Meat bones were another much prized composting ingredient: bones retrieved from the provisions’ barrels were broken up with hammers and then added to the compost. Paulette had never imagined that animal bones could be used in this way, but Fitcher assured her that this was a common practice in London where butchers made good money by selling the by-products of their trade to farmers – not just bones, but also hair and horns. Even bone dust and bone shavings could be sold for a price; boiled down and powdered, they were turned into cakes that were rich in lime, phospates and magnesia.
Nor were fish and fish-bones exempted from these uses. Two or three fishing lines were always trailing behind the brig; when a catch turned up and was large enough to be eaten Fitcher would part with it only on condition that it was carefully filleted so that the head, tail and bones could be composted; when the fish were too small to eat, he would slip them whole into the potting soil. In Cornwall, he said, refuse pilchards were considered excellent manure and were often ploughed whole into the earth.
One day a small plump porpoise was found entangled in the Redruth’s fishing lines. It was still breathing when it was hauled up and Paulette would have liked to set it free, but Fitcher wouldn’t hear of it – he had read somewhere that Lord Somerville had used blubber to very good effect at his farm in Surrey. He was delighted to see the creature on the Redruth’s deck ‘threshing about like a pilcher in a pan-crock’. To Paulette’s dismay the porpoise was quickly slaughtered and stripped of its fat, which was put into a special barrel to decompose.
The only substances which Fitcher had voluntarily debarred from use were what he referred to – at least in Paulette’s presence – as ‘excrementations’. But this was merely a necessity, imposed upon him by the prejudices of the crew; he admitted unhesitatingly that for his own part he would gladly have made use of them. The value of liquid excrementations, he said, had been amply proven by chemists, who had demonstrated that all urine, human and animal, contained the essential elements of vegetables in a state of solution. As for the other kind, well, not for nothing was it said in Cornwall that old Fitcher Penrose ‘was so near with his pennies that he’d skin a turd for its tallow’ – he wasn’t ashamed to admit that he himself had pioneered the use of night-soil as manure in Britain. This was one of several Chinese horticultural methods that was new to him.
‘Indeed, sir? Was there much else?’
‘So there was,’ said Fitcher. ‘Dwarfing for example – they’re right aptycocks at that. And greenhouses. Had them for centuries, and clever little vangs they are too, made of paper and wood. Then there’s air-layering.’
Paulette had never heard of this. ‘Pray sir, what is that?’
‘It’s when ee makes a graft directly on to a branch…’
This, said Fitcher, was a Chinese gardening method that he had popularized in Britain with great profit to himself: ducking into his cabin, he emerged with a piece of equipment that he had designed and marketed as the ‘Penrose Propagation Pot’. It was about the size of a watering-can, except that it had a slit down the side to accommodate a tree-shoot. Facing the slit was a small hoop with which the pot could be affixed to a branch: it was the perfect implement for allowing a shoot to develop roots without planting it in the earth.
‘Wouldn’t never have thought of it if I hadn’t of see’d it in China.’
These stories amazed Paulette. Fitcher was so unlike the plant collectors of her imagination, so peculiar in his appearance and mannerisms, that it was hard to imagine him as an intrepid traveller. But Paulette knew, from her father’s accounts, that even Humboldt, the greatest collector of all, was utterly unlike his legend – stout, dapper, and so much the boulevardier that people who sought him out often thought they had encountered an impostor. Not that Fitcher was an explorer of the same ilk – but the Redruth’s assemblage of plants and equipment was ample proof of his seriousness, his competence, and indeed, his passion.
‘Pray sir,’ she said one day, ‘may I ask what it was that first took you to China?’
‘That ee may,’ said Fitcher, with a twitch of his eyebrows. ‘And I’ll answer as best I can. It came about while I was sailing for a living, on a Cornish fruit-schooner…’
One summer, when the schooner was in London for a few days, it came to Fitcher’s ears that a certain Gent had made it known that he was looking for sailors who had some experience of dealing with plants. On making further inquiries, he was astonished to learn that the man in question was none other than Sir Joseph Banks, the Curator of the King’s Garden at Kew.
