Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin

  • Glyn Williams
Yale University Press: 2013. 9780300180732 | ISBN: 978-0-3001-8073-2

A keen tension runs through Glyn Williams's Naturalists at Sea, his chronicle of 14 Pacific Ocean expeditions spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The source of this tension is the often-fraught dynamic between the expeditions' on-board naturalists and the seamen who made their research possible. Fieldwork, onerous enough in the primitive naval conditions of the era, was often scuppered by the demands of maritime exploration and surveying, and by international political rivalries.

So Williams's odyssey — beginning with English buccaneer William Dampier's foray to New Holland (modern Australia) in the 1680s, and sailing on through other celebrated English, French, Russian and Spanish voyages — is almost as much a history of psychology as of scientific derring-do and discovery. Even Captain James Cook, who on his first great voyage had harmoniously hosted naturalist Joseph Banks, was not immune to discord. On his second expedition, in 1772–75, Cook fell out with naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, and before setting off on his third, with the ship's surgeon now doubling as a naturalist, is said to have exclaimed: “Curse scientists, and all science into the bargain.”

A distant HMS Beagle off Tierra del Fuego in South America in the 1830s, painted by Conrad Martens. Credit: NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON

During the 1831–36 circumnavigation of HMS Beagle, the conservative Captain Robert FitzRoy famously clashed with the young Charles Darwin over slavery in Brazil; Darwin even considered leaving the ship. Dampier's expedition avoided such tension, because Dampier was both a seaman and a naturalist. Among his many beguiling descriptions is that of the hummingbird, which “haunts about Flowers and Fruit, like a Bee gathering Honey, making many near addresses to its delightful Objects”.

The main cause of all this on-board strain, argues Williams, was identified by biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. In the 1840s, Huxley served as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy before becoming a celebrated scientist. The hard physical work of the sailor, “in his constant battle with the elements, is as far apart from the speculative acuteness and abstraction necessary to the man of science as ever”, he wrote in an 1854 essay.

His friend Darwin had a more personal explanation. After four years away from home, he wrote from Tasmania: “I hate every wave of the ocean ... I believe there are very few contented Sailors. — They are caught young & broken in before they have reached years of discretion. Those who are employed, sigh after the delights of the shore, & those on shore, complain they are forgotten & overlooked.”

As Williams explains, whatever their psychology, naval captains of these times were concerned first and foremost with the safety of their ships. Their second priority was to explore and survey coastlines, while claiming lands for their home countries and searching for the fabled Northwest Passage or Terra Australis Incognita — the unknown southern continent of Antarctica. Finally, they had to consider the vagaries of European politics and wars, which could see the imprisonment of an expedition's members. This happened, for instance, when Joseph-Antoine Bruny d'Entrecasteaux's expedition, dispatched from France in 1791, docked its two vessels in the Dutch East Indies in late 1793. After the crew learned with shock that Louis XVI had been executed and that the French Republic was at war with the Dutch, most of them were incarcerated and the two ships were seized.

Naturalists, by contrast, cared most about having enough time to go ashore and discover new flora and fauna. After collecting specimens, often with great difficulty, they depended on the captain's goodwill to enable them to draw and record their trophies in cramped and inclement conditions and, if possible, to keep them alive for the journey home. Darwin was fortunate to be able to spend 60% of his voyage time on land and to dispatch specimens regularly from South America to Britain. Some 70% of Cook's second voyage, however, was spent at sea — to the despair of Forster, who wrote that “after having circumnavigated very near half the globe we saw nothing, but water, Ice & Sky”.

Conflict was inevitable, Williams concludes from studying such records. On Vitus Bering's 1741 Russian expedition to the strait between Russia and North America that now bears his name, naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller had less than a day in newly discovered Alaska. He managed to walk several miles along a beach collecting plants, but when he asked Bering for a small boat and several men, was told to return within an hour or be left behind. In his journal, Steller complained that “the preparation for this ultimate purpose lasted ten years; twenty hours were devoted to the matter itself”. On George Vancouver's British expedition to the Pacific in 1791–95, an on-board greenhouse full of specimen plants, erected on the instruction of Banks (then president of the Royal Society), became a bone of contention. The burden for the crew of keeping the plants alive eventually led Vancouver to arrest the ship's naturalist, Archibald Menzies, for insubordination.

Williams has been researching the history of European incursions into the Pacific and Arctic oceans since the late 1950s, and has published many books on the subject. An erudite and beautifully illustrated work, Naturalists at Sea wears its learning lightly, and conveys to non-specialists an array of fascinating details about explorers and naturalists, familiar and not-so-familiar, quoting judiciously from their journals and post-voyage publications. Although it sometimes struggles to bring its dizzying cast of characters to life, every page testifies to the indomitable vitality of both explorers and naturalists.