nature, nation and nostalgia: narratives of natural history in spanish and british america...

Nature, Nation and Nostalgia: Narratives of Natural History inSpanish and British America (1750-1800)

HELEN COWIE and KATHRYN GRAY

Abstract: This article studies natural history narratives in the eighteenth-century Atlan-tic world. Focusing on two key texts, Juan de Velasco’s Historia del Reyno de Quito andHector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, it examines the closerelationship between natural knowledge and national identity. We consider some of thetensions that emerged between European and American writers of natural history duringthis period and situate these narratives of natural history within a wider critique oftravel-writing and representations of the Americas. We focus, in particular, on the textualdevices employed to confer credibility on Creole natural histories.

Keywords: Crèvecoeur, Velasco, natural history, identity, credibility, Atlantic world

Conflicting religious and political principles characterised the representation of the NewWorld’s flora and fauna from the very early days of European exploration. Ralph Bauersuggests that, from the discovery of the New World through to its various battles forindependence from European rulers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘thequestion of how knowledge could be centrally produced and controlled in the centrifugalcultural dynamics of outwardly-expanding geo-political systems’ was crucial to the pro-duction of natural knowledge in the Atlantic world.1 Taking a lead from Bauer’s hemi-spheric approach, and drawing on recent scholarship on Atlantic science, which showshow experiences of travel, assimilation and expropriation changed both the bearers ofknowledge and the knowledge they communicated,2 this article explores the personal andscientific tensions at work in the construction of natural knowledge in relation to twowriters of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world: Juan de Velasco, a Jesuit from theKingdom of Quito, and J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, who was born French but becamea naturalised British colonial subject in 1765 while living in North America. Both writersprovided eyewitness accounts of the natural flora and fauna of the New World for audi-ences in the Old World, both responded to Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy, andboth were forced into exile as a result of political tensions between European rulers and theemerging politics of colonial independence. Crèvecoeur would return to the New World inlater life, but Velasco never did. In their narratives of natural history, not only do thesewriters reveal the wealth of New World flora and fauna but they also interlace theirobservations with a personal story about loss and nostalgia for their New World homesand identities. Here we examine how Velasco and Crèvecoeur used their ‘Creole’ identitiesto negotiate and contest the very framework of scientific exchange in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, a framework that tended to prioritise the centres of scientificdebate in Europe over the experience of colonial scientists and observers thousands ofmiles away in colonial America. We begin with a brief outline of the authors’ careers. Wethen look in detail at the rhetorical strategies they employed to bolster their credibility asnaturalists, where our discussion shares Sarah Easterby-Smith’s interest in the role and

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 36 No. 4 (2013) doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12082

© 2013 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

rhetoric of expertise and ‘amateurship’ in the late eighteenth century. Velasco andCrèvecoeur’s conscious construction of their colonial identities in relation to an existingtransatlantic scholarly community also has much in common with Anya Zilberstein’saccount of naturalists in greater New England during this period (both of the abovearticles feature in this special issue).

I. Transatlantic Lives

Juan de Velasco was a Jesuit from the Kingdom of Quito (modern-day Ecuador). Born inSpanish America to European parents, he lived in the New World until 1767, when theSpanish crown formally expelled the Jesuit Order from its colonies. Along with many of hisfellow Jesuit exiles, Velasco then relocated to Rome. Here he wrote Historia del Reino deQuito en la América Meridional, anxious, so he explained, to add a history ‘particular to theKingdom of Quito’ to the many ‘general and regional histories of America’ that hadappeared ‘in recent times’. The text was completed in 1789 but not published until 1844.3

Velasco’s Historia was a substantial work, comprising three volumes of material. Thefirst volume concentrated on natural history. The second addressed the Pre-Columbianhistory of Quito, which Velasco reconstructed from ‘various manuscripts’ in his posses-sion and ‘the constant traditions of the Indians, with whom I interacted for a long time’.4

The third volume dealt with colonial history from the Spanish conquest onwards. As aJesuit-authored work focused on a specific geographical region, Velasco’s text formed partof a wider genre of regional Jesuit natural histories written in the late eighteenth century,including Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Storia antica di Messico (first published in Italian in1780 and known to Velasco), and Juan Ignacio Molina’s Compendio della storia geografica,naturale e civile del regno di Chile (first published in 1782, in Italian, and issued in revisedversions in 1782 and 1810). Like these works, the Historia del Reino de Quito confined itsanalysis to a single province of America, differing from earlier, more expansive Jesuitnatural histories such as Jose de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590),whose scope was global or continental.5

Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer was first published in England in 1782 andwas ‘written’ or narrated by James, the fictional Pennsylvanian farmer, who correspondswith Mr F. B. on the climate, geography, people, flora and fauna of Nantucket, Martha’sVineyard, ‘Charles Town’ and John Bartram’s Pennsylvanian farm. Rather than providesweeping accounts of North America’s natural heritage, like Velasco, Crèvecoeur offers alimited survey of American New World society and nature for his audiences in Europe.Ostensibly, Letters is about local, close-up experience of the New World from an agrarianpoint of view, where the expert is embedded in the practice of cultivating the earth. Thisis in contrast to the more voluminous works of his near contemporary Mark Catesby, withThe Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-43), as well as WilliamBartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1792).

