The signature of all things

Elizabeth Gilbert, 1969-

Book - 2013

"Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker--a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma's research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction--into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, a...nd the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist--but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life. he story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who--born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution--bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas"--

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Subjects
Genres
Historical fiction
Published
New York, New York : Viking [2013]
Language
English
Main Author
Elizabeth Gilbert, 1969- (author)
Physical Description
501 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780143125846
9780670024858
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

My most influential college course began with an assignment from the Book of Genesis: we read the two different creation stories that coexist there. If we wanted a secondary source to explain life's existence, the professor said, we were free to spend extracurricular angst reconciling those conflicting reports. But hereafter in class, as scientists, we would look to life itself as primary source. As for the organisms in our purview, his credo was: It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant. By "superior" I believe he meant "uncommonly patient." Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography. The class was evolutionary botany, and its wisdom makes a handy prerequisite for Elizabeth Gilbert's expansive new novel, "The Signature of All Things," about a botanist whose hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin's century. Alma Whittaker is a big-boned girl with an unruly cockade of red hair, energy to burn and the good luck to have been born in 1800 to the wealthiest man in Philadelphia. Her father, a British transplant of low birth and high ambition, made an early fortune in botanical pharmaceuticals. Alma grows up roaming the greenhouses and woodlands of the family estate, and in adulthood remains happiest when flopped on her belly, skirts hiked, admiring the workings of plants. The fascination leads to a long career as one of the great taxonomists of her time. Alma's is a story of the Enlightenment, when people first thought to look to the natural world for life's explanations, rather than to human-centric creation stories of an earth-anchored universe. It's difficult now to imagine a well-heeled industrial civilization that had no word for "scientist," but that term was not coined until the 1830s. When Alma first hears it she's reminded of other cultish isms. Yet a scientist she is, with exactly the kind of mind that can appreciate a plant. Her special passion is mosses: their primitive bodies, stalwart habits and peculiar reproductive modes. She loves the beauty they hold in reserve, unlike showier plants that attract other botanists. She finds previously unknown taxa just beyond her doorstep. And since dried mosses are used as packing material, a rummage through empty crates at the local shipping docks will turn up enough foreign specimens to occupy her indefinitely. Life as an unmarried daughter doesn't confine Alma, who spends years marking the boundaries of mosses competing for territory in a boulder field, marauding in slow motion. Over decades she measures their conquests in millimeters, and is thrilled. A scientifically minded reader might want a few more details about what Alma sees through her microscope as she classifies her discoveries. Admittedly, a reader otherwise inclined might prefer the Victorian equivalent of a car chase; you can't please everyone. The novel is frontloaded with its most hair-raising exploits as back story on Alma's father, a plant thief whose boyhood punishment was to be packed off on the madcap voyages of Captain Cook. Real events provide ample substrate for a novel that entwines the historic and the imagined so subtly as to read like good nonfiction for most of its first half. It crosses over to page turner after the introduction of the author's most beguiling invention, the deliciously named Ambrose Pike. (Dickensian names abound here: earthy Hanneke de Groot, fluttering Retta Snow, the Reverend Welles of unplumbed depths, a Polynesian messiah named Tomorrow Morning.) By this point we are ready to see some action in the love department for Alma, who is "like a book that had opened to the same page every single day" for most of her 48 years. True to his name, Ambrose Pike is both ambrosia and piercing sword, and their mutual captivation proceeds too quickly into what may be the most thrillingly bizarre marriage proposal in literature. But wretched misunderstandings ensue, leaving Alma depressed and without enthusiasm for life or even mosses. She is plunged into her own "Eat, Pray, Love" adventure, though there is to be little praying and