Scientific voyages in the era from roughly the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century certainly merit a place in a conference on "Seascapes."  In the narrowest construction of its relevance, one could point out that during this period European seafarers were for the first time able to plot longitude with accuracy and were therefore able as never before to chart the precise location of remote Pacific islands. It is no accident that in the 1760s the Board of Admiralty chose as commander of its first systematically planned scientific voyage an obscure surveyor whose main claim to notice was his skill at surveying the shores and land of Newfoundland; this was precisely the kind of technical know-how that the self-taught James Cook would put to good use in his first circumnavigation of 1768-1771.  Cook discovered very little that was "new" to his European contemporaries; far more important than discovery was his ability to make practical use of the new mathematical calculations for plotting longitude and his abilities as a hydrographer whose accurate plotting of coastlines left little more than details for the next generation to fill in.  The same skill at accurate plotting of place on the globe characterizes his French rival, too, Louis de Bougainville.  Unlike Cook Bougainville had family wealth and high social connections; he was also a mathematical prodigy, however, who demonstrated the practical application of the scientific advances of his time.  Subsequent commanders, patrons, and scientists were always tinkering with new methods of heightening the efficiency of successive voyages, although Cook remained the model and ideal for sailing expeditions.¹  The scientific travelers of this period began a systematic inventory the contents of the globe, naming, categorizing and bringing back samples of animal, vegetable and mineral curiosities, and heaping up facts about the languages, folkways and physiognomies of the peoples of the earth.  Much, though not all, of this activity took place on "seascapes," if by that we mean the ports and shorelines that were places of encounter between Europeans and the non-European world.

            The history of scientific travel in this period has been a lively field in recent years.  The chronicling of exploration and discovery is, to be sure, one of the oldest varieties of modern historical writing.  It goes back at least to Columbus and his own efforts to create a persuasive and attractive record of his own voyage; it includes the great Spanish accounts of the New World by Acosta and Las Casas, and the Abbþ Raynal's multi-volume history of European colonialism.  Until a decade or two ago, however, the era of scientific travel that is defined by Cook's first circumnavigation of 1768-1771 at one end and Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle from the last days of 1831 to October 1836 at the other attracted little attention from non-specialist historians. Rising interest in the history of colonialism has, however, given a new contemporary relevance to enterprises that were so visibly involved in preparing the way for the imperialism of the late nineteenth century and that had intrinsic interest as initiators of encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans.  In the past decade and a half, scholars from history, art history, anthropology, literature, and the historian of science have converged with creative þlan on a common subject, looking to predecessors like Marshal Sahlins and the Australian art historian, Bernard Smith while speaking confidently on their own about a new canon of historical figures such as the English scientific entrepreneur Joseph Banks and the German traveler George Forster. 

            Some of the best recent literature has focused on the great scientific patrons (such as Banks and Linnaeus) and the metropolitan institutions for organizing the facts and objects streaming into Europe (such as botanical gardens): and understandably so, for these people and institutions dramatically demonstrate the creation of a new kind of science and its close connection to state power and worldwide imperial ambitions.²   Far less attention has been paid to the travelers on scientific voyages.  With the exception of a few world-famous figures such as Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt, they rarely get more than oblique attention.  On the whole the "traveler" is a figure likely to be left to literary scholars and to appear in their studies as a rather isolated and romantic adventurer rather than as someone who needed to earn a living and who, even at the antipodes, was tied to metropolitan guardians of power and wealth.³  What I propose to offer in the remainder of this paper is a more cohesive sketch that situates metropolitan patrons in their web of state political interests and world-traveling scientists in their fine but sticky and tough threads of dependence on patrons.  By filling in these webs of social filiation I hope to show how the knowledge they produced never had the quality of a disinterested laboratory experiment or comfortable armchair speculation, but was always a painfully won, politically linked acquisition.⁴ 

            Patronage began with the ambitions and designs of European monarchs themselves.  King George III of England, Louis XV and Louis XVI of France, Joseph II of Austria, Alexander I of Russia - all of them indicated an interest in great voyages of exploration, all of them wanted to have the glory of world voyages attached to their name.  Thomas Jefferson was emulating his European rivals when he sent his fellow Virginian Meriwether Lewis and the Kentuckian William Clark on an American scientific expedition, one which, to be sure, went overland, but served, among other things, to bolster American claims to the land bordering on the Pacific. In a case like this the relationship between scientific voyages and political power is as close and direct as the historian could wish.⁵ 

