Introduction: Crabs and Pots
In the first volume of his Voyage to Jamaica, published in London in 1707, the physician, collector and natural historian Hans Sloane presented a great deal of evidence of a faraway place which he interpreted for his European readers in ways which both brought the Caribbean island closer to them and, at the same time, emphasized its distance and difference from what they knew.Footnote 1 This book, and its second volume, which did not appear until 1725, documented in words and pictures Sloane's eighteen-month visit to Jamaica in the late 1680s. He had travelled as the physician to the island's new governor—the Duke of Albemarle—and he recorded his voyage, his experiences as a medical practitioner (offering numerous case histories) and, most famously, a survey of the flora and fauna of the island. Indeed, most of the images in the book are engravings of plants gathered by and for Sloane, and many can be traced back, via the drawings made of them, to the original plant specimens stored in Sloane's herbarium, and now in the Natural History Museum in London. One of the prominent composite images in Sloane's book, however, does not simply record a natural specimen from Jamaica, but presents evidence of both people and nature (Fig. 1).
Crabs and Pots. From Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St Christophers, and Jamaica, vol. 1 (London, 1707), Plate II. Published by permission of the Natural History Museum, London.
The image is of a Jamaican land crab and a fragment of a clay pot found in a cave on the island. Although their visual representation—recto and verso—accords with the conventions of the objective description of natural-history specimens and material artefacts, the place of these objects in Sloane's book has more of the “curious” about it than that.Footnote 2 While the juxtaposition of these images on the page may have been simply a matter of convenience, and we don't know who instigated it, the arrangement certainly serves to invite reflection on similarity and difference.Footnote 3 The crab would have been, in its morphology, familiar from European coastal waters, but Sloane's later description informs his readers that these Jamaican creatures live on land in rabbit-like burrows, and that some species can be poisonous.Footnote 4 It is also very difficult to gauge their size from the engraving. How big might these crustaceans be? In turn, the ceramic fragment was, Sloane notes, a dirty red colour with two parallel lines of decoration near the handles. Again, the size is difficult to determine, as is the whole of which it was a part. Most significantly, this artefact has a particular history that Sloane relates in the text which, for the attentive reader, refers to the image. The pots were found in a cave alongside a human skeleton, and they had themselves held the “Bones of Men and Children”. The part that was illustrated was a fragment of one of these burial urns left after “the Negroes had remov’d most of these Pots to boil their Meat in”.Footnote 5 These disturbing human traces mark them out. Thus both the crab and the pot were presented to their audience via a combination of distanced, objective observation and affective written accounts that combined feelings of close familiarity and disquiet at difference.
The presentation of the crab and potsherd together, and in ways which suggest their similarity, is left unexamined in Sloane's text. The plate emphasizes morphology and materiality in engravings that lay the specimen or artefact open for the viewer, but the implicit comparison suggests some further mysteries to be uncovered. Both Dian Kriz and Christopher Ianinni have, in their readings of this and the other composite images of natural specimens and human artefacts that were part of Sloane's book, given detailed attention to the potential meanings of these juxtapositions. They argue that these are unsettled images that trouble the boundaries between nature and culture and are freighted with the violence and insecurity of England's early Caribbean empire. Rather than allowing Sloane's Voyage to Jamaica to present “a neutral space of pure knowledge” of nature and a vision of imperial control, they signal the legacies and memories of past and present violence, the history of the island's dispossessions and the uncertainties of empire at the distant periphery.Footnote 6
For Kriz, this image's instability comes, at least in part, from its historical location between Foucauldian epistemes. For her, the way of knowing implied in the image operates between early modern notions of “resemblance” (and of emblems) and modern ones of “pure visibility” rather than simply within one or the other.Footnote 7 Its instability, or the multiplicity of interpretations it opened up, becomes a representational problem specific to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. For Ianinni, also using ideas of emblematic natural history and Foucault's notion of epistemic transformation, there is more emphasis on geography: on where these images come from. He suggests that they do “almost the opposite” of what would be expected from natural history's supposed “radical effacement of historical context” through visualization. Instead, in Sloane, “The emblematic specimen travels to the reader freighted with troubling knowledge, not only of local conditions within colonial plantation societies but also of the new cultural and economic practices that link the West Indies to developments in the wider circumatlantic world”.Footnote 8 They come from Jamaica and its Atlantic world bearing knowledge both of nature and of mass death, and of the dangers of financial speculation. Such evidence of past times and distant places was, therefore, powerful, potentially troubling and always open to interpretation.