Crèvecoeur’s personal circumstances in colonial America were far from straightfor-ward, and his allegiances during the Revolution were with the loyalist cause. Undersuspicion of being a spy for the British and then a spy for the colonial army, he was forcedto flee from his home in Pine Hill and arrived in England in 1781, leaving his wife andchildren behind in North America. He travelled to his native France shortly thereafter,only to return to America 1783 as a consular official for Louis XVI. Letters was writtenduring the turbulent Revolutionary years, and its narrative structure follows the rise andfall of Crèvecoeur’s fortunes, from his settled and happy time as a farmer in Pine Hill to theuncertainty and violence brought on by the Revolution.6

546 HELEN COWIE AND KATHRYN GRAY


The writings of Crèvecoeur and Velasco need to be studied within the broader politicalcontext of the late eighteenth century, which directly impacted upon both their lives. ForCrèvecoeur, the crucial event was the American Revolution. For Velasco, the key politicaldecision that changed his life was the expulsion of the Jesuits from all Spanish dominionsin 1767, precipitated by growing royal concern at the power and influence of the order inits territories and triggered in the short term by riots in Madrid, blamed on a Jesuitconspiracy. Under such circumstances of enforced relocation, it is not surprising that asense of loss and fond memories of their former homelands informed the accounts thateach of these men wrote about his native country.

The two texts examined also need to be understood as part of a wider eighteenth-century debate concerning the alleged inferiority of American nature. In his acclaimedHistoire naturelle, the first volumes of which appeared in 1749, the French naturalistGeorges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, contended that the New World’s wet, humidclimate had resulted in the emergence of smaller, more enfeebled animals than existed inthe Old World.7 Other writers, most infamously the Prussian philosopher Cornelius dePauw, perpetuated these ideas, claiming that American ‘lions’ were ‘pusillanimous’,American mammals in general shrunken and deformed, lacking tails and having ‘acertain irregularity in the division of toes on the fore and hind feet’, and American insectsand reptiles abnormally large and noxious. De Pauw also theorised that European animalsand people degenerated in America, diminishing in size and vigour.8 American writers,taking offence at these crude generalisations, vociferously repudiated the unflatteringEuropean portrayal of their continent, initiating a transatlantic scholarly debate thatAntonello Gerbi has christened ‘The Dispute of the New World’.9 We situate our narrativesof natural history within this wider critique of travel-writing and representations ofAmerica, looking particularly at the textual devices they employed to enhance their cred-ibility as naturalists.10

II. Credibility Strategies

As colonial scholars, anxious to be taken seriously within the Republic of Letters, bothCrèvecoeur and Velasco carefully crafted their works to maximise their authority andcredibility as writers. Creole naturalists – and long-term residents of the Americas, such asCrèvecoeur – were sometimes insecure about their scholarly status, concerned that theylacked access to the most sophisticated scientific equipment and were not au fait with thelatest literature on natural history. They were also conscious of negative European stereo-types of those born in the Americas, where social and climatic conditions were believed toweaken the body and sap the intellect; the Spanish botanist Hipólito Ruíz, for instance,characterised the typical limeño (native of Lima) as ‘fickle, haughty, cowardly, duplicitous,unfaithful’, the result, he believed, of ‘acrid humours’ nurtured by the Peruvian climate.11

In order to counter these kinds of preconception, Crèvecoeur and Velasco employed spe-cific stylistic devices to demonstrate their familiarity with contemporary scholarly codesand adopted a distinctive epistemological stance that was founded on personal experience.The latter was often couched as a critique of ill-informed European travellers, who, thoughthey too stressed the value of empirical observation, lacked the kind of sustained contactwith American nature that Creoles and long-term residents of the continent could exploit.

Studying both texts, what first strikes the reader are the professions of ignorance withwhich the writers introduce their work. Opening his Historia, Velasco listed the manyqualities that a historian and a naturalist should possess. He then claimed to be lacking inthem all:

Nature, Nation and Nostalgia 547


A historian must be a philosopher and a true critic, in order to know the causes and naturaleffects of the objects he describes and to discern in the confusion and chaos of remote ages thefabulous, the certain, the doubtful and the probable, a quality which I confess I almost totallylack. He must be well versed in that which has already been written on the material, especiallyin the purest primary sources, so as not to merely copy errors and falsities, a matter that isvery alien to me. [...] He must have a regular method[ology] that avoids confusions; a naturalunaffected style, neither so submissive that it repels [the reader] nor so elevated that it is notunderstood.12

This appears to be an open admission of inadequacy. In fact, however, rather than being atransparent confession of Velasco’s limitations, the above statement may instead be inter-preted as a stylistic device to pre-empt possible criticism and demonstrate to readers thatVelasco is conversant with the social graces of the contemporary scholarly community,where ‘to demur about your scientific knowledge was to show your social knowledge’.13

Modesty and self-effacement were an unspoken part of eighteenth-century scientificexchange, and the public notion of philosophical inadequacy was a common trope; theFrench circumnavigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville opened the narrative of his travelswith the self-effacing confession that his writing lacked elegance, ‘the rambling and savagelife I have led for these twelve years’ having ‘had too great an effect upon my style’.14 Inparading these attributes, Velasco was showing his cultural credentials and proving that aCreole from Quito could emulate the graces of the Parisian salon. Moreover, though heclaimed to be inexpert in the qualities required of a historian, Velasco nonetheless exhib-ited awareness of what these qualities were, underlining his familiarity with the verypractices of which he denied knowledge.

