In mid-1680 Captain Robert Knox arrived in London after almost twenty years spent in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), an experience which he began to record during his long voyage home as a passenger.Footnote 1 The first person to greet the bearded and whiskered traveller was a ‘drugster’, a pedlar of the exotic remedies becoming ever more popular in late seventeenth-century London.Footnote 2 The drugster had boarded the ship as soon as it docked, eager to buy produce and recipes from its passengers and crew. By chance, he recognized Knox and reunited him with his brother-in-law and sister. Knox would soon meet several others interested in the knowledge he had brought from Ceylon. He was called into the East India Company's Court of Directors to give an account of his travels.Footnote 3 There he was taken aside by Jeremy Sambrooke, a member of the Royal Society.Footnote 4 Through either Sambrooke or his own brother James, Knox was introduced to the polymath Robert Hooke.Footnote 5 By the following year these new contacts and his cousin, the minister and historian Robert Strype, had helped him compose his notes into An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon. The book was printed by the Royal Society's printer Richard Chiswell in August 1681 and financed by subscribers from the East India Company. It became hugely popular during the author's lifetime and has remained a standard source for the island's history ever since.
Recent scholarship has examined the connections between travel narratives and European expansion and the contribution of both to emerging natural philosophy.Footnote 6 This paper explores these issues by studying how the Royal Society and the East India Company were involved in the production of the Relation and how the text was used by both institutions. The methodizing of travel through the interactions of scholars, merchants, sailors, local informants and colonial and creole officials has been traced from the Iberian world into the writings of the later Renaissance of northern Europe.Footnote 7 Following on from the writings of men like Bacon and Hartlib, the Royal Society, from its inception in the early 1660s, was involved in producing instructions for travellers and guidelines for the authors and compilers of natural histories.Footnote 8 The East India Company's use, as an information source and thus as a source of power, of writings such as travel narratives and directed enquiries has also begun to be explored.Footnote 9 It is argued here that the production of Knox's Historical Relation should be seen as part of an ongoing collaboration between the East India Company and the Royal Society to lay claim to the wealth promised by knowledge of the East by producing travel accounts making use of such guidelines.
Bacon's essay ‘On travel’ advises that the traveller should carry with him ‘some card or book describing the country where he travelleth; which will be a good key to his inquiry’.Footnote 10 This highlights a point which seems rather obvious, but which has been somewhat overlooked in many of the recent discussions of travel literature: travel accounts were not intended primarily for the entertainment and information of European elites, but were designed to be carried on journeys. Travellers used them as starting points for their own impressions and scribbled comparisons or corrections in the margins. Several of the books produced in the milieu of the East India Company in this period explicitly state that merchants and factors were their primary audience. For example, Everard's translation of Tavernier's voyages, Samuel Baron's description of Tonqueen (Vietnam) and Thomas Bowrey's Malay dictionary were all intended for use on voyages.Footnote 11
Robert Knox's work provides an especially interesting example of this process of comparison and annotation, because he took an interleaved copy of his own work with him on his later journeys, using the extra pages, as well as unpublished journals, to draw comparisons between his knowledge of Ceylon and his later observations. Knox has previously been studied almost exclusively in relation to his work on Ceylon, and while it is undeniable that the period of his captivity would have been formative of his ideas about the world at large, the scope of his travel was far wider. Here I explore how the comparisons Knox made between his own description of Ceylon and his observations on later voyages were used by the East India Company in its search for new settlements capable of producing coveted Asians crops for food, medicine, dyes, or cloths. The process of observation was guided at every stage by Knox's ongoing relationship with the Royal Society.
Robert Knox's career
Robert Knox had been captured in Ceylon, along with his father and other members of crew of the East India Company ship Anne, in 1660 and remained in the central kingdom of Kandy for nineteen years.Footnote 12 He became fluent in Sinhalese and well acquainted with local ways of life through his employments as farmer, moneylender and pedlar. Despite never entering the employment of the king, Knox was evidently well informed about events at the court of Rajasingha II (r. 1634–86). Knox began to compose the Relation on his return journey to England in 1680 after his escape via the Dutch fort at Arippu.Footnote 13
Left: frontispiece to Simon de Vries, 't Eyland Ceylon, in sijn binnenste, of 't Koningrijck Candy, Utrecht, 1692, printed by Wilhelm Brodelet. Right: Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, London, 1681, 32, ‘Raja Singh the King of Ceylon’. Here and elsewhere in de Vries's translation, the central figure of the king in his Portuguese dress has been copied directly from that invented by the illustrator of Knox's text (33–4). Knox gives a precise description of the King's dress, but his facial features are not distinct from those of the other figures portrayed in the text. The courtiers' dress and the roundels (Hobson-Jobson, 170–1) they carry are taken from an illustration of Buddhist ‘priests’ in the Relation (75). Other details of the court setting are similar to illustrations in Baldaeus's Naauwkeurige beschryvinge van Malabar en Choromandel (Part II, before 1 and 18). A final curious point about this illustration is that the text of Knox's Relation is written on what seems to be a book made from talipat leaves, a Sinhalese technology of writing which Knox himself describes (109–10).
