1
Transplantation
THE NATURE OF OTHER COUNTRIES
The few memories Sloane recorded of his youth tell of a life lived hunting after nature’s treasures. He had always been ‘very much pleas’d with the study of plants, and other parts of nature’, he recalled in the introduction to his Natural History of Jamaica in 1707, and had seen many curiosities ‘either in the fields, or in the gardens or cabinets of the curious’ in his native land. In 1710, thanking the Earl of Cromertie for a description of the curiosities buried in the bogs of Scotland occasioned a comparison with his home soil. ‘I have seen many such,’ Sloane told the earl, ‘and know your Lordship’s account of them to be very exact and true.’ Sloane remembered watching labourers cut up turf to harvest peat for fuel and how they discovered fir trees’ roots and stumps, the roots’ branches matted together under the sod. This wood was sometimes turned into candles or rope, and used for windmill posts and masts for ships. There were skeletons of giant elk, golden chains, ‘pieces of money’, and bark that locals used to fashion vessels for storing butter. Years later in 1725, thanking the Yorkshire botanist Richard Richardson for some specimen woodcock birds, Sloane recounted how he used to visit ‘many small uninhabited islands’ as a boy ‘where the ordinary sea-mews, &c. have laid their eggs often on the ground, without any or with at least very small nests, so thick, that it was difficult to pass along without treading on them; while the birds made a terrible noise over our heads’. The scene is brief but suggestive of the career that followed: Sloane and his companions coolly invade a natural preserve to gather precious specimens, unfazed by the uproar around them.1
These scenes took place not in England or Scotland, or on some remote tropical isle, but in Ulster in the north of Ireland where Sloane was born and grew up. The world of his youth was one remade by the Protestant Reformation, the conflicts it fostered in the British Isles, the union of the Crowns that created the nation of Great Britain and England’s colonization of Ireland. Ireland was invaded by its eastern neighbour as early as the twelfth century, when Norman barons attempted to subjugate Ulster’s ruling Gaelic lords, the O’Neills and O’Donnells. It was a drive that intensified with the threat posed to Protestant England in the sixteenth century by Spain, which had acquired immense wealth and power through the extraction of silver from mines in American colonies like Peru. English colonists claimed it was necessary to hold Ireland in self-defence against the possibility of Spanish attack and chopped down its woods for the purpose of fuel and building. In 1603, James VI linked England, Wales and Ireland with his native Scotland, becoming King James I. After the O’Neills and O’Donnells fled to mainland Europe in 1607, the English disqualified Catholics from owning property and holding political office, while transplanting Protestants from England and south-west Scotland, many of them Presbyterians, to take possession of the land. As the invaders gained the upper hand, a series of fifty-five London companies organized themselves into a joint-stock venture or corporation known as the Irish Society, for clearing Ulster of its Catholic inhabitants and overcoming the resistance of wood-dwelling rebels called ‘woodkernes’, facilitating colonization. According to King James’s attorney general Sir John Davies, Ulster was ‘the most rude and unreformed part of Ireland’; settling it, said His Majesty, would ‘establish the true religion of Christ among men … almost lost in superstition’. To many like Thomas Blennerhasset, however, who arrived from Norfolk in 1610, what counted about ‘goodly Ulster’ was the profitable cultivation invited by its ‘pleasant fields and rich groundes’.2
The Sloane family came to Ulster as servants of the aristocracy. Among the new Protestant arrivals was James Hamilton from Ayrshire in Scotland in 1603. Hamilton acquired land and title, becoming the first Viscount Clandeboye in 1622 in reward for working as an agent for King James. When Clandeboye died in 1644, his son, also named James Hamilton, inherited his land and became the first Earl of Clanbrassil. Clanbrassil married Anne Carey, daughter of the Earl of Monmouth, in 1641, but his affairs floundered after he supported Charles I’s losing cause in the Civil Wars of the 1640s against Oliver Cromwell. The Hamilton–Carey marriage, meanwhile, indirectly brought about the wedding of two of their servants: Alexander Sloane, a cousin of the Hamiltons, who had also come from Ayrshire to manage their estates, and Sarah Hickes, who had come with Anne Carey. Alexander and Sarah Sloane went on to have seven children, although only three survived to adulthood. James became a barrister and MP; William became a merchant. Their youngest son, Hans, was born in the market town of Killyleagh, County Down, on 16 April 1660. His name, not uncommon in Scotland at the time, was evidently given in honour of the first James Hamilton’s father back in Ayrshire, the Reverend John (Hans) Hamilton of Dunlop. The significance of the name Hans is thus two-fold: it reflects the closeness between the aristocratic Hamiltons and their faithful servants the Sloanes, and speaks to the Reformation heritage of Sloane’s family, since Hans Hamilton had been the first Protestant vicar of Dunlop. Sloane’s father Alexander did well for himself. After Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, he mustered troops on behalf of the king as a commissioner of array and became a landowning member of the gentry, employing tenant farmers to work his land. On his death, he left behind estates at Rowreagh and Ballygarvan in County Down. These, however, went to his first-born James, according to the conventions of primogeniture. Hans, his youngest, would have to make his own way in the world.3
Even though Hans’s most youthful years were a time of relative peace, uncertainty stalked the Hamiltons’ fortunes. The Civil Wars had spawned bloody Irish rebellions during 1641, when Catholic gentry and Gaelic peasants took retribution against the Protestants, although the uprising was fiercely put down by Cromwell’s New Model Army. After the Restoration, Charles extended greater toleration to Catholics, Ulster developed economically and the Protestants consolidated their ascendancy. Division nevertheless remained a hazard of new Irish fortunes. While the Hamiltons backed Hans’s brother James as Whig MP for Killyleagh, his father Alexander became involved in disputes over the will of the Earl of Clanbrassil. The will stated that Clanbrassil’s land must pass to his son Henry, but should Henry and his wife the Countess Alice lack an heir, the property would be shared among Henry’s uncles. One story has it that the countess persuaded Henry to make his legacy over to her, before Henry suddenly died – some allege poison – leaving the dowager Alice to claim everything for herself. Servants then recovered an original copy of the will, prompting legal suits to reinstate the uncles. Ultimately, the estates were divided among several bickering relatives, with much of the property passing to Sophia Hamilton, daughter of yet another James Hamilton, a County Down squire.4
Such were the quandaries of Hans Sloane’s early existence. Born into a land remade by conquest and colonization, he grew up the child of servants of the aristocracy and an Ulster Protestant of Scottish descent, one of the so-called New English settlers of Ireland. He was, therefore, strictly speaking neither English nor Irish (nor Scottish) but a member of the minority ruling elite, who were heavily outnumbered by the disenfranchised Catholic majority, and tended to identify themselves as ‘the English of Ireland’. The political identity of the Ulster elite was ambiguous. They simultaneously asserted loyalty to Ireland while expressing desire for close ties to England. Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, the leading defender of the Protestant Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, advanced the argument that Protestantism was in fact much closer to the original form of Irish Christianity than Roman Catholicism. ‘The religion professed by the ancient bishops’, Ussher controversially wrote in his Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and the British (1631), was ‘the very same with that which now by public authority is maintained therein, against the foreign doctrine brought in thither in later times by the Bishop of Rome’s followers’. Ussher’s improbable contention was that Catholicism had been imposed while Protestantism was indigenous. On the other hand, the directors of the Irish Society were based in London and many colonists kept up close links to the capital, entertaining hopes of greater political union and looking to the British monarchy and their fellow Protestants for direction. How Sloane understood his own ethnic and national identity is not entirely clear, as he left no written statements on the subject. But the shape of his life was very much a British one rather than an Irish or, for that matter, English one in any narrower sense. While he always maintained family ties and allegiances to Ulster, Sloane would later move to London, never to return to his native soil.5
