Abstract
When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801–02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced ‘civilisation’, the application of this term in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race.
On 9 April 1802, two expeditions devoted to the natural historical and imperial ambitions of rival European powers met one another at what became known thereafter as ‘Encounter Bay’ on the southern coast of a land then named Terra Australis Incognita. The British expedition, led by Captain Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) in his vessel the
These two groups of Europeans, divided by national loyalty and scientific rivalry, were united in their presumption that the land and waters they were eagerly charting, naming, and claiming were theirs to possess, despite the fact that there were peoples already there, inhabiting the land mass and coastline. For both British and French, these Indigenous inhabitants were regarded as an inferior branch of the family tree of humanity, but what were the grounds for their supposed inferiority? Was it a matter of their purported ‘savagery’ or of their ‘race’? For Joseph Marie de Gérando (1772–1842), whose Of all the terms of comparison that we can choose, there is none more fascinating…than that offered by savage peoples. Here we can remove first the variations pertaining to the climate, the organism, the habits of physical life, and we shall notice among nations much less developed by the effect of moral institutions, these natural variations are bound to emerge much more prominently: being less distinguished by secondary circumstances, they must chiefly be so by the first and fundamental circumstances belonging to the very principle of existence. Here we shall be able to find the material needed to construct an exact scale of the various degrees of civilisation…(De Gérando, 1969[1800]: 62–3) I have never been able to conceive that Europeans have either justice or equity on their side when in the name of their governments they annex lands newly found by them, but already inhabited by men who do not always deserve the name of ‘savage’. (Baudin, 2016[1802]: 20–1) Mr. Flinders was of opinion, that this mode of procuring their food would cause a characteristic difference between the manners, and perhaps the dispositions, of these people, and of those who mostly depend upon the spear…for a supply. In the one case, there must necessarily be the co-operation of two or more individuals; who therefore, from mutual necessity, would associate together. It is fair to suppose, that this association would, in the course of a few generations, if not much sooner, produce a favourable change in the manners and dispositions even of a savage. In the other case, the native who depends upon…his spear for his support depends upon his single arm, and, requiring not the aid of society, is indifferent about it, but prowls along, a gloomy, unsettled, and unsocial being. (Collins, 1971[1802]: 253–4)
Throughout the 18th century, savagery was a standard feature of ethnographic writing produced by both ‘savants sédentaires’ in Europe and the ‘observateurs au travail’ who fed them information from distant climes (Chappey, 2002: 193–204). This was a genuinely pan-European terminology, as the essays by Hodacs and Persson, Van Gent, and Irving-Stonebreaker in this issue illustrate, but from about the 1770s, a new terminology of racial characteristics began to gain influence, especially in the work of travellers trained in the taxonomic methods of natural history (Gissis, 2011: 88–93; Starbuck, 2013: 217–19). The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies (Gascoigne, 2014: 289–90; Staum, 2003: 24–6). Over the final decades of the 18th century and the early decades of the next, emergent ideas of race, which referred to physical or anatomical differences between populations, were overlaid onto savagery, with its focus on the different social and historical conditions exemplified by nations and peoples. Douglas (2003: 12) argues that the language employed by European travellers to describe Indigenous peoples evinced a ‘common slippage’ depending on the reception they received; nonetheless, the concept of race and the language of human varieties gradually assumed greater explanatory weight. Even where the terminology employed remained fairly stable, as in Flinders’ preference for the terms ‘natives’ and ‘indians’, or Brown’s consistent use of ‘natives’ to describe Indigenous Australians, race emerged as a crucial qualifier. Both men employed the term ‘race’ when accounting for the physical form of the people they encountered – so different in ‘complexion and appearance’ from themselves (Flinders, 1966[1814]: Vol. 1, 146). 1 Race enabled colonial travellers and natural historians to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to physical variations. The implication of the latter was that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be correlated with criteria of physical classification, notably skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature (Chappey, 2002: 259). While race did not become a replacement for the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century the idea of savagery was re-inscribed by race.
