Conclusion: Legacies

Summary

At his apartments in Cannon-Str. Henry Smeathman, esq; of Clements-Inn, author of the history of the Termites or Black Ants. He was also author of the humane plan for the comfortable and free settlement of Black Poor on the Coast of Africa, and of many ingenious treatises not yet published.

Gentleman's Magazine (July 1786)

When Smeathman died in July 1786 there were death notices in the Scots Magazine, the London Chronicle, Whitehall Evening Post, and the Gentleman's Magazine. Thomas Marsham wrote to James Edward Smith in Paris, wondering if he had heard the news about ‘poor Smeathman’, then answered his own question by adding that he was sure his death was ‘well known at Paris’. The death notice in the Gentleman's Magazine did not, like other notices, call Smeathman ‘Dr. Smeathman’, but in adding ‘esq’ to his name posthumously granted him gentlemanly status. This notice also made the curious, if revealing, mistake of referring to Smeathman's essay on the white ants as an essay on ‘Black Ants’. It is possible that the symmetry in the public's mind between ‘Black Ants’ and ‘Black Poor’ arose from the anthropomorphic allegory of Smeathman's essay in which the termites were repeatedly praised for possessing the best human traits such as ‘provident industry and regular government’. But the obituary's conflation of ‘Black Ants’ and ‘Black Poor’ is also a reminder of the refrain so often heard in Smeathman's writings: that improvident and lazy black people should model their society more closely on that of the admirable termites.

Smeathman's essay on the termites has had numerous afterlives. Thomas Winterbottom was such an admirer that he reproduced it in full in his Account of the Native Africans (1803). He also had a favourable impression of the author, telling us that the natives ‘still retain a pleasing remembrance of this ingenious man who they speak of by the title “Fly Catcher”, and relate many interesting anecdotes concerning him’. The Smeathman resort hut on the Bananas is a sign that memories of him still circulate today in the place where he did his field work (Figure 34). Ironically, while Smeathman often regretted that Africans and ants were so unlike each other, Winterbottom saw a charming synchrony between them, particularly evident in their joint husbandry and management of the tropical environment.