‘Sir Joseph Banks?’ cried Paulette. ‘Why sir, do you mean he who first described the flora of Australia?’
‘Exactly.’
Fitcher had not neglected his scientific interests during his years at sea: the leisure hours that other sailors spent in smoking, gossiping and catchum-killala, he had devoted to reading and self-instruction. He did not need to be told that Sir Joseph had served as the naturalist for Captain Cook’s first voyage, or that he was the President of the Royal Society, from which post he reigned unchallenged over a veritable empire of scientific institutions.
Such indeed was Fitcher’s awe of the Curator that his first encounter with him got off to an unfortunate start. Sir Joseph was as grand a gent as ever he had set eyes on, dressed to death, from the powdered curls of his wig to the polished heel of his shoe. On being shown into his presence, Fitcher became acutely aware of the shortcomings of his own appearance: the patches on his jacket seemed suddenly to become more visible, as did the attack of acne that had caused his shipmates to compare his face to a pot of bubbling skillygale. He was at the best of times a shy man, and in moments of awkwardness his tongue grew so heavy that even his siblings had been known to joke that he could say neither bee nor baw without sounding awful broad.
But Fitcher need not have worried. Sir Joseph guessed immediately that he was from Cornwall and proceeded to ask a couple of questions about Cornish flora – the first was about the ‘bladder-seed’ plant, and the second about the flower called the ‘coral necklace’ – and Fitcher was able to describe and identify both of them correctly.
This was enough to satisfy the Curator, who rose from his seat and began to pace the floor. Then suddenly he came to a stop and said he was looking for someone to go to China – a sailor with some horticultural experience. ‘Do you think you might be the man?’
Fitcher, ever stolid, scratched his head and mumbled: ‘It hangs on the pay and the purpose, sir. Can’t say nothing till I know a little more.’
‘All right then: listen…’
It was well known, said Sir Joseph, that the gardens at Kew possessed sizeable collections of plants from some of the remotest corners of the earth. But there was one region which was but poorly represented there, and this was China – a country singularly blessed in its botanical riches, being endowed not only with some of the most beautiful and medicinally useful plants in existence, but also with many that were of immense commercial value. Just one such, Camellia sinensis – the species of camellia from which tea was plucked – accounted for an enormous proportion of the world’s trade and one-tenth of England’s revenues.
The value of China’s plants had not been lost on Britain’s rivals and enemies across the Channel: the major physick gardens and herbariums of both Holland and France had also been endeavouring to assemble collections of Chinese flora – and for considerably longer than Britain – but they too had not had much success. The reasons for the lack of progress were not hard to fathom and the most important of them, without a doubt, was the peculiar obduracy of the Chinese people. Unlike the inhabitants of other botanically blessed countries, the Celestials seemed to have a keen appreciation of the value of their natural endowments. Their gardeners and horticulturists were among the most knowledgeable and skilful in the world, and they guarded their treasures with extraordinary vigilance: the toys and trinkets that satisfied natives elsewhere had no effect on them; even lavish bribes could not persuade them to yield their riches. Europeans had been trying for years to obtain viable specimens of the tea plant, offering rewards that would have sufficed to buy all the camels in Araby – but the quest remained still unrewarded.
A further difficulty was the fact that Europeans were not permitted into the country’s interior and were thus unable to wander about, helping themselves to whatever they chose, as they were accustomed to doing elsewhere: in China they were confined to two cities, Canton and Macau, where they were closely watched by the authorities.
Despite these obstacles, the major powers had not slackened in their efforts to obtain China’s most valuable trees and plants. Britain was not without advantages in this race even though some of her rivals had the benefit of an earlier start: the Hon’ble East India Company’s establishment in Canton was larger than any other, and in order to profit from the British presence, he, Joseph Banks, had persuaded some of the Company’s more scientifically- minded agents to assemble collections as best they could. This they had proceeded to do, and not without some modest success – but only to have their efforts confounded by yet another problem: it had proved damnably difficult to transport the plants from China to England. The vagaries of the weather, the seepage of salt water, and the many changes of climate were not the only dangers they had to contend with – a yet greater threat was the