We find something similar in Crèvecoeur. In Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecoeurconstructs a fictional narrator, the self-deprecating Farmer James, who reflects on hisseemingly ill-informed observations. To his recipient, Mr F. B., he says:

Remember that you have laid the foundation of this correspondence; you well know that I amneither a philosopher, politician, divine, or naturalist, but a simple farmer. I flatter myself,therefore, that you’ll receive my letters as conceived, not according to scientific rules, to whichI am a perfect stranger, but agreeable to the spontaneous impressions which each subject mayinspire. This is the only line I am able to follow, the line which Nature has herself traced forme; this was the covenant which I made with you and with which you seemed to be wellpleased. Had you wanted the style of the learned, the reflections of the patriot, the discussionsof the politician, the curious observations of the naturalist, the pleasing garb of the man oftaste, surely you would have applied to some of those men of letters with which cities abound.But since, on the contrary, and for what reason I know not, you wish to correspond with acultivator of the earth, with a simple citizen, you must receive my letters for better or worse.15

Like Velasco, Crèvecoeur is duplicitous in this narrative strategy and confirms his credibil-ity indirectly. Crèvecoeur adopts prevailing expectations of knowledge construction bylisting educated and learned men who normally preside over natural historical knowledge.Crèvecoeur situates his narrator on the periphery of epistemological control, only toreassert Farmer James’s authority by prioritising seemingly more reliable and geographi-cally specific knowledge offered by the ‘line of Nature’. In James’s correspondence with MrF. B., James’s minister assures him that ‘Although he [F. B.] is a man of learning and taste[...] he will read your letters with pleasure; if they be not elegant, they will smell of thewoods and be a little wild; I know your turn, they will contain some matters which henever knew before.’16 The observer of the natural world in North America has plenty to



teach the Cambridge intellectual, displacing the authority of Europeans by virtue of thefact that the colonial settler takes ‘Nature’ and what is visibly present in the landscape asa guiding principle; as a consequence, the rules of science followed by sedentary natural-ists in Europe have to take second place. Far from being a simple ‘cultivator of the earth’,Crèvecoeur’s farmer draws attention to the necessity and the authority of the rural voice,but through the self-effacing tone he also stresses the negotiations that are made in theprocess of producing natural knowledge of colonial America. The consequence of thisnarrative strategy was to unfix those lines of authority between metropolitan centres inEurope and colonial America as a way of making space for the ‘cultivator’, ‘the farmer’, inthe increasingly heated intellectual debates about the degeneracy of the New World.

A second element that is common to the two texts is the emphasis placed by the writerson personal experience and empirical observation. Sedentary naturalists such as Buffoncould not examine American nature for themselves but were forced to rely on the reportsof informants and the often faded, mislabelled or deformed specimens that were sent toEuropean museums. European travellers, meanwhile, often passed through America rela-tively quickly, precluding in-depth and reliable observations of its fauna and flora.17

Nor were they always sufficiently well trained in natural history to make trustworthyjudgements. Aware of these shortcomings, Creole naturalists and long-term residents ofAmerica deliberately positioned themselves as experts on the natural productions of theirlocalities, founding their own accounts of American nature, history and societies on theirclose and protracted contact with the species and communities in their native regions.They frequently framed their writings as explicit correctives of existing European texts,presenting empirical knowledge as compensation for what they might lack in booklearning.18

Personal experience was certainly central to Velasco’s self-construction as a crediblecommentator on American fauna and flora. Unlike Buffon and de Pauw, who had formu-lated derogatory theories about the New World from the seclusion of their studies, Velascoprofessed to have seen all the things he related in person, or through the surrogate eyes of‘trustworthy persons better informed than myself on this material’.19 The Historia con-tains constant references to the Jesuit’s sustained and direct contact with Quito’s plantsand animal life, suggesting a level of intimacy that Buffon could not have. Referring to aspecies of bear known locally as the ‘ucumari’, for instance, Velasco recounted that ‘it isvery timid and only lives in the cold climates, where [...] I have seen them frequently’.20

Later, discussing Quito’s butterflies, Velasco described how he had not merely viewed theseinsects at a distance, but actively collected them so that he could watch their metamor-phosis at first hand.

I spent a large amount of time in more than one year with my room full of a thousand speciesof caterpillars, observing daily the nature and different properties in the formation andpropagation of this species of living things. I made note of everything most worth knowing,which I hoped would function in part as a correction and in part as an addition to the[Spectacle de la Nature] of the Abbé [Nöel Antoine de] Pluche.21

Through the repeated insertion of phrases such as ‘I saw’, and ‘I was witness to’, Velascosought to convince the reader that he was a careful and diligent observer, his knowledgederiving from long-term interaction rather than fleeting glances.

Because he was so familiar with American nature, Velasco was also able to dispel someof the crude generalisations Europeans had made about his homeland. Hoping to maketheir work noteworthy or perhaps seeking to confirm contemporary theories about climate



