, a Tibetan married to the chogyal’s illegitimate daughter. In Darjeeling he was called the Pagla Dewan: the ‘crazy minister’. He was certainly anti-British, anxious about the reaction of the Qing envoys in Lhasa to a visit from the neighbouring empire. His conduct Hooker described as ‘Indo-Chinese’: ‘assuming, insolent, aggressive, never perpetrating open violence, but by petty insults effectually preventing all good understanding’. Hooker railed against the Sikkim government for harbouring ‘notorious offenders’ even though the administration at Darjeeling did the same: both authorities were short of labour and took whomever they could get. ‘The Cis-Himalayan Bhoteas,’ he wrote to his father, ‘whether of Sikkim or, worse still, of Bhotan [Bhutan], are as uncouth a race as I ever beheld.’ He wrote more sympathetically of the Lepchas, as most travellers did, and the affection was apparently reciprocated. Henry John Elwes, the next plant hunter to visit Sikkim twenty-two years later said the older Lepchas he met didn’t just remember Hooker but almost worshipped him ‘as an incarnation of high wisdom and kindly strength’.
Thanks to Hodgson’s links to the durbar at Kathmandu, where Jang Bahadur was now in charge, Hooker got permission in the autumn of 1848 to extend his explorations into eastern Nepal and travel via the Tamur valley as far as the Tibetan border to the west of the vast peak of Kangchenjunga. He left in late October with a retinue of fifty-five and on 26 November reached the Tipta La on the border ‘where he could see nothing of Thibet but had no strength to crawl farther’. He was suffering ‘an excruciating headache’. There had been huge numbers of new plants to collect, including the rhododendron he named for Hodgson, and because of Darwin’s interest, he was also paying close attention to the breeding of yaks. Returning south from the Ghunsa valley on 5 December, at a place Hooker called the ‘Choonjerma pass’, he paused to sketch a view of distant mountains that included Everest, which had been measured that year. Quite where Choonjerma is remains uncertain. The ‘pundit’ Chandra Das believed it was a balcony or terrace close to a pass called on modern maps the Mirgin La. Wherever Hooker stopped, it’s likely he made the first recognisable image of the world’s highest mountain. The setting sun reminded Hooker of the work of Turner, and as it set
the Nepal peaks to the right assumed more definite darker and gigantic forms, and floods of light shot across the misty ocean, bathing the landscape around me in the most wonderful and indescribable changing tints.
On his way back to Darjeeling, Hooker and Campbell had an audience with the ageing chogyal Tsugphud Namgyal and despite his continuing reluctance Hooker was finally granted access to Sikkim. The following May he set out again to explore the country east of Kangchenjunga and the headwaters of the Tista. Hooker’s presence in Sikkim exposed the fault-lines among the chogyal’s ministers. The minister, or dewan, Tokhan Namgyal opposed foreign interference and did what he could to impede Hooker, but the dewan had a rival: Tsepa Adan, known to the British as Chebu Lama, whose clan had its origins in eastern Tibet but had over the generations intermarried with Lepchas. Because of this, Chebu was more popular within Sikkim but had, rather like Thomas Wolsey, got into trouble trying to fix the chogyal’s lack of an heir. He wanted an accommodation with the British, and worked in Hooker’s interest, accompanying him and intervening at critical moments. This jostling for position reached its climax in early November, as Hooker and Campbell tried to cross the Cho La, a pass of over fifteen thousand feet on the Tibetan border. The dewan saw their actions as a provocation too far and had his men arrest Campbell, keeping him bound. By twisting the ropes that tied him, his captors compelled Campbell to write to the governor general with their demands. Back in Darjeeling, Hodgson wrote to Hooker’s parents to reassure them their son was not involved, but he lost much of his collection, and equipment was stolen or damaged.
