William Jack, surgeon and botanist, made early, significant collections of plants in Malaysia. He was born in Aberdeen, where he attended grammar school, and as a precocious pupil was put in a class with boys several years his senior. He developed an interest in botany at a young age and began studying medicine aged just 14. By 16 he had taken his MA degree.
Jack intended to continue his medical training in Edinburgh, but had to forestall his plans when he was stricken with scarlet fever. Aged 17 and fully recovered, he instead left for London, continuing to pursue his medical and botanical studies. Here he met Sir Joseph Banks, Robert Brown and other eminent botanists within a short period of time.
After qualifying as a surgeon in 1812, Jack obtained a position with the East India Company and set off for India on his 18th birthday, the 29th of January 1813. The next few years saw Jack based chiefly at Dinapur, where he took the opportunity to collect plants and study the Indian flora.
Jack began corresponding with Nathaniel Wallich of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens in 1817 and the following year was able to visit him in person. Wallich persuaded Jack to stay with him and together they planned to carry out fieldwork in Nepal. However, Jack's plans changed after he met Sir Stamford Raffles, governer of Sumatra, during a visit to the Calcutta gardens. Raffles managed to steal the eager young botanist from Wallich, taking him to Sumatra on his return in late 1818.
In Sumatra Jack began ardent botanising, noting that despite the island having been for so long in British possession, its natural history had hardly been researched. "Sumatra is almost a virgin country; for though we have had a settlement on it at Bencoolen, no individual there before Sir Stamford ever penetrated into the country twenty miles beyond its limits," wrote Jack in a letter to his family dated 7th March 1819. He went on to explore and collect in Singapore and Penang over the next three years, making significant collections which formed the basis of his series "Descriptions of Malayan Plants" (1820-1822) in the Malayan Miscellanies (published at the Sumatran Mission press). Jack's promising research was cut short by his premature death in September 1822, when he succumbed to a tropical fever (possibly malaria).
Sir Stamford Raffles was to produce a memoir of Jack's life, drawing on Jack's papers, but these were lost in a fire on board ship as Raffles travelled to Europe in 1824. Raffles then passed away before he could commit anything to paper based on his four-year acquaintance with Jack. The large tree Jackia ornata Wall. (Rubiaceae) was named in his honour by Wallich.
Sources:
I.H. Burkill, 1916, "William Jack's letters to Nathaniel Wallich, 1819-1821", Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 73: 147-278
I.H. Burkill, 1927, "Botanical Collectors, Collections and Collecting Places in the Malay Peninsula", Gardens' Bulletin, Straits Settlements, 4(4-5): 125
W.J. Hooker, 1835, "Descriptions of Malayan Plants. By William Jack. With a brief Memoir of the Author and Extracts from his Correspondence", Companion to the Botanical Magazine, 1: 121-147
W. Jack, "Descriptions of Malayan plants: arranged according to their natural families from the Malayan miscellany", Calcutta Journal of Natural History, 4: 1-69
E.D. Merrill, 1952, "William Jack's genera and species of Malaysian plants", Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 33(3): 199
M.J. van Steenis Kruseman, "Cyclopedia of Collectors", Flora Malesiana, online edn:
www.nationaalherbarium.nl/FMCollectors/J/JackW.htm, accessed 10 January 2012.
