September 1890, William Digance, the son of a poor farmer in Surrey, set out to Brazil to hunt orchids. The 25-year-old, full of excitement and courage, assured his employer, "I mean success." However, Digance struggled with language and amounts; he found himself in trouble with water and thunderstorms during the rainy season, overwhelmed by heat, and repeatedly sick. In his letter, he protested that his employer’s business manager had deceived him, who assured him that the trip would be “easy.” That man said all he said, Digance wrote painfully, because he did not visit Brazil himself. Traveling in the capital or on the railway is very easy, but once inside, the situation is very different, “and everything has to be done with animals, they are not the roads in the UK, it’s a series of climbing up a mountain through Rivers & Woods through Rivers & Woods, sometimes having to stop and chop the road. Six months after leaving, Digance died.
Plant hunting may think of the bold Victorian explorers, brave Holy Grail seekers and people of science – Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace. Of course, this is how plant hunters are described in recent works, including the 2012 children's books, Plant Hunters: The True Story of Their Bold Adventures to Earth. This is also how Victorians were portrayed. In the illustration, the plant hunter wears boots and plaid khaki pants while venturing into the rainforest.
But this is just a piece of the story. Most plant hunters are not particularly fashionable or affluent. They did not become members of the natural history society of August of the era. Instead, people who answer “plant collector” newspaper job advertisements are often poor and abused. Many people are hardly literate. These plant hunters do not neatly fit into the prototype that dominates the colonial extraction story. They are neither powerful imperialists nor deprived natives.
These people did not write famous books, but Have done it Leave the records, although the documents were never intended to be published. The employer requests the hunter's detailed letters - information about each area visited, the number of plants found, the number of boxes shipped, and their routes of transport, and, most importantly, spy notes about competitor hunters operating in the area.
On the torn, faded pages, many with imprints from local hotels or train stations, hunters try to answer the employer’s request. Most of the letters were destroyed long ago, but a large number of archives were preserved in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kevo, London. They are excellent documents, windows to the lives of many plant hunters, which would have lost history.
The people who emerged from these letters made how Victorian historians view the British Empire. For a long time, many believed that the romanticized image of Britain (including the adventure plant hunter in the Kakika) was used to conceal the violence and arrogance characterized by British colonization. Our historians examine the ways in which countries around the world were robbed of their cultural treasures and natural wealth, including orchids, as a result of colonial plunder. We have seen colonists as oppressors and colonized people being oppressed.
But plant hunters are not easy to place in this dichotomy. They improved the interests of the empire, but gained little in the process. They were sent to develop resources for foreign land, but were victims of exploitation in themselves. Not only are they responsible for bringing the product home, they are expected to be part of the product: their adventure story contributed to the commercial appeal of orchids.
Plant hunters are “relentless passion” people who only like danger, according to the companies that hire them. This was not written by the Hunter.
Frederick Sander In the last decades of the 19th century, his career reached his career, an era when the emerging middle class in North America and Europe aspired to "Exotics." Queen Victoria awarded Sander the "Royal Orchid Grower" and Romanovs made him the baron of the St. Russian Empire. Sander's luxury nursery in St. Albans outside London is one of the wonders of Europe. After visiting, Orchid Phil Frederick Boyle wrote in 1893:
Orchids are everywhere! They hang in dense bundles of the roof. They are one foot thick on each plank and two feet thick below. They were hung from the wall. The man kept passing along the gangway, carrying the load full of trolleys. On the first arrival, the fresh shop accumulates in the hands of that group. They belong to the eighty species of Burmah last night, and when we look, a boy brought a telegram that announced fifty from Mexico that would arrive at Waterloo at 2.30 pm.
But letters from the hunters of Sand Company revealed what is needed to achieve “orchids everywhere.” On thousands of pages, dozens of collectors narrate the loss - the fragile orchids are destroyed to prevent competitor hunters from getting their acquisition, orchids stomped under their feet, abandoned in collection scenes, abandoned in collection scenes, on bulk or frozen journeys, on a journey home, the day before the sale, in the sales room, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acultion Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss, in the Acuction Boolss. They also describe their losses: health, money, property.
