The Upas Tree

When I was studying medicine at the University of Glasgow, the economic historian Sydney Checkland published a book with the university press: it had the arresting title The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875–1975. 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, and the ensuing painful twentieth-century contraction of the “second city of the empire” under the sheer weight of the past, Checkland saw a paradigm for the decline of the United Kingdom as a whole, a process that had seemingly become unstoppable by 1981, the year of the book’s second edition.

The tree as a metaphor for human well-being—indeed as the fund of life itself—is a reassuringly solid if conventional one. Though we are ambiguous creatures suspended between nature and culture, trees and their root systems are deeply embedded 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 silvery spears of an olive tree. Some biblical commentators had Christ crucified on a tree, though they don’t say which. Norse mythology had its great 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”. Metonymically, it 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 tree that “never grew”, in the rhyme learned by 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 middle of the 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 watermeadows 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. “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”.

These were the strange fruits of that same science which 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”.

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 Said 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 probably ten times that of Glasgow at its peak (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. 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 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 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 consequence 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 it was these entries which 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’s 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 the sources of practical knowledge at the local level: he quizzed the dukun or local healers, most of whom were women, on how they used plants, and ignored Galenic precepts entirely. And they must have trusted him, because he writes about plants that were used for intimate hygiene or as abortifacients. 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 what is called his “Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet”.

These were mere by-works in relation to his magnum opus, The Ambonese Herbal, the 700 chapters of which he finished in 1687. It is one of the great works of pre-Linnaean 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’s 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’s personality is stamped all over his writing: his is in a richly embodied language that preserves the individuality of everything he comes across. Osip Mandelstam’s description of the experience of reading Linnaeus’s Systema Natura conveys rather well the prose style of Rumphius’s 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’s fabulous botany (which already relies on the economical use of binomials) is a reminder that one of the most powerful forces behind the 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 item of cultural baggage for 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 Recherché 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’s 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 which immobilises 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 never blasts 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: the manchineel’s fruit and sap are among the most toxic on the planet.

It is the upas tree, though, which has entered myth.

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 London has a large, claustrophobic canvas, 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 wrote 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”; Southey, 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 extremely toxic. The tree that brings death and not life hangs over 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 great 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 noxious tree and it, in its turn, becomes pestilential by contagion. A “commanding glance” is sent by the man of power (Pushkin calls him “the Prince”) to a powerless other man to gather the “thick transparent gum” which hardens in the night. The Prince has the poison spread on arrows and looses “perdition through the air” on neighbours who have no access to an antidote, and are in any case unacquainted with such ruthless methods of territorial acquisition. As John Bayley wrote in his appreciation of Pushkin, “Anchar condenses its apprehension of power in a few heavy drops”—indeed, the Prince and the tree have much in common, not least their fierce isolation: Pushkin’s scorn for the figure of the tyrant was a constant of Russian poetry down to Joseph Brodsky. We end up with an anticipation of Stalin, the despot as a 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. (Vladimir Nabokov produced an English version in the dark years of 1941–42, when another tyrant was slaying “his neighbours in their own domains”.) The poem’s publication without its first having been submitted to the censor in an 1832 almanac caused Pushkin a few difficulties with Count Alexander von Benkendorff, director of the Third Section (internal police), who is now remembered solely for his bizarre tendency not to remember his own name: he was sufficiently alert, however, to notice that Pushkin had been bold enough to name the tyrant in the first version of the poem “Tsar”. Nobody in Russia would have had any problems recognising who was meant in subsequent versions by “the Prince”.

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 continues uninterrupted 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 on what geologists call the Central Siberian Plateau, part of a very ancient former continent, lies the city of Norilsk, the only major city in eastern Siberia that lies inside the Arctic Circle. The polar night there 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 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 World’s 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”).

Note: E.M. “Monty” Beekman (1939–2008) was a Dutch-born scholar who emigrated to the United States in 1957. He taught Germanic languages for over thirty years, ending his career as Multatuli Professor of Dutch Literature, Language and Culture at the University of Massachusetts. Fairly late in life he discovered the pioneering work of Rumphius. Having translated a small work by Rumphius on orchids, Beekman then embarked on the weighty and unclassifiable account of tropical flora and fauna titled An Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet: a classic of natural history which had first been published in 1705 thus entered the English language in 1999. With the backing of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the encouragement of Yale University Press, which had published his other two Rumphius translations, Beekman started on the truly heroic task of translating the seven-folio volume of Rumphius’s Herbal just after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2000. It was published in 2011 in a boxed set of six volumes by Yale University Press as The Ambonese Herbal.