Making and Unmaking Local Knowledge in Greater New England
ANYA ZILBERSTEIN
Abstract: Scholars have drawn attention to the crucial role of local knowledge in naturalhistory. This essay argues that naturalists describing early New England focused on itsordinary and domesticated rather than its exotic and wild qualities because they believedthat natural history and ‘improvement’ were complementary pursuits. Their emphasis onthe economic development of nature was part of a transatlantic culture of improvement,in which Americans sought to be undifferentiated participants. Although they claimedthat their expertise was grounded in local experiences, ultimately they aimed to reducelocal peculiarities and, as a result, the provinciality of their knowledge claims.
Keywords: local knowledge, settler colonialism, improvement, climate, Atlantic world,New England, Nova Scotia
‘How grossly ignorant of this Country is the European World?’ asked William DandridgePeck in 1790. Peck was a New Hampshire man, and the surrounding New England areawas ostensibly the ‘Country’ to which he was referring. He was passionately interested innatural history (ten years later he was named Harvard College’s first professor in thesubject), and he thought that the environment of the ‘Northern States’ needed to bedescribed in print and communicated beyond the region.1 Throughout the eighteenthcentury, official or private sponsors such as the Royal Society and the Swedish Academy ofScience commissioned travellers like Mark Catesby and Pehr Kalm to report on the natureof various parts of North America. But neither Catesby nor Kalm and relatively few othersuch travellers went to North America’s most north-eastern region of settlement, whichextended from New England to Nova Scotia. As Peck’s friend Manasseh Cutler wrote, thenorth-east was like a grey area between ‘Canada and the southern states’, which
beside the attention paid to their productions of some of their own inhabitants, have beenvisited by eminent botanists from Europe. But a great part of that extensive tract of country,which lies between them, including several degrees of latitude, and exceedingly diversified inits surface and soil, seems still to remain unexplored.2
Thus claiming no predecessors, Cutler, Peck and numerous other settler elites appointedthemselves as authorities on the flora, fauna, soils and climate of this neglected locale.
Scholars have recently drawn attention to the crucial role of local knowledge andfieldwork in contributing to the study of colonial and extra-European natural history inthe early modern period and through the eighteenth century.3 As Susan Scott Parrish hasput it, metropolitan scientific institutions were often reliant on indigenous or provincialnaturalists to dispatch ‘the exotic biota of Asia, the Americas, Africa, and, later, Australia’,because the ‘collectors in those distant places were understood to possess a local expertiseabout the nature around them’. Given Europeans’ fascination with unfamiliar environ-ments and the novel specimens that could be extracted from them, Parrish and others
emphasise the ways in which curiosity and exoticism drove transatlantic scientificexchanges between indigenes, Creoles and Europeans.4
By examining a range of reports about the relatively unexceptional wild and cultivatedlandscapes of eighteenth-century Greater New England – a region encompassing present-day Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine andNova Scotia – this essay challenges the idea that, for early American naturalists, thesearch for exotics was the main driver of natural historical knowledge-making. It compli-cates approaches to understanding the aims and textual forms of transatlantic naturalhistory by showing that interest in local nature in British or anglophone North Americawas nearly inseparable from the imperative of improvement. I argue that the principalobjective of naturalists in Greater New England – in the colonial and post-Revolutionaryperiods – was not the fulfilment of curiosity but the improvement of nature. For naturalhistorians in this region the desire and possibility to improve on local nature throughscientific methods exceeded their desire and the possibility for discovering natural oddities.Neither could they manufacture an indigenous landscape of exotic species, nor did theywant to. Instead, they established their expertise by producing accounts of local naturethat showed how they were undoing it: removing its peculiarities through improvement.As Harvard professor Benjamin Waterhouse lectured to his students, yoking naturalhistory to agricultural development was ‘the best cure for local prejudices’.5
This emphasis on the economic development of nature was part of the widereighteenth-century culture of improvement, in which American naturalists sought tobe undifferentiated participants.6 Naturalists such as Waterhouse surveyed Americanregions as learned observers and specimen collectors and, at the same time, as settlers,investors and improvers with utilitarian objectives. In part because they were in a poorposition to contribute novelties to metropolitan collections, they were more dedicated todescribing the ways in which colonisation and agricultural improvement had increasinglydomesticated local nature and made it economically productive. As a result of thesetransformations, the region’s landscape increasingly reflected its inhabitants’ cosmopoli-tanism. Accordingly, local elites contributed to the transatlantic republic of scientificletters in part by providing empirical reports about local ecology and in part by explainingtheir dominant role in changing and ‘improving’ it, a tendency of naturalists within andbeyond the region. In Greater New England local naturalists combined these modes ofrepresenting the landscape – observational, prescriptive and analogical – by celebrating itsmost ordinary aspects, the very reason that other naturalists had overlooked the region.