The Relation contains a detailed description of the geography, politics, wildlife, agriculture, religion, languages, laws, learning, medicine and domestic lives of the inhabitants of Kandy, as well as an account of the author's own capture and way of life and the circumstances of other Europeans in the kingdom. It quickly became very popular and was soon translated into German, Dutch and French.Footnote 14 The Relation is said to have formed the basis for Daniel Defoe's hero in both Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720). Knox's contemporary John Locke also drew on the work in his Second Treatise of Government (c.1689).Footnote 15 Along with the Dutchman Philip Baldaeus's description of the Tamil north of the island, published in 1672, and the Portuguese captain João Ribeiro's description, which also focuses on the Sinhalese-speaking part of the island, Knox's account continues to form the basis for accounts of the island in the mid-seventeenth century. The work has also been studied for its literary style, its description of the caste system and religion of Ceylon, the Sinhalese vocabulary that it incorporates and, most recently, the natural history it contains.Footnote 16
Knox also left several other manuscripts, which, added to the records of the East India Company and the Royal Society, allow the reconstruction of a fairly comprehensive picture of his life after leaving Ceylon.Footnote 17 Those found so far are his autobiography; the interleaved copy of the Relation, containing significant additions to the original manuscript and intended for publication as a second edition; several letters to his cousin John Strype and one to Lady Worcester, the daughter of the East India Company's governor, Sir Josiah Child; a truncated account of his voyage to Tonqueen in 1681; and his will.Footnote 18 References to Knox appear in the Journal Books and Council Books of the Royal Society and in the Court Books, Letter Books, Original Correspondence and Factory Records of the East India Company, as well as in the diary of Robert Hooke.Footnote 19
In January 1681 Hooke recorded the first of several meetings with Knox, who was accompanied this time by his cousin James Bonnell.Footnote 20 Around the same time Hooke showed the Royal Society a leaf of the talipat palm that Knox had brought back from Ceylon.Footnote 21 In August the same year, Hooke noted that he had given Knox ‘queries for ye Indies’.Footnote 22 During this period Knox was presented with the interleaved copy of the Relation.Footnote 23 Knox carried these documents with him when he departed the following month on the Tonqueen Merchant to Tonqueen via the Cape Verde archipelago off West Africa.Footnote 24 He reached Bantam and Batavia, and returned via Batavia in early 1682.Footnote 25 In November 1683 the Royal Society's council voted to give Knox a present in return for a long list of items that he had given to its repository.Footnote 26 As well as collecting these items during his second voyage, Knox also made and recorded observations relating to difference in tide times in the northern and southern hemispheres.Footnote 27
On 22 September 1683 Hooke provided Knox with ‘a picture box, an azimuth perspective [and] a longitude clock’ to make further observations on the Royal Society's behalf.Footnote 28 A few months later, Knox sailed in the Tonqueen Merchant, which had since been lengthened, to Madagascar, where he acquired a cargo of slaves for St Helena. He was then intended to go to Timor to procure wood.Footnote 29 But in May 1685, while at St Helena, Knox's crew seized the boat and returned with it to England. Knox followed as a passenger and sued some of the mutineers. In March 1686 Knox was commissioned to take part in the East India Company's war against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in Bengal.Footnote 30 He seems then to have traded independently on the Malabar coast and probably returned to Ceylon before going via the Cape and St Helena to Barbados in 1688, where he repaired his ship before returning to England.Footnote 31
During 1690 Knox is recorded in Hooke's diary as presenting him with exotic plants and seeds of various types, including cannabis and wood from the Mascarene islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues (‘Diego Rois’).Footnote 32 In January 1691, bearing a commission to fight any French ships he encountered, Knox returned via Tenerife to Madagascar, where he remained until September to procure slaves for Bencoulen (Bengkulu, on the west coast of Sumatra).Footnote 33 After arriving from Bencoulen to Fort St George (Madras, now Chennai) via Tranquebar, he was swiftly dispatched to Bengal to trade in cloth, reaching Calcutta (now Kolkata) and staying there until February 1693. After leaving, he returned to St Helena and then to Barbados, losing several men to illness, before returning to England, where he arrived in December 1693.Footnote 34 Although there are no records of Knox carrying out any specific instructions on this voyage, his discussions of natural history with Hooke apparently continued after his return, since he is mentioned as an informant in the Royal Society's records.Footnote 35 After falling out with Sir Josiah Child and refusing several employments with the East India Company, Knox accepted an offer from Samuel Sheppard to go as a free merchant or ‘interloper’ in his ship the Mary. Leaving in May 1698 for Cadiz, he acquired silver for Surat, where he arrived in February 1699 after calling at St Augustine and trading in Ceylon and on the Malabar coast for pepper.Footnote 36 Knox returned to England in 1701, where he remained until the end of his life.Footnote 37 He attended two further meetings of the Royal Society to present a number of items from Persia and the Malay world.Footnote 38
Producing the Relation
Knox states in his dedication to the company that ‘I have writ nothing but either what I am assured of by my own personal knowledge to be true … or what I am assured of by the inhabitants’.Footnote 39 This statement, the portrait of Knox that accompanies the text, and the framing story of his captivity, escape and composition of the text on the homeward journey all create the notion of the text as the product of one man's direct experience, a theme taken up by Defoe. As in his autobiography, Knox's Relation does have personal elements. In both texts the author describes his survival of a series of perilous voyages and captivities with the intention of demonstrating the workings of Providence.Footnote 40 Nevertheless, the Relation is also a composite work. It was produced, illustrated, financed and finally enlarged through the collaboration of the East India Company and various scholars. It is therefore essential to consider the interests of these entities in producing the book before examining how they used the published work.