            While we are well informed about Jefferson's central role in initiating the Lewis and Clark expedition,   I am not aware of any detailed study of a European head of state as dispenser of patronage for travel.  We are better informed about high-ranking ministers as initiators and patrons of voyages.  In England the Duke of Sandwich and other high-ranking ministers were deeply involved in the formulation of aims and the choice of personnel for the Cook circumnavigations (1768-1771, 1772-1775, and 1776-1779/80).  In France the Duc de Choiseul worked closely with his protegþ, Louis de Bougainville, in planning the first French circumnavigation (1767-1769).   These were the two great metropolitan powers and their most famous world voyages, but the list does not stop there.  In Russia the great statesman and philanthropist, Duke Rumiantsev, was the bureaucratic activist who approved the first Russian circumnavigation commanded by Adam von Krusenstern (1803-1806), and years later he financed the scientific voyage of the Rurik (1815-1818) entirely from his own private means.   These ministers clearly thought that sending out these voyages was an important move in the Great Game of their time despite the expense and nuisance they incurred. 

            There is yet another kind of patron that we need to consider: the scientist-entrepreneur.  One would like to know if the model for the rest was Linnaeus, who made a youthful expedition to the country of the Sami (Lapp) people and later sent a string of talented young Swedish naturalists abroad.  After serving as voyage naturalist on Cook's first navigation, Joseph Banks was able to create for himself a position of commanding importance as dispenser of travel patronage through his positions as president of the Royal Society and as director of Kew Gardens and, as his recent biographer John Gascoigne has pointed out, no less important, through his personal connections with a handful of civil servants.  After returning from his South American voyage of 1799-1805, Alexander von Humboldt created a similar role for himself as advisor to the Prussian king.   Adam von Krusenstern too, after his return from his voyage, became a high-ranking naval officer and assisted Rumiantsev in planning the Rurik expedition.   Others did not travel overseas, but benefited from the labors of travelers and correspondents À for example J.R. Blumenbach, who as professor of anatomy at the prestigious University of G�ttingen set himself up as an expert in physical anthropology, read widely in travel literature, assembled a large collection of skulls from different peoples, and recommended enterprising young men to Joseph Banks for a succession of fatal trips to North Africa.⁶ 

            Why did monarchs and statesmen squander scarce resources on these expensive trips to faraway places that earlier generations could also have visited but preferred to ignore?  To answer this question we need to situate their scientific ambitions in the global economic and political history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For world history - and, more to the point of this conference, the history of seascapes - there are few more important dates than the conclusion of the Seven Years War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.   The expulsion of the French state from North America set off a new round of competition between the two dynamic global imperial rivals, France and Britain, for control of the waterways of the Pacific.  In France in particular, the Duc de Choiseul, the leading foreign policy statesman of the day, was determined to recoup French glory and rebuild French empire somewhere, and he readily listened to Bougainville's schemes for colonization and scientific exploration on distant points of the globe.  At the same time the educated public, which had been preoccupied with European and Atlantic rivalries, developed a new wave of interest in faraway places.⁷ A second demarcation dates from the early 1780s, when the news spread across Europe that the voyagers on Cook's third circumnavigation had made a large profit by selling sea otter furs in China.   Russian fur traders had already been working in the Pacific for decades, but the news had the effect of dramatizing the possibilities for wealth and, always important for the history of exploration, setting off a competitive scramble among Russians, British, and Americans for control of the trade.  This heightened the appreciation of statesmen for the strategic importance of places such as the Northwest Coast of North America and the Hawaiian islands.  Over the decades to come the Hawaiian islands became the great entrep»t of the Pacific, the winter home for fur traders and whalers, the stopover for travelers from the Northwest Coast and from East Asia.⁸  Finally, a third important date is 1815.  With the ending of the Napoleonic wars, Europeans turned their attention outward and quickly resumed their imperial rivalries for control of land, trade, and the waterways of the Pacific.  While missionaries had been making ginger forays since around 1800, it was after 1815 that their alliances with island elites began to solidify; the missionaries in places like Tahiti and (beginning in 1820) Hawaii  were responsible to their governing boards at home, but simultaneously served as incomparably powerful agents of colonization and proxies for their home governments.  Over several generations, then, from the mid-eighteenth century, a mix of political, economic, and cultural motives turned the heads of statesmen with imperial imagination in the direction of the Pacific.

