Bio-Prospecting and Experimentation: Producing and Using An Historical Relation of Ceylon

Abstract

In mid-1680, Captain Robert Knox (1641–1720) arrived in London after almost 20 years spent in the central Kandyan kingdom of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), an experience that he began to record during his long voyage home as a passenger.¹ The first person to greet the bearded and be-whiskered traveller was a ‘drugster’: a peddler of the exotic remedies which were growing ever more popular in late-seventeenth-century London.² He had come aboard as soon as the ship docked, eager to buy the produce and the recipes of those aboard. By chance, the drugster, or apothecary, recognised Knox and reunited him with his brother-in-law and sister. Knox would soon meet several other people interested in the knowledge he had brought back from Ceylon. After being called into the EIC’s Court of Directors to give an account of his travels,³ he was taken aside by Jeremy Sambrooke, a member of the Royal Society.⁴ Through either Sambrooke or his own brother James,⁵ Knox was introduced to the polymath Robert Hooke. By the following year, these new contacts and the contribution of his cousin, the minister and historian John Strype, had helped him to compose his notes into An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon. The book was printed by the Royal Society’s printer, Richard Chiswell, in August 1681, financed by subscribers from within the EIC.