I begin with this example from Sloane's History of Jamaica because it suggests important relationships between eighteenth-century Europeans’ use of evidence of places far away in time and space and their conceptualization of the natural and the social. In particular, it suggests that these forms of evidence of past times and distant places spoke, in often contradictory and contested ways, to the troubled question of the differentiation of nature and civilization. What follows moves away from the specific case of Sloane's images to investigate further how evidence from historically and geographically distant places was used and understood in the long eighteenth century in ways that traversed those distances and, in doing so, preserved or erased them for epistemological purposes by using strategies—present in Sloane's work—such as distanced observation, eyewitness experience and disturbing or confirmatory similarities or differences. Doing so first requires attention to how the relationships between historical and geographical distance were understood by Enlightenment thinkers. This, I want to argue, involved, particularly for the Caribbean, attention to the troubled differentiation of the natural and the social (or what I will call the “civil”, following the usage of eighteenth-century historians and philosophers). The discussions that this produced about Caribbean nature, Caribbean civilization and the relationships between them demonstrate how these forms of evidence—and their various constructions of closeness and distance—were deployed by Europeans aiming to reconfigure the relationships between peoples in a world where distant places were being brought into new power-laden relationships with each other.
Eighteenth-Century History and Geography
Understanding the meanings of distant places and past times for eighteenth-century Europeans can usefully begin with a familiar sketch of the sort of history that different parts of the world might have.Footnote 9 This was a characteristic Enlightenment view of the world, and is best presented in a well-known statement which Edmund Burke made in a letter to William Robertson, the historian of America, in 1777:
I have always thought with you, that we possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human nature. We need no longer go to history to trace it in all its stages and periods . . . [N]ow the great map of mankind is unrolled at once, and there is no state or gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our view. The very different civility of Europe and China, the Barbarism of Tartary, and of Arabia. The savage state of North America, and New Zealand.Footnote 10
Here, a universal human history, and the Enlightenment account of its familiar developmental stages, map onto a geography that renders places “savage”, “barbarous” or “civilized”, albeit in different ways in different parts of the world.Footnote 11 Europe, China and India all have a past history of civilization, but they are not one and the same. In this view, the higher the civilizational ladder is climbed, the less the present and the future look like the past. This maps out some significant patterns of closeness and distance among the peoples of the world that only partly depend upon geographical proximity.Footnote 12 Humankind is considered as one, but is then strongly differentiated across space and time. The often geographically distant “savage” is seen as a key to the irrecoverable past of European prehistory, but also as radically different in kind from the European present. However, as will become clear, the neat categorical separations of this distanced, universalist vision of world are significantly disrupted by places, peoples and environments that don't easily fit.
Within this view of the world the investigation of history and geography involved interrogating the evidence of the pasts, presents and possible futures of different, often distant, places. This, because of the conception of history and geography, meant that those different places had different sorts of histories. Thus India, as is well known, was understood as having a glorious classical and civilized past that might, via the work of British scholars, be restored to remedy its fallen present. This can be seen in William Jones's famous comparison of Sanskrit with Latin and Greek, involving much work on ancient inscriptions; Colin Mackenzie's archaeological and antiquarian work; and the mistaken view in the 1780s that the astronomical observatories constructed in Jaipur by Jai Singh II in the 1720s were hundreds of years old and part of a deep historical and philosophical lineage that connected India and Europe.Footnote 13 Mesoamerica and South America, as Jorge Canizares-Esguerra has shown, were also the site of a lively contest over the nature of Mexica and Inca civilizations, and how the history of the New World might be written in the light of the Enlightenment in northern Europe, in Spain and among Atlantic Creole elites.Footnote 14 In contrast, the pan-European fascination with Captain Cook's three voyages in the Pacific—the journals of the voyages being some of the most widely read books of the 1770s and 1780s—were in the service of a discussion of the state of nature which blended concerns with natural history with an examination of the customs and manners of indigenous people.Footnote 15 In the seventeenth century the locus of this discussion had been the forests of North America, signalled by John Locke's famous dictum that “In the beginning the whole world was America”.Footnote 16 This discussion on civilization and savagery was continued by the Scottish literati.Footnote 17 Its shift to the Pacific similarly promised insights into both the nature of humankind and the circumstances of the European past. At the same time, Africa was seemingly of comparatively little interest.