Sander urgently asked his staff to be hunters and writers: he instructed Swedish hunter Claes Ericsson to "write me longer letters." Digance, hired by Sander, wrote that he expects "the devil who doesn't write often." If Sand had sympathy for the hunter's struggles, he wouldn't have expressed it in several of his letters. He turned in a violent phrase: "Muzz!" He wrote once, "If I brought you here, I would beat you until there was no bounds of a piece of skin."
In an interview in 1896, published in a magazine called titSander brags every year, spending up to 3,000 pounds (more than $1 million today). In fact, he spent about a third of his time, but the payment covered a huge travel expense. Sometimes, he just refuses to pay in advance. “I will give you 50 more cases, but there is no money, so tomorrow I’m going to put them on the garbage dump,” Ericsson wrote, after months of begging employers to help him pay his hotel bill. “Now I’m very upset and I can’t write anymore.”
Sander spent too much time giving up on plant hunters. Ericsson is deserted in Singapore and has no money to go home. A hunter must lend him cash. When another Louis Perthius was abandoned in Brazil, his father, Léon, wrote to every office of Sander to make the businessman brutally mock the businessman. Léon asked, a man with his own family, a father, could treat another man's son this way. Maybe risk the lives of young people and sacrifice their youth to "enrich your organization"?
Today’s scholars don’t know if Sander is helpful to these crying sounds. Although most of Sander's letters were lost, presumably discarded abroad, his headquarters staff commented on the letters they received so that we could at least see readers in London when they read them. A strong step down demonstrates interest in the plans and actions of new factories, new shipments, and competitor companies. In most cases, neither the litigation to pay for the disease outbreak nor the reported litigation was marked.
Dutch collector Cornelius Oversluys started a letter in April 1893 with his usual, very good handwriting, only to start trembling as he succumbed to yellow fever. "Don't let me end with a fever...I'm shaking," his crazy and shaky script reads. Rio de Janeiro died in Rio de Janeiro after a series of "cold" and "colic". A colleague, Bavarian Fritz Arnold, died of stomach pain while collecting orchids near the Orinoco River. A fellow hunter listed Arnold's property - a revolver, a watch, a suitcase, a key and a money, and informed Sand.
Sander did not lament these losses in media reports, but instead charmed the story of his hunter's death. For example, according to Sander, Arnold's body was not close, but it was exist The Orinoco River is in an exciting mysterious setting: his body "sits on an open boat" and "the cause of his death is absolutely certain." Sand told an interviewer that another of his hunters was burned to death by the priest for blasphemy, a fate recalling the main features of Rudyard Kipling’s short story The Mark of the Beast.
final, British and European societies began to estimate some ugly aspects of their orchid fanaticism, but this estimate had nothing to do with labor conditions.
Critics began to point out that the abundant orchids in Europe and North America meant that their natural habitat was disappearing. “Not satisfied with specimens that account for 300 or 500 quality orchids, they must require a search of the entire country without anything left around,” lamented Eduard Ortgies, director of the Botanical Garden of Zurich in 1877. Magazine American Garden Sander and one of his rivals, Siebrecht & Wadley, pointed out that their hunters are working to cut down on orchids “still shivering in tropical houses.”
In the political realm, Victorians feared their obsession with things and accumulation. Packaged orchids have become the contemporary Karl Marx of "commodity". Marx wrote that commodities are separated from geography and human origin, but there is no concern about Victorian society at all about human origin. Perhaps Sander and other orchid sellers were so successful in painting certain plant hunters that the cost of human hunting (and the cost of the environment) was never leaked to the press.
If anything, the hunter in Sander's sensational media coverage would be the subject of irony. The plot of the West End Musical in 1903 orchidfor example, involves side hunting in Peru Catlia- Easy to find in the UK. This is a new problem with orchids: they become too common. These orchids have gone from precious exoticism that gave the lives of many working-class plant hunters to their mundane goods today – ubiquitous office gifts, a few steps from scented candles and boxed soap.
The hunter's plight is still invisible. Ericsson begged Ericsson in March 1892 to Sander, who knew the success of the company, the spread of orchids on the windowsills of houses in wealthy countries in the world, was built on the sacrifice of sellables like him.
*Main Image Credit: Allison Zaucha / Illustrations from the Atlantic Ocean. Source: Hulton Archive/Getty; SSPL/Getty; Ohio State University Library; Getty.
This article has been adapted from Sarah Bilston's new book Lost Orchid: A story of Victorian plunder and obsession.
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