The Orchid Thief

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  Some Victorian orchid collectors went to the tropics themselves, but most stayed home and paid professional hunters to travel around the world and collect for them. Having tropical orchids therefore indicated you were rich enough to hire a man to do a task that might kill him. As soon as the English got interested in tropical orchids there were Englishmen who set up tropical-orchid businesses. These commercial growers depended entirely on orchid hunters. No one in England was very good at cultivating or breeding tropical orchids at the time, so hunters were the only way to get nursery stock, let alone new species. The large nurseries employed whole crews of hunters. In 1894, for instance, the preeminent Victorian orchid grower Frederick Sander, who had sixty greenhouses at his estate in St. Albans, employed twenty-three hunters collecting around the world for him, including a man in Mexico, two in Brazil, two in Colombia, two in Peru, one in Madagascar, one in New Guinea, three in India, and one in the Straits Settlement. One of Sander’s best hunters was Benedict Roezl, a tough-looking Czech. Roezl had cut off his left hand accidentally while in Havana demonstrating a machine he had invented for extracting fiber from hemp; the iron hook he used in its place added to his grim appearance. Roezl combed across South America and discovered eight hundred new orchid species in his travels. At the peak of Victorian orchid fever there were scores of orchid hunters crisscrossing the world for different growers. In 1863 a boat sailing to the Andes had among its passengers John Weir of the Royal Horticultural Society; John Blunt, working for Frederick Sander’s archrival John Lowe; and a hunter named Schlim, working for Jean-Jules Linden, a distinguished Belgian nurseryman. All three of these men were heading for exactly the same part of the Andes, looking for exactly the same Peruvian odontoglossums, and each had promised his employer that he would be the first to bring the plants home. The wide world was crowded as far as orchid hunters were concerned. When men working for rival growers crossed paths they sometimes killed each other, or at least came close. William Arnold—the hunter who later drowned in the Orinoco—was a young German who often worked for Frederick Sander. Arnold was a defiant and irritable man known to be picky about the weapons he traveled with. He supposedly bragged to other hunters that he turned down an assignment because the sponsor offered him a lot of money but only a secondhand gun. Sander once sent Arnold to Brazil to look for cattleyas. On the boat ride over, Arnold got into a fight with another hunter on board who was also going to Brazil, also looking for cattleyas, but for Sander’s rival John Lowe. Both hunters were heavily armed and belligerent. After boasts and threats and a display of side arms they nearly ended up in a duel. Once Arnold arrived in Brazil he wrote to Sander about the incident. According to his biographer Arthur Swinson, Sander wrote back to Arnold: “This makes me very excited and gives me much pleasure for I love these battles very much.” He advised Arnold to stop hunting for orchids immediately and instead start tracking Lowe’s orchid hunter to see what kinds of plants he was collecting and to get any he might overlook. Then Sander told Arnold to try to urinate on his competitor’s plants when they were packed for shipping because the urine would cause the plants to bolt and die on the boat ride home.

  Hunters worked solo and evidently enjoyed very little fraternity. They never traveled with their peers, but they were sometimes accompanied by huge crews—Joseph Hooker’s sixty-man entourage included a valet, coolies, seed gatherers, cooks, tree climbers, a taxidermist, and a plant dryer. They undoubtedly got lonely. When Augustus Margary was homesick he would stand outside his tent and sing “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “My Darling Clementine.” Nevertheless, if one hunter encountered another in the jungle they would not socialize, and they would certainly say nothing at all about their orchids. Or they might offer false information and phony directions to some imaginary hillside carpeted with flowers, and sometimes they planted fake maps with orchid habitats marked on them so that they could steer their rivals the wrong way. They were either prideful or greedy or both. Most took every orchid specimen they found. The Czech orchid hunter Roezl once sent Sander a shipment from South America that weighed eight tons. Because orchid hunters hated the thought of another hunter’s finding any plants they might have missed, they would “collect out” an area, and then they would burn the place down. Even hunters working for the same grower were dog-eat-dog. Competition between them was so intense that it could even take their minds off orchids. Whenever some of Sander’s hunters came upon each other they would stop looking for orchids and spend days or weeks pursuing each other through the jungle for no reason at all.

