We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Poor Berlin is ill & I am afraid in a very hopeless way … To have two assistants & neither of them sober, is rather unfortunate
Henry Smeathman, letter to James Lee, 10 June 1773Smeathman need not have felt so inadequate about his ‘ignorance in botany’. The immense variety of unknown tropical specimens would soon constitute a dramatic epistemic challenge to Eurocentric classification systems, including that devised by Linnaeus. Twenty years after Smeathman's residence on the coast, Adam Afzelius, Linnaeus's last student and a highly talented botanist, wrote to Banks from Sierra Leone about the increasingly ‘great number of nondescripts’ spotted daily. Privately he conceded defeat in his journal, the words ‘planta ignota’ appearing frequently. Berlin too, when he landed on Bunce Island, was astonished by what he saw around him. It was as though he had landed on a new planet: ‘I am like a blind person who, having just had his eyes opened, sees the sun for the first time; he falls down in wonder, but knows not why, he looks without being able to see’. The illegibility of Africa's book of nature did not, however, stop him from promptly identifying three new plant specimens and several new genera of insects as soon as he reached the Bananas. He promised Linnaeus that, as soon as some boxes arrived from London, he and Smeathman would send a collection of plants to Sweden. Smeathman followed this up by promising Linnaeus at least one specimen of everything they collected in exchange for a ‘loan of necessary books’, having run through his small stock already. Despite Fothergill's assurance to Berlin that Smeathman had sailed from England with ‘Kempfer, Rumphius and Seba’, he could only find Adanson's Voyage to Senegal, Ellis's tract on corals, and ‘a few travel books by sea captains, the rest was useless trivia’. Luckily, he had brought with him Linnaeus's ‘guiding lights of 1764 and 1766’ but he was still ‘uncertain of the names of specimens, making mistakes, getting on to the wrong track and stopping halfway because of a lack of necessary manuals’. His letter to Linnaeus ends with begging pleas for the latest edition of the Systema, as well as the Genera Plantarum. By way of postscript he added that he was unhappy with his low salary.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
