Talking Plants: Botany and Speech in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Wright William , Hortus Jamaicensis, i, Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens.

Wright , Hortus (ref. 1), i, no. 39; ii, no. 226. See also Wright William , “An account of the medicinal plants growing in Jamaica”, London medical journal, viii (1787), 217–95.

Frasca-Spada Marina Jardine Nick , (eds), Books and the sciences in history (Cambridge, 2000); Smith Pamela H. Findlen Paula (eds), Merchants and marvels: Commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe (New York, 2002); Klein Ursula Spary E. C. (eds), Materials and expertise in early modern Europe (Chicago, 2009).

Shapin Steven , A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century England (Chicago, 1994); Jacob Margaret C. Stewart Larry , Practical matter: Newton's science in the service of industry and empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

Johns Adrian , The nature of the book: Print and knowledge in the making (Chicago, 1998).

Secord James A. , Victorian sensation: The extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of Vestiges of the natural history of creation (Chicago, 2000).

Secord James A. , “How scientific conversation became shop talk”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xvii (2007), 129–56.

Cook Harold J. , Matters of exchange: Commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch golden age (Chicago, 2007); Shiebinger Londa , Plants and empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Schiebinger Londa Swan Claudia (eds), Colonial botany: Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world (Philadelphia, 2007).

The term is from Goffman Erving , Forms of talk (Oxford, 1981), but is used rather more broadly here. For an historical perspective, see Fox Adam , Oral and literate culture in England, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 2000).

Ogborn Miles , “Francis Williams's bad language: Historical geography in a world of practice”, Historical geography, xxxvii (2009), 5–25; Ogborn Miles , “The power of speech: Orality, oaths and evidence in the British Atlantic world, 1650–1800”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xxxvi (2011), 2011–25; Ogborn Miles , “A war of words: Speech, script and print in the Maroon War of 1795–6”, Journal of historical geography, xxxvii (2011), 2011–15.

Drayton Richard , Nature's government: Science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (New Haven, 2000), 93; Shiebinger Swan (eds), Colonial botany (ref. 8), 13.

Shiebinger , Plants and empire (ref. 8); Cook Harold J. , “Global economies and local knowledge in the East Indies: Jacobus Bontius learns the facts of nature”, in Shiebinger Swan (eds), Colonial botany (ref. 8), 100–18.

Parrish Susan Scott , American curiosity: Cultures of natural history in the colonial British Atlantic world (Chapel Hill, 2006); Parrish Susan Scott , “Diasporic African sources of enlightenment knowledge”, in Delbourgo James Dew Nicholas (eds), Science and empire in the Atlantic world (New York, 2008), 281–310.

Chakrabarti Pratik , Materials and medicine: Trade, conquest and therapeutics in the eighteenth century (Manchester, 2010), 157.

Brown Vincent , “Social death and political life in the study of slavery”, American historical review, cxiv (2009), 1231–49.

Shelford April G. , ”‘Birds of a feather’: Natural history and male sociability in eighteenth-century Jamaica”, unpublished paper presented to the seventh symposium of the Social History Project, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, March 2006. See also Withers Charles W. J. , Placing the enlightenment: Thinking geographically about the age of reason (Chicago, 2007), chap. 10: Spaces and forms of geographical sociability.

Miller David Phillip Reill Peter Hanns , (eds), Visions of empire: Voyages, botany, and representations of nature (Cambridge, 1996).

Wright William to Banks Joseph , Edinburgh, 6 March 1789, Papers of Sir Joseph Banks, State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW]. Section 5: Gardeners and collectors. Series 14. Available online at http://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/banks/collection.cfm.

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 28 April 1788, SLNSW.

Wright William to Brown Robert , Edinburgh, 15 February 1801, British Library Additional Manuscripts [BL Add. Mss] 32439, 27r.

Wright to Banks, Port Royal, 23 October 1783, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 6 November 1778 and Port Royal, 23 October 1783, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 23 November 1790, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Jamaica, c. 1782, SLNSW.