less eating in the seaside hut where she finally washes up in Tahiti. The book's locales are captured in glittering portraits: in Tahiti the palm trees rustle like silk, the prostitutes are all business, and feral boys tear around in manic enterprise until they drop to sleep on the sand. Alma has labored all her years to know the world, but only outside her protected domain can she glimpse the real mechanics of creation, and they aren't pretty. The planet offers limited resources; competition is harsh and constant. "Anything less than a fight for endurance," Alma realizes, "is a refusal of the great covenant of life." In a manner that is somehow both predictable and breathtaking, the novel tips its hand and we see all roads leading to the greatest unifying theory ever conceived by natural science. Alma's mosses on the boulder field are, of course, analogues to Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Islands. Alma hasn't read the book Darwin will eventually publish - but Gilbert most certainly has, and she maintains an admirable mastery of the big ideas she paraphrases as Alma's "Theory of Competitive Alteration." The narrative stretches but its center holds, thanks to the protagonist's engaging credibility as a woman on good terms with her strengths and limitations. In Tahiti Alma watches women gather in the river to wash their silky tresses, and wonders whether there is any country on earth where her own hair "would not be considered a tragedy." Yet with utter contentment she articulates a scientist's creed: "I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me." Scion of a proud father and unsentimental mother, Alma possesses a casehardened confidence that does not dispose her to self-pity - or, for that matter, to any special interest in female solidarity. If she has to publish scientific papers using a gender-masking first initial, this strikes Alma as no great inconvenience. Her forthright communications with the learned men of her era - first dictated from her father, then taken over in her own hand - are rewarded with all the standing in the world she really needs to follow her bliss. This story of an intellectually ambitious 19th-century woman is not overly concerned with her femaleness. Whether or not that rendition of possibilities is perfectly accurate, it serves well to inoculate Alma against a potential fate as a typecast chick-lit heroine. If ever a book were doomed to birth in a suffocating caul of expectations, this is it (a fact Gilbert has addressed gracefully in a popular Ted Talk). "Author of the No. 1 New York Times best seller 'Eat, Pray, Love' " appears prominently on the front cover, and, compounding the expectations, the book's publicity proclaims it a neo-19th-century work in style and substance. In fact, the prose is modern and accessible, leaning on plot rather than language to draw readers in. Gilbert has established herself as a straight-up storyteller who dares us into adventures of worldly discovery, and this novel stands as a winning next act. "The Signature of All Things" is a bracing homage to the many natures of genius and the inevitable progress of ideas, in a world that reveals its best truths to the uncommonly patient minds.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Gilbert, the author of the phenomenally successful memoir Eat, Pray, Love (2006), returns to fiction with her first novel in 13 years, and what a novel it is! Taking her sweet time and digressing at will into areas ranging from botany to spiritualism to illustration, she tells the rich, highly satisfying story of scholar Alma Whittaker. Born to Henry Whittaker, the richest man in Philadelphia, who rose from his station as the son of a lowly gardener to an import tycoon, Alma has the benefit of wealth and books, spending hours learning Latin and Greek and studying the natural world. But her plain appearance and erudition seem to foretell a lonely life until she meets gifted artist Ambrose Pike. Their intense intellectual connection results in marriage, but Ambrose's deep but unorthodox spiritual beliefs prevent them from truly connecting. Alma, who has never traveled out of Philadelphia, embarks on an odyssey that takes her from Tahiti to Holland, during which she learns much about the ways of the world and her own complicated nature. Gilbert, in supreme command of her material, effortlessly invokes the questing spirit of the nineteenth century, when amateur explorers, naturalists, and enthusiasts were making major contributions to progress. Beautifully written and imbued with a reverence for science and for learning, this is a must-read. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The publisher is pulling out all the stops for the high-profile author, including both print and online campaigns and an author tour; Gilbert's celebrity may also draw off-the-book-page interest.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