In addition, the essay draws together the transatlantic history of science with environ-mental history. It implicitly critiques the tendency among historians to treat the naturalhistory of British America as a whole without contextualising scientific rhetoric andpractice in terms of the different physical environments of the continent’s variousregions.7 Most early Americanists work on a regional scale because, while the colonies ofNorth America and the West Indies were part of the same empire, they diverged socially,culturally and economically; their environmental diversity only further reinforces theregional divisions in the historiography. In the natural history of eighteenth-centuryGreater New England there was more continuity than change. Both before and after theRevolution, Nova Scotia and New England were not merely a series of contiguous prov-inces but a coherent region based on social interconnections and shared climatic andenvironmental characteristics.8 The region’s short growing season and rugged topogra-phy and the acidity of its sandy, rock-strewn soils meant that, until the industrial boom ofthe nineteenth century, its agrarian economy was ‘the most dismal’ compared with morefertile and temperate or tropical regions of North America and the Caribbean.9 From the
perspective of environmental history, the Revolution reinforced and expanded rather thantransformed land-use patterns in the region. Likewise, war and the creation of a nationalgovernment in the United States only briefly disrupted the informal trans-local and trans-atlantic networks (rather than centralised institutional channels) through which reportsabout local natural history were communicated among learned elites. Furthermore, theregion continued to figure badly in long-standing transatlantic debates about the allegedlydegenerative effects of the New World’s colder climate.10 In this sense, naturalists in NewEngland and Nova Scotia felt they had little to offer the scientifically curious except fordiscomfiting reports about the region’s extreme winters. They opted instead to refuteclaims about the severity and degeneracy of the region’s nature by arguing that it hadbeen (or would be) improved by agricultural development, emphasising its increasingsimilarity to Old World environments. However New England and Nova Scotia’s environ-ments may have looked on the ground, through the beginning of the nineteenth centurylocal naturalists imagined and represented them as manifestations of their toponyms – asre-creations of the British Isles, rather than their exotic outposts.
I. Inquisitive Minds
Local studies of northern flora and fauna had ‘long been desired, by every inquisitivemind’, John Adams had assured the president of the British Board of Agriculture, Sir JohnSinclair, but the financing he had proposed for ‘a natural history of this country’ in aclause in the 1779 Massachusetts constitution had been a non-starter. Both before andafter the American Revolution such projects were usually funded through private initia-tives. In 1781 Cutler urged fellow members in the newly formed private society the Ameri-can Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to sponsortopographical surveys, which were ‘necessary to furnish materials for a Natural History ofthe Country, in which we are, at present, very deficient’ (like Peck in the opening quota-tion, Cutler’s ‘country’ was ‘this part of America’ – that is, New England).11 In the 1790sBenjamin Waterhouse had ‘a strong desire’ to communicate ‘the peculiarities of this newworld’ to ‘the European world’, writing to the president of the Royal Society, Sir JosephBanks, ‘that even England [...] was still unacquainted with us’.12 Samuel Williams, aformer Harvard professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, wrote in his A Naturaland Civil History of Vermont that, although the ‘natural productions of this continent, havebeen one object of general inquiry’ few had been attempted by settlers in the north-east,who were ‘obliged to depend upon transient and partial accounts’. In his history ofVermont, Williams integrated the disparate information on the state’s natural features.Nevertheless, he believed that ‘the subject instead of being fully explored, is yet a treasurebut little examined’.13 Similarly, Titus Smith, a clergyman, botanist and provincial sur-veyor in Halifax, believed that Nova Scotia’s major problem was the dearth of accurateinformation about it.14 Ignorance and neglect must have continued to prevail through thenineteenth century since, as late as 1817, Banks was offered ‘a few facts respecting the suigeneris State of Connecticut’, by ‘a native’ who was concerned that while ‘all sorts ofsingular and anomalous articles [...] from a mammoth to a mite, are sometimes sent foryour inspection and classification from all quarters of the globe’, the ‘new or curious’aspects from his home quarter had long been excluded.15
Such self-aggrandising claims were attempts by naturalists to establish their expertisebecause eighteenth-century natural history on both sides of the anglophone Atlanticworld was largely an avocation rather than a formal discipline; everyone was more or less