Parrish Scott , American curiosity (ref. 13), chap. 4: The nature of candid friendship.

Wright to Banks, Trelawny, Jamaica, 20 August 1784, SLNSW on his visit to Dr Drummond of Westmoreland and his assistant John Lindsay.

Wright to Banks, Trelawny, Jamaica, 29 March 1785, SLNSW.

Parrish Scott , American curiosity (ref. 13).

Meredith Margaret , “Friendship and knowledge: Correspondence and communication in northern trans-Atlantic natural history, 1780–1815”, in Schaffer Simon Roberts Lissa Raj Kapil Delbourgo James (eds), The brokered world: Go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, 2009), 151–91, p. 158.

Barham Henry to Sloane Hans , St Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, 10 May 1712. BL Sloane MSS 4043, 45r–46v.

Barham to Sloane , London, 21 October, 6 and 21 November, 11 December 1717, 29 January, 17 and 29 April 1718, BL Sloane MSS 4045, 55, 58r–60r, 68r–71r, 77r–79v, 89r–91v, 108r—v, 110r—v.

Barham to Sloane, 17 April 1725, BL Sloane MSS 4047, 337r. On the necessity of going to visit Sloane see Delbourgo James , “When the printer met the virtuoso”, Reviews in American history, xxxvi (2008), 485–92.

Shiebinger , Plants and empire (ref. 8), chap. 5: Linguistic imperialism.

Wright to Banks, Port Royal, 23 October 1783, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 18 November 1790, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Kingston, Jamaica, 12 July 1783, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 21 January 1789, SLNSW.

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 5 May 1790, SLNSW.

Memoir of the late William Wright M.D. (Edinburgh, 1828), 43.

Long papers, BL Add. Mss 18275A, 111v.

Quoted in Burnard Trevor , Mastery, tyranny, and desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican world (Chapel Hill, 2004), 102.

Hall Douglas , In miserable slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1999), 165.

BL Add. Mss 18275A, 115v.

BL Add. Mss 18275A, 113v.

Cunningham Andrew , “The culture of gardens”, in Jardine Nicolas Secord James A. Spary Emma C. (eds), Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, 1996), 3–13; Hallock Thomas , “Male pleasure and the genders of eighteenth-century botanic exchange: A garden tour”, William and Mary quarterly, lxii (2005), 2005–718.

Hall Douglas , In miserable slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1999), 164.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 236, 264, 309.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 229; Burnard , Tyranny, mastery, and desire (ref. 41).

Burnard , Tyranny, mastery, and desire (ref. 41), 85; Higman B. W. , Plantation Jamaica: Capital and control in a colonial economy, 1750–1850 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2005).

BL Add. Mss 18275A, 117v–121r.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 238.

Thomas Thistlewood to Edward Long, Westmoreland, Jamaica, 17 June 1776, BL Add. Mss 18275A, 128r.

Thistlewood noted “Several Plants from ye Woods, which I do not know, Some of which bear very pretty Flowers”, BL Add. Mss 18275A, 120v.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 125, 228, 244.

BL Add. Mss 18275A, 120r; Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 164.

Thistlewood to Long, 17 June 1776, BL Add. Mss 18275A, 128.

BL Add. Mss 18275A, 120v, 121r.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 229.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 238.

Casid Jill H. , Sowing empire: Landscape and colonization (Minneapolis, 2005); Tobin Beth Fowkes , Colonizing nature: The tropics in British arts and letters, 1760–1820 (Philadelphia, 2005); Carney Judith A. Rosomoff Richard Nicholas , In the shadow of slavery: Africa's botanical legacy in the Atlantic world (Berkeley, 2009).

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 312 note 8; Casid, Sowing empire (ref. 60).

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 269, 300, 309.

McDonald Roderick A. , The economy and material culture of slaves: Goods and chattels on the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1993).

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 231; Casid , Sowing empire (ref. 60), 209; Burnard , Tyranny, mastery, and desire (ref. 41), 228–40.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 263.

