The Search for the Great Albino

In 1851, seven years after they had set out from their respective countries in search of the Great Albino Orchid, the rival botanists Guillaume Bésancourt and Hans-Joachim Lindenhof ran into one another on the side of a mountain in Peru. It was a wonder they had not met earlier. Embarking on their quest within two days of one another in the spring of 1844, they had stumbled across each other’s trails a score of times in the years that followed, and only a near-miraculous chain of wars, revolutions and natural disasters had prevented their meeting sooner. The world is a small place for the professional orchid collector, and the number of potential habitats for the legendary Great Albino extremely limited. One might add that the day of their encounter was Saturday 21st September, a clear, bright day with above-average temperatures and unusually little wind for the season; Lindenhof’s diary, which has come down to us, abounds in such meteorological detail.

It is impossible to exaggerate the degree of hatred these two men felt for one another. The hatred of professors for one another is nothing to it. The hatred of poets for one another is nothing to it. Even the hatred of popes for one another is nothing to it. Throughout their careers – indeed, from their earliest student days – these two men had known of each other’s most tender hopes, each other’s most reckless ambitions, and they loathed everything they knew. When the young Bésancourt, then a student at the University of Geneva, discovered the Alpine orchid that still bears his name, the news sent arrows of ice through Lindenhof’s heart. When Lindenhof, with degrees from Berlin and Vienna and a fellowship at Oxford by the age of twenty-seven, discovered and described in rapid succession Lindenhofea lunata, Lindenhof striata and Oncidium lindenhofum, pure poison coursed through Bésancourt’s veins.

It was impossible for the one prodigy to record an achievement without the other capping it. No sooner had Lindenhof been appointed Professor of Botany at the University of Freiburg than Bésancourt was named Botanist Royal to the Crown of Sweden. Bésancourt’s Les Orchidées du Monde, the first attempt at a universal description of the plant family, had hardly been out for a month when it was topped by Lindenhof’s aptly named Das Universum der Orchideen; and it only needed one of them to agree to a lecture tour of Europe for the other to embark on a lecture tour of the Americas. So it was with a feeling of excitement bordering on delirium that the two rivals heard of the search to find the Great Albino Orchid; and they each set out upon the trail determined to return either with the flower or not at all.

This, the most terrible of their many battles, had actually started quite innocuously. In May 1844, the Madrid weekly El Nuevo Mundo published an exchange of letters between on Luis de Ballos y Torellas, a retired civil engineer, and a certain Admiral Jiménez de Ayala. Ballos y Torellas, lately returned from constructing railway bridges in Argentina, claimed to have seen there “an unforgettable flower whose every part, from the petals to the root-tips, is of a pure, almost luminous white”. The letter attracted the attention of Admiral Jiménez, an enthusiastic amateur botanist and orchid collector, who wrote in with a very similar account of a flower which he claimed to have seen in parts of Ecuador and Colombia. Before long, the newspaper, making the most of an opportunity to boost its flagging circulation, was offering a prize of a hundred pistols to anyone who could produce a specimen of this remarkable plant; and within a fortnight, the story was picked up by The Times of London, which ran a supercilious and largely inaccurate report of the perverse horticultural antics of the orchid-crazed Madrilenians.

Hans-Joachim Lindenhof, a keen Times reader ever since his Oxford days, read the issue in question and was instantly overcome with that confused mixture of irritation and indifference which is so often the prelude to true adventure, whilst Guillaume Bésancourt, reading a yet more garbled version of the story in the Parisian Le Témoin Quotidien a day later, experienced the same sensations in still more violent form, for the French newspaper claimed that whole mountain-tops in the Andes were covered with the extraordinary white flower. The reporting was obviously wildly exaggerated, but one thing was clear to both botanists: there was more to this than just a publicity gimmick got up by a struggling newspaper to ward off impending bankruptcy.

On the Orinocho Voyage

The Great Albino, or something very like it, had been reported by Sir Walter Raleigh during his voyage to the Orinoco in 1617. There were stylized depictions of it in Aztec and Inca art, and certain North American Indian tribes were said to wear snow-white flowers in their hair for wedding and funeral rites. It was even mentioned in several poems of the Tang dynasty, although the Chinese even at that time regarded it as a mythic construct – comparable, perhaps, with the unicorn or the phoenix.

Now there were two men claiming to have seen it with their own eyes within the space of a decade and in what was – for an orchid collector – a relatively limited part of the globe. For Lindenhof, the matter was clear: he had to discover the plant before Bésancourt did. And for Bésancourt, it was the same: if Lindenhof got hold of that flower, it would be over his dead body.

It would be tedious to go into excessive detail about the many adventures that befell the two rivals in the seven years leading up to that legendary meeting on the mountain-side in Peru. Bésancourt’s diaries have been published elsewhere, and they contain vivid passages on his near-shipwreck off the coast of Maine, his arrest on spying charges in Panama, and his six-month sojourn among the Palaeolithic Indians of the Upper Amazon. As for Lindenhof, not all of his diaries have survived, but we do possess a number of letters, some of them in the University Library of Freiburg and others in the archives of the German Orchid Society in Berlin.