  Hunters had to travel to scary and dangerous faraway places, but that hardly ever deterred them. Benedict Roezl was said to have been robbed seventeen times in his travels. The English plant hunter Joseph Hooker spent two years trekking through the Himalayas outfitted in nothing more protective than his spectacles and a tartan shooting jacket. He had no mountaineering equipment at all, although the wife of a friend gave him some woolly stockings and a little antiglare eyeshade she made for him out of one of her veils. On his climbs Hooker had biscuits and tea and fine brandy, carried a solid-oak traveling desk and brass-bound ditty boxes, and slept with a copy of Darwin’s Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle under his pillow. He rarely had a good night’s sleep because the yaks he used as pack animals were insomniacs and so inquisitive that they would stick their heads into Hooker’s tent and snort on him until he woke up. In his seven months in Assam he was drenched by nearly three hundred inches of rain. Nevertheless Hooker persevered, and by the end of his odyssey he had collected thousands of new species and had traveled higher and farther on Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, than any European before him. In 1865, done with his adventuring, Hooker became director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.

  Commercial growers never hesitated to send their hunters somewhere unwholesome. A grower probably did mind losing a man by misadventure but maybe not as much as losing an opportunity for collecting. Carl Roebelin was another one of the great Victorian orchid hunters. He was German, mentally hard and physically fearless. At Sander’s request he once went hunting on a small island in the Philippines. Just after he arrived an earthquake turned the island inside out and Roebelin was almost killed. As soon as he made it to safety he wired Sander to tell him that he was returning to England because the island had been devastated. At the end of the wire he mentioned that he’d seen some astounding cinnamon-scented lilac vandas in the jungle right before the earthquake. If Roebelin had really wanted to leave the Philippines and come home, this was exactly the wrong thing to say. Sander wired back immediately and demanded that Roebelin return to the island and find those lilac vandas or find another employer to pay his passage home. Roebelin refused and Sander’s threats became more strenuous. Roebelin finally gave in. The plant he retrieved from the wreckage was a new species that was later given the name Vanda sanderiana. It was put on display in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew when it bloomed and was such a spectacle that it drew a crowd of thousands. Many vandas grown commercially now can be traced back to Roebelin’s salvaged plant.

  Sander’s greatest hunter was another German named William Micholitz. He was tireless, productive, and canny, and Sander’s preeminence as a commercial grower was largely due to Micholitz’s many discoveries. Even so, Sander never seemed particularly tender toward him. Once when Micholitz was sailing from Ecuador back to England the ship he was sailing on caught fire. The ship was lost and the orchids he had collected for Sander burned and Micholitz almost died. He sent Sander a telegram saying, “Ship Burnt! What do?” Sander wired back: “Go Back!” Micholitz wired again: “Too late. Rainy season.” Sander: “GO BACK.” In 1899 Micholitz disappeared for several months, which apparently annoyed Sander more than it worried him. He complained in a letter to a friend: “Micholitz is perhaps eaten—we hear nothing.” Micholitz had not been eaten and he did finally reappear; Sander greeted him and then commanded him to go collecting in Colombia at once even though the country was in
the middle of a revolution. Sander once sent Micholitz to the Tanimbar Islands, remote bits of land southwest of New Guinea. After a few months Sander wrote to Micholitz demanding to know what orchids he had found in Tanimbar. Micholitz explained in his reply that he had successfully located orchids and had successfully found locals to help him collect but that he had run into interference: “A big battle has taken place. In the evening the people brought back their dead and wounded. Three had been decapitated by the enemy, and one of them was also minus hands and feet and last but not least his penis, which with one hand they hung up over the gate of the village. After the fight the people did not want to collect any plants.”

