The Signature of All Things (3 page)

“Because I’m a useful little fingerstink,” Henry said.

Banks, who enjoyed unusual incidents, barked with surprised laughter. “I confess that I don’t see the use of you, young man. All you have done for me is to rob me of my hard-won treasure.”

It wasn’t a question, but Henry answered it nonetheless.

“I might’ve trimmed a bit,” he said.

“You don’t deny this?”

“All the braying in the world won’t change it, do it?”

Again, Banks laughed. He may have thought the boy was putting on a show of false courage, but Henry’s courage was real. As was his fear. As was his lack of penitence. For the whole of his life, Henry would always find penitence weak.

Banks changed tack. “I must say, young man, that you are a crowning distress to your father.”

“And him to me, sir,” Henry fired back.

Once more, the surprised bark of laughter from Banks. “Is he, then? What harm has that good man ever done to you?”

“Made me poor, sir,” Henry said. Then, suddenly realizing everything, Henry added, “It were him, weren’t it? Who peached me over to you?”

“Indeed it was. He’s an honorable soul, your father.”

Henry shrugged. “Not to me, eh?”

Banks took this in and nodded, generously conceding the point. Then he asked, “To whom have you been selling my plants?”

Henry ticked off the names on his fingers: “Mancini, Flood, Willink, LeFavour, Miles, Sather, Evashevski, Feuerle, Lord Lessig, Lord Garner—”

Banks cut him off with a wave. He stared at the boy with open astonishment. Oddly, if the list had been more modest, Banks might have been angrier. But these were the most esteemed botanical names of the day. A few of them Banks called friends. How had the boy found them? Some of these men hadn’t been to England in years. The child must be
exporting
. What kind of campaign had this creature been running under his nose?

“How do you even know how to handle plants?” Banks asked.

“I always knowed plants, sir, for my whole life. It’s like I knowed it all beforehand.”

“And these men, do they pay you?”

“Or they don’t get their plants, do they?” Henry said.

“You must be earning well. Indeed, you must have accumulated quite a pile of money in the past years.”

Henry was too cunning to answer this.

“What have you done with the money you’ve earned, young man?” Banks pushed on. “I can’t say you’ve invested it in your wardrobe. Without a doubt, your earnings belong to Kew. So where is it all?”

“Gone, sir.”

“Gone where?”

“Dice, sir. I have a weakness of the gambling, see.”

That may or may not have been true, Banks thought. But the boy certainly had as much nerve as any two-footed beast he had ever encountered. Banks was intrigued. He was a man, after all, who kept a heathen for a pet, and who—to be honest—enjoyed the reputation of being half heathen himself. His station in life required that he at least purport to admire gentility, but secretly he preferred a bit of wildness. And what a little wild cockerel was Henry Whittaker! Banks was growing less inclined by the moment to hand over this curious item of humanity to the constables.

Henry, who saw everything, saw something happening in Banks’s face—a softening of countenance, a blooming curiosity, a sliver of a chance for his
life to be saved. Intoxicated with a compulsion for self-preservation, the boy vaulted into that sliver of hope, one last time.

“Don’t put me to hang, sir,” Henry said. “You’ll regret it that you did.”

“What do you propose I do with you, instead?”

“Put me to use.”

“Why should I?” asked Banks.

“Because I’m better than anyone.”

Chapter Two

S
o Henry did not dangle on the gallows at Tyburn, in the end, nor did his father lose his position at Kew. The Whittakers were miraculously reprieved, and Henry was merely exiled, sent away to sea, dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks, to discover what the world would make of him.

It was 1776, and Captain Cook was about to embark on his third voyage around the world. Banks was not joining this expedition. Simply put, he had not been invited. He had not been invited on the second voyage, either, which had rankled him. Banks’s extravagance and attention-seeking had soured Captain Cook to him, and, shamefully, he had been replaced. Cook would be traveling now with a humbler botanist, somebody more easily controlled—a man named Mr. David Nelson, who was a timid, competent gardener from Kew. But Banks wanted a hand in this journey somehow, and he very badly wanted to keep an eye on Nelson’s botanical collecting. He didn’t like the idea of any important scientific work being done behind his back. So he arranged to send Henry on the expedition as one of Nelson’s hands, with instructions that the boy watch everything, learn everything, remember everything, and later report everything back to Banks. What better use of Henry Whittaker than to implant him as an informer?