All of these parts of the world had a natural history. Their flora and fauna, particularly their flora, might be collected, described and classified. Some parts of the world also had what we might call, following some eighteenth-century examples, an extensive civil history too: a history of civilization that it was the purpose of universal histories to examine and explain.Footnote 18 But what about the places that did not fit neatly onto this great map of mankind? What, for example, was to be made of the Caribbean? It certainly had a natural history, as Sloane had abundantly shown for Jamaica via its crabs, birds and numerous plants, and many others would subsequently show further. Yet, from the perspective of Europeans, and taking Jamaica as the example, its civil history only began with the arrival of the Spanish in the late fifteenth century and, particularly for the British, with their taking of the island from the Spanish Empire in 1655. So, for some authors, these natural and civil histories could be easily separated. Thus Henry Barham, a Jamaican doctor and correspondent of Sloane’s, was the author of two different works in the early eighteenth century, both of which remained unpublished at the time: first, his compendium of Jamaican botany, the Hortus Americanus, which detailed the plants of the island and their uses, and was finally published in 1794,Footnote 19 and second, an account of Jamaican history under the Spanish and the British that remained in manuscript.Footnote 20 Later, in 1756, Patrick Browne, another doctor and botanist, began his Civil and Natural History of Jamaica by telling his readers that he would concentrate on the island's natural history, since, as he said, it was more interesting to him and it was where “I thought my researches more likely to lead to public advantage”. He completed the first part of his history in only twenty-six pages, saying, “In the part which treats of the Civil state of the Island, I own I have been the most brief”, and he then devoted more than five hundred pages to the island's natural history.Footnote 21
However, the image from Sloane's Voyage to Jamaica of the crabs and the pots, and the ways that depiction signals how the description of the natural world could not be easily separated from troubled imperial histories, serves as a reminder that the boundary between the natural and the civil was not so easily drawn, or so self-evidently present, in the Caribbean. In what follows I want to examine what both “nature” and the “civil” meant in relation to the Caribbean, and what the relationships between them were seen to be. This, I argue, depended upon how different sorts of evidence from often historically and geographically distant contexts were used in ways that manipulated a variety of relationships of proximity and distance for authors and readers. At stake in these arguments about the natural and the civil, and the closeness or distance of different branches of humanity, were crucial questions of identity and power in a slave society. In order to do this I first want to examine the question of evidence for what were taken to be the important questions about Caribbean nature, and to argue that this was a nature with particular “civil” qualities that had to be attended to. I then want to address the counterquestion of what the “civil” denoted in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century and to examine the ways in which evidence was used to define or erase the boundaries between the natural and the social, between men and beasts, in some significant answers to this question. Doing so demonstrates that very different sorts of evidence were being used to traverse the substantial spatial and temporal distances involved. Those seeking to resolve these questions drew, in various ways, upon empirical observations, travellers’ tales, classical writings and philosophical reasoning. All of these presented very different mediations of temporal and spatial distances.Footnote 22 Detailed empirical case histories and travellers’ tales offered eyewitness accounts which made particular events present to distant readers. Classical scholarship and philosophical speculation presented more universal and distanced accounts of humankind and its relations to nature. This meant that there were no simple or agreed ways of making these different forms of evidence commensurate with each other, or of adjudicating on the differences between them.
Caribbean Nature
In large part, natural history in the Caribbean was botany, and that is what is focused on here. Following Sloane's botanical explorations in the late seventeenth century, a series of doctors, clergymen and natural philosophers, both those visiting the islands and those resident there, collected, identified, named and preserved specimens of Caribbean plant life. Henry Barham, Patrick Browne, Griffith Hughes, Arthur Broughton, Thomas Clarke, Thomas Dancer, William Wright, Olof Swartz and others all, variously, made collections of plant specimens, published often richly illustrated accounts of the natural history of the islands, or did both.Footnote 23 Across the long eighteenth century there was the now familiar story of the use of the Linnaean system of classification to identify and name plants within an increasingly global system of natural knowledge which ordered the multiplicity of global nature as it was “discovered” in all corners of the world.Footnote 24 This was coupled with the construction of extensive networks of botanical power and knowledge, such as that which Sir Joseph Banks operated from London, and especially from Kew Gardens. These increasingly served to organize a “colonial botany” directed at the agricultural “improvement” of the world. Indeed, an expanding network of botanical gardens across the European empires in Asia and the Americas was seen as the means through which this could be pursued. This network of sites and specimens served to produce an economic or medical botany focused on questions of acclimatization and transplantation which were one of the “big sciences” of the global eighteenth century.Footnote 25 Nature was, as it were, visibly and tangibly on the move within this world of empires. Not only were the texts and images of works of natural history changing the relationships of proximity and distance between people, places and plants, but those plants themselves were appearing as transplanted exotics or newly familiar species in previously distant European and colonial environments.
