The civic tree that would not grow
When I was studying medicine at the University of Glasgow, I came across an arresting title in the university bookshop that made me pick up the book for a second look. The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875–1975 was a short history of the city written by the university’s former professor of economic history and published by its press: indeed Sidney Checkland had probably taught my mother when she studied economics there in the 1950s. In the spectacular nineteenth-century growth of the hundreds of malodorous, blackened and often squalid tenements (‘closes’) that would house the workers who put their labour and lives into the industrial achievements of heavy engineering and shipbuilding—with Glasgow serving as ‘a Liverpool and a Manchester together’ long before the Clyde became a by-word for British engine power—and the ensuing slow painful twentieth-century contraction of the ‘second city of the empire’ due to its overreliance on a very specific set of floating capital, skills and goods and a corresponding failure to diversify, Checkland saw a paradigm for the decline of the United Kingdom as a whole, a process that had become seemingly unstoppable by 1981, the year of the book’s second edition.
For all that his was a book centred on economic history, Checkland had chosen a symbol of natural growth to represent the city itself. The tree as a metaphor for human well-being—indeed as the fund of life itself—is a reassuringly solid one. Though humans are ambiguous creatures suspended between nature and culture, trees and their root systems are entrenched in our metaphors for being at home in the world. Buddha received enlightenment under a sacred fig or Bodhi tree, with its heart-shaped leaves. In Hinduism, the banyan tree is the resting place of the god Krishna—‘and the Vedic hymns are its leaves’. Plato liked to discourse beneath the silver spears of an olive tree. Some Biblical commentators had Christ crucified on a tree, though they don’t say which. Norse mythology had its famous warden tree, Yggdrasil. Even Jeremy Bentham had his ‘tree of utility’.
But what was the upas tree?
The Shorter OED describes the upas tree as ‘a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous as to destroy life for many miles around’. It is a symbol that stands for anything exerting a baleful, destructive influence. Checkland was using the upas tree as a figure for the doldrums of the once proud shipbuilding and marine engineering capital of the world: Glasgow’s determination to maintain its reputation for heavy engineering had come at the expense of everything else that ought to be ‘growing’ in the city. It was a particularly rich irony, since the coat of arms of the city bore a famous miracle tree that ‘never grew’, in the rhyme learned by generations of the city’s schoolchildren, including myself. ‘Now the Upas tree,’ wrote Checkland, ‘so long ailing, was itself decaying, its limbs falling away one by one. Not only had its growth been inimical to other growths, it had, by an inversion of its condition before 1914, brought about a limitation of its own performance.’ By the mid-twentieth century, the city had become a byword for militancy and defensiveness. Like a piece of machinery itself, Glasgow had, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous expression, become a giant with one idea.
There was another sense in which the upas tree was a potent symbol of what industrial development had cost a city which, a hundred years before its modern expansion, had been declared by Daniel Defoe to be ‘the cleanest and beautifullest’ in the kingdom: the chemical industries set up in the 1820s around the Shawfield Works on Glasgow’s southern approaches were to turn its water-meadows into the first industrial wastelands. The employees of this factory, which was established by John and James White on a twenty-acre site on the Rutherglen Road and was only one of the city’s several huge chemical factories and iron foundries, were known as ‘White’s canaries’ or ‘White’s dead men’, depending on whether they had been working with sulphur or soda ash. ‘There were the chrome furnacemen, the pearl ashmen, the crystal house men, the workers at the vitriol tanks, and the acid towers, together with the general labourers’, writes Allan Massie in his short history of the city. ‘The chemicals industry, indeed, in spite of being science-based, produced the nadir of working conditions, a scene of terrible male degradation.’ Contemporary critics wrote about the dismal light and poor air, and the strange, bitter, blighting wind: Charles Dickens caught the atmosphere of all such places with his description of Coketown in Hard Times—the foul-smelling black canals, the serpents of smoke from tall chimneys, the pistons of the steam-engines working monotonously ‘like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’. Industrialised or de-industrialised, there are devastated parts of the country, and not just the suburbs of Glasgow, that offer a ‘Scotland so real it defies the imagination’, in the words of the novelist James Robertson in And the Land Lay Still.
These were the strange fruits of that same science Coleridge had told his friend Humphry Davy in a letter of 1800 was the supremely human activity—and ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’.