In his Autobiography, Knox recognizes the involvement in the Relation of his cousin, John Strype, who ‘Composed it into heads & Chapters, for my papers were very promiscuous and out of forme’, and assisted him in adding ‘severall inlargements [on] such heads as I had but touched briefly’.Footnote 41 The extent of Hooke's direct involvement with the content or structure of the original Relation is uncertain.Footnote 42 However, his preface suggests that he had significant editorial input in the ‘natural history’ section of the work.Footnote 43
The illustrations to the Relation are another element in which contributions from someone other than the author seem certain, since Knox's surviving sketch does not provide enough detail for the depictions of costumes and equipment that accompany the final work.Footnote 44 The majority of the illustrations seem to have been composed from a combination of other sources and with reference to objects like the talipat leaf that Knox had brought back with him from Ceylon.Footnote 45 One illustration in which the source of the borrowing is clear is the outline of Knox's map of Ceylon, certainly lifted from Baldaeus's 1672 work Malabar en Coromandel.Footnote 46 Baldaeus's work was published by Johannes Janssonius van Waasberge, whose plates Moses Pitt had acquired as part of the English Atlas project.Footnote 47 This suggests that Hooke, who also had significant input to this project, might have had access to the original plates as well as to the published text in the Royal Society's library.
The draft second edition of the Relation gives a clearer indication of how the process of using guidelines, queries and other works may have functioned in the composition of the original text. For example, in one passage Knox notes that Hooke has a ‘printed figure’ of the coconut tree, before going on to describe in detail the tree's stages of growth and uses.Footnote 48 A second passage enlarging on the process of tapping a coconut tree for toddy refers again to a picture of the tree, this time identifying it as coming from the Hortus Malabaricus.Footnote 49 These questions are addressed in the interleaved sheets that follow.Footnote 50
Hooke's hand appears in the preamble and the first two chapters of the interleaved copy making editorial corrections and explanations, expanding a section concerning the medicinal use of leeches and speculating about why it tends to rain more in mountainous places.Footnote 51 At the end of the text Hooke has added a list of queries for Knox to address. These include questions about various details of medicine, manufacture and the description of particular plants and topographical features in various locations, including Tonqueen and Mauritius.Footnote 52 Hooke has again made small corrections and elaborations to the text that follows.
The process of questioning, editing and arrangement devoted to Knox's text by the Royal Society Fellows and other scholars was not unique, but is evident in several other works of the period. It is possible to see these guidelines for the composition of natural histories being put into practice in the production of two other contemporary publications: the East India Company surgeon John Fryer's account of his experiences in Persia and India, and Moses Pitt's English Atlas.Footnote 53 The English Atlas was explicitly intended as a composite work; this is demonstrated by the public advertisement for any gentlemen with ‘any curiosities of any country whatsoever’ to bring them to be incorporated in the Atlas, if ‘approved of and judg'd fit to be Printed by those Learned men, whose Judgements are consulted’.Footnote 54
If the Royal Society and other bodies were routinely consulted about the content of natural histories, the East India Company was frequently called on to provide patronage for their authors by financing the publication and through subscriptions. Knox's dedication to the East India Company praises the company for bringing ‘not only the Wealth but the Knowledge of the Indies … home to us’.Footnote 55 The company was certainly keen to amass information about Asia and Africa. Its archives are filled with descriptions of the physical geography, natural resources and contemporary political situation in many parts of the world. These descriptions include entire texts like that which Thomas Bowrey bequeathed to the company in his will or that which Samuel Baron sent to Hooke and Hoskins.Footnote 56 They also include the diaries of factors, lengthy passages in the letters and journals of the factories and the collections of books of advice, often based on the contributions of several different authors.Footnote 57 The company's status was often uncertain during its first century of existence, and it was keen to be seen to benefit the nation by sponsoring the publication of useful information. French and Dutch works of the period exhibit a similar concern to claim that their work contributed to the national good.Footnote 58
However, the circulation of information around European capitals and their settlements in the East Indies also raises the question of the tension between the urge to publicize claims to the knowledge and wealth of the Indies and the need to prevent, by enforcing secrecy, certain information from falling into the hands of European rivals.Footnote 59 So most of the writing generated within the company, although often copied and circulated, was not published. In fact, most was closely guarded from European rivals, who tried equally hard to gain access.Footnote 60 The competition over medicinal drugs and recipes was especially fierce. As the drugster who boarded Knox's returning ship recognized, there were considerable profits to be had from acquiring the knowledge of the commodities that sailors and merchants had obtained through those they met on their journeys.Footnote 61
