The Poisoned Island (29 page)

Brown asks himself whether he is really contemplating this.

He is sitting at his desk in his apartment at the Linnaean Society in Gerrard Street. This is where he lives and, for a few days every month, works. The Linnaean Society may pay the bulk of his upkeep, but it is Sir Joseph Banks who takes up the bulk of his time. In his drier moments Brown has contemplated asking Banks if he should move into Soho Square, perhaps in a bedroom next to Sir Joseph’s own, so he can be on hand at all times of day or night to tend to the old man’s needs.

It took him no time at all to find a record of the Robert Hooke experiment to which Sir Joseph referred. It is collected in a book in Sir Joseph’s library, filed under Hooke (there is a copious amount of material filed under Hooke). The book was published in 1726, and is already very old and well used. It is called
Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke and Other Eminent Virtuoso’s
in His Time (with Copper Plates).
The book collects many of Hooke’s more obscure lectures and experiments, and on page 210 Brown found the relevant lecture.

He has read this account a dozen times now, but feels no nearer to preparing himself for what it is he is considering. Following in the path of old Hooke is one thing—a kind of blasphemy, but a blasphemy that Hooke himself would have had no hesitation in committing. Newton himself had spoken of standing on the shoulders of giants, and while Hooke would not have used such a messianic turn of phrase he would have recognized the need to repeat experiments that had gone before. He probably would have added that the shoulders Newton was referring to were frequently those belonging to Robert Hooke.

It is more that the world has changed since those early adventurers. Newton had stuck a bodkin down the side of his eyeball as part of an investigation into optics. Hooke had been the Royal Society’s first curator of experiments, in which role he had gleefully imagined dozens of investigations which combined the insanely practical with the wildly creative: depriving dogs of air, using telescopes as telegraphs, investigating the vibrations made by a musical chord. But it is as the father of microscopy that Brown has long worshipped his forebear, the creator of the
Micrographia
, the describer of hidden worlds which leapt with unrestrained passion and horror up to the naked eye under Hooke’s lenses.

The
bhang
(or
bangue,
as Hooke had it) experiment is typical of the man. Hooke knew that
bhang
had already been consumed by Indian natives, but he couldn’t have known how the substance would affect a European. Even so, the experiment was performed on himself, recklessly and fearlessly. How can Brown hope to follow him?

One answer springs to mind: because Brown has sailed around the world.

And that is true, isn’t it? Hooke may have been creative and brave, but so little of the natural world was known and understood in the late seventeenth century, so much remained to be named and discovered and described, that Hooke could begin his investigations in the immediate environment around him. He could describe an entire world by looking at a flea. But there has been a century and a half of noticing since then. Men need to look further and further afield for new discoveries. Brown himself had drained all the mystery out of the hills around Edinburgh by tearing up plants and describing them. Everything on those remembered hills was now
known
. The
not-known
is further and further away, on the far side of the world, where a host of flora and fauna without names or description remains to be discovered. It is men like Brown who are cataloguing that host.

Brown wonders to himself how Hooke would have managed on an ocean voyage. It is a presumptuous thought: almost, again, a blasphemous one. Yet had Hooke ever set foot on an oceangoing craft? Had he indeed ever been on a body of water wider than the River Thames? Had he ever felt his vessel climb then fall down mountains of water, the breath of death blowing through its sails, men screaming and shouting in a mad mixture of terror and delight?

Brown does not think so. And it is this thought that gives him the strength to nudge open those same doors as his illustrious predecessor.

He makes careful preparations. He instructs one of the servants at Gerrard Street, a young boy named Leary, to wait outside his door, with instructions to check upon him every half hour and to come in immediately if Brown calls out. He
has paper and quills prepared to write with, for he intends to describe the experience of taking the leaf even as he is experiencing it, unless he passes out and is unable to do so. Leary is to watch him if he passes out, and tell him anything he sees. The boy can read and write, but Brown prefers to rely on his eyes and memory than on his literacy.

A kettle is boiling on the little fire in his room. He lays out the paper and quills next to the book containing the Hooke lecture, in case there are parallels which occur to him. He takes the kettle from the fire, pours it into a pewter cup he has ready for the purpose, and as he drinks, he begins to read:

It is a certain Plant which grows very common in
India
, and the Vertues, or Quality therof, are there very well known; and the Use thereof (tho’ the Effects are very strange, and, at first hearing, frightful enough) is very general and frequent; and the Person, from whom I receiv’d it, hath made very many Trials of it, on himself, with very good Effect.

’Tis call’d, by the
Moors
,
Gange
; by the
Chingalese
,
Comsa
, and by the
Portugals
,
Bangue
. The Dose of it is about as much as may fill a common Tobacco-Pipe, the Leaves and Seeds being dried first, and pretty finely powdered.

This Powder being chewed and swallowed, or washed down, by a small Cup of Water, doth, in a short Time, quite take away the Memory and Understanding so that the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth, or doth, in that Exstasie, but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense yet he is very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks
Words without any Coherence, not knowing what he saith or doth.

Brown takes a jar containing the desiccated leaf of the Otaheite tree and opens it. Once again that heady, pungent, numbing odor leaps from the open jar, and causes him to hesitate at the brink, to ask himself if this is wise and prudent. But he reminds himself of his responsibility to Knowledge and Understanding (the initial capitals resound in his mind), and pours the water onto the leaf.

The odor instantly intensifies, as if a cloud of smoke were being sucked down into a hole, turning into a solid column rather than a diffuse miasma. Brown begins writing.

The Leaf is dried and has broken down into many smaller parts, and now strongly resembles a tea leaf from China, though none of the normal preparation required for tea has taken place. The Leaf has simply taken this form of its own accord. The odour of the dried material is strong and reminds one clearly of
Cannabis sativa,
though with an earthier undertone.

