My works about William Bligh and Joseph Banks are written from the strategic side of the breadfruit voyages. This Afterword is from the botanic side of the beach with Banks wearing two social hats: one as the naturalist and the other as the facilitator.
Did the plan to feed breadfruit to slaves have any basis of sense? The idea sounded reasonable enough but the notion has been taken for granted without questioning. If donating breadfruit plants was a truly humanitarian gesture, one meant to prevent thousands of people from starving, then it received very indifferent treatment from both the slave owners and their slaves. Aside from the breadfruit undertaking we now know that Bligh was sent on a far more strategically important mission, but when it came to disguising the voyage as a botanical excursion, was this single specie of plant worth its while? To grow breadfruit as a key substitute staple, extra long term planning would be required to support the economics of this mono-cultivation. No doubt Banks must have considered the decades needed for such purposeful development, so why not promote faster growing, hardier, edible tubers? According to Bligh’s boatswain’s mate, Morrison, a ‘Good Stock of Potatoes’ was taken aboard the Bounty at Spithead, so why wasn’t the common potato pursued as a staple instead of breadfruit, especially as it’s a South American native plant and has a high starch content like breadfruit?
The short answer is they probably were tried but proved unpopular and unsuccessful in the tropical climate. Potatoes like cooler, drier, conditions and require a lot of space and soil preparation. Additionally, people are more careless about what they put in their mouths today than their Georgian ancestors. To the puritan food neophobics of the times, there was a notion that potatoes were not meant to be eaten, particularly as they weren’t mentioned in the bible. Spanish conquistadors came into contact with potatoes in the sixteenth century; they were initially used as rations for their sailors. The tuber found its way to Spanish soil in 1570 and from there it spread throughout Europe. The potato was an important food article to Peruvian and Inca farmers and the Spanish used them to feed slaves working in silver mines in Bolivia. Against popular belief, the potato plant that Sir Francis Drake first introduced to England was a sweet yellow potato, not the common white potato (Solanum tuberosum). Nevertheless the white potato soon entered England and the Royal Society formally recommended its adoption in 1662. It was not until 1795 that the Board or Agriculture strenuously pushed for its mass cultivation. Thus in 1787, it seems Englishmen were still reluctant to embrace the tuber though potatoes were already being cultivated in Germany, and Frenchmen, if suspicious at first, had begun vigorously promoting its virtues. Being neither God-fearing nor neophobic, Banks would have understood enough about the tuber to appreciate it wasn’t suitable for the Caribbean climate. Yet even if it was, as far as Negro slaves were concerned, the potato never compared with their traditional underground crops, and similarly, the noble spud had absolutely no role to play in the politics of food for Caribbean slaves.
On the assumption that sugar slaves were in desperate need of another staple, then why impose seedless breadfruit on them when they already had more than sufficient starchy foods? Apart from plantains, bananas and coconuts, most other starchy foods were underground crops which were left relatively undamaged by inclement gale force weather; this is in vast contrast with tree crops, and especially breadfruit, that were regularly damaged or uprooted during the passing of typhoons. Developed societies of the eighteenth century tended to limit their selection of available foods, where tribal societies did not. Forests were a natural supermarket for tree nuts, and African natives exploited its seeds wherever they went; it is therefore a reasonable predicate that the slaves may well have enjoyed the tasty kernels of the breadnut or breadfruit.
Africans were the first known humans to recognize they could survive on a primary diet of nuts from trees and vines. They were conscious of the energy that the kernels gave them, and typically, some deliberately over-ate on calorie dense varieties before the onset of expected scarcity. On the West African Guinea coast and eastwards towards Sudan – where many African slaves came from –Treculia africana or African breadfruit grew. This tree is of the same Moraceae family as breadfruit. Its fruits resemble large round breadfruits and contain hundreds of small, palatable, highly nutritious seeds. The kernels are a sought after African food and like the nuts of breadfruit or breadnut, the africana breadnuts can be pounded into flour or simply roasted and eaten. Interestingly the africana flour contains more protein than wheat flour and it makes an excellent substitute if used for bread. For people suffering from protein-energy deficiency in Nigeria today, this special nut flour is made into porridge and fed to the malnourished.