Campbell was not imprisoned for long. When the East India Company promised ‘a severe retribution’ Hooker and his party were delivered back to Darjeeling just in time for Christmas. The dewan, thinking the whole matter closed, even came with them to do some pony trading. The government in Calcutta had little sympathy for Campbell; he was judged the architect of his own misfortune. One official thought Campbell’s actions ‘a grave indiscretion’ likely to antagonise the Chinese. A senior army officer thought it perfectly understandable that hill people would be suspicious of a European surveying their territory. Predictably, Dalhousie promoted him. Hooker, now realising the consequences of his pressure on Campbell to force their way into Sikkim, was a little chastened. Even so, for reasons of prestige Dalhousie ordered a response that was swift and stern. A powerful military force took up positions on the north bank of the Rangit against a small Buddhist nation with no army worth the name. The annual payment to Sikkim was stopped. Hundreds of square kilometres of Sikkim’s terai, its most productive land, was annexed and put under the jurisdiction of Darjeeling. As the official in Calcutta noted: ‘A weak power between great powers must doubly suffer.’
Even before Hooker arrived back in Britain, the field sketches, dried plants and descriptions he sent home to Kew allowed his father to publish The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya, with illustrations worked up by the Scot, Walter Hood Fitch. This talented botanical artist had worked for William Hooker in Glasgow and then followed him to Kew, where he illustrated more or less everything they published. The rhododendrons were planted in Kew’s hollow way, which became known as ‘rhododendron dell’, or else shared with botanical gardens across Europe. Rhododendrons had been known in Europe since the sixteenth century and Linnaeus had classified a small number of species in the mid eighteenth, but Hooker’s publication and their presence at Kew helped spark a fascination for the plants. They fitted neatly into a changing fashion in British gardens for hardier, more naturalistic planting and proved popular on shooting estates, where they offered game birds cover.
In 1855 Hooker, whose Himalayan Journals and rhododendron book had received critical acclaim, was appointed assistant to his father at Kew. Over the next few years he became one of the great figures in economic botany, actively involved in transplanting some of the world’s most valuable plants around the globe in Wardian cases and remaking how the world did business. The plant hunter Richard Spruce and Clements Markham, who later ran the Royal Geographical Society and launched the career of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, brought the cinchona tree, source of the anti-malarial quinine, back to Kew from the Andes. Thousands of seedlings were grown and distributed to experimental sites including Darjeeling, where, against Hooker’s expectations, it flourished. The cost of quinine plummeted, becoming affordable even for the poor. Cork oaks went to the Punjab, chocolate to Ceylon, Liberian coffee to the West Indies. There were crazes for rhododendrons and orchids. But the greatest prize, in economic terms at least, was rubber. Hooker persuaded the government to back expeditions to acquire seeds of the tree, Hevea brasiliensis, from the Amazon to grow them at Kew. After years of effort, seedlings were shipped to Malaya and Sri Lanka, establishing a lucrative colonial industry that materially affected Britain’s ability to fight two world wars. (Years later, a tea planter ruefully told Hooker that at the start of his working life he had failed to follow Hooker’s advice to go into rubber and had consequently missed out on a fortune.)
The tea industry would be among the first to benefit from the rapid advances in botanical knowledge and technology. In May 1848, as Joseph Hooker explored the hills of Darjeeling, the former superintendent of Saharanpur’s botanical garden John Forbes Royle paid a visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden in
London. The verdict of the famous tea brokers on Indian-grown Chinese tea had just arrived: it was good, but not quite good enough. Now the East India Company had a new strategy: go to China and acquire samples from the best plants and everything else deemed necessary to finish the task of establishing viable commercial tea plantations in India. As the Company’s chief botanist, Royle’s task in Chelsea was to persuade the man best qualified for that job, one that would likely prove almost impossibly difficult and no less dangerous.
Not all early Victorian plant hunters were doctor–botanists. Some of the greatest were working-class gardeners who had served long apprenticeships. They were intelligent and knowledgeable but had no formal scientific education. Among these, Robert Fortune was the shining example. Born in the tiny Berwickshire village of Edrom, his father was a farm worker and his formal education began and ended at the local parish school. He was apprenticed to a local nurseryman, moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh under head gardener William McNab and then to the Horticultural Society’s garden at Chiswick, where he took charge of the indoor plants. He was cool-headed, ambitious and deeply skilled, so when the Horticultural Society decided to take advantage of easier access in China, following the Treaty of Nanking, they knew just the man to send. Fortune arrived in Hong Kong in May 1843 and spent the next three years collecting in northern China, bringing back to Europe the winter-flowering jasmine, the kumquat, a fan-palm presented to Victoria for her thirty-second birthday and best of all, the legendary double yellow rose, stolen from a mandarin’s garden. Despite such riches, the public might never have heard of him were it not for his hugely entertaining travelogue Three Years’ Wandering, with its show-stopping account of how he took on a fleet of pirates single-handed to protect his specimens. The East India Company was more interested in his two chapters about the Chinese tea industry. No European had seen or knew more of Chinese tea.