and geography, travellers to the Americas were often tempted to extend their observationsof a specific region to include the entire continent, usually perpetuating negative viewsof America’s climate and fauna. Velasco and other Creole naturalists objected to thisapproach, partly because it presented their provinces in a detrimental light, partly becauseit conflicted with their own, more localised, conception of the study of nature. To disprovesuch unwelcome generalisations, they exposed the methodological flaws of travellers andwere careful to point out how these judgements, however valid for other areas, did notapply to their own localities. A good example of this process appears in Velasco’s chapter onQuito’s birds, in which the Creole discredited the claim made by French astronomer CharlesMarie de la Condamine that American birds could not sing harmoniously but were notablemerely for their striking plumage. Assessing the merits of this assertion, Velasco confessedthat it was not entirely unfounded, for in the province of Maynas, where La Condamine hadbeen based, and indeed ‘in all the very hot’ parts of the kingdom, the birds were indeedindifferent singers. What was wrong about this report, however, and what Velasco tookexception to, was La Condamine’s subsequent assumption that limited musical abilitiesextended to all birds across America, for, as Velasco pointed out, ‘in the high, cold, mild oronly slightly hot [regions], the class of singing birds is very numerous, and there are amongthem some that equal the most famous in the world’. To substantiate this claim, Velascocited the example of the ‘cherriclez’, a bird that ‘learns to dance on a table to the sound ofan instrument [...] to speak a few words and to imitate other animals’, and which was able‘to follow with a whistle all of the notes that are played on musical instruments, with suchrhythm and proportion that it causes wonder to hear it’. ‘I have owned several’, statedVelasco, emphasising his close contact with the bird, ‘and I knew one in Riobamba that wastaken often to the choir of a church, where it accompanied all the music perched on a choirstall.’22 La Condamine’s generalisation was thus premature and unfounded, based onpreconceptions and scanty observation.

This same tendency to prioritise the eyewitness accounts of colonial subjects over themore erudite but less informed writings of European travelling naturalists is fundamentalto Crèvecoeur’s narrative and highlighted in James’s account of capturing bees and re-locating them to his own hives. This had to be done with care and with intimate knowledgeof bee behaviour: ‘If they have previously pitched in some hollow trees, it is not theallurements of salt and water, of fennel hickory leaves, etc., nor the finest box, that caninduce them to stay; they will prefer those rude, rough habitations to the best polishedmahogany hive.’ In metaphorical terms, this isolated description of bees makes a politicalpoint about the simplicity of agrarian, colonial life in comparison with a seemingly moresophisticated metropolitan society. In laying bare the myths of cultivating bees,Crèvecoeur establishes the simpler, more accurate knowledge of the farmer who spendshis time ‘resting’ ‘under my locust-trees, close by my bee-house’, observing and under-standing his bees. The rhetoric of local knowledge is then reinforced when James remem-bers the occasion of F. B.’s visit to James’s farm: ‘I once took you along with me in one ofthese [bee-hunting] rambles, and yet you insist on my repeating the detail of our opera-tions.’23 In this example, not only is the authority of the colonial subject prioritised butCrèvecoeur insists on having the European reader accept the value of the farmer’s knowl-edge over his own.

Moreover, in ‘Ant-Hill Town’, a letter more often reprinted as part of Crèvecoeur’sSketches of Eighteenth-Century Life, the narrator throws a very thin veil over the author’smore sophisticated ambitions: ‘How sorry [I am] that I never have read Buffon! I couldhave explained myself technically, whereas I am now speaking to you in the language of aschoolboy who possesses as yet nothing of knowledge beside curiosity.’24



Crèvecoeur’s meditations on British America’s natural world, from the ‘arches’, ‘vaults’and ‘obscure mansions’ of an ant colony, where he bemoans his lack of technical vocabu-lary,25 to the abundance of America’s ‘broad lap’, as it is described in the Letters – the‘spectacle’ of which ‘must be more entertaining and more philosophical than that whicharises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome’26 – betray an understanding and a rebut-tal of Buffon’s assertion of American inferiority. Further, through strategic use of hisnarrator, Crèvecoeur emphasises the significance of eyewitness accounts. Farmer Jamesthe ‘schoolboy’ naturalist mentioned above, as well as Farmer James the man of naturalsense and a ‘tabula rasa, where spontaneous and strong impressions are delineated withfacility’,27 convey complex strategies of narrative credibility which reinforce the value of‘eyewitness’ accounts and interrogate the process of validating natural knowledge frommetropolitan centres in Europe. Through this individual, agrarian voice, Crèvecoeurengages with scholarly debates about credibility and expertise which dominatedeighteenth-century natural history writing.28

III. Dramatising Nature

As a result of their intimate knowledge of American nature, colonial scholars such asVelasco and Crèvecoeur considered themselves better placed to capture the vitality, beautyand wonder of America’s fauna and flora. Though often beautifully written – certainly inthe case of Buffon – European accounts of America’s natural marvels were sometimesseen to divest the latter of some of their true drama and magnificence, or even to denytheir existence. Surrounded by the wondrous productions of the New World, by contrast,Velasco and Crèvecoeur delighted in their novelty and singularity, and attempted toconvey this through their writings. For them it was more important to communicateverbally the distinctiveness of America’s natural phenomena than to classify them accord-ing to the latest taxonomical trends.

In Velasco this sense of the vitality and uniqueness of American nature manifests itselfin the author’s resentment at what he regards as excessive European scepticism towardsaspects of American nature. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has shown, the eighteenthcentury witnessed a change in the way in which the credibility of historical and otherforms of testimony was assessed. Previously, the credibility of an account had dependedlargely on the social status of the observer. In the eighteenth century, however, a new wayof reading emerged that privileged internal consistency and overall plausibility ofaccounts over the social standing of their authors.29 Applied to works of natural history,this shift in the way testimony was interpreted resulted in a reluctance to believe in theexistence of phenomena that appeared fantastical and out of line with prevailing under-standings of the world; hence de Pauw dismissed stories about the existence of giants inthe New World as the result of overactive imaginations and mistaking the bones ofanimals for those of humans.30 All this was disagreeable to Velasco, who felt that some ofthe most fascinating productions of American nature were being overlooked merelybecause they seemed to defy rational explanation.

