Wedlock (28 page)

On his last expedition, following the coastline west and north from June to December 1779, he and Captain Gordon had become the first Europeans to locate the mouth of the Great or Orange River, the longest watercourse in southern Africa. Trekking through uninhabited desert where native guides initially refused to venture, their oxen dropping through lack of water, the pair named two hills the ‘Two Brothers’ in a gush of fraternity, although Paterson wryly noted that ‘in this desolate region there was no one who could dispute any denomination by which we chose to distinguish whatever we met with’. When at last they had arrived at the steep sandy bank of the broad delta, Paterson recorded: ‘In the evening we launched Colonel Gordon’s boat, and hoisted the Dutch colours. Colonel Gordon proposed first to drink the State’s health, and then that of the Prince of Orange, and the Company; after which we gave the river the name of the Orange River in honour of that Prince.’ Intoxicated as much by their achievements as by their toasts, Paterson never lost sight of his primary goal, rhapsodising on his return journey over ‘the most beautiful plant I ever saw of the Pentandria Monogynia class’. Wreathed with long spikes and crowned with spectacular red, yellow and green flowers, the plant towered above him. But before he had regained Cape Town, now travelling with a plantation owner, Sebastiaan van Reenen, Paterson had chanced upon an even more awesome sight: a herd of six giraffes. More commonly termed the
camelopardalis
or ‘spotted camel’, the giraffe had acquired almost mythical status among eighteenth-century naturalists who had heard reports of the bizarre-sounding creatures but doubted they could truly exist. Pursuing the beasts, before they could disappear into the realms of fantasy once more, van Reenen shot a male and Paterson proudly added its skeleton and skin to the cargo for his homeward journey.

Yet his discoveries and his trophies counted for nothing with his increasingly impatient creditors in Cape Town. Surrounded by his giraffe skin, crates of seeds, bulbs and plants, and some three hundred watercolours of flora and fauna, Paterson was now on the brink of being thrown into prison for his debts. Grudgingly, the garrison’s commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Hendrik Prehn, lent him £500 to satisfy his immediate bills so that he could stay out of jail. The scale of his debts, amounting almost to the total £583 expenses Masson had accrued during his three expeditions at the Cape, suggests that Paterson had received little or no financial support from Mary during his entire stay.
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And it was a much chastened and diminished man who greeted William Hickey when he called at the Cape on his return from India in February 1780. Hickey sadly recorded that, ‘Her Ladyship, instead of fulfilling her engagements, suffered his bills to be protested and returned, thereby exposing him to great difficulties’.
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Still penniless and stranded, Paterson was forced to borrow a further £400 from Hickey’s servant, James Adcock, to buy a passage home. Writing Adcock a promissory note, Paterson assured him there was ‘a considerable sum due to him from Lady Strathmore’, a fact Hickey confirmed while approving Paterson as ‘an honest man’. Having stowed his precious cargo of botanical treasures, Paterson sailed from the Cape on 10 March 1780 in a Dutch East Indiaman, the
Held Woltemade
, along with Hickey and his two creditors, Adcock and Prehn.

Arriving at Amsterdam three months later, Paterson’s troubles only intensified. First Prehn demanded repayment with interest, threatening Paterson with a Dutch prison if he could not comply, then Adcock grew nervous over losing his loan should Paterson end up in jail. A ‘greatly agitated and distressed’ Paterson turned to his old friend Hickey for help, lamenting that ‘it is as much out of my power to find money here as it was in Africa’. Remembering happier times on Table Mountain, Hickey came to the rescue, underwriting his servant’s loan and arranging for an English merchant to pay off Prehn. Once back in England, Hickey felt sure, Paterson’s patron would gladly honour her debts.

It was the end of June by the time Paterson arrived back in London to what should have been a triumphant reception. He had brought back several botanical novelties and was bearing the skin of the first giraffe ever to be seen on British shores. He should have been feted by the Royal Society and honoured by fellow naturalists. Instead it was an ignominious homecoming. His bills still unpaid by Bowes, his debt still owing to Adcock and with no income of his own, Paterson was forced to dodge his creditors and live from hand to mouth. At one point, when Adcock bumped into him by chance in the City, Paterson ‘prevaricated and shuffled’ while mumbling reassurances about his future prospects. In the meantime, Hickey agreed to pursue the money due from Mary Eleanor in order to satisfy the increasingly belligerent Adcock whose loan he had underwritten. Hickey’s father called several times at the Grosvenor Square house that summer then wrote a stinging letter to Mary attacking ‘the injustice of her behaviour towards Paterson, a young man of merit whom she had sent to a distant and savage clime to gratify her desire of collecting rare natural productions’ and whom instead of rewarding ‘she had refused to do common justice to’. Hickey’s father was now threatening to sue Mary for breach of contract, especially when his son only narrowly avoided being imprisoned for non-payment of Adcock’s loan.