If supposing an alternative staple really did have to be found for the slaves, then between breadfruit and breadnut, the latter was the better choice of the two and it could also be found in abundance around busy East Indies anchorages. One such area was Ambon, just five degrees north of Timor in the Spice Islands. Here a renowned botanist, with the impressive name of Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, reveals: ‘On the Ambon coast these trees grow so numerous and dense that they cover houses and beneath them the Ambonese take cover and are shaded, while other inhabitants of these Oriental islands love to make their domicile under and around these trees. Not only because they supply food and other nourishment but because they grow very quickly and the leaves protect them against the sun.’
Another important fruit containing similar jewels to the seeded breadfruits is the enormous jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus). Probably native to India and a very close relative to the breadfruit, jackfruit was well distributed throughout the East Indies and at least one variety had reached the Caribbean before 1787. The jack (jaca, jacque, or similar) is a fruit weighing up to 20 kilograms (44lbs) and is borne directly from the trunk or large branches. The jackfruit has been exploited around the East Indies for centuries and its familiar, abundant, chestnut-like seeds are dealt with in exactly the same way as breadnuts. At the turn of the seventeenth century, in Ray’s History of Plants, he clearly describes jackfruit and states they occurred ‘everywhere in Malabar and throughout the whole of India’. But there was a distinctive feature that Ray noticed about jackfruit: the seeds ‘also excite sexual feeling, and on this account alone the common people frequently use them’. One can imagine what might have taken place if Bligh and Christian were sent to Bali to collect aphrodisiac jackfruits!
Food shortages in the sugar colonies were partly caused by natural calamities and the reluctance of planters to import additional produce. Just how real the plight was for slaves is clouded with contradictions, and English planters were anything but united in calling for breadfruit. There was in fact a reluctance to get involved due to misgivings over fanciful claims, and to the hefty gratuities that the Jamaican House of Assembly could be obliged to award the deliverers. A constant wish of planters was to get out of these tropical colonies and return home with their fortunes to a more comfortable life; so if they were truly swayed by the breadfruit hype, they would have made private arrangements to fetch the plants and not waited the twelve years it took for the British government to do it for them in 1787. Twelve years being from 1775 when Ellis first called upon the national sentiments of English mariners to transport breadfruit from the East Indies to the West Indies. But if the planters, or their commercial representatives, were too niggardly to organise a private venture, then they could have lobbied the government to do so much earlier than they did. Just two years prior to Ellis’s publication, a bill called the ‘Regulating Act” was set up to allow the Government to assume part responsibility of running the British East India Company. The new council’s power extended to control over the Presidencies of Bencoolen; an area where Ellis had advised entirely seedless breadfruit could be found. Banks would have known all about Bencoolen seedless breadfruit for he had a hand in Ellis’s 1775 breadfruit publication. So it seems Banks always had a relatively simple means of procuring breadfruit yet nothing was ever done about it. It was as if the breadfruit was kept as a political trump card, a card that was pulled out on cue in 1787 when it was needed.
If we agree that the reason for the breadfruit expeditions was to obtain food for slaves, at face value the notion that breadfruit might prove a quick-fix solution seems a smart and noble concept, but as my studies have revealed, Banks’s scheme was inherently flawed. It was flawed because breadfruit trees were more likely to be damaged by high winds, and wherever this happened, they usually took longer to recover than the slave’s traditional above ground crops. But the concept was also impractical. It was impractical because of the excessive time necessary to grow sufficient trees from an imported parent stock, in order to cultivate enough young trees to furnish fruits to sustain thousands of laborers with huge appetites. All this would take over twenty or more years to accomplish, and only then if supported by a concerted public effort, and there was no such thing. Then after years of painstaking effort, unlike the Pacific cultivators, the Caribbean farmers would not have had any idea of what type of breadfruit would develop from their creations; nor what cropping seasons to expect; nor how best to cook breadfruit; nor how to preserve it. Oh what a sham it really was!
