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In May 1787, Banks received a letter from India that amazed and excited him. It was from James Anderson, Physician General to the East India Company’s establishment in Madras. It told of a remarkable discovery he had made, which could substantially impact Britain’s trade with the rest of the world.

This is the first surviving letter from Anderson to Banks, but it is unlikely it was the first he sent, as it is entirely lacking the rather formal protocols used in introductory letters at that time. It is likely that someone else in Madras had previously introduced them.

Banks was already acquainted with most of the important European naturalists based on India’s Coromandel Coast, many of whom were sending him plant specimens. There was a flourishing natural-history network in the area, but the most likely candidate for making the connection was Johan Gerhard Koenig, who had become very close to Banks.

Koenig was born in what is now Latvia to German parents and trained as an apothecary in Riga. In 1748, at the age of twenty, he went to Denmark where he worked in several provincial pharmacies.[1] Though he learned something about plants during the time he studied materia medica in Riga, his serious education in botany began when he attended university in Uppsala during the years 1757–9, where he became a student of the already famous Carl Linnaeus. It was here that Koenig met and befriended Daniel Solander who had himself come under the spell of Linnaeus shortly after he had enrolled as a student in the university in Uppsala in 1750.[2]

In 1759, Koenig returned to Copenhagen where he took up an appointment as a hospital pharmacist.[3] Soon his career blossomed: he went on two botanical expeditions, the one to Iceland in 1764 being especially important; and he also obtained a medical degree.[4] No sooner had he earned his medical credentials in 1767, than Koenig’s life took another and dramatic turn when he was appointed to be the next doctor and botanical collector for the Lutheran Danish-Halle mission station based in Tranquebar, on the Coromandel Coast, nearly 300 kilometres south of Madras, where he arrived in early July 1768. The Danish East India Company was established there in 1620 and continued, though now trading under the name of the Asiatic Company, to use the town as its base. The missionaries, mostly Germans from Halle an der Saale, first arrived in Tranquebar in 1706, under the patronage of Frederick IV, the King of Denmark and Norway.[5]

Though the Tranquebar mission valued natural history very highly, Koenig didn’t get along with the missionaries: he found them too controlling and restrictive – for example, he was not allowed to send specimens anywhere other than Copenhagen.[6] Also, his salary was too low for him to travel much beyond Tranquebar and this obviously affected the range and quality of his botanical collections.

It seemed he was trapped but in 1774, and probably through the intervention of the Linnaean-minded community of naturalists in Copenhagen, he was able to leave Tranquebar and travel to Madras, the headquarters of the British East India Company on this stretch of the southeastern coast.

Madras was the Company’s second trading post in India and in 1640, with the building of Fort St George, it became an increasingly powerful commercial and political force in the region.[7] When Koenig arrived there he found that there were several British residents and visitors interested in natural history, among them Lady Anne Monson, who knew Solander and who we’ve already heard of when she met another one of Linnaeus’s students, Carl Peter Thunberg, at the Cape on her way to India.[8] At that time, Koenig could not have chosen a better place to pursue his interests in Indian botany.

One of the first things Koenig did, once free of the restrictions of the mission station, was to write a letter to Solander in which he included a sample of seeds he had collected between Tranquebar and Madras. Koenig had previously written to Solander without any botanical enclosures. Now he promised Solander that he could expect ‘beautiful and better examples’ in the future.[9]

In 1774, Solander, after returning from the voyage to Iceland with Banks, resumed his duties as the ‘Keeper of Natural and Artificial Productions’ at the British Museum. He was also busily working with Banks cataloguing the Endeavour’s natural-history collection and looking after his herbarium.[10] Koenig’s seeds would find their home in this collection.

