William Dampier was an English privateer and navigator who circumnavigated the globe three times between 1686 and 1710 (Preston and Preston 2005). He was a keen observer of nature and during his travels HMS Roebuck Dampier collected a handful of plant specimens from Australia and Brazil. These he gave to John Woodward, a professor at Gresham College, who later gave them to the botanist William Sherard, who in turn bequeathed them to Oxford University when he died in 1728 (Harris et al. 2016). They are now kept in the Sherardian Herbarium at OXF. During a study of these historical collections, Stephen Harris (OXF) found a specimen collected by William Dampier in Salvador, Bahia, during his time in Brazil in April-May 1699 (Harris et al. 2016). The sheet is a single specimen with consisting of a small branch with three attached leaves and a single leaf not attached the branch, but clearly belonging to it (Fig. 2). The specimen has a label with the polynomial taken from Plukenet (1705) “Solanum Brasilianum, folio integro macronato glabro, Papas Americani floribus in summutate caulis. Pluk. Amalth. App. Tab. 454, f. 4” in Sherard’s hand. The specimen is a good match for the illustration in Plukenet (1705) and is likely to have been the specimen from which that plate was made. Plukenet was based in London at the time the Amaltheum botanicum was begin prepared (Jarvis 2007), and he was shown Dampier’s specimens by his “learned friend [Amicissimus & eruditis Vir]” John Woodward (Plukenet 1705: 215).

The branch shown in plate 454, fig. 4 of Plukenet’s Amaltheum botanicum (1705) is completely unarmed, has leaves with entire margins that are markedly discolourous, and are adaxially glabrescent and abaxially densely stellate-tomentose. The small axillary buds above the lower leaves are likely the elements misinterpreted by Sendtner (1846) as spines at the leaf bases (see Fig. 2). The open flowers have anthers like those of S. paniculatum (and other members of the Torva clade sensu Stern et al. 2011) that characteristically spread when dry. These morphological characteristics clearly show that the specimen belongs to the taxon currently recognized as S. paniculatum L.. Solanum paniculatum was described by Linnaeus in his second edition of Species Plantarum (1762: 267) based on an illustration “Jurepeba” from Willem Piso’s De Indiae utrisque re naturali et medici libri 14 (Piso 1658; see Knapp and Jarvis 1991). Solanum paniculatum is a common small tree or shrub occurring in all phytogeographical areas and regions of Brazil (Flora do Brasil 2020 http://floradobrasil.jbrj.gov.br/jabot/floradobrasil/FB127325) and northeastern Argentina and eastern Paraguay (http://www.solanaceaesource.org). It is also extremely variable morphologically, with leaf shapes in particular varying from deeply lobed to entire, even on an individual plant (see Fig. 16 in Knapp and Jarvis 1991). The Dampier specimen has four entire leaves, with glabrescent upper leaf surfaces beearing sparse stellate trichomes, and their shape is almost identical to distal portions of stems from a modern specimen (e.g. Medeiros Neto 27 at VIES) of S. paniculatum from Bahia and, like Dampier’s specimen, this very similar plant was collected with flowers in April.

Since Dunal (1813) did not have access to the Dampier specimen when he described S. brasilianum the Plukenet image (Fig. 1, upper right hand illustration, “Tab. 454, f. 4”) is the only original material (McNeill et al. 2012) and we select it here as the lectotype. Because the illustration is so diagrammatic, and the Dampier specimen is clearly that from which it was prepared, we select the specimen “Herb. Dampier n. 451”, collected by Dampier, as the epitype. Thus the discovery of this long-neglected specimen of S. brasilianum and its examination have allowed us to elucidate its true identity, and we here recognize S. brasilianum as a heterotypic synonym of S. paniculatum.