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Botanists and botanical gardens

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Botanists and botanical gardens

The study of botany and the establishment of botanical gardens in the Malay Peninsula and the Straits Settlements emerged in the early nineteenth century as an integral component of British colonial administration, driven by the convergence of scientific curiosity, commercial agriculture, and imperial prestige. From the 1810s through the early twentieth century, a succession of European naturalists—Danish, Scottish, Italian, and English—undertook fieldwork across Penang, Singapore, and the Indonesian archipelago, while colonial governments progressively allocated land, funding, and institutional frameworks for the cultivation and study of tropical flora. The records preserved in the Society’s journals document a tradition in which botanical science was inseparable from the administrative and economic imperatives of the colonial state, and in which the personal relationships between administrators, gardeners, and collectors shaped the trajectory of discovery as much as formal institutional policy [1, pp. 1–2], [2, pp. 1–5].

The Raffles Expedition and the Founding Generation

The foundational period of Malayan botany is inseparable from the administrative career of Sir Stamford Raffles, whose enthusiasm for natural history predated his famous association with Dr. Thomas Horsfield in Java. During his service in Melaka between 1810 and 1811, Raffles employed four men specifically to search for insects, shells, and wild animals, and his Malay scribe Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi recorded these activities in his memoirs [1, pp. 1–2]. Upon his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen in 1817, Raffles assembled a naturalist staff at Calcutta that included the Scottish surgeon Dr. William Jack, the French zoologists Pierre Diard and Alfred Duvaucel, and a missionary printer [3, pp. 147–148], [2, pp. 4–5].

Jack, who was only twenty-three when Raffles engaged him in November 1818, proved to be, in the assessment of one informed judge, “unquestionably one of the most able botanists ever to become associated with the tremendously rich and then very little known flora of the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago” [2, p. 5]. Arriving at Penang on 31 December 1818 aboard the Nearchus, he produced 130 species descriptions and approximately 40 drawings during his stay there before departing for Bencoolen in May 1819 [3, pp. 152]. His correspondence with Nathaniel Wallich, Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, constitutes the only contemporary day-to-day account of the Raffles expedition’s scientific activities from the perspective of its principal botanist [3, pp. 147–148]. Among his most significant contributions was the description of Rafflesia arnoldi Brown, the giant parasitic flower discovered by Dr. Joseph Arnold in west Sumatra in May 1818, which Jack found “in numbers from all parts of the country” and determined to be parasitic on a species of Cissus and dioecious [1, pp. 11–12], [3, pp. 203–204]. Jack also proposed the new genus Euthemis from two Singapore species, E. leucocarpa and E. minor, and sent Indian ink drawings to Wallich for a planned illustrated fascicle [3, p. 205]. His premature death from pulmonary tuberculosis at Bencoolen on 15 September 1822, at the age of twenty-seven, was a loss that Raffles marked with the words “a finer head or heart there never was” [3, pp. 237–238], [2, p. 5].

The French naturalists Diard and Duvaucel, whose collections were ultimately seized by a committee following a financial dispute, represent the more contentious dimension of colonial natural history [1, pp. 15–16], [3, pp. 147–148]. William Jack authored the descriptions for the ‘Descriptive Catalogue’ of zoological materials seized from the French, though Raffles published it under his own name [1, p. 16]. The destruction of Raffles’s papers, drawings, and Jack’s remaining collections in the fire aboard the ship Fame on 2 February 1824—consuming between 2,000 and 3,000 drawings and all preserved specimens—remains one of the most significant losses in the history of Malayan natural history [1, pp. 18–19], [2, p. 34].

The Establishment of Botanical Gardens

The proposal for a botanical garden in Singapore originated with Nathaniel Wallich, the Danish-born botanist who had served as Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden since 1817. Wallich arrived in Singapore around late August 1822 on a six-month leave of absence intended for the recovery of his health, and departed by the John Adam for Bengal shortly after 21 November 1822 [4, pp. 39–40]. During his stay, he submitted a formal recommendation to Raffles for a “Botanic and Experimental Garden,” arguing that Singapore’s position “in the very heart of the Malayan Archipelago and midway between India China and New Holland” made it ideally suited for such an establishment [2, p. 12]. His proposal was driven not only by scientific curiosity but by commercial and agricultural ambition: timber species comparable to teak, clove and nutmeg cultivation, cotton, coffee, and tea [4, pp. 44–45]. Wallich identified five distinct wild species of nutmeg in the immediate vicinity of the Cantonments alone, and noted that experiments by Lieutenant-Colonel Farquhar had already proven the success of clove and nutmeg cultivation [4, p. 45].

Raffles’s official reply, dated 15 November 1822, allocated a monthly sum of 60 dollars and a one-time donation of 1,000 dollars, with the site to include the eastern side of Singapore Hill extending to the Fresh Water Stream or the road leading to Bukit Salegi [2, pp. 12–13]. The proposed garden comprised approximately 48 acres (144 Bengal biggahs) on the eastern slopes of Fort Canning Hill, bounded by Selegie Road, a cantonment road, and the Stamford Road Canal [4, p. 47]. The monthly budget was to support a permanent establishment of ten labourers and one overseer [4, p. 48]. Dr. William Montgomerie, Assistant Surgeon in general medical charge of the troops, was placed in temporary charge of the garden [4, p. 48], [2, p. 12].

The early gardens were discontinued after 30 June 1829, possibly because the then-Director exceeded the modest monthly budget, leaving the colony without botanical gardens for thirty years until the Tanglin Gardens were established in 1860 [4, p. 48]. In Penang, a parallel development occurred when George Potter, the Head Overseer at the Calcutta Botanic Garden who had accompanied Wallich on his voyage, remained at Penang and was put in charge of a Government Botanic Garden at Ayer Itam, which had been started in the same year [2, p. 44]. The nominal curator was William Leycester, Judge of the Sudder Dewanee and Nizam Adawlut in Calcutta, who had assumed responsibility for the Calcutta Botanic Garden during Wallich’s absence [2, p. 44].

