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Introduction: La selva comes to London -- Across the Andes -- Iquitos and rubber -- Arana's world -- Saldaña Rocca's world -- Over to the Foreign Office -- An officer and a gentleman -- Our man in the Putumayo -- Eyes of another race -- The uttermost parts of the Earth -- La Chorrera -- Godforsaken hell-haunted wilds -- A system of armed extortion -- Deus ex machina -- The veil over the Putumayo mystery -- Publish and be damned -- An international scandal -- The old gang -- The canon and the board -- La selva returns to Parliament -- The Peruvian, the American, and the Select Committee -- The devil and Mr. Casement -- Epilogue : a crime against humanity -- Dramatis personae and chronology

For more than 175 years, the remarkable botanical drawings made in Canton by a Chinese artist working with the British East India Company supercargo John Bradby Blake, were handed down from generation to generation within the same family. They first appeared publicly in 1959 when the estate of Sir Frederick Cripps of Ampney Park, Gloucestershire, came up for auction. A Bristol art dealer bought the drawings, but on the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Mellon had other ideas for them. This article follows the trail from London, via Ampney Park and Bristol, to Oak Spring, Virginia.

It is well-known that when Roger Casement left the Putumayo in November 1910, he took with him several Barbadian men, two Huitoto youths and a bundle of depositions documenting in extraordinary detail the atrocities committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company. What is far less known (and we have to thank Angus Mitchell for directing our attention to it in his publications) is that he also had with him a camera and several rolls of film waiting to be developed. Unfortunately only a handful of the photographs Casement had developed have survived. They lie in a box in the National Photographic Archive in Dublin, dormant and seemingly historically inert. Thankfully, the historicity of these images can be reconstructed, for in March 1912, when it looked asthough the American government was backsliding in its promise of putting political pressure on the Peruvian government to protect the Indians and to stop the brutal labour regime in the rubber lands of the Putumayo, Casement posted copies of a number of these photographs to George Young at the British Embassy in Washington to shock the American administration into action. All of these photographs (which are in the National Archives in Washington, DC) were personally annotated by Casement, in the manner of an atrocity narrative, and provide a rare insight into the political possibilities of the visual image.

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In the last quarter of the 18th century, Joseph Banks came into possession of a set of botanically accurate, western‐influenced, drawings of Chinese plants, executed in Canton by a Chinese artist and supervised by John Bradby Blake, an East India Company supercargo. Banks realized that these drawings, now in the Natural History Museum, London, would help his collectors in Canton accurately identify the Chinese species he sought as living plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew. Banks commissioned a collector's manual whose illustrations were based on the Blake drawings. In the early 19th century, William Kerr used this manual (now unfortunately lost) to continue the Blake practice – these drawings are at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. John Reeves, many of whose drawings are at the Royal Horticultural Society, used Kerr's commissions to produce the next generation of botanical art in Canton.

John Bradby Blake (1745–1773) first visited Canton as a supercargo for the British East India Company in 1767/68. He returned as a resident supercargo in July 1769. Between then and his untimely death in 1773, in collaboration with one or more Chinese artists, he produced over 150 paintings of Chinese plants, many of which are illustrated in exquisite botanical detail. These paintings and the associated archives in the Oak Spring Garden Library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) provide a detailed glimpse into an interesting life and a previously little known dimension of the social and scientific interactions between the British and Chinese in the late 18th century.