Robert Hooke Bangue Experiment (1689)

An Account of the Plant, call'd Bangue

An Account of the Plant, called Bangue

Publication

Author	Robert Hooke
Language	English
Published	1726 (lecture delivered 1689; published posthumously)
Publisher	Richard Waller (ed.), Royal Society
Place	London
Total pages	3

Cannabis Content

Regions documented	Sri Lanka (via Knox's sample); India (general)
Preparations	Leaves and seeds ground to powder, chewed and swallowed; dose described as enough to fill a tobacco pipe
Uses documented	Medicinal (proposed for lunacy); recreational; psychoactive effects described in detail

Access

Original held at	Royal Society Archives (lecture notes); published in Waller (1726), Philosophical Experiments and Observations

"An Account of the Plant, call'd Bangue" is a lecture delivered by Robert Hooke (1635--1703) to the Royal Society of London on 18 December 1689. Hooke's notes were found posthumously and published in 1726 by Richard Waller in Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke. The lecture describes the effects of cannabis on a human subject — possibly Robert Knox, or Hooke himself — and represents the first detailed English-language scientific description of cannabis and the first recorded attempt to evaluate its therapeutic potential in a European institutional setting.

Background

Robert Hooke was Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society and one of the most prolific natural philosophers of the seventeenth century. He is known for Hooke's Law (elasticity), the coining of the term "cell" in biology, and Micrographia (1665), which provided the first detailed microscopic illustrations of insects and plant structures.

Hooke had maintained a close friendship with Captain Robert Knox since Knox's return from nineteen years of captivity in the Kingdom of Kandy in 1680. Hooke had edited Knox's manuscript of An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon and written its preface. The two men met regularly in London's coffee houses throughout the 1680s and 1690s, and Knox brought Hooke specimens and curiosities from his subsequent East India Company voyages.

In September 1689, Hooke's diary records three meetings with Knox within a fortnight at which bangue (cannabis) was discussed. Knox presented Hooke with samples of the plant, which Knox described as "a strange intoxicating herb like hemp" or "Indian hemp." Knox had personal experience of its medicinal use in Ceylon, where he and a companion had consumed dried bangue leaf mixed with jaggery to ward off fevers contracted from drinking contaminated water during their escape attempts between 1673 and 1679.

The lecture

On 18 December 1689, six weeks after the diary entries recording Knox's gift, Hooke delivered a lecture to the fellows of the Royal Society titled "An Account of the Plant, call'd Bangue."

Hooke opened by telling his audience that bangue was "a certain Plant which grows very common in India, and the Vertues, or Quality thereof, are there very well known; and the Use thereof is very general and frequent; and the Person [Knox], from whom I receiv'd it, hath made many Trials of it, on himself, with very good Effect."

He described the method of administration: the leaves and seeds were to be ground into a fine powder, then chewed and swallowed. The dose, Hooke explained, was "about as much as may fill a common Tobacco-Pipe."

Observed effects

Hooke described the effects on a human subject (whom he did not name) in detail:

the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth or doth, in that Extasie but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry and laughs and sings and speaks . . . yet he is not giddy or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks.

Assessment

Despite noting the subject's loss of "Understanding" and "Sense," Hooke's overall assessment was positive. He emphasised that the drug "is so well known and experimented by Thousands, and the Person that brought it has so often experimented it himself" that "there is no Cause of Fear, tho' possibly there may be of Laughter."

Hooke proposed that bangue might have therapeutic applications. He speculated that it could "be of considerable Use for Lunaticks" — that is, as a treatment for mental illness.

Attempt to cultivate

Hooke concluded his lecture by reporting that he was currently attempting to grow Knox's bangue seeds in London, and expressed hope that "if it can be here produced" the plant could "prove as considerable a Medicine in Drugs, as any that is brought from the Indies." The outcome of this cultivation attempt is not recorded.

Publication history

Hooke's lecture notes were not published during his lifetime. After his death on 3 March 1703 — Knox was present at his deathbed and arranged his burial — the notes were collected by Richard Waller and published in 1726 as part of Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke.

The lecture is also referenced in R.T. Gunther's Early Science in Oxford, Vol. 10 (1935), which reproduces material from Hooke's diary.

Context: Bowrey and the parallel tradition

Hooke's lecture was not the first English encounter with cannabis in India. Thomas Bowrey, an East India Company merchant, described his experiments with bangue in Machilipatnam on the Coromandel Coast in 1673 — the same year that Knox began his escape attempts in Ceylon. Bowrey's account, however, was not published until 1905 (as A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679, ed. Richard Carnac Temple).

Knox's and Bowrey's accounts are independent of each other. Bowrey encountered cannabis in India's Muslim merchant community; Knox learned of it from the Sinhalese population in the Kandyan highlands. The two accounts together document the widespread use of cannabis across South Asia in the 1670s, from the Coromandel Coast to the interior of Ceylon. It was Knox's account, mediated through his friendship with Hooke, that brought cannabis to the attention of the English scientific establishment.

Benjamin Breen, in his essay for the Public Domain Review (2020) and his book The Age of Intoxication (2019), provides the fullest scholarly treatment of the Knox-Hooke-Royal Society connection in the context of the seventeenth-century global drug trade.

Significance for landrace documentation

Hooke's lecture is significant for the history of cannabis in Sri Lanka on several counts:

• It establishes that cannabis from Ceylon reached the Royal Society of London, making it one of the earliest documented transfers of South Asian cannabis germplasm to Europe.
• Hooke's attempt to grow Knox's seeds in London is the first recorded attempt to cultivate Sri Lankan cannabis outside South Asia.
• The lecture provides a detailed description of the psychoactive effects of cannabis consumed orally, corroborating Knox's own account of medicinal use during his captivity.
• Hooke's proposal to use bangue therapeutically for "Lunaticks" anticipates by over a century the medical cannabis research of W.B. O'Shaughnessy in Calcutta (1839), which is conventionally treated as the beginning of Western medical interest in cannabis.

No botanical description of the plant accompanies the lecture. Hooke does not describe the morphology, growth habit, or variety of the bangue he received from Knox. Whether the seeds Hooke attempted to cultivate were of Sri Lankan or Indian origin is not specified in the surviving text.

See also

• An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (Knox 1681) — Knox's captivity narrative, the source of Hooke's sample
• Sri Lanka — Country page
• History of Opium in Sri Lanka (Uragoda 1983) — Colonial drug regulation
• History of Medical Cannabis in Sri Lanka (Weliange 2018) — Catalogue of Ayurvedic cannabis texts

Further reading

• Breen, Benjamin (2019). The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Gunther, R.T. (1935). Early Science in Oxford, Vol. 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Winterbottom, Anna (2009). "Producing and Using the Historical Relation of Ceylon: Robert Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society." The British Journal for the History of Science 42(4): 515--538.