In this same letter in which he promised seeds, Koenig made it known that he wanted help from Solander and Banks in getting him an appointment with the East India Company and, in return, he offered his services to the two men – ‘the approval of the Professor and Mr. Banks is desired and for this I offer my most beseeching prayers, and to gain this will be my chief effort.’[11]

In fact, Koenig did not go to work for the East India Company, but instead, in February 1775, the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the local Indian ruler who had a strong interest in natural history and who had already had a European as his personal physician, offered Koenig a job as a naturalist.[12]

Though he was freer to pursue his interests than he had been with the Tranquebarians, Koenig was financially no better off working for the Nawab, because it seems that the latter was in very serious debt to his creditors in the East India Company and could hardly manage to pay his naturalist at all. Koenig was naturally desperate to leave this situation, and the Nawab discharged Koenig from his employ at the end of 1777.[13] Relying entirely on the good will of friends and contacts back in England, Koenig continued collecting, but time was running out. In July 1778, he wrote to the East India Company begging them to hire him as their naturalist; or, as he put it, their ‘Natural Historian’ with a view to ‘compile a Natural History of this Country’ on Linnaean principles.[14]

Koenig’s appeal was successful. It was the first time that the East India Company had hired a naturalist. Probably, unknown to Koenig, on the other side of the world, Banks, just recently elected President of the Royal Society, recommended his appointment.[15]

Koenig now had financial security and, even better, the opportunity to travel. Over the next few years, he visited present-day Thailand, the Spice Islands, Sri Lanka, Calcutta and Tranquebar. Throughout this whole period, he collected plant specimens and sent them to his many correspondents in Europe, particularly Solander and Banks.[16]

In early 1785, Koenig was transferred to Calcutta, the main site of the East India Company’s interests in Bengal, a major upward step in his career, but while collecting his possessions from Tranquebar and Madras to take to his new destination, he began feeling unwell and, on 26 June, he died from dysentery in Kakinada, between Madras and Calcutta. On 6 June, knowing he was dying, Koenig drew up his will: he bequeathed all his papers and specimens to Banks.[17]

Koenig had been a key person in Banks’s botanical world, the first to send him specimens from India, but there were others in Banks’s inner circle of naturalists. One of these was Patrick Russell who had spent more than twenty years in Aleppo, mostly working for the Levant Company as its physician.[18] Bringing with him a large consignment of specimens from Syria, Russell arrived in London sometime after 1772 and soon after became acquainted with both Solander and Banks, who studied his collection with great interest. Early in 1782, Russell headed for India and in August, he arrived in Vizagapatam, north of Madras, accompanying his younger brother who had been appointed to the East India Company as a chief administrator. Earlier in June of the same year, as they were making their way up the coast of India, Russell had met Koenig in Tranquebar and they immediately became fast friends.[19] Not long after Koenig’s death, Russell was offered and accepted the post of Company Naturalist in his place.[20]

Another naturalist was William Roxburgh. Born in 1751, Roxburgh had studied medicine and botany in Edinburgh.[21] His medical career began on East India Company ships but in early January 1776 he decided on a different path. After several months of travel, he arrived in Madras and at the end of May 1776, he was appointed assistant surgeon at Fort St George. At some point after this, certainly before early 1779, Roxburgh met Koenig in Madras and they, too, became close, closer even than Russell and Koenig.[22] Through Koenig, Roxburgh came indirectly under the influence of Linnaeus and he and Koenig botanised together whenever they could over the next few years. In fact, it was while visiting Roxburgh that Koenig died.

It is very likely that Koenig introduced Roxburgh to Banks for it was Banks who wrote to Roxburgh first asking him to collect plant specimens for him.[23] This letter initiated a long correspondence between Banks and Roxburgh which lasted almost thirty years, during which time Roxburgh kept Banks fully informed of the increasing European knowledge of Indian botany.

When, in July 1778, Koenig petitioned the Madras Council of the East India Company to appoint him as their first naturalist, he referred them to the two surgeons, Gilbert Pasley and James Anderson, of the Madras Medical Board, who ‘from their own extensive knowledge are able to form a proper Judgement of my capacity’.[24]

Anderson was the junior of the two men. Born in Long Hermiston, Scotland, in 1738 and educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Anderson, like so many other Scots, began his medical career serving on East India Company ships. He arrived in Madras in 1765 where he joined the Madras Medical Board as the Company’s assistant surgeon.[25] He rose through the ranks and at the time of Koenig’s petition he was in the post of Surgeon General.[26] He had also just begun work on a botanical garden on a piece of waste land that the Company had granted him.[27]

