In March 1803, the Henriette anchored off Cape Town, near Africa’s southern tip. Homeward bound from China with a cargo of tea, porcelain and silks, the ship had stopped to take on supplies for the final leg of its voyage. For two weeks, Dutch merchant Jan Teerlink toured the sights, made new friends and added to his collection of mementos. Among them were seeds acquired from the Dutch East India Company’s celebrated gardens in the town. Company Gardens had been planted in 1652 to provide ships with fresh produce but by the time of Teerlink’s visit they had become a botanical treasure house, filled with the flowers of the fynbos – the unique flora of the Cape. Two centuries on, some of Teerlink’s seeds have unexpectedly sprung to life.
No one knows what Jan Teerlink intended to do with the fabulous collection of seeds he acquired in Cape Town. In garden-mad Holland, such exotic plants would have been a great prize. But Teerlink had no garden: he spent so much of his life travelling that he didn’t even have a house. The seeds may have been destined to create a small corner of the Cape on some wealthy Dutchman’s estate. Or they could have been earmarked for one of the nation’s botanic gardens. One thing is certain: Teerlink could never have imagined that two centuries after he tucked the seeds into his wallet and set off for home, plant scientists in the UK would go to great lengths to cajole them into germinating.
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If it hadn’t been for Dutch historian Roelof van Gelder, Teerlink’s seeds might never have come to light: they lay forgotten in the UK’s National Archives at Kew, in west London. But then, last year, as part of a project for the Royal Dutch Library, van Gelder began to examine documents that had ended up among the High Court of Admiralty’s “prize papers” – material seized from captured ships. As he worked through the boxes of papers he came across material taken from the Henriette, a ship captured by the British navy in 1803. Among the ship’s papers he discovered a red leather wallet embossed in gold with the name of its owner: Jan Teerlink of Vlissingen, the Dutch port known to the English-speaking world as Flushing.
Inside the wallet were some samples of silk fabric and 40 neatly folded paper packets containing seeds. The silk was no surprise: Teerlink was a merchant and the ship had been to China. The seeds, however, were totally unexpected, and the first ever found in the archives. Van Gelder was intrigued: was there any chance they might grow?
The National Archives are practically next door to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Who better to ask? Soon, samples from each of Teerlink’s packets were on their way to the Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex, where Kew’s seed scientists are based.
Outside the controlled conditions of such a bank, seeds rarely survive more than a few years. Almost every claim to have grown plants from ancient seed – wheat from a pharaoh’s tomb and similar fanciful ideas – has proved unreliable. There are only two confirmed cases. In the 1990s, sacred lotus seeds recovered from a dried lake bed in China astonished scientists by sprouting: one seed was 1300 years old. The resulting plants, however, had serious genetic abnormalities. The second case was the seed of a South American canna lily, found inside a 500-year-old Inca rattle.
More representative are the results of an experiment set up in 1879 by the American botanist William Beal. He buried jars of seeds from 25 local wild flowers and asked that future botanists check their viability at regular intervals. At the 120-year check, seeds of only two species still germinated. Teerlink’s seeds were 203 years old and had been kept in very doubtful conditions: first aboard ship, then at the Tower of London and later filed among government records. Seed ecologist Matt Daws did not fancy their chances. “It was such a long shot,” he says. “You wouldn’t expect any to be alive after so long.”
Most seeds germinate only with the right combination of conditions. Fortunately, the packets provided some clues to what those might be. Teerlink had not bought the seeds – there was no mention of them in his accounts. Nor had he collected them himself. “The seeds had been wrapped in the specialised way botanists used and the labels were not in Teerlink’s handwriting,” says van Gelder. “I’m sure a botanist prepared them and either gave them to him or swapped them for goods he had brought from Asia.” That strongly suggests they came from Cape Town’s Company Gardens, which were so famous that Teerlink was bound to have visited them. Whoever prepared the packets had identified most of the species accurately and provided a few helpful field notes.
The seeds came from 32 species. There were species of Erica and daisies, watermelons, legumes and proteas – the iconic blooms of the Cape. Some were just specks, others half a centimetre long, but they all had something in common: they were species of the fynbos, a remarkably diverse type of vegetation unique to the Cape, adapted to the region’s dry Mediterranean climate and frequent wildfires. “Normally, we would do experiments to work out the best conditions for each individual species. But the samples were too small, so we had to go with our best guess,” says Daws.
The seeds of many fynbos plants sprout only after fire has passed through. For many, germination is triggered by smoke: Daws simulated that by wetting the seeds with water that had had smoke bubbled through it. The tougher seeds of legumes need the intense heat of fire to crack their coats before water can get in: Daws chipped these with a scalpel. Fynbos plants also need relatively low temperatures to germinate – a signal that it’s winter and there will be rain. Daws plumped for an average temperature of 15 °C.
In March this year, the seeds of one legume, a species of Liparia, sprouted – 16 of a sample of 25. In June, one of two acacia seeds followed suit, and finally in July, so did one of eight Leucospermum seeds. “It’s remarkable,” says Daws. “You might not think three species out of 32 is very impressive, but I’d have been happy if just one seed had grown.”
For Daws and his colleagues at the seed bank Teerlink’s seeds have been a revelation. Models of seed survival suggest that under optimum conditions crop seeds might survive for a thousand years, a timespan that is impossible to verify. “Under the conditions these seeds were kept even the hardiest cereal seed should have been dead by now, according to the models,” says Daws. “So this is very encouraging. It shows how tough seeds can be.” Today, healthy seedlings of all three species are growing vigorously in a glasshouse at the seed bank. The acacia is half a metre tall. That too is surprising. “You might expect these plants to be sickly and malformed but they all seem quite normal.”
“Seedlings of all three species that sprouted are growing vigorously”
While Kew waited for Teerlink’s seeds to show signs of life, van Gelder got to know the man himself. He was an astute businessman with a taste for adventure. He had once worked for the Dutch East India Company, but after France annexed the Netherlands in 1795, the company collapsed. It could not trade with the east so long as Britain, with its vastly superior navy, was an enemy of France and its allies. Teerlink went freelance and was hired as a “supercargo” by a consortium of investors willing to risk their money on a little subterfuge: he would disguise his nationality by voyaging east in a ship from a neutral country. In 1801, he sailed for China in the Henriette, a Prussian ship with a Prussian captain. The ruse almost succeeded. The Henriette was only a day or two from home when the British seized it.
Teerlink petitioned the High Court of Admiralty for the return of the ship and its cargo, but the Henriette was declared a prize and sold. He went home empty-handed and minus a decade’s worth of his own documents. “Because he had no home he carted everything around with him,” says van Gelder. Teerlink’s confiscated accounts and letters reveal that he was well read, played the violin, smoked a pipe and ate a lot of sweets. He was also very sociable, with friends across the continent. Many were women, which might explain his frequent visits to the barber and the quantities of toiletries he bought. “He obviously liked to look good,” says van Gelder. Letters from women in Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Paris and even London all declare how much they missed him.
So far van Gelder has found no mention of who the seeds were intended for. A business associate? A botanic garden? Or were they for one of his many girlfriends?
