Of course, Sir Joseph Banks was the much-loved president of the Royal Society of Fellows—as Henry well knew—and had Banks nominated a crippled badger to the Society, the Society would have welcomed the creature and minted it a medal of honor, besides. But to welcome in Henry Whittaker? To allow this impudent picaroon, this mackerel-backed shaver, this jack-weighted hob, to add the initials RSF to his indecipherable signature?
No.
When Banks began to laugh, Henry’s stomach collapsed upon itself and folded into a small, hard cube. His throat narrowed as though he were, at last, noosed. He shut his eyes and saw murder. He was capable of murder. He envisioned murder and carefully considered the consequences of murder. He had a long while to ponder murder, while Banks laughed and laughed.
No, Henry decided. Not murder.
When he opened his eyes, Banks was still laughing, and Henry was a transformed human being. Whatever youth had remained in him as of that morning, it was now kicked out dead. From that point forward, his life would be not about who he could become, but about what he could acquire. He would never be a gentleman. So be it. Sod gentlemen. Sod them all. Henry would become richer than any gentleman who had ever lived, and someday he would own the lot of them, from the floor up. Henry waited for Banks to stop laughing, and then he escorted himself from the room without a word.
He immediately went out into the streets and found himself a prostitute. He held her up against an alley wall and battered the virginity out of himself, injuring both the girl and himself in the process, until she cursed him for a brute. He found a public house, drank two jars of rum, pummeled a stranger in the gut, was thrown out in the street and kicked in the kidneys. There, now—it was done. Everything from which he had been abstaining over the last nine years, in the interest of becoming a respectable gentleman, it was all done. See how easy it is? No pleasure in it, to be sure, but it was done.
He hired a boatman to take him up the river to Richmond. It was nighttime now. He walked past his parents’ dreadful house without stopping. He would never see his family again—nor did he wish to. He sneaked into Kew, found a shovel, and dug up all the money he had left buried there at age sixteen. There was a fair bit of silver waiting for him in the ground, far more than he remembered.
“Good lad,” he told his younger, thieving, hoarding self.
He slept by the river, with a damp sack of coins as his pillow. The next day, he returned to London and bought himself a good-enough suit of clothes. He supervised the removal of his entire Peruvian botanical collection—seeds and bladders and bark samples all—from the ship that had come from Cadiz, and transferred it over to a ship heading to Amsterdam. Legally, the entire collection belonged to Kew. Bugger Kew. Bugger Kew until it bled. Let Kew come and find him.
Three days later, he sailed to Holland, and sold his collection, his ideas, and his services to the Dutch East India Company—whose severe and cunning administrators received him, it must be said, without a trace of laughter.
Chapter Four
Six years later, Henry Whittaker was a rich man on his way to becoming richer still. His cinchona plantation was thriving in the Dutch colonial outpost of Java, growing as happily as weeds in a cool, humid, terraced mountain estate called Pengalengan—an environment nearly identical, as Henry knew it would be, to both the Peruvian Andes and the lower Himalayas. Henry lived on the plantation himself and kept a careful eye on this botanical treasure trove. His partners in Amsterdam were now setting the global prices for Jesuit’s bark, and reaping sixty florins for every hundred pounds of cinchona they processed. They couldn’t process it fast enough. There was a fortune to be made here, and the fortune was made in specifics. Henry had continued to refine his orchard, which was protected now from cross-pollination with lesser stock, and was producing a bark both more potent and more consistent than anything coming out of Peru itself. Furthermore, it shipped well, and—without the corrupting interference of Spanish or Indian hands—was judged by the world as a reliable product.
The colonial Dutch were now the world’s biggest producers and consumers of Jesuit’s bark, using the powder to keep their soldiers, administrators, and workers free from malarial fever all over the East Indies. The advantage that this gave them over their rivals—particularly over the English—was quite literally beyond calculation. With determined vengefulness, Henry made an effort to keep his product out of British markets entirely, or at least to drive up the price whenever Jesuit’s bark found its way to England or her outposts.
Back at Kew, and far behind the game now, Sir Joseph Banks did eventually attempt to cultivate cinchona in the Himalayas, but without Henry’s expertise the project lagged. The British were expending wealth, energy, and anxiety growing the wrong species of cinchona at the wrong altitude, and Henry, with cold satisfaction, knew it. By the 1790s, numberless British citizens and subjects were dying every week of malaria in India, lacking access to good Jesuit’s bark, while the Dutch pushed forward in rude health.
Henry admired the Dutch and worked well with them. He effortlessly comprehended these people—these industrious, tireless, ditch-digging, beer-drinking, straight-speaking, coin-counting Calvinists, who had been making order out of trade since the sixteenth century, and who slept peacefully every night of their lives with the certain knowledge that God wished for them to be rich. A country of bankers, merchants, and gardeners, the Dutch liked their promises the same way Henry liked his (that is to say, gilded with profit), and thus they held the world captive at steep interest rates. They did not judge him for his rude manners or his aggressive ways. Very soon Henry Whittaker and the Dutch were making each other quite stupendously wealthy. In Holland, there were people who called Henry “the Prince of Peru.”
By now, Henry was a rich man of thirty-one years, and it was time for him to orchestrate the remainder of his life. To begin with, he had the opportunity now to start his own business concerns, wholly separate from his Dutch partners, and he combed through his options with care. He had no fascination with minerals or gemstones, because he had no expertise in minerals or gemstones. Likewise with shipbuilding, publishing, or textiles. It would be botany, then. But which sort of botany? Henry had no desire to enter the spice trade, although there were famously large profits to be made in it. Too many nations were already involved in spices, and the costs of defending one’s product from pirates and competing navies defeated the gains, as far as Henry could see. He also had no respect for either the sugar or the cotton trades, which he found to be insidious and costly, as well as intrinsically bound to slavery. Henry wanted nothing to do with slavery—not because he found it morally abhorrent, but because he regarded it as financially inefficient, untidy, and expensive, and controlled by some of the most unsavory middlemen on earth. What really interested him were medicinal plants—a market upon which nobody had yet fully capitalized.