Anderson’s career continued to blossom, and in April 1786 he reached the highest rank, that of Physician General. In the same year, on 3 December, he wrote to Joseph Banks from Madras, the letter which Banks received in May 1778, the receipt of which we learned of at the beginning of the chapter.[28]

Anderson was reporting that he had found cochineal insects attached to a grass which, in this part of India, was fed to horses. He had examined the insect with the help of a magnifying glass and it was consistent with its description in the scientific literature: Anderson was referring to the publications of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, famous for his development of the microscope and the first to investigate the structure of the insect using the instrument; to Hans Sloane and the Abbé Guillaume Raynal, both of whom had written on cochineal; and especially to René Antoine de Réaumur, whose magisterial, encyclopaedic natural history of insects contained a definitive account of cochineal.[29]

Anderson claimed that he had observed the insects and noted that ‘multitudes of the young are daily issuing forth of a red colour with six legs and two Antennae: some have wings and are said to be males’: and that he had ‘macerated them in water and spirits of Wine, and find it communicates to both a colour equal to the Cochineal of Mexico’.

Banks may not have been particularly interested in cochineal at that time but he would have instantly recognised the importance of Anderson’s find.

Cochineal is a scale insect which, when crushed and treated, produces a brilliant red liquid. It had been used in Mexico and Peru as a dyestuff for almost two thousand years.[30] It first arrived in Spain in the 1520s as a consequence of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and by the end of the sixteenth century it was the most sought-after red dyestuff in Europe.[31] Producing a startlingly beautiful and vibrant colour never seen before, cochineal was worth its weight in gold and anyone who knew anything about it knew its value.[32]

Anderson impressed Banks even more when he revealed that not only had he planted a small piece of ground with the grass but that he had set out ‘1000 Opuntia Plants for the purpose of cultivating them in the Mexico way’.

This was an important point because it was well known, especially from Réaumur’s extensive discussion of it, that in Mexico the female cochineal insect, which produced the red dye, fed and lived its entire life on a variety of Opuntia, a genus in the cactus family and commonly called prickly pear or nopal.[33] Réaumur wrote about how the Mexicans had domesticated the cochineal insect and were harvesting them from the nopal (cactus) plants which were grown in plantations, called nopalries. The work was intensive and strictly regulated by the seasons. The resulting dye was far superior to and more intense than the one derived from wild cochineal.[34]

Anderson ended his letter to Banks by saying that he would be sending him a sample of the dyestuff he derived from the insects. He feared that the sample he had sent was too damp and that he would take more care in drying the dyestuff in future.[35]

Anderson admitted that this was not going to be easy. He was not certain that what he had been calling cochineal was what Linnaeus had described – looking at it under the microscope, he was inclined to give the insect a new name – and the dyestuff was not so blood-red as he had hoped. Added to that, the cactus that grew in this part of India was much spinier than the one in Mexico: he was not sure he would be able to induce enough insects to live on it?

Banks received the first two of Anderson’s letters sometime in May 1787 and replied to him, agreeing with his main points.[36] The insect was probably not cochineal but another species, so far undescribed in European sources; and it did not give a very good red. It was more like the dye that came from a scale insect species called Polish cochineal, which was now little used. Banks tried out the dye himself and concluded it did not give a good colour, and the results from two professional scarlet dyers, whom he had asked to test it, were so poor that he thought Anderson should abandon the whole project.

However, as Banks put it: ‘Every evil in life has its accompanying benefit.’ Had Anderson not brought the subject of the cochineal to his attention, he admitted, it would never have occurred to him that there was a real opportunity to break the Spanish monopoly on cochineal. India, he argued, had a climate in which the Mexican cochineal could survive, in which spikeless cactus could be cultivated, and an abundant enough labour force to make a success of the project. Banks was certain that the price of Indian cochineal would undercut Spanish sources and, by extension, make Britain if not self-sufficient then at least less dependent on Spain.[37] Anderson would be the perfect person to put the plan into action. ‘If I find the great men at the India House inclined to hear reason on the subject, I shall not fail to propose it to them before the next ships sail,’ Banks wrote.

Before 1785, Banks does not appear to have had any direct contact with the East India Company, despite knowing several of the naturalists associated with it. This changed in April 1785 when Banks received a letter from Thomas Morton, the Secretary to the Court of Directors of the Company, asking him to look over a sample of Chinese hemp that had come his way and to distribute it to those most qualified to judge its properties, in the hope that it might, in future, be grown in Britain.[38] Though nothing much came of this, it did signal that, in the wake of the loss of the American colonies following the War of Independence (1776–83), the East India Company and the government were looking for alternative and more secure sources of raw materials. This entailed the use of naturalists to make proper scientific assessment of the natural resources available.[39]

Banks now found himself being consulted by the Company on several issues and becoming friendly with its leading figures, and those in the government closely involved in its policies: men such as Sir George Yonge, the Secretary for War, Henry Dundas, the chief figure on the government’s Board of Control (which sought to impose restrictions on the Company’s expansionary territorial tendencies); and the Directors of the Company.[40] Banks was consulted, for example, on the plans to begin a Company botanic garden in Calcutta; and on the introduction of tea to India.[41] So when Banks told Anderson that he would share his ideas with the Company, he knew that he would receive a sympathetic hearing.

In 1787 a remarkable book published on the French island of St Domingue (now Haiti) told the story of Thiery de Menonville’s daring journey in 1777 to Oaxaca in central Mexico where he procured a quantity of domesticated cochineals and their nopal habitat, and successfully brought back both the insect and the plant to the island.[42] It was no secret that the local people of Oaxaca and the surrounding area were cultivating cochineal and nopals on a large scale – in the first volume of his major work, A Voyage to the Islands …, 1707, Hans Sloane had a full-size engraving of a Oaxacan nopalry.[43]

Banks had a copy of de Menonville’s book in his library and studied its contents very closely.[44] It wasn’t so much de Menonville’s travel narrative that would have caught his attention but his meticulous description, in the second volume of the book, on how to rear cochineal and cultivate nopal. It was the first published account of the details of cultivation of both insect and plant and, importantly, it was based on first-hand observation rather than hearsay.[45] So taken was Banks by the book that he shared it with Thomas Morton at the East India Company.[46] Anderson also had a copy of it in Madras.[47]

William Petrie, who worked for the East India Company in Madras and who had established the Company’s first observatory there, was in Madras when Anderson began writing to Banks. In a letter to Banks, mostly concerned with the natural history of snakes, Petrie informed Banks that he knew Anderson was working on a cochineal project and added a few words about his character: ‘His application is intense,’ he wrote, ‘Sparing neither fatigue of the Body or Mind, & a perseverance which no difficulties can check. In addition to this, he is a man of great humanity.’[48] Banks had never met Anderson but Petrie’s description of him was certainly borne out by the intensive correspondence reaching Soho Square from Madras. Over a period of thirteen months Banks received more than one long letter per month from Anderson on the subject of cochineal.

However, Petrie’s letter revealed something that Banks found extremely disturbing. Anderson, Petrie remarked, had published the first six letters he had written to Banks in the Madras Courier, the town’s first newspaper, which had only begun publication two years earlier – and the same letters were promptly republished by the Company’s own press – and Anderson had continued sending his letters to the press until fourteen letters were published by early 1788.[49]

Banks was furious. The last thing he wanted was publicity for the project – he’d hoped to keep it secret from the Spanish and the Mexicans in particular. As soon as he learned that the letters had been published, Banks stopped writing to Anderson: ‘I persevered in declining to answer your letters during the time you were printing your Correspondence … from a firm persuasion that no benefit could accrue, either to the company or to you, from that undertaking’, Banks wrote.[50] That was a polite way of putting his displeasure. Anderson, despite Banks’s objection, continued to make public what Banks thought should be kept secret. When, on one occasion, Banks learned that Anderson had printed a set of instructions based on Banks’s advice, he was beside himself with anger.[51] To Thomas Morton at the East India Company in London, with whom he had by now become well acquainted, Banks referred to Anderson’s ‘incredible imprudence’ and to him being ‘actuated by a degree of absurdity wholly above comprehension’.[52]

