ABSTRACT
Alexander Beatson was a senior army officer who also carried out important research and published, widely and influentially, on the subject of botany. Beat-son saw service in India in the Fourth Anglo–Mysore War of the late 1790s and published an account of his experiences on his return to England in 1800. He then took up the position of Governor of the remote South Atlantic island colony of St Helena between 1808 and 1813. As he describes in the extract, during his tenure as governor of St Helena Beatson had to put down a mutiny in 1811 when a number of soldiers protested against measures he had introduced to restrict the availability of alcoholic spirits. As an isolated and desolate stop-off between Britain and her Asian colonies St Helena had acquired a reputation as an ill-disciplined and inhospitable outpost. It had long been very generally supposed that St. Helena was a rocky and unproductive island; mostly devoid of soil.
