Biography

British metallurgist who decided at the age of fifty that his calling was in the botanical exploration of his adopted home, Mexico. From 1931 to 1941 he collected 16,300 numbers, concentrating his efforts on some of the most inaccessible parts of the country in the states of Guerrero, Michoacán, and Mexico State. His collections included well in excess of 300 new species and four new genera.

Hinton was born in London to Charles Howard Hinton and Mary Everest Boole, both mathematicians and authors. When Hinton was seven years old, the family moved to Japan where his father had been appointed a professor at the University of Tokyo. (The move out of the U.K. was forced upon the family when it became known that Charles Hinton was a bigamist.) Seven years later they emigrated to the United States, where Charles Hinton took up a position at Princeton University.

Due to problems with his eyesight, George Hinton was educated by his parents at home before attending university. He studied at the Minnesota School of Mines, Columbia University, the Arizona School of Mines and the University of California at Berkeley, paying his own way through college by working as an assayer in the mines of Mexico during the summer. Their father having died, Hinton also paid for his younger brother Sebastian's education. He fell in love with Mexico and moved there in 1911 with his new wife, Emily Percival Watley (who died ten years later of tuberculosis), working as an assayer, metallurgist, civil engineer, architect and industrialist before botany took over his life. He was especially renowned as a metallurgist and invented the building material 'Floating Cement', from which he unfortunately was not able to make his fortune due to the stock market crash of 1929.

In 1936, five years after taking up botany as a hobby, he retired from mining to devote himself full-time to botanical explorations and enlisted the help of the youngest of his three sons to help him. James Hinton was able to climb on foot to places his father could not reach due to a weak heart and respiratory problems, though he was quite able to ride on horseback for days on end.

The remote sierras of Guerrero and Michoacán that the pair traversed had remained botanically unexplored partly because of the prevalence of banditry as well as the inaccessible terrain. By befriending mountain dwellers, Hinton was able to take advantage of their hospitality in these wild places, and also garnered some protection from the lawless ways of the region's inhabitants. Gifts, medicine and expressions of trust towards his hosts allowed Hinton to travel to places that prospectors, missionaries and even soldiers feared to tread. Nevertheless, there was still a threat from outlaws; in one area Hinton and his son were advised to openly carry their pistols and cartridge belts, as was the local custom. (As a young man Hinton had been held to ransom by bandits and therefore kept a rifle at his bedside at home, but did not normally tempt violence by displaying a weapon while travelling.) In fact, more obstruction was encountered at the hands of local officials than criminals, for although Hinton always abided by the law that he had to provide a duplicate set of specimens for a Mexican institution for every set he sent abroad, his activities were still viewed with suspicion and more than once his parcels for Europe and the U.S. were held up at the post office.

The Hintons travelled on saddle mules, far more resilient (and expensive) animals than horses and pack mules. Hinton paid great attention to the care of the animals, always making sure they were fed twice a day and even shoeing them himself. While he was lucky enough to avoid most of the serious diseases and hazards inherent in wanderings through rural Mexico, Hinton had contracted malaria and in 1937 suffered an internal haemorrhage. He treated himself by eating ice until he stopped vomiting blood, before continuing his travels the next day! He was equally undeterred after he broke his hip travelling on a train that derailed, when a dislodged cast iron spittoon fell on him; after six weeks in plaster he was out collecting again. In 1943 it was a few days after an accident travelling in a truck that his tough constitution was finally beaten; he died of coronary thrombosis.

While he was interested in taxonomy, Hinton knew that his most valuable contribution to botany would be in exploration and thus carried on sending his specimens to specialists for determination, though he often waited years in frustration for the results and the duplicate sales that depended on them. When he was at home in Aguililla he nevertheless spent eight or nine hours a day working in his herbarium, beginning the day by attending a dawn mass with the other villagers (he had converted to Catholicism to integrate fully with the Mexican culture he so loved).

In his life as a mining engineer he was known as a man of the people. In one venture in which he was involved he insisted that any illiterate miners spend an hour of their working day learning to read and write. If they had not done so within six months they would be fired! In 1941 he left his herbarium for a year to work at the Taxco silver mines; while he was gone insects ravaged the specimens. Two years later, after his death, Hinton’s son James moved the surviving herbarium to Mexico City to house it under his watchful eye and sent some 56,000 specimens to New York Botanical Garden, from whence they were redistributed to 44 herbaria. During his lifetime Hinton had always sent one of each specimen to Kew, the British Museum, Zurich, Geneva, Harvard and the Smithsonian, and often to the Field Museum and Missouri as well as New York. His personal herbarium, now in the care of his grandson, George Sebastian Hinton, contains about 20,000 specimens.

Sources:
J. Hinton and S. Rzedowski, 1972, "George B. Hinton, Collector of Plants in Southwestern Mexico", Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 53: 141-181.