            Looking back, one can still ask: why sponsor scientific voyages?  As the ships of Nantucket and New Bedford demonstrated, private whalers could make their way around the Pacific perfectly well despite their indifference to advancing scientific knowledge.  Without big guns, without naval officers' brass buttons, they swarmed across the Pacific and beat out British and Russians rivals for sandalwood (plied between Hawaii and Canton) and whale oil.⁹  There is more than one answer to the question of why the statesmen nonetheless invested heavily in these voyages.   Beyond narrowly practical considerations, they were still the practitioners of Enlightenment statecraft, keenly sensitive to the connections between knowledge and power, aware that by mapping the world they could better control  it.   The prestige of cultural achievements motivated them too; they wished for their states and names to be associated with the advance of science, which, as they advertised it, was synonymous with the advance of civilization.  Hence it was no accident that as the war against Napoleon was winding down Rumiantsev sent out the Rurik; no accident, too, that Metternich at the same time brought Austria's name to the attention of the world by sponsoring a scientific expedition to Brazil.¹⁰  It was not always so easy, however, to reconcile state interests and the universal communication that furthers scientific knowledge in the so-called Republic of Letters.  In 1803, unaware that France and Britain were at war, Matthew Flinders stopped off for refreshment in Mauritius and was detained by the French governor there, who suspected him of being a spy.  Joseph Banks struggled to obtain his release, which did not come about until 1810. ¹¹   Flinders was in fact innocent of any particular spy mission, but other "naturalists" were in fact sent out as economic or political agents.  In any case it was hard to separate the two; the voyages inevitably served the republic of letters and the interests of the state.

            The same ambiguity returns when we consider the voyages from the perspective of the travelers.  They were dependent on their patrons and therefore wedded to state interests, and yet, if they seriously thought of themselves as scientists, then they subscribed to an Enlightenment belief in serving the interests of all humankind.  

            With these double loyalties, the travelers faced a deep potential ambivalence.  This was an age when patronage itself was deeply contested.  Artists and intellectuals in an age of revolution and enlightenment resented the relationship of personal, familial dependence on a social superior and could sometimes turn to the marketplace, voluntary associations and the educated public for support.  But the pull of patronage remained strong, especially for scientists who were seeking employment that almost always had to come from the universities and academies controlled by the state or (for scientific artists) from wealthy private individuals.   To get the appointment to travel as official naturalist on board a scientific expedition was a great prize plum (however much travelers afterwards regretted their decision, and however many never came back), and it was normally a patron who arranged it.  Afterwards publicity, ability to publish one's work, and employment often continued to depend on the goodwill of one's patron.  The result of this situation, especially for the more sensitive and idealistic travelers, could be an agonizing inner conflict between one's sense of personal dignity and the need to need to satisfy the wishes of one's patron.

            For the men of modest means who usually took on the role of voyage naturalist, patronage implied a high degree of material dependence.  Anyone who leafs through the Warren Dawson's calendar of Banks's correspondence (which summarizes from a large sampling of the letters) will again and again encounter supplicants begging for money or employment.  Sigismund Bacstrom, MD, writes from London, June 28, that "since 1779 [he] has made six voyages as surgeon in merchant ships," seeks employment, and "asks Banks to recommend him amongst his friends"; on August 18, 1791 he writes that he hopes to join a world voyage; Banks "wishes him success, will pay him 6d. each for plant specimens w-flowers or fruit"; on November 18, 1796, he has returned, describes his adventures, and thanks Banks for his kindness to his wife during his absence.¹²  The case of Archibald Menzies illustrates how a traveler could depend on his patron dependence for his career, perhaps even his physical well-being.  Menzies was a university-educated Scot and a gifted gardener at Kew whom Banks chose to serve as naturalist on George Vancouver's circumnavigation (1791-1795).  Vancouver was a highly talented captain but also a violent, suspicious man who made trouble even before the voyage began about the space being made on board the ship for the naturalist's collections.  Their dislike of one another only grew over the course of the voyage, and Menzies wrote more than one entry in his diary criticizing Vancouver for his paranoid behavior.  When Vancouver demanded that he hand over the diary Menzies refused.  Vancouver's response was to have him locked up on board the ship.  It was the rule on scientific expeditions that a diary was not the property of its author and was to be handed over at the end of the voyage - but to whom?  Vancouver claimed that it rightfully belonged to him; Menzies defended himself by claiming that it belonged to Banks, his patron, and to Lord Nepean of the Home Office, and in the end, after the voyage was over, he was able with Banks's firm support to keep the diary away from his captain.¹³  

