Reading Flax and Hemp: Their Culture and Manipulation (1854) | A Personal Reflection
A personal reflection on E. Sebastian Delamer’s 1854 book Flax and Hemp: Their Culture and Manipulation, exploring historical hemp cultivation, fibre, traditional uses and the author's observations through a modern reader's perspective.
In 1854, a country clergyman published a practical guide to two fibre crops. Flax and Hemp: Their Culture and Manipulation appeared under the pen-name E. Sebastian Delamer. The man behind the name was the Reverend Edmund Saul Dixon (1809-1893), a clergyman and poultry-fancier who was rector of Intwood with Keswick in Norfolk from 1842 to 1893.
He wrote a run of rural handbooks on poultry, pigeons, the kitchen garden and the flower garden, and used the Delamer name for most of them. This one came out in London with G. Routledge in the series "Books for the Country." Routledge was a publisher best known for cheap literature, a business that opened in 1848, so the book was meant for ordinary readers, not scholars.
The year matters. The Crimean War ran from October 1853 to February 1856, and an Anglo-French fleet entered the Baltic in April 1854. Delamer’s pages carry an echo of it. He notes that the hemp of the Ukraine had supplied Russian exports “till the breaking out of the present war,” and he worries that England depended on a hostile country for an article it could not do without.
In India, meanwhile, hemp was already a medicine and an intoxicant. Dr William O’Shaughnessy’s experiments with it at a Calcutta hospital were published in 1839 and read to the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta that year, and by 1850 cannabis was listed in the pharmacopoeias of Britain, the rest of Europe and the US. Delamer’s book looks at the same plant through rope, sail and field.
1. Man's greed toward clothing
"All the various articles of clothing worn by Man are a something of which he has previously denuded something else. He cunningly entraps innumerable individuals of the fox, weasel, and squirrel tribes, to strip them of their warm and valuable fur. He hatches and feeds legions of caterpillars, that he may rob them of the defensive padding which they spin to protect their helplessness while passing through the chrysalis state. He murders the mighty bull and bison, on no juster ground of provocation than that his victim is possessed of a hide eminently adapted to make mocassins. He pastures the sheep for its skin and its wool, occasionally setting so little store by the carcase as to melt it into tallow or burn it as fuel. The bird of paradise, the ostrich of the desert, and the swan frozen out from the Artic circle, are despoiled of their plumes and down, to bedeck our dames luxuriously. Even the depths of the ocean are made to pay this tribute; and whalebone is stolen from fishes’ mouths to give strength to feebleness and grace to deformity. Mother earth herself is treated with no greater forbearance. By alternately feeding her up with manure, and teasing and tormenting her surface with tillage, she is coaxed and compelled to send forth a living vegetable down, which is shorn, plucked, and plundered from her bosom in the shape of cotton, flax, and our present subject, Hemp."
The Reflection: before he says a word about hemp, Delamer speaks of clothing as a chain of taking, with the earth at the end of it. The idea that every thread has a cost has been written intensley about for thr introduction of the Hemp's section in the book.
2. Flax bows, hemp stands
"Flax is soft and tender in its nature. As it grows, it bends submissively before the beholder, and delights the eye by the smoothness of its aspect and the delicate brightness of its colouring. It supplies us with necessaries, with luxuries, and with emollient medicines. Hemp has something martial in its appearance. It rises stiffly from the seed-bed, like a crop of lances, pointing upright in defiance to the sky, and often overtopping the stature of those to whose labours it owes its birth. Hostility and repulsiveness are the leading elements of its composition. It chokes every herb that grows beneath its shade. It is a robust plant, destined for robust purposes, becoming almost a weapon in the hands of man."
The Reflection: This is a character sketch of two plants, one yielding and one upright. Put in the language of paired opposites, flax is the gentle half and hemp the strong half.
3. Hemp, the force's force
It furnishes him with military and naval stores; with tents to live in, while making war on his enemies or his victims; with cordage and sails, enabling him to traverse the globe as a friend or a foe; with ropes and nets to entrap or hold the sanguinary tiger or the rapacious shark. The elephant, decoyed and bound in hempen bands, forthwith becomes an obedient slave.
The reflection: Here, he outlines the usage of Hemp for military purposes during his times and the before. He puts it phenomenally as "becoming almost a weapon in the hands of man."
