Introduction: bodies of knowledge
As an undergraduate at Oxford, Percy Bysshe Shelley, just as he was forming his literary identity, became fascinated by science, exploration and poetry. According to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley enthused about amazing discoveries that would give humankind a power it had never possessed before, a power to command the elements in even the remotest parts of the globe. With this power, he prophesied, life on earth could be transformed for the better, if only Europe would project its new technologies into foreign lands: ‘The balloon’, he declared, ‘will enable us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa? – Why do we not dispatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely beneath it, as it glides silently over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever.’1
It was not just the newly invented balloon that intrigued Shelley: advances in controlling water, fire and air all suggested ways of spreading civilisation and liberty across the world. ‘What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands of him who knew how to wield it . . . by electrical kites we may draw down the lightning from heaven,’ he exclaimed. Technology promised to make intervention in nature possible on a scale never before dreamed of: ‘The galvanic battery is a new engine, what will not an extraordinary combination of troughs of colossal magnitude, a well arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates effect?’
Shelley’s questions heralded a new age, an age in which we are still living today – a globalised age in which space, time, geography – life itself – have been transformed by science. As he foresaw, science would change Britain and transmit European power into the furthest regions of the world. It would do so because many of the inventions that excited him – Count Rumford’s heating devices, Benjamin Franklin’s lightning conductors, Volta’s battery and the Montgolfiers’ balloons – were turned into technologies for commanding not only the elements but also people’s lives at home and abroad. Shelley was right to link them with each other and with exploration, for at the Admiralty, the Royal Society and the African Association fellow Britons shared his dreams and had the power to make them a reality.
This book is about a three-fold relationship between exploration, science and literature that not only underpinned Shelley’s youthful ideas, but also spread deep into British culture during the years when Britain expanded its colonial possessions further across the globe than ever before. This relationship had significant effects on the British empire and on the attitudes of British people to that empire, changing Britons’ understanding of themselves and of foreigners. This relationship also changed the discourses involved: what we term exploration, science and literature were areas of activity that, while largely distinct from each other, were not always wholly separate or utterly unitary fields.
A few words at the outset about terms. Before the professionalisation of disciplines in the later nineteenth century, there were few hard-and-fast barriers between intellectual discourses and fewer blanket designations. What we call ‘science’ was, in practice, a number of areas of enquiry, which did not necessarily all share common goals and methods. Nevertheless, there were institutional parameters, and bodies concerned with enforcing them, ensuring that intellectuals could, in practice, define what was, and was not, acceptable as a proper scientific discourse. The sanction of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians was important, and both these bodies preferred work that followed inductive method and used an empiricist and realist style. The narratives of explorers, for example, were accepted as valid scientific documents if they followed a ‘plain, unvarnished’ style in which the explorer’s impressions were represented as objectively observed ‘evidence’. If they did not, they might be dismissed as travellers’ tales – fanciful fictions.2 It was also the case, however, that the explorer’s – or experimentalist’s – political opinions and professional associations influenced the reception of his work: the definition of the properly scientific was, in part, a political and social construct. In fact, ‘science’ and ‘scientist’ were concepts under construction in the period. Discoveries were not automatically established as truths or universally hailed as works of genius, for what was granted the authority of demonstrable fact depended on the person’s ability to shape his practice so that it satisfied the needs, or spoke to the anxieties, of groups within his culture. Focusing people’s hopes and fears within a persuasive explanatory frame was a rhetorical, and often political, activity. The way in which men of science represented their experiments and theories, the alliances they made with patrons, press and public all affected the way their activity was seen. So did their gender: the few women who had the opportunity to practise science were mostly presented as assistants to their male relatives or explicators of the original research of men. Effectively, what was accepted as scientific truth depended on its observation (or, in some cases, its defiance) of social conventions about what truth looked and sounded like and where it proceeded from.