Banks not only stopped writing to Anderson but, more importantly, stopped working with him on the cochineal project, bypassing him and dealing directly with the East India Company instead. Anderson was not deterred by Banks’s decision and continued to work on his nopalry, which was being supervised by Dr Andrew Berry, his nephew.[53] As Petrie had observed, Anderson was tireless and he did get some yield of cochineal which was shipped back to England.[54] The quantities were modest but the real problem was that the Madras dye was less effective than the one from Oaxaca.[55]

Anderson seems not to have concerned himself too much about which species of insect produced the red dye; nor whether wild varieties of cochineal were inferior to the domesticated ones in the quality of the dye they produced. Banks, however, was bothered by this. Without the real cochineal being raised in India there would be no chance of undercutting the Spanish. Banks knew it had been domesticated in Oaxaca but could this be reproduced elsewhere? He embraced the texts that consistently spoke about the superiority of the domesticated cochineal; and he interrogated every text he could lay his hands on which included observations of dye-producing scale insects, concluding, finally, that these were all wild varieties.[56] Oaxaca was the only certain source of the real domesticated cochineal.

During the first wave of an interest in cochineal in 1788, Banks did what he could to help the East India Company develop a cochineal industry. One of the first things he did was to send samples of Mexican cactus from Kew to the Calcutta Botanic Garden where they were successfully cultivated and from where they were successfully distributed to other parts of India.[57] At the same time and inspired by the epic story of de Menonville’s travels to and from Oaxaca, he suggested that the Company should send someone to Mexico to get the real cochineal. Banks even found someone who was prepared to do this. At the time, however, the Company was not interested in spending money on this venture and when they learned that the wild cochineal and the cactus were plentiful and there for the taking in Rio de Janeiro, they decided to follow that route.[58] Though Banks disagreed with them he continued to advise them and produced instructions for managing the insects and plants on a long sea voyage.[59]

The idea of a direct ‘procurement’ surfaced again in the Court of Directors in 1790 and Banks, again, reiterated his original plan.[60] Banks reminded them that when this issue was last raised, he had found someone living on the Gulf of Honduras who would be prepared to undertake the risky venture. His brief was to get the cochineal and the cactus and deliver them to England for which he was to receive the sum of £1000 (near £100,000 in today’s value). Banks would ask this person to accompany the precious cargo together with some local people who knew how to cultivate the insect and plant and could be induced to settle in India. Banks added that he would take care of all the details concerning the transport and care of the insect and plant.

Nothing happened. Banks was frustrated.[61] Then, in mid 1792, Francis Baring, the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, head of Baring and Co., one of the most important banking concerns in the world, and a man who knew a bit about cochineal, got in touch with Banks about reviving the idea of sending someone to Oaxaca once again.[62] Banks indicated that he was not willing to put any more effort into this scheme – ‘[I] Cannot but seriously Lament the time [I have] spent in Promoting it – unless the Company could guarantee that this time they were serious.’[63]

Baring’s reply offered Banks the guarantee he sought but then towards the end of his letter he raised the old topic of getting wild cochineal from Brazil. Banks was clearly upset and irritated. ‘I have reported against Sylvester being brought from Brasil,’ he noted in exasperation and in his own hand at the end of Baring’s letter.[64] Six weeks later, Baring and several of his directors finally got Banks’s point about going to Oaxaca, doubled the premium to £2000 and told Banks that he should go ahead with his plan.[65]

Banks did not at first warm to the idea but soon changed his mind – ‘it is a Favorite Plan of Mine,’ he admitted.[66] Two years had, however, been wasted since he last pursued this and he was ‘ignorant whether or not the Person on whom I meant to rely for the first attempt towards putting it into Execution is still alive or if he is Whether he still resides as he did’.[67]

The person Banks had in mind was James Bartlet. Banks had heard from Bartlet when he wrote from Honduras on 21 July 1791, telling Banks that a botanical tour of the area would prove very rewarding.[68] Bartlet was the brother of Alexander Bartlet who, in company with two others, ran a trading company between London and the West Indies and owned plantations on several islands.[69]

On 14 January 1793, Banks wrote to Bartlet. He could not hide his irritation at the Company’s neglect of his plan to supply India with the true cochineal – four years in the making, he remarked – but the main thrust of the letter was to assure him that the East India Company now meant business and that the original plan stood. Banks noted that ‘a Frenchman’ [de Menonville] had proved that both the cochineal and the nopal tolerated a sea voyage well but that, in any case, once the cargo arrived in London, Banks would put the cochineal in his hothouse where he was already growing nopal.[70]

