Shaping Natural History and Settler Society Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape Tanja Hammel Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Series Editors Richard Drayton Department of History King’s College London London, UK Saul Dubow Magdalene College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, comparative and connective studies, and studies which address where particular regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current incarna- tion there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history with an imperial theme. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13937 Tanja Hammel Shaping Natural History and Settler Society Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape Tanja Hammel Department of History University of Basel Basel, Switzerland Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ISBN 978-3-030-22638-1 ISBN 978-3-030-22639-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22639-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 2019, corrected publication 2020 This book is an open access publication. 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Cover illustration: Brachystelma barberiae, watercolour on paper by Mary Elizabeth Barber, preparatory illustration for plate 5607, volume 92, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1866, with permission from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, all rights reserved. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland The original version of this book has been updated. Correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22639-8_11 v In Memory of Patrick Allan Lifford Harries PREFACE ‘Probably the most advanced woman of her time in South Africa’1 created the illustration on the cover of this book. A woman who is hardly known. On 13 November 1864, the Cape-based botanist, entomologist, archae- ologist and ornithologist Mary Elizabeth Barber wrote to the Irish bota- nist William Henry Harvey about a ‘curious little plant’ that her brother Henry had found: growing upon a sandy hill side, in an isolated spot of not more than 9 or 10 yards square, nearly all of them, 8 in number, were in blossom, & he searched the neighbourhood in vain, for more of them, none were to be found. How curiously a group or two of these little plants seem to stand alone in isolated spots, as if they were the last of their species quietly finish- ing their course in this world.2 She felt similarly isolated from the world and believed Harvey to be the only botanist truly interested in Cape flora. It was perhaps in 1865 that Barber made a watercolour painting of the plant and sent further speci- mens to Dublin. These were mounted by Harvey and can be traced in the herbarium today. They are labelled ‘806 Tsomo River on flats [Tsomo River Valley in the former Transkei] – new Brachystelma’. And on the sheet, Harvey pencilled ‘Brachystelma barberiae MS’.3 Harvey could not publish about the plant as by that time he was seri- ously ill and no longer able to work regularly. He died in May 1866, and Barber had to find a new authority who would publish ‘her discovery’. She sent ‘a drawing of curious Brachystelma’ to the botanist Joseph Dalton ix x PREFACE Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.4 In her accompanying letter, Barber described the desolate state of Cape Botany without Harvey. Her strategy worked: Hooker published a hand-coloured lithograph and description of it in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. The description derived entirely from the painting, as he had never seen the plant alive or dead.5 At Trinity College Dublin Herbarium (TCD), there is one herbarium specimen which in its broad outlines resembles the draw- ing, and could have served as the model for Barber’s watercolour. The species was called Brachystemla barberiae Harvey ex Hooker fil. Thanking Hooker for the copy of the magazine she had received, Barber stated that ‘all drawings’ came ‘far short of the original, with its beautiful arches and purple blossoms’. In an apologetic manner, she then continued describing that this plant had an ‘abominable’ scent, which was ‘only appreciated by the “blue bottle” flies’.6 It is salient that Barber ini- tially only reported on her visual perception and neglected the plant’s scent—one of its key features. Most likely, she had only seen her brother’s dried specimens or she might have omitted her olfactory experience due to vision being the preferred sense in science and culture, with the former explanation being the more likely. She did additional research on the plant after sending her specimens to Harvey. With its ‘marvelous appearance’ and ‘strange scent’, Brachystelma barberiae perfectly matched Barber’s botanical research interest which she once described as ‘the marvelous [sic] and the strange, either in appearance or in habits’.7 Yet, the question arises what the type of now-called Brachystelma bar- berae actually is, as correspondence between two botanists of TCD and Kew from the mid-1980s stored at TCD shows. The type could be the illustration in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the somewhat similar speci- men at Dublin (which Hooker never saw), the plant from which Barber made the illustration (if different from the one in the herbarium, no lon- ger extant). The fact that the description was made from a drawing and not from an actual plant raises a problem the two botanists had never encountered before. Thus, the botanist at Kew argued that Barber’s origi- nal painting ‘should be designated holotype’, the reproductions of it were ‘isotypes’ and the specimen at TCD a ‘typotype’.8 According to the botanist S. P. Bester of the Pretoria National Herbarium, Brachystelma barberae is ‘without doubt the most spectacular species in the genus’.9 The colour and odour of the plant remind of decay- ing carcasses. Today, it is not but its occurrence depends on its use by people and animals. In rural areas when food is scarce, tubers are eaten as PREFACE xi a food supplement. San use it as a daily food supplement. Porcupines, baboons, rodents and certain insects are fond of the tubers as well. The tubers serve as a source of water in dry habitats where the plant occurs. No specific medicinal use is known, but many tuberous brachystelmas are used for headaches, stomach aches and colds in children.10 This short history and contextualisation of Brachystelma barberae in many ways serves as a prolepsis to what follows in this book. The woman who is commemorated in its name, who has provided the first herbarium specimens and first watercolour of the plant is at the centre. The Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his seminal book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History rejected ‘both the naïve proposition that we are prisoners of our pasts and the pernicious suggestion that his- tory is whatever we make of it’. ‘History’, according to Trouillot, ‘is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge’ for historians, ‘the exposition of its roots’.11 In this vein, this book narrates a history of a neglected woman scientist in the Cape and makes power relations in science and society visible. Power rela- tions had a deep impact on whether Barber’s words and illustrations were published, praised, criticised, plagiarised, neglected, ignored, silenced, kept and later archived, destroyed, remembered, forgotten or analysed/ written about.