Velasco’s particular concern was that the European parameters for credibility were toonarrow and Old World naturalists and philosophers too quick to discount phenomena theycould not explain. Writing about a species of zoophyte believed to live in the rivers of Quito,for example, Velasco noted that this creature had been extensively discussed by PadreCarlos Rosignoli, who compared it to similar species in Scotland. This account wasuseful, in Velasco’s opinion, and could have furnished contemporaries with helpful



information. It had, however, been largely dismissed because Rosignoli had usedinappropriate language; ‘as this author gave them the title of wonders, he has not beentaken notice of, although he cites authorities of great weight’.31 Elsewhere, describing‘some plants that seem wondrous through their hard to understand effects’, Velasco wassimilarly sympathetic towards his fellow Jesuit José Gumilla, who, because he cited ‘severalextraordinary things’ in his book El Orinoco ilustrado (1741), ‘was taken for a trickster bysome, and classified as credulous and innocent by other more benign [critics]’.32 ToVelasco’s mind this attitude was short-sighted, because El Orinoco ilustrado actually con-tained valuable information. It was reflective, moreover, of a highly Eurocentric conceptionof the world, in which local phenomena not observed in Europe were simply disregarded asthe products of mendacity or imagination. ‘If the effects of the magnet had been observedonly in a canton of Tartary’, meditated Velasco, ‘they would be dismissed as a fable byeveryone’; and yet magnetism was a physical phenomenon known to exist. ‘To believeeverything merely on the say so of a particular person is the credulity and simplicity of theignorant.’ By the same token, however, ‘to deny everything, however proven and verifiedit is, merely because it sounds wondrous, is the caprice and foolishness of the learned.’33

Velasco himself embraced the fantastical with enthusiasm, devoting one whole chapterto the ‘Monsters’ that existed in the Kingdom of Quito and another to the pressing ques-tion ‘If in reality there were giants in America’. In the former section Velasco cited aplentiful array of local monstrosities, including monster guinea pigs with two heads,excess limbs and six toes, a young boy with four ears and, most movingly, a girl born withtwo horns, who perished when doctors attempted to remove them.34 In the latter chapterVelasco insisted that there had indeed been giants in America, despite the fact that ‘theAmerican giants have been on no few occasions material for the laughter of the incredu-lous, principally philosophers’. He deduced this fact from recent finds of enormous bonesin the kingdom, which European sceptics had perversely classified as those of ‘hippopota-muses, elephants and mammoths’, as well as from the size of Pre-Columbian monuments,whose doorways clearly were ‘not made by human strength, but only with that of thosecolossal living beings for whose use and service they were uniquely proportioned’.35 Inboth chapters Velasco emphasised his own direct experience of these phenomena, stating,for instance, that he had ‘seen’ a guinea pig ‘with two heads attached to a single neck’, andthat he ‘knew’ the horned girl personally.36

Why was Velasco so fascinated by monsters and giants? In part, no doubt, his interest inthese beings was merely a reaction against the ‘philosophers’ he disliked so much, andwhose scepticism he hoped to confound by presenting them with phenomena that theirintellectual systems could not easily accommodate. The existence of giants in Americasimultaneously discredited the notion, propagated by Buffon, that New World animalswere small and feeble, a line of argument that had clear parallels in North America, whereThomas Jefferson was eager to include the mammoth in the table he produced showingthe relative weights of European and American species.37 Beyond mere point-scoring,however, Velasco’s interest in the fantastical may also have evidenced an older, morespiritual approach to nature, in which monsters functioned as portents and the existenceof wonders was interpreted as evidence that the land they inhabited was an earthlyparadise. This approach was clearly visible in the work of the seventeenth-century JesuitAntonio de Leon Pinelo, who, hoping to show that paradise had once been situated in theNew World, summoned multiple fantastical beings to support his claim, including Indianswith tails, unicorns and ‘snakes with wings and arms’.38 It can likewise be seen in thewritings of José Gumilla, who, as Margaret Ewalt shows, employed the trope of wonder asa rhetorical device to generate interest in the Orinoco region.39 By the late eighteenth



century such views were receding in European intellectual circles, as monsters, viewed inthe sixteenth century as portents of forthcoming ills, were seen merely as curiosities andquirks of nature, to be studied rather than feared.40 They may, however, have enduredlonger in the Americas, where references to fantastical beings and portentous monsterscontinue to surface quite late in the colonial era. One correspondent, writing to theDirector of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid in 1787, reported, apparentlywith all sincerity, that ‘in the Viceroyalty of Santa Fe, around Popayan and the mountainsof Panama [...] there is said to be a species of satyr’ with ‘half the body of the humanspecies [...] and the other half of the body that of a horse’.41 Another writer, the Peruviansurgeon José Pastor Larrinaga, penned an extensive tract about a female slave who gavebirth to a pigeon ‘without a head, neck, wings and feet’, a monster he believed presagedthe overthrow of the Spanish royal family by Napoleon in 1808.42 Against this backdropVelasco’s extensive treatment of the wondrous and the monstrous may be seen as part ofa wider lingering interest in strange beasts such as the one shown in Fig. 1 (from a set ofnatural history images commissioned by Jaime Baltasar Martínez Compañón, bishopof Trujillo). It reflected both the retention of older conceptions of monstrosity – Velascothought the girl with horns was the product of maternal imagination – and a sense thatfantastical beings elevated Quito’s status as a colony.

Crèvecoeur’s narrative did not engage with deviant or monstrous aspects of the naturalworld, notwithstanding man’s own monstrous treatment of the caged slave in Letter IX.