The exotic tree of permanent shadow
I hadn’t spared a thought for the upas tree in twenty years when, in a dingy little second-hand bookshop at the side of a garish shopping complex on the Jalan Rasuna Saïd in 2005, the year of my first visit as a health consultant to Java’s capital, Jakarta, a city so large that its current population is at least ten times that of Glasgow at its peak of just over one million (but nobody is counting), I discovered a copy of a book called The Poison Tree. It was a translation of selected writings on the natural history of the Dutch East Indies (when Jakarta was known as Batavia) including a description of the upas tree, which had given the book its title, by an obscure naturalist with a curious name: Rumphius.
Rumphius was the Latinised name of a German naturalist from Hanau, Georg Eberhard Rumpf (1628–1702), who settled in the capital of the volcanic Banda Islands in the Moluccas (present-day Maluku), then the heart of Dutch trading operations in the archipelago. Rumphius worked for ‘The Company’, the metonym universally used to describe the formidable Dutch East Indies Company (VOC): he enlisted in its ranks as a gentleman soldier, leaving Europe in 1652. He would spend the rest of his life in Ambon (Amboyna), the main entrepot town in the Spice Islands from which the Dutch conducted and controlled their lucrative monopoly in cloves, pepper and nutmeg, which could sell in Europe for up to three hundred times the local purchase price. The first Europeans to moralise about materialism, the Dutch were ruthless in the defence of their economic interests on the Spice Islands, as the Portuguese and British and many rebellious Bandanese were to discover. Rumphius rose through the ranks, becoming a civil servant and establishing a reputation for himself as a man of ability and probity. He had talents as an architect, geometrician and linguist, but by the 1660s was known as a botanist and naturalist—a man who loved to devote himself to his ‘curious studies’. By a cruel irony, even as he acquired a ‘small parcel of land’ near Fort Victoria on Ambon and the leisure he needed for his studies, he lost his sight, probably as a complication of glaucoma. For the remaining thirty years of his life he had to rely on ‘borrowed eye and pen’. It didn’t stop him dictating to his son and various secretaries some astonishingly delicate descriptions of the world around him; and some of these entries had been translated with brio, in the book I was holding, by the scholar E.M. Beekman.
Understandably, in view of his geographic remoteness from anything like a printing house, only one of Rumphius’ writings was published in his lifetime, his account of the earthquake that killed his native wife and daughter in 1674. He gave his wife’s name to an orchid with white lanceolate floral bracts they had found together: ‘I call it Flos Susannae in Latin […] in memory of her who when alive, was my first Companion and Helpmate in looking for herbs and plants’: the Susanna Flower is now listed in the nomenclature as Pecteilis susannae. In all his work, Rumphius, like a twentieth-century ethnographer, always sought out sources of practical knowledge at the local level: he quizzed the dukun (the local healers), most of whom were women, on how they used plants, and ignored Galenic precepts entirely. And the women must have trusted him, because he writes about plants that were used for intimate hygiene or as abortifacients—women’s secrets. Rumphius also wrote a history of Ambon, as well as reports on the island’s agriculture, a lexicon of the Malay language (up to the letter P) and the several folios that constitute his d’Amboinsche Rariteit-kamer—his ‘Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet’.
These were mere by-works in relation to his magnum opus, The Ambonese Herbal, the seven hundred chapters of which he finished in 1687. It is one of the great works of pre-Linnean naturalism. Beekman, a Dutchman who was a professor of Germanic languages at the University of Massachusetts, spent the latter part of his life translating all the significant works of Rumphius’ considerable oeuvre. In his introduction to The Poison Tree he writes that he set out to use only words that were current before 1700, and in order to verify usage had to turn to the Quaker historian William Sewel’s A Large Dictionary of English-Dutch, a book first published in Amsterdam in 1691. What has been lost to science has been reclaimed as literature, for Rumphius’ personality is stamped all over his writing: his is a richly embodied language that preserves the individuality of everything he comes across. Osip Mandelstam’s description of the experience of reading Linnaeus’ Systema Natura conveys rather well the prose style of Rumphius’ work, which Linnaeus (who concealed his sources) had probably read during his time in the Netherlands: ‘It is Adam handing out certificates of merit to the mammals, having invoked the aid of a wizard from Baghdad and a Chinese monk.’
