The Poisoned Island (22 page)

All that was forty years ago. Nonetheless for Brown, who has read widely on the subject of “Banks, J.,” the stories are vivid. Banks himself is seemingly unaware of the dangers of dredging up some of these tales. The older man’s mind is elsewhere—in Kew, in fact. He has stayed down there these past several nights, close to the new plants, close in particular to the strange breadfruit tree (if such it is) which is growing at impossible speeds in the Great Stove. He has become a man obsessed.

So it is to Kew that Brown goes, and there is Banks again, hunched in his wheelchair before the tree, like one of Bishop Brown’s devout knelt in a room at the bottom of the stairs. The tree has grown again, Brown sees—perhaps another two feet in less than two days. It will soon be the biggest thing in the hothouse. Its bright-green leaves quiver with moisture; one of the gardeners has just been in to water it. A branch is hanging down, notes Brown, and a leaf on the branch is almost touching Banks’s fat, jowly cheek.

“Sir Joseph,” he says as he approaches. The old man starts and looks around, as if disturbed in some guilty undertaking.

“By God, Brown, you startled me,” he says. He knocks the leaf and branch away, and a small splash of moisture lands on the red sash across his chest. The old man is dressed formally, notes Brown.

“Are we expecting company, Sir Joseph?”

“
We
are not expecting anything, Brown.
I
am due to meet with an . . . important individual later today. He is coming here to inspect the plant.”
And don’t ask who it is
is the unspoken instruction.

“Very good, Sir Joseph. I thought I might spend the day examining our new acquisition.”

“Acquisition?”

Brown nods at the breadfruit tree. Banks looks suddenly concerned and weighs something up in his mind.

“What kind of
examination
did you have in mind?”

“I would like to take some cuttings, and examine the leaves and the florescence under a microscope. The equipment I need is all here at Kew.”

Banks looks like he is going to object, and Brown finds this interesting. Why object to a study of such a natural phenomenon as this tree, which is (it seems to Brown) certainly a new
species judging by its growth alone? What is Banks proposing be done about this?

But the old man does not, in the end, object.

“Examine as you will, Brown. But take care—do not damage the plant when taking samples.”

Banks sounds to Brown like an anxious mother leaving a child with a friend.

“No, indeed, Sir Joseph. I shall take every care.”

“See that you do. And . . .”—he looks up at the tree, and his face softens—“let me know what you find out about her.”

He shouts for his attendant, who appears from behind a Jamaican candlewood tree and wheels the old man out.

Her.

*  *  *

Brown begins from first principles. The single astonishing fact of the tree is, of course, its growth. It is planted in the same earth as the other species in the Stove, so he believes its prodigious development cannot be attributed to any unique combination of salts or nutrients absorbed through the roots. No, somehow this tree must be taking in nourishment from the air at a rate of speed and in such quantities as have never before been observed.

A related thought occurs to him: why did the tree not grow like this on board the
Solander
? Could a tree go from sapling to giant so quickly in Kew and not show any evidence of such astonishing development on board the ship? Did it have to wait for some change in its circumstances before growing? There is something vaguely blasphemous about the thought, and Brown files it away for future cogitation.

The second fact, less astonishing but perhaps more pertinent to any classification, is the tree’s florescence. It has only
female flowers. Brown and Banks initially identified the tree as
Artocarpus incisa
, which is currently accepted as being of the class Monoecia Monandria, and the natural order Urticee. The tree is typically hermaphrodite, with male and female flowers. The male flowers form a long yellowish catkin with a single stamen. The female flowers gather into a globe with single perianths, each with a pistil. The fruit of
Artocarpus
is a berry, as large as a melon. It is this fruit which even now is feeding slaves and plantation workers in the Caribbean.

Brown makes a thorough examination of the tree, before taking any samples. He sketches it carefully—the bright green ovoid leaves, the triangular shape of the tree’s growth, the deep brown, almost black bark. The colors should be hard to make out in the gloom of the Stove, but the tree’s vitality transmits itself as if it is illuminated by some internal phosphorescence. He again carefully examines the female flowers. He wonders if this is a mutation—an accident of nature—but then dismisses such a thought. Hundreds of new species are still flooding into the botanic gardens of Europe from far-flung conquered places. It is far more likely that this is a new species, one with male and female plants rather than hermaphrodite ones, which has simply not yet been subjected to a botanist’s investigation.

Brown has seen hundreds of new species, perhaps even thousands. He has drawn them, described them, taken cuttings from them, dried them and theorized about them. The thrill which accompanied the earliest discoveries has given way to a mild shiver of interest when a particularly unusual discovery makes its way to him. He has long ago decided that the world contains an almost infinite plenitude of natural wonder. Every European foot that treads on a far shore is almost certain to pick up dozens of new natural creations, for they litter the ground. The problem is one of classification, not of discovery.

There is a fresh excitement here. If this plant is a species of breadfruit, the economic implications will be enormous, as must already have occurred to Banks. The breadfruit tree has already transformed the economy of the West Indian plantations. It is fifteen years since William Bligh successfully transported the plant from Tahiti to Jamaica at the second attempt aboard the
Providence
, yet another journey sponsored by Joseph Banks himself. But a tree that grows this quickly could transform things again.

On the other hand, a tree without a fruit—which cannot procreate—is useless as a means of feeding slaves. So perhaps this is indeed a curiosity, a mutation from the main branch of life, a weird and strange thing suitable only for a museum or a
hortus siccus.

He wonders if, anywhere within the samples from Otaheite, there may be a male plant of the same species. He observes that some of the female flowers on the tree are already beginning to dry out. They look like they could soon crumble.