As an Ulster Protestant, Sloane benefited from the suppression of Ireland’s Catholics, the seizure of their land and the wealth this brought the colonizers. He likely enjoyed highly cordial if not familial relations with the aristocratic Hamiltons, whose company appears to have lent him an easy sociability around persons of different rank, which was later to become one of the hallmarks of his own extensive social circles. Writing to Sloane to describe his qualifications as a scholar in 1728, Thomas Stack, who became his librarian, flattered his patron with a paean to the easygoing character of the Irish nobility, which he insisted Sloane had inherited. ‘In this blest isle the supercilious frown / Marks not the greatest lord from meanest clown. / Easy access and affability / Are Characters to know the nobles by … / Then all a free and friendly ear may claim, / And peer and peasant are to them the same.’ But Sloane’s youth offered vivid lessons of the perils of discord, too, from the bloody struggle over Ireland to the acrimonious dispute over the Hamilton will in what was virtually his second family. He witnessed his father’s example of how professional service and property ownership could confer genteel standing yet also how such property required resolute management to avoid division and conflict.6
Most importantly, Ulster was where Sloane discovered the natural world and was first captivated by the prospect of its possession. He marvelled at the flora and fauna around Killyleagh, at the western edge of Strangford Lough, not far from the Irish Sea. The eggs he and his companions took from the seagulls probably came from the nearby Copeland Isles. The Hamiltons likely gave him his first intellectual exposure by granting access to their library at Killyleagh Castle, and although no record survives of what he read there, the young Protestant Sloane surely read his Bible. This heritage would have rooted him in a tradition of Christian reverence for the natural world but it would also have given him a sense of duty to use it for human advantage. For early modern Christians, the Book of Genesis taught that the laborious conversion of ‘wilderness’ into gardens was a pious act that redeemed the original sin of Adam and Eve, the Fall from grace and the loss of Eden. ‘The world is a great library, and fruit trees are some of his bookes wherein we may read & see plainly the attributes of God his power, wisdom [and] goodness,’ the Staffordshire Puritan and gardener Ralph Austen wrote in one of many such statements in his Spiritual Use of an Orchard (1653). English Protestants often understood their possession of others’ land in the terms of a providential capitalism: as a means of ‘improving’ both the soil and themselves through mastering botany, cultivating gardens and profiting from agriculture. Sloane would adopt such views and later wrote that it was ‘a great contentment’ to him ‘to see many things cultivated in English gardens which I had seen grow wild in other countries’. When he gazed at nature as a boy in Ulster, he saw a landscape under colonial occupation. So the first of those ‘other countries’ was, paradoxically, his own native land.7
CURIOSITY AND CONNECTION
Sloane’s youth was no jaunt, however, but one almost terminated by severe illness at the age of sixteen. In 1676, Sloane was afflicted by a ‘violent hæmorrhage’ and started spitting blood. According to the historian and secretary of the Royal Society Thomas Birch, whom Sloane later made one of his trustees and to whom he granted a lengthy interview late in life – our main source for his youth – Sloane spent the next three years largely confined to his room in Killyleagh. He slowly recovered his strength, although the problem was to recur throughout his life. The illness marked him and proved formative in more ways than one. From this moment on, Sloane took care always to monitor his diet and, unlike many of his contemporaries, moderate his drinking. He made himself a study in sobriety and became expert, as Birch put it in a resonant phrase, in ‘the prudent management of himself’. While the fight over Hamilton’s Ulster estates suggested the wisdom of efficiently managing one’s affairs and relationships, the severity of Sloane’s illness taught him the necessity of managing his body with scrupulous care. Likely as a consequence of this illness, at least in part, he determined to seek his professional fortune by embarking upon a career as a doctor.8
Three years later in 1679, like many of his fellow Ulstermen, Sloane crossed the Irish Sea and made his way to London. Transferring to the English capital, with its beckoning opportunities, was a sign of his ambition. ‘Most of our young gentlemen are gone or going to London,’ Viscount Rosse later complained of his Protestant countrymen early in the eighteenth century; ‘what is to be done’, reflected another Irish observer more resignedly, ‘will be done in London.’ London was the centre of the British world but it was roiled by Protestant–Catholic tensions. The year before Sloane arrived, the Anglican priest Titus Oates divulged details of a fictitious Popish Plot in which he alleged the existence of a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II. The ensuing Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81 revealed that Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, was in fact a practising Catholic. Alarmed at this turn of events, the Whig Party moved to bar James by law from becoming king, although Charles, with the support of the Tories, succeeded in blocking them by repeatedly dissolving Parliament. Charles, meanwhile, was seeking greater toleration for Catholics because of a secret pledge he had made to convert to Catholicism in return for assistance from his cousin Louis XIV, the King of France, against England’s leading commercial and military rivals, the Dutch. As the Oxford anatomist William Gould told Sloane in January 1681 – in the oldest letter extant in the Sloane correspondence – it was a time of ‘troublesome, jealousyes, fears, plot & counterplots’ that left England an ‘unsettled and tottering nation’.9
Sloane must have been concerned by this state of affairs but he focused on learning the craft of medicine and grounding himself in the study of botany. He took lodging in a house in Water Lane, Blackfriars, next to the chemical laboratory situated at Apothecaries Hall, headquarters of the Society of Apothecaries, which had been set up early in the seventeenth century to organize the apothecaries’ challenge to learned physicians for the right to prescribe and sell medicines. Here Sloane met Nicolaus Staphorst, a German chemist who instructed him in the art of decocting, fermenting and distilling plants for ‘the preparations & uses of most chemical medicines’. He thus began on the most practical rung of the medical ladder. He started frequenting anatomy lectures, too, still controversial at the time because of their associations with grave-robbing and commercial entertainment, though just whose lessons Sloane attended or what they emphasized is not known. Sloane did not obtain a university education so his reading at this time likely had something of an autodidactic quality. His tendency was, in any case, to things as much as words and to gardens as much as libraries. To Sloane, rather, gardens were libraries; as Christian botanists like Austen insisted, the ‘book of nature’ was written by God to be read by the pious, species by species. To this end, he made trips out west to Chelsea Physic Garden, maintained by the Society of Apothecaries since 1673, training his eye to distinguish between different species and commit them to memory, as well as learning their virtues as ingredients for herbal medicine. One could only judge whether the price of a medicament was fair, Sloane later told a friend, if one knew its ingredients – the judgement of one schooled in the art of pharmacy. Chelsea also boasted the latest botanical technology, which Sloane observed with keen interest by permission of Mr Watts, the head gardener. ‘He makes under the floor of his greenhouse a great fire-place … and conveys the warmth through the whole house by tunnels,’ he excitedly told a friend. This system for transplanting and acclimatizing exotic species to produce new fruits was among the first of its kind in England and seized Sloane’s imagination with its potential to domesticate foreign plants via artificial climate control. Watts ‘thinks to make, by this means’, he continued, ‘an artificial spring, summer, winter, &c.’.10
Beyond his apprenticeship, Sloane enjoyed advantageous social connections that bridged the Irish Sea, and he soon began insinuating himself into genteel and learned society. The Anglo-Irish were a close-knit diaspora, with especially tight links between Ulster and London, where the Irish Society was headquartered. In his memoir of Sloane, Birch indicates that the key to his early London progress was his fellow countryman the noted experimental philosopher and pre-eminent Fellow of the Royal Society Robert Boyle, a native of County Waterford on Ireland’s south coast and heir to the fortune of the Earl of Cork. There is some evidence to suggest that Boyle may even have maintained ties with a former romantic interest who was the sister-in-law of the Earl of Clanbrassil, the employer of Sloane’s father; and that Clanbrassil had courted Boyle’s sister Mary. Sloane’s close family friends the Hamiltons may thus have furthered his career from back in Ulster. Boyle’s wealth, reputation for Christian morals and standing as a founding member of the Royal Society meant that his friendship could open doors to both learned and polite acquaintance for the young Sloane, and his patrician character surely disposed him to do so. Boyle’s youthful compatriot left nothing to chance, however, and Birch teasingly records that Sloane ‘cultivated [Boyle] by communicating to him whatever occurr’d to himself, which seem’d curious & important’, although what these things were he does not say. Reports of rare objects, perhaps, unusual phenomena or novel apparatus, such as Watts’s furnaces or Staphorst’s laboratory (Boyle owned his own experimental laboratory), or some of the plants Sloane started collecting around London about this time. Whatever he offered, it worked, and Boyle received him with ‘every mark of civility and esteem’. Curiosity was the currency of learned exchange and favour, as Sloane quickly grasped. His oldest-surviving plants are specimens he gathered in 1682, not for himself but for the gentleman collector William Courten, who also became Sloane’s ‘very particular and intimate friend’ at this time.11
