Joseph Dalton Hooker in the Himalayas: Evolution, Empire, and Environmental Transformation

• In Event: Modern Orogenesis: Mountains and the Human Imagination

Abstract

J. D. Hooker traveled to northern India and Nepal between 1847 and 1851, part of the first British state-sponsored botanical expedition to the heights of the Himalaya. By then he was the premier botanist in England. He also knew a secret, given to him by his friend Charles Darwin two years earlier, that species were perhaps not immutable. Hooker was thus the first naturalist to travel to a foreign region with evolutionary theory as part of his intellectual toolkit (Darwin was done traveling, and A. R. Wallace was yet to travel). He also had his own secret designs, to steal into the forbidden land of Tibet. His voyage was intellectually successful. He measured the evolution of rhododendron as they climbed up mountain zones, data used by Darwin to support his evolutionary theory. The specimens he brought back set off a rhododendron craze in England, turning Britain’s imagination toward the high Himalayas. He also produced the first description, geologically and botanically, of the Tibetan plateau. His travels into Tibet, however, got him arrested by Sikkim authorities, an imprisonment that led Britain to go to war with Sikkim, resulting in the acquisition of about one third of its territory (using a map that Hooker had created from his own wanderings). I traveled to Nepal in May 2023, to follow in Hooker’s footsteps. I found much more than rhododendron and high mountain vistas. These early imperial explorations transformed the high Himalayan culture and landscape into sites of extreme tourism, extreme poverty, and in many respects, both extreme beauty and equally extreme devastation.

Author

• Michael S Reidy, Montana State University