The Signature of All Things (6 page)

So Banks, that day, was not in a mood to listen to Henry Whittaker’s assertion that what the British Empire really needed were cinchona plantations in the midrange altitudes of the Indian Himalayas—an idea that did not further in any manner the causes of cotton, spices, comet hunting, or ballooning. Banks’s mind was cluttered and his foot ached like the devil and he was irritated enough by Henry’s aggressive presence to disregard the entire conversation. Here, Sir Joseph Banks made a rare tactical error—an error that would ultimately cost England dearly.

But it should be said that Henry, too, made tactical errors that day with Banks. Several of them in a row, in fact. Showing up unannounced was the first error. Yes, he had done it before, but Henry was no longer a cheeky lad, in whom such a lapse in decorum could be excused. He was by now a grown man (and a large man, at that) whose insistent hammering at the front door carried a suggestion of both social impudence and physical threat.

What’s more, Henry arrived at Banks’s doorstep empty-handed, which a botanical collector must never do. Henry’s Peruvian collection was still on board the ship from Cadiz, safely docked in harbor. It was an impressive collection, but how could Banks have known that, when all the specimens were out of sight, hidden away on a distant merchant ship, concealed in ox bladders, barrels, gunnysacks, and Wardian cases? Henry should have brought something to personally place in Banks’s hands—if not a cutting of cinchona
roja
itself, then at least a nicely flowering fuchsia
.
Anything to get the old man’s attention, to soften him into believing that the forty pounds a year he’d been pouring into Henry Whittaker and Peru had not been squandered.

But Henry was not a softener
.
Instead, he verbally hurled himself at Banks with this blunt accusation: “You are wrong, sir, to merely study the cinchona when you should be selling it!” This staggeringly ill-considered statement accused Banks of being a fool, while simultaneously befouling
32 Soho Square with the unpleasant taint of
trade
—as though Sir Joseph Banks, the wealthiest gentleman in Britain, would ever personally need to resort to commerce.

To be fair to Henry, his head was not entirely lucid. He had been alone for many years in a remote forest, and a young man in the forest can become a dangerously unfettered thinker. Henry had discussed this topic with Banks so many times already
in his mind
that he was impatient now with the actual conversation. In Henry’s imagination, everything was already arranged and already successful. In Henry’s mind, there was only one possible outcome: Banks would now welcome the idea as brilliant, introduce Henry to the proper administrators at the East India Company, clear all permissions, secure all funding, and proceed—ideally by tomorrow afternoon—with this ambitious project. In Henry’s dreams, the cinchona plantation was already growing in the Himalayas, he was already the glitteringly wealthy man whom Joseph Banks had once promised he might become, and he had already been welcomed as a gentleman into the embrace of London society. Most of all, Henry had allowed himself to believe that he and Joseph Banks already regarded each other as dear and intimate friends.

Now, it is quite possibly the case that Henry Whittaker and Sir Joseph Banks could have become dear and intimate friends, except for one small problem, which was that Sir Joseph Banks never regarded Henry Whittaker as anything more than an ill-bred and thieving little toiler, whose only purpose in life was to be wrung dry of usefulness in the service of his betters.

“Also,” said Henry, while Banks was still recovering from the assault upon his senses, his honor, and his drawing room, “I believe we should discuss my nomination to the Royal Society of Fellows.”

“Pardon me,” Banks said. “Who on earth has nominated you to the Royal Society of Fellows?”

“I am trusting that you will,” said Henry. “As reward for my work and my ingenuity.”