Making and Unmaking Local Knowledge in Greater New England 561
an autodidact. Professorships and courses in natural history began to be established inthe late 1780s, but neither North American colleges nor British universities offered thor-ough training in these subjects until the mid-nineteenth century. Both Williams (a math-ematician) and Waterhouse (a physician) had been active in natural history at Harvard,but there was no designated position in the subject until 1805, when the locally basedAAAS and its offshoot the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture (MSPA)co-sponsored a new professorship in natural history at the college.16 They hired Peck. Inhis inaugural address he spoke of the necessity of teaching students to ‘discover & culti-vate’ regional natural history.17 For addressing the more immediate goal of producing aregional inventory, however, Peck only felt capable of enumerating birds and insects andwas relieved that Cutler, a Congregational minister who was unaffiliated with Harvard but‘much more experienced in Botanic Science & rural Oeconomy’, was taking on the task ofsurveying flora.18 That both Cutler’s and Peck’s qualifications derived from their ‘experi-ence’ reflected the informal, decentralised structure of natural historical practice in theBritish or anglophone Atlantic world.19
North Americans’ claims that metropolitan naturalists had neglected to study theregion should be understood not as a simple complaint but instead as the rhetorical formby which they asserted scientific expertise, particularly about local nature. Authoritativeknowledge depended as much on connections to and social status within local and trans-atlantic networks as on intellectual abilities or unique discoveries. Broadly educated,genteel men (and sometimes women) were accepted as naturalists because of theirinvolvement in voluntary societies for science, the arts or agricultural improvement, cor-respondence with other naturalists or by documentation of their travels abroad. Culturalcapital was accrued especially by describing the nature of far-flung destinations – accom-panying James Cook on his first voyage to the Pacific was how Sir Joseph Banks, RoyalSociety president and the most powerful patron of anglophone natural history in the lateeighteenth century, initially earned his scientific reputation. But credibility could also begained by exploring landscapes close to home, as the Hampshire naturalist Gilbert Whitedid in his parish of Selborne, as long as these excursions were publicised in print.20
The progression of Manasseh Cutler’s career as a botanist is a perfect example of thistrajectory. While Cutler ministered in coastal Massachusetts, he tried to learn as muchabout local vegetation on rambles in his neighbourhood and the White Mountains in NewHampshire as his ‘leisure would admit’. In his report on these hikes, a descriptive cata-logue modestly titled An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions, Naturally Growing inthis Part of America, Botanically Arranged, he claimed discovery of ‘a vegetable, the mostsingular and remarkable production of nature in its fructification I ever saw and to whichI can find nothing similar in any author’.21 Many of the plants Cutler found had beenpreviously identified (not least by Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples) and were not limitedor native to New England. But once Cutler presented his research to the AAAS (whichpublished it), his botanical reputation quickly expanded beyond New England. LunarSociety member and scientific patron Jonathan Stokes requested a correspondence. In1787 the secretary of the American Philosophical Society gave Cutler a tour of thePennsylvania State House’s public gardens; on the same trip he met Benjamin Franklin,studied Franklin’s copy of Linnaeus’s Systema vegetabilium and was introduced to FrançoisAlexandre Frédéric, duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who was travelling the easternseaboard. Eventually Cutler’s correspondents included prominent naturalists in England,Germany, Switzerland and Italy, and he began to receive foreign visitors such as CountLuigi Castiglioni, who was informed that Cutler was ‘a gentleman better acquainted withBotany, etc. [...] than any other person in the Country’.22
II. ‘One of the Worst Places in America for Collecting Plants’
Naturalists in the north-east tried to respond to the desires of their European correspon-dents by offering them the kinds of rarities they prized. They knew that metropolitannaturalists were reliant on local collectors to ship interesting specimens from distantcorners of the world and that such material exchanges conferred what Parrish calls an‘empirical advantage’. However, north-easterners were at an empirical disadvantage inthis particular game of locating species strange enough to excite outside interest. AsParrish points out, when the Bostonian Cotton Mather sent a copy of his ‘Curiosa Ameri-cana’ to London, it was received with disappointment because no curious objects indig-enous to New England arrived with it. Another local man mustered a stone found inside ahorse’s stomach and hoped to impress the Royal Society with its exoticism.23
