“I would be far more useful to the world if I were to embark on another great voyage,” the German naturalist George Forster told a friend in November 1783. Weren’t there enough people who could sort, classify and regurgitate what had already been discovered? But if he couldn’t travel to distant continents and islands, he could explore them with his mind and imagination—and in Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals Forster’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.

Forster had first encountered the breadfruit a decade before, while traveling as an assistant to his father, the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, aboard the HMS Resolution, during Cook’s second voyage. It was a tropical fruit that grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit—roasted on hot stones or fermented into a dough that was baked like bread—but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna, and Malakula (as he explained in his essay), could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, Forster had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree—all of them had been planted by humans.

That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands.

Read the rest of “A Sea of Islands,” an excerpt from The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris.

APROPOS

From Horace Gray’s opinion in Nix v. Hedden. Produce importer John Nix and his four sons hoped to avoid a 10 percent tax on their Caribbean tomatoes under the Tariff of 1883, an act signed into law by Chester A. Arthur that exempted fruit. Though the decision would seem to legally preclude them from doing so, Tennessee, Ohio, Arkansas, and Louisiana have since named tomato varieties their state fruit. In 2016 the Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant Nix, named for the decision, opened in New York City.

This was an action brought February 4, 1887, against the collector of the port of New York to recover back duties paid under protest on tomatoes imported by the plaintiff from the West Indies in the spring of 1886, which the collector assessed under “Schedule G. Provisions” of the tariff act of March 3, 1883, imposing a duty on “vegetables in their natural state, or in salt or brine, not specially enumerated or provided for in this act, 10 percent ad valorem” and which the plaintiffs contended came within the clause in the free list of the same act: “Fruits, green, ripe, or dried, not specially enumerated or provided for in this act.”

The single question in this case is whether tomatoes, considered as provisions, are to be classed as vegetables or as fruit within the meaning of the tariff act of 1883.

The only witnesses called at the trial testified that neither vegetables nor fruit had any special meaning in trade or commerce different from that given in the dictionaries, and that they had the same meaning in trade today that they had in March 1883.

The passages cited from the dictionaries define the word fruit as the seed of plants, or that part of plants which contains the seed, and especially the juicy, pulpy products of certain plants, covering and containing the seed. These definitions have no tendency to show that tomatoes are “fruit,” as distinguished from “vegetables,” in common speech, or within the meaning of the tariff act. There being no evidence that the words fruit and vegetables have acquired any special meaning in trade or commerce, they must receive their ordinary meaning. Of that meaning the court is bound to take judicial notice, as it does in regard to all words in our own tongue; and upon such a question dictionaries are admitted not as evidence but only as aids to the memory and understanding of the court.

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.

The attempt to class tomatoes as fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said, “We do not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds, in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance. On the other hand, in speaking generally of provisions, beans may well be included under the term vegetables. As an article of food on our tables, whether baked or boiled, or forming the basis of soup, they are used as a vegetable, as well when ripe as when green. This is the principal use to which they are put. Beyond the common knowledge which we have on this subject, very little evidence is necessary, or can be produced.” Judgment affirmed.

First published in the Spring 2018 issue, Rule of Law.

Cultivating vanilla is an intricate and laborious process from start to finish. That’s the reason it’s the second most expensive spice in the world, right after saffron.

All the vanilla orchids bloom in the month of March, with pale yellow, white, or green blossoms that smell faintly spicy, like cinnamon. The flowers only last a few hours, opening in the morning and shriveling by noon. Although vanilla orchids contain both male parts (the anther, which creates pollen) and female parts (the stigma, which receives pollen), these organs are separated by a thin membrane that seems to prevent the plant from self-pollinating. Botanists believe the plant is pollinated by native animals but are uncertain which ones. For many years, a tiny insect known as the Melipona bee was thought to be the flower’s pollinator. But recent research—performed by a team of graduate students who sat on platforms in the jungle canopy to watch wild vanilla orchids bloom—saw many different types of bees, ants, hummingbirds and bats visit the flowers. But none of them showed signs of pollinating. In all likelihood, it might be several of these visitors that guarantee the plant’s fertilization.

In the nineteenth century, when the plant was taken outside of Mexico, it lacked the native pollinators necessary for natural fertilization. It was a Belgian botanist named Charles Morren, working with a greenhouse specimen, who first made this link in 1839. He noted “the absence of the species of insect which nature has doubtless given to the climate of Mexico to effect in this latter region a fecundation.” To fertilize a vanilla plant, he wrote, you needed to do it by hand: “It is thus necessary to raise the velamen or to cut it when the plant is to be fecundated, and to place in direct contact the pollen and the stigmatic surface.” He went on to note: “The fecundation never fails.”