The issues of evidence for this sort of natural history related to particular questions. What is this plant? Where has it come from? Where will it grow? What uses can it be put to? These questions might be answered differently, or using different means, in Europe or in the Caribbean and other parts of the world, and across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as field observation, the construction of herbaria and nascent laboratory science offered different forms of knowledge.Footnote 26 They were, however, questions that were being asked by gardeners and natural historians of all sorts, from Kew's centre of calculation to the gardens of plantation overseers.Footnote 27 They were also questions that, in the eighteenth century at least, required forms of evidence, and ways of producing evidence, that were “civil” as much as they were supposedly “natural”. This was because Caribbean nature itself had a civil history. It was, indeed is, necessarily recognized as a hybrid nature of transplantation—a mix of plants from here and there—a botanic assemblage with a history of human involvement and engagement which cannot be understood outside the histories of trade, empire and slavery, and the transplantations of people, practices and capital that they established. This was evidently true of the plantation economy's cash crops, such as sugar, coffee and indigo. Yet it was also true of trees, fruits and flowers such as logwood, cashew, bananas, peanuts, hibiscus, tamarind and poinsettia; and of the grasses, beans and vegetables that fed people and animals—themselves transplanted too—on the islands.Footnote 28
Responses to this varied. As Jill Casid has argued, the evidence of this abundant and vibrant Caribbean nature that was presented in Europe through the publication of natural histories of the islands by Sloane, Browne, Hughes and others was a particular way of seeing land and life on the islands which obscured, through the textual and visual evidence of the multiplicity of flora, another humanized (or civil) nature that was simultaneously being produced. This was the increasing dominance of the slave plantation complex in the Caribbean landscape and its reliance on a few monocultural cash crops, notably sugar cane. This plantation landscape was, in many ways, a form of humanized nature whose central human characteristic was dehumanization.Footnote 29 Natural histories of the region presented evidence of abundant nature that rendered the Caribbean distantly exotic, but avoided the troubling depiction of an environment and society defined by sugar and slavery.
Yet this Caribbean nature was also made familiar and was “civilized” through these natural histories via the naming of plants and other representational practices.Footnote 30 For example, as shown in Figure 2, Griffith Hughes's Natural History of Barbados aligned, with an eye to the idea of nature's hierarchies—and the bigger the tree the better—his fine illustrations with metropolitan figures of status, power and influence.Footnote 31 In the same vein, Hans Sloane dedicated his first volume to Queen Anne, and William Wright dedicated his Hortus Jamaicencis, three large volumes containing around six hundred dried plant specimens, to the Earl of Buchan.Footnote 32 Sloane and Browne also embedded their botanical practice in the social landscape of Jamaica's plantocracy, identifying on whose land particular plants could be found and displaying evidence of that in their publications. In these ways, exotic Caribbean nature might be tamed and brought closer to familiar European concerns.
Palm dedicated to the Prince of Wales. From Griffith Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados (London, 1750), Plate IV. Published by permission of the Natural History Museum, London.
Another civil history of Caribbean nature was constructed through Jamaica's botanical gardens, whether they were privately or publicly owned. In Arthur Broughton's catalogue of the contents of the notable garden constructed by Hinton East in the mountains of Liguanea, Caribbean nature was organized via Linnaeus's system, but also overtly presented as part of a history of transplantation (Fig. 3).Footnote 33 In Broughton's catalogue it was the hybrid nature of the garden that was represented, highlighting the civil history of plant movement and transplantation. This was also evident in more public renderings of Caribbean botany.Footnote 34 Thus, in Jamaica's government-sponsored botanical garden at Bath in St Thomas's Parish in the 1780s, this civil history was memorialized via an obelisk to Admiral Rodney. This celebrated not only his defeat of the French at the Battle of the Saints, which saved the island of Jamaica from capture, but also his own capture of plants—including mango, cinnamon and a mimosa—from a French ship bound from Mauritius to Saint Domingue, and his delivery of them to the botanical garden for the good of the island. The obelisk, placed “in the Centre of our Garden over a Well in which is to be included an Hydraulic Machine for raising Water,” bore the Latin inscription
Nature's Assemblage. From Arthur Broughton, Hortus Eastensis (Kingston, Jamaica, 1792), 11. Published by permission of the Natural History Museum, London.
Thus the botanical garden, designed to build a public botany for an age of imperial reform, delivered lessons in natural history that were also lessons in civics.