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 160; Morgan Philip D. , “Slaves and livestock in eighteenth-century Jamaica: Vineyard pen, 1750–1751”, William and Mary quarterly, lii (1995), 1995–76; Brown Vincent , The reaper's garden: Death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

Hall , In miserable slavery (ref. 46), 307.

Burnard , Tyranny, mastery, and desire (ref. 41).

Drayton , Nature's government (ref. 11), 121; Spary E. C. , Utopia's garden: French natural history from old regime to revolution (Chicago, 2000).

Eyre Alan , The botanic gardens of Jamaica (London, 1966).

Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 1 June 1788, NLNSW.

Thomas Dancer to Edward Long, [Jamaica], 24 July 1789, Long Papers BL Add. Mss 22678, 10v.

Long Edward , The history of Jamaica (London, 1774), ii, 259. Wright noted in 1790 that “Dr Rutherford gives lectures in a truly learned and Philosophical Stile” at the Edinburgh garden, Wright to Banks, Edinburgh, 18 November 1790, NLNSW.

A manuscript “Abstract of an Oration deliver'd at A Board of Directors under the new Act (1789) respecting the Bath & the Botanic Garden in Jamaica by T. Dancer M.D. Island Botanist. 1st March 1790” and a newspaper report of the “Substance of an Address, Delivered at a Meeting of the New Bath Directors, By Dr. Dancer, Island Botanist” are both in BL Add. Mss 22678, 35r–43r, 45r.

All quotations are from the printed version, BL Add. Mss 22678, 45r; Drayton , Nature's government (ref. 11), 115.

Blackburn Robin , The overthrow of colonial slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988); Brown Christopher L. , Moral capital: Foundations of British abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006); Kate Davies, “A moral purchase: Femininity, commerce and abolition, 1788–1792”, in Eger Elizabeth Grant Charlotte Gallchoir Clíona Ó Warburton Penny (eds), Women, writing and the public sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001), 133–59.

Drayton , Nature's government (ref. 11), 115.

The manuscript version called them “groveling Kinds”, compare BL Add. Mss 22678, 37r and 45r.

BL Add. Mss 22678, 41r, 45r.

BL Add. Mss 22678, 45r; Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 20 July 1791, BL Add. Mss 22678, 60v.

BL Add. Mss 22678, 45r.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 24 July 1789, BL Add. Mss 22678, 9r, 9v, 10r.

Long to Dancer, London, 6 July 1789, BL Add. Mss 22678, 7v.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 24 July 1789, BL Add. Mss 22678, 14v.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 24 July 1789, BL Add. Mss 22678, 10v–11r.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, [1790?], BL Add. Mss 22678, 49v–50r.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 20 July 1791, BL Add. Mss 22678, 60v–61r.

For competition over cinnamon, see Bleichmar Daniela , “Atlantic competitions: Botany in the eighteenth-century Spanish empire”, in Delbourgo Dew (eds), Science and empire (ref. 13), 225–52.

Dancer to Long , Jamaica, 6 April 1788, BL Add. Mss 22678, 4r.

Dancer Compare to Long , Jamaica, 24 July 1789, BL Add. Mss 22678, 14v–15r and [Thomas Dancer], Catalogue of plants, exotic and indigenous, in the botanical garden, Jamaica (St Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, 1792).

Dancer to Long , Jamaica, 24 July 1789, BL Add. Mss 22678, 8v.

Dancer , “Account of the cinnamon tree growing in Jamaica”, BL Add. Mss 22678, 21r.

Samuel More to Edward Long, London, 11 February 1790, BL Add. Mss 22678, 31r; Drayton , Nature's government (ref. 11), 112.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, [1790?], BL Add. Mss 22678, 48r.

Thistlewood to Long, Westmoreland, Jamaica, 17 June 1776, BL Add. Mss 18275A, 128v.

Dancer to Long, 8 April 1787, 6th April 1788, BL Add. Mss 22678, 1–2, 3–4 (quotation at f. 4r).

Dancer to Long, 24 July 1789, [1790?], 20 December 1790, 13 April 1791, BL Add. Mss 22678.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, [1790?], BL Add. Mss 22678, 48v; Edward Long to Mr Martin, London, [no date], BL Add. Mss 22678, 6.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 20 December 1790, BL Add. Mss 22678, 57r.

