The Triumph of Seeds (31 page)

Darwin’s experiments focused on the plants commonly found in an English garden—cabbage, carrots, poppies, potatoes, and so on. From this humble beginning he cautiously concluded that long-distance dispersal by ocean current, as well as by wind and birds, could help explain the colonization of islands like the Galapagos. But he still harbored doubts about how far seeds might travel, and their fate once they arrived:
“How small would the chance be of a
seed falling on favorable soil, and coming to maturity!” Had he tried his experiments on cotton, he might have felt more encouraged.

It turns out that the same fluffiness that keeps cotton aloft in wind also helps it to float in water, trapping air bubbles that make the seeds of long-fibered species buoyant for at least two and a half months. Their dense hairs also keep water from penetrating the seed coat—even after cotton seeds sink, they can remain viable in salt water for more than three years. With genetic data now matching Darwin’s cotton to a coastal South American ancestor, researchers have a pretty clear idea of just how it crossed the 575 miles (926 kilometers) from mainland to archipelago. Blown far out to sea by a storm, or what is known in the dispersal business as “an extreme meteorological event,” that first adventurous seed then floated for weeks on the swift Humboldt Current before washing ashore on a rocky Galapagos beach. From there it may have proceeded inland the way Darwin envisioned, wafted by an onshore breeze. But there is another possibility that is just as likely and far more charming. Throughout the arid lowlands of the Galapagos, endemic finches line their nests exclusively with seed plumes, making it possible that Darwin’s cotton made the last stage of its journey in the beak of a Darwin’s finch.

The odds of any particular seed finding a good home by wind or wave seem long. But given time and repetition, both strategies produce results. More plants rely on wind for dispersal than all other methods combined, although usually at a scale of inches or feet. Add an ocean current to the equation, however, and stories like Darwin’s cotton become practically commonplace—at least 170 other plant species arrived in the
archipelago by similar means. In fact, reaching the Galapagos hardly sounds like a feat at all considering how cotton colonized South America in the first place—crossing the full breadth of the Atlantic Ocean not once, but twice. Biogeographers call it
“a miracle squared,” but the evidence is unequivocal. American cotton species contain the genes of two distinct African ancestors, adding an evolutionary twist to a transatlantic relationship with impacts far beyond the interest of botanists. In the nineteenth
century, the movement of cotton across the Atlantic Ocean lay at the heart of world events—industrialization, globalization, British ascendancy, slavery, and the American Civil War.

I
t’s hard to overstate the importance of cotton in shaping the modern era. Historians have called it
“the revolutionary fiber,” and “the fuel of the industrial revolution.” It became the first global, mass-produced commodity and anchored the infamous “trade triangle” that connected American plantations, British mills, and African slave ports—raw cotton flowed east, finished fabrics flowed south, and slave labor flowed west. As Karl Marx put it,
“without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry.” Marx wrote those words in 1846, a time when the cotton trade accounted for a staggering 60 percent of American exports and employed one out of five British workers. In raw and finished forms, it remained the dominant European and American export activity for more than a century. But the sweeping social and economic changes wrought by cotton seed fibers began far earlier.

When Christopher Columbus encountered cotton in the Caribbean, he naturally took it as further evidence that he’d reached the coast of Asia. For over a thousand years, cotton had been considered a distinctly Asian fabric, produced in India and distributed along trade routes that stretched east to Japan and west as far as Africa and the Mediterranean. Persia alone imported between 25,000 and 30,000 camel loads of Indian cotton every year, and a modest but steady supply reached Europe by way of Venice, where it was seen as a lucrative supplement to the spice trade. Cotton was bought and sold widely within Asia as well. Historians have often noted that the Silk Road was a Cotton Road when viewed in reverse. Chinese merchants returned home with vast amounts of the Indian fabric, but still couldn’t keep up with demand. Eventually, China created its own supply by decree—a strict fourteenth-century law required anyone farming more than an acre to plant part of that land in cotton. When Portuguese and Dutch ships first reached Asian ports in
search of spices, they found cotton to be a vital part of the equation. Printed fabrics from India often had more purchasing power than European silver, especially when trading with the remote islands where nutmeg and cloves were grown. Textiles went on to become a profitable sideline for the Dutch, but it was the British East India Company that really ushered in the new cotton era.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, three things aligned to transform the economics of cotton: fashion, innovation, and politics. By copying the designs of expensive silks at a fraction of the cost, calicoes (from the coastal city of Calicut) and other printed fabrics helped introduce color and a sense of style to
Europe’s growing middle class. In spite of resistance from the wool and linen industries—including protectionist laws, the occasional fabric riot, and the surprising spectacle of calico-clad women being attacked and stripped naked in the streets of London—imports of Indian cotton boomed. The East India Company shifted its trade from spices to textiles, feeding markets not only in Europe but also in British-held territories around the world, from Africa to Australia to the West Indies. The success of Indian fabrics as a global commodity inspired imitation and led to a series of transformative inventions: James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule, and Richard Arkwright’s water frame. Mechanization increased the quality of British-made fabrics and dropped the price, shifting global production from Indian villages to English mill towns. The Industrial Revolution was underway, with the seeds of cotton inspiring its machinery just as another seed, coffee, had revved up the minds of its workforce.

Politically, rising demand for cotton—and the need for a steady supply—helped justify British expansion in India. Through coercion and conquest, the East India Company came to dominate the subcontinent at the same time that British mills were stealing away the cotton business, undermining India’s economy. It’s no wonder Mahatma Gandhi chose homespun cotton as a symbol of resistance to British rule, saying it was “the patriotic duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton and weave his own cloth.” A stylized spinning wheel
remains the focal point of the Indian national flag. As the first highly mechanized industry, cotton helped shift Europe from an economy of farms to one of factories, establishing a pattern that would hold for two centuries—the import of raw materials from south to north, followed by the export of finished products to the world. In Europe, that system bolstered empires and created a surge of prosperity. In America, it led to war.

The cotton encountered by Christopher Columbus in the New World differed from
its African and Asian relations. The fibers were longer and the seeds stickier, making it notoriously difficult to work with. But the good admiral praised his cotton nonetheless, claiming that it grew in abundance, required no tending, and could be harvested year round. His descriptions were full of typical Columbus braggadocio, but in the case of cotton his enthusiasm wasn’t far from the mark. Longer fibers in the plumes made for a superior yarn, and a single species of American cotton now accounts for over 95 percent of world production. But as my own attempts made clear, separating seeds from fiber was no easy task. In spite of the worldwide boom, American cotton remained a minor crop until Eli Whitney assembled his famous ginning machine. It sparked immediate increases in efficiency and productivity, but there is no way the young inventor could have predicted the other consequences that lay in store.

Though he received a patent for the device signed by then secretary of state Thomas Jefferson (who ordered a gin for Monticello after looking at the plans), Eli Whitney never profited from his invention. Its simple design made it simple to copy, and he soon learned that rural southern courts had little compassion for an urban northern patent holder. Collecting even a small portion of his due would have brought Whitney phenomenal wealth. In the decade following his fruitless patent, cotton-gin technology drove a fifteen-fold increase in exports from the American South. Production continued to double every decade, and by the mid-nineteenth century, southern plantations accounted for nearly three-quarters of the world’s raw cotton
supply. More than any other commodity, it gave the young American nation wealth, clout, and international prestige.

No historian disputes the legal woes of Eli Whitney, but those wrongs pale in comparison to the other consequences of his invention. Mechanization may have simplified the processing of cotton, but growing the crop still demanded massive inputs of labor. The suddenly profitable American cotton business reinvigorated what had been a declining market for African slaves. That most gruesome third leg of the Atlantic trade triangle surged to a new peak in the 1790s, when as many as 87,000 slaves crossed the
Middle Passage to America every year. The US Congress banned human trafficking from abroad in 1808, but the domestic trade continued to flourish, and the number of slaves quintupled between 1800 and 1860. In some places, buying and selling the people who picked cotton became a business that rivaled the buying and selling of cotton itself.

This deep-rooted coupling of slavery and cotton came to define the economy of the Antebellum South, setting the stage for America’s deadliest conflict. Over a million people would be killed, wounded, or displaced by the time the Civil War ended in 1865. It was a defining confrontation that left behind persistent social and political divisions. But the underlying economics of seed fluff hardly changed at all. With sharecropping in place of slavery, cotton production rebounded to prewar levels within five years, and it remained the top American export until 1937. Things worked out fine for Eli Whitney, too. His cotton-gin patent expired, still worthless, but he went on to make a fortune in a different industry—the manufacture of muskets, rifles, and pistols. Ironically, weapons from the Whitney Armory were among the most common firearms used in the Civil War.

W
hile seeds and warfare may sound like odd bedfellows, cotton fluff is not the only dispersal strategy to influence events on a battlefield. The first aerial bombardment in history consisted of four small hand grenades chucked from the cockpit of a reconnaissance plane during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. The Italian pilot acted alone,
without orders, and pulled the pins himself as he swooped low over a Turkish encampment in the Libyan Desert. There were no injuries, but people on both sides of the conflict decried his action as a shocking breach of military etiquette. That sense of outrage passed quickly, however, as strategists recognized the potential of this new kind of attack. Dropping those grenades ushered in a new era in war-making, and the pilot earned himself a permanent footnote in textbooks of military history. But few people remember the unusual design of his aircraft. It was not a biplane in the style of the Wright brothers or Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian pioneer in aviation; nor was it inspired by the bird-like gliders of Otto Lilienthal. It consisted of a tail fan and a shapely wing that would have looked familiar to anyone from Indonesia, where the same design wafted about by the thousands in the canopy of the rainforest. The airplane used in that famous incident was essentially a flying seed, scaled-up from the streamlined pips of a Javan cucumber.

Most pioneering aviators took their cues from birds and bats, but Austrian Igo Etrich looked to a far older version of wings. Fossils like those I saw with Bill DiMichele show that seeds have been winged for hundreds of millions of years. With that amount of practice, plants have thinned and stretched the tissues of their offspring into a huge diversity of fins and props, from the honeycombed ridges found on “fringed grass of Parnassus” to the layered skirts of a larkspur, or to the more familiar whirligigs of maple and sycamore. Etrich focused his attention on a seed whose single backswept wing reached six inches (fifteen centimeters) across, but, like a cotton fiber, was only one cell thick, providing lift without weight. The vine of the Javan cucumber is thin and nondescript, tangling upward toward the sunlit treetops of Indonesian forests. Few Western botanists have seen one—but they knew about the seeds long before they found the plant that made them.

Drifting down by the hundreds from the split end of every pumpkin-shaped fruit, Javan cucumber seeds commonly fly long distances from the edges of the rainforest. Sailors have reported finding them on the decks of ships, miles out to sea. The seeds accomplish these extraordinary glides through traits attractive to any aeronautical engineer—passive stability and a shallow angle of descent. The first term refers to self-correction in flight, the ability to regain equilibrium when things start to wobble. The flexible membrane of a Javan cucumber seed achieves this stability inherently, with contours that constantly readjust the center-point of lift. Having a shallow descent angle means that the seeds lose less than a foot and a half (half a meter) in altitude for every second they fly. (Twirling maple seeds, by comparison, fall at more than
twice that rate.) Though he called his plane the
Taube
, German for “Dove,” Etrich didn’t hide the fact that it was based on a seed, and Javan cucumbers have enjoyed a cult following in aviation circles ever since. Production
Taubes
featured a tailed fuselage dividing the curve of the wing, but Etrich dreamed of building planes that mimicked the cucumber seed exactly—eliminating the tail and fitting the cockpit inside a single, uninterrupted wing surface. Mainstream aviation moved away from that vision after World War I, but the idea of a “flying wing” aircraft persisted in the imaginations of a few maverick designers for the next seventy-five years, culminating in what is still considered the most advanced, expensive, and deadly airplane ever built.