Banks was speechless for a long moment. His eyebrows, on their own accord, fled to the top of his brow. He drew a sharp breath. And then—most unfortunately for the future of the British Empire—he laughed. He laughed so heartily that he had to dab his eyes with a handkerchief of Belgian lace, which may very well have cost more than the house in which Henry Whittaker had been raised. It was good to laugh, after such a tiresome day, and
he gave in to the hilarity with all his being. He laughed so hard that his manservant, standing outside the door, poked his head into the room, curious about this sudden explosion of merriment. He laughed so hard that he could not speak. Which was probably for the best, because even without the laughter, Banks would have encountered difficulty finding words to express the absurdity of this notion—that Henry Whittaker, who by all rights should have swung from the gallows at Tyburn nine years earlier, who had the ferrety face of a natural-born pickpocket, whose appallingly penned letters had been a real source of entertainment to Banks over the years, whose father (poor man!) had kept company with pigs—that this young
bilker
expected to be invited into the most esteemed and gentlemanly scientific consortium in all of Britain? What a good whacking bit of comedy was this!

Of course, Sir Joseph Banks was the much-loved president of the Royal Society of Fellows—as Henry well knew—and had Banks nominated a crippled badger to the Society, the Society would have welcomed the creature and minted it a medal of honor, besides. But to welcome in Henry Whittaker? To allow this impudent picaroon, this mackerel-backed shaver, this jack-weighted
hob
,
to add the initials RSF to his indecipherable signature?

No.

When Banks began to laugh, Henry’s stomach collapsed upon itself and folded into a small, hard cube. His throat narrowed as though he were, at last, noosed. He shut his eyes and saw murder. He was capable of murder. He envisioned murder and carefully considered the consequences of murder. He had a long while to ponder murder, while Banks laughed and laughed.

No, Henry decided. Not murder.

When he opened his eyes, Banks was still laughing, and Henry was a transformed human being. Whatever youth had remained in him as of that morning, it was now kicked out dead. From that point forward, his life would be not about who he could become, but about what he could acquire
.
He would never be a gentleman. So be it. Sod gentlemen. Sod them all. Henry would become richer than any gentleman who had ever lived, and someday he would own the lot of them, from the floor up. Henry waited for Banks to stop laughing, and then he escorted himself from the room without a word.

He immediately went out into the streets and found himself a prostitute. He held her up against an alley wall and battered the virginity out of himself, injuring both the girl and himself in the process, until she cursed him for a brute. He found a public house, drank two jars of rum, pummeled a stranger in the gut, was thrown out in the street and kicked in the kidneys. There, now—it was done. Everything from which he had been abstaining over the last nine years, in the interest of becoming a respectable gentleman, it was all done. See how easy it is? No pleasure in it, to be sure, but it was done.

He hired a boatman to take him up the river to Richmond. It was nighttime now. He walked past his parents’ dreadful house without stopping. He would never see his family again—nor did he wish to. He sneaked into Kew, found a shovel, and dug up all the money he had left buried there at age sixteen. There was a fair bit of silver waiting for him in the ground, far more than he remembered.

“Good lad,” he told his younger, thieving, hoarding self.

He slept by the river, with a damp sack of coins as his pillow. The next day, he returned to London and bought himself a good-enough suit of clothes. He supervised the removal of his entire Peruvian botanical collection—seeds and bladders and bark samples all—from the ship that had come from Cadiz, and transferred it over to a ship heading to Amsterdam. Legally, the entire collection belonged to Kew. Bugger Kew. Bugger Kew until it bled. Let Kew come and find him.

Three days later, he sailed to Holland, and sold his collection, his ideas, and his services to the Dutch East India Company—whose severe and cunning administrators received him, it must be said, without a trace of laughter.

Chapter Four

S
ix years later, Henry Whittaker was a rich man on his way to becoming richer still. His cinchona plantation was thriving in the Dutch colonial outpost of Java, growing as happily as weeds in a cool, humid, terraced mountain estate called Pengalengan—an environment nearly identical, as Henry knew it would be, to both the Peruvian Andes and the lower Himalayas. Henry lived on the plantation himself and kept a careful eye on this botanical treasure trove. His partners in Amsterdam were now setting the global prices for Jesuit’s bark, and reaping sixty florins for every hundred pounds of cinchona they processed. They couldn’t process it fast enough. There was a fortune to be made here, and the fortune was made in specifics. Henry had continued to refine his orchard, which was protected now from cross-pollination with lesser stock, and was producing a bark both more potent and more consistent than anything coming out of Peru itself. Furthermore, it shipped well, and—without the corrupting interference of Spanish or Indian hands—was judged by the world as a reliable product.