Sloane trained as a physician at a moment when philosophical accounts of the natural world were very much in flux. The original writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers on topics ranging from natural philosophy (the physical sciences) to medicine and natural history had been lost with the decline of Greece and the fall of the Roman Empire. But many Greeks and Romans had been translated into Arabic (and Aramaic) by scholars under the Islamic Caliphates that extended from the Middle East and North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula (al-Andalus) after the seventh century CE. This translation work was supported by the House of Wisdom (Bayt al Hikma) in early ninth-century Baghdad, founded by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mūn, and included intensive commentaries on such key writings as Galen’s treatises on medicine by the tenth-century Persian Muslim polymath Ibn Sīnā (known in Europe as Avicenna). Innovative mathematics and experimental sciences also flourished under the Caliphates, such as the tradition of al-kīmiyā’ (alchemy) which derived from Greek, Egyptian and other sources and was described in manuscripts like the Corpus Jabirianum, attributed to the Muslim Arab polymath Jābir ibn Hayyān (later called Geber in Europe). After the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453, bringing down the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, numerous scholars and manuscripts travelled west, especially to the Italian peninsula, prompting new Latin translations by Renaissance Humanists. Although most European university scholars would adhere to ancient philosophical teachings until well into the eighteenth century, the retranslation of this Arabicized scientific corpus stimulated considerable ferment. The sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus adopted techniques used by Muslim astronomers of the Marāgha school (in Iran) and posited a mathematical explanation for a cosmos in which the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth as the Almagest of Ptolemy of Alexandria had insisted, even though Copernicus’ objective was not revolutionary scientific change but reconciling his views with Aristotle’s model of a geometrically perfect cosmos, which he still supported.12
The Pisan natural philosopher Galileo Galilei’s observation of ungeometrical spots on the surface of the sun using powerful new telescopes during the early years of the seventeenth century, and his support for Copernicus’ hypothesis that the sun was indeed the centre of the universe, further undermined the scientific orthodoxy of Aristotelianism. Some began to question both the ancient teachings that dominated university curricula and esoteric or so-called occult philosophies that, like Aristotelian theories of causation, characterized nature as an entity imbued with its own soul or inherent purpose. These traditions included Hermetic magic (after the fabled pagan deity Hermes Trismegistus), varieties of Neo-Platonic thought and practices such as alchemy and astrology. In writings published during the second quarter of the century, René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi in France, and Boyle in England, articulated a ‘mechanical philosophy’ that rejected the idea that nature behaved purposefully. Instead, ‘corpuscularianism’, as it also became known, focused on what Descartes termed ‘matter in motion’ and accounting for the behaviour of ‘corpuscles’ (atoms) without reference to innate principles of activity. Experimental programmes dedicated to reassessing physical causation in mechanical terms became established in new scientific institutions such as the Accademia del Cimento, founded by Galileo’s students in Florence in 1657, and the Royal Society, founded in London in 1660.13
Scholars have often labelled these events the Scientific Revolution, associating them with a momentous shift towards truly empirical scientific methods. At their most emphatic, as expressed in works like Herbert Butterfield’s Origins of Modern Science (1949), such narratives have identified this shift with the birth of a modern secular worldview that embodied the triumph of human reason and the supremacy of western civilization. The phrase ‘Scientific Revolution’ was coined only in 1939, however, by the French historian of science Alexandre Koyré, while teaching in Cairo, and tends to distort how seventeenth-century sciences were in reality marked by important continuities with the past as well as significant change. By contrast with the classic narratives of revolutionary change, virtually all natural philosophers, including Descartes and Boyle, were committed Christians who saw their mechanical account of nature not as a replacement for the biblical story of the creation but as a complementary account of the workings of God’s universe. The devout Boyle, architect of the Royal Society’s experimental programme, was also a practising alchemist with an extensive interest in the supernatural. Experimentation had been carried out in many other cultures in previous periods, for example by the alchemists who maintained laboratories in the medieval Islamic Caliphates. The mechanical philosophy, meanwhile, was neither novel nor particularly empirical, since it drew on ancient Greek sources like Democritus and Epicurus and no one could actually see the atoms it posited as the basic building blocks of matter. Isaac Newton’s epochal Principia mathematica (1687) reduced the movements of both heavenly and terrestrial bodies to mathematically computable laws of motion and gravitation, leading eighteenth-century disciples to celebrate a Newtonian universe that ran like a machine, a vision reviled by Romantic-era critics such as William Blake, whose famous 1795 print Newton depicted the great natural philosopher as a soulless geometer indifferent to the sublimities of nature. Both of these views, however, were distortions of Newton’s work and of how he saw the world. In secret, Newton too was a practising alchemist, a zealously unorthodox Christian who denied the Holy Trinity and a prophetic millenarian who spent more time calculating biblical chronology than on the mathematics of the Principia. He estimated that the Day of Judgement would come in the year 2066. Rather than describing a randomly mechanical universe, Newton’s discussions of the ‘active powers’ at work in matter such as electricity and magnetism in his Opticks (1704) were taken by some to reintroduce the controversial possibility that matter behaved according to innate principles of activity, resembling the ‘occult’ conceptions of Aristotelians and magicians.14
Sloane’s exposure to doctrines of mechanical matter appears to have come primarily through chemistry. ‘Chymistry’, as it was then known, referred to a range of practices that ran the gamut from rigorous technical experimentation to mystical visions of its role in charitable Christian living. In its medical application, chemistry provided an alternative to Galenical healing, which focused on balancing the four humours (blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile) to promote bodily health through interventions such as bloodletting and purges. The sixteenth-century Swiss-German healer known as Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) was accused of engaging in demonic magic, but his adaptation of alchemical techniques for the medical preparation of minerals was nonetheless highly influential, as he espoused a vision of the body as a microcosm of the material universe (the macrocosm). His followers coined the term iatrochemistry for chemical healing. The Flemish chemist Johannes Baptista van Helmont subsequently rejected Paracelsus’ microcosm/macrocosm model, but his own spiritual quest to discover a liquid subtler than fire that would dissolve material bodies (the alkahest) still derived from Paracelsian principles. The ideas of both Paracelsus and van Helmont appealed strongly to English dissenters and reformers during the Civil Wars and the Republic, but after Puritanism had been repudiated during the Restoration mechanical theories of matter as a passive rather than active entity gained currency.15