Moreover, exiling Henry to sea was a good strategy for keeping the boy away from Kew Gardens for a few years, while allowing a safe distance in
which one could determine exactly what sort of person this Henry might become. Three years on a ship would offer ample opportunity for the boy’s true temperament to emerge. If they ended up hanging Henry on the yardarm as a thief, murderer, or mutineer . . . well, that would be Cook’s problem, wouldn’t it, not Banks’s. Alternatively, the boy might prove himself at something, and then Banks could have him for the future, after the expedition had kicked some of the wildness out of him.

Banks introduced Henry to Mr. Nelson as such: “Nelson, I would like you to meet your new right hand, Mr. Henry Whittaker, of the Richmond Whittakers. He is a useful little fingerstink, and I trust you will find—when it comes to plants—that he knowed it all beforehand.”

Later, privately, Banks gave Henry some last advice before he dispatched the boy to sea: “Every day that you are aboard, son, defend your health with vigorous exercise. Listen to Mr. Nelson—he is dull, but he knows more about plants than you ever will. You shall be at the mercy of the older sailors, but you must never complain about them, or things will go badly for you. Stay away from whores, if you don’t want to acquire the French disease. There will be two ships sailing, but you’ll be on the
Resolution
, with Cook himself. Never put yourself in his way. Never speak to him. And if you do speak to him, which you must never do, certainly do not speak to him in the manner in which you have sometimes spoken to me. He will not find it as diverting as do I. We are not similar, Cook and I. The man is a perfect dragon for protocol. Be invisible to him, and you will be happier for it. Lastly, I should tell you that aboard the
Resolution
,
as with all His Majesty’s ships, you shall find yourself living amongst an odd cabal of both rogues and gentlemen. Be clever, Henry. Model yourself upon the gentlemen.”

Henry’s deliberately expressionless face made it impossible for anyone to read him, so Banks could not have realized how strikingly this final admonition was received. To Henry’s ear, Banks had just suggested something quite extraordinary—the possibility of Henry’s someday becoming a gentleman. More than a possibility, even, it may have sounded like a command, and a most welcome command at that:
Go forth in the world, Henry, and learn how to become a gentleman.
And in the hard, lonely years that Henry was about to spend at sea, perhaps this casual utterance of Banks’s would grow only greater in his mind. Perhaps it would be all he ever thought
about. Perhaps over time Henry Whittaker—that ambitious and striving boy, so fraught with the instinct for advancement—would come to remember it as having been a
promise.

H
enry sailed from England in July of 1776. The stated objectives of Cook’s third expedition were twofold. The first was to sail to Tahiti, to return Sir Joseph Banks’s pet—the man named Omai—to his homeland. Omai had grown tired of court life and now longed to return home. He had become sulky and fat and difficult, and Banks had grown tired of his pet. The second task was to then sail north, all the way up the Pacific coast of the Americas, in search of a Northwest Passage.

Henry’s hardships began instantly. He was housed belowdecks, with the hen coops and the barrels. Poultry and goats complained all around him, but he did not complain. He was bullied, scorned, harmed by grown men with salt-scaled hands and anvils for wrists. The older sailors derided him as a freshwater eel, who knew nothing of the severities of ocean travel. On every expedition there were men who died, they said, and Henry would be the first to die.

They underestimated him.

Henry was the youngest, but not, as it soon emerged, the weakest. It was not much less comfortable a life than the one he had always known. He learned whatever he was required to learn. He learned how to dry and prepare Mr. Nelson’s plants for scientific record, and how to paint botanicals in the open air—beating away the flies who landed in his pigments even as he mixed them—but he also learned how to be useful on the ship. He was made to scrub every crevice of the
Resolution
with vinegar, and forced to pick vermin from the bedding of the older sailors. He helped the ship’s butcher to salt and barrel hogs, and learned how to operate the water distillation machine. He learned how to swallow his vomit, rather than displaying his seasickness for anyone’s satisfaction. He rode out tempests without showing fear to the heavens or to any man. He ate sharks, and he ate the half-decomposed fish that were in the bellies of sharks. He never faltered.