Similarly, ‘exploration’ was – and is – a social and political construct, one that is bound up with the history of imperialism. The people whom Britons called heroic explorers were often, to indigenous peoples, something much more mundane: travelling traders, suspicious vagrants, helpless visitors or unwelcome invaders. In using the term here, then, we do not intend to uphold uncritically the mythmaking that defined travelling Britons as intrepid adventurers but categorised the people they met (and, in practice, depended upon) as primitive savages. Instead, we wish to investigate the voyaging of men such as Captain Cook as a process not dissimilar – or necessarily superior – to the voyaging of the indigenous people who themselves travelled – sometimes to guide the very white men who were later called explorers. We use the term exploration, accepting that it was not only white men who explored and that it did not consist of discovering uninhabited blanks on the map. It was a form of travel, engaging with unfamiliar people in places that were their homes.
While exploration embodied the activities of travelling and visiting, it also carried the freight of conquest and colonisation. We reflect all of these activities in our use of the term. Thus, we prefer ‘exploration’ as a concept to ‘travel’ since we do distinguish – as Britons in the period did – between the kind of travelling performed by men such as Cook, William Bligh, Mungo Park and Francis Masson and the kind that gentlemen performed on their tours of Europe, Scotland and Wales. Although it is true that travellers on the Grand Tour sometimes reported back upon the rustic ‘natives’ in similar manner to travellers in Africa, India and the Pacific, it remains the case that these European ‘natives’ had been known for centuries. The people whom Cook met and described, on the other hand, were unknown to Britons, and it is this encounter that we examine under the term ‘exploration’.
If ‘science’ and ‘exploration’ were not simple or wholly separate entities, neither was literature. Yet it too had parameters, patrolled by arbiters of the literary. Newly powerful critics such as Francis Jeffrey defined, in the influential journals that served the expanding public sphere, what was and was not acceptable as literature. Their critical definitions, ostensibly made on aesthetic grounds, were also shaped by class-consciousness and political bias. Though relatively narrow, such definitions did not categorically separate the literary from the non-literary by equating the literary with fiction, and the non-literary with fact, or by separating aesthetic writing from scientific writing. And even when iconic poets themselves – Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example – distinguished poetry from science, they accepted that the two discourses were polar opposites and thus shared certain characteristics. They were both forms of literature, parts of a Janus-faced enquiry into the principles that animate both mind and nature.3 In fact, it was not customary formally to divide fictional from factual writing until De Quincey in 1848 made fiction a defining characteristic of the ‘literature of power’ and claimed it was distinct from the ‘literature of knowledge’.4 By this distinction he fenced off travel writing, natural history, political journalism, to name but a few genres, from the realm of ‘high’ literature – that which communicated across time, through the aesthetic mode of the sublime.
It is the period before De Quincey’s distinction between the literature of power and the literature of knowledge that we cover in this book. In this Romantic era, writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth did not oppose their journalism or their travel writing to their fiction categorically. For Coleridge, literature could include a Theory of Life, an essay on criticism, and articles on William Pitt as well as poems, and all could work through the sublime and the beautiful. We reflect this practice in our construction of what constituted literature and the literary in the period, using the terms to designate poetry most frequently but not excluding the other discourses that writers such as Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and De Quincey himself wrote so voluminously.
Explorers such as Mungo Park and William Bartram also wrote texts that were of value both to naturalists and to poets. In effect a number of explorers were both literary and scientific writers simultaneously. Their writing reveals the overlaps between what we today designate as separate things. Obviously, though, overlaps do not constitute identity: it remains the fact that there are differences between sailing to the Pole, dissecting a corpse and writing a poem. The terms exploration, science and literature designate sometimes overlapping areas of thought and practice, which were sometimes performed by the same people, yet retained distinct cores and skills.
Our study begins with one significant date in the history of the Romantic era, and ends with another. The first, 1768, is the year that Captain James Cook embarked on the most important scientific voyage of the eighteenth century, sailing for Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia and returning to Britain with an unprecedented number of botanical specimens as well as charts, journals and calculations that put parts of the world on European maps for the first time. Cook was accompanied by a retinue of naturalists and astronomers – but not ‘scientists’ – since the word ‘scientist’ did not exist in 1768. It was coined the year our study ends – 1833 – in a historic meeting of a body that also did not exist when Cook set sail – the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 1833 was also, significantly, the year that Britain moved to ban a practice that, in 1768, was the bedrock of the national economy – colonial slavery. Clearly, between the two dates a major conceptual shift had occurred in the way Britons conceived of themselves and the world. We describe this shift as ‘looking beyond to see in’.
