Redruth

The captain is Fitcher Penrose, and his quest is for the Golden Camellia, a plant unique to China. He has a painting of it, and knows it is real. Besides being a thing of great beauty, this is a valuable botanical for its many healing properties.

Penrose is from Cornwall, and his vessel, the Redruth, is imaginary, dreamed up by the novelist Amitav Ghosh for his trilogy about the opium trade and Opium Wars.

In Ghosh's nineteenth-century tale, The Redruth was a nursery ship, fitted out for carrying plants. Instigated by naturalists like Charles Darwin and Sir Joseph Banks, many such vessels plied the oceans during this era, carrying plants from one continent to the other for sale and to improve botanical gardens like Kew.