Founded as a trading post by merchant-adventurer Job Charnock and the East India Company in 1690, Calcutta grew quickly—it had 120,000 people by 1750—and became the capital of British India in 1772. By the time Robert Fortune sailed up the Hooghly with his Wardian cases of tea, Calcutta was the largest colonial trade center in Asia and a global city, the administrative and commercial center of India, and its cultural and intellectual hub.*
Spread along the eastern bank of the Hooghly, the city was safeguarded by the beefy, irregularly octagonal riverside Fort William and administered by an army of East India Company scribes in the Writers’ Building. Theaters and an opera house (1827) offered cultured entertainment, elite gentlemen’s clubs—the stoutly white Bengal Club (1827) with its dancing-cobra emblem,† even a number of Masonic lodges—provided social status, and the Auckland Hotel (1841) added luxury.‡ A handful of churches preached familiar themes in familiar settings: St. John’s Church (1787), modeled on London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields; the brilliant white St. Andrew’s Kirk (1818), with its black weather vane topped by a crowing cock; and the newly consecrated St. Paul’s Cathedral (1847). The city even had a golf course; founded in 1829, the Royal Calcutta Golf Club was the oldest outside the British Isles. There were, to be sure, also less salubrious ways to pass time. In the 1750s, Robert Clive, the celebrated soldier and first governor of Bengal, called it “one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond concepcion [sic].”11
Fortune’s exact destination, though, lay five miles downriver from the city itself: the Calcutta Botanic Garden.
He was met at the garden’s riverside ghat (steps down to the river) by Dr. Falconer, a heavy-set northern Scot from the coastal village of Forres, with whom Fortune had been corresponding. Anxious to see how the tea had fared, the Wardian cases were unloaded. As Fortune later wrote:
When the cases were opened in Calcutta the young tea-plants were found to be in good condition. The seeds which had been sown between the rows were also just beginning to germinate. These, of course, were left undisturbed, as there was room enough for them to grow; but it was necessary to take other measures with those in the camellia cases. On opening the latter, the whole mass of seeds, from the bottom to the top, was swelling, and germination had just commenced. The camellias, which had now arrived at their destination, were lifted gently out and potted, and appeared as if they had never left their native country. Fourteen new cases were got ready, filled with earth, and these germinating seeds were sown thickly over the surface, and covered with soil in the usual way. In a few days the young plants came sprouting through the soil; every seed seemed to have grown …12
Their journey far from over, the smuggled botanical jewels now had to be quickly taken from tropical Calcutta up to the Company’s gardens in the Himalayas. Within ten days the collection of plants, tools, and Chinese tea makers were ready to move on. Fortune had already been gone for nearly three years by then, but instead of returning home to England and his family, he accompanied the tea and its entourage.
As the monsoon rains were still a few months off, and the Hooghly River too shallow upstream to travel by boat, the group was obliged to take a ship back down to the Bay of Bengal to access the main branch of the Ganges where it flowed into the sea. Under the brutal late-March sun, the ship slid away from Calcutta in the ebb tide, down the Hooghly, and into the tangled tidal fringes and deltaic channels of the Sundarbans, the swampy, intermittently submerged archipelagic maze of mangrove forest that fingers into the sea. Narrow-snooted gharial crocodiles, soft-shelled turtles, and stocky freshwater sharks swam in abundance. From the shoreline or perched in tipsy wooden canoes, bare-chested fishermen cast nets for freshwater eel, catfish, and carp, including the golden mahseer, with its large, thick scales the size of tea saucers. The ship joined the main channel of the Ganges and traveled three hundred miles north to the Rajmahal Hills, then followed the river’s northwest arc to Allahabad, more than five hundred miles farther upstream. In the nineteenth century, thousands of “blind” Ganges River dolphins swam there, foraging in the muddy bed with their long, narrow beaks and large flippers, and Fortune would have seen schools of them rolling on the water and ducking and diving under the surface.
His travelogue, though, mentions none of this, nor of the opium growing along the river valley. While he passed through the main opium-producing belt of British India during the harvesting season and surely saw peasants lancing the plump, pale-green poppy capsules and scraping off the tarry sap with curved knives, the only references to opium in his book were to ruffian addicts he encountered in China—never of the drug’s source. “All the towns on its banks have already been frequently described in accounts of India,” he wrote instead. “I may, therefore, simply state that we passed in succession the large towns of Patna, Dinapoor, Ghazepoor, Benares, and Mirzapoor, and reached Allahabad on the 14th of April.”13
Beyond Allahabad, the Ganges is strewn with shoals and rapids and not navigable by boat, so the entourage had to continue its journey by land. The twenty-eight Wardian cases plus the tea-processing implements filled nine bullock-pulled wagons. Throughout the 450-mile journey, fraught with danger, hardship, and, for the Scot, deep exoticism, he kept to his austere style. “In due time all arrived at their destination in perfect safety,”14 he wrote, with impressive restraint, of the weeks plodding northwest toward the Himalayas as the heat of the plains grew fierce.
The destination was Saharanpur, a former Mughal garden laid out in the mid-eighteenth century in the lower foothills. “When the cases were opened, the tea-plants were found to be in a very healthy state,” Fortune wrote. “No fewer than 12,838 plants were counted in the cases, and many more were germinating. Notwithstanding their long voyage from the north of China, and the frequent transshipment and changes by the way, they seemed as green and vigorous as if they had been all the while growing on the Chinese hills.”15
Between these and the earlier batches, Fortune added, by his own estimation, nearly twenty thousand new tea plants from China into India.16
Having safely delivered his charges—both plants and tea makers—to their new homes, Fortune spent the remainder of the spring and summer touring the government’s infant Himalayan tea plantations. At last, he began his long journey home. The first stage from the mountains to Calcutta took a month, visiting en route “the well-known cities of Delhi and Agra.”17 Fortune arrived in Calcutta at the end of August and stayed with Dr. Falconer at the botanic garden until a mail steamer was ready to depart for England.
“On the 5th of September I had the pleasure of seeing the Victoria regia flower for the first time in India,” he wrote, referring to the giant water lily with leaves that can measure nearly six feet across and bear the weight of a young teenager. “It was growing luxuriantly in one of the ponds in the botanic garden, and no doubt will soon be a great ornament to Indian gardens. It will soon reign as the queen of flowers in every land, and, like our beloved sovereign whose name it bears, the sun will never set on its dominions.”18