On March 16th, 1689, Sir Hans Sloane left Jamaica and set sail for England onboard the frigate Assistance with the embalmed body of Christopher Monck, 2nd duke of Albemarle, the widowed Duchess, and over 800 specimens of plants, preserved birds and mammals, and a small menagerie of live animals including an enormous yellow snake, an iguana, and an alligator kept in a tub of salt water. Eighteen months before, Sloane had departed for Jamaica as the Duke’s personal physician. The voyage south had taken three months, and the Duke, notorious in England for his dissolute behaviour, died within ten months of setting foot on the island. Jamaica was well known by early travellers for its pestilent airs, excessive humidity and heat, and it was perhaps this paradisiacal tropical atmosphere, so different than the dank English climate, that did the Duke in. Perhaps it was his excessive fondness for drink. In any case, the Duke ailed and died. But Sloane had not only come to Jamaica to serve as physician. In Sloane’s own words, since his youth he had delighted in the study of plant and natural specimens and “had seen most of those Kinds of Curiosities, which were to be found either in the Fields, or in the Gardens or Cabinets of the Curious” in Europe, yet found the accounts of "Strange Things, which I met with in Collections, and, was inform'd, were common in the West-Indies, were not so satisfactory as I desired." To remedy this lack of detail, during his fifteenth month sojourn in Jamaica and the neighbouring islands, Sloane collected, preserved, sketched and documented every creature, plant, mineral, and soil he encountered.

A floating world crammed with the most extravagant and mysterious creatures and plants from the southern seas, the Assistance on its voyage home would have been a wonder-laden vessel for any curious naturalist in the seventeenth century. Most of Sloane’s plants would have been dried and pressed between sheets of paper. We can’t be sure exactly which creatures Sloane was able to transport home. Most likely he would have had jars of pickled lizards, birds, fish, eels, and small animals, perhaps been stored in large cases or arranged on shelves with small lips to prevent damage during high winds and storms. He would have dried the skins of lizards and chameleons and hung his stuffed creatures from the ceiling with strings to deter attack from insects and vermin. Rats were particularly abundant, an infestation that suited his seven foot yellow snake just fine, rats being “the most pleasing Food for these sort of Serpents.” While in Jamaica, he had dissected several yellow snakes, and not uncommonly had found thirteen or fourteen rats in their bellies.

It’s not clear how many living plants Sloane tried to bring back or how they faired on the voyage, but not one of his creatures survived. His “Guana”, which was let free to run about at will, was frightened by a seaman one day, leapt overboard and drowned. His snake, which had been tamed by a native to follow him everywhere “as a Dog would his Master,” escaped from its jar and was shot by the duchess’s footman. And on May 14th, his alligator which he had kept alive with scraps of “Guts and Garbage of Fowl, &c.,” finally died. “Thus I lost, by this time of the Voyage, all my live Creatures and so it happens to most People, who lose their strange live Animals for want of proper Air, Food, or Shelter.”