When the order to hoist sail was issued, the Ibis was still at anchor in Port Louis. On her way out of the harbour, the Redruth passed within a few hundred yards of the schooner. There was no one on deck, and the bare-masted lbis looked tiny in comparison with the tall sailships that were anchored around it. It amazed Paulette to think that so small a vessel could play so large a part in so many lives; even when the Redruth’s sails filled with wind and sent the brig racing ahead Paulette could not tear her eyes away from the Ibis: it fell to Fitcher to remind her that she had a job to do.
‘Look sharp Miss Paulette: no time to lowster at sea…’
This, Paulette soon discovered, was no exaggeration: the business of tending plants on a ship at sail was one that allowed for very little rest. Something always needed doing; it was like caring for a garden that was tethered to the back of a large and extremely energetic animal. Almost never was the Redruth on an even keel; the closest she came to it was when she was merely dipping and tilting; at other times her decks were rolling steeply from side to side and her nose was either plunging into the sea or shooting out of it. And each of these movements was a potential hazard for the plants: a slight change in the angle of light could expose some shade-loving shrub to the fierce heat of the tropical sun; a breaking swell could send up a jet of seawater that would come down on the pots as a drenching shower of salinity; and if the decks tipped beyond a certain angle, the Wardian cases could escape their cables and go caroming along the gangways.
For each of these contingencies, and many more, there were procedures and protocols, all devised by Fitcher himself: he was not a man to provide lengthy explanations of his methods and for the most part Paulette had to learn by watching and imitating. But sometimes, as he was working, he would begin to mumble to himself – and there was much to be learnt, Paulette discovered, from these near-inaudible disquisitions.
On the subject of soils for example: Fitcher would take a look at a plant that was wilting, even in the shade, and he would trace its ills back to the composition of the matter in which it was planted. Some soils were ‘hot’, he said, and some were ‘cold’, by which he meant that some types of earth heated up quicker than others and some tended to retain their heat over long periods. To redress the balance, as necessary, he kept several barrels of soil in reserve, some marked ‘cool’ and some ‘hot’: the former tended to be lighter in colour, being of a chalky composition, while the latter were generally darker, being peaty, with a greater amount of vegetal matter. When one or the other was needed he would send Paulette down to fetch him some, and then he would apply the remedy in carefully judged amounts.
Paulette was inclined at first to dismiss these notions of hot and cold soils as a far-fetched fancy – but there was certainly no denying that Fitcher’s methods sometimes effected miraculous resuscitations.
Manure was another matter which Fitcher had studied in great depth. He was not by any means dismissive of some of the conventional materials that were used to enrich the soil – the Redruth’s holds contained many barrels of rape-cake, malt dust and ground linseed – but the fertilizers that interested him most were those that could be harvested or generated while under sail. Seaweed for instance: he believed that certain varieties of it could be turned, through a process of soaking, drying and pulverizing, into matter that was extremely beneficial for plants. Whenever the Redruth encountered a patch of seaweed, he would lower nets and buckets into the water to haul up some fronds: then, after picking out the undesirable varieties, he would soak the rest in fresh water and hang them up on the after-shrouds and the rigging. When dry, he would grind them in a mortar and apply the powder in pinches, as though it were a rare remedy.
The Redruth’s flock of chickens was another important source of plant food. One of Paulette’s duties was to clear the droppings out of the coop every morning; this, said Fitcher, could be turned into a powerful fertilizer if mixed with water and fermented. The bird’s carcasses were not neglected either: when a chicken was slaughtered for the table, every part of it was put to use, including the feathers and bones which were cut up into tiny bits before being added to the compost barrels that hung from the Redruth’s stern. Stray seabirds, Fitcher claimed, were even more useful in this regard since they could be chopped up whole. Whenever an exhausted auk or gull came down to the brig to rest there would be a furious scramble among the sailors – for Fitcher offered a small reward for captured birds.
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.