1. Trujillo del Perú, vol. VI, plate 84. Real Biblioteca, Madrid, RB II/3048, © PatrimonioNacional de España



He did, however, dramatise American nature, bringing to life animals in their habitats forEuropean readers who would never have these experiences. In Letter X, ‘Of Snakes; and onthe Humming-Bird’, the potent nature of the New World landscape is dramatically ren-dered while providing detailed analysis of specific species of snake and bird. The narrator,James, prefaces his account of snakes by asserting his credentials as an observer, assuringhis recipient that his comments were based on studies of two animals, ‘the one of whichI saw and the other I received from an eyewitness’. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and JohnBartram, with whom he is regularly compared, Crèvecoeur does not provide copious listsor illustrations of species of plants and animals to account for their scale and number inthe New World climate.43 Instead, Crèvecoeur renders the snakes, and then the humming-bird, in language that brings to the fore the potency and resilience of America’s nativespecies. In particular, the ‘copperhead’ snake is considered to be the most dangerous, withno known cure for the poisonous venom: ‘Let man beware of it!’ Crèvecoeur/Jamesexclaims. The narrator also suggests that the potency of this snake’s venom is such that,if bitten, a man might take on the characteristics of the animal:

I have heard only of one person who was stung by a copperhead in this country. The poorwretch instantly swelled in a most dreadful manner; a multitude of spots of different huesalternately appeared and vanished on different parts of his body; his eyes were filled withmadness and rage; he cast them on all present with the most vindictive looks; he thrust out histongue as the snakes do; he hissed through his teeth with inconceivable strength and becamean object of terror to all bystanders. To the lividness of a corpse he united the desperate forceof a maniac.

Without the venom, however, the snake might be tamed and become ‘as gentle as you canpossibly conceive a reptile to be [... W]hen the boys to whom it belonged called it back, theirsummons was readily obeyed.’ Although the veracity of the first account is questionable –it is founded on hearsay, after all – the value of the eyewitness is reasserted in the secondaccount, re-establishing the credibility of the colonial farmer to document and describeNew World species. Other sections of the letter describe in equally dramatic language therattlesnake, which is said to be as swift as a horse, with eyes that display fire and which hasthe capacity to hypnotise its prey to such an extent that it ‘rushes in to the jaws of thesnake’ of its own volition.44 Whether or not these accounts of snakes are from second- orfirst-hand experience, Crèvecoeur’s larger point is that only by living in the New World,and by engaging with discourses of natural knowledge on a local and direct level, canany of these stories be verified. Ultimately, the potency of the copperhead or the hypnoticabilities of the rattlesnake would not be determined by European intellectuals alone;colonial naturalists facilitated the production of natural knowledge in New Worldenvironments.

In contrast to the violence of the snakes is the beauty of the humming-bird, a speciesnative to America. Again the narrator justifies his authoritative position through eye-witness accounts: ‘From this simple grove I have amused myself a hundred times inobserving the great number of humming-birds with which our country abounds.’ Theexceptional beauty of the ‘diminutive’ bird is prioritised:

On that little bird, Nature has profusely lavished her most splendid colours; the most perfectazure, the most beautiful gold, the most dazzling red are forever in contrast and help toembellish the plumes of his majestic head. The richest palette of the most luxuriant paintercould never invent anything to be compared to the variegated tints with which this insect bird



is arrayed [...] When fatigued, it has often perched within a few feet of me, and on suchfavourable opportunities I have surveyed it with the most minute attention. Its little eyesappear like diamonds, reflecting the light every side; most elegantly finished in all parts, it isa miniature work of our Great Parent, who seems to have formed it the smallest, and at thesame time the most beautiful of the winged species.

Much of this information could have been gleaned by an eighteenth-century audiencefrom Mark Catesby’s comprehensive ornithology The Natural History of Carolina, Floridaand the Bahama Islands (1731-43), but in this narrative Crèvecoeur also provides an insightinto the bird’s surprisingly aggressive characteristics:

When it feeds, it appears as if immovable, though continually on the wing; and sometimes,from what motives I know not, it will tear and lacerate flowers in a hundred pieces, for, strangeto tell, they are the most irascible of the feathered tribe. [...] They often fight with the fury oflions until one of the combatants falls a sacrifice and dies.45

In lieu of taxonomical models Crèvecoeur and Velasco brought to life and dramatised thenatural world by focusing on the vitality, magnificence and, often, the uniqueness of NewWorld species as seen through the eyes of colonial subjects.

IV. Conclusion

Velasco’s and Crèvecoeur’s texts offer a revealing insight into the construction of naturalknowledge in the Atlantic world. Composed in the same decade, the two works had verydifferent fates: Letters was widely read and celebrated; Historia remained unpublished until1844, when it was resurrected by the government of newly independent Ecuador as partof a broader nation-building project. Despite these differing receptions, however, bothtexts are illustrative of the epistemological concerns and authorial practices that shapednatural history writing in this period, highlighting the shared insecurities and grievancesthat afflicted colonial scholars. They also point to the existence of geographically dispersedscholarly communities and complex and conflicted senses of belonging.