By 1833 science had transformed European understanding of the natural and human worlds and simultaneously transformed European modes of acting in those worlds. In the process, it had itself been changed: it had gained immensely in authority and power, was acquiring institutional and professional status, and was recognisable as a distinct and coherent body of knowledge and practice. Quite simply, ‘science’ had come of age as a European discourse and the ‘scientist’ was a new species with more social authority than his forebear, the ‘natural philosopher’ or ‘man of science’,5 had ever possessed.
What in 1768 was largely amateur natural philosophy performed by men (and not women)6 of science had, by 1833, begun to turn into institutionalised disciplines, some staffed by paid professionals, most with their own learned societies. The Royal Society was no longer the only major scientific body, for new societies such as the Linnean (1782), the Geological (1807) and the Wernerian (1808) flourished. So did new journals, especially after the invention of the steam press, with Nicholson’s Journal, the Philosophical Magazine, the Annals of Philosophy and the Edinburgh all giving sciences a much larger place in a public sphere that, indeed, they were helping to form. From 1825 that sphere began to widen still further, as Whig reformers responded to Henry Brougham’s calls to educate the labouring classes by founding Mechanics’ Institutes. These were intended to spread useful sciences, and within a few years were teaching chemistry and electricity in Newcastle, Derby, Edinburgh and many other towns. From 1828 the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge backed them up with a series of publications.
More than anything else, science’s profile was raised by astonishing discoveries made in the far Pacific. Cook returned with strange fruit plucked from tropical trees, with still stranger beasts from the antipodean bush and, most marvellous of all, a living ‘Indian’ from an island so remote that white men had not visited it before 1767. Old scientific disciplines such as botany and natural history were transformed as a result, while more recent ones such as race theory and comparative anatomy gained new scope. Meanwhile, armed with new instruments which, like Cook’s marine chronometer and Gowin Knight’s compasses, made exploration feasible, astronomers saw planets and inconceivably remote clusters of stars, navigators hunted the mysterious force that lay at the poles, while chemists harnessed gas and electricity, making the secret of life itself seem within reach. These scientific activities, in turn, pushed literary writing towards new subjects and styles. Works as diverse as Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Wordsworth’s The Excursion responded to the latest discoveries as they looked out across the seas in order to probe into Britons’ inner selves. Thus, what scholars have called ‘Romanticism’ arose partly as a response in writing (travel writing, scientific writing, literary writing) to encounters with foreign people and places. These encounters were seminal: they shaped not only the discourses that explicitly addressed distant cultures, but also those that concerned themselves with matters closer to home.
The relationship between exploration, science and literature cannot be addressed outside the contexts of colonialism and cultural imperialism. As many critics have emphasised in the past ten years, explorers often travelled in order to spread British dominion over new lands and seas. When science codified explorers’ journeys, it acquired authority. When Romantic literature responded to this codification, it gained power. Science and literature thus increased their social status as they processed information that was acquired as part of an effort to exploit foreign peoples. As bodies of knowledge, they grew strong by acquiring knowledge of new bodies. In turn, both science and literature gave Britons confidence to imagine and to execute further exploration for the benefit of empire.
The reverse was also true: throughout this book we show that the movement from exploration to science, to literature and back was not always one by which Britain’s imperial priorities were confirmed. The acquisition of information about new worlds and new peoples, and the use made of that information back in Britain, did not necessarily assist in the extension of British power across the world. What many writers learned led them to question the utility and morality of colonialism: Cook’s descriptions of the Society Islands, for example, gave Coleridge a utopian image, in contrast to which he could show Britain’s Caribbean slave islands to be dystopias. Other writers saw exploration and experimentation as a relentless pursuit of nature’s secrets that was a new and socially dangerous form of male egotism: Mary Shelley indicted the comparative anatomist Victor Frankenstein, the polar explorer Captain Walton and the Orientalist Henry Clerval. What she had read of contemporary scientific quests effectively led her to doubt the benefits of scientific knowledge as it was currently being constructed. Blake, meanwhile, linked exploration with militarisation, writing ‘he who shall train the Horse to War/ Shall never pass the Polar Bar’ (Erdman, p. 491). And even those, such as Robert Southey, who did not oppose per se the idea that the exploration and classification of the world should be a national goal, nevertheless gained leverage to attack particular colonial policies and specific justifications of empire.
