The Signature of All Things (4 page)

They sailed on. He watched a native in the Friendly Islands have his arm cut off at the elbow, on Captain Cook’s orders, for having stolen a hatchet from the
Resolution
. He and Mr. Nelson were botanizing on those same islands when they were ambushed by natives, who stripped them of their clothes, and—far more injuriously—stripped them of their botanical samples and notebooks, as well. Sunburned, nude, and shaken, they returned to the ship, but still Henry did not complain.

With care, he observed the gentlemen on board, appraising their behaviors. He imitated their speech. He practiced their diction. He improved his manners. He overheard one officer tell another, “As much of a contrivance as the aristocracy has always been, it still constitutes the best check against mobs of the uneducated and the unreflecting.” He watched how the officers repeatedly bestowed honor upon any native who resembled a nobleman (or, at least, who resembled some English idea of a nobleman). On every island they visited, the
Resolution
’s
officers would single out any brown-skinned man who had a finer headpiece than the others, or who wore more tattoos, or who carried a bigger spear, or who had more wives, or who was borne upon a litter by other men, or who—in the absence of any of these luxuries—was simply
taller
than the other men. The Englishmen would treat that person with respect. This would be the man with whom they would negotiate, and upon whom they would bestow gifts, and who, sometimes, they would pronounce “the king.” He concluded that wherever English gentlemen went in the world, they were always looking for a king.

Henry went turtling, and ate dolphins. He was eaten by black ants. He sailed on. He saw tiny Indians with giant shells in their ears. He saw a storm in the tropics turn the skies a sickly green color—the only thing that had ever visibly frightened the older sailors. He saw the burning mountains called volcanoes. They sailed farther north. It got cold again. He ate rats again. They landed on the west coast of the continent of North America. He ate reindeer. He saw people who dressed in furs and who traded in beaver pelts. He saw a sailor tangle his leg in the anchor chain and be pulled overboard to die.

They sailed farther north still. He saw houses made of whale’s ribs. He bought the hide of a wolf. He collected primroses, violets, currants, and juniper with Mr. Nelson. He saw Indians who lived in holes in the ground, and who hid their women from the English. He ate salted pork studded with maggots. He lost another tooth. He arrived at the Bering Strait and heard beasts howling in the Arctic night. Every dry item he owned became soaked, and then iced. He watched his beard grow in. Sparse as it was, it still collected icicles. His dinner froze to his plate before he could eat it. He did not complain. He did not want it reported back to Sir Joseph Banks that he had ever complained. He traded his wolf hide for a pair of snowshoes. He watched Mr. Anderson, the ship’s surgeon, die and be buried at sea in the
dreariest prospect a man could ever imagine—a frozen world of constant night. He watched sailors volley rounds of cannon fire at sea lions on shore, for sport, until there was not a creature left alive on that beach.

He saw the land the Russians called Elaskah. He helped make beer out of spruce pine, which the sailors hated, but it was all they had to drink. He saw Indians who lived in dens not one degree more comfortable than the dwellings of the animals they hunted and ate, and he met Russians, stranded at a whaling station. He overheard Captain Cook remark of the leading Russian officer (a tall, handsome blond man), “He is clearly a gentleman of good family.” Everywhere, it seemed, even in this dismal tundra, it was important to be a gentleman of good family. In August, Captain Cook gave up. He could find no Northwest Passage, and the
Resolution
was already blocked in by cathedrals of icebergs. They reversed course and headed south.

They barely stopped until they reached Hawaii. They ought never to have gone to Hawaii. They would have been safer starving in the ice. The kings of Hawaii were angry, and the natives were thieving and aggressive. The Hawaiians were not Tahitians—not gentle friends—and moreover, there were thousands of them. But Captain Cook needed fresh water, and had to remain in port until the holds were once more filled. There was much looting by the natives and much punishment by the English. Guns were fired, Indians were wounded, chiefs were appalled, threats were exchanged. Some of the men said that Captain Cook was unraveling, becoming more brutal, exhibiting more theatrical temper tantrums, and more enraged indignation, at every theft. Still, the Indians kept stealing. It could not be permitted. They pried the nails right out of the ship. Boats were stolen, and weapons, too. More guns were fired and more Indians were killed. Henry did not sleep for days in vigilance. Nobody slept.

