Indian forests
Not all of Dundas’s reporters shared Atkins’s cornucopian view of South Asian forest resources.
The naturalist Francis Buchanan Hamilton (a Scottish student of John Walker and John Hope at the University of Edinburgh) supplied much of the empirical basis of Dundas’s memorandum. He contrasted the timber wealth of Southeast Asia with the pillaged state of Mysore’s teak forests in the south of India.(5)
Buchanan Hamilton reported that he had “passed through the whole extent of the country” in the north of Cochin “without seeing one large Teak tree, although on every hill small stunted plants were common.”
Dundas’s nephew Philip Dundas suggested that the Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan had devastated the Indian woods in his bid to build a navy capable of resisting British expansion. “I fear that the consumption has been of late years (in Hyder’s and Tippoo’s time and since) greater than the means of the Country could afford.”
Buchanan Hamilton recommended trade with Siam and Cochin- China to compensate for the exhaustion of Mysore. Soon afterward, the directors of the East India Company established a forest committee to canvass the extent of mature teak timber and promptly discovered that easily accessible stands were indeed exhausted. In a “pivotal and innovative” response, the company banned all felling of teak trees without authorization and confiscated “unclaimed lands.”
Gregory Barton has charted how these fears gave rise to the first systematic efforts of conservation in the British Empire toward the middle of the nineteenth century. But as we have seen, these concerns can be traced back to the crucible of enlightened improvement.
Scottish planters, naturalists, and administrators clearly shared a peculiar sensitivity to the problem of exhaustion. They also shared a bold and imaginative approach to overcoming the threat of collapse through schemes of bioprospecting, domestic diversification, and colonial substitution. Murray’s bid to recast the material foundations of naval power at home sprang from the same source as Dundas’s global survey and promotion of teak.
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By the time Murray at last won permission to build the Atholl, the game was lost. In 1810, a year before his death, Henry Dundas issued a final political gesture: a printed broadside in favor of teak from the wilderness of his forced retirement after an impeachment charge ended his public career. He was now residing more or less permanently at his country estate Dunira, just a dozen miles south of Atholl. Among the improvements Dundas introduced to the estate was a nursery for larch and oak. But his pamphlet contained not a single word about the timber despite Atholl’s repeated contacts with the Admiralty since 1807.
Instead, Dundas stressed the “present scarcity” of domestic timber. Napoleon’s blockade had effectively cut off Baltic supplies, forcing “Britain to seek out American timber.” But Dundas made it clear that the real alternative to oak was “the teak . . . of India.”
Thanks to effective imperial control of the South Asian market, he assured the public that it would come at half the cost of English oak. He went on to recommend that naval dockyards be built at Bombay, Pegu, Rangoon, and Cochin to exploit this timber at the source. On grounds of strategic necessity, the Admiralty had already begun to establish a series of dockyards along the Asian coast that year. In a short time, numerous teak ships were commissioned, entrenching Dundas’s vision in the naval budget, although the Asian timber never came into widespread use.