From the author of Eat, Pray, Love comes this sweeping tale of one family's journey from rags to riches. Spanning two centuries and set in numerous countries, the novel follows the exploits of the Whittaker family, beginning with Henry Whittaker, an impoverished man from England who makes his fortune in South America. With such a massive narrative task at hand, narrator Stevenson never ceases to impress in this lengthy yet enriching performance. Her English accent and sensitive but firm reading perfectly matches the author's prose. The reading is clear and steady, and Stevenson creates a sense of intimacy between herself and the listener that never dissipates during the course of this audio edition. A Viking hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) returns to fiction with a sprawling 19th-century saga about a young botanist, Alma Whittaker. Alma's fascination with plants (mosses in particular), combined with her recently broken heart, leads her from her birthplace of Philadelphia to Tahiti and, eventually, to the formulation of her "Theory of Competitive Alteration." Substitute finches for mosses and the Galapagos Islands for Tahiti, and you will see where Alma is headed with her ideas about how plant life evolves in order to survive. Beautifully read by the English actress Juliet Stevenson, this audiobook encompasses Alma's experiences with natural science, love, loss, and enlightenment and delivers a cracking good story in the process. -VERDICT Highly recommended. ["Gilbert's (Stern Men) first novel in 13 years gets off to a strong and compelling start but loses its way midpoint; awkward plot points make the second half feel at times like another book entirely," read the less impressed review of the Viking hc, LJ 10/1/13.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Gilbert's sweeping saga of Henry Whittaker and his daughter Alma offers an allegory for the great, rampant heart of the 19th century. All guile, audacity and intelligence, Whittaker, born in a dirt-floored hovel to a Kew Garden arborist, comes under the tutelage of the celebrated Sir Joseph Banks. Banks employs Whittaker to gather botany samples from exotic climes. Even after discovering chinchona--quinine's source--in Peru, Henry's snubbed for nomination to the Royal Society of Fellows by Banks. Instead, Henry trades cultivation secrets to the Dutch and earns riches in Java growing chinchona. Henry marries Beatrix van Devender, daughter of Holland's renowned Hortus Botanicus's curator. They move to Philadelphia, build an estate and birth Alma in 1800. Gilbert's descriptions of Henry's childhood, expeditions and life at the luxurious White Acre estate are superb. The dense, descriptive writing seems lifted from pages written two centuries past, yet it's laced with spare ironical touches and elegant phrasing--a hummingbird, "a jeweled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon." Characters leap into life, visible and vibrant: Henry--"unrivaled arborist, a ruthless merchant, and a brilliant innovator"--a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution. Raised with Dutch discipline and immersed in intellectual salons, Alma--botany explorations paralleling 19th-century natural philosophers becoming true scientists--develops a "Theory of Competitive Alteration" in near concurrence with Darwin and Wallace. There's stoic Beatrix, wife and mother; saintly Prudence, Alma's adopted sister; devoted Hanneke de Groot, housekeeper and confidante; silent, forbidding Dick Yancey, Henry's ruthless factotum; and Ambrose Pike, mystical, half-crazed artist. Alma, tall, ungainly, "ginger of hair, florid of skin, small of mouth, wide of brow, abundant of nose," and yet thoroughly sensual, marries Ambrose, learning too late he intends marriage blanc, an unconsummated union. Multiple narrative threads weave seamlessly into a saga reminiscent of T. C. Boyle's Water Music, with Alma following Ambrose to Tahiti and then returning alone to prosper at Hortus Botanicus, thinking herself "the most fortunate woman who ever lived." A brilliant exercise of intellect and imagination.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue Alma Whittaker, born with the century, slid into our world on the fifth of January, 1800. Swiftly--nearly immediately--opinions began to form around her. Alma's mother, upon viewing the infant for the first time, felt quite satis­fied with the outcome. Beatrix Whittaker had suffered poor luck thus far generating an heir. Her first three attempts at conception had vanished in sad rivulets before they'd ever quickened. Her most recent attempt--a per­fectly formed son--had come right to the brink of life, but had then changed his mind about it on the very morning he was meant to be born, and arrived already departed. After such losses, any child who survives is a satisfactory child. Holding her robust infant, Beatrix murmured a prayer in her native Dutch. She prayed that her daughter would grow up to be healthy and sen­sible and intelligent, and would never form associations with overly pow­dered girls, or laugh at vulgar stories, or sit at gaming tables with careless men, or read French novels, or behave in a manner