Sex, Botany and Empire (Icon Science) E-Book

Patricia Fara

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Icon Science
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 169

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

When the imperial explorer James Cook returned from his first voyage to Australia, scandal writers mercilessly satirised the amorous exploits of his botanist Joseph Banks, whose trousers were reportedly stolen while he was inside the tent of Queen Oberea of Tahiti. Was the pursuit of scientific truth really what drove Enlightenment science? In Sweden and Britain, both imperial powers, Banks and Carl Linneaus ruled over their own small scientific empires, promoting botanical exploration to justify the exploitation of territories, peoples and natural resources. Regarding native peoples with disdain, these two scientific emperors portrayed the Arctic North and the Pacific Ocean as uncorrupted Edens, free from the shackles of Western sexual mores. In this 'absorbing' (Observer) book, Patricia Fara reveals the existence, barely concealed under Banks' and Linnaeus' camouflage of noble Enlightenment, of the altogether more seedy drives to conquer, subdue and deflower in the name of the British Imperial state.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Chapter 1: The Three Ss

Chapter 2: The Scientific Swede

Chapter 3: The British Botanist

Chapter 4: Exploration and Exploitation

Chapter 5: Exoticism and Eroticism

Chapter 6: Imperialism and Institutions

Chapter 7: Heroes and Hemispheres

Further Reading

Notes

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-1-78578-227-5

Text copyright © 2003 Patricia Fara

The author has asserted her moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Dedication

For Delia and Michael

Acknowledgements

In writing Sex, Botany and Empire, I relied heavily on books and articles by other historians. I am particularly indebted to the work of Richard Drayton, John Gascoigne, Lisbet Koerner and Londa Schiebinger. In addition, I should like to thank Harriet Guest and Anne Secord for their helpful suggestions, and also Sujit Sivasundaram, who commented on a draft of the whole book.

About the Author

After gaining a degree in physics at Oxford University, Patricia Fara ran a company producing audio-visual material on computing before switching to the history of science. A specialist in 18th century England, she now teaches at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of Clare College. A regular contributor to radio and TV programmes such as In Our Time, she has published widely on the history of science. Her prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History was translated into nine languages, and other highly acclaimed books cover diverse topics including Isaac Newton, women in science, electricity, Erasmus Darwin and the First World War.

· CHAPTER 1 ·

THE THREE SS

That curiosity which leads a voyager to such remote parts of the globe as Mr B— has visited, will stimulate him when at home … As nature has been his constant study, it cannot be supposed that the most engaging part of it, the fair sex, have escaped his notice; and if we may be suffered to conclude from his amorous descriptions, the females of most countries that he has visited, have undergone every critical inspection by him.

Town and Country Magazine, September 1773

Harriet Blosset was rich, beautiful, and delighted to be watching an opera with her fiancé, a wealthy young Lincolnshire landowner called Joseph Banks. She probably never forgot the date – 15 August 1768. A messenger arrived at the theatre to inform Banks that he should report immediately to Plymouth, where James Cook was waiting for him on the Endeavour to set sail for the Pacific Ocean. During dinner at her family home that evening, Banks drank heavily while she vowed tearfully to live quietly in the countryside. Left behind to embroider waistcoats for her absent lover, Miss Blosset plunged into depression and became obsessed with death. In contrast, Banks rapidly recovered from their separation; he was away for nearly three years and had a marvellous time.

The Endeavour expedition to Tahiti and Australia is central to this book because it changed not only Banks’s life but also the pattern of British science. The ingenuous young botanist became President of London’s Royal Society, where he reigned over an international scientific empire for more than 40 years. Although he was never allowed to forget the sexual slanders about his early exotic adventures in the Pacific region, Joseph Banks became a powerful administrator who convinced the British government that investing in scientific research would benefit the country’s commercial and imperial expansion. More than any other single individual, Banks welded together the Three Ss – Sex, Science and the State.

* * *

Backed by the Admiralty and the Royal Society, Cook sailed the Endeavour towards Tahiti in order to observe a rare astronomical event, the Transit of Venus, when the planet crosses in front of the Sun. Cook’s ship was packed with shiny brass instruments under the care of navigators who had been specially trained to use them. This was the first of Cook’s three round-the-world voyages, and one of the earliest scientific expeditions to be funded by the state. Banks, however, was paying for himself and his seven servants and assistants, because collecting foreign plants was not the sort of project that attracted government money. Banks was no scholar – he had struggled through the classics syllabus at Harrow and Eton and failed to complete his degree course at Oxford. But he had been fascinated by botany since he was a child, and he pulled strings at the Admiralty so that he too could travel on the Endeavour. Banks was enthusiastic about the new system for classifying plants and animals that had been introduced by the Swedish expert Carl Linnaeus, now an elderly man but still much admired. As Banks set sail for the Pacific, he probably reflected on Linnaeus’s youthful expeditions to the Arctic regions, and perhaps fantasised that one day he would supplant Europe’s great botanic emperor – a dream that did, in fact, come true.

How appropriate, many people must have thought, that Venus, the planet of love, was to be observed from the island of Tahiti. Discovered only the previous year by a British expedition led by Samuel Wallis, Tahiti already represented an exotic paradise for Europeans, an earthly Garden of Eden. According to travellers’ reports, the fine climate and fertile soil nurtured an uncorrupted natural society, a people who lived in harmony, totally free of the decadent vices plaguing Western civilisation. Above all, the Tahitians supposedly suffered none of the sexual inhibitions that so restricted English enjoyment; on the contrary, the gratification of erotic desire was seen as one of life’s major objectives.

When Wallis sailed close to the island in his Dolphin, he was immediately struck by the stunning scenery, but later marvelled even more at the social customs. At first, the crew members and the local inhabitants were mutually suspicious. For several days, they negotiated language barriers while also deciding how much they could trust one another. Not surprisingly, the Europeans resorted to their guns, and several Tahitians died before an effective system of bartering was discovered, in which sex was the main unit of currency. As canoe-loads of lovely young women were paddled around the Dolphin, even the chronically ill members of the sick bay rallied and begged permission to go ashore.

The Tahitian women initially allowed themselves to be enticed with trinkets, but as time went by they cleverly raised the price of seduction. There was no iron on Tahiti, so a metal that was commonplace in England there became a valuable commodity as the women insisted on receiving longer and longer nails. The ship’s master disdainfully recorded events as though he himself were not participating: ‘all the Liberty men carryed on a trade with the Young Girls, who hade now rose their price for some days past, from a twenty or thirty penny nail, to a forty penny, and some was so Extravagant as to demand a Seven or nine Inch Spick.’ Although the carpenter swore that he was guarding his supplies closely, he probably made a handsome profit, since the Dolphin began to disintegrate as nails and cleats were pincered out of the wood.

A few months later, a French expedition landed on the island, and their ecstatic reports reinforced Tahiti’s reputation as an idyllic Utopia of free love, an Elysian paradise currently available on Earth to ordinary mortals. By the time that Cook and Banks arrived in 1769, the islanders were suffering from sexually transmitted infections which they called ‘Apa no Britannia’ – the British disease. Cook struggled to maintain discipline among his men, ordering them back to the ship when they disappeared on shore. But he also had an anthropological zest for joining in local practices, and he ate roast dog, shaved himself with a shark’s tooth, and stripped to the waist so that he could attend traditional ceremonies. Suppressing his own emotions, he dispassionately noted that erotic dancers ‘keep time to a great nicety’ (although he did lose count as one naked soloist twirled around); Cook also survived a strange Sunday which opened with a Christian service and closed with what he drily called ‘an odd scene’ of public sexual intercourse.1

By the standards of his age, Cook was a tolerant man who tried hard to observe and analyse without judging. Inevitably, his measured neutrality sometimes wavered. Tones of moral outrage crept into his journals, and he found it impossible not to condemn the promiscuity he witnessed. Banks had no such qualms – he was there to enjoy himself. Although Cook might remain a spectator, Banks revelled in being a participant, confessing his escapades with the same self-congratulatory candour as James Boswell (who naturally longed to visit Tahiti as soon as he heard that it rivalled London for romantic delights). The female dancers found it advantageous to keep their eccentric visitors happy, and Banks readily believed that they singled him out for special attention. After their leader had pirouetted naked in front of him and presented him with some cloth, he ‘took her by the hand and led her to the tents accompanied by another women her freind’. Sometimes he joined in the dancing himself, wearing only a loin cloth but not ‘ashamd of my nakedness for neither of the women were a bit more coverd than myself’.

His special ‘flame’, he wrote, was Otheothea, the personal attendant of a high-ranking woman called Purea – or Queen Oberea as she was mistakenly called by the Europeans, who misheard her name and elevated her rank because they were insensitive to fine social distinctions between people they lumped together as an inferior race. During the Dolphin’s visit, Purea had taken over Wallis’s social agenda. She distracted him from perpetrating further carnage among the islanders by entertaining, massaging and feeding him; convinced of her devotion, he rewarded her with lavish presents. By the time that the Endeavour arrived, Purea had been defeated in a civil war, but she still tried to manipulate the island’s uninvited guests, even organising a ritual copulation ceremony for Banks to observe.

