Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls

Sir Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls C.M.G.,M.D was a Medical doctor, horticulturist, legislator and publicist for Dominica. Along with his mentor Dr. John Imray, and particularly after Imray's death in 1880, Nicholls bestrode the life of Dominica like a colossus^[1] Born in London in 1851, he studied medicine at the Universities of Aberdeen and London (St. Bartholomew's Hospital). During his long and successful medical and horticultural career he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Member of the New York Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Linnean Society. Nicholls arrived in Dominica in 1873 as an assistant to Imray and in 1877 married Dominican, Marion Crompton.^[2] He built on the firm foundations that Imray had laid in instituting and expanding the work of the Board of Health, developing the Roseau hospital from its position as an infirmary, leading the expansion of the island health service in an island with no roads, fighting ignorance and superstition in an effort to make vaccination compulsory and in dealing with yaws, alastrim, malaria, yellow fever and other diseases afflicting the population at the time. He combined work with research and published his findings in medical journals in Britain, which attracted much attention.^[3][4]

Nicholls took a keen interest in the natural history of Dominica; opening up and publicising the Boiling Lake from the time he led the first recorded visit there in 1875. He guided the future King George V and his brother Prince Albert Victor to the summit of Morne Diablotin in 1880. He corresponded with the curators of Kew Gardens in England and was influential in the establishment of the Botanic Gardens in Roseau in 1891. He was a world expert on tropical agriculture publishing an influential work "A Textbook of Tropical Agriculture" which was used throughout the British Empire and was translated into several languages.^[5] Nicholls wrote Manual de agricultura tropical in 1901 with Henri François Pittier. He inherited land from Dr. Imray, most notably St. Aroment, and owned several estates in his own right. But Nicholls was more successful as a physician and horticulturist than he was a would-be politician. He was defeated by members of the so-called "Mulatto Ascendancy" whenever he contested an election but he was an officially nominated member of the legislature as Senior Medical Officer for many years, served on various select committees, was a magistrate for a few years and a member of the Executive Council of the Leeward Islands. He acted as Administrator of Dominica from time to time. He was a leading member of the Anglican Church and as a mark of honour he was buried next to the church in Roseau. The Alford Ward at the PMH is named after him.

He "is credited with the discovery of the Boiling Lake in Dominica," and he "has a mountain (Morne Nicholls) and a parrot named after him." ^{[6] [7][8]} He is said to have been known as "The Uncrowned King of Dominica."^[9][10]

The Boiling Lake was allegedly “discovered” – that is, first visited by white Europeans – in January 1875. Its “discoverers,” Edmund Watt and Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls, were young mid level colonial officials in Dominica. Although only in their mid-twenties, they held the sort of positions unattainable for someone of their youth and inexperience except in colonial settings. Watt was a magistrate, and Nicholls, a recent graduate from the medical schools at the universities of Aberdeen and London, was superintendent of hospitals. As officials in the growing bureaucracy of the empire, they interpreted their mandate as representatives of the Crown as requiring their chronicling in great detail the natural and anthropological phenomena encompassed within their imperial gaze. Themselves avid readers of exploration narratives, and aware of the publicity value of such publications to help them out of a colonial backwater, they reported their feat widely in the scientific journal Nature and the more popular Illustrated London News, The Times, and The Field. They recounted the “strenuous hike” – as Dominican anthropologist Lennox Honychurch realistically describes it – “in the tones of dramatic Victorian adventure, similar to exploring the Congo or reaching the source of the Nile”. Their zeal in spreading the tidings of their momentous achievement was such that by the time Hesketh Bell arrived in 1899 to take up his post as Dominica’s administrator, he acknowledged the lake to be “the chief ‘sight’ of Dominica”.^[11]

Nicholls’s career as a colonial official in Dominica developed against the background of these political tensions. An ambitious man who held appointed positions in the local legislative council until his death in 1929, Dr. Nicholls built his reputation on his scientific endeavors. In his two reports to the government (1880 and 1894) on the cure for yaws (which translated local curative practices into scientific discourse) added to the fame he had earned as the lake’s discoverer. His experiments in the cultivation of lime at his estate at St. Aroment, it is claimed, set the foundation for the Dominican economy from the collapse of sugar exportation in 1885 until the late 1950s. (Nicholls worked with his mentor, Dr. John Imray, on adapting the Martiniquan process of extracting essential oil from the lime rind. When James Anthony Froude visited Dominica in the late 1880s, he described Nicholls as “the only man in the island of really superior attainments”. The discovery of the Boiling Lake in 1875 was, for Nicholls, the beginning of a career as a colonial official of scientific accomplishments. His initial reaction to the “discovery” however, was marked by awe rather than scientific restraint. His description of the “expedition” to the lake, published in the magazine The Field in June 1876 attempts to imbue the moment of arrival with all the wonder of grandiose achievement.^[12]

Dominica's Boiling Lake is the second-largest hot lake in the world.^[13] The largest is Frying Pan Lake, located in Waimangu Valley near Rotorua, New Zealand.

Family Background

Empress Josephine's grandfather Gaspard Joseph de Tascher and Uncle Robert-Marguerite Tascher, baron de La Pagerie were direct ancestors of Nicholls. Through Empress Josephine's uncle, Nicholls was a direct descendant of Jean-Henri Robert Tascher de La Pagerie, (Count Tascher de La Pagerie et de l'Empire) cousin of Josephine's. He married Marcelle Clary, the Swedish Queen's Désirée Clary's niece and had a daughter Rose Amable Julie Joséphine.^[14] His family made him closely related to anyone descended from or related to Joséphine. Additionally, the Belgian, Luxembourg,Swedish, Monégasque and former Romanian monarchs are all descended from a cousin of Joséphine's first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais, as was Vittorio Emanuele, senior-line claimant to Italy.^[15] The claimant family of Baden are also Joséphine descendants.

Order of St Michael and St George

The New Year Honours 1896 were appointments by Queen Victoria to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by members of the British Empire. They were published on 1 January 1896.

• Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls,C.M.G., MD, Medical Officer of Public Institutions of the Island of Dominica.^[16]

Family

• Frederic Nicholls
• Phyllis Shand Allfrey
• Soroya Volney
• Giselle Volney
• Alex Volney
• Krystal Volney
• C.J. Volney
• Ronald Volney

References

Sir Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls