River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [47]
Meat bones were another much prized composting ingredient: bones retrieved from the provisions’ barrels were broken up with hammers and then added to the compost. Paulette had never imagined that animal bones could be used in this way, but Fitcher assured her that this was a common practice in London where butchers made good money by selling the by-products of their trade to farmers – not just bones, but also hair and horns. Even bone dust and bone shavings could be sold for a price; boiled down and powdered, they were turned into cakes that were rich in lime, phospates and magnesia.
Nor were fish and fish-bones exempted from these uses. Two or three fishing lines were always trailing behind the brig; when a catch turned up and was large enough to be eaten Fitcher would part with it only on condition that it was carefully filleted so that the head, tail and bones could be composted; when the fish were too small to eat, he would slip them whole into the potting soil. In Cornwall, he said, refuse pilchards were considered excellent manure and were often ploughed whole into the earth.
One day a small plump porpoise was found entangled in the Redruth’s fishing lines. It was still breathing when it was hauled up and Paulette would have liked to set it free, but Fitcher wouldn’t hear of it – he had read somewhere that Lord Somerville had used blubber to very good effect at his farm in Surrey. He was delighted to see the creature on the Redruth’s deck ‘threshing about like a pilcher in a pan-crock’. To Paulette’s dismay the porpoise was quickly slaughtered and stripped of its fat, which was put into a special barrel to decompose.
The only substances which Fitcher had voluntarily debarred from use were what he referred to – at least in Paulette’s presence – as ‘excrementations’. But this was merely a necessity, imposed upon him by the prejudices of the crew; he admitted unhesitatingly that for his own part he would gladly have made use of them. The value of liquid excrementations, he said, had been amply proven by chemists, who had demonstrated that all urine, human and animal, contained the essential elements of vegetables in a state of solution. As for the other kind, well, not for nothing was it said in Cornwall that old Fitcher Penrose ‘was so near with his pennies that he’d skin a turd for its tallow’ – he wasn’t ashamed to admit that he himself had pioneered the use of night-soil as manure in Britain. This was one of several Chinese horticultural methods that was new to him.
‘Indeed, sir? Was there much else?’
‘So there was,’ said Fitcher. ‘Dwarfing for example – they’re right aptycocks at that. And greenhouses. Had them for centuries, and clever little vangs they are too, made of paper and wood. Then there’s air-layering.’
Paulette had never heard of this. ‘Pray sir, what is that?’
‘It’s when ee makes a graft directly on to a branch …’
This, said Fitcher, was a Chinese gardening method that he had popularized in Britain with great profit to himself: ducking into his cabin, he emerged with a piece of equipment that he had designed and marketed as the ‘Penrose Propagation Pot’. It was about the size of a watering-can, except that it had a slit down the side to accommodate a tree-shoot. Facing the slit was a small hoop with which the pot could be affixed to a branch: it was the perfect implement for allowing a shoot to develop roots without planting it in the earth.
‘Wouldn’t never have thought of it if I hadn’t of see’d it in China.’
These stories amazed Paulette. Fitcher was so unlike the plant collectors of her