The Poisoned Island (46 page)

The constable and the librarian watch the coffin being lowered into the earth. Nearby an ancient English oak waves his branches in the spring breeze, his leaves brushing the head of the vicar. The captain’s widow throws in a handful of earth, and then the little burial party turns away, leaving the gravediggers to complete their work. When they have smoothed out the earth they too leave that place, and only the ancient oak remains to stand guard.

There was no ship called the
Solander
, and Sir Joseph Banks financed no trips to the South Seas at the end of his long and distinguished life, although he maintained an extraordinary network of collectors and gardeners which continued to populate the beds and stoves at Kew well into the second decade of the nineteenth century. The design of the
Solander
is based on the great ships which preceded her—notably the
Endeavour
and the
Bounty
—but she is fictional, as is her crew and mission.

What is more, it is highly unlikely that such a botanizing mission would have been sent to Otaheite in 1812. As I suggest in the book, this was a time of great upheaval on the island, with chieftains battling for supremacy while the titular “king” Pomare II sat it out on the neighboring island of Moorea.

The depiction of Tahiti itself is one part imagination to one part history. Otaheite (as the island was known in England until well into the nineteenth century) held such a grip
on the imaginations of Britons that a clear picture is hard to paint. The fact that Tahiti fell under French imperial sway a couple of decades later means we are left with contemporary accounts of the pre-French “first contact” from the late eighteenth century. Prominent among these is the account of Banks himself, but there are also accounts from missionaries and amateur explorers. Banks is notable for being one of the few Europeans who made an attempt to understand the strange (to European eyes) mysteries of Tahitian culture and religion on their own terms. Others viewed the islanders as savages, albeit savages that they wanted to sleep with. Even those who dubbed the savages “noble” did so on the basis that the islanders were different: alien, exotic, almost not human. What is not in doubt is that the Europeans flooded the place with their own poisons, both physical (dysentery, syphilis) and cultural (alcohol and guns).

There will be those upset by the opening scene of the book. It is of course an imagined scene, but that does not have to mean it is an implausible one. Joseph Banks is one of the great heroes of English science and imperial history. He was a man who contained worlds, who saw the bonds between scientists as being at least as strong as the bonds between countrymen, a friend of the King and an architect of Empire. But he was also a man of enormous appetites whose accounts of his sexual activities on Tahiti shocked England for a generation or more, and to whom gossips attached countless tales of spurned women and expensive courtesans. Banks’s account of his adventures on Tahiti is like a message from another world, a world which preceded modern morality, in which license and licentiousness spawned both the astonishing gluttony of the Prince Regent and, within a few years, the public morality of the Victorians.

The Banks project in Kew is drawn from history. Sir Joseph did indeed use Kew as a horticultural engine of Empire, and believed strongly that nations would gain power by gaining mastery over plants. He was not alone in thinking this; it was something of an Enlightenment view, shared equally by Carl Linnaeus and Thomas Jefferson. The story of Sir Joseph’s quest for a cure for the King’s illness is entirely my invention. However, there can be little doubt that the man would have moved mountains if beneath them he might have found a curative for George III’s demons.

The book is set during a period which stands at the end of a hundred years of enormous advances in botanical understanding. Reproduction, respiration, classification, photosynthesis, inheritance, the development of species over time—all our modern understanding of these concepts arrived in a rush, fully or part-formed, at the end of the eighteenth century. Robert Brown himself occupies a distinguished place in the pantheon of the great botanists, alongside John Ray, Carl Linnaeus, the de Jussieux and Adanson. However, at the time in which my story is set his reputation was yet to soar, in England at least (his
Prodromus
on his New Holland botanizing was widely admired in France) and his discoveries of the inner worlds of cells were still some years away. His analysis and description of the breadfruit (
Artocarpus incisa
in 1812,
Artocarpus altilis
today) is, I hope, appropriate for a skilled botanist at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Needless to say, the breadfruit tree described within does not exist in nature. If anyone knows of a tree with the qualities described here, I suggest they contact their nearest botanical garden immediately.

Lastly, the story of Aaron Graham’s defense of Peter Heywood against the charge of mutiny is true. It is also true
that Heywood had a “wife” on Tahiti who was left behind when Heywood was brought back to England to face charges, though his son is my invention. Henry Nott was indeed the senior missionary on Tahiti at this period; again, his adoption of a son is fictional.

For more on the core characters of
The Poisoned Island
—Horton, Harriott, and Graham—please see the notes to the novel which precedes this one,
The English Monster
.

The poem by Peter Heywood at the start of Chapter Five is from “Correspondence of Miss Nessy Heywood,” E5. H5078, the Newberry Library, Chicago. I found it in Caroline Alexander’s excellent
The Bounty
(Harper Perennial). Sources for the other quotations used in the book are provided within.

I came across the “Hindostanee Coffee House” and Dean Mahomet for the first time on
http://www.georgianlondon.com
, an excellent blog maintained by the historian Lucy Inglis.

My thanks to the staff of the Kew Gardens library and herbarium; the staff of the London Library; my editors at Simon & Schuster, Jessica Leeke and Mike Jones, who by their efforts made this book much better than when they found it; my agent, Jim Gill; my friends Dan Dickens and Josie Johns, who read the manuscript and made wise suggestions; my wife, Louise; and the two people to whom this book is dedicated, my amazing children, Jack and Lily.

Also by Lloyd Shepherd

The English Monster