He gazes on the female flowers for a while, the hard green leaves caressing his cheeks, the tree’s dark odor filling his nose, his eyes prickling. Then he stands, and takes from his pocket the sharp little gardener’s knife which his friend, Reverend José Francisco Corrêa de Serra, had given to him as a leaving present a week before the departure of the
Investigator
. Like him, it has been around the world, and its keen edge has bitten into all manner of wondrous and weird stalks, stems, and branches. He uses it to cut into one of the younger-looking branches of the tree; no mean task, as they are
all
young. He hears what sounds like the shriek of a woman, almost as if she were in the Stove itself, and this so startles him that he accidentally cuts into the flesh at the end of his thumb, causing him to curse in a way which would have brought down
righteous fury from his dead father. He sucks at the end of his thumb, his own blood metallic on his tongue. He looks about him, the severed branch in his hand.

He sees nothing, but walks around the inside of the hothouse to be sure. He even opens the door and shouts to one of the gardeners outside, irritated by the pain in his thumb. Had anyone heard a woman in distress? The man admits to hearing something, but could not be sure where it came from. Brown asks him to check the vicinity and the man complies, saying he’ll bring word if he discovers anything.

Brown goes back into the Stove, and takes one last look at the tree to confirm his findings so far. For a moment he imagines he is standing and staring at a savage on a New Holland shore, dark skin with white painted lines, and a bone through its flat nose. They were so fearful, those savages, so reluctant to approach and to converse, so different from the friendly, comforting Indians of Otaheite which he had seen described so often. But that fear, and their purple-black skin and penetrating eyes, made those New Holland savages all the stranger, all the more mysterious.

He takes his branch out of the Stove, and shuts the door.

*  *  *

There is a large shed which has been constructed in the Garden specifically for the landing, potting, and cultivation of the plants from the
Solander
. In one corner of this shed, Brown has assembled a small version of his workbench in Soho Square, with paper, pencils, measurement devices, magnifying glasses and, most important, a microscope. Brown has been fascinated by microscopy since his days in Ireland, where he had acquired a single-lens microscope to help him botanize.
It is still his favorite device, old-fashioned and in many ways little different to the original tiny devices made by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in Holland a century and a half ago. The excitement of seeing the tender skeletons of leaves and the rugged surfaces of seeds magnified dozens of times is still with him.

He cuts up the branch, chopping the leaves down, removing the female flowers, and cutting the wood into serviceable chunks, which he proceeds to place under the microscope over the next three hours, a flower then a chunk of wood then a fragment of leaf, making notes and small sketches as he goes. The work of the shed goes on around him, and the Sun makes its way down towards evening, but Robert Brown pays no notice, absorbed once again in the work of identification and classification.

Around six, one of the gardeners shuffles up to him and coughs politely, then asks him if he has finished, for they wish to lock up the shed for the night. Brown looks at him for a moment, as if forgetting where and who they both are, his eyes round and open from their microscopic exertions. Then he smiles, tiredly, and says that yes, he will finish now.

He removes one more specimen from the microscope, and starts to slide the bits of tree into jars. The wood drops heavily into its jar, but when he picks up the leaves and flowers they crumble in his hands, suddenly dry and fragile. He has never seen a plant dry so quickly, and as he slides the fragmented material into the jar it reminds him of young green tea.

Nonsense, of course. Tea does not make itself.

He looks at the cut on his thumb, which had been forgotten during his work. His hands are stained green from his handling of leaves and twigs. The cut has scabbed over shockingly quickly, as if infected with the prodigious growth of the strange tree. He ponders this and barely notices the laughter from outside, where an unseen girl is running across the lawns of Kew.

As a young man—more a boy—Charles Horton had joined the Navy as a midshipman on the
Apollo
, a frigate out of Portsmouth. The ship was barely hours out of port and headed for Gibraltar and the Mediterranean when it encountered a pair of French ships off Brest. The subsequent fight, which was actually more of a protracted running-away on the part of the English and had almost led to the capture of the
Apollo
, saw the death of the vessel’s captain and the precipitous promotion of its first lieutenant, John Willowhead, then in his midtwenties. When they’d finally extricated themselves from the attentions of the French, thanks to a particularly skillful and improvised maneuver on the part of their new young commander, the crew had sailed the
Apollo
back to Portsmouth, battered and bruised. Horton, like most of the crew, stayed with the ship and so did Willowhead, making post captain after three more excursions.

Horton sailed around the world at least twice with Willowhead,
a line of successful prizes enriching the captain and his officers and firing a fierce sense of pride among the frigate’s crew. Willowhead was a man of no little learning, with a sardonic way of handling his men, and a ruthless appetite for combat. It was this hunger, Horton learned over time, which marked out men for successful captaincy. He recognized no such tendency in himself, and had for that reason given up any dreams of becoming a captain. Willowhead would do anything, go anywhere, and fight anyone in pursuit of both a prize and of personal and national glory. Where possible, the two glories overlapped, but not always, and with most captains, including Willowhead, the personal was more resonant than the national. But he kept this leonine appetite in check through a careful allegiance to the safety of his crew. His cabin was crammed with books, his table was always pleasant and filled with direct, clever conversation. Horton was later promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the
Sandwich
, a newer and fiercer vessel than the
Apollo
, whose reputation receded along with her age. The last Horton had heard, Willowhead was involved in a skirmish off Japan, attempting to force the trading rights of that mysterious nation from the Dutch. But that had been a decade ago.