When Robert Brown wrote to his patron, Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), of his and Flinders’ encounter with the French expedition, he made special mention that among their natural historians and illustrators was one who was ‘ Dare we express the desire to see our illustrious correspondent imitate this conduct and send us any specimens of the human varieties which he may discover? These strangers would be particularly welcomed by the observers of mankind, and if our hospitable attentions could persuade them to stay and agree, by adopting our country, to put an immense distance between their cradle and their grave, their remains, later cherished and preserved through the genius of science and the requirements of a gentle sensibility, would find a place in our museum amongst the articles from their homeland, of which they would then complete the picture. (Jauffret, 2004[1974]: 594–6)
It is important here to emphasise that race and savagery did not represent entirely divergent trends in Enlightenment thought (Fornasiero, Monteath and West-Sooby, 2004: 354; Hughes, 1988: 28–9). Rather, as Péron’s attitude illustrates, the characteristics of both savagery and race were interwoven, and each were thought to be modifiable by means of human ingenuity. Among the other instructions drawn up for the Baudin expedition was Men themselves, gathered alive, would doubtless be the best materials for an exact comparison of the various varieties of the human species; but not to mention the insurmountable difficulties of a meeting of this nature, it is not lawful for us, even when we could, to sacrifice happiness, or even to violate the will of our fellow-men to satisfy a mere philosophical curiosity. (ibid.: 266–7)
In addition to the production of scientific portraits, Cuvier requested the collection of physical specimens, most importantly skulls, the scientific comparison of which he thought Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) had demonstrated to great effect. Cuvier’s avidity here was particularly notable: ‘travelers should not neglect any opportunity when they can visit places where the dead are deposited’, so that bones might be taken and catalogued. ‘Whole skeletons would be infinitely precious’, as no scholar had yet been able to write ‘a detailed comparison of the skeleton of the Negro and that of the White’ (Cuvier, 1798: 268). Cuvier urged that no impediment should be allowed to stand in the way of this scientific task, not even the sentiments of the French crew who might object to the preparation of human cadavers aboard ship: Perhaps the sailors will oppose the operations to be accomplished on the ship, which seem to them barbarous; but in an expedition which has for its object the advancement of the sciences, the principals must be governed only by reason, and know how to inspire their crews with it. (ibid.)
By contrast with the Baudin expedition, Flinders’ expedition was relatively poorly equipped with instructions. The Admiralty instructions, which may have been drafted with the advice of the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), did require the participants on the
The University was one of the most vibrant and influential institutions of learning in Europe. It provided a focal point for the intellectual life of an exceptionally lively community of Scots scholars, many of whom, as Silvia Sebastiani has demonstrated, saw themselves as contributors to the natural history of humankind. The teaching of moral philosophy at Edinburgh was also framed as ‘the science of man’, with more in common with the orientation of natural history than one might suppose. Indeed, Silvia Sebastiani (2013: 45–71) has defined Scottish stadial history – developed and employed by Adam Smith (1723–90) in his
At the heart of this intellectual endeavour lay a widely shared adoption of the method of taxonomic study integral to the formation of natural historical knowledge. Stadial models of historical progress were based on an interpretation of historical data on the basis that all human societies progress through stages of development from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’.
4
Underpinning the stadial view was a fundamental assumption that human societies were the product of a universal humanity, which David Hume had formulated in his It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of man, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. (Hume, 1975[1739–40]: 83)
Scottish stadial thinking took shape around the belief that societies in different stages of development could co-exist at the same time and that more or less all people passed through the same stages of development, which could be discerned and studied by means of natural historical observation and classification. Different models of taxonomy circulated among the intellectuals of Edinburgh, linking them to much broader European debates on the best way to classify and order the natural and physical world.
