The voyage-in-print

Ross's unpublished manuscript is in many ways simply a curiosity. I cannot date it precisely, although it can be pinned down to a six-year period between 1848, the date of latest publication cited in its pages (another Admiralty narrative), and 1854, the year of Ross's death.Footnote ⁹ It is written in a clear hand, with occasional corrections and insertions from a second, rougher hand, which suggests it was a clean copy intended to circulate, perhaps even to find a publisher. I do not know for certain where it was written, although to assume it was written in Ross's home on the remote coral atoll seems reasonable – there is no record of him travelling beyond the region in these years. In 1908, the manuscript somehow found its way to the collections of the British Library, where it was carefully catalogued, paginated and tucked away.Footnote ¹⁰

At first glance, the critical context to consider is that of the voyage narrative, an established genre that took on new life in the 1820s and 1830s. As the steam press and a widening readership transformed the publishing industry, travel books of all sorts were standard bestsellers, bringing the adventures and exoticism of empire home to the fireside.Footnote ¹¹ Within this general market for books of travel, the Admiralty narratives had a particular place. Their lineage stretched back to Hakluyt's compilations of Elizabethan explorers, through the descriptions of Cook's voyages of Pacific discovery of the previous century.Footnote ¹² But, as Adriana Craciun has recently shown, the voyage narrative was reinvigorated in the 1820s, becoming a representative kind of text that spoke to new appetites for print and illustration, for useful knowledge and adventure.Footnote ¹³ A long review of John Franklin's Narrative of the Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823) supplies a good summary of the genre and its appeal:

Voyage narratives like these reflected the expanding role and influence of the Hydrographic Office.Footnote ¹⁵ With British trade and imperial influence growing in the post-Napoleonic world, naval officers expertly trained in hydrographic measurement carried the flag to all corners of the oceans. Naval regulations governed their literary responsibilities, as they did all other aspects of their work. All the records of a naval voyage (logs, remark books, accounts and journals) had to be formally submitted by a ship's officers to the captain before disembarking (a condition enforced by the fact that an officer could not receive his shore half-pay without the captain's acknowledgement of their receipt). The captain then submitted the logs, charts and remark books, whether his own or his officers’, to the Admiralty. Nevertheless, the captain could then, with permission, engage with publishers to publish an account for the general reader, drawing upon all the logs and journals by arrangement with the Admiralty.Footnote ¹⁶ Government grants, such as those to assist the expensive publication of scientific researches (a thousand pounds in the case of the Beagle), did not fund the general narratives.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet the whole business of these ‘voyages’ was never quite so regulated as this description implies, and variously subversive versions are not hard to find. For example, one reviewer described Jacques Arago's popular Voyage round the World (1822), which recounted the French Pacific expedition of Uranie and Physicienne in 1817–1820, as the ‘fly-boat of the expedition’. He praised the volume because it came years in advance of a detailed narrative whose plates and length would place it ‘beyond the reach of general readers’.Footnote ¹⁸ John MacDouall, a clerk on the Beagle on her first voyage to South America in 1826 and 1827, published a Narrative of a Journey to Patagonia and Terra del Fuego in 1833, with a defiant quotation – ‘Zounds, I'll print it!’ – on the title page and a coy reference to his pecuniary motives (‘sterling deserts’) in the preface.Footnote ¹⁹ A more complex instance shows us the influential hydrographer Francis Beaufort working behind the scenes. In 1832–1834, Lieutenant William Allen, a protégé of Beaufort's, had participated in an expedition up the Niger, backed by a steamship company owned by MacGregor Laird. Beaufort had negotiated with Laird an agreement about publications, both scientific and popular, before the expedition started – but in 1834 he nevertheless encouraged Allen to prepare his journals for separate publication. The secretary for the steamship company then complained that all the London publishing firms were aware of this competing literary project, and would not undertake Laird's Journal on good terms, since they expected Allen's to appear immediately afterwards. In the end, Allen left the field to Laird, although he later published a Narrative with the same publisher (Richard Bentley) on a second Niger expedition.Footnote ²⁰

These examples sketch the publishing world that the official Narrative of HMS Beagle entered. The Narrative followed the established pattern. FitzRoy discussed a division of subjects with Darwin as the voyage neared its end, collected his officers’ logs and remark books, and arranged for future publication with the London publisher Henry Colburn. It proved to be a complicated work, including the account of a previous voyage, a South American survey of 1826–1830. Captain Phillip Parker King had prepared the general narrative of that earlier expedition, but because King had since retired to his estates in Australia in 1832, it was edited for publication by FitzRoy, who had joined King as commander of HMS Beagle, then the sister ship to Captain King's HMS Adventure, in mid-voyage in late 1828. When it appeared in 1839, the Narrative consisted of King's account, edited and with appendices prepared by FitzRoy; FitzRoy's description of his second voyage in HMS Beagle alone; FitzRoy's own very large set of appendices collected in a separate volume; and finally Darwin's Journal of Researches into Geology and Natural History. Darwin had completed converting his diaries for publication by June 1837, and he chafed at the delay caused while FitzRoy gave priority to finishing the charts and the accompanying sailing directions for the Admiralty.Footnote ²¹ When the Narrative finally appeared in August 1839, the whole set cost £3 18s, a handsome sum.Footnote ²²

