French colonial administrator and horticulturalist who travelled in Asia and introduced many economic plants into cultivation on Mauritius and Réunion. Pierre Poivre was born to a bourgeois family in Lyons and prepared for life as a missionary with the Missions Etrangères in Paris. Despatched to China in 1740, Poivre arrived in Canton, where he was soon imprisoned as the result of a misunderstanding. He managed to secure his release and in doing so made such an impression on the Viceroy that he was given the rare privilege of being permitted to travel in the interior of the province, where he learned about methods of agriculture and trade, and collected plants, developing a strong interest in botany.
Poivre made his way back to Europe in 1745, where more misfortune awaited him on the high seas when his ship engaged with an English vessel. First he lost an arm to a cannonball, then he was taken captive by the English, who left him in Jakarta, Indonesia. Here he observed the Dutch spice trade and after being freed was sent to Pondicherry, India, from whence he made his passage home via Isle de France (Mauritius). He suffered another imprisonment just before reaching the coast of France, again at the hands of the English, but reprieve came with the peace between the two countries. By now Poivre had abandoned plans to be ordained and decided he would attempt to break the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade, instead.
In France, Poivre renounced his ecclesiastical duties and made a number of proposals to the French East India Company (EIC) based on his observations in Asia. One of these was to begin cultivating spices from the Moluccas in Isle de France. The EIC recruited Poivre to enact this project and to open up direct trade with Cochinchina (southern Vietnam) and thus in 1749 he set sail again. The Cochinchina sovereign agreed to the establishment of a French trading post at Tai fo and Poivre introduced rice from there to Isle de France. He then visited China, the Philippines and the Moluccas, where he made deals with traders and acquired young plants and seeds of spices such as nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and pepper, and returned to Isle de France with them. He proceeded to cultivate these over the next three years at the site of the EIC's Pamplemousse nursery. On his return journey to France, he visited Madagascar before being made prisoner yet again by the English, delaying his arrival in France until 1757.
Poivre now settled in his home city, Lyons, where he was elected as a Member of the Academy and devoted himself to agriculture. During the next decade he visited French Guiana and the Caribbean, but did not return to the East until 1767, at the behest of the French government, which appointed him Intendant of Isle de France and Bourbon (Réunion). He spent the next six years administrating these colonies and introduced some 600 plants. He sent many plants and herbarium specimens on to Paris before his return in 1773. He died in Lyons in 1786, leaving numerous unpublished manuscripts and the memoir, The Voyages of a Philosopher. He presented his herbarium to Bernard de Jussieu, including about 100 Chinese plants.
Poivrea Comm. ex Thou was named in honour of Poivre by his friend, the botanist Philibert Commerson. The Botanical Garden of Pamplemousses still thrives in northern Mauritius.
Sources:
E. Bretschneider, 1898, History of European Botanical Discoveries In China: 117-120
M.J. van Steenis Kruseman, 1985, "Cyclopedia of Collectors", Flora Malesiana, online edn:
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/FMCollectors/P/PoivreP.htm, accessed 13 September 2011.