The Later Nineteenth Century: Curtis, Beccari, and Institutional Development

The second major phase of Malayan botanical activity began in the 1880s. Charles Curtis, who arrived in Penang in July 1884 as Assistant Superintendent of Forests for the Straits Settlements, transformed a malarial waste ground in the Waterfall River valley into a significant botanical and recreational asset [5, pp. 75–78]. His design philosophy was rooted in landscape aesthetics rather than systematic botanical arrangement, prioritising the exploitation of natural landscape features over taxonomic ordering [5, p. 87]. By the end of 1885, 11,500 trees had been supplied from his nurseries for roadside planting, and between 1886 and 1890, plant distributions ranged from 1,123 to 6,213 specimens per year [5, pp. 84–86]. Curtis built a Herbarium of over 3,000 specimens by 1890, forwarded duplicates to Kew, and lent the entire collection to Dr George King for Materials for a Malayan Flora [5, pp. 84–86]. His 1894 catalogue, published in the JSBRAS, recorded 1,971 species across 793 genera and 129 natural orders native to Pulau Pinang [5, p. 86]. The Gardens were transferred from the Forest Department to the Land Office on 1 January 1895 as part of a retrenchment programme, and Curtis retired on 7 December 1903 [5, pp. 75].

In Borneo, the Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari (1843–1920) conducted four major expeditions between 1865 and 1878, producing one of the most extensive natural history collections of the nineteenth century [6, pp. 166–173]. His first expedition yielded 20,000 botanical specimens representing 3,300 species of Higher Plants, 800 fruits in spirit, a large timber collection, and 48 orang-utans [6, p. 2]. His major illustrated work Malesia was published in three volumes between 1877 and 1890, with reproduction costs partly met by a grant from the Bentham Trustees in London [6, p. 3]. Beccari also discovered Amorphophallus titanum in Sumatra, whose tuber was so heavy it required two men to carry, and whose seeds produced a flowering specimen at Kew in 1889, eleven years after discovery [6, p. 2, n. 1]. His two monographs on rattan-palms were published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Calcutta, in 1908 and 1914 [6, p. 3].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on botanists and botanical gardens reveals a clear evolution in scholarly priorities across more than a century. The earliest publications, such as Hanitsch’s 1913 edition of Wallich’s letters [4] and Burkill’s 1916 edition of Jack’s correspondence [3], were fundamentally archival in character: they recovered and published previously unpublished primary documents to fill gaps in the administrative and scientific history of the Straits Settlements. These works were motivated by the recognition that the personal correspondence between Raffles, Jack, and Wallich constituted the only contemporary record of the Raffles expedition’s scientific activities, supplementing and in places contradicting the later Memoir of Sir Stamford Raffles (1830) and Lady Raffles’ account [3, p. 147].

The mid-twentieth century saw a shift towards synthetic biographical and historiographical treatment. Bastin’s 1981 edition of Raffles’s letters to Wallich [2] and his 1990 article on Raffles’s scientific career [1] both argued that Raffles’s contributions to botany and zoology had been overshadowed by his political reputation, and that his role as patron and active naturalist was foundational to British scientific institutions in the region [1, pp. 1–2]. The 1997 article by Jones on the Penang Botanic Gardens [5] represented a further methodological advance, drawing on colonial administrative records to restore agency to a mid-level officer whose work had been absorbed into the broader narrative of H. N. Ridley’s tenure at Singapore [5, pp. 75–78].

A recurring theme across the literature is the tension between the scientific and the commercial in colonial botany. Wallich’s 1822 proposal explicitly linked botanical research to the cultivation of economically valuable species [4, pp. 44–45], and the modest budget of 60 dollars per month reflected the colonial administration’s limited commitment to purely scientific objectives [4, p. 48]. The discontinuation of the Singapore gardens in 1829 and the thirty-year gap that followed [4, p. 48], as well as the transfer of the Penang Gardens from the Forest Department to the Land Office in 1895 [5, p. 90], both illustrate the vulnerability of botanical institutions to fiscal retrenchment and administrative reorganisation. The archival records preserved in the Library of the Botanic Garden, Calcutta, and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague [2, p. 1], together with the India Office Library and Records, London, and the Linnean Society [1, p. 25], remain the principal repositories for the primary sources that underpin this historiography.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. J.S. Bastin (1990). Sir Stamford Raffles and the study of natural history in Penang, Singapore and Indonesia JMBRAS 63(2): 1–25.
  2. J.S. Bastin (1981). The letters of Sir Stamford Raffles to Nathaniel Wallich, 1819–1824. (with notes), . Bastin JMBRAS 54(2): 1–73.
  3. I.H. Burkill and W. Jack (1916). William Jack’s letters to Nathaniel Wallich, 1819–1821. .H. Burkill JSBRAS 73: 147–168. Read on JSTOR
  4. Hanitsch R and N. Wallich (1913). Letters of Nathaniel Wallich relating to the establishment of botanical gardens in Singapore JSBRAS 65: 39–48. Read on JSTOR
  5. D.S. Jones (1997). The ‘Waterfall’ Botanic Garden on Pulau Pinang and the foundation of the Penang Botanical Gardens 1884–1910 JMBRAS 70(2): 75–96.
  6. I.H. Burkill and J.C. Moulton (1921). Odoardo Beccari JSBRAS 83: 166–173. Read on JSTOR