As a result, evidence about plants such as the breadfruit which were eventually brought to the Caribbean from the Pacific by Captain William Bligh, came both from the observations of their characteristics, and from an understanding of their history and geography. For example, the plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood conducted a whole range of experiments in imperial transplantation in his Jamaican gardens.Footnote 36 He argued from his experience of the island's soil, topography and climate that Jamaica had “such a Variety of Soils & Situations of difft Temperature, that I am apt to imagine, most of ye Fruits, both of the Torrid, & Temperate zones might be cultivated with success, and that the latter might be Naturalized by degrees”. And he also argued as early as 1776, and presumably from his reading, that the island could support “the Bread Fruit & other Productions of Otaheite . . . &c in the Pacific Ocean”.Footnote 37
Yet this raises the question of who could give plants a history by changing their geography, and the related question of who could be a botanist in the sense of producing useful evidence about plants and their transplantation and acclimatization. As Judith Carney and Nicholas Rosomoff have argued in their book In the Shadow of Slavery, if the focus is on subsistence crops, not cash crops, then the extent of Africa's botanical legacy in the Americas comes into view. Bananas, guinea grass, pigeon peas, sorghum and many other subsistence crops depended for their transfer to the Americas on the agency, expertise and skill of enslaved Africans and on the cultivation of these plants in what Carney and Rosomoff call “the botanical gardens of the dispossessed”, the provision grounds and gardens where the enslaved grew their own food to ensure survival within the plantation complex.Footnote 38
It is certainly the case that evidence about plants, particularly those that might be used as medicines or poisons, was sought from African sources in the Caribbean, and the Amerindians they might have learned from too. As Hans Sloane put it in the first volume of his Voyage to Jamaica, “Another use of this history might be to teach the inhabitants of the parts where these plants grow, their several uses, which I have endeavour’d to do, by the best information I could get from books, and the inhabitants, either Europeans, Indians or Blacks”.Footnote 39 Indeed, as Susan Scott Parrish has argued for natural history in the Atlantic world more generally, the validation of knowledge, especially of poisons, as originating from an African source could be crucial to it being accepted as true.Footnote 40 However, that information had to be suitably mediated, by men like Sloane, for it to gain credibility in Europe.Footnote 41 As a result, the “uncivilized” underpinnings of the civil history of Caribbean botany were always present and always being both affirmed and denied. By making proximate indigenous and enslaved botanical practitioners who were otherwise kept at a distance, the reliance on these forms of knowledge threatened hierarchies of expertise, ideas of precedence in “discovery” and notions of control over the global and local processes of transplantation. Such evidence needed careful representation. For example, the ackee tree that grew in the botanical garden of Hinton East was identified in Arthur Broughton's catalogue as having been “brought here in a slave ship from the coast of Africa”, but it is then attributed to Dr Thomas Clarke, the first superintendent of the government-sponsored botanical garden at Bath.Footnote 42
As I have emphasized, the natural history of the Caribbean was always a civil history, and that civil history could never be entirely a European matter, entwined as it was in the history of trade, empire and slavery. Evidence about plants quickly became evidence about historical processes of movement and transplantation, whether that involved heroic acts such as that of Admiral Rodney, projects like the building of botanical gardens or collections of botanical specimens, or the movements of plants on slave ships and into the provision grounds. The last of these meant that enslaved Africans were botanists too. They had also been part of producing, and knowing, the hybrid nature of those islands. Evidence of these movements, and their transformation of relationships of proximity and distance, threatened to challenge powerful Eurocentric notions of identity and agency. At least, that was the case unless the category of the “civil” could be thoroughly reworked so as to exclude Africans from these claims. In the next section I want to address the questions of evidence around the definition of what was “civil” in the Caribbean. This means examining the boundaries between the “social” and the “natural”, and focusing on the question of who was human.