suited only to a savage Indian, or in any way whatsoever become the worst sort of discredit to a good family; namely, that she not grow up to be een onnozelaar , a simpleton. Thus concluded her blessing--or what constitutes a blessing, from so aus­tere a woman as Beatrix Whittaker. The midwife, a German-born local woman, was of the opinion that this had been a decent birth in a decent house, and thus Alma Whittaker was a decent baby. The bedroom had been warm, soup and beer had been freely offered, and the mother had been stalwart--just as one would expect from the Dutch. Moreover, the midwife knew that she would be paid, and paid handsomely. Any baby who brings money is an acceptable baby. Therefore, the midwife offered a blessing to Alma as well, although without excessive passion. Hanneke de Groot, the head housekeeper of the estate, was less im­pressed. The baby was neither a boy nor was it pretty. It had a face like a bowl of porridge, and was pale as a painted floor. Like all children, it would bring work. Like all work, it would probably fall on her shoulders. But she blessed the child anyway, because the blessing of a new baby is a respon­sibility, and Hanneke de Groot always met her responsibilities. Hanneke paid off the midwife and changed the bedsheets. She was helped in her ef­forts, although not ably, by a young maid--a talkative country girl and re­cent addition to the household--who was more interested in looking at the baby than in tidying up the bedroom. The maid's name does not bear re­cording here, because Hanneke de Groot would dismiss the girl as useless the next day, and send her off without references. Nonetheless, for that one night, the useless and doomed maid fussed over the new baby, and longed for a baby herself, and imparted a rather sweet and sincere blessing upon young Alma. Dick Yancey--a tall, intimidating Yorkshireman, who worked for the gentleman of the house as the iron-handed enforcer of all his international trade concerns (and who happened to be residing at the estate that January, waiting for the Philadelphia ports to thaw so he could proceed on to the Dutch East Indies)--had few words to say about the new infant. To be fair, he was not much given to excessive conversation under any circumstances. When told that Mrs. Whittaker had given birth to a healthy baby girl, Mr. Yancey merely frowned and pronounced, with characteristic economy of speech, "Hard trade, living." Was that a blessing? Difficult to say. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and take it as one. Surely he did not intend it as a curse. As for Alma's father--Henry Whittaker, the gentleman of the estate--he was pleased with his child. Most pleased. He did not mind that the infant was not a boy, nor that it was not pretty. He did not bless Alma, but only because he was not the blessing type. ("God's business is none of my business," he frequently said.) Without reservation, though, Henry admired his child. Then again, he had made his child, and Henry Whittaker's tendency in life was to admire without reservation everything he made. To mark the occasion, Henry harvested a pineapple from his largest greenhouse and divided it in equal shares with everyone in the household. Outside it was snowing, a perfect Pennsylvania winter, but this man possessed several coal-fired greenhouses of his own design--structures that made him not only the envy of every plantsman and botanist in the Americas, but also blisteringly rich--and if he wanted a pineapple in January, by God he could have a pineapple in January. Cherries in March, as well. He then retired to his study and opened up his ledger, where, as he did every night, he recorded all manner of estate transactions, both official and intimate. He began: "A new nobbel and entresting pasennger has joyned us," and continued with the details, the timing, and the expenses of Alma Whittaker's birth. His penmanship was shamefully crabbed. Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctua­tion brought reason to sigh with unhappiness. But Henry wrote up his account, nonetheless. It was important for him to keep track of things. While he knew that these pages would look appalling to any educated man, he also knew that nobody would ever see his writing--except his wife. When Beatrix recovered her strength, she would transcribe his notes into her own ledgers, as she always did, and her elegantly penned translation of Henry's scrawls would become the official household record. The partner of his days, was Beatrix--and a good value, at that. She would do this task for him, and a hundred other tasks besides. God willing, she would be back at it shortly. Paperwork was already piling up. Part One The Tree of Fevers Chapter One For the first five years of her life, Alma Whittaker was indeed a mere passenger in the world--as we all are passengers in such early youth--and so her story was not yet noble, nor was it particularly interesting, beyond the fact that this homely toddler passed her days without illness or incident, surrounded by a