It all sounded promising but, in the event, it soon unravelled, as Banks explained to Hugh Inglis, the Deputy-Chairman to the Company’s Court of Directors.[71] Banks had no reply from Bartlet; it had now been three and a half years since Banks had written to him.[72] Even if someone could be found to take Bartlet’s place, Banks remarked, he doubted if the venture would be successful now because of Anderson’s foolhardy decision to print and distribute Banks’s directions for transporting cochineal and nopal by sea, including sending them to a botanist working for the King of Spain. This and the publication of de Menonville’s book, Banks argued, meant that the Spanish were more vigilant than ever and the venture was now ‘more likely to End in the Loss of Liberty or Even of Life, than the final attainment of the Object in Question’.

For these reasons Banks was bowing out of the plan which he had been enthusiastic about years before. Besides which, with Britain now at war with France, and rumours rife of a secret treaty between France and Spain, it would be foolhardy to try to enter Mexico in secret and steal the plants and insects.

Even though Banks said that he was no longer willing to be involved with the cochineal project, he did leave a little room for manoeuvre and ended the letter to Inglis with the promise that if something did come up, he ‘would not decline to Proceed’.

Sure enough something did occur. On 23 June 1802, Banks received a letter from Robert Sproat, a Scottish physician.[73] The letter, dated 5 March 1802 and sent from present-day Honduras near the town of Palacios on the coast, reminded Banks that they had been introduced in 1794 when Sproat was temporarily in London. Sproat also told Banks that he had, as agreed, sent him part of a collection of plants in 1796, but, unfortunately, the ship carrying them was intercepted and ended up in New Orleans, then under Spanish control, where none of the contents survived; the other part of the collection, which remained with him, was destroyed during an attack by the local people. What Banks made of all this we don’t know but a passage in the letter a little further on would have jumped off the page. It reads: ‘I also had the Opuntia sent me from the city of Comayagua & having transplanted it in an adjoining plantation it flourished exceedingly. I was even flattered with the full hopes of getting in to my possession the Cochineal Insect, for conceiving it to be one of your especial desiderata, I used my utmost influence to obtain it from the interior of Guatemala; I at last received the Insect but to my great astonishment found that either through ignorance or design in the sender they were all bruised to death! A circumstance I relate not Sir to claim any merit for the exertions I made, but for your information respecting the existence of the Insect in that country.’ Sproat concluded this part of his letter by commenting that with more care the operation might have succeeded and been sent to England – ‘without trial it is but conjecture at best, which affords no satisfaction.’

In his 27 August 1802 reply, Banks confirmed that Sproat’s remarks on cochineal gave him ‘particular pleasure’ because it seemed very likely that the real cochineal and the cactus could be procured from Guatemala and sent to India.[74] If Sproat was ‘inclined to undertake this patriotic task’ – which looked possible without ‘any hazard of loss to yourself’ – Banks would make him a generous settlement: £500 on receipt of the cactus plants in London; £1000 for the delivery of healthy cochineal; and a further £1000 for the delivery of both insect and plant to India. Banks provided Sproat with a condensed version of his instructions on how to keep the cochineal and the cactus alive on a sea voyage, with the added incentive of a gratuity for the ship’s captain ‘proportioned to the state of health in which either Plants or Insects arrive’. Finally, it was up to Sproat to try and entice one or two local people skilled in nopalry and cochineal cultivation to care for both all the way to India and then to stay or be sent home if they so wished.

The letter to Sproat showed Banks at his most excited. ‘I need only add’, he remarked towards the end of the letter, ‘that as I who am constantly employed in the execution of projects of this nature without ever having accepted remuneration in any shape have not the slightest view to advantage in this.’

As it turned out, nothing further seems to have happened. Did Sproat receive Banks’s letter? Was he alive? Did he decline the offer? We don’t know. All we do know is that the East India Company kept offering a £2000 reward for the ‘importation of the cochineal insect from South America’, but there were no takers.

As time went on the Company lost interest, and the dream of Oaxacan cochineal in India died.[75]