A Perfect Red by Greenfield Amy Butler

Author:Greenfield, Amy Butler [Greenfield, Amy Butler]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780061980893
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2008-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Anderson’s Incredible Folly

WITH THIERY DE MENONVILLE’S demise, the French attempt to obtain cochineal collapsed. Yet Thiery’s quixotic quest was not entirely in vain. After his return from Mexico, he had written an account of his travels, and he later compiled a treatise on the care of cochineal, including much hard-won knowledge from his struggle to establish the insect on Saint-Domingue. In 1787, Thiery’s colleagues and friends gathered these papers and published them. The resulting book, Traité de la culture du nopal et de l’éducation de la cochenille, was soon reprinted in Paris.

No doubt Thiery’s colleagues hoped that the book would inspire other Frenchmen to imitate their friend’s daring. Events, however, conspired against them. By the time Thiery’s Traité was published, France was teetering on the brink of a cataclysmic revolution. Imperial wars and French support for American independence had emptied government coffers; not a sou could be spared for another expedition to Mexico. Instead, to the consternation of patriotic Frenchmen everywhere, the first nation to put Thiery’s treatise to use was France’s archenemy: Great Britain.

In the late eighteenth century, as Old Regime France was crumbling, Great Britain was going from strength to strength. Its capital, London, was home to about 700,000 people, making it the largest city in Europe. Expanding British factories exported textiles, cutlery, and weapons around the globe. The British navy was widely conceded to be the world’s best, and the British Crown was well on its way to acquiring the empire upon which the sun famously never set. True, Britain had recently lost thirteen colonies to the American rebels, but its remaining possessions were still substantial. Besides controlling Canada and a fair number of Caribbean islands, the British Crown ruled over parts of India through a dual-control arrangement with the British East India Company. Soon Britain would lay claim to Australia and New Zealand as well.

Having surpassed the French in the sheer extent of their imperial mandate, Britons also intended to outdo them in making use of the fruits of empire. By the 1780s, inspired by French exploits, British scientists, entrepreneurs, and politicians were dreaming up ever more ambitious schemes to obtain commercially valuable plants and establish them in suitable locations throughout their empire.

Of all these dreamers, the most ambitious was Joseph Banks, a gentleman of independent fortune from Lincolnshire (see fig. 13). Born in 1743, he was rich, well connected, and possessed of an energy that few could match. Having been instructed in botany by one of Linnaeus’s prize pupils, he traveled as a scientific observer on the HMS Endeavor, as part of Captain James Cook’s South Seas voyage of 1768–71. Banks returned with a wealth of astonishing finds: he had collected over thirty thousand exotic plant and animal specimens, including representatives of more than a thousand species unknown to European science. These specimens, combined with his dramatic stories of kangaroos, shipwrecks, and island romances, made him famous—more famous, many said, than Captain Cook himself.

As a result of his rising reputation, Banks came to the attention of Britain’s king, George III, who enjoyed discussing issues of agricultural improvement with him.

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