degree of wealth nearly unknown in the America of that time, even within elegant Philadelphia. How her father came to be in possession of such great wealth is a story worth telling here, while we wait for the girl to grow up and catch our interest again. For it was no more common in 1800 than it has ever been for a poor-born and nearly illiterate man to become the richest inhabitant of his city, and so the means by which Henry Whittaker prospered are indeed interesting--although perhaps not noble, as he himself would have been the first to confess. Henry Whittaker was born in 1760 in the village of Richmond, just up the Thames from London. He was the youngest son of poor parents who had a few too many children already. He was raised in two small rooms with a floor of beaten earth, with an almost adequate roof, with a meal on the hearth nearly every day, with a mother who did not drink and a father who did not beat his family--by comparison to many families of the day, in other words, a nearly genteel existence. His mother even had a private spot of dirt behind the house in which to grow larkspurs and lupines, decoratively, like a lady. But Henry was not fooled by larkspurs and lupines. He grew up sleeping one wall away from the pigs, and there was not a moment in his life when poverty did not humiliate him. Perhaps Henry would have taken less offense at his destiny had he never seen wealth around him against which to compare his own poor circumstances--but the boy grew up witnessing not only wealth, but royalty. There was a palace at Richmond, and there were pleasure gardens there, too, called Kew, cultivated with expertise by Princess Augusta, who had brought with her from Germany a retinue of gardeners eager to make a false and regal landscape out of real and humble English meadows. Her son, the future King George III, spent his childhood summers there. When he became king, George sought to turn Kew into a botanical garden worthy of any Continental rival. The English, on their cold, wet, isolated island, were far behind the rest of Europe on botanizing, and George III was eager to catch up. Henry's father was an orchardman at Kew--a humble man, respected by his masters, as much as anyone could respect a humble orchardman. Mr. Whittaker had a gift for fruiting trees, and a reverence for them. ("They pay the land for its trouble," he would say, "unlike all the others.") He had once saved the king's favorite apple tree by whip-grafting a scion of the ailing specimen onto sturdier rootstock and claying it secure. The tree had fruited off the new graft that very year, and soon produced bushels. For this miracle, Mr. Whittaker had been nicknamed "the Apple Magus" by the king himself. The Apple Magus, for all his talents, was a simple man, with a timid wife, but they somehow turned out six rough and violent sons (including one boy called "the Terror of Richmond" and two others who would end up dead in tavern brawls). Henry, the youngest, was in some ways the roughest of them all, and perhaps needed to be, to survive his brothers. He was a stubborn and enduring little whippet, a thin and exploding contrivance, who could be trusted to receive his brothers' beatings stoically, and whose fearlessness was frequently put to the test by others, who liked to dare him into taking risks. Even apart from his brothers, Henry was a dangerous experimentalist, a lighter of illicit fires, a roof-scampering taunter of housewives, a menace to smaller children; a boy who one would not have been surprised to learn had fallen from a church steeple or drowned in the Thames--though by sheer happenstance these scenarios never came to pass. But unlike his brothers, Henry had a redeeming attribute. Two of them, to be exact: he was intelligent, and he was interested in trees. It would be exaggeration to claim that Henry revered trees, as his father did, but he was interested in trees because they were one of the few things in his impoverished world that could readily be learned , and experience had already instructed Henry that learning things gave a person advantage over other people. If one wanted to continue living (and Henry did) and if one wanted to ultimately prosper (and Henry did), then anything that could be learned, should be learned. Latin, penmanship, archery, riding, dancing--all of these were out of reach to Henry. But he had trees, and he had his father, the Apple Magus, who patiently took the trouble to teach him. So Henry learned all about the grafter's tools of clay and wax and knives, and about the tricks of budding, booting, clefting, planting, and pruning with a judicious hand. He learned how to transplant trees in the springtime, if the soil was retentive and dense, or how to do it in the autumn, if the soil was loose and dry. He learned how to stake and drape the apricots in order to save them from wind, how to cultivate citruses in the Orangery, how to smoke the mildew off the gooseberries, how to amputate diseased limbs from the figs, and when not to bother. He learned how to strip the tattered bark