Such exchanges may explain why outsiders’ expectations remained low through theeighteenth century. Robert Boyle instructed scientific travellers to head for Greenland andVirginia but never mentioned the northern colonies of British America. The Englishauthor of Revolutionary-era American Husbandry, a comprehensive survey of Americanlandscapes, singled out the northern colonies as barren territories where ‘every spot isinhospitable and frigid’.24 According to numerous reports, the long-cultivated areas of theregion were too similar to English agricultural landscapes to justify commissioned collect-ing expeditions. Charles Blagden expressed his frustration with the nature of the regionwhen he wrote to Banks from Rhode Island, where he was stationed during the AmericanRevolution, that it was ‘just an English country, covered with the same herbage & conse-quently one of the worst places in America for collecting plants’.25 The relative lack ofmaterial in Banks’s extant correspondence and papers suggests that, at least as presidentof the Royal Society, he was not particularly interested in northern climates. In his earlytrips to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1766 he was impressed by the quality (if not thequantity or size) of garden produce, but his trip to the South Pacific with Cook just a fewyears later seems to have convinced him that even England’s climate was too cool tocompete with the biotic diversity and potential of tropical environments.26 A naturalist inSouth Carolina praised Jeremy Belknap’s 1792 natural history of New Hampshire butassured him that, whether or not the state’s nature was still ‘comparatively little known’,further studies were likely to ‘excite little curiosity’.27 By the early nineteenth centurynaturalists had come to accept the idea that ‘the most interesting plants are not found nearthe old settlements’ of New England.28 A common perception was that ‘no two countrieson the globe [...] resemble each other so much as Old England & New’.29
Such perceptions aligned with those of north-eastern naturalists, except that they werepleased rather than frustrated to document a cultivated landscape as one of the localenvironment’s most outstanding features. This attitude is evident in the kinds of specimensand natural historical descriptions that they sent to the Royal Society beginningin the late seventeenth century. Correspondents in Nova Scotia reported that Canadianmaple syrup was a good substitute for ‘West India Sugar’. Native trees produced aturpentine-like sap. The juice of one tree was ‘sanative’ and grew in both Nova Scotia and‘the more Easterly parts of N. England’; the sap of another tree acted as a non-fatal poisonand had ‘a very strong unsavoury Smell [...] stinks as bad as Carrion’. These were nearly theonly items published about the region’s northernmost areas in the Philosophical Transac-tions before the nineteenth century. Southern New England’s botanical offerings were alsoof a garden variety. The most ‘remarkable instances’ of vegetation in New England, wrotethe governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop, in 1670, were the thriving orchard and fieldcrops ‘brought over hither’ from England. A 1724 report titled ‘Observations of Some
Making and Unmaking Local Knowledge in Greater New England 563
Plants in New England’ boasted that apples, pears, peaches, onions and green beans ‘suitmighty well with our Soil, and grow here to great Perfection’, and the Connecticut pastorJonathan Edwards contributed botanical observations of ‘a remarkable pumpkin vine’.30
Winthrop apologised to the publisher of the Transactions for the unexceptional quality ofhis colony’s nature – ‘I know not whether I may recommend some of the productions ofthis Wilderness as rarities or novelties, but they are such as the place affords.’31 Whether ornot novel or rare plants abounded in specific locales, Winthrop and other local naturaliststended to understand the environment in highly pragmatic terms. In depictions of north-ern British America, improving landowners and government officials often franklyasserted how the natural environment and scientific descriptions of it both shaped andwere shaped by prevailing political and economic concerns. Their primary interests in andviews of nature were shaped by an ideal of economic development based on resourceexploitation.32 In contrast to their Scottish counterparts with sights on the Highlands,New Englanders rejected romantic notions of the region as a mysterious northern frontier.Cutler’s botanical curiosity was all-embracing, but in his travel notes it seems he was mostsatisfied and comfortable when he saw the familiar: a freshly mown lawn – ‘a close-fedpasture’ or, in another spot, a ‘picturesque’ meadow.33 As a naturalist, Cutler valued exoticspecimens, but as an improver he desired a prosperous agricultural scene. Paradoxically,he sought a domesticated environment in which to hunt for wild nature.