5
The nosology of human diseases of William Cullen (1710–90), a leading figure in Edinburgh’s School of Medicine, was, for example, a product of his ‘intimate acquaintance’ with ‘the different branches of Natural History’ (Thomson, 1832: 2). Cullen in fact collaborated with Walker in the 1750s in adapting a new scheme for classifying fossils into Classes, Orders, Genera, Species, and Varieties. This fivefold division, though arbitrary, is excellent, and has now, from experience, been found the best in the arrangement of natural bodies. It is even applicable and commodious in other departments of science. (Walker, quoted in Thomson, 1832: 693, 729–30)
In speculating on the relationship between species and varieties in particular, Walker and Cullen addressed a key matter of debate among European natural historians. Whereas each of the classifications from classes to species were thought to indicate the invariable criteria endowed by nature, ‘varieties’ were thought to be distinguished by modifications of nature ‘by means of contingent forces such as climate and soil’, enabling further variation by mixing to create ‘hybrids’ (Lehleiter, 2014: 192). When applied to the classification of human beings in particular, the identification of ‘variety’ was held to depend on the variable effects of climate, air, diet, or manner of life that manifested in the skin colour, hair, stature and size, and above all the facial structure and skull morphology of the various supposed ‘races’ (Turnbull, 2007). The Comte de Buffon (1707–88) had claimed in his
Carlos López-Beltrán (1994: 213; 2007: 8–28) has amply demonstrated that physicians, with their particular concern to identify the precise influence of and interaction between innate and environmental conditions in the ill-health of individual patients, were at the intellectual forefront of the emergence of new ideas of heredity and a renewed focus on anatomical science.
6
This development was integral to the medical curriculum at Edinburgh. Over the second half of the 18th century, the Medical School garnered a world-leading reputation, attracting students not only from Scotland, but from all over Britain and Ireland, from Europe, and from the various colonial societies in North and South America as well (Rosner, 1992: 20–1). There was no necessarily sequential order to the curriculum, and students were strongly recommended to combine their medical courses with natural and moral philosophy (Gregory, 1770; Johnson, 1792: 72–4). The parallels between medicine and moral philosophy were not merely coincidental. Throughout the later decades of the 18th century, both medicine and moral philosophy were understood as progressive sciences, based on the articulation of universal principles derived from an intimate study of nature, human nature, and human health relying on close observation and empirical analysis (Eddy, 2008; Haakonssen, 1996; Kidd, 2006). Lisbeth Haakonssen (1997: 56) has noted that Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy was ‘like natural philosophy…an empirical science based on induction. The subject of morals was man’s particular nature and the exploration of his nature began with matters of fact’. Moral philosophy was literally inscribed on the body. Virtue, as Adam Ferguson (1967[1767]: 117–18) expressed it, had its own particular anatomy: That the temper of the heart, and the intellectual operations of the mind, are, in some measure, dependent on the state of the animal organs, is well known from experience. Men differ from themselves in sickness and in health; under a change of diet, of air, and of exercise…
We know little of Robert Brown’s formal education at Edinburgh before he left the University in 1793 without graduating. What we do know is that as a medical student he was enrolled in the Reverend Walker’s course in natural history in 1792 (a year after another medical student who was to become a travelling naturalist, Mungo Park) (Eddy, 2003: 99, 108). Brown also devoted himself at the University to the study of botany, and was able to apply the taxonomic method in his own botanical fieldwork conducted while serving as a regimental surgeon with the Fifeshire Fencibles in Ireland in 1795. One of the most important signs of the influence of his Edinburgh experience, however, was his active pursuit of private research over subsequent years that reflected the University’s blending of medicine, natural history, stadial theory, and moral philosophy. His personal library, for instance, contained Adam Smith’s
The combination of Scottish moral, historical, economic, and social thought with the methods of natural history and medicine was itself a product of the profound shifts that had taken place in European scientific thought over the previous 200 years (Golinski, 2011: 225). The rise of mechanics in the 17th century seemed to provide a universal guide for knowledge of the natural world, including the human body (Gaukroger, 2010: 293–4). One of the effects of this development was to trace newer and clearer lines of causation in the internal structure of the human body (Cottom, 2001: 10). Not only did medicine provide insight into the sickness and health of the human frame, it was based on the idea that diagnosis required a mind trained in the techniques of studying humans in situ. The physician was supposed to apply their knowledge of medicine to the unique characteristics of the patients they treated and the specific conditions of life that had a direct bearing on their health and ill-health. Those conditions included everything from climate and diet to habits and dispositions (Gregory, 1772: 12–14). It was in this sense that the concept of race itself was understood both anatomically and morally, in terms of its variable traces on the human form requiring a close study of the multitude of human varieties.