Keeping his whereabouts secret, the humiliated Paterson was in no position to laud his discoveries to the illustrious Royal Society or bask in the admiration of fellow botanists. There was, therefore, no report detailing Paterson’s achievements or any mention of his travels in the society’s records that year. And while Masson’s Cape collection had been splendidly housed in a new greenhouse at Kew, Paterson’s botanical spoils were casually dispersed in ignoble obscurity. Plainly, Paterson had already sent home a quantity of his discoveries before his return, for in 1779, when the naval physician James Lind called at the Cape on his way to India, he half-heartedly collected only a few plants, ‘Masson and Paterson having sent home everything this place produces in the vegetable way’.
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Probably these specimens had been shipped to Mary, although Paterson was also in touch with Forsyth and Solander while away. Further botanical items were certainly presented to Mary, along with the giraffe skin, soon after Paterson’s return in 1780. Whether Paterson met with his erstwhile patron for this exchange is unknown; if he did, he was probably fobbed off over his money by an ever-charming Bowes.

Despite the restraints on her scientific activities, Mary did manage to send some of Paterson’s Cape seeds to her mother’s home of St Paul’s Walden Bury, where they were planted at some point in 1780, while others were despatched to Gibside for cultivation at a later date. A letter from Mary to Thomas Joplin, the Gibside gardener, in January 1781, asked him to send ‘all the Cape Seeds which were to have been sown in the spring at Gibside’ as she now planned to sow them at St Paul’s Walden Bury, because ‘all those sown there last year throve so remarkably well’.
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Despite her instructions, certain seeds obviously remained at Gibside, for a second letter urged Joplin to inform her ‘if the Cape Seeds ripen, particularly the White Geranium’.

At the same time, a number of dried plants which Paterson had brought back were preserved in a unique cabinet which Mary had commissioned for the purpose.
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Crafted in burr elm and decorated with seven cameos of literary figures, in keeping with Mary’s interest in literature, the cabinet - preserved in the Bowes Museum - incorporates lead reservoirs for carrying water and a retractable shelf for examining specimens. The fragile African specimens carefully placed in its drawers in 1780 would survive until at least 1854, when Mary Bowes, Mary Eleanor’s youngest daughter, sent the cabinet complete with its plants to her nephew, John Bowes. ‘It was built by your Grandmother’s orders,’ she would explain, ‘and some of its Cape plants are still in tolerable preservation.’
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A number of the Cape exotics brought back by Paterson were duly acclaimed as newly discovered species, although fewer than might be expected given the extent of his four expeditions. The horticultural bible of the day, William Aiton’s
Hortus Kewensis
, would describe three:
Mesembryanthemum compactum
(dotted thick-leav’d Fig Marygold),
Hermannia odorata
(sweet-scented Hermannia), and
Lobelia pubescens
(downy-leaved Lobelia). All, according to Aiton, were discovered by Paterson and ‘introduced’ in 1780 ‘by the Countess of Strathmore’.
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Many more, which Paterson either described inexpertly or introduced obscurely, remained to be claimed by future botanists. Probably sold by Paterson in a desperate effort to survive from day to day, they would end up in other collections. Some found their way to James Lee, the kindly nurseryman in Hammersmith; a full fourteen years later he would report excitedly that one, the unpromisingly named giant cudweed, or
Gnaphalium eximium
, had flowered for the first time ‘in great perfection’. The seeds of this ‘most magnificent and shewy of all the species hitherto introduced to this country’ had been discovered, Lee noted, five hundred miles from the Cape by Paterson. It is likely that other seeds, bulbs and cuttings went to William Forsyth at the Chelsea Physic Garden, to William Aiton at Kew and to Solander and Banks. They would have included many of the geraniums, gladioli, mesembryanthemums, euphorbias and ixias that would bring their exuberant colours to English borders and window boxes from the early nineteenth century onwards.