Naturalists assumed that these pursuits were compatible because the exploration ofAmerican environments was a preliminary step to colonisation and development. In thissense, natural history was a speculative venture. Early American surveys were organisedto satisfy avocational interest in local landscapes and natural history as well as for officialbusiness such as mapping crown territory, determining provincial and private propertyboundaries and appraising land values. Private accounts of journeys through the colonieswere recorded in published travelogues, personal journals, letters and the minutes ofsociety meetings. Official surveys describing natural resources included hyperbolic pro-motional tracts aimed at attracting investors and settlers, reports to the British Board ofTrade, and gazetteers which took stock of the agricultural and building development ofindividual towns, counties and provinces. The natural history expedition was a cousin tothese personal travelogues as well as the more formal demographic and statistical tours,which, like William Petty and John Sinclair’s surveys of Ireland and Scotland, were thepreliminary procedure to any project for capitalising on natural resources. As a man hiredto survey Cape Breton Island in 1766 wrote to an agent for the Lords of Trade, ‘I shallendeavour in the Description of this Island, to give their Lordships what Intelligence I amAble, and as I have made it my business to make myself acquainted with the former andpresent state of this Island and the manner of Improving it.’34 Like early modern travel-writing of any kind, surveys were composites in intent, practice and record – variousenough to exceed the genre.35
All these forms of geographical description were shaped – explicitly or implicitly – by theabiding goal of improvement. Consequently, detailed descriptions of wild plants andanimals were often embedded in improvement literature or, conversely, natural historiesdescribed features of the agricultural landscape. Gilbert White began his Natural History ofSelborne, for example, by comparing the fertility of the village’s various soils. Moreover,because surveyors’ descriptions of wild and cultivated nature were combined, they aresometimes difficult to differentiate in retrospect. Standard questionnaires or natural his-tories about particular areas presumed this continuum by asking about and presenting arange of seemingly heterogeneous information. Belknap’s third volume of his statehistory, subtitled ‘A Geographical Description of the State; with Sketches of its Natural
History, Productions, Improvements, and Present State’, was compiled ‘from originalsurveys of many townships and tracts of the Country; from the conversation of manypersons who have been employed in surveying, masting, hunting and scouting; as well asin husbandry, manufactures, merchandise, navigation and fishery’.36
While all naturalists committed themselves to data-gathering, they were rarely devotedexclusively to science for its own sake. Agricultural improvement and natural history wereclosely related pursuits. As Emma Spary puts it, in the eighteenth century, ‘natural historyincreasingly became a science of natural economy’.37 Provincial practitioners especiallytended to conflate the two or justify the study of natural history in the economic terms ofimprovement. Most believed, as Benjamin Waterhouse did, that utility and economy were‘the ultimate ends’ of science. In his lectures on natural history Waterhouse declared thatbotany, chemistry, mineralogy and zoology formed ‘the very basis of agriculture’ and that,in turn, ‘every student of nature knows the dependence of agriculture on a correctnatural history’ (it was the MSPA, after all, that provided funding for Harvard’s professor-ship of natural history and botanical garden). He pointed to Banks – president of the RoyalSociety and founding member of the Board of Agriculture – as a paragon of utilitariannatural history.38
The Nova Scotia Society for Promoting Agriculture (NSSPA, founded in 1789) assertedthat ‘great improvements in Natural History – particularly in Agriculture’ were enhancedby the study of ‘Botany and Chemistry, both of which are subservient to Agriculture’.39
William Peck repeatedly explained to the Harvard Corporation that ‘the acquisition &diffusion of a more perfect knowledge of the natural productions of our own country’would contribute to regional economic development and vice versa. ‘Commerce’, Pecksaid, ‘is the friend of Science.’ One of his counterparts in Nova Scotia expressed therelationship between research and development even more bluntly: ‘The four quarters ofthe Globe are ransacked to supply [man’s] wants, and he draws so much from the veg-etable kingdom that it is necessary that some should be acquainted with a considerableshare of its productions.’40