European travel writing has been described as the simultaneous result of universalist and nationalist claims.Footnote 62 The process of assimilation of the works of Baldaeus, Drakenstein and others into Knox's work continued with the translation, circulation, and reappropriation of the finished text. The translations of the Relation reorient it through the additions of new prefaces, dedications and illustrations. For example, the Dutch version is accompanied by a new illustration showing Knox's work being presented to the king of Kandy (Figure 1). This illustration also reminds us that travel texts in European languages circulated outside Europe, a point to be discussed in more detail below. In this case, it raises some interesting questions about how this depiction of the kingdom of their enemy Rajasingha II was received by the Dutch in Colombo. The geographical information provided by the Relation was certainly incorporated into Dutch maps in the years after its publication.Footnote 63
The incentives to guard information closely should therefore be counterpoised against the importance of national claims when considering whether or not a manuscript was to be published. It is interesting to note that, in contrast to the fairly extensive and often unflattering coverage of Dutch relations with the court, the Relation makes little mention of English attempts to negotiate with Kandy.Footnote 64 For the English company, Ceylon was a coveted site for trade, particularly in cinnamon. The company had made several attempts to treat with Rajasingha II to establish an alliance against the Dutch. These included letters sent under the pretext of attempting to free Knox and the other English prisoners. These attempts had been obstructed by the Dutch and forestalled by the rebellion of the king's son in 1664.Footnote 65 With its description of the remaining English captives, the Relation could even have served as a potential pretext for further interventions.Footnote 66 Printed books therefore need to be regarded as part of a range of texts circulating on various levels of openness that informed the policy of the East India Company and scholars' investigations. The extensive translation of European travel texts, as exemplified by that of the Relation itself, meant, first, that rivals' texts would be closely scoured, reappropriated and ‘corrected’, and then that the most coveted information was often closely guarded. The next section explores how the often imprecise descriptions of medicinal plants and agriculture given in the Relation were used in Knox's unpublished manuscripts to form the basis of practical experiments in bio-prospecting and transplantation.
The desirableness and facility of this undertaking – using the Relation (1): bio-prospecting
Travel texts were meant to be read and used not only or even primarily in European capitals, but also in settlements abroad and during journeys. When travel books were taken on voyages, comparison between the written descriptions and first-hand experience took place, sometimes generating further written accounts. An example of this process is Baron's Description of Tonqueen, which, as he states, is partly an attempt to correct Tavernier's account.Footnote 67 Baron composed his work in the East India Company's settlement at Madras, so this means that either he was carrying a copy of the Six Voyages with him, or that he consulted it in the library of Fort St George. Similarly, Allen Catchpole's discussion of the possibility of establishing a factory at Pulo Condore makes extensive comparisons with a work of William Dampier in his appraisal of the fruit and timber yielded by the local trees and also refers to Tachard's account of a voyage to Siam and an apparently unpublished description by Henry Smith.Footnote 68
This process of comparison and ‘improvement’ is also evident in the use of the Relation. The Royal Society had several other contacts who possessed personal experience of Ceylon. The society used these men's accounts to compare with and enlarge on Knox's Relation. Paul Herman, Leiden professor of botany and employee of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC – the Dutch East India Company) in Ceylon, is first mentioned in the society's records in 1680 as preparing a catalogue of the plants of the island.Footnote 69 Herman's account was received at the society on its eventual publication in 1698.Footnote 70 Herman exchanged specimens with Hans Sloane and his draft illustrations for a second edition eventually came into the hands of James Petiver.Footnote 71 In 1683 he sent his Vocabularium Selanense to Thomas Hyde, the Oxford orientalist and friend of Robert Boyle, who compared his transliterations of Sinhalese words with Knox's versions.Footnote 72 The society was also in contact with a physician named Strachan who had lived on the island for seventeen years and published articles in the Philosophical Transactions concerning the use and transportation of elephants in Ceylon and on the religions, plants and wildlife of the island, in several cases drawing on Knox's work.Footnote 73
A letter to his cousin Strype concerning the interleaved copy of the Relation reveals that Knox was also carrying his own text with him and making annotations on at least one of his subsequent journeys.Footnote 74 It is not clear whether this was only during the first Tonqueen voyage via Cape Verde, Bantam and Batavia, or also during the second to Madagascar and St Helena.Footnote 75 But there is evidence that on both voyages Knox referred back to the text, directed by questioning from members of the Royal Society and the practical instructions of the East India Company. In both cases, Knox's expertise on Ceylon expressed in the Relation was used to make comparisons between the island and other prospective sites for colonial settlement, trade or transplantation.