We have no direct record of Sloane’s reading during his medical training, but the French chemist Nicolas Lémery, whose lectures Sloane later attended in Paris, likely played an important role in shaping his attitudes. Sloane probably first met Lémery in London in 1681 on a trip the Frenchman made to England to seek patronage from Charles II, and they would meet again in France two years later. At some point – it is not clear when – Sloane acquired a series of notes based on Lémery’s Paris lectures on fermentation, the use of furnaces and experiments on animals, as well as several published writings including Lémery’s Cours de chymie (1675). In the widely read Cours, which ran to multiple editions, Lémery decried alchemists’ claims to produce gold as an ‘ars sine arte, cujus principium mentiri, medium laborare, et finis mendicare’: an art without art, whose principle was to lie, to toil and finally to beg. In truth, Lémery himself employed apparatus and techniques developed by alchemists and even acknowledged Hermes Trismegistus as the ‘father’ of the chemical enterprise, but cut all discussion of the transmutation of metals from the third edition of his Cours. Sloane’s exposure to the chemical ideas of Lémery, perhaps reinforced by his friendship with the corpuscularian Boyle, evidently imbued him with an animus against all notions of magical matter, and an unshakeable conviction that nature was a mechanical entity designed by God to be exploited for human profit. Such views would profoundly shape his attitudes as a collector.16
Sloane made a series of further intellectual contacts, probably through Boyle, with scholars engaged on pressing questions of global variation in both nature and society prompted by increasing travel, trade and colonization. In the Principia, Newton had shown that the motion of all bodies behaved with uniformly computable regularity both on earth and in the heavens. Whether or not such uniformity extended to the world’s peoples, plants and animals remained to be seen. Sloane came to know the philosopher John Locke, a friend of Boyle’s since 1660, who served not only the aristocratic English lords proprietor of Carolina who ruled the new southern American colony established in 1664 but also on the Board of Trade and Plantations (Locke later called Sloane his ‘ingenious’ and ‘very good friend’). In his analyses of different societies across the world, Locke did not find the moral equivalent of the global physical uniformity Newton had demonstrated. After studying travel accounts detailing the practice of human sacrifice in Mexico, for instance, Locke contradicted Christian orthodoxy in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) by concluding that there was no such thing as an innate (and innately moral) human nature. Instead, he underscored the need for a ‘natural history of man’ to gather evidence of moral and cultural variation in human societies, a goal towards which Sloane’s collections would later substantially contribute.17
Sloane’s most decisive engagement with questions of global variation came through the field of botany and his friendship with John Ray. Ray had trained at Cambridge before moving to Essex and was both an ordained priest and Fellow of the Royal Society. He became a leading exponent of ‘physico-theology’ (natural theology) and emphasized the divinely rational structure of nature in such pious works as The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691). ‘There is for a free man no occupation more worthy and delightful than to contemplate the beauteous works of nature,’ he wrote in 1660, ‘and honour the infinite wisdom and goodness of God.’ As ships brought unfamiliar specimens into European ports, naturalists like Ray sought to produce expanded catalogues of plants and animals to determine whether exotic species were different from or the same as those in Europe, and classify them in systematic taxonomic orders. By the time Sloane met him in the early 1680s, Ray was hard at work on a three-volume botanical taxonomy, the Historia plantarum (1686–1704), as well as catalogues of insects, fish, birds, snakes and quadrupeds. Classification required formidable powers of observation, memory and verbal description, as well as mastery of Latin – the lingua franca of the natural sciences – to apply lengthy descriptive polynomial labels. Picturing species was increasingly desirable but entailed a manual dexterity most naturalists lacked, so they resorted to employing artists if they could afford them (Ray, for one, could not). When it came to plants, Ray’s favoured method of classification required taking multiple anatomical characters into account to fix the identity of a species, rather than opting for a single feature, as advocated by the Paris botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Rivinus of Leipzig, his leading rivals. Ray’s was the method Sloane would adopt for his own botanical work.18
A continental tour capped Sloane’s formation. In the spring of 1683, he crossed the Channel to Dieppe with two fellow naturalists, Tancred Robinson and Thomas Wakley, and rode by coach down to Paris, the Italian peninsula their ultimate destination. This was not Sloane’s first Channel crossing, as he had already visited Montpellier in the south of France in 1680, evidently for health reasons, since English travellers esteemed the ‘great benefit of the French air’ (William Gould had told Sloane he hoped ‘Mompellier’ would restore him). But this second trip proved much more significant. This was not the Grand Tour of noblemen like the Earl of Arundel who aimed to become art and antiquities collectors by versing themselves in the classics and fine arts. Sloane was no aristocrat and lacked classical or university education (the Society of Antiquaries was one of the few London clubs he did not later join). His, rather, was a scientific pilgrimage. In Paris, he continued his botanical training under the eminent Tournefort at the Jardin du Roi, where he studied plants in the garden from six to eight in the morning much as he had in Chelsea. From two to four in the afternoons he attended the fashionable yet pious anatomy lectures of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, which featured graphic studies of both human and animal bodies (living and dead). Not unlike the chemistry of Lémery, Duverney’s anatomy lessons emphasized mechanical rather than Galenical or Aristotelian explanations of physiology and may have reinforced Sloane’s tendency to mechanical views of matter. Sloane likely saw the natural history and anatomical collections these savants curated as well. He paid visits to the renowned Hôpital de la Charité to observe the treatment of its patients and sat in on the lectures of a chemist named Sanlyon. Armed with a letter of introduction from Tournefort, Sloane then travelled south to Montpellier to continue studying medicinal plants in its botanical garden under Pierre Magnol and Pierre Chirac, the latter known for his emphasis on the healing effects of plants’ chemical properties.19
Robinson and Wakley continued on to Italy, but Sloane remained at Montpellier for several months. As a result, he missed seeing the celebrated natural history collections of Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna and those at the Collegio Romano in Rome curated by the great Counter-Reformation Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. ‘We saw Aldrovandus his musaum an incomparable collection of all sorts of naturall raritys,’ Wakley wrote to him, ‘reduced into order with ye name of every thing almost written on them wch is one of ye best prospects I ever saw.’ Sloane had felt compelled to linger in Montpellier, passing many hours in its physic garden and visiting the city’s fish market, a common haunt for naturalists since local fishermen often brought in rare species. Montpellier was also home to a community of Protestants. French Protestantism was under severe duress at this time, as the state took measures to suppress it that were soon to culminate in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which saw many Huguenots flee across the Channel to England, North America and beyond. Robinson wrote back alarmedly to Ray about ‘daily skirmishes between the king’s soldiers and the Protestants of these parts’, as French dragoons used force to coerce the Huguenots into renouncing their faith. The chemist Lémery was himself a Protestant who had probably told Sloane of his own travails when they met on the road to Paris. According to Birch, Sloane cemented his connection to Lémery with a precocious gift of rare phosphorus samples (perhaps obtained from Boyle, who had conducted extensive trials with the stuff), which ‘that great chemist had not seen before, tho’ he had mention’d them in his course’. This was more than the passing kindness it might seem: it shows Sloane shrewdly realizing at a young age, perhaps for the first time, how to use rare objects to distinguish himself as a rare person and a useful contact. But Lémery had fallen on hard times. He had lost his position as apothicaire du roi and had his shop closed down by 1683 because of his religion, obliging him to convert to Catholicism in order to resume work. Sloane’s Montpellier host Magnol was also a Huguenot, so Sloane likely heard of his co-religionists’ trials from several different sources.20
Sloane’s French tour culminated in another Protestant haven. On 28 July 1683, he received his medical degree at the University of Orange, the only Protestant university in France, north-east of Montpellier in the principality of Orange, ruled by the Dutch stadtholder William III. Here Sloane was examined on the doctrines of the four humours – the orthodoxy of European medicine – establishing the framework in which he would practise during his long career, one that combined copious bloodletting with recourse to the many different herbal remedies he was also learning. For all the emphasis he would place on botanical empiricism and mechanical philosophies of matter, therefore, like most physicians of his day he remained an unwavering adherent of humoralism – one of the most ancient dogmas of bodily health. The examination record notes that Sloane ‘was examined and found competent’ on works by Hippocrates and Galen, ‘did argue and maintain a disputation, and was awarded the highest honours’. It also describes his appearance as a young man: ‘of medium height, hair very short, light chestnut, face rather long and grave, marked with the small pox’. Conferred in the presence of the Bishop of Orange, Sloane’s degree underscored the Ulsterman’s membership in the international Protestant community while foreshadowing the role William III would play in his fortunes when he assumed the English throne in 1689.21
