Clarke Abel

Clarke Abel: The Doctor Who Named an Ape

A shipwreck off the coast of China, a pirate raid that stripped him of almost everything he had collected, and a diplomatic mission that ended in the British ambassador being ejected from Beijing for refusing to kowtow — this was the expedition on which Clarke Abel built his scientific reputation. He came home from Lord Amherst's failed embassy to China with almost nothing left of his botanical haul, and still managed to leave his name on a flowering shrub, a Sumatran ape, and a Himalayan antelope.

An English Surgeon-Naturalist

Clarke Abel was born on September 5, 1780, in Suffolk, England. He trained as a surgeon, but from early in his career combined medical practice with the close observational habits of a naturalist, a common dual career for educated Englishmen of his generation who wanted a foothold in both a respectable profession and the emerging scientific societies of London. That combination of skills — a physician's discipline paired with a collector's eye — made him a natural choice when Britain needed a chief medical officer who could also serve as an expedition's scientific officer.

Chosen by Joseph Banks

In 1816, Abel was appointed physician and naturalist to Lord Amherst's embassy to China, the mission's chief medical officer as well as its scientific eye, on the direct recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, the towering figure who for decades had shaped British botanical exploration from his position as president of the Royal Society. The Amherst embassy of 1816–1817 was Britain's second major diplomatic mission to the Qing court, intended to open trade relations; it collapsed in acrimony when Amherst refused to perform the kowtow before the Jiaqing Emperor and was denied an audience altogether, sent back to the coast within days. For Abel, though, the expedition's diplomatic failure did not erase its scientific value: traveling through the Chinese interior on the way to and from Beijing gave him rare access, as a Western scientist, to a landscape few Europeans had been permitted to observe firsthand.

Collecting a Continent, Losing It at Sea

Abel used the journey to make geological observations at the Cape of Good Hope and to collect plant specimens across the Chinese interior, including seeds of a flowering shrub that would later be named Abelia chinensis in his honor by the botanist Robert Brown, Banks's own botanist, who described the plant, in the words of one biographical account, "with friendly partiality." But the return voyage was catastrophic: the ship carrying Abel and his collections was wrecked, and the survivors were then attacked by pirates, a combination that destroyed the great majority of the specimens he had spent the mission gathering. Only a portion of his material survived, recovered in part with the help of the diplomat and sinologist Sir George Staunton. Living specimens of the plant that carries his name were not successfully reintroduced to cultivation in Britain until 1844, when the plant collector Robert Fortune brought them back from China nearly two decades after Abel's own attempt had been lost at sea.

Narrating the Disaster

Abel turned the expedition, failures and all, into a substantial published account: Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China, and of a Voyage to and from that Country, in the Years 1816 and 1817, issued in 1818. The book combined an account of the diplomatic mission with Abel's own natural-history and geological observations, and it stands as one of the more detailed English-language records of the Chinese interior available to European readers in the early nineteenth century, made more vivid rather than less by its account of shipwreck and piracy.

Naming an Ape and an Antelope

Abel's scientific standing was not limited to plants. He is credited as the first Western scientist to report the presence of the orangutan on the island of Sumatra, a documentation significant enough that the Sumatran orangutan later received the scientific name Pongo abelii in his honor — one of only two recognized orangutan species, and today critically endangered. He was also the first scientist to describe the Chiru, or Tibetan antelope, in 1826, the same year he died. His scientific standing among his London peers was formalized in March 1819, when he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; he also held memberships in the Linnean Society of London and the Geological Society of London, the era's principal institutional homes for naturalists.

A Second Posting to India

Abel's medical career continued alongside his naturalist work. He later served as surgeon-in-chief to Lord Amherst again, this time during Amherst's tenure as Governor-General of India, a post that brought Abel back into direct service to the same patron whose embassy had made his scientific name years earlier.

Why Clarke Is Called a Genius

Abel's case rests on the particular kind of intelligence prized in early nineteenth-century natural history: the capacity to observe accurately and describe precisely, under difficult and often dangerous field conditions, phenomena that no European scientist had properly documented before — a shrub, an ape, an antelope, each identified and recorded well enough that his name still attaches to them two centuries later. This is closer to disciplined empirical skill and physical endurance than to abstract theoretical brilliance; Abel did not develop a new scientific framework, and his fame rests on priority of observation rather than conceptual innovation. The honest counter-case is that Abel operated within, and depended heavily on, an institutional system built by others — Joseph Banks selected him, Robert Brown formally described and named the plant he collected, and Abel's own collection was largely destroyed before he could analyze it himself. His genius, such as it was, was the field naturalist's genius: showing up in the right unexplored place with trained eyes and a surgeon's precision, and surviving long enough to get the observation home, or in this case, to get at least the account of it home even when the specimens themselves were lost to the sea.

Legacy

Clarke Abel died on November 24, 1826, at Cawnpore, India, at age forty-six. His name persists across several branches of natural history: the flowering genus Abelia and the related genera Abeliophyllum and Diabelia, the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan Pongo abelii, and his own 1818 narrative, still consulted by historians of Sino-British diplomacy and of early nineteenth-century natural history as a firsthand account of a mission that failed as diplomacy but left a real, if battered, scientific record behind it.

Achievements

• Fellow of the Royal Society — 1819
• Fields: botany