South Carolina 6: Rice’s Origin Tale

When South Carolina congressmen became more vociferous about the supposedly false theories of modern science, I began to wonder how Charleston had ever produced the important innovations in botany that underlay its lifestyle: the selection of new types of rice and roses. Periodically, I’ll be publishing the result of my inquiries into the lives of two innovative growers, Hezekiah Maham (rice) and John Champneys (roses). Previous entries can be found under “South Carolina” in the index at the right.

Maham is not given credit for his discovery. This posting gives the conventional history of the introduction of rice. I treat it as a legend.

Weather: Last snow 12/31/12; 10:03 hours of daylight today.

Afternoon temperatures have not risen much above freezing, but the sun has been bright and the snow has disappeared from open areas. Whatever moisture has remained in the air no longer has not been enough to provide cloud cover at night. Morning temperatures are getting lower and lower.

Clouds appear in late afternoon, but there are none showing on the weather maps. The moisture is not coming from an ocean. It’s been sucked out of the unprotected soil.

I begin to understand, the brutal winter climate is a much a reason only grasses grow here, as the lack of rain in summer. What else has adapted to zero air temperatures and a desiccating sun?

What’s still green: Few rose stems; juniper, pine, and other evergreens; yucca.

What’s red: Cholla; apple, apricot branches. Sandbar willow gotten redder.

What’s grey or blue: Snow-in-summer, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia, petunias.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds.

Weekly update: Rice was introduced at least three times into South Carolina: first in the early years of the colony, again after the revolution when planters needed to replace their lost seed grain, and then again when Joshua John Ward made his improved selection available.

The first occurred before there were many written records and has become the subject of folk history; the second is remembered in family tradition, and the third, a commercial transaction, was recorded for all to know by the participants.

Alexander Salley found the only public record of what became the folk tradition was a 1715 entry in the journal of the House of Commons noting the body had agreed to pay a gratuity of one hundred pounds to John Thurber for “bringing the first Madagascar Rice into this province.”

He found the first narrative explanation appeared sixteen years later in a pamphlet he attributed to Fayrer Hall, who had served in expeditions against pirates in 1718. Hall wrote the introduction of rice

“was owing to the following Accident. A Brigantine from the Island Madagascar happened to put in there; they had a little Seed Rice left, not exceeding a Peck or Quarter of a bushel, which the Captain offered and gave to a Gentlemen of the Name of Woodward. From Part of this he had a very good Crop, but was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection, that it is thought it exceeds any other in Value. The Writer of this hath seen the Captain in Carolina, where he received a handsome gratuity from the Gentlemen of that Country.”

The basic motifs of the folk narrative, told in several variants, are that:

1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony

In the first retelling, the identity of Thurber was reduced to a sea captain, who was now the one from Madagascar.

Between the time Charles II granted the land to eight proprietors in 1663 and Thurber’s petition, Madagascar was not controlled by any western power. Attempts by the British had ended in 1649, while the French were massacred in 1673.

The only westerners who visited the island after that were pirates, who exploited the slave trade after they’d been driven from the Caribbean. The British finally removed them from the island about the time Thurber made his petition. By then, the Sakalava had consolidated power, and the French had established their base on the nearby island of Bourbon, now La Réunion.

Hall used the word “accident” to suggest the introduction was a chance, not deliberate act. From the first the proprietors wanted to develop a colony and listed rice as one of the crops that was both suitable to the climate and congruent with the throne’s desire to establish a completely self-sufficient mercantile economy. In 1672, William Jeffereys sent a barrel of rice “for the prop. acct of the Lords Proprs of Carolina” which was received by the governor.

Many of the early settlers never accepted the legitimacy of the proprietors and had thrown off their power in 1720. The use of the word “accident,” like the hidden reference to pirates, may have been an attempt to suggest the proprietors had nothing to do with the introduction of rice as a crop and, by extension, the success of the colony.

The double reference to rice as a gift may have been another attempt to contrast proper behavior with that of the proprietors. The third governor of the colony, John Yeamans, shipped his surplus food to Barbados where he could make a profit rather than sell it to the settlers he’d brought with him who didn’t have enough to eat.

Woodward is assumed to have been Henry Woodward, who died sometime between 1685 and 1690. He had come to the area on the exploratory voyage of 1666 and stayed with the Cusabo on Port Royale sound. He was captured by the Spanish the next year. He escaped when Robert Searle raided Saint Augustine in 1668, and stayed with the pirates until shipwrecked on Nevis in 1669.

He returned to the area with the expedition that founded Charles Town in 1670, and explored the interior. His friendly relations with the Westbo opened trade with the Indians in 1674, an arrangement rejected by later settlers who precipitated a war that exterminated the tribe and replaced them with the Shawnee.

Disgraced, he went to London in 1682 to seek rehabilitation and returned as the official Indian agent for the proprietors with rights to a 20% commission on trade. He was in trouble again in 1685 for supporting the Yamasee and Scots settlers at Stuart Town against the proprietors.

His ambiguous loyalties to pirates, proprietors, rebellious settlers and native Americans made him a figure suspect to all. He’s the element in Hall’s narrative that became the least stable.

The quantity of rice usually struck the narrator as too small to explain the spread or variations in the crop, and so a second introduction was often mentioned, much like the story of Seth resolves problems of ancestry introduced by the fight between Cain and Abel. Hall suggested that

“Mr. Du Bois, Treasurer of the East-India Company, did send to that Country a small Bag of Seed-Rice some short Time after, from whence it is reasonable enough to suppose might come these two Sorts of that Commodity, one called Red Rice in Contradistinction to the White.”

This addendum introduces the remaining motifs in the origin tale:

9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice

Notes:
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998, on Yeamans.

Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by Salley.

Salley, A. S. Jr “The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina,” Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, no 6, 1919.

Photographs: The light on New Year’s Day was extraordinary. The sun was hidden behind clouds. Most came from reflections from the snow, which also provided a backdrop that made photographs unusually clear. All taken 1 January 2013.

1. Leather-leaf globemallow, empty flower holders; composite family.

2. Tomatillo seeds rattle in the unopened cases; nightshade family.

3. Black-eyed Susan cone, with no seeds remaining; composite family.

4. Áñil del muerto head, with a few seeds remaining; composite family.

5. Golden spur columbine, empty flower holders; buttercup family.

6. Alfalfa seeds; legume family.

7. Illinois bundle flower, empty flower holders; legume family.

8. Perennial four o’clock seed capsules, with black tongues exposed; four o’clock family.

9. Large-leaf soapwort, with black tongues exposed; pink family.

10. Yellow evening primrose, empty seed holders; evening primrose family.

11. Winterfat seed heads, some still full, some empty; composite family.

South Carolina 5: Rice and Roses

When South Carolina congressmen became more vociferous about the supposedly false theories of modern science, I began to wonder how Charleston had ever produced the important innovations in botany that underlay its lifestyle: the selection of new types of rice and roses. Periodically, I’ll be publishing the result of my inquiries into the lives of two innovative growers, Hezekiah Maham (rice) and John Champneys (roses). Previous entries can be found under “South Carolina” in the index at the right.

Maham and Champneys were not part of the social elite who are remembered in family histories. The previous entries covered what little is known about their lives. This one provides what is known about their major achievements.

Weather: Snow from New Year’s Eve has been protecting the land since morning temperatures fell to their post-solstice lows; last snow 12/31/12; 9:54 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Few rose stems; juniper, pine, and other evergreens; yucca, garlic. Snow covered most beds.

Most seeds have been dispersed, but some are still being released. Many heads survive as ghosts of themselves, some still surprised that death came so quickly. The older ones, of course, knew and had prepared their shrouds. The skeletons reveal family likenesses.

What’s red: Cholla; apple, apricot and sandbar willow branches.

What’s grey or blue: Snow-in-summer, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow: Globe willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia, petunias.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds.

Weekly update: Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are an unlikely pair to be the ones responsible for Charleston’s antebellum wealth and beauty. It’s even odder, given South Carolina’s current reputation for fundamentalism, that the actions of the two contributed to the growing body of experience that led people to accept Charles Darwin’s 1859 suggestion that natural selection was the operative cause of evolution.

After the war, Maham needed seed rice for his Pineville area plantation. He died four years later. In the years since he had been so deeply in debt, he must have had some success, because the next year, his younger daughter, Mary’s husband, George Haig died and left the slaves he’d acquired from Maham to his wife for her life.

In 1800, Joshua John Ward was born at Brook Green plantation to Maham’s niece, Elizabeth Cook, and John Ward. Thirty-seven years later, his overseer, James C. Thompson, noticed part of a rice head that was larger than any other Ward had seen.

Ward saved the seed, and planted it the next year on the margins of an old field where it was nearly destroyed by standing water and rats. The following year, he and Thompson planted the seed they’d been able to salvage in a large tub in Thompson’s yard, only to have a slave leave the gate open and a hog eat most of the crop. They transplanted the survivors, and most of the rice was sterile.

In 1840, they took what had survived the hog and rot, and planted half an acre. The next year, Ward planted 21 acres at Brook Green, which his factor sold above the market price. In 1842, Ward tried 400 acres, and the following year planted nothing but the new large grain.

In 1844, Ward made Carolina Gold available commercially. From then until the civil war, the Brook Green rice “commanded the highest price of any rice on the world market in Paris and London.”

Ward claimed his 1838 seed was descended from that planted by his great-uncle in 1785.

Sometime in the early 1800's, either 1802 or 1810 or 1811, John Champneys found a new rose growing on his plantation, which appeared to be a cross between a white musk, cultivated in Europe since the Crusades, and Parson’s Pink, which had been introduced to England from China in 1759.

Philippe Noisette, a son of the head gardener to the future Louis XVIII, had moved to Charleston in 1795 with his Haitian wife after the revolution there. He experimented with the rose, now called Champneys’ Pink Cluster, and in 1814 sent either seeds or plants to his brother who had a nursery in Paris. Either Philippe or Louis Claude crossed the plant with another rose. The hybrid was introduced in Europe as Blush Noisette in 1819.

Meantime, plant stock of some kind was sent to William Price, Jr., who had the best known American nursery on Long Island, and traded plants with his English suppliers. Two years before Champneys died, the Loddiges Nursery outside London offered a new rose, Champigny, in 1818.

Noisettes were the first roses to introduce the recessive gene for reblooming isolated by the Chinese into a fragrant European species. A number of new varieties appeared in France in the 1820's and 1830's. By the 1840's, they were crossed with tea roses, which led in 1867 to La France, the first hybrid tea released by Jean-Baptiste André Guillot the younger.

At the time, Louis Claude Noisette and other French growers were becoming aware of the mechanics of plant reproduction. When Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had argued in 1694 that plants had sexual organs, and pollen was the male agent of fertilization, most ignored him.

In 1729 a 22-year-old Carl Linnaeus expanded his ideas to suggest a method of classifying plants in Introduction to the Floral Nuptials. He continued his work to make reproduction the basis for his description of the natural world and external characteristics, the morphology, the criteria naturalists would use to distinguish species.

The most important work for breeders appeared in 1793, when Christian Konrad Sprengel described his practical experiments with pollination. Still, more than a generation passed before the first controlled rose hybrid was introduced by Beauregard in Angiers in 1839. Safrano, a grandparent of La France, combined a yellow China with a Bourbon, itself a spontaneous hybrid of Parson’s Pink and a damask found on La Réunion in 1823 by Edouard Perichon.

At the time Maham acquired his gold husked seed and Champneys bought his pink shrub rose, observation and selection were the only methods available to farmers to improve their crops. In 1843, Ward’s relative through his mother’s sister, Robert Allston complained that poor rice came from the “commingling of the grain” which happened when different varieties were planted in adjacent fields, and planters were “careless” in selecting their seed stock.

The year before Ward introduced Carolina Gold, Allston described the types of rice then growing in the state. His classification criteria were morphological: seed husk color, size, shape, and awns, also called beards.

The most important variety, which he attributed to Maham, had a gold shell. This coexisted with white rice, which had a creamy hull; guinea rice, which he said looked like guinea corn, a form of African sorghum or millet, and proud rice, a red grain with a white husk and awn like gold seed.

Allston contrasted these with attempts to improve the quality of the crop, either through introducing new seed or careful selection. His example of the first was a bearded variety brought from the East Indies the year before. As an illustration of “improvement” through “a long-continued, careful selection of the seed,” he mentioned the long grain rice about to be introduced by Ward.

At the time Carolina Gold and Safrano were introduced in 1844 and 1839, Darwin was back in England from his five year voyage on the Beagle and working out an explanation for the endemic species he’d seen in the Galapagos islands.

It’s his name we associate with the revolution in plant breeding, even though he drew on the work of men like Sprengel. Similarly, while J. J. Ward and Louis Claude Noisette received the credit and profits for developing new plant varieties, they needed the experience of Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys, and the support of men like Robert Allston and Philipe Nosette.

Innovation can only come from a combination of shared interests and special individuals.

Notes: Mary Charlotte Cook, Ward’s maternal aunt, married Benjamin Allston Sr. Allston’s uncle was William Allston, the father of Robert Francis Withers Allston.

Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.

Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob. Epistolae de Sexa Plantarum, 1694.

Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. “Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold,” The Rice Paper, November 2009; the “highest price” quotation.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, 1859.

Hurst, C. C. “Notes on the Origin and Evolution of Our Garden Roses,” 1941, reprinted in Graham Stuart Thomas, The Old Shrub Roses, 1955.

Linnaeus, Carl. Praeludia sponsaliorum plantarum, 1730.

_____. Systema Naturae, first edition 1735.

Spengle, Christian Konrad. Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen, 1793.

Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.

Photographs:
1. Tahoka daisy, empty seed heads, 1 January 2013, composite family.

2. Zinnia, flower head, 1 January 2013, composite family.

3. Coral bells, flower stalk, 1 January 2013, saxifrage family.

4. Heavenly Blue morning glory, seed capsule, 1 January 2013, convolvus family.

5. Datura, seed head, 1 January 2013, convolvus family.

6. Oriental poppy, seed head, 1 January 2013, poppy family.

7. Sensation cosmos, flower head with some seeds visible, 1 January 2013, composite family.

8. Garlic chives, some seeds have dropped, but not all; 1 January 2013, allium family.

9. Creeping baby’s breath, seed capsules, 1 January 2013, pink family.

10. Mexican hat, seed had disintegrating, 1 January 2013, composite family.

Seeds

Weather: Afternoon clouds bring humidity and thunder; last rain 8/5/12; 13:50 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, rose of Sharon, datura, sweet pea, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Sensation cosmos.

Pepper roasters are in business in the local grocery parking lot.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, bush morning glory, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet and white prairie clovers, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, knotted spurge, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, Queen Anne’s lace, gum weed, goat’s beard, horseweed, wild lettuce, golden hairy asters, goldenrod; buds on Tahoka daisies.

Few native sunflowers and little áñil del muerto up yet.

In my yard, looking east: Bouncing Bess, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, calamintha, leadplant, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Picked the unripe peaches before the tree bough guillotined me.

Looking north: Hartweig evening primrose, nasturtium, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons, sweet alyssum.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.


Weekly update: Seeds have always been a mystery - not in any mystical way, mind - it’s just they don’t grow for me. Didn’t in Ohio, didn’t in Texas, didn’t in Michigan, and don’t here.

I look with envy on those who, year after year, dry, wet or in between, succeed. Despite this year’s bad spring, I see ears on corn stalks, large green tomatoes and two foot high zinnias that have been blooming for a month.

I take no pleasure in watching others who expend a great deal effort to put in a vegetable garden, only to have the corn rise unevenly and the tomatoes struggle. I wonder at those who do succeed their first year and never try again. But then, maybe they do, but they’re only allowed one good year to lure them into years of frustration.


This year, after I’d done all my planting, I hired a man to expand my driveway so I could turn around without jockeying. He was good, but it is no more possible to convince a man with a backhoe that you’ll will not soon pay someone in relandscape his damage than it is to tell a barber “just a little.”

In June, I was left with strips three to six feet wide beyond the drive that were going to sprout weeds - and have. Prostrate knotweed is growing luxuriously where I put down a soaker hose, but, like cheat grass, it will eventually die and leave unsightly remains. Every day I find more goat’s head and Russian thistles.


To try to contain the damage until the time when I could put in new grass or clover seed, I planted some trees and used my left over seed. It was neither the time to buy nor to plant trees, but something had to be done.

This year I tried something new. Instead of watering them from the base like you’re told to do, and which has failed for me more often than not, I went out every afternoon when the sun was the hottest and turned on the sprinkler. I knew I’d put water in the ground, but I also knew this spring was abnormally dry, with extremely low humidity levels. I simply wanted to cool the leaves, to somehow counteract the effect of the heat.


The trees have made it - though I won’t know until next spring if they really have survived. But, surprisingly some of the seeds, I put in, a month too, late are blooming. At one end of the drive, I transplanted some seedlings that had come up too dense, then stopped growing in May. The California poppies are blooming, as are a few Shirley poppies [above pink] and some larkspur. [section head] In the original bed, a few Shirleys have been putting out small flowers on short stems [above coral], but the larkspur never materialized. The only California poppy that’s blooming is from last year.


At the other end, some cosmos and morning glory plants are thriving - not blooming mind, but producing leaves. One’s even engulfing a small tree I planted in June.


How was I to know? My other morning glories are maybe a foot long and weakly climbing.


In one place, prairie coreopsis [top] and bachelor buttons camp up. I didn’t deliberately plant either, but I did sow one of those seed mixes companies send as free gifts. They’ve come up downstream from where I think I planted them; they apparently washed around when I was giving some struggling trees some help in June.


I’ve tried and tried, and failed and failed, with bachelor buttons, and there they were - for about three days. I’d never even risk a prairie coreopsis and only hope it can self-seed.

I don’t know if I’ve finally found the secret - that when the package says uniformly moist it means drenched every day - or if this is another case of first year luck. I won’t know until next year, when, like anyone lured by the occasional, unexpected success, I’ll gamble again.


Photographs:
1. Prairie coreopsis, 16 July 2012.
2. Blue larkspur and unopened California poppies in new location, 11 August 2012.
3. Shirley poppy in new location, 7 August 2012.
4. Shirley poppy in usual location, 9 July 2012.
5. California poppies in usual location, 25 April 2012, with some invading winecup and volunteer garlic chives.


6. California poppy in usual location, 9 July 2012.
7. Heavenly blue morning glory in new location, 21 July 2012.
8. Scarlet rambler morning glory in usual location, 7 August 2012.
9. Bachelor button, 27 July 2012.
10. Open California poppies and larkspur in new location, 7 August 2012.