Naturalists carrying out fieldwork at the frontiers of settler colonies or states, more thanin areas with established boundaries, were motivated by the prospective applications oftheir research. Studying the nature of a newly subjugated or supposedly uninhabitedplace was a path to ‘improving’ it. Because the potential for territorial expansion wastypically both the cause and the consequence of natural history surveys in foreign places,naturalists were unapologetic for the economic and political objectives of their activities.For example, a 1784 proposal to Banks to fund an astronomical, botanical and topographi-cal surveying ‘expedition across the continent of America, by the way of Quebec and theLakes’ promised ‘great advantage to the Nation, and in particular’ to its sponsors. Banksdeclined the application on political grounds (it was too soon after the RevolutionaryWar), but he agreed with the applicant that ‘an ample return [... and] benefits would arise’from the future exploration of ‘the neglected interior of that vast body of land’.41 Whilenaturalists searched for the region’s special characteristics, their excursions were also aninvestment in its economic development. When surveying rocks and minerals, Belknapand Cutler were heartened to find flint and slate, which could be readily mined andcommodified, and disappointed that ‘some specimens of rock chrystal have been found,but of no great value. No lime stone has yet been discovered.’ English explorers, beginningwith Martin Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert in the sixteenth century, failed to findmineral riches to justify the colonisation of northern North America, turning instead tothe proxy gold of fish and fur and, their most durable conquest, land. Two centuries laterNew Hampshire was still thinly settled with white settlers, but Belknap’s description of its
Making and Unmaking Local Knowledge in Greater New England 565
rich soils might induce more to come. The hikers studied mountain vegetation in part toassess possibilities for cultivating the slopes. Indications of fertile soil in what was other-wise marginal terrain could seem to be evidence of latent improvement.42 Even if novaluable minerals were ever found in New England’s uplands, agricultural developmentcould continue to bring ‘certain riches’: the precipitation at the top of the mountainyielded ‘freshets, which bring down the soil, [to] the intervals below, and form a finemould, producing by the aid of cultivation, corn and herbage in the most luxuriantplenty’.43
Local naturalists tended to omit details about irremediable areas, implicitly reinforcingthe idea that the study of particular environments was worthwhile only insofar as theycould be exploited or improved. In a 1715 report to the Board of Trade a colonial official inNova Scotia summarised Cape Breton’s landscape in one sentence: ‘the Soil is no wayvaluable being intirely a Rock covered over with moss.’44 Since surveyors had little incen-tive to provide detailed descriptions of environments they deemed too poor in resources,ecological and economic geography were subtly converged in their accounts. A 1730
report about Nova Scotia to the Board stated that the ‘part of ye Soil that has beencultivated is found to be fertile, but no certain judgment can be made of the parts that havenever been cleared’.45 The botanist Titus Smith, who was hired as a surveyor by theprovincial government in 1801-2, described the coast facing Cape Breton Island with thecaveat that, since he was ‘informed by others who had traversed that part of the countrythat the land to the Westward of the road was chiefly barrens [...] we therefore concludedto shape our course accordingly’ – that is, they avoided exploring the coast altogether.46
III. Trans-Local Nature
‘Chiefly barrens’ was a phrase used to describe many of the hilly and stone-filled land-scapes of the north-east. If the wild nature of New England and Nova Scotia provedinsufficiently strange for British curiosity cabinets, too often its cultivated landscapes alsocame up short. It seemed to many travellers visiting from Britain or Europe that, if theregion’s farmers had tried to recreate English and Scottish landscapes, they had chosenthe worst parts. The small farms of Greater New England rarely impressed visitors. Of a‘farmer and landholder of some eminence’ near Belfast, Maine, who planted only five of hiseighty acres, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote: ‘It is not easy to see, how old Nicholsoncan have acquired the reputation of being a good farmer.’47 When a Birmingham manassessed the countryside in Connecticut, he expressed a typical newcomer’s view: ‘ThisState is divided into small farms, and the little farmer, in this as well as in any other State isa poor miserable being.’ His fiancée declared Rhode Island to be entirely a ‘vile country’,where farmers showed ‘apathy and indifference to everything’ and particularly ‘to thegardens and farm-yards’. They intended to return to Birmingham. Based on what he hadseen of southern New England, he decided that the only reason ‘a man should cross theAtlantic’ was to appreciate that England was ‘infinitely more rich and bountiful than thiscontinent’.48
Against such unfavourable comparisons, those with an interest in promoting the regionemphasised its striking resemblance to cultivated countries on the other side of the Atlan-tic. A Halifax improver declared England to be ‘like this a Cold Northern Climate’.49 TheNSSPA suggested that ‘there is nearly the same difference between our spring and that ofNew York’, which was something like ‘spring in Middlesex and that of Yorkshire, inEngland’. Despite that Yorkshire was ‘in Latitude 52 degrees’, its farmers were prosperous