Bryan Edwards to Joseph Banks, London, 9 June 1793, SLNSW.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, [1790?], BL Add. Mss 22678, 49r.

Dancer to Long, Jamaica, 20 December 1790, BL Add. Mss 22678, 56v.

Dancer Thomas , Some observations respecting the botanical gardens (Jamaica, 1804), 3, 5, 8. Banks's copy is British Library B.93(3).

Among many other works see Klein Lawrence , “Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenth-century England”, in Still Judith Worton Michael (eds), Textuality and sexuality: Reading theories and practices (Manchester, 1993), 100–15.

Carney Rosomoff , In the shadow of slavery (ref. 60), 123; Casid , Sowing empire (ref. 60), chap. 5: Countercolonial landscapes.

[Dancer], Catalogue (ref. 90), 4, which also included the Akee tree as “introduced by Negroes in some of Mr. Hibbet's ships”.

Sloane Hans , A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St Christophers, and Jamaica (London, 1707 and 1725), i, Sig B[2]r; ii, 61.

Barham Henry , Hortus Americanus (Kingston, Jamaica, 1794), 148–9.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 149.

Foucault Michel , The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (London, 1976), xviii.

Jewson Nicholas , “The disappearance of the sick man from medical cosmology, 1770–1870”, Sociology, x (1976), 225–44.

Fissell Mary E. , “The disappearance of the patient's narrative and the invention of hospital medicine”, in French Roger Wear Andrew (eds), British medicine in an age of reform (London, 1991), 92–109; Porter Roy , “The rise of physical examination”, in Bynum W. F. Porter Roy (eds), Medicine and the five senses (Cambridge, 1993), 179–97; Reiser Stanley Joel , Medicine and the reign of technology (Cambridge, 1978), chap. 1: Examination of the patient in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Brown , The reaper's garden (ref. 66).

Sheridan Richard B. , Doctors and slaves: A medical and demographic history of slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge, 1985).

Memoir of the late William Wright (ref. 39), 45–46.

Dancer Thomas , The medical assistant: Or Jamaica practice of physic; designed chiefly for the use of families and plantations (Kingston, Jamaica, 1801), 253.

Henry Fuller to Hans Sloane, Jamaica, 21 August 1696, BL Sloane Mss 4078, 114.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), ii, p. xiv.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. ci.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cix.

Porter , ” The rise of physical examination” (ref. 112), presents evidence that Sloane's oral examinations might take up to half an hour.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cxxviii; Churchill Wendy D. , “Bodily differences?: Gender, race, and class in Hans Sloane's Jamaican medical practice, 1687–1688”, Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences, lx (2005), 391–444.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cxlviii, see also cvi and cxvi.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. xcix (treating Sir Henry Morgan).

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cxl.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, pp. xcvii, c, cxiv, cxviii, cxxi, cxxvii, cxxxviii, cxxxix, cli, cliv.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cxxxiv.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cxlvi.

[ King William ], The present state of physick in the island of Cajamai (London?, 1710?), 4.

Long , History of Jamaica (ref. 73), iii, 583 and 587.

Wear Andrew , Knowledge and pratice in English medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000).

Barham to Sloane , St Jago de la Vega, 10 May 1712, BL Sloane Mss 4043, 45r.

Barham to Sloane , St Jago de la Vega, 10 May 1712, BL Sloane Mss 4043, 45r.

Barham to Sloane , London, 17 April 1718, BL Sloane Mss 4045, 108r.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), ii, 386 quoting Barham's manuscript; Barham, Hortus (ref. 108), 90.

Barham to Sloane , London, 11 December 1717, BL Sloane Mss 4045, 77v; Sloane, Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. liv.

Barham to Sloane , London, 11 December 1717, BL Sloane Mss 4045, 78r.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 18, 210; Delbourgo James , “Sir Hans Sloane's milk chocolate and the whole history of the cacao”, Social text, xxix (2011), 71–101.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 86, 113, 121, 146. Peanuts and sesame were used as medicines too.

