An exotic London feast and its effects

On January 21, 1859 a bunch of subscribers to the journal The Field met at the London Tavern, Bishopsgate. At the head of the table was Richard Owen of Iguanodon fame and there was David W. Mitchell, artist and secretary of the Zoological Society of London and Francis "Frank" Buckland among others. Servings included a large pike, American partridges, a bean goose and meat from an African eland that had died at the Zoo. Several speeches were made after this exotic banquet, and the consensus was that one could have eland and game birds in the English countryside for everyone to hunt, eat and enjoy. Professor Owen later wrote in the newspapers on the delicacy of eland and the need for an "Acclimatisation Society".

Luton Times and Advertiser - 29 January 1859

The idea of such a society was not new, the French had established one in 1854, but the rumbles that emerged from these French, English and later Australian acclimatisation societies can still be felt in India.

A stream in Mukurthi National Park

Frank Buckland, the kid under the table. 

The belief at the time was that animals were placed on the earth for humans to benefit from and for Buckland the zoologist and key founder of the British Acclimatization Society, the main  benefit was in eating them. He called himself a zoophagist and he had tried leopards, mice, hedgehogs, crocodiles, turtles among numerous other species. Whenever an animal died at the London Zoo, he was interested in trying it out. But these acts hardly caused the kind of damage that the Acclimatisation Society that he founded would unleash in places like Australia and New Zealand. Buckland studied anatomy under Henry Gray (of Gray's Anatomy fame) and a classmate of his was Francis Day.[Collins] Day went to India in 1852 as an Assistant surgeon in the Madras Presidency. Between his medical duties, he also spent time looking at fishes, in Cochin (1861) and later in the Nilgiris.  The Nilgiris were already compared with the Scottish highlands and it seems that just a few elements were missing. In 1866, back in England, Day and Buckland went to collect trout eggs in the Hampshire stream near Southampton (so that time spent before getting to the ship would be minimized) for release in the Nilgiris.  The first attempt to stock the Nilgiris failed and in 1867 he repeated these experiments. His experiments did not go unnoticed, the Neilgherry Excelsior from June 1866 had a satirical piece on "Dark Night, Esq., F.L.S., F.Z.S .... we have no doubt Government, who seem quite struck with the production, will see the propriety of allowing Dr Night to reside on the hills on full pay, and continue piscatorial researches which redound not only to his own but to his country's honour." Dr Day persisted and by 1868 he had stocked the Pykara river and the Ootacamund lake with around three hundred fishes of ten species including the trout Salmo trutta.  By 1869 he becomes such an expert on the fishes of India that he is assigned to special duty to inspect the fisheries of India and in 1871 he was made Inspector-General of Fisheries. Buckland, meanwhile, also became an Inspector of Fisheries. In 1902 rainbow trout were imported into the Nilgiris. Other species such as Russian carp and tench were also recorded in 1904. Surprisingly little is to be found on the impact of fish introduction in the Nilgiris, most research on fisheries talk about them only in glowing terms. 

Wattle expanding over the grasslands in Mukurthi (October 2013)

The editors of the 11th edition of Encylopaedia Britannica apparently thought it fit that the entry on Acclimatization be written by Alfred Russel Wallace, and he spends considerable effort on a definition  (v. 1:114-121 ):

The process of adaptation by which animals and plants are gradually rendered capable of surviving and flourishing in countries remote from their original habitats, or under meteorological conditions different from those which they have usually to endure, and at first injurious to them.
The subject of acclimatization is very little understood, and some writers have even denied that it can ever take place. It is often confounded with domestication or with naturalization; but these are both very different phenomena. ... A naturalized animal or plant, on the other hand, must be able to withstand all the vicissitudes of the seasons in its new home, and it may therefore be thought that it must have become acclimatized. But in many, perhaps most cases of naturalization there is no evidence of a gradual adaptation to new conditions.

An appendix to the entry is from Frank Finn of Calcutta:

 A great deal has been said about the upsetting of the balance of nature by naturalization, and as to the ill-doing of exotic forms. But certain considerations should be borne in mind in this connexion. In the first place, naturalization experiments fail at least as often as they succeed, and often quite inexplicably. Thus, the linnet and partridge have failed to establish themselves in New Zealand. This may ultimately throw some light on the disappearance of native forms; for these have at times declined without any assignable cause.
 Secondly, native forms often disappear with the clearing off of the original forest or other vegetation, in which case their recession is to a certain extent unavoidable, and the fauna which has established itself in the presence of cultivation is needed to replace them.
 Thirdly, the ill effect of introduced forms on existing ones may often be due rather to the spread of disease and parasites than to actual attack; thus, in Hawaii the native birds have been found suffering from a disease which attacks poultry. And the recession of the New Zealand earthworms and flies before exotic forms probably falls under this category. As man cannot easily avoid introducing parasites, and must keep domestic animals and till the land, a certain disturbance in aboriginal faunas is absolutely unavoidable. Under certain circumstances, however, the native animals may recover, for in some cases they even profit by man's advent, and at times themselves become pests, like the Kea parrot (Nestor notabilis), which attacks sheep in New Zealand, and the bobolink or rice-bird (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) in North America. Finally, it should never be forgotten that the worst enemies of declining forms have been collectors who have not given these species the chance of recovering themselves.   