and so, it followed, ‘that the same quantity of land, acre for acre, in Nova Scotia, willmaintain as many people, yield as much corn, as in New York [...] or any of the oldColonies’.50 Sweden was particularly inspiring to members of the NSSPA, who marvelledthat despite being ‘one of the most northern and barren countries in Europe’, with acapital ‘almost one thousand miles to the north of Halifax’, Sweden had nonetheless‘made great improvements in Natural History – particularly in Agriculture’.51 After trav-elling to Sweden, Peck noted the physical similarities between the steep northern coast ofJutland and the ‘White Mountains in New Hampshire’, which where both covered with adark brown moss. ‘I must tell you’, he wrote to his sister, ‘that next to my own country Ilove Sweden, because it so resembles it.’52
Rather than trumpeting local peculiarities, early naturalists used such analogies todraw attention to the common characteristics of north-eastern American and northernEuropean environments. Any deficiencies were thus minor or merely temporary; throughthe practical application of natural history the north-east was in the process of becominga more domesticated, familiar and European place. While naturalists continued to gatherinformation on local ecology, they did so in order to place their localities in the mainstream– rather than the eccentric backwaters – of transatlantic cultural and economic currents.Their broader motivation for compiling inventories and writing narrative histories of localnature was to integrate the region into this wider world, to be homologous with it. Theygrounded their expertise in knowledge of local nature, but the ultimate aim was to reducethe region’s peculiarities and, as a result, the provinciality of their knowledge claims.Progressive improvement would erode (if not erase altogether) sharp distinctions betweenthe region and other cultivated places. It would allow them to transcend localism and, sotoo then, the local knowledge associated with it.
NOTES1. William D. Peck to Jeremy Belknap, 30 March 1790, Box 1 HUG 1677, William Dandridge Peck Papers
(WDPP), Harvard University Archives.2. Manasseh Cutler, ‘An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions, Naturally Growing in this
Part of America, Botanically Arranged’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1 (1785),p.396.
3. For studies of how local knowledge was transmitted (with or without attribution) by non-elite informantsin a variety of early modern colonial contexts, see Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds), Colonial Botany:Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,2005), and Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 2008).
4. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p.106. On curiosity about the exotic nature of theNew World as a key element of early American natural history, see also: Richard W. Judd, The Untilled Garden:Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740-1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press,2009); Nicholas Dew and James Delbourgo (eds), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge,2008); James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity And Enlightenment in Early America(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Nature and Nation: Natural Historyin Context’, in Sue Ann Prince (ed.), Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in NorthAmerica, 1730-1860 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2003), p.76-96.
5. Benjamin Waterhouse, Heads of a Course of Lectures on Natural History (Cambridge: Hilliard & Metcalf,1810).
6. Richard H. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
7. Dew and Delbourgo, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; Parrish, American Curiosity; Andrew J. Lewis,‘A Democracy of Facts, An Empire of Reason: Swallow Submersion and Natural History in the Early AmericanRepublic’, William & Mary Quarterly 62:4 (October 2005), p.663-96; Chaplin, ‘Nature and Nation’.
8. Stephen J. Hornsby et al., The Northeast Borderlands: Four Centuries of Interaction (Fredericton, NewBrunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1989); Stephen J. Hornsby and John G. Reid (eds), New England and the MaritimeProvinces: Connections and Comparisons (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).
Making and Unmaking Local Knowledge in Greater New England 567
9. Winifred B. Rothenberg, ‘The Emergence of a Capital Market in Rural Massachusetts, 1730-1838’, Journalof Economic History 45:4 (1985), p.781 (‘most dismal’); Julian Gwyn, ‘Comparative Economic Advantage: NovaScotia and New England, 1720s-1860s’, in New England and the Maritime Provinces, p.94-108; Brian Donahue,The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
10. On other responses to the ‘dispute of the New World’, see Helen Cowie and Kathryn Gray’s essay in thisissue.
11. MC to the Harvard Corporation, 18 January 1781, in William Cutler and Julia Cutler (eds), Life, Journals,and Correspondence of Reverend Manasseh Cutler, LLD, by His Grandchildren, 2 vols (Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke& Co., 1888), vol. I.82-3.