In exhibiting a range of responses to the expansion of empire, Romantic-era writers helped shape a debate. The dominant imperialist ideology of the late Victorian period had not yet emerged; scientific and literary writers were part of a contest in which ideologies and stereotypes were in the process of being formed, often in conflict with each other and in contradiction with themselves. In this relatively early period of what became the nineteenth-century empire, travellers of different perspectives – men, women, deists, evangelical missionaries, slavers, abolitionists, doctors, generals, botanists and ethnographers – were debating with each other, and for the benefit of their readers (including their governments), the nature and usefulness of what (and who) they saw and collected. Writers used what explorers showed them to argue about the reasons and the ends for which Britain should be subjecting remote parts of the world to its scrutiny. Deskbound writers, men as diverse as the surgeon J. C. Prichard and the poet William Cowper, used the latest scientific surveys of indigenous peoples as evidence that Britain should found an empire dedicated to missionary proselytism rather than commercial profit. In other words, they developed a new and (as they saw it) more ethical vision of empire as a result of what natural historians wrote.
One of the things natural historians wrote was that indigenous people’s very bodies revealed their natural inferiority to whites. It is in reference to this that we have subtitled our book Bodies of Knowledge. Our story is about the ways in which certain discourses – structures of knowledge – gained definition, coherence and authority in relationship to the bodies of the indigenous peoples with whom Britain’s explorers and colonisers were in contact. And although that contact took place on the plains of America, in the deserts of Africa, in Indian villages and on tropical beaches, it was largely back in their mother country that Britons described and depicted it. Nevertheless, the representations made in the countries that Britons visited and colonised were also significant, affecting the views that visitors and visited had of themselves and each other and influencing the actions of both. So powerful were the representations of contact that Britons’ perceptions of their place at home as well as of their role in the world were changed (as were native peoples’).
What explorers and scientific and literary authorities declared about the people of remote lands made Britons see themselves in a new context so that even discourses that did not originate in direct response to indigenous people were affected by them. Thus, we examine some of those discourses, showing how sciences that had intrinsically little to do with foreign places were defined, by poets and public, in relationship to the black and brown bodies which explorers and colonists had brought into Britons’ consciousness. Vaccination (one of the most significant medical advances of the time) and the new chemistry of heat acquired unexpected public profiles because they became implicated in debates in which the relationship of Britons at home to the peoples of the empire was central. In many cases it was the writers we now call Romantic who implicated them: men such as S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Clarkson seized on new scientific discoveries to dramatise what they had come to see as the major moral problem facing Britons – the problem of exploitation of native peoples across the world. Science in Britain, it follows, often acquired its position in the contemporary public sphere as literary writers responded to it in their own discourses. Conversely, those literary writers found their own characteristic voices as they developed what they had read of contemporary exploration and science into works that made Britons peer into their consciences as they looked out towards the peoples of the empire.
Literature, Science and Exploration is divided into two sections. The first deals with the effects of overseas exploration and colonisation on scientific and literary discourses that spanned the empire, the second with the ways in which science and literature interacted in a British context, where exploration had opened up debates about Britons’ relationship to ‘foreign bodies’. Running through both sections are two common threads, or rather two substantial figures. The first, Sir Joseph Banks, himself an explorer, was one of the most influential men of science of the time. His influence, often neglected by historians of science as well as by scholars of Romanticism, was pervasive in the scientific and literary culture of the period. The second, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a theorist of science and a mentor of its practitioners as well as one of the most incisive analysts, as a journalist and poet, of the effects of exploration and empire at home and abroad. Although they never met, these two men were affected by each other again and again: Banks was an unwitting begetter of the Romanticism for which Coleridge is best known; Coleridge helped shape the public profile of the scientific practices that Banks had fostered.
In what follows, we summarise the developments in exploration, science and literature that form our subject, giving a schematic overview of the relationship that we assess in detail in the book as a whole.