Of particular interest are the “Berlin” letters XIII – XXVIII, in which he describes with terse evocativeness the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a conflict in which he managed to fight on both sides and fire an estimated three thousand rounds of live ammunition without ever harming anyone. Be that as it may, our two collectors made their way through an earthquake, wind and fire to northern Peru, where they first started hearing definite reports about the Great Albino and definite reports about each other. Bésancourt was recovering from a dose of malaria at the time, whilst Lindenhof had lost all his pack-animals to marauding bandits, but the news of a range of mountains where Great Albino Orchids grew like apples in an orchard spurred them both on to one more superhuman effort.

A Mule Train

Only hours after receiving the news, Bésancourt was levering himself into the saddle of his mule, whilst Lindenhof was buying new pack-animals with gold which he had carried secreted in the heel of his left boot ever since his days in Mexico.

The Frenchman from the north of the country, the German from the south, they approached the Cordillera de Chilca, that range of mountains in the central Andes famed for its dizzying precipices and its sudden blizzards. It was early in the spring of 1851, and they had still not set eyes on the orchid, except in dreams.

April and May saw them methodically combing the foothills of the Cordillera de Chilca, shooting jaguars, netting butterflies and discovering all manner of never previously described flora, but still no nearer to the longed-for Great Albino. Bésancourt, who had never fully recovered from his illness, was still subject to periodic bouts of delirium, whilst Lindenhof had broken three ribs in a fall and was barely able to sit on a mule, let alone walk. Circling one another like the great slow vultures that watched their every movement from the ice-blue skies above, they ascended higher and higher, up mountains ever steeper and ever more rugged, and it was not long before they at last ran across one another’s trails. The charred remains of a campfire here, the clean-picked carcase of a mule there were enough to tell the whole story: they had come halfway round the world, they had suffered danger and disease, starvation and sickness, doggedly continuing their desperate quest against all odds, against all sense, almost against all hope – and they were still no nearer to their objective.

The rival, always the rival was one step ahead.

It was probably at this point – early in the August of 1851 – that Bésancourt shot his bearers and proceeded on his journey accompanied only by two mules. Authorities differ as to whether he was suffering from another malarial attack or an attack of sheer megalomania, but he certainly made much better speed without his bearers, and Lindenhof lost all track of him for several days. Only when Bésancourt’s last two mules and all the food and equipment they were carrying disappeared in a landslide did Lindenhof begin to gain on him at last; and by that time, the Frenchman was within two or three days’ climb of the very summit of the fateful Cordillera.

Harrowed by disease, racked with fever, the thin, ascetic Frenchman was now nothing but skin and bone. His arms and legs were skeletal, his clothes in tatters, and his eyes black wells of desperation. Only his moustache continued to flourish, a wonderful wingspread of gleaming chestnut upon his taut and wind-tanned skin. On and on he trudged, too exhausted to take heed of the scores of unnamed mosses and rock-plants and hardy grasses which littered his stony way, on and on up the paths which were no longer paths, past the trees which were no longer trees, through the shrubs which were growing smaller and spikier and scrubbier with every step he took in that tortured wilderness of wind and light and cold, the ice-world of the Tierra helada.

Tierra Helada, land of ice

On and on he went, and behind him came the German, his broken ribs bandaged with strips of tent-cloth, his elbows hugging his sides, his strong, square-cut face a grey mask of pain. Eventually his bearers mutinied and left him. He continued on his own, almost seeing the Frenchman’s footsteps inscribed on every inch of the rocky road before him.

And then they met. It happened so suddenly, so simply. Bésancourt pushed his way through a clump of buses, Lindenhof negotiated a large volcanic boulder – and all at once they were standing face to face. For a moment they stared at one another, unable to comprehend this instant which they had been mentally rehearsing for the past twenty-five years.

Bésancourt was the first to break the silence. In heavily accented English, speaking in a cracked voice and through chapped and bleeding lips, he said, “I have seen the Great Albino. It exists.”

Bewildered, Lindenhof looked around, his temples pounding and his stomach turning over. For a second his vision departed him entirely. When he had gained control of himself once more, all he could see was the bare mountainside, rocky and bleak, and the snow-capped wastes of the Andes all around. At this altitude, virtually nothing grew. The Great Albino was nowhere to be seen.

“We have found the orchid,” continued Bésancourt, in a voice which trembled with excitement and exhaustion. “Je comprends enfin. It is here. It is everywhere.” With which words he gestured solemnly towards the great white world spread all around him and suddenly sat down on a rock, his hand over his heart. “Nom de nom,” he muttered, with a strange laugh, “c’est pas à croire.” He threw Lindenhof a quizzical look. “I cannot believe it,” he continued in English. “After so much … And I always thought, I always thought … Pas à croire.” He stared at Lindenhof, his eyes bulging in their sockets. “Mon Dieu,” he exclaimed, half-retching as he spoke, “mon Dieu, je meurs.” And with something, according to Lindenhof’s diary “very near a laugh” (“beinahe mit einem Lachen”) he clutched at his heart again, fell forward, and died.

That at least is the account of those last moments given us by Lindenhof. His diary, which was found upon his corpse several years later, survived in remarkably good condition, although his body had been picked to a skeleton by the vultures and the wind. The corpse of Bésancourt was unearthed under a little burial-mound of rocks and pebbles not far from the point where Lindenhof’s remains lay. The last words in the German botanist’s diary, written in a trembling, scarcely legible hand, are “Auch ich habe die Orchidee gesehen” — “I too have seen the orchid.”

First published in the Heidelberg Review Number 2, Fall 1995

Jonathan Steffen is a writer, renowned poet and musician

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