For Bligh to detect suitable trees for the purpose intended, he needed the tree’s owners to describe things like the worth and weight of particular fruits; the annual yield of fruits; cropping periods, or other traits that might be beneficial. Bligh should have noted and measured this data against details from other such surveys in accessible areas of Tahiti-Nui and Tahiti-Iti. Obviously there would’ve been difficulties in deciphering the Maohi language, yet for such a popular food item, the information gleaned would have been accurate enough. It is unfortunate for posterity that neither Bligh nor his gardeners made any serious effort to remove the shoots that were best suited for plantation slaves. The plants taken were simply the ones more easily obtained and then only those which looked like they might survive the voyage ahead.
Our breadfruit seekers were singularly motivated by rewards based upon quantity. If fetching Tahitian plants was a concerted means to ease a forecast food shortage for slaves, then Banks was learned enough to know he would have had to appoint a person of the caliber that Solander was: a schooled botanist with an unrelenting drive and ability to select only the most applicable varieties for removal. The great Linnæus once said, ‘The true botanist will sweat in advancing his beloved science’. Bligh was certainly no botanist, he listed eight kinds in his Bounty log then failed to describe them adequately. And notably in the Providence expedition, in relation to variety, all Bligh stated was, ‘I had five’. From Bligh’s previous experiences with Captain Cook at Matavai, and the example of Solander’s earlier efforts, he should have suspected there were more than eight varieties growing in the area. In 1922, from information supplied by an American consulate in Tahiti, one botanist, P. J. Wester, listed some 52 varieties supposedly originating in Tahiti though he pointed out that many were ‘undoubtedly synonyms’. Although Wester’s figure is arguably excessive, in 1893, another botanist had listed 16 of 24 varieties as ones ‘worth multiplying’.
It is worth noting that Sir John Sinclair, founder of the Department of Agriculture and Minister in the Pitt Government, wrote an enlightening letter to the Planters & Merchants in the West Indies. Here Sinclair proposed that two nourishing food plants, each found growing in the East Indies, should be introduced to St Vincent in the West Indies. It seems that after all the breadfruit kafuffle, almost twenty-two years after Bligh had introduced his 336 breadfruits to St Vincent, niggardly planters were still looking for a cheap and easy food sustenance for their laborers. Reminiscent of Banks’s pet breadfruit projects, offering familiar incentives such as gold medals, Sinclair proposed the introduction of two food articles called ‘Budgeree’ and ‘Chena’. But Sinclair went a step farther than Banks ever did with breadfruit; he showed how to cook his new Royal fare.
But as time went by and the anxious new eaters sat down to their first morsels of boiled breadfruit, it was a disappointing offering for hardworking, heavily built, Negroid laborers. So far we have seen how breadfruit was impractical and unreliable as a substitute staple, but what about the nutrition in breadfruit? What was known about nutrition in the late eighteenth century, and equally important, what did Banks know about it before he went about McDonaldizing breadfruit and inflicting it on Caribbean slaves? As breadfruit is a seasonally available crop with an extremely short shelf life, it is arguable that it was totally unsuitable as a reliable staple and particularly where it has a tendency to synchronize cropping during the warmer, unsettled sub-tropical weather: the same conditions that give rise to typhoons in the Caribbean and other tropical regions. But even when available, the pulp of seedless breadfruit was not sufficiently wholesome to be consumed as a solitary staple food. With blind acceptance we have been led into thinking that seedless breadfruit was some sort of miracle food when it wasn’t then and it isn’t now.
In June 1989, at a symposium on food and cookery at Oxford, forty-one writers tabled forty-two well-researched papers on the subject of the world’s staple foods. It is disappointing that breadfruit was not amongst the staples studied. In such a large area as the Pacific Ocean, where this widely consumed article is a well-considered staple in certain places, it is curious that this famous item was missed. This could have been an oversight, or it might be that breadfruit was not considered worthy for research as it did not fit the mould as a staple by definition: i.e., a principal food article of prime importance. Staple is a modern word derived from its near homonym, “stable”. The Germans, ever dexterous at stretching their staple, bratwurst, somehow manage to stretch staple into hauptnahrungsmittel (basic food). In an article on the word itself, Keith Botsford believes that the underlying metaphor is of ‘stability, consistency and order’. A staple could also be imagined as a small group of essential locally produced foods, or as a basic food that can be stored and therefore it need not be fresh, like rice.