The colonial Dutch were now the world’s biggest producers and consumers of Jesuit’s bark, using the powder to keep their soldiers, administrators, and workers free from malarial fever all over the East Indies. The advantage that this gave them over their rivals—particularly over the English—was quite literally beyond calculation. With determined vengefulness, Henry made an effort to keep his product out of British markets
entirely, or at least to drive up the price whenever Jesuit’s bark found its way to England or her outposts.

Back at Kew, and far behind the game now, Sir Joseph Banks did eventually attempt to cultivate cinchona in the Himalayas, but without Henry’s expertise the project lagged. The British were expending wealth, energy, and anxiety growing the wrong species of cinchona at the wrong altitude, and Henry, with cold satisfaction, knew it. By the 1790s, numberless British citizens and subjects were dying every week of malaria in India, lacking access to good Jesuit’s bark, while the Dutch pushed forward in rude health.

Henry admired the Dutch and worked well with them. He effortlessly comprehended these people—these industrious, tireless, ditch-digging, beer-drinking, straight-speaking, coin-counting Calvinists, who had been making order out of trade since the sixteenth century, and who slept peacefully every night of their lives with the certain knowledge that God wished for them to be rich. A country of bankers, merchants, and gardeners, the Dutch liked their promises the same way Henry liked his (that is to say, gilded with profit), and thus they held the world captive at steep interest rates. They did not judge him for his rude manners or his aggressive ways. Very soon Henry Whittaker and the Dutch were making each other quite stupendously wealthy. In Holland, there were people who called Henry “the Prince of Peru.”

By now, Henry was a rich man of thirty-one years, and it was time for him to orchestrate the remainder of his life. To begin with, he had the opportunity now to start his own business concerns, wholly separate from his Dutch partners, and he combed through his options with care. He had no fascination with minerals or gemstones, because he had no expertise in minerals or gemstones. Likewise with shipbuilding, publishing, or textiles. It would be botany, then. But which sort of botany? Henry had no desire to enter the spice trade, although there were famously large profits to be made in it. Too many nations were already involved in spices, and the costs of defending one’s product from pirates and competing navies defeated the gains, as far as Henry could see. He also had no respect for either the sugar or the cotton trades, which he found to be insidious and costly, as well as intrinsically bound to slavery. Henry wanted nothing to do with slavery—not because he found it morally abhorrent, but because he regarded it as financially inefficient, untidy, and expensive, and controlled by some of the
most unsavory middlemen on earth. What really interested him were medicinal plants—a market upon which nobody had yet fully capitalized.

So, medicinal plants and pharmacy it would be.

Next, he had to decide where he should live. He owned a fine estate in Java with a hundred servants, but the climate there had sickened him over the years, bestowing upon him tropical diseases that would periodically throw his health into havoc for the rest of his life. He needed a more temperate home. He would cut off his arm before he ever again lived in England. The Continent did not appeal: France was filled with irritating people; Spain was corrupt and unstable; Russia, impossible; Italy, absurd; Germany, rigid; Portugal, in decline. Holland, though favorably disposed toward him, was dull.

The United States of America, he decided, was a possibility. Henry had never been there, but he had heard promising things. He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia—the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn—a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone—except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage.

Before he settled anywhere, however, he wanted to be fitted up with a wife, and—because he was not a fool—he wanted a Dutch wife. He wanted a clever and decent woman with the least possible frivolousness, and Holland was the place to find her. Henry had indulged himself at times with prostitutes over the years, and had even kept a young Javanese girl on his estate in Pengalengan, but now it was time to take on a proper wife, and he recalled the advice of a sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before, “To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”