Sloane returned to London in the summer of 1684. He took up residence in Fleet Street and, while continuing his botanical studies, at last commenced a private medical practice. The friendship and patronage of the physician Thomas Sydenham, well known for his hostility to medical theory and his emphasis on empirical methods, here proved instrumental. Boyle, who not only knew Sydenham but also appears to have influenced his approach to medicine, probably brokered the introduction; Sloane’s friend Locke also knew Sydenham. According to one anecdote, Sloane carried a letter of recommendation that described him as ‘a ripe scholar, a good botanist, [and] a skilful anatomist’, leading Sydenham to reply, ‘this is all very fine, but it won’t do – anatomy – botany. Nonsense! Sir, I know an old woman in Covent Garden who understands botany better, and as for anatomy, my butcher can dissect a joint full as well; no, young man, all this is stuff: you must go the bedside, it is there alone you can learn disease.’ Birch records that Sydenham soon offered Sloane his ‘greatest intimacy and friendship, and desir’d … him to settle in his neighbourhood, that he might introduce him into practice, recommending him in the strongest terms to his patients’.22
Sydenham’s mentorship helped steer Sloane away from the classical physician’s emphasis on reasoning from first principles and providing causal explanations of illness towards direct observation of individual cases instead. Like the debates over matter in natural philosophy, the relationship between medical theory and practice was also in ferment. In 1543, the same year Copernicus had advanced the doctrine of heliocentrism in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, the Brussels anatomist Andreas Vesalius had published De humani corporis fabrica, in which he used first-hand dissections and graphic illustrations to challenge Galen’s classical account of human anatomy. But learned physicians took care to distance their new interest in empirical techniques from the methods of those they contemptuously labelled ‘empirics’. The possibilities for employing the magical arts in healing had long intrigued the learned. Adepts like the fifteenth-century Neo-Platonist physician Marsilio Ficino, for example, had seriously studied the alleged healing powers of talismans and amulets. As many learned Europeans were gradually moving away from belief in magic towards the end of the seventeenth century, physicians derided the activities of lower-class folk healers they branded ‘quacks’ and ‘cunning men’, with whom they competed for patients, and who in turn scorned elite doctors as peddlers of meaningless Latin jargon. Sloane sought to navigate this fraught space between learned physic and empirical healing, reproducing Sydenham’s anti-theoretical rhetoric in the process. ‘The knowlege of natural-history,’ he later wrote in his account of Jamaica, ‘being observation of matters of fact, is more certain than most others, and in my slender opinion, less subject to mistakes than reasonings, hypotheses, and deductions are.’23
Thus it was that Sloane began to make his way. Being born without property into Ulster’s Protestant elite had dealt him a mixed hand. He gained no wealth from his family, was an outsider to the seat of power in London and was undoubtedly concerned by the simmering conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Such concerns, in addition to his youthful illness, may well have contributed to the ‘grave’ countenance his medical examiners noted in Orange. Yet Sloane’s progress was brisk thanks to his contacts and the new associations he forged. No xenophobic patriot abroad, he had used his travels well to master Latin and French, and returned from the continent with a growing network of friends that crossed national and confessional lines, telling Ray he would ‘do all in my power’ to obtain specimens for him from the gardens of Paris and Montpellier if he wished. By the time Sloane was back in London and under Sydenham’s tutelage, the trainee apothecary had transcended the menial station of common pharmacists and surgeons and was ascending to the status of gentleman physician. The landless Ulster Protestant was now a well-travelled cosmopolitan, skilled in the arts of curiosity and connection.24
BURIED TREASURE AND THE PILLARS OF HERCULES
Wider and more dangerous worlds than those of a London doctor soon beckoned, however. The city to which Sloane returned was fast becoming one of the great commercial emporiums of the world. The acceleration of trade and migration in the British Isles meant that by 1700 London would outstrip Paris as the largest city in Europe, with a population of around 575,000. Despite the Catholic sympathies of the Stuart monarchs, the English capital became a haven for Protestant immigrants, attracting Dutch and German artisans as well as Swedes, Moravians, émigrés from the Palatinate, French Jews and Huguenots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. London also became home to labourers from beyond European shores, in particular several thousand men and women from West Africa, who arrived as a result of the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade, many of whom worked in domestic service once in England. By 1684, Ray was directing letters to Sloane ‘at Mr. Wilkinson’s, bookseller, at the Black Boy, over against St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet-street’. The ‘Black Boy’ was a shop sign, one increasingly common at the time, and emblematic of the rise in importance of slavery to English economic fortunes, as well as a sign of things to come for Sloane personally. Though he did not know it yet, within three short years of returning from France, he would find himself embarking on an altogether more hazardous voyage: to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, to work as a physician and make collections in natural history.25
After Christopher Columbus’ first Atlantic voyage in 1492 and landfall on the island of Hispaniola (today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the Portuguese and Spanish had divided the world into two jurisdictions by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The Portuguese claimed Africa, South and East Asia and the easternmost lands of South America that would become Brazil, while the Spanish conquistadores established the kingdoms of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru further west. Brazil turned to the importation of African slaves to harvest sugar on plantations, while Peru became a source of immense wealth in the form of silver, as the Spanish enslaved indigenous American populations to toil in the mines at Potosí and elsewhere. According to the reigning economic philosophy of mercantilism, nations conceived the amount of wealth in the world in finite terms, measuring it by the size of their stockpiles of bullion and the balance of trade. This made Spain the wealthiest European empire of the sixteenth century, allowing it to use precious metal to pay for luxurious silks and spices imported from both India and China.26
By the second half of the seventeenth century, however, Spanish might was in decline, as the mines yielded less and rival powers exploited new sources of wealth. The French had run a lucrative fur trade in Québec since the 1530s, although capturing part of Hispaniola in 1659 (which they christened Saint Domingue) was to bring them far greater riches as they imported African slaves to harvest sugar, coffee and other crops. But it was the Dutch who decisively challenged the Iberian model of colonization. Rather than organizing colonial viceroyalties as extensions of the state, the Dutch licensed private companies to carry out the work of colonization, breaking the Portuguese stranglehold on the slave trade in West Africa in the process. Instead of mining bullion or harvesting staple crops (though they did plant sugar in Surinam and elsewhere), they excelled as private oceanic traders. The English, meanwhile, envious of Spanish wealth, had dreamed of finding their own mineral paradises from New England and Virginia to the jungles of Guiana on South America’s northern coast, where the Elizabethan privateer Walter Ralegh reported wondrous tales of an entire city made of gold called ‘el Dorado’. But nothing came of such visions. Instead, it was the island of Barbados that emerged by the mid-1640s as England’s first profitable Atlantic colony thanks to sugar and slavery, copying the pattern set by the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch in the Azores, Brazil and elsewhere in the West Indies. In 1655, the English added Jamaica to their possessions, when Cromwell’s forces invaded as part of his ‘Western Design’ to strike against Spanish America. By now, the Dutch were England’s main rivals. So, starting in 1651, Parliament passed a series of Navigation Acts to bar Dutch merchants from the lucrative carrying trade that brought English crops like tobacco to market in Europe, and fought three Anglo-Dutch Wars between 1652 and 1674. London’s rise, as Sloane experienced it during the late seventeenth century, thus came about as a result of these campaigns which stimulated English shipbuilding and the many skilled trades that supported it, trebling imports from the colonies and generating increased customs revenues for the Crown.27