Rumphius’ fabulous botany (which already relies on the economical use of binomials) is a reminder that one of the most powerful forces behind what is now called ‘enlightenment’ was the need to find an exact nomenclature and descriptive method for naming specimens from botany in particular and the natural world in general. Botany played a central role, as the substantial part of materia medica and an item of cultural baggage which had to be acquired by every educated person, in the development of modernity, bringing together medicine and science, commerce and expanding empire, and connecting them all with the new cognitive scope accorded to the eye by magnification and microscopy.
Evocation is one thing, systematic description another; Rumphius had a talent for both. Beekman’s copious notes on what is a relatively obscure chapter of natural history make it doubly a pleasure to linger over Rumphius in translation: his translator is a knowledgeable guide not only to the natural phenomena and obscure customs of the Malay Archipelago but also to changing usage in English, German, Dutch, Malay and Chinese. If George Steiner could spot a resemblance between Joseph Needham’s famous synoptic work Science and Civilisation in China and Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as documents of a civilisation grasped in the round, then there is a case to be made for Beekman’s recreations of Rumphius’ primordial epiphanies.
After a brief description of the ‘spatter-poison’, the bloody sap of the tree collected using bamboo conduits and smeared on arrow-tips for hunting game (and killing Dutch mercenaries), Rumphius writes: ‘Under this tree and for a stone’s throw around it, there grows neither grass nor leaves, nor any other trees, and the soil stays barren there, russet, and as if scorched.’ The upas tree casts a dense meteorological shadow: it has a sinister climate all of its own. Birds unfortunate enough to alight on it can be found dead beneath it. All animals shun it except for a ‘cackle-snake’ that sometimes terrorises nearby villages, a kind of basilisk able to immobilise victims by gazing at them before destroying them with its mephitic breath.
What Rumphius was describing was the cryptobotany of the bark cloth tree, ‘ancar’ in Malay or Antiaris toxicaria in botanical nomenclature, around which has grown, as Beekman comments, a ‘tanglewood of lore and legend […] most of it preposterous though marvellous as fiction’. A surgeon working for the Dutch East Indies Company in Semarang, N.P. Foersch, published in the London Magazine of December 1783 one of the first widely read accounts of the upas tree, embellishing his paper with several fantastic folk-tales about the terrible ‘bohun upas’ but providing no details about its botanical nature or even how the poison was prepared. It now seems that Foersch was a fictitious person and the letter itself a hoax perpetrated by the Shakespeare specialist and friend of Dr Johnson George Steevens, who was pandering to the eighteenth-century fascination with exotic tales; at any rate it was a literary mystification that gripped the Romantic imagination. The upas tree does indeed produce a toxic latex containing a cardiac glycoside that can cause a fatal arrhythmia, but its shade has never blasted the living in the manner either Rumphius or Foersch suggest: indeed it is considerably less malign than the West Indian manchineel (Hippomane mancinella), commonly found as a windbreak near coastal plains and beaches: its fruit and sap are among the most toxic on the planet.
It is the upas tree, though, which has entered myth.
The sentinel tree of the Arctic Circle
The malefic upas tree bewitched the poets of the early Romantic period, where the fascination may have been fed by references to it in Erasmus Darwin’s poem ‘The Botanic Garden’, where it was called ‘the Hydra-tree of death’. Coleridge wrote, ‘It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost, / Weeps only tears of poison.’ The Victoria and Albert Museum in south London has a large, claustrophobic canvas titled The Upas, or Poison Tree in the Island of Java, based on Darwin’s poem by the Irish artist Francis Danby, which was the sensation of the British Institution exhibition of 1820, only a few years after Stamford Raffles had been Lieutenant Governor of the island during the Napoleonic Wars and penned a dismissive note about Foersch’s ‘extravagant forgery’ in his encyclopaedic The History of Java (1817). Byron in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ associated the tree with the ‘uneradicable taint of sin’; Balzac, Southey, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Melville and Ruskin all had upas trees in their literary gardens. Even Blake imagined, in a pre-Freudian parable on the dangers of repression, an unspecified ‘poison tree’ growing in the garden of his mind: it had grown out of anger and its apples were likely to be toxic. Nothing could grow in its shade. The tree that brings death and not life leans out of the Romantic era and into the twentieth century as a self-poisoning of the mind: Friedrich Nietzsche would have recognised it, having in spite of his better intentions contributed to its upkeep, as the tree of resentment.