He landed at Madeira, at Tenerife, at Table Bay. Down in the Cape, he encountered for the first time representatives of the Dutch East India
Company, who impressed him with their sobriety, competence, and wealth. He watched the sailors lose all their earnings at gaming tables. He watched people borrow money from the Dutch, who seemed not to gamble themselves. Henry did not gamble, either. He watched a fellow sailor, a would-be counterfeiter, get caught cheating and be whipped senseless for his crime—at Captain Cook’s command. He committed no crimes himself. Rounding the Cape in ice and wind, he shivered at night under one thin blanket, his jaws clattering so hard he broke a tooth, but he did not complain. He kept Christmas on a bitterly cold island of sea lions and penguins.

He landed in Tasmania and met naked natives—or, as the British called them (and all copper-colored people), “Indians.” He watched Captain Cook give the Indians souvenir medals, stamped with an image of George III and the date of the expedition, to mark this historic encounter. He watched the Indians immediately hammer the medals into fishhooks and spear tips. He lost another tooth. He watched the English sailors not believe that the life of any savage Indian had any account at all, while Cook tried futilely to teach them otherwise. He saw sailors force themselves on women they could not persuade, persuade women they could not afford, and simply buy for themselves girls from their fathers, if the sailors had any iron to trade for flesh. He avoided all girls.

He spent long days on board the ship, helping Mr. Nelson draw, describe, mount, and classify his botanical collections. He had no particular feelings of affection for Mr. Nelson, though he wished to learn everything that Mr. Nelson already knew.

He landed in New Zealand, which looked to him precisely like England, except with tattooed girls whom you could buy for a few handfuls of penny nails. He bought no girls. He watched his fellow sailors, in New Zealand, purchase two eager and energetic brothers—aged ten and fifteen—from their father. The native boys joined the excursion as hands. They had wanted to come, they indicated. But Henry knew the boys had no idea what it would mean to leave their people. They were called Tibura and Gowah. They tried to befriend Henry, because he was closest to their age, but he ignored them. They were slaves and they were doomed. He did not wish to associate with the doomed. He watched the New Zealand boys eat raw dog meat and pine for home. He knew they would eventually die.

He sailed to the verdant, tufted, perfumed land of Tahiti. He watched
Captain Cook be welcomed back to Tahiti as a great king, as a great friend. The
Resolution
was met by a swarm of Indians, swimming out to the ship and calling Cook’s name. Henry watched as Omai—the Tahitian native who had met King George III—was received at home first as a hero and then, increasingly, as a resented outsider. He could see that now Omai belonged nowhere. He watched the Tahitians dance to English hornpipes and bagpipes, while Mr. Nelson, his staid botanical master, got drunk one night and stripped down to the waist, dancing to Tahitian drums. Henry did not dance. He watched Captain Cook order that a native man have both his ears shorn off at the temples by the ship’s barber, for twice having stolen iron from the
Resolution
’s forge. He watched one of the Tahitian chiefs try to steal a cat from the Englishmen, and receive a lash of a whip across the face for his troubles.

He watched Captain Cook light fireworks over Matavai Bay, to impress the natives, but it only frightened them. On a quieter night, he saw the million lamps of heaven in the skies over Tahiti. He drank from coconuts. He ate dogs and rats. He saw stone temples littered with human skulls. He climbed up the treacherous avenues of rock cliffs, beside waterfalls, gathering fern samples for Mr. Nelson, who did not climb. He saw Captain Cook struggle to keep order and discipline among his charges, while licentiousness reigned. All the sailors and officers had fallen in love with Tahitian girls, and each girl was reputed to know a special secret act of love. The men never wanted to leave the island. Henry withheld from the women. They were beautiful, their breasts were beautiful, their hair was beautiful, they smelled extraordinary and they inhabited his dreams—but most of them already had the French disease. He held out against one hundred fragrant temptations. He was ridiculed for this. He held out nonetheless. He was planning something bigger for himself. He concentrated on botany. He collected gardenias, orchids, jasmine, breadfruit.