It could be argued “what determines an essential food, and what is a basic food?” I believe a staple food is a single food article of necessity, one that accounts for the highest average daily intake of calories. This brings meat, poultry, and fish into the arena plus fruits like the plantain, bananas and breadfruit. Grains, legumes, and nuts are all seeds of a kind and account for the bulk of the world’s staples. With the exception of animal meat and some fish, seeds utilized as staples contain the highest levels of protein. We don’t normally see leafy vegetables used as staples, but root crops or underground tubers like potatoes, taro or cassava are common staples. Root crops tend to be starchy foodstuffs which are more labor intensive to maintain than seed crops. In the Caribbean, where the field slaves cultivated their root crops on small plots, it should be remembered that they prepared and cooked their food as well. Items like cassava were a fallback food because it requires considerable time and effort to prepare, a drudgery normally reserved for tribal women. Aboveground crops like the all-important plantain, plus coconut or seedless breadfruit, added to the list of starchy slave foods, but without sufficient meat, fish, pulses or nuts, there was precious little protein in a slave’s gruel.
Now what we must ask is, did Banks realize that? Mostly the diet of English rural dwellers and peasants consisted of cereal gruels and soups composed of bits of meat and vegetables into which hard-baked bread was dunked. They occasionally had some dairy foods and fish but as peas were extensively eaten, these made up for the protein that the rest of their diet lacked. No doubt Banks would’ve enjoyed a high protein staple of meat, poultry and fish, common amongst the upper classes of his time. In fact the deadly sin, gluttony, was such a common ailment of the aristocracy that it was ‘preached against vigorously by wandering friars’. But was Banks aware of protein per se, or did he just assume that eating certain things helped to build or repair body tissues?
In the eighteenth century, diet was no longer confined to a set of eating practices; causal connections were being drawn between a balanced diet, bodily well being, and the stability and conduct of mind. But it wasn’t till 1840 that nutritionists started to calculate the human requirements of fat, carbohydrate, and protein constituents. Navy diets were kept tightly regulated and surgeons were kept busy treating seagoing occupational diseases like scurvy. Here we see how little was known, and even less understood, about the effects that different foods had upon the body. For example, it wasn’t until 1804 that the British Admiralty responded to recommendations requiring seaman to be administered a daily ration of lemon juice. Some 211 years before this enactment, after a voyage to the Pacific, Admiral Hawkins was the first of many to inform the Admiralty that a daily ration of lemon juice protected seamen against scurvy. During these 211 intervening years well over a million sailors had succumbed to the disease. Clearly the Admiralty’s we-shall-not-be-moved policy and ignorance in nutritional matters is indicative of conservative government strictures.