In fact, it was the celebrated Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who in his somnambulistic poem ‘Anchar’, wrote the finest lyric on the upas tree—‘The fearsome sentinel / Stands alone in all the world.’ Only a black whirlwind dares to disturb the poison tree and it, in its turn, becomes pestilential. Where does the contagion stop? Even language itself, we suspect, might become the infectious vector of this primal curse. And sure enough, a man of power (Pushkin identifies him only as the Prince) sends another man (‘a poor slave’) by ‘commanding glance’ to gather the glassy coagulated resin that hardens in the night. The Prince has this gum spread on arrows and looses ‘perdition through the air’ on neighbours without access to an antidote, and who are in any case unacquainted with such ruthless methods of territorial acquisition.
Pushkin neglected to submit this poem to the censor for approval before its first publication in 1832 and consequently had dealings with Count Alexander von Benkendorff, director of Nicholas I’s Third Section (internal police), now remembered if at all for his bizarre inability to remember his own name: he was alert enough however to notice that Pushkin had been bold enough to name outright the tyrant in the first version of the poem ‘Tsar’, the man to whom the history of the nation belongs. Not that anybody in Russia would have had any problems recognising who was meant in subsequent versions by ‘the Prince’. In a critical study of Pushkin John Bayley wrote that, ‘Anchar condenses its apprehension of power in a few heavy drops’—indeed, both the Prince and the tree are the grim guards of their redoubtable isolation. Pushkin’s subversive understanding of the nature of tyranny has been addressed by many subsequent Russian poets, including Joseph Brodsky. Instead of the Prince we have Stalin, the despot as paranoid, whose ‘passion for survival’ in a political landscape made oppressive by his doings leads him to destroy all those who might possibly pose a threat to his rule.
Pushkin’s upas tree poem is a parable about despotism and domination, and how Russia’s long history of hard-nosed dealings with its neighbours has poisoned regional politics, a situation that, as we are reminded from time to time, continues to this day. It is also in the Russian Federation that we find a contemporary upas tree with tap-roots descending deep into the history of the industrial exploitation of nature as well as into the nature of political power. At the foot of the Putoran Mountains, between the Yenisei River and Taymyr Peninsula is the ancient geological formation called the Siberian Traps, the flood basalt remnant of the paroxysmal eruptions (Permian-Triassic extinction event) that palaeontologists believe caused the extinction of nearly all species on Earth about 250 million years ago: here is the city of Norilsk, the only major city in eastern Siberia that lies inside the Arctic Circle. The polar night in Norilsk lasts for six weeks in winter, blinding curtains of snow are commonplace, and the temperature can scrape around -50°C for weeks in January and February. Norilsk was founded at the end of the 1920s as the one of the main encampments of the boreal Gulag system: its nickel deposits are the most extensive in the world, and it also sits on vast seams of copper, platinum, cobalt, palladium and coal. Thousands of prisoners died there under the harsh conditions of forced labour, starvation, and intense cold in the years between 1935 and 1956, and detainees were being sent to the mines up to 1979: with a high accident rate and limited life expectancy it is still a dangerous place to work (and it appears in the top-ten list of the Blacksmith Institute’s report on the Worst Polluted Places, 2007). Now the city is run by a company called Norilsk Nickel, which raises capital and trades in all the respectable places: it is a major player in the global extraction business. Norilsk (population 175 000) is still a closed city, a useful Soviet-era policy which has never been lifted in some places although you can apparently link up to their inhabitants on the web.
After sixty years of mining and smelting, it has become economically cost-effective to work the polluted soil around the mines in order to recuperate the heavy metals dispersed in the initial tailings. That can only be described as a death-star vision of recycling. Norilsk’s heavy metal smelter—where the ores are melted in what Blake would have called ‘the Furnaces of Affliction’—is the largest in the world, with an annual atmospheric blow-off of many tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc as well as several radio-isotopes. Within thirty miles of the nickel smelter, according to a CNN report in 2007, there is not a single living Siberian larch, the only tree that survives in the taiga. The name of the smelter is Nadezhda (‘Hope’).