The Narrative was favourably reviewed and the major periodicals of the day printed long extracts from the work. FitzRoy's accomplishments in exploring the geography of the southern part of the continent won many scientific accolades. Darwin, however, did not think highly of either captain's account. He called King's volume a ‘heavy pudding’ with ‘natural History of a very trashy Nature’;Footnote ²³ in FitzRoy's volume, the chapter advocating the study of biblical evidence in geology dismayed him. Extracting himself from Colburn and his naval co-authors, Darwin republished his volume in 1845 in a much less expensive second edition (7s 6d) as part of the publisher John Murray's Home and Colonial Library. Billed as ‘cheap literature for all classes’, this was a series that carried many other travel narratives.Footnote ²⁴ Around the same time, there also seems to have been a plan for a second edition of the King–FitzRoy volumes. Darwin's bibliographer R.B. Freeman noted a Colburn advertisement inserted in a book published in 1849, although the edition did not materialize.Footnote ²⁵

Clunies Ross of Cocos-Keeling

These second editions – one real, one prospective – are the cue for the re-entry of Ross and his satirical manuscript to the story. Who was FitzRoy's supposed ghostwriter? Luckily, we know considerably more about the life of John Clunies Ross than we do about the provenance of his manuscript. His varied activities as whaler, merchant captain, estate manager, shipbuilder and finally coconut plantation owner illustrate in remarkable fashion the commercial networks stringing through the British Empire. Ross was born in the Shetlands in 1786. The eldest son of a schoolteacher, George Cluness (sic), and Elizabeth Ross of Yell, he went to sea in 1800, first as an apprentice seaman on a whaler in Greenland, then joining a ship in the southern whaling trade, sailing in the south Atlantic and Pacific. He became master of a merchant ship in the East Indies trade. By 1816 he had entered the employ of Alexander Hare as overseer and manager for Hare's estate in Banjermassin, Borneo, acquired by Hare a few years earlier when the British occupied the Dutch East Indies at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Hare left this property for Batavia, Java, as Borneo passed again into Dutch control, and eventually left the region for the Cape of Good Hope in 1820, taking a group of his slaves to develop a holding there. (They were only nominally ‘freed’ despite the recent abolitionist laws against slavery in the empire.) In the meantime, Ross, ejected by the Dutch authorities from the Banjermassin estates, returned temporarily to London, and in 1821 married Elizabeth Dycote, who had sheltered him from press gangs. He began looking for a place to settle as a base for his trading activities, apparently considering the prospects of several locations before deciding on Cocos-Keeling.Footnote ²⁶ The atoll, twenty-five miles in circumference, was made up of some two dozen islands, of which the two largest were about five and six miles long.Footnote ²⁷ Ross made an initial visit to the then uninhabited islands in December 1825, and returned with his family in February 1827.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 2.

Chart of Cocos-Keeling made later in the century. H.B. Guppy, ‘The Cocos-Keeling islands,’ Scottish Geographical Magazine (1889) 5, pp. 281–297, 457–474, 569–588, following p. 512.

Ross's relationship with his associate Hare became part of the disputes regarding his claim to original settlement of the islands. Dissatisfied with the spread of British abolitionist regulations, Hare had moved again with his slaves to Cocos-Keeling in 1826, settling on a different island in the group shortly before Ross returned with his family. Hare became notorious for his cruelty and especially for the abuse of his female slaves; Ross's approach, in which he encouraged a form of self-government among the Malays, seemed much more palatable to contemporaries. In 1831, when his slaves deserted en masse for Ross's protection, Hare left the islands. The population, consisting of the original groups of Hare's slaves and Ross's servants and family, grew steadily; around 1835, there were 175 inhabitants, with twenty of these ‘native British’.Footnote ²⁹ The former slaves harvested coconuts in return for wages from Ross; Ross processed the oil, took it to market, and supplemented the subsistence agriculture of the community with traded goods.Footnote ³⁰

Ross's hopes for his settlement spread through the printed word. We know he wrote several petitions to the British authorities urging his claims, explaining the value of the islands and urging that the territory become a British possession. He also provided information and a detailed chart of the islands to the geographer of the East Indies Company, James Horsburgh; the latter's India Directory, the standard reference for navigators, gave a few pages of information on Ross and his settlement in the fourth edition (1836), telling navigators that there they could find supplies of water, hogs and poultry and make minor repairs.Footnote ³¹ Ross's hopes emerged in more detail in a monthly journal published in Calcutta, Gleanings of Science. This monthly had been founded in 1829 by Captain J.D. Herbert, deputy surveyor general for India, to serve its readers with a digest of European scientific news and to act as a forum for local contributions.Footnote ³² An article on the Cocos-Keeling settlement in October 1830 seems to have been based on documents Ross sent to the Colonial Office, and perhaps written by Herbert. It represented the atoll as a secure anchorage and ‘a convenient entrepôt for much of the trade in which England, Australia, Mauritius, India and the Eastern Islands are engaged’. Alongside a catalogue of native vegetation and fauna was added an account of all the crops which Ross had introduced, from figs and oranges to watermelon, leeks and lettuce. Describing a salubrious climate, with no jungles or pestilence, no snakes or poisonous fish, the article suggested that an invalid visitor from Calcutta (a month's voyage away) could ‘combine all the salutary influences of a sea voyage, with the conveniences and comforts of the land’.Footnote ³³ From its origins, then, the settlement built its existence on the prestige and appeal of hydrographical knowledge, natural history and even medical theory, packaged for a wide readership.