When the Bounty sailed out of sight of Portsmouth, nutritionists were still grappling with the complexities of post-swallowing food sciences, indeed the very function of digesting foodstuffs was still being argued. So at best, Banks, like his peers, could only have had the barest scientific knowledge of food values. Nutritional science began before the chemical revolution of the eighteenth century, and the word protein wasn’t in common usage until 1840, some twenty years after Banks’s death. During this period various scientists had been wrestling with the mysteries of body proteins though protein was not isolated and enthroned until 1838 by the Swede, Jons Jacob Berzelius. The advances of chemistry in Banks’s time had made it possible to study nutrition in a quantitative way but little was known, and much less understood, of the existence of proteins. In 1773 the French food scientist, Antoine Parmentier, published that because both insects and birds were attracted to, and seemed to thrive on wheat grain, this must be evidence of wheat’s nutritional value – here it is perhaps significant that it’s uncommon see birds picking at seedless breadfruits. In the absence of any knowledge of proteins, when Parmentier studied potatoes, he thought their high starch content was the most nutritionally valuable part of the article. Parmentier had no idea that proteins are the primary constituents of all living things. Had Parmentier studied seedless breadfruit he might have come to the same conclusion he did with his wheat. However in such a hypothetical instance, he would not have understood that the flour of mature breadfruit pulp contains a meager 4.1% of crude protein, where un-enriched wheat-bread flour contains 11.8%, and potato flour 8%.*
It might be concluded here that Banks believed starchy foods, like seedless breadfruit, were the most nutritional kinds of foods. However as millet is a non-glutinous grain, this fact conflicts with remarks he made about millet and breadfruit. In 1789, before Banks had news of the Bounty mutiny, he sent 14 new species of Indian grain to the Governors of the West Indian possessions and exclaimed, ‘The introduction of an improved species of millet or Guinea Corn might Easily Prove a greater blessing to those Islands than the Bread Fruit’. Notably millet is mentioned in the bible, and an outstanding variety, native to tropical Northwest Africa, is pearl millet which had found its way to India about 2000 years ago. In 1787 the African slaves were receiving rations of guinea corn (grain sorghum), and were likely growing pearl millet as well. In his youthful enthusiasm Banks seems to have been trailing the colonies diets. Pearl or Indian millet is high in protein and when combined with legumes, as was the eating habits of slaves, consumers got the most out of the grain’s nutrients. The Negroes would not have known the biological reasons why seeds gave them sustenance, but they did appreciate a diet that included nuts or grains that made them strong and healthy.
From his voyage with Cook, Banks would have observed the seaman’s so-called “portable soup”. This was a strange concoction made from dried cakes of boiled down offal, hooves, horns and seasoning, and to Cook, like kids with their Aeroplane Jelly, it appeared to provide his men with a degree of sustenance. The perception that portable soup was highly nutritious was also highly exaggerated, yet the idea persisted long after Banks’s death. It is pertinent to this study that portable soup, like breadfruit pulp, is a glutinous substance, and as blood is similarly sticky, it was therefore believed that somehow glutinous or starchy foods must be good for the blood. Banks might have believed this, and if he was a true altruist, he may have believed that seedless breadfruits were the best kind of breadfruits for hardworking slaves.
Whatever beliefs Banks had about nutrition, there is little doubt that breadfruit was a brilliant ploy to sneak a foot in the Tahitian door; to provide a salve for the abolitionists, and as an added bonus, a cost effective way of surveying the Torres Strait before the French did. The questions remaining are was breadfruit a genuine, albeit lame, method of containing the Caribbean slaves from rebelling or absconding? Did Banks hold the welfare of West Indian slaves above his desire to build new strategic bases in Britain’s swing towards the East? Was Banks really a silver-tailed philanthropist, or were the breadfruit expeditions just a wasteful means of containing the bleating of fearful planters? Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were rumblings all around England, Europe, and in the Caribbean as well. For slaves who were rebellious, there awaited executions by slow hanging or burning, yet despite the horrific consequences, rebellions were commonplace in Jamaica – indeed British soldiers were used in warfare against runaway slaves called Maroons. Only in nearby French St. Domingue were slaves successful in overthrowing their white rulers. Clearly better strategies for controlling the costs of food were urgently required.
This wind of change provided the impulse for nutritional science to advance. But the great leaps in post-swallowing sciences came too late to have molded Banks’s breadfruit rationale. For the Admiralty, breadfruit was a means to an end: the pitiful penal colony in newly gained Australia in no way offset the losses of the American colonies. Bligh’s breadfruit introductions were simply the end result of mercenary policy decisions; they were the product of political affairs not altruistic moves. This is at great variance with balanced nutrition which is more about cultural issues than the vested interests of imperialists, niggardly planters, and their cronies.
* Since this was written studies have demonstrated that breadfruit flour’s protein was found to be easier to digest than wheat or rice flour. Breadfruit flour is gluten-free and nutrient-dense; a complete protein option for modern foods.
[© 2022] For citation purposes please quote: Karl E. A. Lorbach; Conspiracy on the Bounty — Bligh’s Convenient Mutiny, Appendix Four.
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