from an old tree and take the thing right down to the ground, without sentimentality or remorse, in order to demand life back out of it for a dozen more seasons to come. Henry learned much from his father, though he was ashamed of the man, who he felt was weak. If Mr. Whittaker truly was the Apple Magus, Henry reasoned, then why had the king's admiration not been parlayed into wealth? Stupider men were rich--many of them. Why did the Whittakers still live with pigs, when just nearby were the great wide green lawns of the palace, and the pleasant houses on Maid of Honor Row, where the queen's servants slept on French linens? Henry, climbing to the top of an elaborate garden wall one day, had spied a lady, dressed in an ivory gown, practicing manège on her immaculate white horse while a servant played the violin to entertain her. People were living like this, right there in Richmond, while the Whittakers did not even have a floor. But Henry's father never fought for anything fine. He'd earned the same paltry wage for thirty years, and had never once disputed it, nor had he ever complained about working outdoors in the foulest of weather for so long that his health had been ruined by it. Henry's father had chosen the careful­lest steps through life, particularly when interacting with his betters--and he regarded everyone as his better. Mr. Whittaker made a point never to offend, and never to take advantage, even when advantages may have been ripe for plucking. He told his son, "Henry, do not be bold. You can butcher the sheep only once. But if you are careful, you can shear the sheep every year." With a father so forceless and complacent, what could Henry expect to receive out of life, aside from whatever he could clutch at with his own hands? A man should profit, Henry started telling himself when he was only thirteen years old. A man should butcher a sheep every day. But where to find the sheep? That's when Henry Whittaker started stealing. By the mid-1770s, the gardens at Kew had become a botanical Noah's Ark, with thousands of specimens already in the collection, and new consign­ments arriving weekly--hydrangeas from the Far East, magnolias from China, ferns from the West Indies. What's more, Kew had a new and ambitious superintendent: Sir Joseph Banks, fresh from his triumphant voyage around the world as chief botanist for Captain Cook's HMS Endeavour . Banks, who worked without salary (he was interested only in the glory of the British Empire, he said, although others suggested he might be just the slightest bit interested in the glory of Sir Joseph Banks), was now collecting plants with furious passion, committed to creating a truly spectacular national garden. Oh, Sir Joseph Banks! That beautiful, whoring, ambitious, competitive adventurer! The man was everything Henry's father was not. By the age of twenty-three, a drenching inheritance of six thousand pounds a year had made Banks one of the richest men in England. Arguably, he was also the handsomest. Banks could easily have spent his life in idle luxury, but instead he sought to become the boldest of botanical explorers--a vocation he took up without sacrificing a bit of flash or glamour. Banks had paid for a good deal of Captain Cook's first expedition out of his own pocket, which had afforded him the right to bring along on that cramped ship two black man-servants, two white manservants, a spare botanist, a scientific secretary, two artists, a draftsman, and a pair of Italian greyhounds. During his adventure, Banks had seduced Tahitian queens, danced naked with savages on beaches, and watched young heathen girls having their buttocks tattooed in the moonlight. He had brought home with him to England a Tahitian man named Omai, to be kept as a pet, and he had also brought home nearly four thousand plant specimens--almost half of which the world of science had never before seen. Sir Joseph Banks was the most famous and dashing man in England, and Henry admired him enormously. But he stole from him anyway. It was merely that the opportunity was there , and that the opportunity was so obvious. Banks was known in scientific circles not merely as a great botanical collector, but also as a great botanical hoarder. Gentlemen of botany, in those polite days, generally shared their discoveries with each other freely, but Banks shared nothing. Professors, dignitaries, and collectors came to Kew from all over the world with the reasonable hope of obtaining seeds and cuttings, as well as samples from Banks's vast herbarium--but Banks turned them all away. Young Henry admired Banks for a hoarder (he would not have shared his own treasure, either, had he possessed any) but he soon saw opportunity in the angered faces of these thwarted international visitors. He would wait for them just outside the grounds of Kew, catching the men as they were leaving the gardens, sometimes catching them cursing Sir Joseph Banks in French, German, Dutch, or Italian. Henry would approach, ask the men what samples they desired, and promise to procure those samples