When boiling water is poured onto the Leaf, this odour intensifies even further, and sniffing the steam from the water causes my Head to spin slightly, as if from a sudden combination of Drink and Tobacco. Removing the head from the steam causes this Sensation to quickly pass, leaving the Head very clear and capable of rapid Thought, as if refreshed by a dose of clear cold Water. I am now about to drink the Tea, and will attempt to write down my sensations and any other items of Notice as they occur to me.

The Tea from the Leaf is bitter and foul tasting, and . . . its effect is sudden. It has burned my tongue badly, but the pain is as if from a distance place. My head fills light . . . filled with light . . . and the room . . . suddenly huge.

Young Leary hears Mr. Brown shout from inside the room, and hesitates for a long while. His instructions had been quite clear: to enter the room if he hears a shout,
of any kind
, Mr. Brown had said, and his eyes had been emphatic on the point because, more than anything, Mr. Brown had looked scared. Leary, who is barely sixteen, has never seen any of the bookish men who congregate at the Linnaean Society look scared. Angry, yes, and frequently impatient, and certainly not beyond smacking their dry botanical hands around the back of his head, but never
scared
.

So he enters the room reluctantly, as per Brown’s instructions, and finds the librarian lying with his head down on his desk, a pewter cup hanging down by his side in one hand, the other hand holding a quill which blindly carves out odd patterns on the paper laid out on the desk. There is a rich dizzying odor in the air. Leary rushes to the side of the man, and Brown then sits uprights and grabs him by the throat.

“There is light . . . light . . . pouring out of me . . . pouring out of the walls . . . spinning . . . my Father shouting.”

Leary struggles and eventually Brown lets go, his eyes rolling back into his head as he falls back in his chair. Leary stumbles back a step or two, and then Brown arches his back as if from a great convulsion, and shouts more of that insane gibberish.

“An Island . . . there . . . a boat . . . a figure in white standing in a boat . . . cliffs, the sea . . . scared . . . a tree . . . roots go deep down the mountain . . . into the island a tree . . . holds the Island together.”

Leary grabs a cloth from the sideboard and drenches it in a bowl of cool water. He does this automatically, as if a cool cloth to the head could cure the ills of the world, his memory full of the sweat-drenched face of his mother as she expelled his dead little sister and with one final arch of her own back departed this world. Brown screams, and leans forward in his chair, holding his stomach, his head down on the desk again. He speaks as he does so, and Leary is conscious that he should be remembering the things Brown says. He wishes he could write them down, but feels Brown gave him no permission to use the quill and paper on the table. Leary instead concentrates on remembering what he sees and hears. Brown has dropped the pewter cup but the other hand still scrabbles frantically at the paper, the quill scratching like rats beneath the floorboards. But the marks he makes are only swirls and lines, not letters. He mutters while the strange random characters pour from the quill.

“Something is chasing me . . . chasing me through the trees . . . I can hear her coming . . . Oh my
Lord
. . . there is pain and . . .
infection
. . . I feel my blood in my veins . . . something else . . . something else in my veins . . . it is sharp and . . .”

He screams again, and then falls back, allowing Leary to mop his forehead once more. Gradually, Brown’s face smooths out and relaxes, his breathing steadies and a smile breaks out over his face like sun over a calming sea. Within only two minutes he is peaceful in the chair, staring at the ceiling, the quill forgotten at his side, his fingers picking out
shapes in the air above his face, as if organisms danced in the space above him.

“I can see . . . inside
everything
,” Brown whispers, rapturously. “Inside . . . my eye is a microscope . . . there, at the heart of everything . . . inside the Cell itself . . . there, small . . . invisible . . . in every cell the same thing . . .”

Hooke:
After a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry.

Minutes pass, and then an hour. Brown’s fingers continue to dance in the air, but gradually they slow and eventually drop to his side. Brown’s eyes close, and he sleeps, leaving his young attendant to carefully resoak the cloth, over and over again, his mother’s voice whispering back through the years.

I have sent Leary away. Several hours have passed since I drunk the tea made from the leaf. Leary woke me from a sleep after much trying, he says. He believed me almost dead, so hard was it to wake me. At first I did not want to wake up, and I shouted at him for disturbing my dreams (I do not remember doing so, though Leary assures me this is true). He was scared and said he would go and fetch help. But then the effect of the leaf seemed to cease, suddenly, as if dying off from lack of sustenance. It was an extraordinary sensation of falling away, as if my head was filled with a light-infused smoke which then, without warning, disappeared, leaving me awake and refreshed but also in a state
of profound thirst and hunger, both for food and drink but also for more of the tea.

Hooke:
And that which troubled his Stomach, or Head, before he took it, is perfectly carried off without leaving any ill Symptom, as Giddiness, Pain in the Head or Stomach, or Defect of Memory of any Thing (besides of what happened) during the Time of its Operation. And he assures, that he hath often taken it, when he has found himself out of Order, either by drinking bad Water, or eating of some Things which have not agreed with him.

It is now three hours since I took the Tea, and I can report strange contrary feelings of great physical renewal combined with intense thirst for more of the leaf. My former feelings of lassitude and torpor, which plagued me some years ago and had in recent days been returning, have entirely gone. Also, my mind seems to be operating with a renewed clarity, and even my vision seems sharper and clearer than it had wont to be. And yet I take little comfort in these advantages, for they are accompanied by this sharp hunger and thirst for more of the leaf, which I am struggling to overcome. For there can be no doubt of the intensity of the experience of the leaf, and until I know a good deal more about it I am not prepared to indulge myself.