Caribbean Civilization
The Jamaican historian and botanical writer Edward Long had a simple answer to the question of African botanists. It came from evidence about American animals. “Brutes”, he wrote, “are botanists by instinct”, and he cited examples from Alexander Esquemeling's History of the Buccaneers of America (1678) detailing how Costa Rican monkeys had applied moss and chewed-leaf poultices to gunshot wounds. Long concluded that “whether man in his rude state possesses any similar instincts we are uninformed, but probability is in the affirmative”. In support of this suggestion he argued that while “Negroes” had a range of medicaments, including “lime juice, cardamoms, the roots, branches, leaves, bark, and gums of trees, and about thirty different herbs”, which had been shown to be “wonderfully powerful” in suppressing tropical diseases “which have foiled the art of European surgeons”, this could effectively be discounted as botanical medicine. This was because it was not, Long argued, accompanied with thought, since “the Negroes generally apply them at random, without any regard to the particular symptoms of the disease; concerning which, or the operation of their materia medica, they have formed no theory”. Like the Costa Rican monkeys, they had not developed through rational thought their own medical skills and knowledge. Instead, it came from “the Creator . . . who has impartially provided all animals with means conducive to their preservation”.Footnote 43
Long, who has been called “the father of English racism”, keenly pursued this logic.Footnote 44 In his History of Jamaica of 1774, and in his notes towards a second edition of that work which are in marginal annotations and on papers bound into a copy of the first edition in the manuscript collection of the British Library, Long sought evidence which would help examine the nature of the boundary between the human and the animal. Doing so as part of a work of history was a direct challenge to the relationships of historical and geographical proximity and distance established by the universal histories of the “great map of mankind”. Instead of the world's peoples being defined by their manners and customs, and subject to change and civilization, “races” would be defined and fixed in history and geography by the nature of their bodies and the natural capacities of their minds.
In assessing the boundary between the animal and the human, the key question that Long and others thought needed answering was “Can the orangutan speak?” Long argued that it could, or that it was at least worth considering what it would mean to try and teach it, since the experiment—even if thought ludicrous—would provide crucial evidence however it turned out:
How far an oran-outang might be brought to give utterance to those European words (the signification of whose sounds, it is plain . . . he has the capacity to understand . . .), remains for experiment. If the trial were to be impartially made, he ought to pass regularly from his horn-book, through the regular steps of pupilage, to the school, and university, till the usual modes of culture are exhausted upon him. If he should be trained up in this manner from childhood . . . to the age of 20 or 25, under fit preceptors, it might then with certainty be determined, whether his tongue is incapable of articulating human languages.Footnote 45
It would be astonishing, Long thought, if the orangutan could not do as well as “a natural idiot” or a parrot, and thought it likely that these primates had some sort of language by which they communicate among themselves.
Long's target here was the French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, who, in his Histoire naturelle (1749) had compared “Hottentots” and “Orang Utangs” and concluded, echoing Descartes, that “Whatever resemblance . . . takes place between the Hottentot and the Ape, the interval between them is immense”, since the former is endowed with the capacities of thinking and speaking, “whereas the ape has not the necessary principle [of thought]”.Footnote 46 God had made them different even if they looked the same and had similar anatomical structures, of brain or vocal organs, revealed by dissection. As Long put it,
According to Mr. Buffon, he [the orangutan] has eyes, but sees not; ears has he, but hears not; he has a tongue, and the human organs of speech, but speaks not; he has the human brain, but does not think, forms no comparisons, draws no conclusions, makes no reflections, and is determined, like brute animals, by a positive limited instinct.Footnote 47
Yet, as Long wrote in the margin of his own copy of his History, “But how can we be sure of this fact?”Footnote 48 Moreover, as he had argued in the first edition, “when we compare the accounts of this race [the orangutan], so far as they appear credible, and to be relied on, we must, to form a candid judgement, be of opinion that Mr. Buffon has been rather too precipitate in some of his conclusions”.Footnote 49
Therefore, in both his printed first edition and his manuscript notes, Edward Long sought evidence to refute Buffon: evidence from near and far, in time and space, which would address the question of the proximity of the animal and the human, and the relationship between nature and civilization. He gathered tales of monkeys, apes and primates; fragments from classical authors; accounts of dissections and animal behaviour (such as those of talking dogs and reasoning horses). These forms of evidence exhibited great differences in the epistemological appeals that they made to their readers on the basis of the distanced universality of their claims, the affective rhetoric of their arguments, or the credibility that came with historical or geographical distance or proximity. Yet they all shared the purpose of questioning the divide so strictly drawn by Buffon as his immense interval and aimed to bring much closer together the animal and the human.
Long also drew support from Enlightenment thinkers. He read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), particularly footnote 10, which discussed travellers’ accounts of great apes in order to support Rousseau's case, despite the travellers’ own conclusions, that there might “in fact be veritable savage men” who signal the original state from which what Rousseau calls “civil man” has elevated or perfected himself.Footnote 50 One clear signal of this elevation or perfection is that while both sorts of “men” are human, “savage man” cannot speak and “civil man” can. This conclusion of Rousseau’s, that “although the organ of speech is natural to man, nevertheless speech itself is not natural to him,” was taken up by another, less renowned, Enlightenment thinker read by Long.Footnote 51 This was James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, whose work Of the Origin and Progress of Language was published in 1773.