The attempt to catalogue the physical markers of human variety was a feature of the lectures in anatomy given by Alexander Monro ‘secundus’ (1733–1817), who succeeded his father (Alexander Monro ‘primus’, 1697–1767) to the chair of anatomy in 1759. According to his son and successor, Monro ‘tertius’ (1773–1859), Monro ‘secundus’, ‘in his lectures, used to describe and exhibit the diversity in the forms of the skulls of different nations, which he imputed very much to the powerful influence of posture and pressure applied to the head. On this principle, he explained the cause of the round head of the Turk, from the influence of the pressure of the turban’ (Monro, 1840: xcix). In using skulls to map human difference, Monro ‘secundus’ was following the precedent established by his friend Petrus Camper, who used skull morphology and measurements of ‘facial angle’ to separate the various human races from one another, and from the apes (Camper, 1794: 59–64; Cogan, 1794: xi; Meijer, 1999: 168). Similarly, in his
In the last decades of the 18th century in Scotland, however, the notion of race was still understood as an effect not so much of firm physical endowments, but of the slow action of variable factors such as climate, diet, and social modes of life (López-Beltrán, 2002: 67–75). In 1775, John Hunter (1754–1809) (not the famed anatomist of the same name) took his medical degree at Edinburgh with a dissertation on human varieties,
For late-18th-century Scottish natural historians, race and human variation represented a taxonomic puzzle. There was no stable or commonly shared definition. There is, however, a marked difference separating the 18th-century natural historical discourse of race from later 19th-century invocations of race that identified fixed barriers between purportedly ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races. What 18th-century Scottish natural historians pondered was not primarily the gradations of being, but the proper classification of beings. Race was not yet the determinant of one’s physical and intellectual endowments, but one among a number of markers of one’s physical, intellectual and cultural differences from others. In that sense, Scottish natural historians such as Walker (1808: 409, 411) continued to identify physical, social, and even moral criteria as indexes of racial classification. Race, like language, institutions of government, or methods of warfare, was an ethnographic criterion like any other, subject to the vagaries of nature, such as climate and geography, but simultaneously to human mores and morals, laws, and literature. Toward the end of the 18th century, however, a gradual shift was underway toward a harder discourse of race that reflected the growing emphasis placed on the supposed anatomical markers of racial difference. This shift was especially apparent in France in the work of Cuvier. Nonetheless, as the varied instructions to the Baudin expedition reveal, even here an older and more variable discourse of savagery still had purchase even as a more rigid discourse of race emerged. This debate was far from an insular French, or even Continental European, concern. 8 The figure of Robert Brown illustrates that this discursive shift was also taking place in Scottish Enlightenment medicine, moral philosophy, and natural history.
In the early weeks of the Flinders expedition, Brown used his time for research to prepare for the tasks ahead. It is striking that his own account of what he read, and the extent of his personal library on the voyage, was dominated by texts relating to what the French were then calling ‘anthropology’. Brown was able to read French, and he carried with him and consulted a number of French and European works, among them the Comte de Buffon’s
On 21 January 1803, Brown and Flinders each recorded a violent encounter between the Indigenous inhabitants and a party of sailors out collecting wood at a place Flinders named Blue Mud Bay (on the coast of what is now Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia). Both Brown and Flinders were mystified by the courage and aggression of the Indigenous people, who not only stood their ground when fired upon, but forced the sailors to withdraw, wounding at least one with numerous spears. At a subsequent encounter that day, an Indigenous warrior was shot and killed when paddling away in a canoe. Flinders commanded his men to return to the beach the next day to retrieve ‘the dead body of the native’ (ibid.: 346). A body was indeed found, as Brown described it, ‘washd up upon the beach’ (ibid.: 348). The artist aboard the
This grisly work on the shore, and Westall’s portrait of the warrior’s butchered humanity, seemed to lend credence to Cuvier’s concern that the quest for scientific knowledge would appear barbarous to the unlearned. Yet his body was taken aboard ship. He was not the only person to die on that fateful day. A British sailor, Thomas Morgan, also died ‘in a frenzy’ that night from the effects of sunstroke. Flinders (1966[1814]: 198) recorded that after the dead warrior’s body had been anatomized, Morgan’s body was ‘committed to the deep with the usual ceremony’, and a nearby island was named Morgan’s Island in his honour. Neither Flinders or Brown, but a sailor aboard the
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was supported by a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) project grant entitled ‘The Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Legacies of the Enlightenment’ (P15-0423:1).