4. A plant kept in captivity
"For clothing merely, as a means of warmth and covering, hemp must be weakened in its proportions and constitutions, by the restraint of specially crowded culture. It is cramped and imprisoned, even while fed and kept alive, like a captive savage of too ardent a temperament. With greater liberty allowed, it seems to take a perverse pleasure in arming man with the means of mischief as well as with those of useful toil."
The Reflection: The farmer’s trick is to crowd the plants so they grow thin and fine. Delamer writes about this as a kind of imprisonment. And with liberty, the empowerment it provides, calling the plant a savage of too ardent a temperament. His personification rightly captures the usage and potential.
5. The verdict, and the word 'bang'
"Hemp bears no flowers that please the eye: its healthy hue is a dark and sombre green; its stem is rigid and roughly bristly; its sharp and penetrating odour affects the head; its leaves are exceedingly acrid to the taste; and instead of yielding a sedative potion or a soothing liniment, it furnishes, in the shape of 'bang,' a poisonous as well as an intoxicating agent. Flax, lastly, heals the honourable wounds of the soldier; hemp disgracefully finishes the career of the hopeless criminal."
Reading: This is the book’s only nod to the plant’s intoxicating side, and it sounds like a 'Victorian judgement.' He associates 'hemp's intoxicating effects' with poison, contrasting it with flax, which he associates with healing and honour.
There is beauty in his words, while capturing the raw qualities of hemp, yet his portrayal overlooks its place in Eastern traditions, where its uses and significance extend far beyond intoxication.
6. The introduction to the plant's biology
"In the Linnaean system, it belongs to the class Dicecia (two houses), and the order Pentandria (five males); that is, the male and female flowers grow on separate and distinct plants, and each male flower contains five stamens, or fructifying organs. In the female plant, the flowers are solitary in the axillae of the leaves; in the male they grow in thin pendulous spikes, at the ends of the stem and branches. Some female flowers, however, are occasionally found amongst the males, and some males also amongst the females. It would, therefore, prove nothing contrary to the views which modern botanists hold, with respect to the functions of the anthers and their pollen, if instances could be adduced of female hemp-plants having produced perfect seed when there has been no male plant growing near them. Miller states that he tried the experiment for several years, by removing all the male plants before their blossoms opened, and although the female plants continued stong and flourishing, yet they never produced any good seed. Though both arising from the same seed, the difference of which is undistinguishable, yet the male plant is ripe five or six weeks sooner than the female. In both, the flowers are devoid of corolla, or petals. Each grain of seed produces no more than a single stem, which is occasionally called the “reed,” and sometimes the “boon.” The useful fibre is contained in the bark. When the plant is full grown, the difference in the aspect of the sexes is so great — the male being smaller, and more delicate than the female — as to be easily distinguished at a considerable distance.
[...] To avoid confusion, even when quoting them, we shall adopt the language of the present day. By male we designate sterile, by female, reproductive plants.
The Reflection: Delamer offers a detailed account of hemp’s botanical characteristics, from its reproductive biology and differences between male and female plants to the fibre contained in its bark. His observations reflect the botanical understanding of his time, though his terminology for the sexes of the plant differs from that used today.
7. A plant traced to the East
“Hemp, like many other plants in long and general cultivation, is reputed to be a native of the East, to which part of the globe we may trace it with more or less certainty. Linnaeus, in his Materia Medica, gives it to the East Indies and Japan. Thunberg says it grows here and there in Japan. [...] it is said to grow wild in India; but in [...] it is assigned to Persia. Pliny and Dioscorides speak of it as a native of Europe. However that may have been originally, hemp has been grown in Europe from time immemorial, for the sake both of the cordage manufactured from its fibre and of the oil which is expressed from its seeds.”
The Reflection: Delamer says hemp “is reputed to be a native of the East,” then lists authorities who place it in the East Indies, Japan, India, Persia and even Europe. He settles nothing, and he adds that in Europe it has been grown “from time immemorial” for cordage and oil. The passage points to an ancient plant with no single clear birthplace in this book.
Phenomenal Fact
Bhanga/Vijaya has been crowned as a sacred plant among other five, immortalized in Ātharvaṇa Veda, chapter 11, one of the oldest sciptures, where it is invoked to free us from aṃhas.
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