Monboddo's account of language's origins and progress was a universalist one which sought to address the question for all the world's humans, and delved deep into their prehistory to do so. He acknowledged the use of speech, and its connection to reason as “that which chiefly distinguishes us from the brute creation”, but he wanted to make this a problem to be solved rather than the solution in its own right to the question of the human. In short, Monboddo wanted to know how “the human race” had got into this position. Simply put, children are not born able to speak, they learn it. Likewise, there must have been a point when people could not speak, so what were the origins of language, and how did it progress?Footnote 52
In pursuit of an answer, Monboddo made several significant arguments. First, there was the separation of language into the idea and its expression as sound. He argued that for a sound to be language rather than, for example, a cry of pain, the idea must come first. This makes his study of language a study of the origin and progress of thought and its relation to reason. Second, he argued that language, both as ideas and as their articulation as sounds, was not natural to “man”, it was learned. Language is, therefore, social or, as Monboddo termed it, political (Rousseau would have said “civil”). Therefore the development and progress of language depended upon a certain state of the development of civil society. For Monboddo, then, society comes before speech. So, when reflecting on the animals that were closest to humans in this capacity, Monboddo identified beavers rather than apes, since beavers, he argued, exhibit a highly developed social (or political or civil) organization.Footnote 53 Finally, and perhaps predictably, Monboddo offered a history of mankind, a characteristic development through stages of “progress”, where both thought and language are developed together with advancing forms of civil society. To understand this, Monboddo offered extensive discussion of “barbarous languages”, giving a lot of attention to Huron in particular, and to classical languages.Footnote 54
While this notion of progress drew on Enlightenment stadial theory, the question of origins in Monboddo's understanding of humanity and language also involved a radical sense of the development of the human out of the animal state. As with all such theories he had some difficulty with the starting point. Where could language have come from in the first place? And he had to suggest that the very smallest first step might have involved divine intervention. But from there everything, both mental and physical—the processes of abstraction in thought from sense impressions and the articulation of sounds by moving throat, tongue, lips and so on—all were learned and developed. As he put it,
This progress, in the individual, is very well known; but we propose here to exhibit the species itself in its infancy,—first mute; then lisping and stammering; next by slow degrees learning to speak, very lamely and imperfectly at first; but at last, from such rude essays, forming an art the most curious, as well as most useful among men.Footnote 55
This radical notion of the “progress” of the human from brute origins brought “man” and “beast” close together in other ways. Lord Monboddo was prepared to countenance, even when he knew that others would not, seventeenth-century Dutch stories of a race of men with tails in the Nicobar Islands, arguing that “we have not yet discovered all the variety of nature, not even in our own species”.Footnote 56 And he is best known for stating that orangutans
are proved to be of our species by marks of humanity that I think are incontestable . . . [T]hey walk erect. They live in society, build huts, joined in companies attack elephants, and no doubt carry on other joint undertakings for their sustenance and preservation; but have not yet attained the use of speech.Footnote 57
They were, for Monboddo, Rousseau's “veritable savage men”. Indeed, like wild children unable to speak and the deaf and their education in language, the orangutan was crucial to Monboddo. His theory depended upon the possibility of the existence of non-speaking humans. In the orangutan he had found them. Or rather, it should be said that from a mixture of evidentiary traces from many places and times both near and far—translated and directly gathered travellers’ tales of exotic places which Monboddo knew stretched credibility, natural histories such as that of Buffon, anatomical specimens (some of which Monboddo had seen), and the accounts of the behaviour of individual animals transported to Europe—Monboddo discerned the outlines of an “Ouran Outang”. This was a composite beast that he located firmly in Africa as well as in Asia and one that suited his purpose of demonstrating the proximity of the human and the animal.Footnote 58
It was this that was picked up by the historian of Jamaica, Edward Long. In a footnote he stated that
an ingenious modern author has suggested many strong reasons to prove that the faculty of speech is not the gift of nature to man; that articulation is the work of art, or at least of a habit acquired by custom and exercise; and that mankind are truly in their natural state a mutum pecus [a dumb herd].Footnote 59
Yet Long was only interested in admitting the non-speaking orangutan into the ranks of humanity, and deploying it alongside his other evidence of the proximity of the human and the animal, because that allowed him to render other people as lesser humans. He used the orangutan's humanity to challenge Buffon:
[I]f we admit with Mr. Buffon, that with all this analogy of organization, the oran-outang's brain is a senseless icon of the human; that it is meer matter, unanimated with a thinking principle, in any, or at least in a very minute and imperfect degree, we must then infer the strongest conclusion to establish our belief of a natural diversity of the human intellect . . . [A]n oran-outang, in this case, is a human being, quoad his form and organs; but of an inferior species, quoad his intellect; he has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to white men; the supposition then is well founded, that the brain, and intellectual organs, so far as they are dependent upon meer matter, though similar in texture and modification to those of other men, may in some of the Negroe race be so constituted as not to result to the same effects; for we cannot but allow, that the Deity might, if it was his pleasure, diversify his works in this manner, and either withhold the superior principle entirely, or in part only, or infuse it into the different classes and races of human creatures, in such portions, as to form the same gradual climax towards perfection in this human system, which is so evidently designed in every other.Footnote 60
It was, therefore, Long's argument from Jamaica, and based on the evidence of the natural and the civil presented by the orangutan, that if there can be humans who cannot speak, then there can also be speakers (and thinkers) who are not fully human. His purpose was to use this evidence to close down one set of differentiations, between the animal and the human, in order to establish another “immense divide” across all arenas of human life, between “the Negroe race” and “white men”. So, just as Caribbean nature, when it came to botany, had a civil history, it was also the case that Caribbean “civil man”, to use Rousseau's term, had to negotiate a natural history based on a differentiation of the species. Or, at least, the question of humanity in the Caribbean, the question of Caribbean civilization, was asked in ways that required evidence of what was attributable to nature and what was a matter of development, progress and (civil) history. For Long, as we have seen, that evidence came in all sorts of forms, and from both near and far in space and time: primate behaviour in London, published evidence of dissections, travellers’ stories from across the world, classical scholarship, and the ponderings of the philosophes. He deployed these very different forms of evidence, with their very different epistemological appeals (based on different mediations of time and space), in support of a new vision of the world which stressed the primacy of humankind's separation into “races” in the face of the close proximity, boundary-crossing and hybridizations that trade, empire and slavery had also provided the basis for in the Caribbean.
Assessing the Evidence
Defining the relationships between natural history and civil history meant being able to situate the different peoples of the world in their environments, forms of development and relationships with one another. It had, therefore, profound consequences for the construction of the power-laden social world of plantation slavery, particularly in the age of abolition when activists sought to construct a fellow feeling or affective closeness between black and white—at least in the abstract—which Long had worked so hard to deny. This meant that the use of evidence from distant periods and places was both central to answering these historical questions and deeply contested. Rousseau had argued that these crucial problems of human origins and human difference could be solved by the determined work of philosophical travellers imitating Plato, Thales or Pythagorus and providing compelling evidence of distant places for European consumption. Instead of relying on the unsystematic observations and stories of sailors, merchants, soldiers and missionaries, these informed travellers would be able to properly observe and represent “the human race” in all its diversity.Footnote 61 Done right, Rousseau thought, these travellers’ reports would have to be believed, closing the distance between here and there. This programme could not, of course, be followed through. Despite their philosophical underpinnings, the implications of what Captain Cook may or may not have found out about human nature in the Pacific were much debated. The Great Map of Mankind remained open to interpretation precisely because there was such a wide range of possible evidence concerning modes of humanity distant in time and space that could be brought to bear, and no real consensus on how to evaluate or reconcile it. Thus, as has been shown, Lord Monboddo and Edward Long were very eclectic in their gathering of what they saw as useful material. Both juxtaposed a range of evidence from comparative anatomy, behavioural observation, travellers’ tales (both recent and long ago) and classical authors side by side in their texts, arguing that they spoke to the same issues.
These curious combinations of geographically and historically disparate forms of evidence were necessary because, in the Caribbean, but also more broadly, Europeans’ understandings of places far away always had to negotiate the relationship between distance in space and distance in time, between history and geography. Places far away were understood as also, from a European perspective, places long ago. In each case the question of the relationship between natural history and civil history had to be answered. This is what created the demand to bring a range of forms of evidence—which mediated historical and geographical distance in different ways—to bear on the questions that needed answering in the Caribbean (and elsewhere) about the civil history of nature and the natural history of civil man. Yet, while there was much at stake in finding answers, this disparate and uncontained array of potential evidence was not accompanied by a sense of how these different ways of understanding distant histories and geographies might be made commensurate. The very different relations to the world that they produced for European readers in their deployments of distanced universalist claims (present in various ways in stadial and natural histories, classical texts and philosophical pronouncements on savagism and civility) or localized and personalized observations (whether of faraway lands, the behaviour of captive animals or anecdotes about similiarity and difference) meant that the tensions, however accidental, which were there in Sloane's image of the crabs and the pots never went away.