Hampshire Advertiser 1 August 1863, p. 3
The Bombay Cynthia is a silk moth

Even before the trout, the Nilgiris were affected by another import that was far worse. The idea of an Acclimatisation Society was born in Paris. A branch opened in Algeria just as the British Society was born and a few years later branches sprouted in Australia. English settlers in Australia were especially unsettled by the strangeness of the land- trees that shed bark instead of leaves, mammals that laid eggs and had pouches and so on- and sought the familiarity of plants and animals they knew from England. At the same time, there was the idea that some of the Australian plants might do well in other parts of the world. In 1827 Kew Gardens helped introduce the Australian Acacia longifolia to the Cape region. Acacia saligna went to southern Africa in 1833, A. cyclops in 1835, A. mearnsii in 1858, A. pycnantha in 1892. Ferdinand von Mueller of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria was particularly involved in these Acacia transfers.  It seems like some specimens would have passed through India around the same time. Acacia mearnsii has unfortunately done too well on the Nilgiris, at the cost of grassland habitats. Interestingly a forest officer Charles Lane Poole resigned protesting the introduction of Australian trees in the Woodbush district of Transvaal on the grounds that it would destroy the indigenous forest. No such qualms seem to have been recorded among the foresters in India.[Carruthers et al.] The story of Eucalyptus is harder to unravel. Several species were collected on Captain Cook's voyages and were tried at Kew. It has been claimed in some sources that the earliest plantations in India were by Tipu Sultan at Nandi Hills around 1790. This is interesting and considering the statements on Nandidurg and its vegetation at the time of its siege it would seem like all the rest was planted later. According to Doughty, Tipu got the trees from seeds obtained by Dutch traders. The French, although friendly with Tipu seem to have had an interest in Eucalpytus that came much later with Prosper Ramel, a member of the French Societe Zoologique de l’Acclimatation who met Ferdinand Mueller in 1854 and became a rabid Eucalyptus fan (he even proposed smoking them). Ramel saw the utility of E. globulus in drying up swampy ground.[Doughty] Tipu did take a great interest in horticulture, trees and botany. An especially intriguing bit is that Tipu obtained the notes of Hope's botany lectures taken by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton when a certain Boswell who had borrowed it from Buchanan-Hamilton accidentally left the book in a trunk at Sathyamangalam when it was overrun by Tipu's men. The notes were discovered in Tipu's library after the Siege of Srirangapatnam in 1799, they had been carefully bound in leather.[Noltie] Perhaps someone will be motivated enough to research the specific Eucalyptus trees at Nandi Hills and try to trace their origins. These are quite interesting in that they appear to have a different kind of bark. 

One of the members of the British Acclimatisation Society was Robert Maitland Brereton, a railway engineer posted briefly in Nasik, central India. He promised to obtain some Indian game birds and deer. Viscount Powerscourt offered to get junglefowl and seeds of useful plants from Mysore. Edward Blyth also made offers but it appears that he was more interested in money. H.E. Watts wrote in 1864 of the pre-eminence of India as a sourcing area for introduction into Australia. He made a list of the best game birds to introduce that included the snow-partridge (Tetraogallus himalayensis) "five times the size of the common English bird, and of most exquisite flavour". As late as 1960, this species was trapped in Pakistan and introduced into the Ruby mountains in Nevada, USA where they still persist in the wild.

The work of the Australian acclimatisation societies involved introducing the skylark, blackbird, starling, chaffinch, Java sparrow and Indian myna! There were wealthy individuals like Eugene Schieffelin who made it his life's mission to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare into the United States of America. They still suffer from the starlings he introduced in 1890.

Some attempts to reclaim the Nilgiri grasslands from pine (2012)

Notes

Francis Day was also a Hume collaborator, especially active during the Sindh expedition of 1871. Day's work in fisheries required him to work with the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce where Hume was a secretary (1871-79). 
 

There is apparently a book (that I have not seen) on the history of acclimatisation societies  -

• Lever, C. 1992. They dined on eland: the story of the acclimatisation societies. Quiller, London

Postscript
Recent surveys have not found brown trout in southern India, suggesting that the species has been eliminated.

• K. V. Radhakrishnan, B. M. Kurup, B. R. Murphy and S.-G. Xie (2012) Status of alien fish species in the Western Ghats (India) as revealed from 2000–2004 surveys and literature analyses. J. Applied Ichthyology 28:778-784.

Animal trade and movement out of India seems to have been quite intense until as late as 1938. See this note on the shipwreck of the City of Salisbury.

December 6, 2016:A 1977 publication by the Nilgiri Wildlife Association - here notes the following introductions:

• Acacia melanoxylon and A. dealbata were introduced around 1832 by Captain Dun
• Eucalyptus globulus was introduced in 1843 by Captain Cotton of the Madras Engineers (probably from Tasmania)
• Chukor partridge were imported and released in 1892 and again in 1910 and 1916 in the Nilgiris
• See-see Partridge were released in 1911 and 1916
• Red Jungle Fowl were bred in captivity and released but fortunately failed to live in the wild.
• Rabbits were introduced around 1892!

Harold Littledale (a professor English at Baroda, who married the daughter of one of the founding Indian members of the BNHS, Atmaram Padurang - causing perhaps much sorrow to Rabindranath Tagore) one of the early members of the BNHS proposed in 1890 that Markhor could be introduced into the Nilgiris. 

References

• Carruthers, J., L. Robin, J. P. Hattingh, C. A. Kull, H. Rangan, and B. W. van Wilgen (2011) A native at home and abroad: the history, politics, ethics and aesthetics of Acacia. Diversity and Distributions 17 (5):810-821.
• Collins, Timothy (2003) From Anatomy to Zoophagy: A Biographical Note on Frank Buckland. Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 55:91-109.
• Doughty, Robin (1996) Not a Koala in Sight: Promotion and Spread of Eucalyptus. Cultural Geographies 3:200-214.
• Whitehead, P.J.P. & P.K. Talwar, 1976. Francis Day (1829–1889) and his collections of Indian Fishes. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series 5(1): 1–189.
• Littledale, H. (1890). "Proposed introduction of the Black Partridge and other game into the neighbourhood of Bombay". Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. 5 (4): 417.