Captain Cook struck out on land, wishing for an audience with the chiefs, to appease them, but he was met instead by hundreds of furious Hawaiians. Inside of a moment, the crowd became a mob. Henry watched as Captain Cook was killed, pierced through the breast by a native spear and clubbed over the head, his blood mixing with the waves. In one instant, the great navigator was no more. His body was dragged away by natives. Later that night, as a final insult, an Indian in a canoe threw a chunk of Captain Cook’s thigh on board the
Resolution.

Henry watched the English sailors burn the entire settlement in retribution. The English sailors could scarcely be held back from murdering every Indian man, woman, and child on the island. The heads of two Indians were severed and put on pikes—and there would be more of this, the sailors promised, until Captain Cook’s body was returned for decent burial. The next day, the rest of Cook’s corpse arrived on the
Resolution
, missing his vertebrae and feet, which were never recovered. Henry watched as the remains of his commander were buried at sea. Captain Cook had never spoken a word to Henry, and Henry—who had followed Banks’s advice—had never let himself be seen by Cook. But now Henry Whittaker was alive, and Captain Cook was not.

He thought they might return to England after this disaster, but they did not. A man named Mr. Clerke became captain. They still had their mission—to try again at the Northwest Passage. When summer returned, they sailed back north once more, into that awful cold. Henry was pelted with ash and pumice from a volcano. Every fresh vegetable had long ago been consumed, and they drank brackish water. Sharks followed the ship, to dine off the slop from the latrines. He and Mr. Nelson recorded eleven new species of polar duck, and ate nine of them. He saw a giant white bear swim past the ship, paddling with lazy menace. He watched Indians tie themselves into small canoes covered with fur, and navigate the waters as if they and their boats were one animal. He watched the Indians run on the ice, pulled by their dogs. He watched Captain Cook’s replacement—Captain Clerke—die at age thirty-eight, and be buried at sea.

Now Henry had outlived two English sea captains.

They gave up once more on the Northwest Passage. They sailed to Macao. He saw fleets of Chinese junks, and again encountered representatives of the Dutch East India Company, who seemed to be everywhere in their simple black clothes and humble clogs. It appeared to him that everywhere in the world, somebody owed money to a Dutchman. In China, Henry found out about a war with France, and a revolution in America. It was the first he had heard of it. In Manila, he saw a Spanish galleon, loaded, it was said, with two million pounds’ worth of silver treasure. He traded his snowshoes for a Spanish naval jacket. He fell ill from the flux—they all did—but he survived it. He arrived in Sumatra, and then in Java, where, once more, he saw the Dutch making money. He took note of it.

They rounded the Cape one last time and headed back to England. By October 6, 1780, they were safely returned to Deptford. Henry had been gone four years, three months, and two days. He was now a young man of twenty years. During the entirety of the journey, he had acquitted himself in a gentlemanly manner. He hoped and expected that this would be reported of him. He’d also been a zealous observer and botanical collector, as instructed, and was now prepared to divulge his account to Sir Joseph Banks.

He departed the ship, received his wages, found a ride to London. The city was a filthy horror. The year 1780 had been a dreadful one for Britain—mobs, violence, antipapist bigotry, Lord Mansfield’s home burned to the ground, the Archbishop of York’s sleeves torn from his clothing and thrown in his face right on the street, prisons broken open, martial law—but Henry knew none of this, and cared about none of it. He walked all the way to 32 Soho Square, straight to Banks’s private home. Henry knocked on the door, announced his name, and stood ready to receive his reward.

B
anks sent him to Peru.

That
would be Henry’s reward.

Banks had been rather dumbfounded to discover Henry Whittaker standing at his door. Over the past few years, he had nearly forgotten about the boy, though he was too clever and too polite to reveal this. Banks carried a staggering amount of information in his head, and a good deal of responsibility. He was not only overseeing the expansion of Kew Gardens, but also supervising and funding numberless botanical expeditions all over the world. Hardly a ship arrived in London during the 1780s that did not carry a plant, a seed, a bulb, or a cutting on its way to Sir Joseph Banks. In addition, he held a place in polite society, and kept his hand in every new scientific advancement in Europe, from chemistry to astronomy to the breeding of sheep. Put simply, Sir Joseph Banks was an overoccupied gentleman, who had not been thinking about Henry Whittaker during the past four years quite as much as Henry Whittaker had been thinking about him.