            If there is a bread-and-butter quality to the conflict between Menzies and Vancouver, J.R. Forster (George's father, and an important naturalist in his own right) exemplifies to an extreme degree the Enlightenment intellectual's insistence on autonomy in a society based on hierarchical dependence.  In 1765 he went to Russia to investigate the conditions of a German colony settled on the Volga River; after handing in a critical report the following year, he never received fair payment for his work.  Going next to England in search of employment, he ended up replacing Banks as naturalist (and taking George along as his assistant) on the second Cook navigation after Banks exasperated Cook and Sandwich with his excessive demands for arranging the ship to his liking.  Forster was brilliant, but also impossibly touchy and quarrelsome, a trial to Cook and almost everyone else on the expedition.  When they returned, he and Cook argued over who had the right to compose the official narrative account of the voyage.  Forster was then outraged when Sandwich was dissatisfied with his English and tried to set an editor over him, a step that Forster interpreted as censorship.  Sandwich seems to have been eager to reward him fairly, but Forster refused to make the slightest concession.  In the end he got a terrible lesson in patron-client relations; instead of the rich recompense he might have expected - a lifelong sinecure would not have been unthinkable - he found himself dismissed, in debt, and in need of employment.  He did better after returning to Germany, where he and George were celebrated as heroes of German culture; Frederick II ("the Great") took a personal liking to him despite his cheekiness and saw him safely installed as a professor at the University of Halle.¹⁴   

            The demand for intellectual autonomy surfaced in a more explicitly ideological form in the life and writings of George Forster, whose reputation in German letters suffers down to the present day from his association with political radicalism. George Forster was a radical, late Enlightenment intellectual, dedicated to republican ideals of government and critical of aristocracy.  His voyage narrative reads like an education in the different political possibilities available to human beings.  Contrary to any expectation that "natural man" had a single, natural form of political organization, the great "discovery' of the voyage for George Forster was the tremendous diversity of human societies and their political arrangements.  Polynesia was something like a laboratory for observing the refusal of human beings to conform to stereotypical European expectations of nature - a lesson he still remembered years later in a debate with Kant about the unity and diversity of the human species.  Even though he admired the social skills, artistic taste and craft work of the Tahitians, he was revolted by their "aristocracy" and what he perceived to be its sloth and its exploitation of the ordinary people.  With good reason he worried about the impact of European contact, which he feared would only further the elite's taste for luxuries.  His judgment of them culminated in a cyclical vision of history, in which their original equality had already given way to deep social divisions and would eventually lead to upper-class decadence and revolution by the exploited masses.   More to his taste were the more egalitarian Marquesans, who had a simpler way of life but one with greater dignity, he thought, for ordinary people.  At the same time Forster wrote in an age of enlightened monarchy and was mindful of it as he composed his account.  His introduction included an encomium for George III, the sponsor of the voyage.  He had high praise for the island of Tonga, which he thought was ruled by a "monarchy" and which pleased him and the other voyagers with its well-ordered lawns and friendly reception of the visitors.  There was, then, an unresolved tension in the book between democratic and monarchic conceptions of enlightened political order.¹⁵

            The democratic and revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposed to inaugurate a new era in which the privileges of birth and rank would disappear and a new, meritocratic order would govern public life.  But it cannot be said that the importance of patronage and personal connections disappeared after 1789.  On the contrary they continued to be an area in which power-holders had very wide discretion to choose and advance their favorites.  To be sure, merit mattered too, just as it had mattered before 1789.  But for the first half of the nineteenth century, naturalists continued to be reckoned among the "gentlemen" on board, and class mattered in their selection and subsequent fate.  A case in point is the selection of Darwin as supernumerary aboard the Beagle on its circumnavigation from the last days of 1831 to 1836.  Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the expedition, sought a gentleman companion who could alleviate the tedium and loneliness of a long sea voyage.  Darwin was not the first choice and to all appearances not a particularly well qualified choice as a recent Cambridge graduate who seemed more devoted to the camaraderie of college life and hunting than to the austere pursuit of scientific knowledge.  It was his former botany professor at Cambridge, John Stevens Henslow, who made the critical connection by asking Darwin if he was interested and recommending him to the Admiralty.  Once on the voyage, Darwin turned into a passionate and exacting observer and collector, so much so that Robert McCormick, the voyage surgeon, felt that he was being systematically disadvantaged by FitzRoy despite his right to be considered the official voyage naturalist and soon took his leave from the expedition.  Darwin had quickly established a hearty friendship with FitzRoy and looked down on the modestly born McCormick; he had outclassed him in the competition for access to species.¹⁶   

            Patronage and personal connections play a perennial role in professional life.  Their importance was especially great on the scientific expeditions.  On the patronage side, the powerholders were so elevated that they stood outside bureaucratic chains of command and had wide-ranging discretion in choosing voyage personnel.  On the other side, scientists were simply dependent on patrons for the privilege of joining a voyage, for the means to carry out their work during the expedition, and for publishing privileges and financial support after their return.  As a result, the science of this era was deeply intertwined with its politics, and the accounts of non-European peoples and places were inseparable from the preconceptions of metropolitan centers of power.