Meanwhile, Mary donated Paterson’s magnificent giraffe skin and bones to her friend John Hunter, quite possibly at the instigation of Bowes in payment for the surgeon’s services so recently rendered.
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Whatever the motive for the gift, Hunter was ecstatic with the addition to his burgeoning anatomical collection. After examining and preserving the bones, and dissecting the ligaments of its neck in an effort to understand its stupendous stature, Hunter had the skin stuffed and placed in the hallway of his Jermyn Street house. With its legs hacked off so that it would fit the hall, the beast sat on its haunches as an unsettling welcome to patients and guests. Eventually moved to Hunter’s purpose-built museum in Leicester Square which would open to public view eight years later, it caused a sensation in the press. ‘Amongst the curiosities of Mr Hunter’s Museum is an animal brought from South America,’ reported an ill-informed
London Evening Post
, ‘called the
Camel Depard
, which, from the report of its size and other circumstances, it was hitherto much doubted by Naturalists whether such an animal did really exist or not.’

It would be many more years before Paterson would achieve the recognition that he deserved. Although on his journey home he had optimistically promised to publish an account of his travels, he was in no position to achieve this goal while living by his wits in a hostile London in 1780. He therefore had little alternative, after Britain declared war on Holland later that year, but to agree to join a British fleet bent on capturing the Cape. Recruited for his extensive knowledge of the south African coastline, most probably on the promise of a commission if he complied, Paterson would guide the British squadron in June 1781 into Saldanha Bay, about eighty miles west of Cape Town, for a surprise attack on the Dutch fleet. With his old friend Gordon, now a colonel in full command of the Cape garrison, caught unawares by the assault, the Dutch lost five merchant ships, including the
Held Woltemade
which had conveyed Paterson homeward the previous year. Hailed as a hero among his army comrades, Paterson’s actions were met with less generosity among the international scientific community. The French ornithologist, François le Vaillant, felt ‘tears trickle down my cheeks’ as he watched his entire natural history collection go up in smoke when one ship was blown up by its captain to protect it from British looters.
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Five years later, when Masson made his second visit to the Cape, he would be peeved to find his movements severely restricted by the Dutch government which now accused Paterson of spying.
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Yet Robert Gordon, who had every reason to feel betrayed by his former travelling companion, seemingly bore no grudge. True to his Scottish roots, he remained pro-British all his life and ultimately killed himself in 1795 after being branded a traitor for allowing British troops to take the Cape without resistance. His widow later gave Paterson three merino sheep.
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Rewarded with his commission a few months after the Cape assault, Paterson was made an ensign in the 98th Regiment and served in India for the next four years. It was only on his return to Britain as a lieutenant in 1785 that he finally began writing the long-promised account of his Cape adventures. Published as
A Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraria
in 1789, with seventeen exuberantly coloured plates of plants and animals, it became the first book in English to describe the Cape interior.
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Dedicated to Joseph Banks, by then president of the Royal Society, the first edition pointedly made no mention of Paterson’s original patron. Yet only a year later, the second ‘corrected’ edition included a generous tribute to the ‘protection and support’ of the ‘Honourable Lady Strathmore’. Conceivably in the interim Paterson had been reconciled to his former patron and maybe even received his long-awaited reward.

Vividly conjuring the triumphs and ordeals of his expeditions, the book went into eight editions in French and one in German. Even then Paterson would have to wait nearly another decade before gaining the acclaim he craved. Promoted to captain and newly married, he was despatched with one of the first transport ships to Sydney and served in Norfolk Island and Tasmania before ultimately being appointed lieutenant-governor of New South Wales. Tirelessly shipping specimens of native flora to his friends back home, including Hunter, Forsyth and Banks, he insisted that natural history ‘is, and ever will be, my favourite study’.
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Yet despite his repeated appeals to Banks, his less than zealous new patron, it would be 1798 before he was finally welcomed into the elite fold of the Royal Society. Having introduced several new species from Australia, which were commemorated with his name, he received the ultimate honour in 1810 when the botanist Robert Brown named an entire genus, a member of the iris family,
Patersonia
after his friend.
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That same year, on his way home to Britain, Paterson died at sea.