Two points merit particular mention by way of conclusion. First, the circumstancesin which Velasco and Crèvecoeur produced their works illustrate the transatlantic andoften trans-imperial knowledge networks in operation in the Atlantic world. Velasco, forinstance, was part of a wider Jesuit knowledge network centred in Rome. Prior to theexpulsion of the order from Portugal and the Spanish realms in 1759 and 1767 respec-tively, this network played an important role in transmitting information about thenatural world across the Atlantic.46 Following the banishment of the Society of Jesus fromSpanish America, the Jesuit network contracted, but its members remained active con-tributors to works on the natural world. Velasco, now located in Rome along with many ofhis former colleagues, was able to read their works and draw on their arguments, con-sciously participating in a wider expatriate discourse that included such writers as‘Señores Francisco Javier Clavijero, D. Juan de la Nuix [and] D. Ignacio Molina’ (all cited inthe preface to his Historia).47

While Velasco composed his text in Europe, Crèvecoeur’s manuscript was composedlargely during his time as a farmer in Pine Hill, New York, where he benefited from theintellectual influence of his neighbour Cadwallader Colden, who introduced Crèvecoeur toRaynal’s A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans inthe East and West Indies (1770), and to whom Letters was dedicated. Letters travelled with



Crèvecoeur across the Atlantic as he fled the American Revolution, his papers beinghidden in a box containing plant specimens.48 After selling the manuscript to publishers inLondon, he escaped to France and enjoyed the intellectual environments of the Parissalons in the company of Franklin, Buffon and Mme d’ Houdetot, before returning toAmerica as a consular official.49 From Frenchman to British subject, from rural colonialfarmer to consular official, Crèvecoeur’s own personal circumstances allowed him tobridge the values and expectations of the European and the American, as well as themetropolitan intellectual and the agrarian farmer.

A second point that should be noted is that writing natural histories of their formerhomelands became, for both authors, a way of forging or reaffirming personal andnational identities. For Velasco the Historia held out the possibility of ‘doing a small serviceto the Nation and the patria’ – the ‘Nation’, in this case, being Spain and the ‘patria’ theKingdom of Quito. For Crèvecoeur, Letters represented a subtle means of challenging theauthority of intellectual and national boundaries. Crèvecoeur’s documentation of NorthAmerican natural knowledge in Letters and, later, in Voyages dans las Haute Pensylvanie etdans l’Etat de New York (1801), a narrative populated and narrated by a cast of Europeanemigrants, very like James, reflected the enabling features of his own itinerant travels forthe production of natural knowledge. Unfortunately for Crèvecoeur, his ideal New Worldlandscape, which he hoped would be populated by identifiably different but complemen-tary national identities, faded in the face of stronger currents of nationalistic discoursewhich preoccupied post-revolutionary politicians of the newly emerging United States ofAmerica.50

On a more personal level the natural histories also became a place where their authorscould reflect on their own transatlantic and trans-cultural identities, as they tried to definetheir loyalties and explain their place in the world. ‘I am not a European, because I wasborn in America, nor am I an American, being on all sides a native of Europe’, statedVelasco in the preface to his natural history, encapsulating the conflicting loyalties of theCreole.51 ‘I am at once an American by adoption and law, and a Frenchman by birth’,52

declared Crèvecoeur, in a letter to Jefferson. The act of composing their natural historiesmade both of these writers think about who they were and how they wanted to be seen byothers. The transatlantic careers of Crèvecoeur and Velasco thus complicate traditionalconceptions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, reflecting international networks of correspon-dence and, often, complex national or ethnic identities.

NOTES1. Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.3.2. There is a growing literature on Atlantic science. Recent works have challenged Bruno Latour’s model of

metropolitan ‘centres of calculation’ and colonial peripheries, showing how scientific knowledge was formedthrough movement and cultural exchanges, some of which crossed national and imperial boundaries. See, forexample: James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York:Routledge, 2008); Daniela Bleichmar, Paula de Vos, Kristin Huffine and Kevin Sheehan (eds), Science in theSpanish and Portuguese Empires (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Neil Safier, ‘Spies, Dyes, andLeaves: Agro-Intermediaries, Luso-Brazilian Couriers, and the Printed Worlds They Sowed’, in Simon Schaffer,Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence,1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009), p.239-70.

3. Juan de Velasco, Historia del reino de Quito (Quito: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1844), vol.I.i.4. Velasco, Historia, p.i.5. Silvia Navia Méndez-Bonito, ‘Las historias naturales de Francisco Javier Clavijero, Juan Ignacio Molina y

Juan de Velasco’, in Luís Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma (eds), El saber de los Jesuitas: historias naturalesy el nuevo mundo (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2005), p.228.



6. Albert E. Stone maps the timeline of the text in his introduction to Letters. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur,Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (London:Penguin Books, 1986), p.12.

7. George Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History (London, 1797), p.27.8. Cornelius de Pauw, Récherches philosophiques sur les Américains (London: 1770), vol. I.7-13.9. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).

10. See, for example, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Postcolonialism avant la lettre?’ in Mark Thurner andAndrés Guerrero (eds), After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-sity Press, 2003), p.89-110. While Crèvecoeur’s work is often seen as a precursor to the American novel andnineteenth-century concerns with American individualism, this analysis of Letters follows Pamela Regis’sdefence of Letters as a work of natural history. See Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson,Crèvecoeur and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992).

11. Hipólito Ruíz, Relación histórica del viage que hizo a los reynos del Perú y Chile el Botánico D. Hipólito Ruíz enel año de 1777 hasta el de 1788, en cuya época regresó a Madrid, ed. Jaime Jaramillo-Arango (Madrid: Real Academiade Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales de Madrid, 1952), vol. I.18 (Cowie’s own translation).