  Sander and Micholitz seem like a miserable couple, but what drew them together was that they were both in love with the same thing. Everything was less important and less interesting to them than orchids—even death and war. On the brink of World War I, Micholitz wrote to Sander that he worried about the approaching conflict but just for one reason, one that Sander certainly understood: “I suppose if it comes to a universal war, there will be very little demand for orchids.” A few years later Sander was on his deathbed. Just before he fell into his final coma, he sent a note to a garden director in Frankfurt and signed off with a few lines Micholitz would have appreciated: “This illness will be the end of me. Tell me, how are the plants I sent you? Are they still alive?”

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  Some hunters traveled for so long that they became attached to the jungle and became strangers at home. Carl Roebelin dated local women and adopted the language of wherever he was hunting, and after a few years he settled in Burma with a Burmese woman and just shipped the plants he collected back to England by themselves. Charles Waterton, who wrote a book called Wanderings in South America, declared that while on his travels he had been “seized with an unconquerable aversion to Piccadilly” and went to live permanently with the Orinoco Indians. There is no record of what residents of places like Tanimbar and Assam and Belize felt about European hunters arriving out of the blue and harvesting their native flowers. Often local people worked for the hunters as guides. To say that most hunters respected them for anything other than their ability to find flowers would be untrue. Joseph Hooker, for one, scorned the locals he met; he called the Bhotias “queer and insolent,” the Lepchas “veritable coward[s],” and the Khasi “sulky, intractable fellows.” Orchid fever usually prevailed over common decency. At its worst it was the same arrogance and sense of entitlement of European colonization, only in miniature. In the late 1880s an Englishman in New Guinea discovered a new variety of orchid growing in a cemetery. Without bothering to get permission he dug up the graves and collected the flowers. As an afterthought he gave the people whose ancestors he had disinterred a few glass beads for the disturbed graves and to persuade them to help him carry the plants to port. After this graveyard shipment arrived in London it was sold in a deluxe auction house for a record amount of money. Another hunter in New Guinea found some good orchids growing on human remains. He collected the plants and sent them to England still attached to ribs and shinbones. That same year a Dendrobium from Burma was auctioned off at Protheroe’s of London still attached to the human skull on which it had been found.

  Sometimes orchid species were discovered and brought back to Europe but then couldn’t be found again in the wild. These were known as lost orchids, and every orchid fancier and every ambitious commercial grower and every prideful hunter was determined to find one of them. Paphiopedilum fairrieanum was one of the lost orchids. It had been discovered in north India in the early 1800s and then seemed to vanish. Hunters scoured India and Burma for it without success, but their sponsors kept sending them back to look again. Frederick Sander’s hunters once collected a few species that looked so much like Paphiopedilum that Sander was sure he had hit the jackpot. He sent the specimens to the dean of botanists, William Reichenbach, who examined the plants, identified them as cattleyas rather than the lost Paphiopedilum, and sent a nasty and dismissive note to Sander saying, “Don’t talk to me about your stupid Cattleya—it’s too piddling!” Paphiopedilum fairrieanum was eventually rediscovered by a hunter in the Himalayas forty years later. Cattleya labiata vera was, at one time, common in European greenhouses, but then one by one each mysteriously died until there was only a single plant left in all of western Europe. No nurseryman or plant hunter could remember where the flower had originally been found. Then the greenhouse with the sole surviving specimen burned down, incinerating the final domesticated Cattleya labiata vera. Hunters pined for it without luck for seventy years and finally more or less abandoned the search. One evening, seven decades after the last one had burned, a British diplomat spotted a woman at an embassy dinner in Paris with a corsage that reminded him of Cattleya labiata vera. He traced the flower to Brazil and confirmed that it was the lamented Cattleya, and soon hunters were able to restock Europe’s greenhouses. Most other lost orchids, though, have never been seen again.