For the remainder of his life, Ross remained based on Cocos-Keeling, navigating the Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the region and developing his own family and community on the islands. He died in 1854, aged sixty-eight, and was buried near his home called Selma, under a gravestone of imported Scottish granite.Footnote ³⁴ Despite his many petitions, the British authorities remained reluctant to annex the islands, as this would risk contravening agreements made in 1824 to demarcate their colonial interest in Malaysia and Singapore from the Dutch East Indies. Yet in 1857, the British Navy unexpectedly sailed in from Australia to plant the flag, greeted by Ross's puzzled son, John George Clunies Ross. The Foreign Office in London had in fact sent instructions to take possession of different ‘Cocos’ (of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal), but it proved to be a difficult mistake to correct diplomatically. In the short term, this piece of truly ‘accidental empire’ may have cost the Ross family their favourable trading position with Dutch-controlled ports in the region.Footnote ³⁵ Incorporated subsequently into the governments of Ceylon (1878), the Straits Settlement (1884) and then Singapore (1903), the high point of political importance for the islands perhaps came in the world wars of the twentieth century, when they offered Allied forces a vital cable and wireless station. With the community still led by the Ross family, Cocos-Keeling remained a British possession until it passed to Australia in 1955.Footnote ³⁶

Figure 3.

Chart and description from ‘Some account of the Cocos or Keeling Island and of their recent settlement’, Gleanings of Science (1830) 2, pp. 293–301, 293.

Ross's ambition for the islands explains many of his attitudes in his satire. Although he was not present during the Beagle’s visit in 1836 (being absent on a trading voyage to Batavia), he strongly resented the aristocratic young naval officer FitzRoy and was slighted by his punctilious refusal in the Narrative to use the courtesy title ‘captain’ (instead of ‘master’) to describe him. He mocked FitzRoy's description of the ceremony of crossing the equator as a ‘truly exhilarating ceremony’ that provided rough sailors with ‘quite … a blessed relief from the ennui of Dandyism’. He criticized FitzRoy's navigational skills and mocked his explanations of two infamous Royal Navy shipwrecks in South America, the HMS Thetis wreck of 1830 and the HMS Challenger wreck of 1835. He was equally scathing about FitzRoy's judgements concerning settler life and trade in the places the Beagle had visited. Accusing FitzRoy of naivety regarding the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Ross outlined the labour practices Ross himself had introduced in Cocos-Keeling, which he characterized as a style of serfdom like that of medieval Europe on the one hand, and of contemporary village practices in India on the other. He also relentlessly satirized the relationship between FitzRoy and Darwin, presenting it as a competition between two equally ambitious young men. In the opening part of the supplement, Ross wrote,

Later, speculating about FitzRoy's doubts regarding a chart of Cocos-Keeling, he imagined a conversation between the Royal Navy officer and the naturalist:

Figure 4.

Illustrated London News (14 January 1899) 114, p. 37, showing the appearance of the island at the end of the century, with George Clunies Ross, John's grandson, in the centre. From the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University.

Enlarging: a satire of complete knowledge

The description of the FitzRoy–Darwin relationship suggests how Ross's social resentments and objections to naval authority found a focus in his critique of the scientific objectives of the voyage. His essential point was that he, Ross, represented the truly scientific observer of Cocos-Keeling. His account, then, though it might be fairly described as digressive, was far from a random scattershot of barbs. Instead it was structured around a systematic critique of knowledge-making as an imperial enterprise. His frustrations expose a compelling picture of relationships of knowledge and power in the networks of Britain's maritime empire. The observations and theories circulating in the Narrative, Ross knew, could matter to decisions at the highest levels of government about the future of the island as a British possession. They mattered economically, by shaping the reputation of the islands as a safe harbour and hence a waypoint for trading ships. They also expressed an intellectual hierarchy between the travelling expert and the local informant that – in Ross's eyes – carelessly appropriated his own information and insights. Ross, then, by writing under the guise of a collaborator/amanuensis of FitzRoy, was reclaiming his own expertise.