European colonization of the Americas also initiated the Columbian Exchange: a momentous transfer of diseases, plants and animals that transformed the environments and populations of the Americas, Europe and West Africa. Native American societies, which had remained isolated from other continents for centuries, were decimated by European diseases such as smallpox and their landscapes transformed by European farming and the introduction of domesticated animals like horses, cows and pigs. Europeans came to consume new foods like sugar, chocolate, maize and potatoes, which provided precious new sources of energy, while African plant species from okra to wild grasses made their way to American soil via the Atlantic slave trade. These exchanges had a profound impact on European knowledge of the natural world. Because neither the Bible nor Aristotle contained any mention of the Americas, their accidental discovery by Columbus (who was looking for a new passage to Asia) helped erode the credibility of both scriptural and ancient knowledge even before the writings of Copernicus and Galileo. The existence of this New World was a wonder that provoked new philosophical scepticism, though it by no means instantly transformed science and medicine. Systems of magic remained part of the framework for understanding the Americas as a source of what adepts called nature’s ‘secrets’. John Dee, for example, a mystic who advised Elizabeth I, advocated the colonization of the Americas and is sometimes credited with coining the phrase ‘the British Empire’, was expert in both navigation and astrology.28
European landfall in the Americas did, however, prompt an intensified commitment to collecting information, specimens and objects. It was not only natural philosophy that changed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but natural history too through ambitious projects to catalogue the contents of the world. Columbus and the Iberians showed the way forward. Sloane later observed in his work on Jamaica how the Italian navigator had collected specimens of ‘gold, parrats, maiz, or Indian corn, and other valuable or strange things’ to impress his patrons back in Spain with the potential wealth of American resources. Inspired by the creation of the Casa da Índia in Portugal (1434), Queen Isabella of Castile founded the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville in 1503, dedicated to the oversight of commerce, taxes and exploration through the accumulation of navigational charts, plants and medicines. Developing state institutions and an imperial infrastructure, the Spanish began conducting trials on new drugs and publishing compendious natural histories like the mining inspector Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535–49), which inventoried American plants and animals as imperial possessions, very much in the tradition of Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, the first-century encyclopaedia that catalogued the Roman Empire. The Madrid cosmographer Andrés García de Céspedes depicted the new travel-based knowledge in the frontispiece to his Regimiento de navegación (1606) via the image of a ship passing through the mythical Pillars of Hercules in the Strait of Gibraltar, symbolizing the limits of the known (European) world at the western edge of the Mediterranean, adorned with Christian crosses and the exhortation to explore plus ultra – further still.29
European collectors had been scouring the trade routes and outposts of Asia as well. The correction of errors in classical texts carried out by Renaissance humanists included naturalists’ efforts to revise ancient authorities like Pliny through new programmes of botany and horticulture. The cultivation and symbolic identification of botanic gardens as spiritual paradises can in fact be dated back at least to the eighth-century Islamic Caliphates, whose scholars drew in turn on Sanskrit sources and Indian traditions. This fusion of botanical traditions, fed by translations of ancient works by authors such as Avicenna from Arabic into Latin, as well as by the Venetian Republic’s commercial links to the Levant, inspired the creation of new gardens on both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, where they served medicinal purposes while also symbolizing Christian redemption for original sin and the recovery of lost knowledge. By the seventeenth century, such gardens were increasingly to be found in northern Europe too. The Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius journeyed to Spain to observe American plants, translated texts drawing on Asian sources like the Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas (1563) and set up a botanical garden at the University of Leiden in the 1590s. Clusius instructed merchants in the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602 as a joint-stock venture to conduct trade in Asia, to send him as many specimens as possible, making Leiden uniquely well stocked with plants from a network that stretched around the Cape of Good Hope to India’s Malabar Coast and Batavia (Jakarta) on the island of Java where the company had set up its capital. This commercial network yielded monumental surveys of tropical natural history like the twelve-volume Hortus Malabaricus (1678–93) overseen by Malabar’s colonial governor Hendrik van Reede, which contained information and illustrations of almost 800 plants gathered through extensive interactions with local Ezhava (Kerala) botanists. The success of these Dutch networks began to draw South Asian knowledge, from Ayurvedic and Malayali traditions, into the European world and formed a model of colonial botany the French and English eagerly emulated.30
In addition to gardens, Europeans created museums for both natural specimens and artificial objects that showcased these new worlds. Instituting collections of objects was not a new phenomenon in Europe although they had often focused on forms of matter believed to possess magical properties. During the Middle Ages, Catholic church treasuries acted as repositories for relics of saints’ bodies and remnants of the true cross, drawing the sick to them for their alleged healing powers as well as pilgrims. In addition to reliquaries, Renaissance princes assembled wonder-cabinets to show off ‘marvels’ as courtly spectacles intended to move viewers to awe and amazement. Renaissance traditions of compendious collecting aspired to total or universal knowledge by recreating the world in microcosm as a theatrum mundi or theatre of the world. In his Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplissimi (1565), possibly the first printed treatise on assembling an encyclopaedic collection, the Bavarian Protestant Samuel Quiccheberg outlined a systematic classification scheme intended to comprehend the divine creation in its entirety by defining categories into which to sort every single form of matter. These included ‘crafted artefacts (artificialia)’, ‘world of nature (naturalia)’, ‘tools of artifice (means of acting on nature)’ and ‘enacted knowledge (representations)’ – the kind of categorical divisions Sloane would later take up and refine to organize his own collections. Both working pharmacists like Ferrante Imperato of Naples and noblemen like Fernando Cospi and Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna assembled microcosmic museums (here). There was no single way of collecting the world, however, and no two collections were exactly alike. The most spectacular example of encyclopaedic collecting was that of Athanasius Kircher at the Collegio Romano, whose museum, filled with objects sent by Jesuit missionaries the world over, Sloane’s travelling companions Robinson and Wakley had visited. Steeped in Neo-Platonism and the natural magic tradition, Kircher’s methods were strikingly learned yet imbued with mystical overtones. He made studies of fossils, monsters, volcanoes, medicines, languages, musical harmonies, comparative religion and the history of China; worked on technologies such as magnetic clocks and magic lanterns (early image projectors); and notably, though quite erroneously, translated the hieroglyphics on Egyptian obelisks brought to Rome. To Kircher, the world was a grand esoteric and Baroque puzzle to be assembled and solved with virtuosic ingenuity.31
The English were latecomers to these widening worlds. Since the sixteenth century, advocates of imperial expansion had published collections of travel accounts such as Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582), urging competition with Spain. England’s response to the threat of Iberian domination included linking science and the state through a programme of collecting. This initiative, which would influence Sloane decisively, was proposed by Francis Bacon. Born in 1561, Bacon was a lawyer who became lord chancellor under James I. He was directly involved in American colonization as a shareholder and council member in the fledgling Virginia Company and promoted the settling of plantations in his essays. In this context of state service, private colonial enterprise and resurgent geopolitical ambition, Bacon called for a ‘great instauration’ or reformation of scientific knowledge. He was well aware of the innovations of the Spaniards, some of whose works on navigation and cosmography the English had hungrily translated, as well as the gardens and collections at Padua, Leiden and elsewhere. Inspired by such examples, the Gesta Grayorum (1594), a revel attributed to Bacon, envisioned the progress of the natural sciences and technological arts on new empirical, collective and institutional foundations. These were to include ‘a most perfect and general library’, ‘a goodly huge cabinet’, an experimental ‘stillhouse … furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels’ and ‘a spacious, wonderful garden’ that would constitute ‘a model of universal nature made private’.32
