Environmental Engineering Reference
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ingredients with milk, which he sold in London as “Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate.” Thus began the
British fixation with chocolate.
17
Sloane, who later gave his name to Sloane Square in London, continued collecting plants, from opi-
um poppies and cannabis to Chinese rhubarb, as well as a variety of insects and thousands of objects
from around the world. His treasure trove, including a large herbarium, became the basis for the vast
assembly of art, artifacts, and natural objects that became the collections at today's British Museum.
Great private collectors of plants and animals of the Victorian era included Lionel Walter Rothschild, of
the Rothschild banking family, who created a huge museum and animal park in Tring, north of London.
From there, as we shall see, a number of celebrated animal escapees made their first appearances in the
English countryside.
Botanical collecting was close to the heart of the British Empire. Imperial botanists made moving
plants around the world into a major industry. When Britannia ruled the waves, the ships of the Royal
Navy rearranged the planet's biology. They took eucalyptus trees from Australia across the world, ini-
tially to fight malaria by using their prodigious thirst to drain swamps. They took potatoes from the
Americas to Europe and then Asia, blackberries from the hedgerows of England to Saint Helena, and
rice from Asia to South America. They also took camels from Arabia to British Columbia, donkeys from
Ireland to South Africa, toads to Bermuda, and almost everything to Australia.
The moving of plants formed the backdrop to many colonial escapades. Captain William Bligh
sailed to Tahiti in the South Pacific to bring breadfruit trees to the West Indies as a cheap food source
for plantation slaves, who themselves had been shipped in from Africa. His first attempt in 1789 aboard
HMS
Bounty
ended in an infamous mutiny. Bligh was cast adrift at sea but made it home and on a
second journey in 1793 successfully delivered plant samples to Jamaica. Breadfruit remains a favorite
food in the Caribbean today.
The British were not alone. The early German explorer Alexander von Humboldt shipped no fewer
funded the debts he incurred on the first circumnavigation of the Earth in the 1520s by selling cloves
he collected from the Moluccas (the Maluku Islands) of modern-day Indonesia. The Dutch later gained
a global monopoly on spices grown on these islands. It was broken in 1753, when horticulturalist and
missionary Pierre Poivre, the French governor of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, bagged cuttings during
a series of clandestine visits and planted them in his botanical garden at Pamplemousses.
The infrastructure of colonial plant introductions grew extensive during the nineteenth century. Kew
Gardens in South West London became a scientific hothouse and holding ground for dispersing plants
across the British Empire. Here Joseph Hooker masterminded the planting of Ascension Island in the
mid-nineteenth century, but he had bigger fish to fry. He hatched schemes to smuggle from the forests
of South America both cinchona, the source of quinine, and then, most famously and profitably, wild
rubber—to create huge plantations in India and the Far East. Oil palm from West Africa, tobacco from
the Caribbean, tea from China, and sugarcane from New Guinea all passed through Kew en route to
commercial exploitation in lands distant from their homes.
Kew had outposts in Cape Town, Ceylon, Malaya, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and else-
where, while the Dutch botanic garden in Leiden linked up with tropical collections assembled in the
Dutch East Indies, such as that at Bogor in Java. By no means all the translocations succeeded. While
the British rubber project was a huge success in Malaya, its cinchona plantation in India lost out to a
Dutch rival. These gardens also became frequent sources for escapes into the wild, as migrant species
leaped fences from botanic gardens or plantations.
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