by week's end. He always carried a paper tablet and a carpenter's pencil with him; if the men did not speak English, Henry had them draw pictures of what they needed. They were all excellent botanical artists, so their needs were easily made clear. Late in the evenings, Henry would sneak into the greenhouses, dart past the workers who kept the giant stoves going through the cold nights, and steal plants for profit. He was just the boy for the task. He was good at plant identification, expert at keeping cuttings alive, a familiar enough face around the gardens not to arouse suspicion, and adept at covering his tracks. Best of all, he did not seem to require sleep. He worked all day with his father in the orchards, and then stole all night--rare plants, precious plants, lady's slippers, tropical orchids, carnivorous marvels from the New World. He kept all the botanical drawings that the distinguished gentlemen made for him, too, and studied those drawings until he knew every stamen and petal of every plant the world desired. Like all good thieves, Henry was scrupulous about his own security. He trusted nobody with his secret, and buried his earnings in several caches throughout the gardens at Kew. He never spent a farthing of it. He let his silver rest dormant in the soil, like good rootstock. He wanted that silver to accumulate, until it could burst forth hugely, and buy him the right to become a rich man. Within a year Henry had several regular clients. One of them, an old orchid cultivator from the Paris Botanical Gardens, gave the boy perhaps the first pleasing compliment of his life: "You're a useful little fingerstink, aren't you?" Within two years, Henry was driving a vigorous trade, selling plants not only to serious men of botany, but also to a circle of wealthy Lon­don gentry, who longed for exotic specimens for their own collections. Within three years, he was illicitly shipping plant samples to France and Italy, expertly packing the cuttings in moss and wax to ensure they survived the journey. At the end, however, after three years of this felonious enterprise, Henry Whittaker was caught--and by his own father. Mr. Whittaker, normally a deep sleeper, had noticed his son leaving the house one night after midnight and, heartsick with a father's instinctive suspicion, had followed the boy to the greenhouse and seen the selecting, the thieving, the expert packing. He recognized immediately the illicit care of a robber. Henry's father was not a man who had ever beat his sons, even when they deserved it (and they frequently did deserve it), and he didn't beat Henry that night, either. Nor did he confront the boy directly. Henry didn't even realize he'd been caught. No, Mr. Whittaker did something far worse. First thing the next morning, he asked for a personal audience with Sir Joseph Banks. It was not often that a poor fellow like Whittaker could request a word with a gentleman like Banks, but Henry's father had earned just enough respect around Kew in thirty years of tireless labor to warrant the intrusion, if only just this once. He was an old and poor man, indeed, but he was also the Apple Magus, the savior of the king's favorite tree, and that title bought him entrance. Mr. Whittaker came at Banks almost upon his knees, head bowed, penitent as a saint. He confessed the shaming story about his son, along with his suspicion that Henry had probably been stealing for years. He offered his resignation from Kew as punishment, if the boy would only be spared arrest or harm. The Apple Magus promised to take his family far away from Rich­mond, and see to it that Kew, and Banks, would never again be sullied by the Whittaker name. Banks--impressed by the orchardman's heightened sense of honor-- refused the resignation, and sent for young Henry personally. Again, this was an unusual occurrence. If it was rare for Sir Joseph Banks to meet with an illiterate plantsman in his study, it was exceedingly rare for him to meet with an illiterate plantsman's thieving sixteen-year-old son. Probably, he ought to have simply had the boy arrested. But theft was a hanging crime, and children far younger than Henry got the rope--and for far less serious infractions. While the attack on his collection was galling, Banks felt sympathy enough for the father to investigate the problem himself before summoning the bailiff. The problem, when it walked into Sir Joseph Banks's study, turned out to be a spindly, ginger-haired, tight-lipped, milky-eyed, broad-shouldered, sunken-chested youth, with pale skin already rubbed raw by too much exposure to wind, rain, and sun. The boy was underfed but tall, and his hands were large; Banks saw that he might grow into a big man someday, if he could get a proper meal. Henry did not know precisely why he had been summoned to Banks's offices but he had sufficient brains to suspect the worst, and he was much alarmed. Only through sheer thick-sided stubbornness could he enter Banks's study without visibly trembling. God's love, though, what a beautiful study it was! And how