Nonetheless, as he began to recall the orchardman’s son, he permitted Henry entry into his personal study and offered him a glass of port, which
Henry refused. He bade the boy to tell him all about the journey. Of course Banks already knew that the
Resolution
had safely arrived in England, and he had been receiving letters from Mr. Nelson along the way, but Henry was the first live person Banks had encountered straight off the ship, and so Banks welcomed him—once he’d remembered who the boy was—with penetrating curiosity. Henry spoke for nearly two hours, in full botanical and personal detail. He spoke with more liberty than delicacy, it must be said, which made his account a treasure. By the end of the narrative, Banks found himself most deliciously informed. There was nothing Banks loved more than knowing things that other people did not realize he knew, and here—long before the official and politically polished logs of the
Resolution
would be made available to him—he already knew all that had occurred on Cook’s third expedition.

As Henry spoke, Banks grew impressed. Banks could see that Henry had spent the past few years not so much studying as conquering botany, and that he now had the potential to become a first-rate plantsman. Banks would need to keep this boy, he realized, before someone else filched him away. Banks was a serial filcher himself. He often used his money and éclat to pinch young men of promise away from other institutions and expeditions, and to bring them into the service of Kew. Naturally, he had lost some young men over the years, as well—lured away to safe and lucrative posts as gardeners at wealthy estates. Banks would not lose this one, he decided.

Henry may have been ill-bred, but Banks did not mind an ill-bred man, if he was competent. Great Britain produced naturalists like flaxseed, but most of them were blockheads and dilettantes. Meanwhile, Banks was desperate for new plants. He would gladly have embarked on expeditions himself, but he was nearing fifty years old and suffering awfully from gout. He was swollen and pained, trapped most hours of the day in his desk chair. So he needed to dispatch collectors in his stead. It was not as simple a task as one might think, to find them. There were not as many able-bodied young men as one might hope—young men who wanted to earn wretched salaries in order to die of the ague in Madagascar, or be shipwrecked off the Azores, or assaulted by bandits in India, or taken prisoner in Grenada, or simply to vanish forever in Ceylon.

The trick was to make Henry feel as though he were
already
destined
to work for Banks forever, and not to give the boy any time to ponder things, or to have someone warn him off, or to fall in love with some saucily dressed girl, or to make his own plans for his future. Banks needed to convince Henry that the future was prearranged, and that Henry’s future already belonged to Kew. Henry was a confident young fellow, but Banks knew that his own position of wealth, power, and fame gave him the advantage here—indeed, gave him the appearance, at times, of being the hand of divine providence itself. The trick was to use the hand unblinkingly and swiftly.

“Fine work,” Banks said, after Henry had relayed his stories. “You’ve done well. Next week I shall send you to the Andes.”

Henry had to think for a moment: What were the Andes? Islands? Mountains? A country? Like the Netherlands?

But Banks was talking forward, as though all were decided. “I’m funding a Peruvian botanical expedition, and it departs Wednesday next. You’ll be led by Mr. Ross Niven. He’s a tough old Scot—perhaps too old, if I may be candid—but he’s as hardy as anyone you’ll ever meet. He knows his trees and, I daresay, he knows his South America. I prefer a Scotsman to an Englishman for this sort of work, you know. They are more cold-minded and constant, more fit to pursue their object with relentless ardor, which is what you want in your man abroad. Your salary, Henry, is forty pounds a year, and although it is not the sort of salary upon which a young man can fatten his life, the position is an honorable one, which carries along with it the gratitude of the British Empire. As you are still a bachelor, I am certain you can make do. The more frugally you live now, Henry, the richer a man you will someday become.”

Henry looked as though he were about to ask a question, so Banks bowled him over. “You don’t speak Spanish, I suppose?” he asked, disapprovingly.