The Sailor, The Physicist, and the Ganja
“The Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing … but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings … yet is he not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances … after a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry.”
~ Robert Hooke, An Account of the Plant call’d Bangue before the Royal Society
On 16 January 1658, Anne washes ashore in Sri Lanka( then Ceylon), with a broken mast and a crew of sixteen seamen, including the owner and captain Robert Knox, and his son, also called Robert Knox. Their ship is impounded and they are placed under arrest by the men of King Rajasinghe II, the king of Kandy. Knox Sr. angers the king by his perceived lack of courtesy and failure to observe proper formalities. The ruler’s taking offense of the absence of due conduct on part of Knox was aggravated by his already tense relations with some parts of imperial Europe.
The crew was confined to the kingdom but were treated rather leniently; the younger Knox had managed to establish himself as a farmer, moneylender, and peddler, all-in-all a rather lucrative job in the subcontinent. Both the Knoxes contracted Malaria, which was then a sort of inadvertent welcome ritual for European colonists in tropical lands. With the death of the Elder Knox, his son made many attempts to escape but was prevented. Finally succeeding after nineteen years of captivity, Robert Knox and a companion by the name of Stephen Rutland made a daring escape to Arippu, a Dutch fort on the north-west coast of the island. The Dutch treated Knox generously and transported him to Jakarta, from where he was able to return home via an English vessel to London in September 1680.
During his voyage back home Knox wrote down his trials and tribulations into the manuscript of An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, published in 1681 by the British East India Company. The book sold very well and succeeded in garnering him international fame and three translations (German, French, Italian) within his lifetime. The memoir is noted for its detailed examination of 17th century Kandy kingdom’s economic, social, cultural, and anthropologic mores. The Relation also had a wide impact on the English novel with marooning and survivalist novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton being inspired by Knox’s life.
His work brought him close to Robert Hooke, the English polymath and Royal Society member who gave the inverse square law, Hooke’s law, and the term cell. Knox brought Hooke gifts from his travels and the latter entertained him with chocolate and tobacco in local coffeehouses, then considered luxuries. On one such occasion, Knox presented Hooke with an intriguing plant, which would turn out to be remarkable serendipity, “a strange intoxicating herb like hemp”, which he dubbed as “Indian hemp”. Largely unknown to Europe, this herb that Knox had chanced upon was cannabis indica, a plant well-acquainted to the Hindus for millennia, and referred to by Europeans varyingly as banga, bangue (bhang) or ganga, ganges (ganja). Although Europeans had previously come across it, they were highly skeptical of it being the hemp they knew. Knox was the first to explore, holistically describe and popularise its multifarious psychological and therapeutic effects. It is, however, interesting to note a European’s account of the effects of the herb which were penned before Knox’s discussion but published much later, as described in an article in the Himal Magazine:
“(If someone is) merry at that instant, he shall continue so with Exceeding great laughter, rather overmerry. (But) if it be taken in a fearfull (sic) or Melancholy posture, he Shall keep great lamentation and Seem to be in great anguish of Spirit. (Others) lay upon the Carpets complimenting each other in high terms, each fancying himself an Emperor.”
Knox lauded it as a “wonder-drug” enlisting its multifarious remedial uses, and exalting its particular utility in helping the ailments suffered from consuming supposedly turbid, contaminated rainwater. He described it as wholesome, albeit mentioning that it ‘took away memory and understanding’. In December 1689, only six weeks after learning of it, Hooke addressed the Royal Society, electing to dedicate an entire lecture (which was quite the entitlement) to what was the first detailed description of cannabis in English, commending its possible curative properties and noting that Knox “has so often experimented it himself, that there is no Cause of Fear, tho’ possibly there may be of Laughter.” Talking of Knox, he said ‘(Knox) hath made many Trials of it, on himself, with very good Effect’. The ubiquitous and frequent consumption of the plant in most parts of the subcontinent was noted, particularly its versatile therapeutic, recreational, and religious usage. The medical community however didn’t share Hooke’s enthusiasm, and ignored proposals to investigate the potential pharmacological utilities of the herb until they were studied in India, decades later, replacing the then prevalent general narcotic drug Opium, which was often administered to cure a number of maladies, mixed with water and laced with other chemicals, having been popular with Scientific greats as Boyle, Halley, and Hooke himself, who tried to cultivate ganja in his yard, perhaps to cure his insomnia, apparently to failure owing to the unsuitable growing conditions in Britain.
Knox continued to work for the East India Company for thirteen years after his return from the East, after a few failed ventures he returned to England in 1701, spending the remainder of his life unmarried but prosperous and peaceful, writing about Ceylon and his life, and of course, consuming cannabis every now and then.
Author: Nishant Singh
Editor: Pitamber Kaushik
