An Empire Restored: America and the Royal Society of London in the Restoration

1

AN EMPIRE RESTORED

Chapter Two

An Empire Restored: America and the Royal Society of London in the Restoration

Sarah Irving

Over thirty years ago, J. H Elliott framed the confrontation between the Old World and the New in terms of the issue of how the discovery of the New World affected European categories of understanding. America, he argued, was assimilated into “the half-light of [the European] traditional mental world.”[1] More recently, however, some scholars have suggested a very different situation, in which the discovery of America produced a kind of shock of the new; a sense of wonder which, defying categorization, compelled the reorientation of European consciousness.

The epistemological nature of this issue has led historians to emphasise the importance of the New World as a storehouse of new knowledge, and to examine the impact of this knowledge on the intellectual pursuits of the Old World. Natural Philosophy, for example, has been the subject of some excellent studies of the role of knowledge in shaping British attitudes to the New World and to her burgeoning empire.[2] This chapter aims to extend this research by turning our attention towards the concept of empire. I want to suggest that, if we introduce into this line of enquiry an exploration of the language of empire, we discover that America was part of a largely neglected intellectual tradition.

We could be forgiven for assuming that the idea of empire in seventeenth-century England was that which is familiar to us today; a territorial, colonial exercise of a state’s power. One of the sources which shaped the mental universe of early modern England, however, tells a markedly different story. The Creation narrative in the book of Genesis describes an empire which is not geographic. “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”, commanded God to Adam in the Garden of Eden.[3] The dominion of which God spoke consisted in Adam’s perfect knowledge of the natural world; his ability, as Genesis 1:20 put it, to give the proper names “to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.” Adam’s dominion was not a sovereignty of territory but a sovereignty of knowledge. In the Fall from Eden, however, Adam lost his omniscience, and with it his epistemic empire over the world. It is important to note here that in the seventeenth-century, the terms “dominion” and “empire” both denoted plenary authority or sovereignty, whether over territory or over intangible phenomena such as ideas.

The mid seventeenth-century was a transformative moment in the history of science, in which a number of natural philosophers reframed the Adamic story in an apocalyptic context. In the final ages of the earth, “knowledge will increase” (as the book of Daniel put it)[4] and man would be restored to his empire over nature. Natural philosophers, following the work of Francis Bacon, believed that it was their task to restore man’s empire of knowledge. The Royal Society of London, England’s first scientific institution which was established in 1660, set itself this project.

This chapter explores the way in which the Royal Society imagined America during the Restoration. The drive to restore perfect knowledge of the natural world motivated an extensive correspondence between fellows of the Royal Society of London, and colonists, traders and explorers in the Americas. The significance of this correspondence was not only, as many historians have recognised, that America was important as the setting for posing new questions about the veracity of knowledge, but also that America was conceptually significant, as it gave shape to a tradition of empire as dominion over knowledge.

I: Intellectual contexts

In October 1667, Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society of London, wrote to John Winthrop Jr, the Governor of Connecticut. Oldenburg’s aim was to remind Winthrop that his role was not only to effect good government in His Majesty’s plantations; as a member of the Royal Society, Winthrop’s responsibility was also to help foster what Oldenburg and his colleagues termed, a “Commonwealth of Learning”.

“So good an opportunity as this I could not let passe without putting you in mind of yr being a Member of ye Royall Society, though you are in New- England; and even at so great a distance, you may doe that Illustrious Company great Service…[by] communicating to them all the Observables of both Nature an Art, yt occur in the place, you are.”[5]

Oldenburg’s request for information about the natural world of New England alerts us to the importance of America in a project of “lay[ing] open…an Empire of Learning” as the astronomer Edmond Halley put it.[6] In the forty years following the Restoration, Winthrop was just one of many correspondents of the Royal Society in the New World. Sometimes colonists who were Fellows themselves would send back “rarities” “curiosities” and detailed knowledge from the colonial periphery to the metropole of London. This transfer of knowledge was literary, but often tangible and haphazard too; letters and wooden boxes of specimens were shipped across the Atlantic, occasionally falling victim to the perils of sea voyages.

In order to understand the Royal Society’s vision of a New World empire of knowledge we must firstly sketch the intellectual context in which it emerged. The story of the appearance of America in early modern natural philosophy is a story of a confrontation between ancient authorities and a strange landscape which challenged those authorities by virtue of its novelty. The ancients had not imagined America. It was a world unknown to Pliny and his Roman contemporaries, and unaccounted for by the Bible. This fact meant that, whilst America was interpreted within the framework of existing intellectual authorities – chiefly the Bible, Roman writers and the scholastic tradition – it also challenged their heuristic powers.[7] As Francis Bacon pointedly remarked of the Greeks in the New Organon (1620), “They knew only a fraction of the parts and regions of the world…much less the territories of the New World…But in our time large parts of the New World and the farthest parts of the Old are becoming known everywhere, and the store of experiences has grown immeasurably. Hence if (like astrologers) we are to gather signs from the time of nativity or conception, nothing significant seems to be forecast for those philosophies.”[8]

Bacon’s confidence in the novelty of the discoveries of his age belies the fact that one aspect of his intellectual project – the ideal of recovering the epistemic dominion over the earth that mankind once possessed – was not new. It is important to note that there was a long historical continuity of the idea of recovering knowledge of the world. As Richard Yeo has pointed out, “in Western tradition there has been a conviction that it is possible and worthwhile to collate knowledge that is representative of some larger whole…a view of the world as a mirror of the divine mind.”[9] The idea that Adam’s knowledge had been lost in the Fall but that elements had survived through the patriarchs, and thence through early theologians, was commonplace in Scholasticism as well as in medieval occult philosophy. The Hermetic tradition, for example, held that this original knowledge – the prisca theologia - had been passed down through Moses to the Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus and thus to Plato.[10] A related belief, held by the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, was that elements of the true religion were to be found scattered and fragmented throughout all the world’s religions.[11]

It would be tempting to see an over-arching concern with the restoration of man’s original knowledge as a kind of early modern zeitgeist, because elements of this ideal can be traced in the work of thinkers as diverse as the Elizabethan magus John Dee, the radical Protestant Samuel Hartlib and the natural philosophers Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. We must be cautioned, however, against such an assumption. This particular episode of intellectual history was more complex. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century English natural philosophy was animated by a diversity of intellectual traditions which, while sharing a broad interest in the re-creation or emulation of paradise on earth, were markedly different in their authors’ intentions and the sources from which they drew their inspiration. Recognising this complexity, we can identify a number of possible ways of imagining America which were available to early modern English writers. It will be helpful here to outline two, in order to understand the context in which the idea of America as a restored Adamic empire of knowledge emerged.

Perhaps the most significant way of conceiving of America was through a set of questions about the origins of the New World’s inhabitants. How does one make sense of the Americans in terms of the descendants of Noah’s sons? Did the Biblical Flood reach America? Are the Americans one of the lost tribes of Israel? And above all, why have they not established commonwealths? Such questions prompted reflections upon this new land and its strange inhabitants. Here the English were mirroring questions that the Spanish had also asked when they first encountered America. Columbus and then the conquistadors had been particularly interested in how the Amerindians could be fitted into the Biblical history. One particular concern, as Sabine McCormack has shown, was with the similarities between the myths and deities of the Amerindians, with those of the Bible. The Salamanca theologian Bartolome de las Casas, for example, maintained that the Inca worship of the sun god “augured the worship of Christ the Sun of Justice in the Andes.”[12] The similarity between the creation-narratives of the Americans with those of the Bible convinced the Calvinist missionary Jean de Lery that the Tupinamba people of Brazil’s myth of a flood “contained traces of the story of Noah.”[13]

In England, the Norfolk minister Thomas Thorowgood argued in Jews in America or The Probabilities that the Americans be of that Race (1650), that the American Indians were in fact Hebrew, being descended from Noah’s son Shem. The ancient Hebrews were not the only race with which the Americans were compared. Johann Theodore de Bry who illustrated the mathematician and explorer Thomas Hariot’s account of Virginia in 1590, depicted the ancient Picts as Americans. As Amy Gordon and Peter Burke have both argued, these kind of comparisons helped in part to generate a new mode of historical writing which concerned itself with the cultural and social origins of peoples, rather than with their politics.[14] Of course the origins of anthropology, as many scholars have rightly observed, were not far off.[15]

A number of English texts, including Thorowgood’s, grappled with the issue of the Noachian flood. The issue of whether or not the flood had reached the New World, and if so, from which of Noah’s sons its inhabitants were descended, was vexing. In 1681 Thomas Burnet, who later became the Royal Chaplain to William III, published Telluris Theoria Sacra, (The Sacred Theory of the Earth.) Strongly influenced by Descartes” Principia Philosophicae, Burnet argued that the current state of the earth, with its oceans, valleys and mountains, was evidence of the imperfections caused by the great deluge. Burnet then tried to explain the flood by arguing that when the world was created, the water retreated to the core of the globe, becoming artesian water which rose to the surface when God commanded it.[16]

The set of questions about the origins of the people and the natural environment of the Americas provided one possible framework for interpreting the New World. Closely related to this set of questions, and very often drawing upon it, was a second context in which America was imagined. This was the intellectual tradition of natural history writing and the practice of collecting objects with which it was increasingly associated.

An interest in natural history had existed since ancient times but was transformed considerably in the late Renaissance and early seventeenth-century. The Roman author Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (c.77AD)was one of the most frequently cited texts by early modern natural historians. Pliny’s authority, for example, is cited in the Jesuit missionary Jose d’Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) and by the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo yValdés, General and Natural History of the West Indies, the English version of which was published in 1555.

The medieval interest in the natural world derived from the belief that nature held allegorical keys to understanding God’s two books. One of the defining characteristics of medieval natural histories was their concern with the heuristic significances of animals. As William B. Ashworth Jr points out, Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium (1555) for example, included folk tales and myths about animals.[17] Herbs as well as animals were of particular interest in the Renaissance, which is evidenced by the genre of herb collections called the res herbaria. As Scott Atran has shown, however, the interest in the variety of herbs did not necessarily mean that an attempt was made to cite the exact location of a particular herb, or its variety. In fact, Scholastic writers resorted to ancient categories for describing herbs, even when the herbs came from the New World.[18]

This reliance upon ancient authorities for the interpretation of the natural world was accompanied by a view of the significance of nature as emblematic, laden with symbols of the divine. Scholars frequently argue that this was a distinctly “pre-modern” conception of nature because its heuristic principle was that of symbolic reference. It was then eclipsed, they believe, by the taxonomic description characteristic of modern science.[19] Michel Foucault memorably described this change as an epistemic shift.[20] As Peter Harrison has recently shown, the contrast between interpreting texts and nature allegorically, and reading them as literal truth, was the contrast between the Catholic and Protestant hermeneutics.[21] To simplify Harrison’s point, Catholics read the Bible and nature allegorically, whereas Protestants read the two books as literal history. This new hermeneutic was central, he argues, to the rise of modern science.

This epistemological transformation is perhaps easy to overstate, but there were some important associated changes in the practice of natural history and collecting in early seventeenth-century England. The first was an increasing interest in collecting natural specimens which was made possible by explorations of America. This phenomenon helped give rise to the idea that reliable knowledge about nature was that which was directly discovered rather than that which was derived from ancient texts.

During the middle ages and early Renaissance, collections of natural and artificial objects, just like natural histories, were seen as a representation of God’s power to intervene in natural processes and produce miracles.[22] As Lorraine Daston has pointed out, travel “was the alpha and omega of collecting…the voyages of exploration and subsequent trade with newly discovered lands created a steady flow of exotica.”[23] A good illustration of the increasingly important role that travel played in collecting is the case of the John Tradescants, Senior and Junior. John Tradescant senior was the gardener to Charles I, and amassed a great collection of plants. Although he possessed American specimens, he had not seen it necessary to travel to the New World himself. By contrast, several decades later, his son John Tradescant the younger (c.1608-1662), whose collections formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum, realized the importance of the New World to natural knowledge. Tradescant Junior took an avid interest in the Americas. He visited Virginia three times, first in 1637, then in 1642 and finally during 1653-4. The Calendar of State Papers records that “In 1637 John Tradescant was in the [Virginia] colony, to gather all rarities of flowers, plants, shells &c.”[24] America was fast being imagined as an Eden; a storehouse of the unknown natural world ready for discovery and classification.

In 1656, Tradescant Jr published a catalogue of his collection, entitled Musaeum Tradescantium. Funded by Elias Ashmole, it was the first catalogue of a museum printed in England,[25] but its categories and classifications were only a semblance of order. The culture of collecting in mid seventeenth-century England remained largely in the form of cabinets of curiosities, categorized not by type or geographic location but often by the material from which it was made, if at all. Objects hung from ceilings and the purpose of most collections was not to improve knowledge of the natural world, but to represent social status through the conspicuous display of rare objects. Francis Bacon’s proposed reform of natural history was intimately connected to the disdain he felt for the way in which collecting was being practiced in the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, which he saw one of the weaknesses of the existing state of knowledge. The character of natural history in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England was unsystematic and amateur. Collecting specimens of natural history was a popular pastime of the aristocracy, but Bacon viewed such collections as focusing only upon the curiosity of the artefact; they were aimless, the objects were de-contextualised, and the trivial collections did not advance knowledge of their subject. Meticulous and empirical natural histories, Bacon argued, would be one of the most fruitful ways of advancing knowledge. The epistemological concern underlying Bacon’s project for natural history was with the purpose and veracity of knowledge. It was precisely this problem, however, which haunted the Royal Society’s attempts to regain man’s original omniscience.