Patience Schell's book addresses a series of tensions: between science as a universal endeavour and the national political context in which research is conducted; between a scientist's drive to achieve empirical knowledge and the challenges that evidence poses to conventional wisdom or belief; between the emerging practices of specialised scientific research and the informal social networks that make the actual research possible; and, finally, between European views and assumptions about other regions and the local knowledge that challenges approaches often seen as alien to what is relevant on the ground.
Chile is the locus where these tensions play out, roughly from the 1820s to the 1890s. The country was at this time concerned with transitioning from monarchy to independent nationhood, building national institutions, opening the economy to international trade and, most importantly, defining its boundaries and understanding the nature of its resources. Chile was (and is) a fragmented country geographically, confined for most of this time, at least until the War of the Pacific between 1879 and 1883, to a small perimeter from the town of Copiapó (latitude 27oS) to the Araucanian frontier at the Bío Bío River (37oS). The successive governments of Joaquín Prieto, Manuel Bulnes and Manuel Montt, each serving two consecutive terms of five years from 1831 to 1861, fully understood that to integrate the new nation they had to secure settlements along the Pacific Ocean coastline. Prieto and his minister, Diego Portales, made certain that Valparaíso would be the main port in the area, at the expense of the Peru–Bolivian Confederation in the 1830s; Bulnes took possession of the Straits of Magellan in 1843, and Montt, along with his minister Antonio Varas, made sure to colonise the lands below the Araucanian frontier in the 1850s. This was a country definitely on the move, but lacking the necessary tools to define precisely where it began and ended, and what was in it, from minerals to plants, insects, animals and human beings.
And this is where science comes in, or perhaps more appropriately, where science allied with global commercial-strategic designs comes in. Not surprisingly, Great Britain, now free from Spanish imperial interference, was actively investigating sea routes around Cape Horn and the Magellan Straits, looking not so much for the modest trade that the western mainland of South America could offer, as to the promise of what was beyond the Pacific Ocean, namely China, India and Australia. But be that as it may, there was clearly a confluence of interests between Chile's desire to establish its own boundaries and Great Britain's intent to secure the knowledge necessary to sail through one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world. It is here that Charles Darwin enters the story, as a (paying) guest of the HMS Beagle, captained by Robert FitzRoy, tasked with studying the hydrographical conditions of the area.
Of course, Darwin was more interested in what was on the land than in the water, and he literally jumped off the Beagle every chance he got to see what was animate or inanimate in the wind-swept plains of Patagonia, or in the more amenable locations of the central valley. Of his tireless endeavours in Chile numberless pages have been written, but what is less known, and what the author rescues admirably, is the network of contacts he developed in Chile, and how important the country was to the development of his theories. One of the people he met in Chile was a Frenchman, Claude Gay, who became the most active explorer, collector and recorder of Chile's flora, fauna, geography and history. Darwin moved on after The Origin of Species to more successful publishing endeavours, like his best-selling book on earthworms, but it was Gay (and the Chilean government) who focused most intensely on that narrow strip of land, with the aim of documenting and classifying everything on it. Gay's research might have been faulty, but there is no doubt that he was the pioneer modern specialist on Chile's natural endowments, and that he sparked an interest in the natural sciences within Chile. Others would follow, like a methodical Prussian, Rodulfo Philippi, and a keen-eyed Pole, Ignacio Domeyko, as well as a host of Chilean disciples, but the author gives proper credit to the French scientist originally commissioned by the Chilean government to map out the boundaries and the natural peculiarities of the emerging nation.
There is much more in this book that will be of interest to historians, scientists and other readers. Chile's contribution to science in general is one important aspect; the networks, friendships and quarrels among scientists constitute another. But above all, the most important contribution of this book is that it demonstrates beyond any doubt the significance of science to the building of a new nation in Latin America, a finding perhaps applicable within and well beyond the region. Despite all the pressing political and economic problems which most historians usually emphasise, and rightly so, the author demonstrates that there are other significant angles for understanding post-independence issues in nineteenth-century Latin American history. The world of science is one of them.
The caveats about this volume are few. The study is firmly based on a wide range of primary sources located in archives in Chile and the United Kingdom, but it would have been desirable to update the bibliography of published primary and secondary sources. For instance, since 2007 the Cámara Chilena de la Construcción, in association with the National Library and the Catholic University of Chile, has republished the 30 volumes of Gay's Historia física y política de Chile, all prefaced by leading scholars in the various fields on which he wrote. The same collection has also published relevant volumes by Rodulfo Philippi (Viaje al desierto de Atacama, 2008) and Ignacio Domeyko (La Araucanía y sus habitantes, 2010), which contain substantive introductory studies by Chilean scholars. An article on Claude Gay from 2002–3 by a leading historian of science, Rafael Sagredo, is cited in the bibliography, but Sagredo has published many relevant studies in the decade since. Simon Collier's Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), an extraordinary synthesis of the period covered by this book, is missing from the bibliography. Perhaps readers will be curious to consult these sources after perusing The Sociable Sciences. This book certainly provides a most motivating start.
