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'The Neighborhood Would Be Very Interesting For “‘The neighborhood would be very interesting for a Botanist to visit,’ or André Michaux, French Botanist in the American Field” Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University On 20 July 1804, the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, a Charleston, South Carolina newspaper, printed the first of three installments of “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux, a Celebrated French Botanist.” The author, J.P.F. Deleuze, had originally written it for the Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle as a tribute to André Michaux, who had died in 1802 in Madagascar.1 Michaux had spent so many years during the late 1780s and early 1790s in Charleston, however, that the editors of the newspaper assumed their readership would be interested. Deleuze began his celebration with an argument for the value of Michaux’s work and spelled out the global botanical mission of the botanist, his superiors, and his predecessors. “The vegetables which enrich our fields,” he wrote, “are nearly all the conquests of industry [“Industry” here referring to human intervention and labor in the Natural world]. Our Legumes, and our fruits,” he continued, “come from different countries, and in their wild state they were inferior to what they are in our gardens. Observation has successively discovered them in their native countries, culture has perfected them, and commerce has passed them from one country to another. After different trials we have made choice of the most productive species of these, which suit each country best, and in those districts where the inhabitants could scarcely find nourishment, afford abundant crops to a numerous population.”2 Deleuze was quick to credit this process for enriching France: “Of about 250 kinds of trees which at this day cover the soil of France, more than three-fourths are of foreign origin,”3 including species from Greece, Persia, China, and India. European contact with America merited additional praise. “America,” he wrote, “has procured for us the [sic]4 maize, which has become the principal nourishment of many people on our 1 Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze was a naturalist who was employed as a librarian at the Museum national d'histoire naturelle. He translated a range of international botanical works into French. 2 DeLeuze, “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux, a Celebrated French Botanist. Translated from the original of M. De Leuze,” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 20 July 1804. 3 DeLeuze, “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux.” 4 This article preserves the original 1804 translation of Deleuze. 25 Hyde continent, and the potatoes which has augmented the population of Ireland and Switzerland, and which in the north of Europe affords so great a supply of nourishment and we are also indebted to it for a number of useful trees, such as the Acacia, the tulip tree, the satin, the maple, & c.” But as valuable as these natural resources had proved, it would take more than market forces to bring them to Europe: “These riches may be increased continually but to procure them it is not sufficient,” he cautioned, “to rely upon commerce which only sends what is found upon the coasts: it requires naturalists who penetrate the interior of countries, and who know how to distinguish and chuse what may be useful.” He then defended his lengthy introduction to the memoir writing, “I have gone more fully into these reflections to make us feel how much gratitude is due to those courageous men who, to serve society, renounce its comforts, and go to seek the unknown treasures of nature in desert and savage countries.” Global market forces and selective breeding carried out by farmers and botanists were vital, but also limited. To make the most of the agri-business potential, scientists—or “naturalists” in eighteenth-century terms—needed to trek deep into unexplored territories, and governments needed to fund their work: It was an argument for the “colonial machine,” and the colonial botany machine, in particular.5 The courageous man at the heart of this part of the colonial machine (and memoir) was André Michaux, a botanist whom Louis XVI commissioned with finding North American trees that could contribute to the rejuvenation of French 5 The term “colonial machine” has been used by historians James McClellan and François Regourd to describe the eighteenth-century system developed by the French government to gather knowledge and resources from its colonial ventures. They describe a system that is both centralized and diffuse in typical ancien regime fashion. It is a machine serving the interests of the king, but necessarily involving multiple bureaucracies. The machine most importantly concerned the Maison du Roi and Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, the Maison du Roi representing direct interests and concerns of the king, the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies having the bureaucratic tentacles to carry it out. Yet the two bureaucracies did not necessarily work seamlessly or smoothly together; redundancies seem to be inherent in the system. The “machine” as represented by the two great bureaucracies at the top was felt “on the ground” by a range of institutions and peoples including, under the Maison du Roi, the Bâtiments du Roi, the royal press, a range of other (less involved but still important) ministries together with trading companies (the Compagnie des Indes), French religious orders, and private individuals who participated in the work of the machine, or who contributed their knowledge to the working of the machine. As McClellan and Regourd write, “The key here is the institutionalization of expertise. .” See James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Brespols), 50, 57. Importantly, as I have explored elsewhere, Michaux’s mission both intersected with these efforts, but differed from them in that North America was not a French colony. Instead, Michaux had to engage with the new American government in carrying out his work. Journal of the Western Society for French History André Michaux, French Botanist 26 forests. In particular, it was hoped that French forests, sufficiently re-invigorated with American arboreal introductions, could be persuaded to yield the sort of timber desperately needed to build a French navy capable of competing with the British. Michaux’s credentials made him ideal for the task: he had trained in botany at Versailles and recently returned to Paris from a royal expedition to Persia. He arrived in New York City in the late fall of 1785. He would spend the next ten years systematically exploring North America as far north as Canada into the Hudson Bay, and as far south as Florida and the Bahamas, and as far west as the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.6 Over the course of his North American mission, Michaux maintained a journal in which he recorded the distance and details of his travels, the plants and trees that he found and identified, the people with whom he met and stayed. The journals are sometimes cursory, other times detailed. The relative uniformity in ink color and hand-writing displayed in sections of the journal suggest that while sometimes he recorded events on a daily basis, at other times he described the activities of multiple days at a single sitting. Not all of volumes of his journal survive: the volumes covering his early years in North America when he explored the mid-Atlantic region were lost in a shipwreck on his voyage back to Europe. But those that do survive offer a rich window into the world of eighteenth-century colonial botany. In recent years, scholars have turned their focus increasingly to the examination of the relationship between the work being conducted in the field—and therefore on the “periphery,” to the “metropole” where their work was received. 7 Scholars have sought to understand how botanists in the field generated 6 For more on Michaux, see the following: Elizabeth Hyde, “André Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the 'Injunction of Science,'" Special Issue: “Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (forthcoming 2020); Elizabeth Hyde, “Of Monarchical Climates and Republican Soil: French Plants and American Gardens in the Revolutionary Era,” in Foreign Trends on American Soil, edited by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017); Elizabeth Hyde, “André Michaux and French Botanical Diplomacy in the Cultural Construction of Natural History in the Atlantic World” in Of Elephants and Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790-1830,” edited by Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Museum, 2013), Elizabeth Hyde, “Arboreal Negotiations, or the Cultural Politics of André Michaux’s Mid-Atlantic Mission.” In Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660-1830, edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2012:08. 7 For the French example, see James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Brespols). For Spanish, English, North American, and Caribbean American examples, see Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008). 2018 27 Hyde knowledge: did they rely open local or indigenous populations?8 or could they only see their work through a “metropolitan” lens?9 And then did they seek to impose “metropolitan” frameworks on what they found?10 Others have explored the means by which knowledge was communicated: how did botanists use the powers of observation in the field to translate information into knowledge? Did they gather and send specimens? Live or dried? Did they record their observations in paintings or drawings executed in the field? And how did they process the information once they returned from the field?11 Finally, scholars have examined the physical, linguistic, and logistical challenges of exploring vast expanses of dangerous wilderness.
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