Nor was the botanist particularly interested in the tropical species that we usually associate with floral beauty - orchids, palms, birds of paradise, and the like, that made other naturalists famous. Indeed, despite his later reputation as a smuggler of cinchona, Spruce had little personal interest in utilitarian plants. This, then, is the story of how one of Britain’s most promising, skilled explorers struggled to find a place in Victorian science, unable to shake his love for the underdogs of the plant world. Years of inexplicably coughing up blood and suffering from debilitating headaches forced the botanist to conduct his work in warmer, more tropical climes. Although bryophytes actually thrive in cooler environments (like England), Spruce’s livelong mysterious bodily afflictions prevented him from living comfortably in these same conditions. This swashbuckling story of botanical espionage, though, obscures what Spruce spent most of his life obsessed with: those most minute and mundane specimens of the plant world - bryophytes, or mosses and liverworts. Today, Spruce is mostly remembered for this final leg of his expedition - under the orders of the famous Sir Clements Markham, he studied, cultivated, and eventually smuggled out young cinchona trees to plant in India as potential treatment for malaria. From 1849 to 1864, the botanist trekked along the Amazon and its tributaries, ending up in the Andes of Peru and Ecuador on a successful collecting mission for Kew Gardens and the English East India Company.