What The Hell America!

In September 1890, William Digance, the son of an impoverished farmer from Surrey, set off for Brazil to hunt orchids. Full of excitement and bravado, the 25-year-old assured his employer, “I mean to succeed.” But Digance struggled with the language and the amount of money everything cost; he found himself stranded by rising water and thunderstorms in the rainy season, overpowered by the heat, and repeatedly sick. In his letters, he protested that he’d been deceived by his employer’s business manager, who’d assured him the trip would be “easy.” The man only said that, Digance wrote bitterly, because he hadn’t visited Brazil himself. It was easy enough to travel in the capital or by rail, but the situation was quite different once one headed into the interior, “& everything has to be done with animals they are not English roads—it is a series of climbing up one mountain & down another through rivers & woods where one has to sometimes stop & cut a road. it is not very easy I can assure you.”  Six months after his departure, Digance was dead.

Plant hunting may conjure up images of bold Victorian explorers, intrepid grail seekers, and storied men of science—Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace. Certainly, that is how plant hunters have been described in recent works, including a 2012 children’s book, The Plant Hunters: True Stories of Their Daring Adventures to the Far Corners of the Earth. And that’s how they were depicted in the Victorian age too. In illustrations, plant hunters are handsome mustached men wearing boots and plaid khaki pants as they venture into the tropical rainforests.

But this is only one slice of the story. The majority of plant hunters were not particularly fashionable or wealthy; they did not become members of the era’s august natural-history societies. On the contrary, the men who answered newspaper job advertisements for “plant collectors” were generally poor and ill-educated. Many were barely literate. These plant hunters don’t fit neatly into the archetypes that have come to dominate stories of colonial extraction. They were neither powerful imperialists nor dispossessed native people.

These men didn’t write famous books, but they did leave records, though these documents were never intended to be published. Employers demanded detailed letters from their hunters—information on each area visited, plants found and their condition, numbers of boxes shipped and their transportation routes, and, most important, spying notes on rival hunters operating in the region.

On torn, faded pages, many bearing the imprint of a local hotel or railway station, hunters attempted to answer their employers’ demands. Most letters were long ago destroyed, but a substantial archive is preserved at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. They are remarkable documents, a window into the lives of many plant hunters that would otherwise be lost to history.

The men emerging from these letters complicate how historians of the Victorian period think about the British Empire. For a long time, many have argued that the romanticized image Britain presents of itself—including the adventurous plant hunter in khakis—has been used to cover up the violence and hubris that characterized British colonization. We historians have studied the ways in which countries all over the world were robbed of their cultural treasures and natural riches—including orchids—as a result of colonial plunder. We have come to see colonizers as oppressors and colonized peoples as oppressed.

From the June 1919 issue: Orchid-hunting

But plant hunters are not easy to place in this dichotomy. They advanced imperial interests but gained little in the process. They were sent to exploit resources of a foreign land but were themselves victims of exploitation. They were not only tasked with bringing home the product but expected to be part of the product: Their stories of adventure contributed to orchids’ commercial appeal.

According to the companies that employed them, plant hunters were men of “indefatigable zeal” who loved nothing more than danger. This was not what the hunters wrote.

Frederick Sander reached the peak of his career as a nursery owner in the final decades of the 19th century, a time when emerging middle classes in North America and Europe longed for “exotics.” Queen Victoria bestowed on Sander the honorific “Royal Orchid Grower,” and the Romanovs made him a Baron of the Holy Russian Empire. Sander’s lavish nursery premises in St. Albans, outside London, were one of the wonders of Europe. After a visit, the orchidophile Frederick Boyle wrote in 1893:

The letters of Sander & Co.’s hunters, however, reveal what it took to achieve “orchids everywhere.” On thousands of pages, dozens of collectors recount losses—of fragile orchids destroyed to prevent rival hunters from acquiring them, orchids trampled underfoot and discarded in frenzied scenes of collection, orchids dying en masse on the journey home in crates or freezing, the night before a sale, in the auction rooms. They also narrate their own losses: of health, money, possessions.

Sander was hugely demanding of his employees as hunters and as writers: He instructed Claes Ericsson, a Swedish hunter, to “write me longer letters.” Digance, whom Sander employed, wrote that he anticipated a “devil of a row for not writing oftener.” If Sander felt any sympathy for the hunters’ struggles, he did not express it in the few of his own letters that survive. He used violent turns of phrase: “MOUTH SHUT!” he wrote once, and “If I’d got you here I would beat you until not a single patch of your skin was left unbruised.”

In an 1896 interview published in a magazine called Tit-Bits, Sander bragged of spending up to 3,000 pounds—more than half a million dollars in today’s money—on each hunter every year. In truth, he spent about one-third of that, but that sum covered considerable traveling expenses. Sometimes, he simply refused to pay up in advance. “I would have sent you more 50 cases but got no money, so I’m going to put them on the rubbish heap tomorrow,” Ericsson wrote, after months of begging his employer to help him cover his hotel bills. “Now I’m so upset I can not write any more.”

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Sander abandoned the plant hunters when they cost too much. Ericsson was deserted in Singapore without money for the trip home; a fellow hunter had to lend him the cash. When another, Louis Perthius, was abandoned in Brazil, his father, Léon, wrote letters to each of Sander’s offices to excoriate the businessman for his cruelty. How was it even possible, Léon asked, that a man with his own family, a father, could treat another man’s son this way; could risk a young man’s life and sacrifice his youth to “enrich your establishment”?

Scholars today don’t know whether or how Sander responded to these cries for help. Although most of Sander’s letters were lost, presumably discarded abroad, his head office staffers annotated the letters they received, so that we can at least see what moved readers in London as they read. Vigorous underlinings indicate interest in new plants, new shipments, and the plans and actions of rival companies. Pleas for money to cover expenses and reports of disease outbreaks were, for the most part, left unmarked.

The Dutch collector Cornelius Oversluys started a letter in April 1893 in his usual, quite well-formed handwriting, only to start quaking as he succumbed to yellow fever. “The fever don’t let me finish … I am all shaking,” he wrote, in frenzied and wobbly script. Digance, after a sequence of “colds” and attacks of “colic,” would die of “bilious fever” in Rio de Janeiro. A colleague, Bavarian Fritz Arnold, died after suffering stomach pain while collecting orchids near the Orinoco River. A fellow hunter itemized Arnold’s possessions—a revolver, a watch, a suitcase, keys, and money—and notified Sander.

Rather than lamenting these losses, in media reports, Sander glamorized stories of his hunters’ deaths. According to Sander, for example, Arnold’s body was found not near but literally on the Orinoco River, in thrillingly mysterious circumstances: His corpse lay “in an open boat,” and “the cause of his death was never definitely known.” Sander told an interviewer that another of his hunters was burned to death by priests for blasphemy—a fate recalling that of the main character of Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Mark of the Beast.”

Eventually, British and European society began reckoning with some of the uglier aspects of its orchid mania—but this reckoning had nothing to do with labor conditions.

Critics began to point out that the abundance of orchids in Europe and North America meant they were disappearing from their natural habitats. “Not satisfied with taking 300 or 500 specimens of a fine Orchid, they must needs scour the whole country, and leave nothing for many miles around,” lamented Eduard Ortgies, the director of the Zurich botanical garden in 1877. “This is no longer collecting, it is wanton robbery.” The magazine The American Garden singled out Sander and one of his competitors, Siebrecht & Wadley, noting that their hunters were working to cut out the few orchids “still trembling in their tropic homes.”

Victorians all along the political spectrum worried about their obsession with things and accumulation. The packaged orchid had become, to quote contemporary Karl Marx, a “commodity.” Marx wrote about the ways in which commodities become detached from geographical and human origins, but the bit about the human origins didn’t worry Victorian society as much. Perhaps Sander and other orchid sellers were so successful in painting a certain picture of plant hunters that the human cost of plant hunting, unlike the environmental one, never leaked to the press.

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If anything, the hunters in Sander’s sensationalized media reports became subjects of satire. The plot of the 1903 West End musical The Orchid, for instance, concerns a side-splitting hunt in Peru for the rare purple Cattleya—which could easily be found in Britain. That was a new problem with orchids: They became too common. The orchids went from precious exotic that cost the lives of so many working-class plant hunters to the mundane commodities they are today–that ubiquitous office gift, a couple of steps up from scented candles and boxed soap.

The plight of the hunters remained invisible. “Do not forget your Travellers in Brazil for the Bricks of St. Albans,” Ericsson begged Sander in March 1892. He understood that the company’s successes, the spread of orchids across the windowsills of homes in rich countries of the world, were built on the sacrifices of expendable men like him.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Hulton Archive / Getty; SSPL / Getty; The Ohio State University Library; Getty.

This article has been adapted from Sarah Bilston’s new book, The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession.