Maritime Transport and Botanical Transplants: Bringing Sugarcane to Colonial New South Wales

Abstract The spread of plant species across the globe, from one climate to another, was a goal of imperial European powers beginning in the fifteenth century. But even in the eighteenth century, transporting live plants by sea was a risky business, with low survival rates. Live plants were affected by temperature, sunlight, strict rations of fresh water, infestation by insects and shipboard rodents, and the constant barrage of salt from seawater. If a plant survived the voyage, it was more likely to thrive when transplanted, which was a major advantage of live transport. Seeds, however, were always a gamble. Even with these limitations, advances in botany in the late eighteenth century made it possible to cultivate tropical plants out of season in hothouses in northern Europe. The increased success with transplanting species from one territory to another encouraged global trade in tropical commodities. Botanists like Sir Joseph Banks targeted commercially useful plants from around the world and collected them for evaluation. The development of techniques to transport species to new colonial territories contributed to “botanical imperialism,” the control of colonial territory through the cultivation of alien plants. In this article, I will explore how these techniques developed and focus on the relative influence of species like sugarcane, which was transported across the globe a millennium earlier in open canoes. I will also investigate the impact of introducing sugar to Australia with other plants carried by the First Fleet to see how initiatives as disparate as evangelical agriculture and penal reform influenced, and were influenced, by the development of colonial society.