Mark Catesby Research Articles

On the identity of Catesby's fish in armour, “Cataphractus Americanus” (Siluriformes: Doradidae)

In the Appendix to his classic two-volume work, “The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands…”, Mark Catesby (1747:19, Pl. 19) described and illustrated the doradid catfish “Cataphractus Americanus”. The names “Cataphractus” and “Cataphractus Americanus” are not available from pre- and post-Linnaean editions of Catesby's work (i.e., Catesby, 1747; 1754; 1771) including Edwards' (1771b) Catalogue appended to the third edition. Linnaeus (1758), however, cited Catesby's “Cataphractus Americanus” in his description of Silurus cataphractus, a species currently valid in Acanthodoras Bleeker 1862. Based on this study of Catesby's original description and illustration, his “Cataphractus Americanus” is newly assigned to Platydoras Bleeker 1862, rendering polytypic the type series of Silurus cataphractus Linneaus 1758. Consequently, BMNH 1853.11.12.193 [ex. Museo Gronovii] is here designated the lectotype of Silurus cataphractus Linneaus 1758, and its objective synonyms Cataphractus americanus Bloch & Schneider 1801, and Cataphractus americanus Lacépède 1803.

CHRISTOPHER P. IANNINI. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature.

Two of the most important literary figures of the early republic, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and John Audubon, were Frenchmen whose sensibilities had been shaped by their experiences in the dynamic plantation world of the circum-Caribbean. Audubon, indeed, was the son of a Saint-Domingue sugar planter who would not have emigrated to the United States if not for the trauma (as he saw it) of the Haitian Revolution. In this short, dense, and rewarding series of essays on writers on nature in the lower South and the West Indies—from Hans Sloane at the start of the eighteenth century through to naturalists Mark Catesby, William Bartram, and Audubon—the plantation world was not some exotic and culturally retrograde region at the edge of a cosmopolitan non-slaveholding world. For Audubon and Crèvecoeur as well as Thomas Jefferson (who is the subject of a very interesting chapter), these were places that were central to the scientific and literary culture of Enlightenment America. But the very novelty of the plantation world and the cruelty it engendered as capitalist social institution and economic engine made this idea difficult to articulate. Both Audubon and Crèvecoeur wanted to efface the Caribbean from their consciousness, to drop a curtain, as Audubon put it, over the dire picture of slave revolt, and to escape as soon as they could from what Crèvecoeur called a “chaos of men, negroes and things” (pp. 143, 255).

Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature

Christopher P. Iannini's Fatal Revolutions is a significant contribution to the hemispheric turn taken by Ralph Bauer, Susan Scott Parrish, and others in recent studies of the relationship between natural history and literary culture in European colonies in the Americas. Through close readings of a seemingly “eclectic series of texts” (p. 8) Iannini makes a compelling argument for the role of depictions of the Caribbean region in the development of American letters, capaciously defined: From Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina through [John James] Audubon's Ornithological Biography and Birds of America, North American readers had been trained to regard the southern colonies (later, states) … as part of an extended Caribbean region that was both a primary source of national wealth and enlightened knowledge and a corrosive influence on national manners, borders, and beliefs. (pp. 282–83) Iannini's primary concern is the linkage between the development of the plantation economy in the Americas and “the rise of natural history as a new scientific discipline, intellectual obsession, and literary form” (p. 3). In effect, Fatal Revolutions traces the increasing role that the ethnography of slavery plays in works of natural history written between 1700 and the early nineteenth century.

Mark Catesby: Pioneering Naturalist, Artist, and Horticulturist

Mark Catesby: Pioneering Naturalist, Artist, and Horticulturist

South Carolina on My Mind

Despite being a stepmother-in-law--a combination of two very negative stereotypes--I have a wonderful son and daughter-in-law. Last July, my daughter-in-law, Laura, sent me an e-mail in which she outlined her plans for my Thanksgiving. She and Geoff invited me to their home in Summerville, South Carolina, to Thanksgiving dinner with Laura's parents, and following that, to three days at a condo on the shore in Litchfield, south of Myrtle Beach. Needless to say, I accepted their invitation, and I could easily fill this entire column with a discussion of the wonderful time we had and the great meals we ate. However, I am supposed to stick to biology, and I will. Fortunately this is easy to do because South Carolina is a very interesting place, biologically speaking. As a northerner, I had very little experience of the South, that is, until a few years ago when Geoff moved to Charleston and met Laura. Now, I'm lucky enough to go there at least once a year. Laura has lived in Summerville most of her life and teaches biology in the local high school. Thus, I have a knowledgeable guide, especially because she is also interested in environmental issues as well as in the history of Charleston and has been a docent at several of its historical sites. Despite the horrors of the Civil War and the march of progress, Charleston has managed to hold on to more of its architectural and institutional history than most American cities. For example, the College of Charleston (founded in 1770) and the Charleston Museum (founded in 1773) remain in the heart of the city. The museum is not in its original home, but it contains a wonderful collection of artifacts related to South Carolina's history and biology. I particularly liked the galleries devoted to natural history and was struck by two displays there. The first is an exhibit of eight herbarium sheets of plants collected at the Gettysburg battlefield from April to June 1894 by Charles K. Bell, a student at the Lutheran Seminary that is near the battlefield and was itself the site of fighting on the first day of the battle. With each sheet, which is marked with the location on the battlefield where Bell collected the plant, is a photograph of what that particular site looked like at the time of the battle. These are stark images of bodies, artillery, and so on. To make the display even more haunting, there is a note in the case stating: "Perhaps the last thing some mortally wounded Confederate or Union soldier saw was one of these plants." The other display I was drawn to is of the 20 new bird species collected by Mark Catesby (1682-1749) in South Carolina and then named by Carl Linnaeus. Each species is represented by a mounted specimen and by an outspread wing to show the plumage. This exhibit is a great reminder of the biological riches awaiting the early naturalists who explored the area. While at the museum, I bought several books on South Carolina biology, including a collection of natural history pieces written before 1860. I would not say that southerners continue to relive the Civil War, a claim sometimes made by northerners. However, I would say that they are very aware of their past. I think that history in general, not just that of the mid19th century, is very important to them. However, 1860 definitely marks a pivotal time in that history, and so it's not surprising that it is used as an ending or beginning point for many historical studies. The first selection chosen by David Taylor (1998), the editor of this collection, is the one I found most memorable. It was written by John Lawson (?-1711), whose early history is unknown. He wrote of his travels in 1700 from Charleston, through western South Carolina, and on to the North Carolina coast. In an essay on "The Beasts of Carolina," he tells of seeing buffalo, bears, panthers, mountain cats, wild cats, wolves, elk, deer, skunks, beavers, foxes, muskrats, raccoons, squirrels, and possums; the latter, oddly enough, he called the "wonder of all the animals" (p. …

Identification of the Plant and Associated Animal Images in Catesby'sNatural History, with Nomenclatural Notes and Comments

Abstract The published images in Mark Catesby's Natural History are compared with the original watercolors now preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, England. This comparison has allowed for a more exact evaluation of the 174 plants illustrated by Catesby, resulting in determination of all plant species but one. The typification of most plant names is given in detail, with full bibliographic citations. Most non-plant organisms associated with the plant images are also identified and their nomenclatural status discussed. Catesby plates are newly designated here as lectotypes or neotypes for the following plant names: Cassine paragua Mill., Dracontium foetidum L., Echites umbellatus Jacq., Ficus citrifolia Mill., Fraxinus caroliniana Mill., Gleditsia aquatica Marshall, Hibiscus tiliaceus L., Ilex caroliniana Mill., Ipomoea catesbaei G.F.W. Mey., Laurus sassafras L., L. winterana L., Magnolia virginiana L. var. foetida L., Malva abutiloides L., Menispermum carolinum L., Passiflora cuprea L., Plata...

How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (review)

How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses. By Mark M. Smith. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 200. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by Micki McElyaSpanning an ambitious chronology from contact and enslavement to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mark M. Smith examines how white southerners made sense, literally, of a vicious racial ideology of immutable difference that was shot through with obvious contradic- tions and profound hypocrisy. Decrying what he sees as a tyranny of the visual in the current scholarship on race in the United States, Smith argues that whites marshaled their senses of smell, hearing, taste, and touch to solidify a black-white racial binary in the context of visual uncertainties and a prevailing one-drop rule. These other senses became increasingly important over time, he contends, when whites were confronted with a growing population of seemingly white people who were legally and socially black. Smith also explores the various ways in which African Americans resisted these sensory stereotypes from the antebellum period to the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. This book is a provocative example of the growing field of sensory history of which its author is a leading proponent. It offers fresh insights for understanding historical experience and crafting multidimensional narratives and analytical frameworks as it also raises a host of important methodological and historiographical questions.How Race Is Made focuses largely on how blackness smelled pungent, loathsome, and intoxicating - in the noses of white southerners, with some consideration of their other senses and stereotypes. Of particular interest to Journal of the Early Republic readers will be Smith's contention that these sensory notions took shape in the eighteenth century and lingered into the antebellum period, when they were used to anchor slaveholding southern paternalism before sustaining the architecture and inconsistencies of Jim Crow segregation (12). This part of the book might also be the most frustrating for scholars of the Atlantic world and early America, for it moves briskly and impressionistically across three centuries, drawing evidence from travel narratives, economic reports, scientific papers, and Notes on the State of Virginia. In one of Smith's more compelling examples, and one that pushes his argument beyond a racial binary, he discusses naturalist Mark Catesby's assertion in 1 754 that the of Carolina and Florida were naturally a very sweet People, their Bodies emitting nothing of that Rankness that is so remarkable in Negres [sic.] (14). Indicative of the ways whites boasted about and authenticated their racial knowledge through interracial intimacies, Catesby claims that he knows this well because he has shared sleeping quarters with several Indians during his travels. Desire for contact and closeness was always equal to, and often simultaneous with, repulsion in framing racial hierarchy and attempting to legitimize slavery and then segregation, as long as it remained on white supremacist terms.Smith goes on to argue that extravisual sensory history holds the key to understanding the violence, emotional extremity, and horror of southern white responses to abolition, Reconstruction, and integration, particularly massive resistance to the implementation of Brown. He posits a distinction between sight and the more instinctual sensory perceptions of sound, smell, taste, and touch, arguing that nonvisual senses often indexed viscera and emotion more than thought and reason, and drawing a line between race-thinking and gut-feeling (2). …