splendidly Joseph Banks was dressed, in his glossy wig and gleaming black velvet suit, polished shoe buckles and white stockings. Henry had no sooner passed through the door than he had already priced out the delicate mahogany writing desk, covetously scanned the fine collection boxes stacked on every shelf, and glanced with admiration at the handsome portrait of Captain Cook on the wall. Mother of dead dogs, the mere frame for that portrait must have cost ninety pounds! Unlike his father, Henry did not bow in Banks's presence, but stood before the great man, looking him straight in the eye. Banks, who was seated, permitted Henry to stand in silence, perhaps waiting for a confession or a plea. But Henry neither confessed nor pleaded, nor hung his head in shame, and if Sir Joseph Banks thought Henry Whittaker was fool enough to speak first under such hot circumstances, then he did not know Henry Whittaker. Therefore, after a long silence, Banks commanded, "Tell me, then--why should I not see you hang at Tyburn?" So that's it, Henry thought. I'm snapped. Nonetheless, the boy grappled for a plan. He needed to find a tactic, and he needed to find it in one quick and slender moment. He had not spent his life being beaten senseless by his older brothers to have learned nothing about fighting. When a bigger and stronger opponent has landed the first blow, you have but one chance to swing back before you will be pummeled into clay, and you'd best come back with something unexpected. "Because I'm a useful little fingerstink," Henry said. Banks, who enjoyed unusual incidents, barked with surprised laughter. "I confess that I don't see the use of you, young man. All you have done for me is to rob me of my hard-won treasure." It wasn't a question, but Henry answered it nonetheless. "I might've trimmed a bit," he said. "You don't deny this?" "All the braying in the world won't change it, do it?" Again, Banks laughed. He may have thought the boy was putting on a show of false courage, but Henry's courage was real. As was his fear. As was his lack of penitence. For the whole of his life, Henry would always find penitence weak. Banks changed tack. "I must say, young man, that you are a crowning distress to your father." "And him to me, sir," Henry fired back. Once more, the surprised bark of laughter from Banks. "Is he, then? What harm has that good man ever done to you?" "Made me poor, sir," Henry said. Then, suddenly realizing everything, Henry added, "It were him, weren't it? Who peached me over to you?" "Indeed it was. He's an honorable soul, your father." Henry shrugged. "Not to me, eh?" Banks took this in and nodded, generously conceding the point. Then he asked, "To whom have you been selling my plants?" Henry ticked off the names on his fingers: "Mancini, Flood, Willink, LeFavour, Miles, Sather, Evashevski, Feuerle, Lord Lessig, Lord Garner--" Banks cut him off with a wave. He stared at the boy with open astonishment. Oddly, if the list had been more modest, Banks might have been angrier. But these were the most esteemed botanical names of the day. A few of them Banks called friends. How had the boy found them? Some of these men hadn't been to England in years. The child must be exporting . What kind of campaign had this creature been running under his nose? "How do you even know how to handle plants?" Banks asked. "I always knowed plants, sir, for my whole life. It's like I knowed it all beforehand." "And these men, do they pay you?" "Or they don't get their plants, do they?" Henry said. "You must be earning well. Indeed, you must have accumulated quite a pile of money in the past years." Henry was too cunning to answer this. "What have you done with the money you've earned, young man?" Banks pushed on. "I can't say you've invested it in your wardrobe. Without a doubt, your earnings belong to Kew. So where is it all?" "Gone, sir." "Gone where?" "Dice, sir. I have a weakness of the gambling, see." That may or may not have been true, Banks thought. But the boy certainly had as much nerve as any two-footed beast he had ever encountered. Banks was intrigued. He was a man, after all, who kept a heathen for a pet, and who--to be honest--enjoyed the reputation of being half heathen himself. His station in life required that he at least purport to admire gentility, but secretly he preferred a bit of wildness. And what a little wild cockerel was Henry Whittaker! Banks was growing less inclined by the moment to hand over this curious item of humanity to the constables. Henry, who saw everything, saw something happening in Banks's face-- a softening of countenance, a blooming curiosity, a sliver of a chance for his life to be saved. Intoxicated with a compulsion for self-preservation, the boy vaulted into that sliver of hope, one last time. "Don't put me to hang, sir," Henry said. "You'll regret it that you did." "What do you propose I do with you, instead?" "Put me to use." "Why should I?" asked Banks. "Because I'm better than anyone." Excerpted from The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.