We can follow this analysis through three of the targets to which Ross returned often: a satire of complete, global knowledge; a satire of observations and accuracy; and a satire of scientific theorizing. Most obviously, to open his satire, Ross mocked the idea of comprehensive knowledge by commenting on the length of the Narrative. Preferring ‘brevity to verbosity and thinness to thickness’, ‘FitzRoy’ complained that Colburn had unfairly restricted him in 1839 to a mere 1,052 pages. But in this forthcoming edition, he claimed, ‘all the super-interesting extracts from hitherto unknown ancient and modern writings in Latin, Spanish, English, and French – prose and poetry – down to the Chilian [sic] newspapers of the other day’ that he had collected could finally be revealed. ‘[A]mplified [and] enlarged’, the volumes would turn into ‘Kentledge pigs’, the slabs of pig iron used as ship's ballast.Footnote ³⁸

There was a long tradition of criticizing voyage narratives for their exhaustive detail, so in this picture – Kentledge pigs aside – Ross was touching a familiar chord. But there seems also to be an echo of another satirical novel, Benjamin Disraeli's The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828).Footnote ³⁹ In Disraeli's novel, Popanilla, a native of the uncharted Isle of Fantaisie, is seduced by a trunkful of tracts from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge washed ashore from a wreck. Popanilla becomes a nuisance to the king, lecturing about hydrostatics and progress, and is disgraced, exiled and put to sea in a canoe. Blown by a storm to Hubbabub, Vraibluesia (i.e. London), Popanilla is immediately gulled by an opportunistic publisher and ghostwriter into authoring a hasty voyage narrative. Disraeli mocked the detail of voyage narratives in an interesting way, by stressing the labour of an authoritative account:

The echoes of Disraeli's novel are suggestive not least because they hint at how texts circulated in the empire. We know something, though not much, about Ross and his books. A Dutch captain visiting Ross in 1842 described Ross as having a large library of more than a thousand volumes, ‘many of a very good taste, extensive and great erudition, especially those dealing with physics, geography, history and philosophy, mechanics not excepted’.Footnote ⁴¹ Ross's manuscript casually alludes to older volumes of travels and to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, as well as to modern literary sensations such as Charles Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.Footnote ⁴² He also noted in passing how he learned of books. For example, he had seen a manuscript summary of books of voyages in the Indian Ocean in ‘an old Gentleman's library at the Cape of Good Hope’; he ordered FitzRoy's Narrative when he heard of its ‘importance towards him and his undertaking’, although he was ‘out of the way of bookshops’. Later, he recorded that an acquaintance had copied out and forwarded to him relevant parts of a Narrative by Sir Edward Belcher published in 1848.Footnote ⁴³ We even know from Ross's own records that his brother, Robert Clunies Ross, also a merchant captain, touched at Cocos-Keeling to deliver ‘letters and stores’ after a ninety-four-day passage from London en route to Java, in December of 1828.Footnote ⁴⁴ It does not, then, seem unlikely that he would know of a satiric novel published in London in June of that year about an Indian Ocean island.

Without knowing the contents of Ross's library, of course, a direct connection to Disraeli's Captain Popanilla remains speculative, but it does indicate the need to consider a more general relationship with satire as a genre.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although voyages and tours were certainly long-established satirical subjects, Ross seems up to date with satirical trends. However strongly and personally he critiqued FitzRoy, he was not writing in the bawdy and scatological Radical tradition of the first decades of the century. Instead, the work has more in common with what Kyle Grimes has called the ‘markedly dialogical forms’ of Romantic satire, which played with conventions of print to offer ‘a material and intentionally disruptive intervention into the public discourses of the day’.Footnote ⁴⁶ By engaging with a familiar critique of voyage narratives as ill-digested miscellany, and by writing about writing and authorship, both Ross and Disraeli spoke directly to contemporary conditions of literary and intellectual culture.Footnote ⁴⁷ Disraeli helps us see, then, that Ross's attack on the Narrative of 1839 was recognizably related to other satires of ‘the march of intellect’ in which bewildering and proliferating forms of print were targets of the critique, even as they provided its vehicle.Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, Martin Rudwick has shown such satirical elements entering geological science in this period, describing a series of caricatures attacking Charles Lyell by Henry de la Beche. De la Beche's c.1831 sketch of the ‘Knowledge Locomotive Engine’ was a jab at popular education just like the shipwrecked trunk of SDUK pamphlets that triggered the expulsion of Popanilla.Footnote ⁴⁹

Ross's identification of his work as a ‘Supplement’ further specified a particular contemporaneous use of the ‘dialogical’ mode of satire. In the 1830s and 1840s, supplements and companions had emerged as a format that could experiment with content and audience while proposing a relationship with a more established or respectable periodical. The supplement was clearly ready-made for satire: a format that could be turned on its head to subvert, rather than merely accompanying or extending, the parent format.Footnote ⁵⁰ One particularly notorious case was the publication of the great moon hoax of 1835; attributing the discovery of men and animals in the moon to Sir John Herschel, it was advertised as a ‘supplement’ to the Edinburgh Journal of Science.Footnote ⁵¹

To insist on these elements as part of satirical tradition in this period is not to resist their unique flavour in Ross's work. His satire has an oceanic touch.Footnote ⁵² Besides sketches ‘correctly drawn from memory and imagination’ of an island not visited, he promised readers a

The forthcoming new edition would be a comprehensively global geography, giving the reader the oceans themselves, just as its expanded historical remarks on New Zealand and Australia would be ‘somewhat commensurate with the extent of those countries’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ross pointed here to the globalist mandate of nineteenth-century scientific expedition – not to discover, but to fill in the blanks, recording everything, everywhere, past and present. Voyage narratives, their charts and appendices represented the infrastructure of navigational and geographical knowledge that supported the all-encompassing ambitions of a maritime empire.

Revising: a satire of observation and accuracy

Ross affected to ‘enlarge’ upon the Narrative, but throughout the text there were also extensive revisions that established his own authority as an expert observer. Some were minor, though pointed, corrections. For instance, FitzRoy and Darwin had both described Ross's manager, Mr. W.C. Leisk, as ‘an English resident’, and Ross (the Shetlander) allowed that Leisk was British, but certainly not an Englishman.Footnote ⁵⁵ But other revisions tackled essential natural-historical and hydrographical matters. To Darwin's own rather flowery account of the islands, Ross added new details about the height of land, the tides and the channels in the lagoon, and described bird species and vegetation unmentioned by Darwin.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ross also insisted on correcting FitzRoy's nomenclature for the islands, explaining his reasoning at length. FitzRoy followed the older name of Keeling (after the captain of the Dutch East India Company who plotted the islands in 1609), but Ross used ‘Cocos and Keeling’ in order to distinguish between the higher Keeling's (also called Horsburgh) Isle to the north and the low-lying southern group he called the ‘Cocos chain’, upon two of which Ross and Hare had settled. It was a distinction, he said, which prevented shipwreck – mariners who spotted the northern island and took it for the whole could otherwise mistakenly steer into the shallow areas and reefs between the two groups. More importantly, Ross argued that what accurate observations FitzRoy had produced – the positions of the islets and soundings in the lagoon – had simply relied on surveys shared by Leisk, and made by Ross.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ross presented his extensions and revisions using a distinctive textual technique that emphasized the work of reading, comparing and writing in order to distinguish real from false knowledge. As he tackled each aspect of these matters to do with Cocos-Keeling, what he called his ‘chef d'oeuvre’, Ross repeatedly divided his manuscript into two columns, with the original text on the left and his revisions to the right. This device called attention to itself as a record of competing or related texts. This was a technique used similarly in Bible printing to relate Old and New Testament. James Secord has noted the publication of such parallel passages in early Victorian periodicals, where they could be used either to identify anonymous authors or to produce evidence of plagiarism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Essentially, Ross had the latter purpose, pointing to the impossibility of reconciling his and FitzRoy's or Darwin's points of view; that is, the issue was revision not only of error, but of culpable error. By insisting that he was producing a new edition, he shifted the accusation of intellectual theft – or as he called it, in a sailor's metaphor, the ‘impressment’ of workFootnote ⁵⁹ – into proof of his own ‘inexpressible attachments to Science’. Instead of crying

Theorizing: a satire of intellectual enthusiasm

Enlarging and correcting, Ross's manuscript had a third significant line of attack as well: on the nature of proper and improper scientific theorizing. Contrasting his own work with the hasty work of scientific travellers, Ross accused both FitzRoy and Darwin of theorizing wildly, led astray by their philosophical ambition. Fitz Roy's own volume had made him an easy target on this score. After escorting the Beagle back to Plymouth in the penultimate chapter, FitzRoy had devoted his final chapter to the question of geological evidence for the Deluge. As he piously remarked, he thereby hoped to educate young officers who, like his former self, knew little of the strength of the Bible's evidence.Footnote ⁶¹ Reviewers in 1839 had deplored this part of his volume. The Quarterly Review, for example, noted that ‘on this subject the gallant Captain has got quite beyond his depth’.Footnote ⁶² Ross shared these views, making repeated scornful references to FitzRoy's biblical literalism.Footnote ⁶³ Ross further marked FitzRoy as a hopeless theorizer by attacking his essay on tides, in which the latter commented on the theories of tidal movements proposed by William Whewell, the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher who had initiated a project to collect tidal data across the world's ocean midway through the Beagle voyage.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ross also dismissed FitzRoy's meteorological speculations, suggesting that FitzRoy developed his ‘Low Island Squall-causing theory’ simply because he was ‘ambitious to rival Mr. Darwin in the line of theory – [and] invention’.Footnote ⁶⁵ FitzRoy's contributions to all three questions – tides, storms, mosaic geology – indicate his engagement with the scientific debates of his day. By attacking each of them, Ross was also attacking his tendency to theorize.Footnote ⁶⁶

