The mutiny, therefore, not only deprived Bligh of his ship, but defused a grand botanical enterprise. The breadfruit expedition, backed by the great and influential botanist Sir Joseph Banks, patron of Kew Gardens and president of the Royal Society, had been commissioned to transport the nutritious, fast-growing fruit to the West Indies for propagation as a cheap food for slave laborers who worked the vast sugar estates. William Bligh lost his ship Bounty at the hands of one Fletcher Christian and a handful of miscreants on a voyage back to England from Tahiti, where the Bounty had been sent to collect breadfruit and other useful plants of the South Pacific. As the world well knows, in the year 1789, Lt. Vincent and to Bath.Īnd it was in homage to the second, transforming consignment of plants brought to Bath that I now paid my visit, for Bath Gardens played a small but poignant part in one of the great sea sagas of all time-the mutiny on the Bounty. While most specimens gathered by British collectors were destined for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, outside London, some went to satellite stations at Calcutta, Sydney, St. Eighteenth-century botanizing had become a global enterprise, undertaken by colonial powers such as France, Spain and the Netherlands as well as Britain, to establish encyclopedic plant collections for study and sometimes useful propagation. Established in 1779, Bath is one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world, its collection jump-started, in this time of English-French hostilities, by the capture of a French ship coming from Mauritius laden with Indian mangoes, cinnamon and other exotics that included the euphonious bilimbi, brindonne and carambola, as well as jackfruit and June plum. The stark botanical labels hinted at the labor and eccentric vision that lay behind the garden. Inside the gate and beyond the sentinel of royal palms, few flowers bloomed, for this garden is given less to blossoms than to trees.Įlephant apple from India Christmas palm from the Philippines Ylang ylang from Indonesia two aged tropical dragon's blood trees and a Barringtonia asiatica, believed to be 230 years old. Unfolding lazily from the shade of the garden wall, a straggle of young men with ganja-glazed eyes leaned forward to scrutinize us as we approached. There are two reasons a visitor might come to Bath today: the springs and its botanical garden, which now, beyond its Victorian-looking iron gate, lay snoozing in the sun.
A pretty village of sagging, historic houses, it had formerly been a fashionable spa known for its hot springs the 17th-century privateer Henry Morgan is reputed to have enjoyed the genteel practice of taking the waters.
Six miles inland I and my guide Andreas Oberli-a Swiss-born botanist and horticulturist who has lived in Jamaica for nearly 30 years-arrived at Bath, seemingly deserted at this late morning hour. While Jamaicans might come to the village of Bath, where I was now headed, this part of the island is little visited by outsiders. There are few beaches on this southeastern side of Jamaica, nothing resembling the white sands and resorts on the opposite shore, around Montego Bay. An hour out of the maelstrom of Kingston's traffic, the first frigate bird appeared, and then, around a bend in the road, the sea.
0 kommentar(er)
