Breadfruit

I have missed a week of posting; apologies but I have been tied up writing a book chapter on breadfruit plants using the plant-thinking as a hook. This is in essence the thrust of my chapter; apologies for the length.

John Tyley produced a watercolour painting of a Breadfruit Tree with an enslaved African man sitting beneath it. The watercolour is held by The Linnean Society of London and recently has been lent to The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge University), and The British Library for display in their Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, and Unearthed: The Power of Gardening, respectively; the photograph above was taken at the Fitzwilliam in 2023.

Tyley was a free (not enslaved) mixed-race botanical illustrator. Little is known but it is believed he was a self-taught botanical artist from Antigua, one of the Caribbean Leeward Islands. He was employed by Alexander Anderson, superintendent of the St Vincent Botanical Garden around 1793 where he remained until 1800 when he was exiled for sedition; he has been corresponding with other free men-of-colour who were trying to gain equal rights with white men (St Vincent is also a Leeward Island).

Tyley’s heritage is unknown but being of mixed-race, his ancestry would most likely include enslaved Africans trafficked to work on the British plantations in the Caribbean. As you can see, he painted the enslaved man at rest; an unusual act during day-light hours, and hence it represents his political stance. Between 1707 and 1807 it is estimated that almost 302,000 enslaved people were imported into the Leewards; part of the some 1-million 401-thousand, 300 people trafficked into the British Caribbean during this time; it is known that around 21 enslaved men laboured in the St Vincent Botanical Garden when Tyley was employed there. 

The tree that the enslaved man, depicted as a type rather than a specific individual, sits under is a Breadfruit Tree, an Artocarpus incisus using its then botanical name. This tree was also trafficked to the Caribbean, imported from Tahiti to provide a cheap and reliable food source for enslaved labourers in the sugar plantations; sugar being another plant not native to the region.

The first attempt at bringing Breadfruit from its Tahitian home to the Caribbean was in 1789 but it was scuppered by the now infamous mutiny on the Bounty. The second attempt was successful with Captain Bligh docking in St Vincent in January 1793. He landed 559 plants for the care of Anderson, including 331 Breadfruit from Tahiti. However, these weren’t the first Breadfruit to come to the Garden as in January 1792, Anderson had obtained a small specimen from a contact on the French-Caribbean island of Martinique; by December it was 6-feet in height, and doubtless thriving in large part due to the work of the Garden’s enslaved labourers (you only need to see the sheer quantity of Anderson’s extant archives to know he couldn’t have spent a huge amount of time in the Garden himself).

So, we have trafficked people and trafficked plants. I am putting aside all other trafficked plants in the Garden to focus on the Breadfruit because it was only the Breadfruit Tree that Tyley depicted with an enslaved man, and so the concept of rhizomial thinking in Michael Marder’s book Plant-Thinking as my linking point.

Marder’s work on plant-thinking stems from the recent philosophical shift towards our more-than-human world and focuses on exploring vegetal life in relation to ontological and ethical concerns. His work draws on metaphysics, and phenomenology to deconstruct and rethink how we contemplate plants. Marder’s rhizomial thought comes via Deluze and Guattari’s who in A Thousand Plateaus propose the term arborescent as a linear hierarchical way of engaging with the world. Think of trees with their tap root as an analogy; a taproot may have conjunctions with other roots but there is a strict chain of command. Rhizomatic thinking meanwhile is the opposite with lateral integrated experimental connections; a rhizome has no up or down, nor left or right, it just has ‘lines of flight’ – a tendency to change. And this is what Marder argues is ‘plant-thinking proper’, ‘the inextricable relation to “an outside”, to something other’, that foregrounds ‘the interconnections in the “lines of flight”…[that means one goes] beyond [a] self-sufficient identity’.

And if we start to consider the mycorrhizal network that helps plants thrive or not-thrive (some plants are collaborative, some only to their kin, whilst others are adverse to sharing and exchanging resources), then the Breadfruit Trees that was trafficked, weren’t just planted, watered and pruned, but had to establish networks and communicate with already established plants, in order to live and hopefully thrive in their new diasporic home.

The tree can’t be arboreal (in Deluze and Guattari’s way of thinking) in the way it relates to the plants around it; it needs to work with other plants to gain nutrients. And the trafficked enslaved African also has to use rhizomatic processes to survive; building networks that are the antithesis to the arboreal system of colonialism and enslavement. And the man’s resting pose echoes Tyley’s politics, and the networks he was part of that sought to communicate equality.

The range of merchandise The Fitzwilliam produced from the Tyley Breadfruit painting. The Linnean Society permitted this use provided the profits went to the St Vincent Botanical Garden (Welch 2023)