Banks’s subsequent notoriety as a Pacific rake hinged on an incident in Purea’s canoe, where she had invited him to spend the night. Because of the heat, he discreetly explained, ‘I strippd myself’ and yielded to Purea’s suggestion that she look after his clothes. When he woke up a bit later, he discovered that his elegant white jacket and waistcoat with silver frogging had disappeared, along with his pistols and gunpowder. After handing over his musket to one of Purea’s men to keep guard, Banks settled back down to sleep, but was forced to emerge the next morning with a borrowed robe wrapped round his shoulders, ‘so that I made a motley appearance, my dress being half English and half Indian’. Purea, Banks concluded sadly, had probably colluded in the theft of his garments and weapons. After trying unsuccessfully to negotiate some pigs in compensation, he shamefacedly trailed back to the Endeavour.2

* * *

Banks’s exploits in the Pacific were a gift for gossip columnists and satirists. For years after he arrived back in England in 1771, caricatures, pamphlets and articles mocked his sexual activities during the voyage. The Purea episode featured in many of the vicious poems written in what now seem painfully contrived rhyming couplets. This is a typical example:

She sinks at once into the lover’s arms,

Nor deems it vice to prostitute her charms;

‘I’ll do,’ cries she, ‘What Queen’s have done before’;

And sinks, from principle, a common whore.

In addition to being savaged for exploiting the Tahitian ruler, Banks was criticised for refusing to honour his engagement to Miss Blosset (although her family did successfully extract a substantial financial settlement from him). He was accused of opting for science rather than sex. Harriet Blosset’s ex-paramour had, critics sniped, been seduced by ‘the elegant women of Otaheite [Tahiti] … but she found her lover now preferred a flower, or even a butterfly to her superior charms’. Satirical poets voiced similar complaints about his abandonment of Purea. In one long defamatory epistle, Oberea (Purea) tries to lure back her British botanist by converting herself into a luxuriant plant and weaving her ‘wanton foliage round thy hand’. He has, she laments, deserted her for science – ‘at least … spare one thought from Botany for me’, she begs.3

Banks became known as the ‘Botanic Macaroni’ (Figure 1). The term ‘Macaroni’ was originally coined to denigrate the aristocratic youths who had acquired continental manners during their Grand Tour to Italy, but it became a more general term of abuse for deriding foppish young gentlemen who adopted ridiculous extremes of stylish clothing. The label was laden with sexual contempt. A Macaroni, sneered one journal, is ‘neither male nor female, [but] a thing of the neuter gender … It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’4 Just as plants were grouped into families, and people into tribes, so too the caricaturists identified different types of Macaroni, classifying them by the streets they paraded in, or the occupations they devised to fritter away their time.

Dressed in an ultra-fashionable coat and wig, the Botanic Macaroni carries a sword, by then no longer the essential prop of an elegant gentleman but the sarcastic (and highly symbolic) attribute of a Macaroni too effeminate to know how to use one. His right leg is swathed in bandages, a unique early reference to the gout that would later make him an invalid. Ineffectually smiling and clutching his magnifying glass, Banks is a botanical libertine whose excessive desire for women has been replaced by an obsessive preoccupation with plants.

Figure 1. ‘The Botanic Macaroni’ (1772), by Matthew Darly. (© The British Museum.)

Botany may now seem a harmless scientific pursuit, but in the late 18th century it was fraught with sexual allusions. When satirists jeered at Banks for offering an exceptionally large plant to Queen Oberea they were not being particularly original, even though in his case the joke carried extra bite because Banks really was a botanist. Throughout the Enlightenment period, lewd poems graphically compared women’s bodies with geographical features such as hills, rivers and creeks, while plants provided pornographic analogies for the sexual organs of both men and women. Legacies of this erotic botanic intensity survive in words such as ‘defloration’, the vibrant flower paintings of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and the floral place settings in Judy Chicago’s feminist art installation, ‘The Dinner Party’.

To make matters worse, even the scientific language of botany was saturated with sexual references. Banks ardently supported the controversial Linnaean system of classification, which relied on counting the numbers of male and female reproductive organs inside flowers. To describe different groups of plants, Linnaeus had used extraordinary terms like ‘bridal chamber’ and ‘nuptials’. For prudish Britons, this sexualised version of nature verged on the pornographic, and battles over botanical textbooks resembled current debates about allowing children to watch violent videos. Self-appointed moral guardians of society declared that they wanted to protect young women from the corrupting influence of botanical education. They clamped down on mixed flower-gathering expeditions, and sanitised floral vocabulary by introducing meaningless euphemisms. By allying himself with Linnaeus’s supporters, Banks opened himself up to widespread insinuations about his sexual activities.