‘Bio-prospecting’ describes the process of examining and describing plants and identifying them, with the aim either of using them in situ or else of transporting them to other locations – botanical gardens in Europe or colonial plantations.Footnote 76 The acquisition of plants that could yield drugs and food crops had a high potential monetary value and has been identified as a major factor in sixteenth-century Iberian political power, as well as in European colonial expansion in the New World.Footnote 77 There is some debate about the comparability of European investigations of plants that could provide food and drugs in the East Indies and in the West Indies. Both programmes involved exchanges with ‘informants’, involving varying degrees of consent and cooperation.Footnote 78 However, some scholars have argued that, in contrast to the largely oral exchanges that took place in the West Indies, in the east the European contribution consisted largely of compiling or rearranging south Asian knowledge that had been previously systematized and recorded.Footnote 79
Knox's Relation contains no direct reference to written medical texts or specialists.Footnote 80 A ritual that would have been performed by a priest as part of a cure is mentioned twice.Footnote 81 Furthermore, there is no reference to the influence of any system of medicine that may have resulted from the presence in Kandy of Muslim traders from the Malabar coast, nor to any imported medicines. Probably because its author lived mostly in rural areas rather than in the city or court, the Relation concentrates its short section on medicinal plants on household medicine using simples: ‘The woods and trees are their Apothecaries Shops, where with Herbs, Leaves they make all their Physic and Plaisters, with which they sometimes they will do notable cures.’ Rather than listing these medicines, ‘of which there are hundreds’, Knox simply notes the cure of a broken arm with unspecified herbs and his own cure of a sore throat by chewing the bark of the ‘Amaranga tree’.Footnote 82 In the interleaved version, Knox expands on the preparation of a simple from this bark ‘as I was instructed by one of the C[o]untry men’. The survey of edible plants, whether wild or cultivated on a small scale for food, is similarly perfunctory. He notes the existence of two types of aloe, gives the Sinhalese names for four other vegetables and mentions that several European herbs have already been transplanted, from ‘which I perceive all other European plants would grow here’.Footnote 83
Despite the Relation's lack of detailed descriptions of edible and medicinal herbs and plants, a comparison of the original with the interleaved copy and with the truncated journal of Knox's voyage to Tonqueen in 1681 demonstrate that he was involved in bio-prospecting for naturally occurring plants yielding drugs and food by comparing the plants growing in Cape Verde with those of which he was aware in Ceylon. The plant in which the process of bio-prospecting and transplantation can be most clearly traced across these three texts is the ‘jack’, a name used both for the tree and for its fruit. In the Relation the following description is given:
There is another Fruit, which we call Jacks; the Inhabitants when they are young call them Polos, before they be full ripe Cose; and when ripe, Warracha or Vellas; But with this difference, the Warracha is hard, but the Vella as soft as pap, both looking alike to the eye no difference; but they are distinct Trees.Footnote 84
The fruit is described here as a foodstuff: ‘they are a great help to the People, and a great part of their food’, being compared to a turnip or cabbage, with the thick white juice being used to catch birds.
In his account of the ‘I[s]le of May’ (Maio, Cape Verde), Knox also describes the type of jack yielding ‘warracola’, this time revealing a medicinal use for the fruit, although omitting the description of the tree itself. He notes,
The leafe resembles a Cabbage both in thickness & colour; onely not so large. It is ful[l] of white thick milk, or juice, if you break the leaves which is soon done, being very brittle. The Chingulais put to many medicinal uses: & here in this I[s]land of May they grow in great plenty, just above the sand on the sea shore.
Knox argues that the plants were probably indigenous rather than transplanted, since the inhabitants, whom he correctly assumed were mainly transported from around the Gulf of Guinea as slaves during the period of Portuguese rule, appeared to be unaware of many of their medical uses. He goes on to link the types of plants that are likely to prosper relative to the positions of the two islands, noting that
the difference of Longitude doth not much chang or alter the nature of the Climate as the Latitude doth. For notwithstanding Zeilon Lyeth Degr. log ½ to the Eastward of this Iland, yet here I saw several Plants growing wild, wch grow in the same manner upon Zeilon.
