Talking Plants: Botany and Speech in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING SCIENCEWilliam Wright, an eighteenth-century Scottish doctor and Jamaican botanist, was comfortable communing with plants. As he put it in the prefatory discussion of botany for his Hortus Jamaicensis, a three folio volume collection of some six hundred plant specimens from the island:The Man who inclines to this happy turn is never at a loss for society, whether in the Garden, In the Field, on the bleak summit of the mountain, In the plenteous Vale, in the sweet range of the Hedge Row or in the cool umbrage of the Wood, He never fails to meet with numerous acquaintances, whether adapted to the purposes of Health, Food, agriculture or to gratify the Sight, Smell or Taste.'Materialized into Wright's Hortus - via dried and pressed leaves, stalks and seeds, and the accompanying handwritten text - were both the fruits of and the basis for other forms of communication with a variety of interlocutors. Its elaborate title page, which imitated the conventions of a printed book, and its presentation to David Steuart Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan and a fellow of the Royal Society, opened up realms of gentlemanly conversation and scholarly debate about natural history and natural philosophy. Its plant descriptions also occasionally signalled other oral encounters. Wright's specimen of sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), that most significant plant for eighteenth-century Jamaica's system of plantation slavery, took up a full page in the Hortus. The text on the opposite leaf noted that 'The Sugar Cane is probably a Native of Arabia as well as of Guinea and the Continent of South America. The new Negroes brought here well know its use and give an account of their boiling it into Syrup in Africa. Finally, in its discussion of the medical uses of plants, Wright's Jamaican herbarium let the doctor speak to his patients. For example, for Lignum Vitas as a treatment for the Lues Venerea, he noted that 'Ten drams of Gum Guiacum Six Drams of Speices of Edinburgh] Treacle and thirty drams of Corrosive Sublimate infused in a Bottle of Rum is our mercurial Tincture. Two tea Spoonfulls morning and Evening in a pint of Decoction made of Sarspariila & Lignum Vitae is a dose for a grown person. He would expect a cure in six weeks.2Wright's Hortus begins to demonstrate the range of ways in which speech was involved in the making of eighteenth-century natural historical (and natural philosophical) knowledge, and the ways in which spoken words flowed around and into and out of texts (in both script and print), images and objects such as dried specimens and mounted collections. It is not the case that speech has been entirely neglected in the history of science, although considerably more attention has been paid to texts, images and objects.3 For example, much has been made of the norms of civil conversation that underpinned truth-telling in the early Royal Society and of the contemporaneous chatter and clatter of coffeehouse lecturers and their audiences.4 Neither has the relationship between talk and text gone unexamined. Both Jim Secord and Adrian Johns, in their close examinations of the making and use of books in the construction of scientific knowledge, have found themselves drawn into worlds where what was spoken was of utmost significance. For Johns, it was the oral transactions conducted between natural philosophers and stationers in the printshops of late seventeenth-century London that were crucial to what got made and credited as knowledge of nature.5 For Secord, the of mapped out across mid-nineteenth-century Britain in his analysis of the reception of Vestiges of the natural history of creation is, in many ways, also a geography of speaking. This ranges across, and differentiates between, the gossip of London's literary salons, Albert reading aloud to Victoria in their Buckingham Palace drawing room, the high table mutterings of Oxbridge dons, Liverpudlian prelates denouncing evolutionary thought from their pulpits, and the excited speculations of Halifax mechanics. …