In the Novum organum (1620), Bacon argued that rather than look to common experience of the natural world as it was to frame axioms about its regularity, in the manner of the Aristotelian scholastics, the learned should examine not regular phenomena but unusual ones, and produce useful matters of fact through the staging of artificial experiments to test nature’s capacities under specific conditions. He renewed his vision of science as a collective endeavour vital for the health of the state in his fictional New Atlantis (1627), where he envisaged the practical benefits of knowledge gathered through maritime exploration centred on an institution of scientific learning named Salomon’s House on the imaginary island of Bensalem. Bensalem dispatched ‘merchants of light’ to collect information for study by ‘interpreters of nature’ who would ‘enlarg[e] … the bounds of human empire’ by ‘finding out … the true nature of all things … whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them’. Acknowledging Iberian precedence, Bacon’s Bensalemites spoke Spanish and Salomon’s House included a gallery of ‘principal inventors’, the first of which was ‘Columbus, that discovered the West Indies’. Bacon also helped himself to Céspedes’ Habsburg emblem of a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules and used it on the title page of his Novum organum, adding the legend ‘Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia’: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. This was a quotation from the Book of Daniel (12:4) where Daniel interprets apocalyptic visions concerning Israel, its salvation and ‘the time of the end’. Bacon thus mimicked Daniel’s millenarianism to suggest that the salvation of Protestant England would be new knowledge itself. The lord chancellor’s message resonated with Sloane, who later emblazoned the title page of his Natural History of Jamaica with the same verse.33
Bacon’s legacy took lasting form later in the century as his teachings inspired the institutionalization of scientific curiosity, including the gathering of collections. The stripping of the altars during the Reformation had distanced Protestants from the veneration of ornaments, relics and magical objects elsewhere in Europe, while the collection of works of art became synonymous with the sensory corruptions of Catholic finery. Indeed, Cromwell’s forces confiscated Charles I’s art collection and quickly sold it off to raise funds for the Puritan Republic. Natural history collecting, however, was considered by Protestants to be both a devout pursuit and a highly useful one. After Bacon’s death, an influential circle of Protestant millenarians around the Polish intelligencer Samuel Hartlib championed his ideas in England. Hartlib outlined programmes of agricultural and economic reform in areas from mining to alchemy, aimed at the ‘discovery of infinite treasure’ by tapping the full ‘fatnesse of the earth’, as the agriculturalist Gabriel Plattes put it in 1639. Collections also began to proliferate. South of the Thames, John Tradescant and his son maintained a botanical garden at mid-century, engaged in collecting for aristocratic patrons and opened their own museum of curiosities piously styled ‘Tradescant’s Ark’, subsequently purchased by the antiquarian and alchemist Elias Ashmole and absorbed into the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University in 1683. The Royal Society pursued an explicitly Baconian programme of natural history collecting. Shortly after it had received a formal charter from Charles II in 1662, the society set up its own museum, the Repository. The Repository eschewed wonders and marvels in favour of the factual documentation of nature through common and quotidian specimens. This strategy was allied with projects in comprehensive or ‘universal’ knowledge such as John Wilkins’s proposal to frame a natural language for naming and classifying every single thing in the world in rigorously logical fashion, as well as planned histories of trades and artisanal techniques.34
As a botanist, and especially after he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1685, Sloane would have become familiar with the Tradescants and the Repository, while Wilkins’s treatise was one of the first books he acquired for his library. He began his own private collections by gathering plants and animals but would gradually branch out to minerals, fossils, coins, antiquities, books, manuscripts and curiosities of all kinds. Individual models of the collector as learned virtuoso undoubtedly played a key role in his formation. Unlike Bacon’s imaginary Salomon’s House, the Casa de Contratación or the Académie des Sciences (founded in Paris in 1666), the Royal Society was not in fact a state institution but a congeries of independent gentlemen pursuing their private interests, even as they sought to produce knowledge valuable to the English state as a source of ‘publick treasure’, in the words of its early historian Thomas Sprat. But assembling collections was also a strategy employed by physicians seeking genteel status. While curiosity in women was associated with Eve’s sinful tasting of forbidden knowledge in Eden and often considered unfeminine and threatening, male collectors enjoyed imagining themselves as Promethean heroes – masculine, cunning and inventive. In Sloane’s London, personal models abounded of the virtuoso – the courtly man of parts, conversant in all branches of learning, expert in ‘the excellencie’ of all manner of objects and adept at conversational performance: John Evelyn, William Courten and the Duke of Chandos, not to mention the physicians John Woodward and Richard Mead, all of whom Sloane came to know and who encouraged his collecting by their example.35
Unlike these men, however, Sloane’s formation as a collector also lay in natural history’s myriad commercial and colonial embroilments. In works like the Natural History of Oxfordshire (1676), the chemist and Ashmolean curator Robert Plot had published detailed studies of English counties in the tradition known as chorography, whose content ranged from antiquarianism to surveys of local commodities. As England acquired possessions overseas, natural history was adapted to survey colonies as well. The royalist Richard Ligon travelled to the Caribbean in 1647 and published A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes in 1657, describing the island’s flora and fauna and including technical information for would-be planters on how to set up sugar mills. The profitability of sugar, publicized by writings like Ligon’s, drew naturalists to the Indies. Henry Stubbe, another physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote about the increasingly fashionable commodity of chocolate in his book The Indian Nectar (1662) and visited Jamaica shortly afterwards. The secretary of the Royal Society Henry Oldenburg armed travellers with questionnaires, composed by Boyle and his colleagues, in which commercial issues figured prominently. In 1670–71, Colonel Thomas Lynch sailed for Jamaica as its new governor with a list of queries (which Sloane later acquired for his collections) that asked about the direction of the winds for the purpose of navigation, how hurricanes affected the workings of the compass and whether Jamaican sugar dried faster than Barbadian, as well as requesting specimens of seeds, fruits and soils and suggesting trials for growing rice, olives and coffee. Thomas Sprat went so far as to characterize the Royal Society and the Royal African Company, which enjoyed a legal monopoly on the transportation of African slaves in these years, as ‘twin sisters’. Sprat’s comparison was especially apt at a time when presidents of the Royal Society and governors of Caribbean colonies were sometimes the same people: the Earl of Carbery, Sir John Vaughan, acted as governor of Jamaica in 1674–8 and president of the Royal Society in 1686–9. Knowledge and profit went hand in hand. When not busy selling his own English servants into slavery while in Jamaica, Carbery corresponded with Henry Oldenburg in London about matters of scientific interest.36
The waning years of the century saw the English once again copy the Dutch, this time financially through the creation of new instruments of credit, the public trading of stocks and the practice of speculative investment, culminating in the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The period became notorious for its ‘projects’, where inventors aimed to ensnare investors with the promise of quick fortunes, often in the form of new-fangled machines, though their schemes often came to naught or proved fraudulent. Before he turned to publishing novels, the merchant and journalist Daniel Defoe was himself an arch-projector who lost significant sums on schemes that ranged from salvage dives to recover bullion from sunken treasure ships to the breeding of civet cats. ‘The tradesman often-times drowns’, Defoe rued, ‘owing to an adventurous bold spirit in trade, joined with too great a gust of gain.’ While the selling of shares in such projects was a novel form of financial capitalism, the projecting spirit had roots in much older traditions of treasure hunting and continued to draw on arcane if not occult methods. In 1691, for example, the Whig politician Goodwin Wharton invoked the assistance of angels in his attempt to salvage a sunken Spanish galleon at Tobermory in Scotland (Wharton’s professed angelology did not prevent him from later being appointed a lord of the admiralty). The anonymous author of an anti-projecting pamphlet entitled the Angliae tutamen (1695) complained that diving bells were all ‘noise and nonsense’ and ‘pernicious projects’ that ‘tickled … the ear with the vast wealth of gold and silver that should be taken out of the sea with these tools’. Such magical allure, however, proved hard to resist.37