* * *

One of the most successful parodies of Banks and his sexual prowess was Mimosa: or, The Sensitive Plant, which appeared with Banks’s name on the title page in 1779, seven years after his return from Tahiti. The book was published anonymously, but several Enlightenment writers appreciated the metaphoric potential of this plant that visibly shrinks and grows. It is hard to imagine modern adults laughing at, let alone buying, a long poem that slanders the sexual proclivities of prominent aristocrats through botanical innuendo. Nevertheless, such satires are rewarding to study because humour provides a marvellous entrée into other cultures. The opening sentences of the preface convey Mimosa’s flavour: ‘The world will determine with what justice I dedicate the SENSITIVE PLANT, to a Gentleman so deeply skilled in the science of Botany … The plains of Otaheité … rear that plant to an amazing height … and Queen Oberea, as well as her enamoured subjects, feel the most sensible delight in handling, exercising, and proving its virtues.’

Presumably the poem’s readers did not find such puns tedious, even when repeated several times in different versions. Four pages later, the anonymous author approached the conclusion of his dedication to Banks. ‘Men of science, with equal ardour, have entered on the same task, and you, Sir, stand foremost in the list of those, who, anxious for the propagation of the PLANT, have explored worlds unknown before, and brought home to your native land, discoveries of its virtues, and relations of its vigour.’5 Hardly subtle – yet significantly, the writer was drawing on familiar clichés of geographical and botanical pornography to colour scientific exploration with imperial overtones of possession, domination and exploitation.

This Mimosa dedication neatly ties together the Three Ss – Sex, Science and the State. Its visual counterpart is Figure 2, another Macaroni caricature of Banks. As in ‘The Botanic Macaroni’, the redundant sword and elaborate feathers hint at sexual ambiguity. Banks had scoffed at the young gentlemen who wanted to complete their education in Europe; his Grand Tour, he had declared, would be one round the whole world. Although he took every opportunity to enjoy himself, Banks regarded himself not as a tourist but as a traveller. Like Linnaeus before him, he wanted to capture the world by classifying it scientifically. And here Banks is being mocked for these imperial pretensions, his feet uncertainly straddling the two halves of the globe. In order to enlarge his scientific collection, he vainly strives to catch a butterfly, symbol of triviality. The caption sneers:

Figure 2. ‘The Fly Catching Macaroni’ (1772), by Matthew Darly. (© The British Museum.)

I rove from Pole to Pole, you ask me why,

I tell you Truth, to catch a ___Fly!

Like modern political cartoons, these Macaroni caricatures are superficially funny but also hint at deeper criticisms of social structures. Cook’s voyage of exploration was no naïve search for scientific truth. The astronomical and botanical observers on board did, of course, make many new discoveries, but the voyage’s backers had provided funding to meet commercial and political objectives. Banks complained about the dishonesty of royal hosts who stole the clothes of their sleeping guests, but apparently had no compunctions about theft on an international scale. While he was taking over the indigenous women and plants, Cook was securing Pacific territories for the British nation.

There is no single correct way of interpreting the past: as people try to make sense of their own lives, they repeatedly create new versions, new memories. Or, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it, life is lived forward but understood backward. Scientists like to browse through earlier centuries and pick out glorious ancestors whose illustrious achievements seem to presage their own success. To boost their own position, they construct stories that celebrate science’s inevitable progress, as if a torch of truth were handed on from one great man to the next (or, very occasionally, a woman). In these triumphant tales, Carl Linnaeus appears as a botanic forefather who introduced a major system of classification that is still in use today; Joseph Banks, on the other hand, features merely as an adventurous explorer, an assiduous disciple who used Linnaeus’s schemes to catalogue the plants and animals he collected.

This heroic style of telling history may be traditional, but it leaves many questions unanswered. To start with, it does not explain how, why and when science and its applications became so fundamental in society. For centuries, the top subjects were theology and the classics, and the balance only slowly started to tip towards science and mathematics. Historians often neglect the 18th century because it lacks famous figureheads such as Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin, yet this was a crucial period when science started to become established and gain prestige. Along with their Enlightenment contemporaries, Linnaeus and Banks fought hard to establish that scientific knowledge was valid and valuable.