As well as describing two other plants, ‘Bintombracole’ and ‘Endraatta’, growing both on Ceylon and May, he also discusses the neighbouring island of St Iago (Santiago), where he notes plants common throughout the East Indies such as oranges, limes, coconuts, grapes, plantains and watermelons, as well as briefly discussing the effect of the soil type on the native flora.Footnote 85
In the interleaved copy of the Relation Knox describes the jack tree in much more detail. As well as its value as a foodstuff, he mentions the strength of its roots and the hardness of its timber, which he compares to that of the English oak, and notes that it is used as a building material for houses in Ceylon.Footnote 86 In the same copy Knox mentions that the people of Ceylon are not familiar with grafting, perhaps implying that he himself had tried this technique. Finally, he notes a failed attempt to transplant the jack:
I brought one younge plant to the I[s]land of [Barbados] and it was planted in Jehew Halls plantation, but the head haveing been twice [broken] of[f] in my passage the[re]after it died, [else] I doubt not but it would have grown to the great benefitt of the [inhabitants] of the I[s]land which was my onely end.Footnote 87
Knox's discussions of the jack tree and its products in these three passages serve several functions. The survey of the Cape Verde islands can be regarded as part of the East India Company's search for potential bases in the Atlantic Ocean. One of the company's projects during the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth was to establish a chain of settlements in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans like St Helena or the Dutch factory at the Cape and the later French settlements in Madagascar and Mauritius.Footnote 88 These bases were intended to function as small plantations, supply bases for ships trading to both the East and West Indies, and points of defence.Footnote 89 Knox's account of Cape Verde is clearly geared towards this objective. He includes accounts of the fortifications and buildings, as well as possible products, such as cotton, which he observes the inhabitants produce by spinning it with a stick, again comparing it to the method used in Ceylon. In addition, he gives a brief (and unflattering) account of the inhabitants.Footnote 90 A similar example was the company's instructions to Knox to make an ‘exact survey’ of Tristan da Cunha, giving an account of harbours, vegetation and animals and presenting an opinion on whether it would be ‘advantageous for the Company hereafter to make settlement upon any of those Islands’, which ‘Capt Gayez & others inform us would save the lives of many men’.Footnote 91 This commission was again to be undertaken using an earlier text containing advice, in this case the unpublished journal of a ship's mate who had landed at the island the previous year.Footnote 92
This instance of ‘bio-prospecting’ on Cape Verde can thus be seen as part of an ongoing speculative survey of several possible bases for the East India Company. The search for food and drugs was coupled with an analysis of the defensive capabilities of the island, its potential for manufacturing cotton or extracting natural resources such as ironstone, and its capacity to supply a workforce, whether through independent trade or free or coerced labour.Footnote 93 The race to identify, settle and defend suitable island bases was run against the Dutch and French East India Companies, who were making similar surveys in this period.Footnote 94 These trading companies were also competing for those islands that had already been settled.Footnote 95
At the same period, the Royal Society was engaged in a number of investigations about the effects of longitude and latitude, as well as climate, altitude and soil type, on plant and animal life and even disease.Footnote 96 It therefore seems likely that Knox's discussion in his later texts of plants that grow in distant places with similar latitudes, and his account of grafting, were developed through his contacts with these scholars. Such theories had obvious implications for the types of plant to be sought in the process of bio-prospecting, as well as for the types of crop that were likely to be transplanted effectively. Thus the development of scientific theory regarding the natural world was inextricably linked to European expansion and proto-colonialism.Footnote 97 These processes, with their allied claims to both national supremacy and international scope, also had religious connotations.Footnote 98 Such implications can also be identified in Knox's presentation of the jack, coconut and plantain trees as ‘the most wonderful things that God's hands hath wrought’.Footnote 99
The Relation is a work in two parts: natural history and personal account. Although the text should be regarded as a composite work with considerable input from European scholars, this does not negate either the presence in the text of Knox's personal outlook or the effects of ideas received during the nineteen years he spent in Ceylon or in his subsequent travels. Indeed, Knox's responses to the questions put to him by scholars such as Hooke and his contribution to bio-prospecting on behalf of the East India Company should be examined with reference to his personal interactions with members of the societies he visited.Footnote 100 Knox was in Ceylon for nineteen years, during which time he adopted the local language, dress and way of life.Footnote 101 He also raised a child; in fact, it was his return to Europe rather than this level of assimilation that was unusual.Footnote 102 Knox's identification of himself as a member of Kandy society is evident in his language in the description of Cape Verde. At one stage he describes a plant, Allacola, ‘which wee have on Zeilon’.Footnote 103 This perspective also colours his account of his subsequent travels. For example, from Knox's perspective as a resident of Kandy the inhabitants of Cape Verde are dismissed as lacking in ‘ingenuity’. Rather than inquiring into their own medicines and industries or taking into account their enforced migration, he assesses them based on the knowledge of the particular plants he recognizes from Ceylon, and from the viewpoint of a transitory visitor rather than a resident. The customs of Madagascar similarly receive a less than complimentary treatment in Knox's writings.Footnote 104
The desirableness and facility of this undertaking – using the Relation (2): transplantation