Sloane Hans , Catalogus plantarum quæ in insula Jamaica (London, 1696); Shiebinger , Plants and empire (ref. 8).

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 52.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 171–2.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 88, 94, 115–16, 122.

Wright , Hortus (ref. 1), i, no. 119.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 9.

For example, Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 19, 77, 196; Browne Patrick , The civil and natural history of Jamaica (London, 1756), 344. On the ways in which such knowledge was communicated by colonial naturalists, see Murphy Kathleen S. , “Translating the vernacular: Indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic”, Atlantic studies, viii (2011), 2011–48.

Casid , Sowing empire (ref. 60); Parrish Scott , American curiosity (ref. 13), Chakrabarti , Medicine and materials (ref. 14); Sheridan, Doctors and slaves (ref. 114).

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 168.

Manuscript notes from Barham relating to the plant Vervain inserted after p. 170 of the Natural History Museum's (London) copy of Sloane, Voyage (ref. 107), i. See also p. 171. For thumbnails see Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 34; Long , History of Jamaica (ref. 73), iii, 777; Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India proprietor, kept during a residence in the island of Jamaica (London, 1834), 330.

Voeks Robert , “African magic and medicine in the Americas”, Geographical review, lxxxiii (1993), 66–78.

Handler Jerome S. , “Slave medicine and obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834”, New West Indian guide, lxxiv (2000), 57–90; Laguerre Michael , Afro-Caribbean folk medicine (South Hadley, Mass., 1987); Sheridan, Doctors and slaves (ref. 114), chap. 3: African and Afro-West Indian medicine.

Parrish Scott , American curiosity (ref. 13).

See above, ref. 135.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. cxlii.

Sheridan , Doctors and slaves (ref. 114), 89; Browne , Civil and natural history (ref. 146), 300; Sloane, Voyage (ref. 107), ii, 383.

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, p. lv; Barham to Sloane, London, 21 November 1717, BL Sloane Mss 4045, 69r.

Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 101.

Memoir of the late William Wright (ref. 39), 92.

Memoir of the late William Wright (ref. 39), 27.

Lewis , Journal of a West India proprietor (ref. 149), 321.

Parrish Scott , American curiosity (ref. 13); Chakrabarti , Materials and medicine (ref. 14).

Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), ii, p. viii; Delbourgo , “Sir Hans Sloane's milk chocolate” (ref. 138).

This might also include the problematic interpretation of gossip, rumour and ‘loose talk’ which emerges around revolts of the enslaved. See, for example, the extended debate about Denmark Vesey in “Forum: The making of a slave conspiracy”, William and Mary quarterly, lviii (2001), 913–76 (part I) and lix (2002), 135–202 (part II); Lepore Jill , New York burning: Liberty, slavery, and conspiracy in eighteenth-century Manhattan (New York, 2005).

Safier Neil , Measuring the new world: Enlightenment science and South America (Chicago, 2008). Compare the presentation of the ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ of the ‘other’ as Sloane abstracted material from Barham's manuscript in Voyage (ref. 107), ii, 367 (Pickering's herb), 370 (Papaver spinosum) and 387 (Hog Plum).

Barham to Sloane , London, 21 November 1717, BL Sloane Mss 4045, 68v.

Long , History of Jamaica (ref. 73), iii, 380–1.

Wright , Hortus (ref. 1), ii, no. 341.

Drayton , Nature's government (ref. 11), 93; Chakrabarti , Medicine and materials (ref. 14).

See, for example, the “Nancy” stories retold in Lewis , Journal of a West India Proprietor (ref. 149), 253–9, 291–6.

Trapham Thomas , A discourse of the state of health in the island of Jamaica (London, 1679), 97–98; Sloane , Voyage (ref. 107), i, 168 and ii, 367; Barham , Hortus (ref. 108), 54–55; Dancer , Medical assistant (ref. 116), 360; Wright , “An account of the medicinal plants growing in Jamaica” (ref. 2), 228.