On 24 December 1834 the Committee of Tea Culture in Calcutta wrote a letter that settled an argument the Company had been having with itself for eight years. The wild shrub of Upper Assam, it told the government plainly, was genuine tea, "beyond all doubt indigenous," and the credit belonged to two named men: "the indefatigable researches of Capt. Jenkins and Lieut. Charlton." This office certifies that sentence exactly as written, because the sentence itself is the interesting part. Neither man was the first to send the Company a sample of that plant. He was simply the first one the Company chose to believe.

The first sample came in 1826, and got no further than a filing note

The committee's own letter admits as much. "We were acquainted with the fact," it says, "that so far back as 1826, the late ingenious Mr. David Scott, sent down from Manipur specimens of the leaves of a shrub, which he insisted upon was a real tea." Scott was already dead by the time the committee wrote that line, so he never learned whether his insistence had been worth anything. It had not, not yet. The committee held the sample and did nothing with it, because it had no fruit attached, and fruit, not leaf, was the one part of the plant that could actually settle the question against a look-alike Camellia.

A second sample failed the same test in 1828

Two years after Scott's leaves went nowhere, a second attempt met the identical wall. The Company's own record, reprinted alongside the 1834 letter, notes that "in 1828, Captains Grant and Pemberton sent specimens of what the natives asserted to be the tea plant to Mr. Secretary Swinton, from Manipur, but for want of the fruit, its genuine nature was not identified." Two separate submissions, six years apart, from two separate sets of officers, and the Company filed both the same way: interesting, unconfirmed, next.

Charlton's own trees died before anyone could look at them

The man the committee would eventually credit had already tried and failed once himself. Lieutenant Andrew Charlton, stationed on the Assam frontier, wrote to his superior Captain Francis Jenkins on 17 May 1834 describing what he had known for three years already, since around 1831. Near Beesa he had found the shrub growing wild and obtained "three or four young trees, which I gave to Dr. John Tytler in Calcutta, with a view of their being planted in the Government Botanical Garden." Charlton's own next sentence: "I have since understood they decayed soon after." Nobody examined a fruit that never grew. Even Captain Jenkins had his own dead end that same spring, a "genuine tea tree" plant given to him at Sadiya that arrived too sickly to survive the trip to Calcutta.

Three years on, Charlton tried again, and sent fruit

Charlton did not let the dead nursery be the end of it. By November 1834 he had gone back to the same ground and come back with more than leaves. His letter to Jenkins, dated 8 November from Sadiya, reads almost apologetic about the delay: "I have now the pleasure of sending you some seeds and leaves of the tea tree of Assam." He was direct about what he was actually proving: this was, in his words, "the best test that the tree is not a Camellia, as Dr. Wallich imagines." Jenkins forwarded the jar and box on to Calcutta by dak on 22 November, and this time the package carried the one part of the plant nobody had managed to deliver intact before.

Nathaniel Wallich, the Company's superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, had spent eight years assuming the Assam samples would turn out to be "some sort of Camellia," the wild shrub's near-twin and the one plant that could counterfeit a tea leaf without being tea. Leaf and flower could not settle that argument. Fruit could. Wallich split Charlton's capsules open against a Himalayan Camellia he already had on hand, the Nipal Camellia, Camellia kissi, and found what the leaf alone had never shown him: a genuinely different seed case, deeply split into three round lobes rather than one shallow triangle. On 24 December, the same day the committee wrote its letter to the government, Wallich signed his own memorandum confirming it: the Assam shrub's fruit did not match the Camellia's. It matched China's tea.

The men the record forgot to credit

Read the December 1834 letter next to the men it actually names, and the gap is plain. Robert Bruce, the trader shown the wild plant near Rangpur in 1823, the man whose own find started this whole search, is not in that sentence at all. He had died in 1824, a decade before the committee wrote a word of thanks to anyone. David Scott, whose 1826 samples the committee itself credits with first raising the question in writing, is named only as "the late" Mr. Scott, already gone. The two men the committee actually thanked, Jenkins and Charlton, were the ones standing in the room in 1834 with fruit in hand, not the ones who had been right eight years earlier with nothing to prove it.

The question did not settle with that letter, either. The Royal Society of Arts in London still holds a letter from Charles Alexander Bruce, Robert's brother, dated 16 August 1842, on the subject of a gold medal for cultivating the plant in Assam. Eight years after the committee's declaration, three years after the first Assam chests sold in London, someone was still writing to London about who the credit belonged to.

What the file actually shows

The journal that first reprinted this correspondence, in January 1835, said its own reason for printing it whole rather than summarised: readers would "naturally wish to follow the whole train of the discovery, and give the credit thereof where it is due." A fair instruction, and one the record itself makes hard to follow simply. The industry's founding, in full, the committees, the charter, the 1839 auction, is set down elsewhere on this site. What belongs here is the file underneath that founding: three rejected or unexamined samples, two of the men behind them already dead by the time anyone said thank you, and a plant that had to grow fruit twice, eight years apart, before this office's own trade would agree to certify it.