12. Velasco, Historia, vol. I.ii.13. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World

(Williamsburg, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2006), p.117.14. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage round the world. Performed by order of His Most Christian Majesty

in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768 and 1769, trans. John Reinhold Forster (London: J. Nourse, 1772), p.xxv-xxvi.15. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p.49-50.16. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p.41.17. For a discussion of the pros and cons of studying nature in the field and in the museum, see Dorinda

Outram, ‘New Spaces in Natural History’, in Nicholas Jardine, James Secord and Emma Spary, Cultures ofNatural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.249-65.

18. For more discussion of Creole credibility strategies, see ‘The Creole Conundrum’, in Helen Cowie, Con-quering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p.114-48.

19. Velasco, Historia, vol. I.81.20. Velasco, Historia, p.85.21. Velasco, Historia, p.119. Pluche’s work appears to have circulated widely in Spanish America following its

translation into Spanish in 1755.22. Velasco, Historia, vol. I.106-7. For detailed analysis of La Condamine’s voyage see Neil Safier, Measuring the

New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008), and Larrie D.Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped theWorld (NewYork: Basic Books, 2011).

23. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p.58-9.24. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, ‘Ant-Hill Town’, in Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America; see Letters,

p.248. Recently, Dennis D. Moore has republished Crèvecoeur’s Letters, to include ‘Ant-Hill Town’, with the effectof connecting this narrative voice much more strongly with Farmer James. When published more autono-mously as part of Sketches of Eighteenth-Century Life, the narrative voice is a little more ambiguous. Dennis D.Moore, More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Unpublished by Crèvecoeur(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

25. Crèvecoeur, ‘Ant-Hill Town’, p.246.26. Crèvecoeur, ‘Ant-Hill Town’, p.42-3.27. Crèvecoeur, ‘Ant-Hill Town’, p.46.28. See Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, p.251; ‘Introduction’, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Susan

Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.xxii. In a slightly different context, Margaret Meredithdiscusses strategies of credibility, in particular the importance of established intellectual circles and friendshipsthroughout Europe and across the Atlantic to help validate the findings of itinerant travellers and go-betweens.See Margaret Meredith, ‘Friendship and Knowledge: Correspondence and Communication in Northern Trans-Atlantic Natural History, 1770-1820’, in Schaffer, Roberts, Raj and Delbourgo, The Brokered World, p.151-91.

29. See ‘Toward a New Art of Reading’, in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the NewWorld (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p.11-59.

30. De Pauw claimed that ‘the thigh bone of a Patagonian’ shown in London was later shown ‘to havebelonged to a bull from Brazil’. See De Pauw, Récherches philosophiques sur les Américains, vol. I.xix-xx.

31. Velasco, Historia, vol. I.75.32. Velasco, Historia, p.71.33. Velasco, Historia, vol. I.71.34. Velasco, Historia, p.133.35. Velasco, Historia, p.161.36. Velasco, Historia, p.133.37. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Baltimore, MD: W. Pechin, 1800), p.49.38. Antonio de León Pinelo, El paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo (Lima: Rau′l Porras Barrenechea, 1943), vol. II.9,

46-7, 76.39. Margaret Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco

(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), p.140-70.



40. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, Paris and Venice, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990);Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, ‘The Enlightenment and the Anti-Marvellous’, in Daston and Park,Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p.329-68.

41. Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid, Fondo Museo, Sección A – Real Gabinete, legajo 43.42. José Pastor Larrinaga, Cartas historicas á un amigo, ó Apología del Pichon Palomino que parió una mujer, y se

vió en esta ciudad de los reyes el dia 6 de abril de 1804 (Lima: Imprenta de los Huérfanos, 1812), p.152-3.43. Pamela Regis considers Crèvecoeur’s Letters as part of a wider analysis of natural history writing of the

period, comparing Crèvecoeur’s work with William Bartram and Thomas Jefferson; see Regis, Describing EarlyAmerica.

44. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p.180-83.45. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p.184.46. For a discussion of how Jesuit correspondence networks functioned, see Steven Harris, ‘Confession-

Building, Long-Distance Networks and the Organization of Jesuit Science’, Early Science and Medicine 1:3 (1996),p.287-318.

47. Velasco, Historia, vol. I.ii-iii and 81.48. Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York:

Viking Press, 1987), p.62.49. For an account of Crèvecoeur’s time in Paris and the role of the salons in the development of his work,

see Allen and Asselineau, St John de Crèvecoeur, p.68-101.50. For fuller discussion of Crèvecoeur’s Atlantic cosmopolitanism and itinerancy see ‘ “The Itinerant Man”:

Caribbean, Raynal’s Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism’, in Christopher P. Iannini, FatalRevolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: Universityof North Carolina Press, 2012) p.131-76. On issues of empire and the significance of geography in Crèvecoeur’sLetters, see Yael Ben-Zvi, ‘Mazes of Empire: Space and Humanity in Crèvecoeur’s Letters’, Early AmericanLiterature 42:1 (2007), p.73-105.

51. Velasco, Historia, p.i.52. Allen and Asselineau, St John de Crèvecoeur, p.213.

helen cowie is Lecturer in History at the University of York. She received her PhD in history from the Universityof Warwick in 2008. Her book Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire was published by Manchester UniversityPress in 2011.

kathryn gray is Lecturer in English Literature at Plymouth University. Her book John Eliot and the PrayingIndians of Massachusetts Bay was published by Bucknell University Press in 2013. Her primary research interestsare early American literature and culture, with a particular focus on transatlantic concerns and debates.



nature, nation and nostalgia: narratives of natural history in spanish and british america...

Documents