  Orchid hunters’ hauls got bigger and bigger toward the middle of the 1800s. This was partly motivated by rapacity and shortsightedness, but also by the fact that plant transportation was so unreliable that most of the plants shipped to Europe arrived dead—you needed to collect a huge haul to end up with even a small surviving heap of plants in London. In a letter to the Royal Horticultural Society in 1819 a nurseryman noted that only a few of a thousand plants shipped to him survived the trip. In 1827 a Whitechapel surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward put a caterpillar to pupate in a glass jar and promptly forgot about it. Probably there was a little soil in the jar, because months later when Ward remembered the caterpillar, he noticed that a tiny fern and a few sprigs of grass had sprung up in the jar. Ward surmised that plants might flourish if they were kept in a sealed glass container with a little moisture and protected from London’s dirty air, and that it might be possible for someone to cultivate exotic plants this way even inside a dark apartment. He then took a bigger jar and put in more plants and eventually created a miniature garden that was so extraordinary that landscape designers and horticulturists came to his house just to admire it. Word of Dr. Ward’s indoor jungle got around, and soon a fern-filled “Wardian case” became a fixture in Victorian living rooms. Ward himself created the most elaborate of Wardian cases, which contained a fish tank, a fern garden, a chameleon, and a Jersey toad.

  Dr. Ward further surmised that his glass cases might overcome the difficulties of plant transportation, and in 1834 he built a prototype, filled it with English ferns, and sent it on a six-month ship ride to New South Wales. The ferns thrived. He then shipped tender Australian ferns back to England in a sealed case, and they also survived. Ward published a magazine article in 1839 describing his Wardian cases; and in 1842 expanded it into a book called On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases. Wardian cases were adopted directly by European gardeners. Now instead of only one in a thousand plants surviving a journey, more than nine hundred of a thousand plants would make it alive. The Wardian case made possible a new economy of botany. Profit-making plants like tea trees, tobacco, cork oak, and coffee bushes could be moved from their native continents to another, and from one region of a country to another. Natural boundaries melted; the world shrank to the size of a glass caterpillar jar. Inside a Wardian case, Joseph Paxton could ship an Atnherstia nobilis from India to Chatsworth Hall; Joseph Hooker could send a consignment from Tierra del Fuego to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew of full-grown Argentinean trees.

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  Even after the Wardian case improved plant transportation, the huge hauls continued anyhow, and garden journals in England began publishing warnings about emptying the jungles. Some well-traveled places were already so deflowered that to find any orchids or to hope to find new species, hunters traveled to more and more remote jungles in places such as Surabaja, the Naga Hills, the Irrawaddy River area, Yap, and Fakfak. They combed through the East Indies island by island. In one journal a Malaysian botanist wrote that there were barely any orchids
left in his country. In 1878 a Swiss botanist wrote: “Not satisfied with taking 300 or 500 specimens of a fine orchid, [collectors] must scour the whole country and leave nothing for many miles around.… These modern collectors spare nothing. This is no longer collecting; it is wanton robbery.” A collector returning from Colombia reported that the places where Miltonia used to flourish were now “cleared as if by forest fire.” Even the most inaccessible places were crowded with orchid hunters. Joseph Hooker climbed through the Khasia Mountains in Assam; the place was mobbed when he got there. He wrote to his father: “What with Jenkins’ and Simon’s collectors here, twenty or thirty of Falconer’s, Lobb’s, my friends Raban and Cave and Inglis’s friends, the roads here are becoming stripped like the Penang jungles, and for miles it sometimes looks as if a gale had strewed the road with rotten branches and Orchidae. Falconer’s men sent down 1000 baskets the other day.” Early shipments from the tropics to England consisted of maybe fifty plants. Glass was so expensive that most greenhouses were small; fifty plants amounted to something in a small greenhouse. Then in 1845 Britain repealed the high tax on glass and thus launched the era of enormous plant houses, such as the Palm House at Kew Gardens, with its forty-five thousand square feet of pale green glass panels. Collectors and nurserymen wanted more of everything. In 1869 the Suez Canal opened, making the voyage from Africa, Madagascar, and Asia to Europe much shorter and more survivable. Hunters got better at their work, and by the 1870s shipments contained thousands and even tens of thousands of flowers. On one expedition for odontoglossums in Colombia, four thousand trees were chopped down and ten thousand orchids peeled off them. Even that number was soon surpassed. On May 4, 1878, an English grower named William Bull announced he was about to receive a record-sized consignment of two million plants.