So, medicinal plants and pharmacy it would be.
Next, he had to decide where he should live. He owned a fine estate in Java with a hundred servants, but the climate there had sickened him over the years, bestowing upon him tropical diseases that would periodically throw his health into havoc for the rest of his life. He needed a more temperate home. He would cut off his arm before he ever again lived in England. The Continent did not appeaclass="underline" France was filled with irritating people; Spain was corrupt and unstable; Russia, impossible; Italy, absurd; Germany, rigid; Portugal, in decline. Holland, though favorably disposed toward him, was dull.
The United States of America, he decided, was a possibility. Henry had never been there, but he had heard promising things. He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia—the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn—a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone—except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage.
Before he settled anywhere, however, he wanted to be fitted up with a wife, and—because he was not a fool—he wanted a Dutch wife. He wanted a clever and decent woman with the least possible frivolousness, and Holland was the place to find her. Henry had indulged himself at times with prostitutes over the years, and had even kept a young Javanese girl on his estate in Pengalengan, but now it was time to take on a proper wife, and he recalled the advice of a sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before, “To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”
So he sailed back to Holland to pick one. He chose quickly and calculatingly, plucking a wife from a respectable old family, the van Devenders, who had been custodians of the Hortus botanical gardens in Amsterdam for many generations. The Hortus was one of the foremost research gardens in Europe—one of the oldest links in history between botany, scholarship, and trade—and the van Devenders had always managed it with honor. They were not aristocrats by any means, and certainly not rich, but Henry did not need a rich woman. The van Devenders were, however, a premier European family of learning and science—and that he did admire.
Unfortunately, the admiration was not mutual. Jacob van Devender, the current patriarch of the family and of the Hortus (and a masterful hand at growing ornamental aloes), knew of Henry Whittaker and did not like what he had heard. He knew that this young man had a history of thieving, and also that he had betrayed his own country for profit. This was not the sort of conduct of which Jacob van Devender approved. Jacob was Dutch, yes, and he liked his money, but he was not a banker, not a speculator. He did not measure people’s worth by their piles of gold.
However, Jacob van Devender had an excellent prospect of a daughter—or so Henry thought. Her name was Beatrix, and she was neither plain nor pretty, which seemed just about right for a wife. She was stout and bosomless, a perfect little barrel of a woman, and she was already rolling toward spinsterhood when Henry met her. To most suitors’ tastes, Beatrix van Devender would have appeared dauntingly overeducated. She was conversant in five living languages and two dead ones, with an expertise in botany equal to any man’s. Decidedly, this woman was not a coquette. She was no ornament of the drawing room. She dressed in the full spectrum of colors that one associates with common house sparrows. She nursed a hard suspicion of passion, exaggeration, and beauty, putting her confidence only in that which was solid and credible, and always trusting acquired wisdom over impulsive instinct. Henry perceived her as a living slab of ballast, which was precisely what he desired.
As for what Beatrix saw in Henry? Here, we encounter a slight mystery. Henry was not handsome. He was certainly not refined. In all truth, there was something of the village blacksmith about his ruddy face, his large hands, and his rough manners. To most eyes, he appeared neither solid nor credible. Henry Whittaker was an impulsive, loud, and bellicose man, who had enemies all over the world. He had also become, in the past years, a bit of a drinker. What respectable young woman would willingly choose such a character for a husband?
“The man has no principles,” Jacob van Devender objected to his daughter.
“Oh, Father, you are most grievously mistaken,” Beatrix corrected him dryly. “Mr. Whittaker has many principles. Just not the best variety of them.”
True, Henry was rich, and thus some observers speculated that perhaps Beatrix appreciated his wealth more than she let on. Also, Henry aimed to take his new bride to America, and perhaps—the local wags gossiped—she had some shameful secret reason to leave Holland forever.
The truth, however, was simpler: Beatrix van Devender married Henry Whittaker because she liked what she saw in him. She liked his strength, his cunning, his ascendency, his promise. He was rough, yes, but she was no dainty blossom herself. She respected his bluntness, as he respected hers. She understood what he wanted of her, and felt certain that she could work with him—and perhaps even manage him a bit. Thus, Henry and Beatrix quickly and straightforwardly formed their alliance. The only accurate word for their union was a Dutch word, a business word: partenrederij—a partnership based on honest trade and plain dealing, where tomorrow’s profits are a result of today’s promises, and where the cooperation of both parties equally contributes to prosperity.
Her parents disowned her. Or it may be more precise to say that Beatrix disowned them. They were a rigid family, the whole lot of them. They disagreed over her alliance, and disagreements among van Devenders tended to be eternal. After choosing Henry and leaving for the United States, Beatrix never again communicated with Amsterdam. Her last glimpse of her family was of her young brother, Dees, ten years old, weeping at her departure, pulling at her skirts, crying, “They are taking her away from me! They are taking her away from me!” She uncurled her brother’s fingers from her hem, told him to never again shame himself with public tears, and walked away.
Beatrix brought with her to America her personal maidservant—an immensely competent young washbasin of a woman named Hanneke de Groot. She also procured from her father’s library a 1665 edition of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, and a most valuable compendium of Leonhart Fuchs’s botanical illustrations. She sewed dozens of pockets into her traveling dress, and filled each pocket with the Hortus’s rarest tulip bulbs, all swaddled protectively in moss. She brought along, as well, several dozen blank accounting ledgers.
She was already planning her library, her garden, and—it would appear—her fortune.
Beatrix and Henry Whittaker arrived in Philadelphia in early 1793. The city, unprotected by walls or other fortifications, consisted at that time of a busy port, a few blocks of commercial and political interests, a conglomerate of farming homesteads, and some fine new estates. It was a place of expansive, generative possibility—a veritable alluvial bed of potential growth. The First Bank of the United States had opened there just the year before. The entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was at war with its forests—and its denizens, armed with axes, oxen, and ambition, were winning. Henry bought 350 acres of sloping pastures and unmolested woodland along the west bank of the Schuylkill River, with the intention to add more land as soon as he could acquire it.