As well as surveying potential bases for naturally occurring foods and medicines, the East India Company was also involved in attempts to transplant both agricultural and manufacturing techniques from both the West and the East Indies. These efforts were based on consultations with ‘experts’, books and manuscripts in London and involved transporting both people and texts around the company's settlements. Consultations in London encompassed a range of people from merchants like Thomas Bowrey, scientists such as Robert Boyle, and an unnamed man from Mauritius whom Knox was ordered to bring before the Court of Directors in 1690.Footnote 105 The exchanges also drew on developing theories about the effects of latitude in order to select suitable crops for transplantation. For example, in 1682 the directors noted in a letter to St Helena that ‘we have discoursed with many persons and we know that very good [wheat] doth grow in many parts of the world with latitude similar to yours’.Footnote 106
To effect the movement of experts, the company employed techniques ranging from persuasion via material incentives to coercion, depending on their relative status in a particular area. In 1685 a request was sent to the Bombay factory to supply St Helena with slaves skilled in sugar plantations and the manufacture of saltpetre.Footnote 107 In 1666 an attempt to persuade growers of indigo from the area around Surat to move to the island to demonstrate their skills had failed.Footnote 108 A comparable attempt in 1689 and 1690 to induce a group of French Huguenot wine growers to come to the island to plant vines was, however, successful – although the experiment itself proved short-lived.Footnote 109 Knox was involved with this transfer of expertise from the East and West Indies in several ways. After the reluctance of the Surat indigo growers to comply with the company's request, a West Indian cultivator had been brought in to demonstrate the farming of indigo.Footnote 110 Knox was then instructed to procure indigo and cotton seeds from Madagascar to be sown under the supervision of this planter.Footnote 111 As well as the journal of Captain Bass, on the basis of which the company urged the establishment of salt works, Knox also carried a written set of rules that the company had sent from Barbados and which they were instructed to implement with regard to the slaves whom Knox was to transport from Madagascar.Footnote 112
Based on his own descriptions of agriculture in Ceylon in the Relation, Knox was also intended to contribute to the company's attempts at the transplantation of crops. The description of agricultural techniques in the original text is more extensive than that devoted to medicinal plants, and focuses in particular on rice cultivation. Rice production in seventeenth-century Kandy was organized on a village level, with paddy lands worked communally and a portion of their produce set aside for the king's storehouses.Footnote 113 Knox describes the creation of these paddy fields by the management of water. He notes and names five different types of rice requiring various amounts of time to ripen.Footnote 114 He explains that the type to be sown will be selected depending on how long the necessary amount of water is likely to be available and the approach of the time of year when the fields are due to revert to grazing land for cattle.Footnote 115 Finally, he mentions that there is a type of rice that can be grown without permanent submersion on high lands that cannot be flooded with water. Knox goes on to describe the preparation of the fields using light ploughs drawn by oxen, the cooperation of the villagers in reaping the harvest and the method of treading out the grain using oxen.Footnote 116 The interleaved version of the text again expands on this section, giving more detailed instructions and in one passage providing a diagram of a tool used to channel water.Footnote 117
On the basis of Knox's account of the rice variety that ripened without standing in water, in addition to the oral advice of Knox and ‘several others’, the directors formulated a plan to sow this variety on the highlands of St Helena.Footnote 118 In 1684 they ordered their agents in Surat to acquire ‘three or four baggs of fresh Paddy, of that particular Kind … wee intending it for seed at St Helena’.Footnote 119 The letter goes on to give instructions to store the rice in a cool cabin during the journey and to transfer it between bags at least once a fortnight in order to ‘preserve its prolific quality’. The letter to Surat stresses the potential value of the crop, which is described as ‘no meane concerne to this Kingdom’.Footnote 120 Knox and a former fellow captive were then instructed to oversee the sowing of the rice. The directors in London informed their council in St Helena,
there is a peculiar sort of Rice that groweth best on high and dry Lands, the seed and cultivation whereof he knoweth very well. He and Ralph Knight that is on board his ship having wrought many years upon it with their own hands in Ceylon.Footnote 121
Knox was also intended to demonstrate the uses of coconut trees; instructions from London implied these were growing on the island.Footnote 122 He was supposed to demonstrate how to draw the oil, which is compared to the oil of almonds. This process is described in the interleaved version of the Relation, as well as in the Autobiography.Footnote 123 A final lesson drawn from the Relation relates to the production of iron. The directors note that Knox believes that ironstone is plentiful in St Helena and that ‘in the Country where he was captive, every poor man … made his own Iron for the use of his family’. Knox was instructed to demonstrate the technique in the hope that the stone could be transported to India and manufactured there.Footnote 124
Rice was clearly an important foodstuff on St Helena in the early period, and its transport and storage seem to have been difficult. References in the early records are made to shortages and poor store quality.Footnote 125 An earlier proposal to send two slaves experienced in cultivating rice paddies had already been dropped after advice that the crop was unsuitable for the high ground of St Helena.Footnote 126 This motivated the choice of the specific type of rice that it was intended Knox supply. However, it is unclear whether Knox ever put into practice the intended experiments in rice growing, the production of iron or the growing of cotton and indigo.Footnote 127 In fact, Knox's most important contribution to the development to the island was probably as a slave trader. He arrived at St Helena with at least two consignments of slaves from Madagascar. Slaves were often valued not only for their labour but for their expertise in growing the types of crop the company wished to establish on St Helena.Footnote 128 Transplantation of people was carried out alongside that of plants. Like his description of Ceylon, Knox's account of his visits to Madagascar in the draft second edition would have been intended for the use of other traders.