A striking group of underwater objects that came into Sloane’s possession in the 1680s, and which he later had engraved for his Natural History of Jamaica, show how the mania for treasure hunting drew him personally into worlds of speculation, colonization and profiteering by luring him to the West Indies (here). These consisted of a spar from a sunken Spanish treasure ship and several silver coins that had been recovered from it, which had become so encrusted by coral in the depths of the Caribbean Sea as to appear curious hybrids of art and nature. Sloane was sufficiently intrigued to tell their story in a letter he wrote in early 1687 to one of his acquaintances in Ireland, the Ulster landowner Arthur Rawdon. Sloane recounted how a New England sea captain named William Phips (whose journal he later acquired) had obtained a royal patent with the backing of six London partners gallantly styled the ‘Gentleman Adventurers’, including Christopher Monck, the second Duke of Albemarle. Phips coerced Native American, African and East Indian divers from as far away as the Ceylon pearl fisheries to locate ‘a rock on which grew vast quantity of coral’ encasing a wreck from the middle of the century. This was one of the great Spanish treasure ships that had brought silver from Cartagena via Hispaniola through the perilous Caribbean Sea en route to Europe. The Gentleman Adventurers struck it rich: Phips’s prodigious divers succeeded in bringing up 15 tons of pieces of eight and ‘a great many ingots of Mexicon silver in bars’. Albemarle’s share alone was ‘about 50,000 or 60,000 pounds worth of cobs, bars, gold, plate, and pretious stones … some saphirs, emeralds, and rubies’, with their total value estimated at £210,000 (roughly £18 million in today’s money). The English may have failed to find gold and silver on American soil, but they successfully plundered it from their rivals under the sea.38
This spectacular result nonetheless prompted disapproving commentary from Sloane on what would prove to be one of his enduring themes: the follies of credulity. In the expanded version of the story he later included in his Natural History, he noted that many people fruitlessly sought to emulate the Duke of Albemarle’s good fortune, including ‘the Prince of Orange, afterwards King William, from Holland’, who ‘equip’d a ship which was sent thither, but they came too late’. Albemarle’s lucky strike was the exception, not the rule. Sloane also discussed the invention of a diving bell, great numbers of which were then being demonstrated up and down the Thames, by the astronomer Edmond Halley, with which Halley had attempted (in vain) to salvage ivory from a ship returning from West Africa and wrecked off the Sussex coast. The ‘money brought into England from the first wreck was very considerable’, Sloane conceded, ‘yet much more was lost on projects of the same nature. For every silly story of a rich ship lost, was credited, a patent taken out … and a ship set out for bringing home silver. There was one ship lost amongst the rest, said to be very rich, near Bermudas, which was divided into shares and sold. It was said to be in the possession of the devil, and they told stories how he kept it.’39
This ‘silly’ obsession with treasure nevertheless drew Sloane across the Atlantic. Hungry for coin to pay off his debts, the Duke of Albemarle had accepted the governorship of Jamaica in order to pursue more salvage operations on sunken wrecks. Christopher Monck was the son of George Monck, the military commander who had played a pivotal role in the Restoration of Charles II. Sloane met the younger Monck and his wife the duchess before going to France, in 1680–81 if not earlier, perhaps through Arthur Rawdon, whose father George Rawdon had fought the Irish rebellions alongside George Monck in the 1640s. By 1687, Sloane’s status as a prominent doctor was confirmed by his membership of the medical elite as he was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians, an exclusive professional club whose Fellows would number only forty-five by the middle of the eighteenth century. On the recommendation of the king’s physician Peter Barwick, Albemarle offered Sloane an appointment as his personal doctor and, crucially, the chance to sail with him to Jamaica. The prospect may have discomfited Sloane since Monck was a Tory whose appointment as Jamaica’s governor came from the new Catholic king James II. Sloane’s political sympathies, by contrast, lay with the Whigs: he had made his first trip to France in 1680 in the company of Charles Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, a leading Whig who had opposed James in the Exclusion Crisis. But beyond the political awkwardness of the appointment lay considerable potential for scientific glory in collecting specimens unknown in Europe. ‘I have talked a long while of going to Jamaica with [Christopher Monck,] the Duke of Albemarle as his physician, which, if I do,’ Sloane told Ray, ‘next to the serving of his grace and family in my profession, my business is to see what I can meet withal that is extraordinary in nature in those places.’ ‘I hope to be able to send you some observations from thence,’ he went on, ‘God Almighty granting life and strength to do what I design.’40
The risk of shipwreck, piracy, disease and slave rebellions made any Caribbean adventure a highly dangerous prospect, and several of Sloane’s associates were against his going. ‘You must not go to Jamaica,’ Sydenham apparently warned him; ‘better drown yourself in Rosamund’s pond,’ he quipped, referring to a common place for suicide in St James’s Park. Ray was also worried. ‘Were it not for the danger and hazard of so long a voyage, I could heartily wish such a person as yourself might travel to Jamaica,’ he told his friend. Perhaps Sloane’s training as a physician gave him confidence that he could withstand both the Atlantic crossing and life in the tropics; perhaps surviving his youthful illness convinced him he was seasoned against physical adversity. Despite his scorn for the treasure hunters, moreover, he too must have dreamed of making his fortune. He accepted Albemarle’s offer: he would follow in his father’s footsteps and serve the aristocracy in an English colony. Because it was rare for learned naturalists to make such dangerous voyages themselves, Sloane’s fellow botanists rejoiced at the thought of how he might expand their collective knowledge of the world’s known species. ‘We expect great things from you,’ Ray nudged him, warming to the prospect, ‘no less than the resolving all our doubts about the names [of plants] we meet of in that part of America’ and observing ‘whether there be any species of plants common to America and Europe’. ‘You alone might furnish a vast stock’ of new species, Tancred Robinson agreed, with ‘the hott part of the West Indies being before your eyes’. ‘I will never lett you rest’, he continued, ‘till you do it.’ ‘[I] never had the opportunity of soe curious a collector as yr selfe in those parts,’ chimed in the keeper of Oxford’s botanical garden Jacob Bobart, swelling the chorus of approval that launched Sloane on his scientific mission.41
Sloane himself spoke of his desire to see first hand the plants he had only heard of in order to burnish his credentials as a doctor, ‘many of the antient and best physicians having travell’d to the places whence their drugs were brought, to inform themselves concerning them’. In addition to expanding European knowledge of the world’s plants, identifying new drugs might prove highly lucrative. The ‘hope of finding a specific remedy like Quinquina’, an anti-malarial extract commonly termed the Peruvian or Jesuit’s bark (a forerunner of quinine), ‘determined my decision to go to the Indies’, he told a French acquaintance in 1714. Birch cryptically refers to ‘the fortune, which [Sloane] … acquir’d’ in the West Indies, without specifying its source, though he likely meant just this kind of commercial bioprospecting. Sloane was also well aware that Jamaica’s planters would pay handsomely for his medical services, not least to keep their slaves alive and their profits flowing: ‘planters give a great deal of money for good servants, both black and white, and take great care of them for that reason’, he observed, ‘when they come to be in danger of being disabled or of death.’ Finally, there was the matter of salary, and Sloane negotiated to his advantage. In return for services rendered to the Crown, he secured complete medical oversight of the duke’s fleet, including authority over all its surgeons and apothecaries, for the hefty sum of £600 per year, with an additional £300 to be paid upfront. With these arrangements made, and after several months of preparation, Sloane left London at the age of twenty-seven and set sail with Albemarle’s fleet on 12 September 1687 from Spithead, Portsmouth. ‘I thank God I am very well & well pleased with my undertaking,’ he wrote to Rawdon, whom he asked to convey his regards to the Hamiltons back in Ulster. ‘I doubt not but that it will turne to account.’42