EXPLORATION
Between 1768 and 1833 exploration transformed Britain’s position in the world. When Cook set sail for Tahiti, Britain had only recently wrested control of Quebec from France. It still ruled its American colonies from London. Spain was the imperial power in Mexico and ‘Louisiana’ – a vast area whose extent was a matter of imagination, for parts of America’s northwest coast had still to be charted. Britons knew still less of Africa, and were second to the Dutch in the exploration of South East Asia.
By 1833 the picture had changed vastly: Britain had lost its first (American) empire and, after fifty years of intense exploration and conquest, acquired a new one. It had colonised Australia, spread its missionaries to Polynesia, and planted its manufacturers in South America. It had penetrated Africa, and charted much of the polar seas and America’s west coast. It had crossed Canada, taken possession of India, occupied Burma and founded Singapore. Though challenged by Russian voyages of discovery and commerce, its navy was the most powerful in the world and its explorers were national heroes.
No explorers seemed more heroic than those who travelled to the Pacific and Africa. They fascinated the public because they endured great dangers and encountered people who had previously been so little known. But it was, more than any other single person, Sir Joseph Banks who made them fascinating, since he not only combined exploration with science but also represented the expeditions for public consumption. Banks was an explorer himself: in 1768–72, as a member of Cook’s voyage, he visited Tahiti and charted much of the New Zealand and Australian coasts. It was a major scientific achievement because Banks, on board as a gentleman of science with a retinue of botanists and assistants, increased the number of plant species known to science by 25 per cent. A second voyage was planned, but, after a disagreement, it left without Banks. Cook commanded, returning to Tahiti before pushing further south than ever before towards Antarctica (1772–5). The third, 1776–80, sailed through the Pacific to Alaska in search of the Northwest Passage. Cook, however, was killed at Hawaii.
Cook’s achievements were celebrated at home because they suggested that Britain’s culture of invention and manufacture allowed it to do what no other nation could. Science assisted exploration, which in turn provided men of science with opportunities to test their ideas in demanding conditions. It was his use of the newly invented chronometer for determining longitude, for example, and of the latest medically approved agents against scurvy, that allowed Cook to chart the furthest-flung regions of the globe.
The relationship between science and exploration appeared mutually beneficial and the voyages seemed free of the rapacious self-interest that characterised Britain’s colonies in India, America and the West Indies. In the words of his elegist Anna Seward, Cook had voyaged not in aid of war or exploitation, but from benevolence (although in fact he had secret instructions to claim land for the Crown as well as to test the latest scientific instruments).7 Cook, in other words, made Britons feel good about their global power, at a time when many were ashamed about the imperial violence their nation was inflicting in America, India and the slave islands of the Caribbean. He advanced geographic and scientific knowledge, without, it seemed, colonising or subjugating indigenous peoples. But after Cook died, Banks turned his legacy in a more nakedly imperialist direction. Essentially, our discussion of exploration tells the story of how he did so and to what effect.
By 1778 Banks had the scientific authority and political influence, as the President of the Royal Society and as a confidant of the King and his ministers, to initiate explorations that aimed to increase imperial profit as well as to further scientific knowledge. He became the shadowy orchestrator of a campaign of exploration designed not just to map but also to colonise the remotest parts of the world. He sent the very men who had sailed with Cook on a series of journeys of major importance in the history of science and exploration. Matthew Flinders circumnavigated Australia, showing it to be a single landmass, while his botanists collected and classified native species. William Bligh went to Tahiti to uproot the breadfruit trees that grew so plentifully there and take them to the West Indies, where they would provide a cheap food for slaves. After Bligh’s eventful voyage on the Bounty, Banks had him sent to Australia to govern the penal colony that had been established there as a result of his lobbying. George Vancouver, meanwhile, retraced Cook’s route along America’s west coast, claiming territory and seeking the Northwest passage that would, if found, permit speedy communication with Britain’s lucrative colonies in Asia. Vancouver did not find the passage, and neither did the later explorers whose expeditions Banks influenced: William Scoresby, James Ross, John Franklin, William Edward Parry. But the fact that they travelled at all owes far more than has often been realised to Banks’s power and to his vision. More than any other Briton, Banks had the combination of authority and imagination to hitch scientific exploration to colonial expansion.