Amazing rare things: the art of natural history in the age of discovery

From the fifteenth century onwards, as European explorers sailed forth on grand voyages of discovery, their encounters with exotic plants and animals fanned intense scientific interest. Scholars began to examine nature with fresh eyes, and pioneering artists transformed the way nature was seen and understood. In Amazing Rare Things, renowned naturalist and documentary-maker David Attenborough joins with expert colleagues to explore how artists portrayed the natural world during this era of burgeoning scientific interest. The book focuses on an exquisite selection of natural history drawings and watercolors by Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Mark Catesby, and from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo--works all held in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Attenborough and his coauthors offer lucid commentary on topics ranging from the 30,000-year history of human drawings of the natural world, to Leonardo's fascination with natural processes, to Catesby's groundbreaking studies that introduced Europeans to the plants and animals of North America. With 160 full color illustrations, this beautiful book will appeal to readers with interests that extend from art and science to history and nature.

Flamingo, drawn and engraved by Mark Catesby

Flamingo, drawn and engraved by Mark Catesby

No Man is an Island: The Life and Times of André Michaux

Abstract Botanical explorers roamed temperate North American colonies long before Andre Michaux came to the United States. The efforts of these men and women accounted for thousands of new species of plants described in the scientific literature from the early 1500s until 1785 when Michaux arrived to begin his studies that would ultimately result, in 1803, in an abbreviated summary of the region's known flora. Most of the early collecting efforts concentrated on trees and shrubs of potential ornamental significance or plants of medicinal importance. Introduction of temperate North American plants was well underway by 1600, with a steady flow of natural objects going to Western Europe throughout the seventeenth century. Although broad, general interest in North American plants declined after 1700, the efforts of a few—notably Mark Catesby, John Clayton, John Mitchell, John Bartram, Pehr Kalm, Alexander Garden, Caldwaller Colden and William Bartram—greatly shaped Carl Linnaeus' understanding of our flora fr...

THE SOUTHEASTERN REGION: A BIODIVERSITY HAVEN FOR NATURALISTS AND ECOLOGISTS

Many ecologists and biologists of my generation started out as naturalists. Many of us grew up in small towns, in the countryside or on farms, where nature was just outside the back door. My first graduate students at the University of Georgia more than 50 years ago, Robert Norris (winner ESA Mercer Award), David Johnston, and Edward Kuenzler, were talented self-educated naturalists. I learned as much from them as they did from me. One does not become a naturalist by taking a course; one needs to get into it at an early age. With more young people now growing up in the big cities, a regional natural history journal can play a major role in promoting the study and preservation of natural areas that are increasingly threatened by urban sprawl. The southeastern region, stretching from the mountains to sea, has a high diversity of habitats ranging from northern spruce forests to sub-tropical broad-leaf evergreen and palm vegetation. The region has more wetlands than any other region in the United States, including some of the biggest — the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, the Everglades of Florida, the Louisiana Mississippi delta wetlands, the Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, the Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina, and the Ace Basin in South Carolina. Southeastern coastal tidal salt and freshwater marshes and swamps are the most extensive and best-developed examples of this ecosystem type to be found anywhere in the world. Southeastern streams, rivers and impoundments are home to a high diversity of fish, herps, mollusks, and other aquatic life. Much of this diversity has yet to be described. The southeast has a long tradition for natural history going back to the early explorer-naturalist-writers: Mark Catesby, William and John Bartram, Alexander Wilson, John Abbott, and John James Audubon. John Muir, who before moving west, made a thousand mile walk in 1867 from Kentucky to central Florida in order to get acquainted with the plants, animals, and people of the region. Then there were the naturalists-educators. The LeConte brothers, for ex-

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision.

Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was a major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus, which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil. Catesby's Natural History exerted an impotant influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the 18th century. Inspired by a major travelling exhibition of Catesby's watercolour drawings from the Royal Library, this interdisciplinary collection considers Mark Catesby's endeavours as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned.

Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World. Victoria DickensonEmpire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision. Amy R. W. Meyers, Margaret Beck Pritchard

<i>Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World</i>. Victoria Dickenson<i>Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision</i>. Amy R. W. Meyers, Margaret Beck Pritchard

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision. Edited by Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard. Chapel Hill and Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. xviii + 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, index, list of contributors. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95

<i>Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision</i>. Edited by Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard. Chapel Hill and Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. xviii + 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, index, list of contributors. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95

Mark Catesby's Natural history of America: the watercolors from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle

The Natural History, the life work of the English naturalist and artist Mark Catesby (1682-1749), the most important precursor of Audubon, was twenty years in the making, from 1729 to 1749. It was the first comprehensive study of the flora and fauna of the eastern seaboard of North America, and its beautifully finished, often striking images remained an indispensable reference source throughout the century of its publication. Published here for the first time are the original watercolors from which Catesby prepared the etchings which accompanied his published volumes. Having been stored away from the light between the pages of a unique copy of the book in the Royal Library at Windsor, which King George III bought in 1768, they are wonderfully fresh, and communicate all the enthusiasm of the pioneer naturalist amazed by the colors and variety of the new species of birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, insects and plants he was documenting (some of them now extinct). The watercolors have recently undergone conservation at the Royal Library and selections are being exhibited at several international venues. The conservation has brought to light many new drawings illustrating Catesby's working methods, and Henrietta McBurney's research sheds valuable new light on Catesby and the composition of his epochal Natural History.

Environmental inequalities: class, race, and industrial pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980

By examining environmental change through the lens of conflicting social agendas, Andrew Hurley uncovers the historical roots of environmental inequality in contemporary urban America. Hurley's study focuses on the steel mill community of Gary, Indiana, a city that was sacrificed, like a thousand other American places, to industrial priorities in the decades following World War II. Although this period witnessed the emergence of a powerful environmental crusade and a resilient quest for equality and social justice among blue-collar workers and African Americans, such efforts often conflicted with the needs of industry. To secure their own interests, manufacturers and affluent white suburbanites exploited divisions of race and class, and the poor frequently found themselves trapped in deteriorating neighborhoods and exposed to dangerous levels of industrial pollution. In telling the story of Gary, Hurley reveals liberal capitalism's difficulties in reconciling concerns about social justice and quality of life with the imperatives of economic growth. He also shows that the power to mold the urban landscape was intertwined with the ability to govern social relations. |Features the pathbreaking work of Mark Catesby, the British naturalist and illustrator who founded natural history and bird art in America, preceding Audubon by nearly a century.

The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800

B IRDERS interested in American history are fond of noting that Columbus knew he was near land when he saw a flock of migrating birds.1 Thus Europe's discovery of the New World is synchronous with the discovery of New World birds. This fact is not just a starting point for the present article; Columbus's use of the birds is symptomatic of the next three hundred years of American ornithological writing. He was not interested in determining the species; these birds were but a chance sign in a more important venture, and birds as signs were incorporated into the discourse of discovery. Indeed, few American ornithologists writing before the publication of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands ( 73 I-I743)2 described birds in a discourse we would consider ornithological. The principal function of such early tracts as Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land in Virginia (i 590), William Wood's New Englands Prospect (i634), and Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (i637) was to promote immigration by advertising a colony's opportunities. These tracts listed birds primarily to assure potential settlers of an adequate food supply; hence these field reporters classified birds as a natural commodity. Southern reporters such as John Lawson in A New Voyage to Carolina (I 709) and William Byrd in Natural History of Virginia, or the Newly Discovered Eden (I737) claimed to write natural history, and they treated the land and its inhabitants in much greater depth than the earlier writers had.3 Lawson signed himself Surveyor General of Caro-

Natural History in America—from Mark Catesby to Rachel Carson, by Wayne Hanley. Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co, £8.95.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Natural History in America. From Mark Catesby to Rachel Carson.Wayne Hanley

Previous articleNext article No AccessNew Biological BooksNatural History in America. From Mark Catesby to Rachel Carson. Wayne Hanley Dennis PulestonDennis Puleston Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 53, Number 1Mar., 1978 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/410341 Copyright 1978 Stony Brook Foundation, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.