If you’re confused by Morren’s instructions, don’t worry, you’re not the only one. The single line he wrote about this extremely delicate process baffled botanists around the world. When they attempted to follow his instructions, they had spotty results at best. It’s actually not Morren’s method that’s used to hand-pollinate vanilla today. We use the method of the unlikely hero of nineteenth-century botany, Edmond Albius.

Read the rest of “The Marriage of Vanilla,” originally published in 2017.

Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually it’s not quite as simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies (whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out.

It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogs. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even dis­information is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogs, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogs.

Read the rest of “Bleeding a Poppy,” from the Winter 2012 issue, Intoxication.

In the spring of 1634, smallpox spread across southern New England. It began, reported William Bradford, governor of Plymouth, near a trading house. The afflicted, Bradford wrote, “died most miserably; for a sorer disease cannot befall them, they fear it more than the plague.” The characteristic symptom was the eruption of small lesions on the skin. Bradford observed that those who had the pox “have them in abundance; and for want of bedding and linen, and other helps, they fall into a lamentable condition, as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering, and running one into another; their skin cleaving (by reason thereof) to the mats they lie on.” He claimed that just by rolling over, a victim might lose all of the skin on one side of their body. “And then being very sore,” he added, “what with cold, and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.”

Normally, Indigenous communities had individuals who stepped in to heal the ill. Europeans might have doubted the efficacy of Indigenous cures, taking them for heathen devotions to dark forces. But even in their skepticism colonists knew that members of a native town tended to rally around to cure someone who was sick. In 1634, the normal practices fractured. There were not enough healthy Indigenous people available to bring water to the sick, maintain fires, or bury the dead. Unable to gather new firewood, native peoples, Bradford wrote, would eventually “burn the wooden trays, and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows.”

Some were so weak they could not make it back to their houses after having crawled out to find water. Bradford claimed that the colonists, after getting over their initial fear, “seeing their woeful, and sad condition, and hearing their pitiful cries, and lamentations,” felt enough compassion that they brought firewood, food, and water, and buried the dead. Even still, a local sachem and almost everyone in the town died. “But by the marvelous goodness and providence of God,” Bradford wrote, employing the characteristic rhetoric of dissenters who believed in predestination, “not one of the English was so much as sick, or in the least measure tainted with this disease,” even though they visited the Indigenous daily.

During the 1630s, infectious diseases killed thousands in North America, territory that, with the notable exception of the epidemic in coastal New England from 1616 to 1619, had been spared the kinds of catastrophic epidemics of hemorrhagic fevers that had taken the lives of millions in New Spain the previous century. But no more. The increased volume of shipping across the Atlantic amplified the chances that contagious individuals might land in North America, enhancing the possibility of Old World diseases killing individuals whose bodies may have already been weakened by stress induced by physical displacement and relentless attacks on their culture and beliefs.

At the same time, the number of colonists increased dramatically, especially in territory claimed by the Massachusetts Bay Company. The opposite demographic profiles of shrinking native towns and growing immigrant communities contributed to rising tensions in eastern New England. The tensions erupted in the cataclysmic Anglo–Pequot War of 1637.

Read the rest of “The Mystic River Massacre.”

Against the Hobbesian idea of the social contract in which “every individual concludes an agreement with the strictly secular authorities to insure his safety”—what Arendt calls the “vertical version of the social contract”—she argues that the American political experiment was founded on the discovery of a “horizontal” version of consent.

Horizontal consent has its roots in the “prerevolutionary experience” of early colonial Americans. That experience is marked by “numerous covenants and agreements, from the Mayflower Compact to the establishment of the thirteen colonies.” Signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, anchored off the coast of present-day Massachusetts, the Mayflower Compact was a declaration of self-rule agreed to by the Pilgrims and the commoners who had sailed with them. These future citizens from all social and economic classes arrogated to themselves the right to govern themselves, demanding that their government be one of consent.

Arendt expresses amazement at the astounding confidence these original settlers “had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves together into a ‘civil Body Politick.’ ” This new body politic was to be held together not by force, but simply by the faith each person had in the loyalty of each to their mutual promises. It was this actual experience of their joining together and constituting new governments—something repeated in every colony and in towns and cities across the North American continent—that, Arendt argues, was new and distinctly American. The American republic “rests on the power of the people.”

