O. Pierre Havens, Upland Rice grown outside of Savannah ca 1880
Cochin Upland Rice comes to the Western Hemisphere
Growing rice in huge water impoundments is a costly matter. The water control, the ditching, the labor to grade soil, plant, hoe, and harvest insured that only the wealthiest planters—those using slave labor—could undertake it in early America. Yet not all rice needs to be grown this way. In various places in Europe, Asia, and Africa upland rices flourished—grain that could be grown like a garden vegetable, with rainwater irrigation or pond supply water. Horticultural information about these upland varieties began circulating among educated westerners in the mid-18th century. The political and economic implications of upland rice were grasped immediately. It could be a “common farmer” cereal grown like any other patch grain. It could supply good quality feed for fowls and other livestock. It could be grown on terraces in hilly country. Wet rice had to be grown on river bottoms and flat land.
Reports from Asia spoke of rice culture using specially adapted varieties of rice, planted at spaced intervals in fields, in elevated parts of Indonesia, Cochin China, and Thailand.
Accounts of Asian upland rice had stimulated a demand throughout the British America for seed that might be planted. The first upland seed to arrive in North America came through the efforts of a supercargo and plant collector for the East India Company at Canton China in the 1770s—John Brodly Blake.
The Cochin Upland Rice was one of five landraces traditionally cultivated in the hills of Vietnam: Tangi, Bo-lo, Lirnam-bang, Lirandi, and Le-muyo. The last is an early short season rice, ripening in four and ½ months and was exclusively dry raised on the uplands. Nineteenth century observers of rice cultivation in Cochin China observed that upland rice cultivation required more labor and care than aquatic growing. “The land must be ploughed three or four times, and all the tuft and lumps well broken up by the harrow. During its growth, it must be weeded two or three times to save the crop from being choked. The seed is sown by hand in the month of May and is harvest in November. It is never reaped, in consequence of the grain not adhering to the ear, but is pulled up by the roots.” [Edward Brown, Cochin China and My Experience of It (London: Charleston Westerton, 1861), 211]. The South Carolina and American General Gazette on Dec. 28, 1771 published the “Travels of a Philosophers” containing a notice that Blake had conveyed to John Ellis of Gray’s Inn in London Cochin upland rice and the tallow tree for distribution in Carolina and the West Indies. “We have the pleasure to inform the public, that by the indefatigable industry of a very curious gentleman at Canton, a sufficient quantity for experiment of the upland rice from Cochin China, so long wished for, has been sent by the Thames Indiaman to his friend in Gray’s Inn, who will take proper care that it is distributed to such persons in our southern colonies as will make a fair trial of this most useful grain.”
John Ellis held the office of royal agent for West Florida, an administrative post in London superintending the colony’s develop. He communicated the rice to several colonial planter botanists: to his brother Henry Ellis in Jamaica, General Robert Melvill in Dominica, and Dr. Alexander Garden of South Carolina. A botanist himself, Ellis had published an instruction Directions For Bringing Over Seeds and Plants, from the East-Indies and other Distant Countries in a State of Vegetation (London: L. Davis, 1770), so whatever he communicated had a fair potential for being viable. Despite this, of the parcel shipped to Alexander Garden, a sole grain tillered and grew at his garden at Otranto in Goose Creek, South Carolina.
Perhaps a word should be said about recipient Robert Melvill. For the period 1765 to 1771 he served as governor of several islands ceded by the French in the West Indies at the close of the Seven Years War. These included the Grenadines, Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago. A botanist, he typically spread seed he received around those places he governed. Trinidad was still under Spanish rule during the period of Melvill’s governorship, so it is unlikely that he introduced Cochin rice to Trinidad. It, like bearded rice, probably came from the Lowcountry with the Merikans.
John Ellis sent seed to botanist Alexander Garden in South Carolina, the foremost natural historian of the 1750s-1770s. Garden had difficulty growing the plant, and a single rice plant germinated. From this solitary survivor, he extracted seed and distributed it to at least three other planters of his network in South Carolina. He also dispensed the Chinese Tallow tree (now an invasive species), the Camphor tree, and two varieties of Indigo, one sky blue, the other deep to supplement the West Indian sourced dye plants that Eliza Lucas Pinckney had brought to the Lowcountry. But the short-season upland rice that the Merikans brought to Trinidad may not have derived from these Carolina seeds
Cochin rice came into coastal Georgia via another route. John Ellis conveyed seed to Benjamin Franklin when he was in London. Franklin shipped them to horticulturist John Bartram in Pennsylvania on October 17, 1772. Other rice was sent to Noble Jones, proprietor of Some of Wormsloe Plantation outside of Savannah Georgia during the 1780s. Wormsloe was a certain of experiment and seed dispersal in colonial Georgia. Cochin rice made its way through Jones’ network to growers throughout Lowcountry Georgia before the end of the eighteenth century.
How long did it last in North America? Difficult to tell—but given its vulnerability to weed pressure I suspect that farmers who grew upland rices found two other available varieties: red bearded from Africa and Gopher from the West Indies easier to grow. The question remains whether the rice survives somewhere in the West Indies. When I went to Trinidad in 2016 it did not appear to be in evidence, despite its being reported as a crop in 1906. But this does not preclude its survival elsewhere—perhaps Tobago.