Fortune’s first expedition had not helped him live up to his name. His pay had been a miserly £100 per annum and the Horticultural Society had been reluctant to provide firearms for him to defend himself as he travelled. They were more used to gentlemen who came with their own guns and didn’t rely on being paid. Yet his immense success did win him the directorship of the Chelsea Physic Garden, which he proceeded to improve wholesale. The job wasn’t lucrative but it came with a house and other benefits and more importantly didn’t involve risking his life. The notion of intellectual property barely existed in 1848 but Fortune knew very well that what he was being asked to do by John Forbes Royle wasn’t so much plant collecting as industrial espionage. He also knew what could happen if he were caught. The East India Company would have to offer a much better deal to persuade him back to China – and it did: five times his previous salary, free passage and Fortune could keep whatever else he collected to sell to the growing market of wealthy gardeners, who already knew China as a treasure trove. All he had to do was deliver what the Company needed.
Disguising himself as a merchant and masking his indifferent Chinese accent by claiming to be from whatever region was furthest from where he was, Fortune completed his mission. Even when the East India Company killed the vast majority of the thousands of tea plants he sent in his first batch, he didn’t give up. Told that all the seeds he sent had proved unviable, Fortune developed an ingenious method of transporting them in the soil of a mulberry bush inside a Wardian case so that when Falconer received them more than twelve thousand plants had germinated. Despite the setbacks and the subterfuge, he not only delivered viable plants, he also sourced all the best equipment necessary and hired Chinese tea growers who not only knew what they were doing but were prepared to teach others. The Indian tea industry, thanks to Fortune, finally reached critical mass and exploded into life. The Himalaya would never be the same again.
In little more than a decade, ten thousand acres around Darjeeling were planted with tea in thirty-nine gardens. Some of Darjeeling’s most famous tea gardens were founded in this period: Happy Valley, formerly the Wilson Tea Estate, founded by the Englishman David Wilson in 1854; Glenburn, named by the Scot Kimble Murray, its first manager; Makaibari, in the Bengali Banerjee family for four generations. (Narendra Modi presented Queen Elizabeth with a packet of Makaibari tea when they met in 2018.) In the rush to plant tea, tree cover in the region largely disappeared. What had been largely undisturbed forest thirty years before was simply gone. Yet the impact on the people of the Himalaya was even greater. More trees could be planted, and were; Darjeeling’s hunger for workers, on the other hand, would uproot communities in ways that would change society and politics for good. In 1839, when Archie Campbell arrived, there were around a hundred people in the district of Darjeeling. Ten years later, when Hooker was in Sikkim, the population was ten thousand. In 1871, when the first official census was done, it had climbed to 94,712. Ten years later, the year the railway arrived in Darjeeling, a more reliable census recorded 155,179. Ten years after that, in 1891, the figure had risen to 223,314. The town of Darjeeling itself was by then more than sixteen thousand strong and had been made Calcutta’s summer capital, home to some of India’s best private schools: St Paul’s and the Jesuit college St Joseph’s, where kings of Nepal and Bhutanese nobles went to school, as well as the novelist Lawrence Durrell.