As with the example of the jack tree, the discussion of Knox's involvement with the attempted transplantation of rice is only the most traceable example among several indications that Knox was involved in transplantation around the settlements he visited.Footnote 129 Whether or not it was eventually implemented, Knox's commission was one of a long series of agricultural experiments on St Helena that began with the Portuguese introductions of the fruit trees at which early travellers marvelled, as well as of the European plants and herbs brought during their initial colonization of the island in 1502. The English fleet sent to colonize the island in 1659 was instructed to stop at Cape Verde to pick up specimens of cassava, yam, potatoes, beans and chickpeas, as well as orange and lemon trees, for transplantation.Footnote 130 Attempts to transfer plants and techniques from the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to St Helena continued until the twentieth century with mixed results. Some successes included yams, New Zealand flax and coffee.Footnote 131 Others such as rice and cinchona (the source of quinine) never became established.Footnote 132
London scholars also continued to play an advisory role in these experiments. Several governors sent species to London, and Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, William Roxburgh and William Hooker would all later investigate the island's plant species.Footnote 133 The East India Company also continued to receive advice about the suitability of crops for transplantation based on the latitude at which they were found. For example, Joseph Banks's recommendations about the transplantation of tea to certain areas of India were based on previous writings about the types of tea growing at similar latitudes in China.Footnote 134 Often, however, the failure or success of such schemes seems to have been due to social rather than environmental factors. For example, the company apparently gave no thought to the logistics of transplanting to St Helena the system of cooperative rice growing that Knox describes in Kandy, where agricultural production was based on a combination of landowning ‘free planters’ and company plantations, both depending on slave labour.
Conclusions
Investigation of the production and circulation of Knox's Relation illuminates several points about the place of travel texts and natural histories in the process of European expansion and in the development of ideas about the effects of latitude on plants and people. The involvement of Strype and Hooke in the first and second editions shows how questioning, comparison and appropriation of other accounts helped form composite ‘natural histories’ with several applications. Cooperation between the East India Company and the Royal Society in producing this text should be viewed as part of an ongoing collaboration between the two institutions to lay claim to the wealth promised by amassing useful knowledge about the world. Such claims were important in establishing the authority of both organizations. They also formed part of competition with the French and Dutch to lay claim to that knowledge as well as to the wealth of the East and West Indies on behalf of the nation. Other examples from the same period include the published works of Fryer and Dampier, as well as the unpublished letters, responses to questions and descriptive accounts that fill the archives of both the society and the company. By providing merchants and travellers with queries, guidelines on making observations and instruments such as those Hooke gave Knox, scholars could amass information that returned as advice to the company's agents about appropriate crops or medicinal plants likely to flourish at certain latitudes or under particular environmental conditions. The advice also appeared in the forms of guidebooks or ‘natural histories’, maps and dictionaries. Some aspects of the contemporary uses of Knox's work, including the incorporation of its linguistic content in dictionaries and of its political and religious content in contemporary philosophy, fall beyond the scope of this paper. Other Knox manuscripts, such as the journal Hooke mentioned in 1684, remain to be identified, precluding an analysis of how the information he provided about tides could have been used in sea charts. It is nevertheless clear that, just as Hooke predicted in his preface, the information provided by Knox was drawn on by specialists in a number of fields.
To locate Knox's Relation within a range of published and unpublished manuscripts produced by collaboration between merchants and scholars in the late seventeenth century also allows a clearer picture of how such texts were used to explore the possibilities of transferring non-European practices and techniques to European settlements like St Helena, or of identifying other possible areas for settlement such as the Cape Verde islands. For example, Knox's involvement in bio-prospecting based on the Relation is recognizable only if his unpublished second edition and journal of his voyage to Tonqueen are also consulted. Similarly, it is necessary to trace the movement of ideas from the Relation to the company's correspondence to see the contribution of the work to attempts at the transplantation of crops, agricultural techniques and human experts around the globe. Many merchants like Knox moved across areas that are now often studied separately, such as the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, taking their ideas and prejudices as well as their papers and specimens with them. They also occupied roles such as author and slave trader that are often studied within quite different conceptual frameworks. Following their journeys across these spaces can contribute to a greater awareness of how ideas and techniques were transferred between different areas of the world in the early modern period.