The power to covenant existed prior to America. But the generative idea of power through mutual promises and compacts was most often fleeting; it may have flared into existence, but it was quickly and consistently extinguished as new centers of power claimed for themselves the sovereignty and the right to govern. But this is not what happened in the American Revolution, at least in the first 150 years of the republic, where the “new American experience and the new American concept of power” was elevated and incorporated into constitutions and institutions “designed explicitly to preserve it.” In On Revolution, in which Arendt examines horizontal consent at greater length, she argues that the experience of the freedom to act together in assemblies and mutual compacts opened the American colonists to a “new experience of power.” The colonists had a history of acting in concert—to build roads and places of worship, found communities, and govern themselves. It is the “great good fortune of the American Revolution,” she notes, that the colonies, prior to the Revolutionary War, “were organized in self-governing bodies.” When the American Revolution broke out and the authority of the English king was rejected, the American revolutionaries were not transported into anarchy. This is because the colonists were experienced with organized power in government bodies through constituent assemblies.

What so impresses Arendt is that, in the wake of the liberation from England, the American colonists immediately took to governing themselves in legislatures elected according to constitutional principles, “so that there existed no gap, no hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between the war of liberation, the fight for independence that was the condition for freedom, and the constitution of the new states.” Without missing a beat, the colonists made use of their experience in self-government to put new constitutions before the people of the various states for popular approval. Thus, the American constitutions were not simply acts of government designed to limit the government and protect civil liberties. Rather, the constitutions were active examples of a people coming together to constitute themselves.

The American constitutions were more about creating new powers than about limiting power, and it was this task, “the creation of new power,” that Arendt saw to be the central activity of the American Revolution. The difference between American constitutions and their European descendants is that in America the constitutions were not made and imposed by experts, but were constituted by the people themselves.

When Arendt published On Revolution in 1963, she worried that Americans had lost the foundation of their freedom and power, because the U.S. Constitution did not in the end institutionalize the public spaces of power that had given Americans the experience of freedom. There is no institutional space guaranteed by the Constitution for town hall meetings, citizen deliberation, or civic associations. Thomas Jefferson himself saw this problem and understood that while the Constitution “had given freedom to the people” it “had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised.” For Arendt and for Jefferson, “the failure of the founders to incorporate the township and the town hall meeting into the Constitution” meant that representation came to supplant the experience of freedom in self-government: “‘the school of the people’ ”—Emerson’s phrase—“in political matters had withered away.” And since the “Constitution itself provided a public space only for the representatives of the people, and not for the people themselves,” the expected result was their increasing lethargy and “inattention to public business.” This failure to guarantee in the Constitution spaces of freedom for the people meant that the “treasure” of the American Revolution, the experience of freedom that underlay the foundation of freedom, was lost. Arendt’s conclusion in On Revolution is that the tragic loss of the revolutionary spirit of freedom was the result of a turn away from civic republicanism toward bourgeois consumption.

Read the rest of “The Right to Dissent.”

If the framers of the Constitution weren’t our founding democratic ancestors, and indeed created a Constitution designed to obstruct democracy, we can nonetheless find such ancestors among forces that the framers sought to shut down. The founding-era democratic movement, though obscure today, was strong. And it was just as American as its more famous opponents.

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Leisure is not merely recreation, which we might undertake for the sake of work—to relax or rest before beginning to labor anew. Leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.

Despite a long tradition of thinking that Aristotle helped to inspire, the kind of leisure that functions as an ultimate goal of living does not require vast estates and the life of a country gentleman. It can be taken in a moment, or in a long pause; it can fruitfully coexist with certain kinds of manual labor. The great books movement that for a time shaped American intellectual culture began among working people, in workmen’s inst…

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On the night Charles Dickens first met Hans Christian Andersen, he had drunk a few drops over his usual habit, but only because his hostess, Lady Blessington, had asked him to make the punch and he’d had to keep testing his product. Past a certain point, he had a tendency to invite strangers to visit him at home, regardless of whether he wanted to see them or not. Sometimes, the next morning, he awoke afraid that someone whose name he’d forgotten was about to knock on his door.

It was an argument for moderation. Or it would have been if those invitations hadn’t burbled up from such a deep well of feeling. By the end of those dinners, he loved his new friends. He wanted them to meet his family and see his home.

If he regretted his impulsiveness later, he reminded himself that, though his close friends were frequent visitors, no strangers had ever taken him up on his offer. He’d cer…

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From “The Wonder of the Ordinary” by Mary Beard

In ancient Greek, my experience in the museum would have been called thauma: a “wonder” or “wonderment.” But it has a more complicated range of meanings than those translations suggest. Thauma was a loaded ancient catchword. At its simplest, it could describe the feeling of being amazed, as well as referring to the object that caused the amazement. That Egyptian bread was a thauma itself, and it also left its young viewer in a state of thauma.

Some wonders are on a grand or even cosmic scale: the pyramids, showers of meteorites or eclipses of the sun, for example. For me it was the wonder of the ordinary—and those moments of feeling almost unbelievably close to people who lived thousands of years ago—that sparked my excitement in the deep past. Ever since, this has underpinned my life as a classicist (the word commonly applied si…

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