This spiralling population growth was driven largely by the expansion of the tea industry. At the time of the 1891 census forty-five thousand acres were under tea in 177 gardens and they all needed large workforces. These came from all the neighbouring countries but by far the greatest proportion came from Nepal, often with the assistance of Nepali leaders who were rewarded with parcels of land. In the 1891 census, eighty-eight thousand were recorded as Nepali, almost certainly an underestimation. The majority were Rais, Tamangs and Limbus, and some Newari merchants as well, Tibeto-Burmese ethnic groups with their own religious traditions disadvantaged by a stratified society that favoured the dominant Khas. There were migrants from Sikkim and Bhutan, and from across the mountains in Tibet. The district of Darjeeling had become a new frontier, once sparsely populated, now a polyglot, multicultural experiment. You could escape debts, bad marriages or the boredom of village life in Darjeeling. It became a magnet, a new centre of gravity in the eastern Himalaya. In the British imagination, Darjeeling is about colonial life, like an extended episode of The Jewel in the Crown. Yet the European population was tiny in comparison to the tens of thousands of migrants starting new lives in a world where the rules of home were powerfully changed. It’s hardly surprising that Darjeeling became a Himalayan cultural and literary melting pot, though when independence came in 1947 this Nepali population would find itself fighting for political space.
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If tea changed the landscape of the Himalaya, then the Himalaya also changed the landscape of Europe and North America, or at least their gardens. In 1866 the now Royal Horticultural Society organised the most expensive international plant show in history. Despite the cold London weather, it was a smash, so popular in fact that it managed to turn a profit. The exhibition was sponsored and organised in part by the prominent Victorian plant nursery James Veitch & Sons, which had made a fortune furnishing the gardens of the aristocracy. Through the 1860s, Veitch had sponsored plant hunters to travel the world looking for new species for its wealthy clients, particularly South America and Japan, where John Gould Veitch had climbed Mount Fuji before bringing back the largest collection of Japanese conifers yet collected and important new maples as well. (He shared the voyage home with Robert Fortune, who had been on a similar mission.) This was still the era of Joseph Paxton, Victorian Britain’s head gardener, who had died the year before: huge formal gardens adorned with hugely expensive and finicky bedding plants grown under glass. The philosophy of this extravagance was clear from the Lord Mayor of London’s speech at the 1866 exhibition banquet:
It has been said that Nature, so fair and bounteous in herself, needs not the hand of man to train and cultivate her; but Nature in every shape requires
cultivation.
Resistance to such unnatural extravagance came from an Irish gardener called William Robinson, who founded what the biographer Nicola Shulman has dubbed ‘the horticultural lodge of the Arts and Crafts movement’. In 1870 he published The Wild Garden, which advocated more naturalistic planting and an end to labour-intensive and expensive ‘bedding out’. Nature should lead the way, he argued, and that meant relying on plants more suited to Britain’s temperate climate. He championed herbaceous borders, planted with shrubs and perennials to lighten the workload for ordinary gardeners, but while he spoke out for native plants, he also saw a role for other parts of the world that were suited to the northern European climate. That’s where the Himalaya came in, since altitude acts in many ways like latitude. Unlike tropical species from South America, Himalayan plants were much more the ‘natural, hardy species’ Robinson had in mind, like the rhododendron, which flowered beautifully but resisted frost.
This growing fashion for hardy plants and more naturalistic planting offered a final glorious flourish to a world of Himalayan plant hunting that was now facing decline. In 1906 Joseph Hooker wrote to a colleague deploring the decline of botany in India in comparison to other parts of the British Empire. There were exceptions. Inspired by Hooker, the British Association organised an expedition to Sikkim that included the gigantic Henry John Elwes, botanist, butterfly collector and former Scots Guard, whose booming voice was best experienced from a distance. And in 1906, the same year Hooker complained of the parlous state of Indian botany – ‘Excuse my growl. I do love Indian Botany. I long to see another Griffith’ – the Kew botanist Isaac Henry Burkill also visited Sikkim. The following year he was in Nepal, the first trained botanist to visit the Kathmandu valley since Wallich more than eighty years earlier, collecting some four hundred species. Later Burkill was attached as botanist to a punitive security operation in the Abor Hills of modern Arunachal Pradesh against the Adi people, ethnic Tibetans who resented British control. This was country both Griffith and Hooker had explored, the latter, after his expedition to Sikkim, in the company of his friend Thomas Thomson. Yet Hooker was right when he wrote how ‘the contrast between India and China in this respect is deplorable, especially as I am sure that many of the new Chinese plants will be found in the E Himal’.