American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World

Abstract

Susan Scott Parrish's subtitle reveals the exact contours of her study. Yet she begins with a different image: the Guinea-born slave Kwasi. The governor of the Dutch colony of Surinam “sent Kwasi to the Hague in 1776 to visit Willem V, prince of Orange” (p. 2). William Blake engraved Kwasi's likeness for a book; Linnaeus named in his honor a tree native to Surinam (Quassia amara) whose products formed a substantial export to Europe. “[A] principal healer and diviner for both slaves and colonials in Surinam,” Kwasi helped the Dutch attack the Saramakas, escaped slaves and their descendants (ibid.). What does Kwasi have to do with the British colonists and their scientific correspondents in London? Parrish demonstrates, in seven chapters and thirty-two monochrome illustrations, that “Kwasi shows us, in the colonial sphere and by extension the larger Atlantic world, the ways in which conjuring and scientific modes were by no means walled off from each other among imported African, displaced native, colonial European, and imperial European communities” (p. 5). “British America … was exceptional as a meeting place or battleground for once distant peoples, microbes, plants, and animals that produced a strange new world for all” (p. 7).