But the attacks on FitzRoy's views were a mere prologue. Darwin's theory of the formation of coral reefs was the scientific debate that concerned Ross most. Indeed, the whole manuscript can be viewed as a preamble to a separate refutation of Darwin (‘a perfect adept in the science of assertion’) which posthumously appeared in a natural-history journal published in Batavia in 1855.Footnote ⁶⁷ There was much at stake in the coral reef question for both men. In a practical sense, in an age of expanding oceanic trade, reefs were feared as a hazard to ships. But they also held complex philosophical, religious and cultural associations. In the early Victorian imagination, coral and coral islands evoked ideas about geo-history (the relationship of sea and land), about the nature of living things (coral shifted between definitions of plant, animal and mineral), and also about the evangelical Christian mission to tropical societies (islands as miniature worlds of redemption and progress).Footnote ⁶⁸ In particular, as historian Alistair Sponsel has shown, debates about coral reef formation reflected concerns about scientific theorizing itself.Footnote ⁶⁹ Early nineteenth-century geologists were preoccupied with questions of evidence – studies of stratigraphy, fossils, mountains or volcanic action – and styles of reasoning.Footnote ⁷⁰ Literally and figuratively, coral involved knowledge beneath the surface of direct observation, sharpening the relationship of empiricism and theory. What knowledge about coral reefs was the fruit of a disciplined scientific imagination, and what was baseless speculation, mere enthusiasm and ambition? Ross's work indicates that such philosophically tinged debates about coral reef formation were widely known.

Darwin considered his ideas on coral reefs the most important result of his voyage, and presented them to the Geological Society in 1837 promptly on his return. Ross does not seem to have seen the account printed in its journal, nor Darwin's separate monograph of May 1842, but he did read closely the version of the 1837 presentation that was reprinted in Darwin's volume of the Narrative. Ross's response swung between mockery and detailed criticism. Denouncing the ‘super-sublimity and deeply-diving profundity of his [Darwin's] theory’, Ross imagined an exchange between FitzRoy and Darwin on the uplift of coral islands in which Darwin, ‘in a densely deep-brown study to find out something plausible’, was persuaded to turn away from volcanic evidence:

FitzRoy's geological speculations, Darwin promised, would be saved until needed ‘for a clincher’.Footnote ⁷¹

Setting aside this spoof, Ross's critical review of Darwin's evidence – here, and in Ross's separate article – is a good example of contemporary debates over coral reef formation. Darwin's conclusions about coral reef formation were closely related to his geologizing in the Andes and his experience of the 1835 earthquake in Concepción, Chile. He argued that the South American continent was undergoing elevation, and that the Pacific basin was subsiding in correspondence with the uplift. Using this insight, paired with evidence that coral organisms could not grow at great depths, he could unify the different appearances of reefs – fringing reefs, barrier reefs and the atolls of the Pacific, such as Cocos-Keeling – under a single explanation. Fringing reefs formed offshore in tropical waters, around the height of the lowest tide; as the coral mounted up above the level of the surf, it died off and the reef grew in an outward direction. If the coastland were stable, it gradually formed a large barrier reef, such as that off the coast of Australia. When a fringing reef formed off a coast that was subsiding, however, it slowly took on the distinctive circular appearance of the atolls; that is, the corals grew up as the land within the fringe sank.

Ross rejected this account, holding to an older viewpoint that corals grew up through the ocean from the tops of submarine mountain ridges or volcanoes. The fullest account of his own views was published in 1836 in the Singapore Free Press, a weekly newspaper, in an essay titled ‘On the formation of the oceanic islands in general and of the coralline in particular’. There he described the ‘birth’ stage of islands, with coral forming on extinguished volcanoes, their growth stimulated first by the heat of the submarine mountain, and then, once at a certain level from the surface of the ocean, from solar heat that could reach the coral. He explained in detail how channels would break into the generally circular shape of the coral growth, forming triangular islets, steeply dropping on the ocean side and sloping on the other to gradually produce the central, shallower area of the lagoon. These islets, smoothed and glazed by coral growth, debris and the silt produced by fish and worms, would eventually reattach into a curving island with one deep channel into the lagoon. Fresh rainwater, filtering through the chalky silt to press seawater downwards and outwards, would accumulate in a reservoir, followed by vegetation that would further add to the island's growth. It was a distinctly providential geology: Ross saw oceanic islands like his as being designed ‘to facilitate the beneficial intercourse of man with man on either shore’. Moreover, they were a site for man's ‘avocation of improving’ the ‘inanimate and irrational agents of creation’ through his labour, through agriculture, by building dykes to increase land mass, and by constructing shallow walls within the lagoon for fish ponds.Footnote ⁷²

