London’s Uncertain Comforts: Fuegian Travelers and the Indeterminate Geography of Climate and Health

Abstract

The phenomenon John Crowley calls the “invention” of comfort was shaped by European urbanization and demographic upheaval, namely the movements and crowding together of ever larger numbers of people into metropolitan centers in temperate regions such as London, Paris, and New York. From these centers, concentrations of scholarship, techno-scientific expertise, and capital supported colonial and commercial exploits abroad and fostered knowledge of other climatic regions and the indigenous peoples encountered there. Likewise, the notoriety of native arrivals in European capitals (voluntarily or not) reinforced geographical and exhibitionary impulses, inviting comparison today to medical topography, a discipline that emerged in the 1820s to link geography, climate, race, and disease onwards. The field was based on the theories of Parmenides and Aristotle, whereby the globe was divided into distinct climatic zones that determined the character of human beings found there. It was a doctrine supporting comparative anatomy and scientific racism, according to which regions of extreme temperature and weather were called to account for seemingly “abnormal” physiognomies and sensory faculties observed among some of the natives who were paraded around European streets, theatres and intellectual arena. The cumulative record of these encounters demonstrates the contributing role of global mobility to the geographical reasoning behind these and successive period discourses.The story of the indigenous Yamana Jemmy Button, his arrival in London from Tierra del Fuego in 1830 and his subsequent return to the cold, windswept region a year later, is recounted here to bring multiple sources of historical and theoretical elucidation (voyage narratives, medical and climate theory, environmental history, architectural theory, and others) to bear on the invention of comfort. The article aims to enlarge John Crowley’s thesis, specifically what he sees to be the contribution of spectacle and material culture to comfort’s social construction. It identifies caveats to the deterministic scope of geography that were posed by nineteenth-century hygienic science and immunology and by the accumulating store of observation-based studies of climate and weather. These developments connected disease to human populations, urban settings, and buildings in nuanced, environmentally-attuned ways. The article concludes by proposing the particular relevance of naval history and world-voyaging ships for these developments, including the roles played by vessels like the H.M.S. Beagle which conveyed the Fuegians to England and back again.