He left Peru in early 1785, carrying not only notes, an extensive herbarium, and samples of bark packed in linen, but also bare root cuttings and some ten thousand cinchona roja seeds. He brought home some capsicum varieties, too, as well as some nasturtiums and a few rare fuchsias. But the real prize was the cache of seeds. Henry had waited two years for those seeds to emerge, waiting for his best trees to put out blossoms untouched by frost. He’d dried the seeds in the sun for a month, turning them every two hours to keep them from growing mold, and had wrapped them in linen at night to protect them from dew. He knew that seeds rarely survived ocean voyages (even Banks had failed at carrying seeds home successfully from his travels with Captain Cook), so Henry decided to experiment with three different packing techniques. He packed some of the seeds in sand, embedded others in wax, and kept the rest loose in dried moss. All were stuffed in ox bladders to keep them dry, and then wrapped in alpaca wool to hide them.
The Spanish still held the monopoly on cinchona, so Henry was now officially a smuggler. As such, he avoided the busy Pacific coast and traveled east, overland across South America, carrying a passport that identified him as a French textile merchant. He and his mules and his ex-slaves and his unhappy Indians took the thieves’ route—from Loxa to the river Zamora, to the Amazon, to the Atlantic coast. From there he sailed to Havana, then to Cadiz, then home to England. The return voyage took a year and a half in total. He encountered no pirates, no noteworthy storms, no debilitating illness. He lost no specimens. It wasn’t that difficult.
Sir Joseph Banks, he thought, would be pleased.
But Sir Joseph Banks was not pleased, when Henry met up with him again, back in the comforts of 32 Soho Square. Banks was merely older and sicker and more distracted than ever. His gout was tormenting him terribly, and he was struggling with scientific questions of his own design, which he considered important to the future of the British Empire.
Banks was trying to find a way to end England’s dependence on foreign cotton, and had thereby dispatched plantsmen to the British West Indies, who were working—unsuccessfully, thus far—on growing cotton there. He was also trying, also unsuccessfully, to break the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade by growing nutmeg and cloves at Kew. He had a proposal before the king to turn Australia into a penal colony (this was a mere hobby idea of his), but nobody as yet was listening. He was working to build a forty-foot-tall telescope for the astronomer William Herschel, who was desirous of discovering new comets and planets. But most of all, Banks wanted balloons. The French had balloons. The French had been experimenting with lighter-than-air gases, and were sending up manned flights in Paris. The English were falling behind! For the sake of science and national security, by God, the British Empire needed balloons.
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!