The account was not unusual, in that it followed the outlines of the ‘crater’ or submarine theory of coral development, including the idea of their gradual development into land fit for human habitation. Yet it was no mere summary.Footnote ⁷³ It showed Ross's familiarity with the key points of debate in the 1820s and 1830s, such as the depths at which coral could grow, or the difference between coral environments of the lagoon and those of the turbulent outer edge of the reef. Ross's 1836 essay dealt only with atoll islands, but in the article published posthumously, he addressed another type, the islands with distinctive central peaks surrounded by fringing reefs, such as Tahiti. These peaks, he argued, developed as matter from an original eruption that had fallen into the center of the cone, forming a kind of plug that was then steadily pushed upwards by pressure from the Earth's molten core. Ross also pointed to geological evidence of elevation in other islands of the Pacific to counter Darwin's claim of general subsidence, with strong words about Darwin's limited and unsystematic investigation. His allusion to ‘the sinking house-post story’ referred to Darwin's interest in a Cocos-Keeling marker that inhabitants told Darwin had been much higher within the last decade – evidence of rapid subsidence that Darwin, fresh from observations of the sudden upheaval of the shoreline in the South American earthquake of 1835, seized for his theory. (Ross explained this marker in terms of superficial shifts of the sandy soil on the islands, like changes to a sandbar or spit, such as were part of his own direct experience of Cocos-Keeling.) On Ross's point about coral living at great depths, much of the recent scientific evidence was decisively against him. But in his latter point about mixed and inconclusive evidence, especially once a number of coral islands were compared, Ross held some indisputable cards – one of the reasons the scientific debate about coral reef formation would continue for many decades.Footnote ⁷⁴

In sum, Ross was arguing for evidence that islands were emerging out of the Pacific, and Darwin that islands were gradually sinking beneath it. This identifies succinctly enough why a man intent on developing a colony on a tiny Pacific atoll might resist Darwin's theory.Footnote ⁷⁵ For Darwin, the theory of coral reef formation was a step into maturity as a scientific thinker and an important stage in his thinking about species. With it, he declared strong intellectual allegiance to the geologist Charles Lyell's gradualist methods, the view that changes in the Earth can be explained by the slow accumulated results of forces whose operation the naturalist can find in the present. For Ross, Darwin's theory of subsidence merely reflected an ‘effort at depreciation’ of the Cocos-Keeling themselves.Footnote ⁷⁶

The substance of these debates, whether geological, tidal or meteorological, has been only lightly sketched here. Instead, it is their significance as part of Ross's satire that interests us. What can these engagements with theorizing tell us about scientific voyaging and the circulation of knowledge? First, they remind us of who could engage. Those who considered themselves entitled and prepared to engage in scientific culture extended geographically and socially, from Calcutta to Cocos-Keeling to London, and from merchant trader to naval officer to gentleman-naturalist. This range of participants depended on shared familiarity with the historical record, assuming knowledge of the importance of other travels to the growth of natural knowledge. It relied as well on contemporary awareness of growing commercial and political networks throughout the British Empire. John Herschel's Manual of Scientific Enquiry Prepared for the Use of Officers in HM Navy and Travellers in General was first published in 1849 but it really sought not so much to instigate new activity as to regulate the status quo: naval cruisers and merchants ‘in every sea’, and a flow of ‘[v]aluable reports … from men of observation and intelligence’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Second, the satire and its context reveal the ways in which such debates hinged on collective projects (conceived, like Herschel's Manual, in Baconian ways) and how, in turn, these involved hierarchies that were negotiated in print. Naval expeditions and navigational science, as we have seen, were manifestly collaborative affairs, collecting input from many different sources, and crediting those in managed ways in their printed productions, whether voyage narrative or charts and sailing directions. Whewell's tidal investigations, into which FitzRoy carefully inserted his own experiences and thoughts, were modelled on such practices for amassing data from different corners of the globe and from men from different walks of life.Footnote ⁷⁸ Print made those hierarchies of authority visible, but, as Ross showed, they simultaneously made them open to challenge. Whose contribution was most vital, or most vulnerable? That such disputes could arise is an obvious and familiar point in the history of science. The Narrative satire, in its play with editing, revising and repositioning authorship, underlined the slightly different message that print culture gave ‘credit’ and authority in science its instability as well as its reach. It was not so much that natural knowledge was mutable, in the formulation of historian of science Kapil Raj, with meaning and skills changing depending on geography and circumstance. It was rather that knowledge emerged from several, sometimes competing, structures of authority – that is, it could be repackaged or serialized, with the standing of a FitzRoy, a Darwin, a Whewell, a Horsburgh or a Ross taking precedence differently in different contexts.Footnote ⁷⁹ The way that texts and records cycled between different settings was a demonstration that knowledge could be unfixed, not merely distributed.

Character and global knowledge

Ross's commentary on print culture as an ingredient of contemporary science was central to his text. Colburn's ‘literary dairy’ was as much a target as FitzRoy's ‘impressment’ of observations, or Darwin's ‘science of assertion’. In a revealing finale, Ross ended his text with the question of the public record, giving competing assessments of himself and FitzRoy, again using his technique of parallel columns. The testimonial for FitzRoy consisted of an extract from a leader in the weekly London Examiner of 21 June 1845, which attacked Fitzroy's brief and unpopular tenure as governor of New Zealand. Ross had clearly read the Narrative in light of the anti-colonial, pro-native reputation that FitzRoy had acquired in New Zealand. The Examiner was known for its sharp political journalism, especially concerning foreign affairs. Associated most often in its opinions with the radical wing of the Liberal Party, its disapproval of the Tory FitzRoy is unsurprising.Footnote ⁸⁰ Whatever his other merits, FitzRoy was no diplomat, and had antagonized the colonial population by resisting (quite reasonably, in modern assessments) their aggressive efforts to dominate New Zealand natives.Footnote ⁸¹ Ross transcribed the article's conclusion into his manuscript as FitzRoy's ‘character’:

If the tone of satire – the essential amiability of Punch or the anger of Swift – can be defined by its ending, then Ross steered in conclusion toward anger, his attack on FitzRoy becoming a cry against public wrongdoing. It was a venomous portrayal of the imperial surveyor, reversing FitzRoy's remarkable achievements as an Admiralty hydrographer. In the Examiner analogy, the ‘chart’ of FitzRoy's actions in New Zealand became the blueprint for future imperial political activity – just as his literal charts had always been sending the Royal Navy through the world's oceans, and directing the traffic of British goods and people.

Ross gave his defence of his own character through the voice of one Captain Francis Harding, incorporating into his manuscript part of a report concerning yet another official naval visit to the islands at the end of 1837. Harding on HMS Pelorus arrived to evaluate a complicated dispute between Ross, his foreman Leisk and another employee, an American sailor, which had ended in accusations that Ross kept the natives on Cocos-Keeling against their will. Given the British abolitionist laws, it was a serious allegation, because Ross was still eager for recognition of Cocos-Keeling as a British possession. Harding's report had vindicated Ross. Opposite the Examiner’s denunciation of FitzRoy, then, Ross transcribed Harding's praise of Ross's ‘management … discriminating judgement, forbearance under injury and philanthropy generally’.Footnote ⁸³ In parallel columns, the merchant captain was upheld by the authority of the Royal Navy, and the naval officer pilloried by a weekly newspaper. There Ross ended the whole manuscript. He rested his case, as it were, with testimony that contrasted merchant captain-turned-settler and naval captain-turned-governor. The ending fits the intent and form of the satire in returning not just to politics and personalities but also to the circulation of texts. It highlighted (and equalized) two different forms of written judgement, the Admiralty report and the newspaper editorial. Moreover, by adopting this explicit distinction between himself and FitzRoy as his last word, Ross came full circle from the deliberate ambiguity of his authorial identity in the preface. No longer a nobody sort of fellow, a collaborator to FitzRoy, or his amanuensis, Ross revealed himself as FitzRoy's equal: captain, colonist and author.

Ross's satire gives us new glimpses of a famous voyage. The picture of FitzRoy and Darwin trading ‘deep-brown studies’ while perched on a coral reef is intriguing for its suggestions about the two men's developing relationship. We could further explore the manuscript to learn much more from Ross's remarks on ethnography and race, or his sense of relations between merchant marine and the Royal Navy. From Ross's remote vantage point in Cocos-Keeling, FitzRoy and Darwin had appropriated local experience and knowledge carelessly in order to build their global perspectives. At best, this was a form of theft or ‘impressment’; at worst, it gave an inaccurate account that damaged local interests without apparently affecting the public reputation of either scientific traveller.

Yet the principal significance of the manuscript lies with its demonstration of the practices of an engaged colonial reader. Ross's critique of the Narrative moved in several layers – familiar jibes about the voyage narrative as an exhaustive and lumpy set of records, revisions and corrections of the details of both Darwin's and FitzRoy's observations, and finally a denunciation of the appeal of ‘assertions’ or theorizing rather than observation in modern scientific culture. It shows how scientific debate circulated and was deployed throughout the empire within the frameworks of a print culture with global reach – its books, its journals, its newspapers; its collection, revision and digest of documents. In that sense, Ross shared much more with Darwin and FitzRoy than any of the three would have been likely to admit. The prestige and widening appeal of scientific knowledge, and the media through which that flowed, were critical to all their projects. Print culture both assumed and created possibilities of participation in collective enterprises and larger debates – whether this meant contributions to navigational charts and directions, or engagement with investigation of tides, coral reefs, climate and the distribution of plants and animals. The miscellany of the voyage narrative and its shifting voices – whether the original edition or the satire – reflected these conditions.

All three of the protagonists here – Ross, FitzRoy and Darwin – were remarkable scientific travellers, observers and authors. Although we often think of travel writing as produced for readers in their armchairs in Britain, Ross's manuscript helps us see how books and periodicals circulated to some of the most apparently isolated places on earth. It also illuminates the complexity of the colonial print world, pointing to fractures of class and conflict within communities of both colonizers and colonized. No straightforward hegemonies of print are indicated by Ross's suggestion that ‘Mr. Darwin should be very careful of the books and charts, on whose authority he sets forth these assertions, for assuredly these documents … have been engraved and printed solely for geologists of his class and station’. Indeed, he concluded, ‘we should prefer rather trusting to the ones in common use by common navigators on this hemisphere’.Footnote ⁸⁴ If we want to understand both the dense thickets of local circumstances and the powerful abstractions and infrastructures of modern science, then we know that travellers are a good place to start. Like the naturalist and the naval officer and the merchant captain, texts like the Narrative trailed across the world, trying to piece things together.