12. Benjamin Waterhouse to Joseph Banks, 20 December 1793, BL Add. MS 8098.305-306.13. Samuel Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont (Walpole, NH, 1794), p.ix-x.14. Titus Smith to James Clarke, [n.d.], MG 1664, Nova Scotia Archives (NSA); ‘Letter to the Agricultural
Society’, Nova Scotia Magazine (February 1792).15. David Humphreys to Joseph Banks, 1 May 1817, BL Add. MS 8958.49-52.16. John Adams to Sir John Sinclair, 24 May 1805, in The Correspondence of the Right Honourable Sir John
Sinclair, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), vol. II.38-9.17. Draft of inaugural address to Harvard Corporation [1805], Box 2 HUG 1677, WDPP.18. William D. Peck to Jeremy Belknap, 30 March 1790, WDPP.19. George B. Goode, ‘The Beginnings of Natural History in America’, in Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (ed.), The
Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-tion Press, 1991), p.23-89.
20. On travel and scientific networks, see Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Sciencein the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). On Banks, see John Gascoigne, Science inthe Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1998); Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (London: Harvill Press, 1987).
21. Cutler, ‘An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions’. After the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 Cutler,a principal in the Ohio Company, led a survey of the Ohio Valley in anticipation of land sales. See ManassehCutler, An Explanation of the Map [...] of the Federal Lands Comprehended between Pennsylvania West Line, the riversOhio and Sioto, and Lake Erie (Salem: Dabney and Cushing, 1787).
22. [Cutler diary entry], 14 June 1785; Aaron Dexter to Cutler, 20 June 1785; [Cutler diary entry], 23 June1785, in Cutler and Cutler (eds), Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Reverend Manasseh Cutler, vol. I.115-16; JohnC. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1984), p.38-9, 45; LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois, andUpper Canada, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, trans. H. Neuman, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London, 1800), vol. I,preface.
23. Parrish, American Curiosity, p.118-25 (Mather, p.120; horse’s stone, p.125).24. Robert Boyle, General Heads for the Natural History of a Country Great or Small, Drawn Out for the Use of
Travellers and Navigators (London, 1692); Anon., American Husbandry: Containing an Account of the Soil, Climate,Production, and Agriculture (London: J. Bew, 1775), p.13-14 (probably Arthur Young).
25. Charles Blagden to Joseph Banks, 28 October 1777, p.148-51, Sir Joseph Banks Correspondence, DawsonCollection, British Museum (Natural History) (DTC-BMNH).
26. O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life, p.52-7, 91, 128.27. David Ramsay to Jeremy Belknap, 11 March 1795, in Robert L. Brunhouse, ‘David Ramsay, 1749-1815:
Selections from his Writings’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55:4 (1965), p.139-40.28. William D. Peck to Mr Kirby, 22 April 1817, Box 2: Folder ‘Papers 1815-19’, WDPP.29. ‘Oxen’, [n.d.], H MS c16.4, Benjamin Waterhouse Papers, Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A.
Countway Library of Medicine (BW-HML).30. ‘An Account of a Sort of Sugar Made of the Juice of the Maple, in Canada’, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society 15 (1685): p.988; ‘An Extract of a Letter, Written by John Winthrop, Esq. Governour of Connecticutin New England’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 57 (1670): p.1151-4; ‘Observations on Some ofthe Plants in New England [...] Honourable Paul Dudley, Esq; F.R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions of the RoyalSociety 33 (1724-5): p.194-200; Wallace Anderson (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. VI, Scientific andPhilosophical Writings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p.31, 163.
31. ‘An Extract of a Letter’, p.1151.32. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England ([1983] New York:
Hill and Wang, 2003), p.19-22.33. Cutler and Cutler, Life, Journals and Correspondence of Reverend Manasseh Cutler, vol. II.103. On the
assimilationist vision of the picturesque, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English RusticTradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), and I. S. MacLaren, ‘The Limits of thePicturesque in British North America’, Journal of Garden History 1 (Jan.-March 1985), p.97-111.
34. Samuel Holland to John Pownal, Esq. (Plantation General), 16 August 1766, CO 323/24.46-7, NationalArchives, Kew.
35. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp.p.15-37; William H. Sherman, ‘Stirrings and Searchings (1500-1720)’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds),The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.29-32; John Brewer,
Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,2000). The essays by Sarah Easterby-Smith and Emily Senior in this issue specifically consider the ways in whichsuch natural historical descriptions reflected the aesthetic conventions of the genre or of a trained visual bias.
36. Jeremy Belknap, History of New-Hampshire, vol. III, Containing a Geographical Description of the State; withSketches of its Natural History, Productions, Improvements (Boston, MA, 1792), p.3.
37. Emma C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.13; see also Alix Cooper, ‘ “The Possibilities of the Land”: The Inventoryof “Natural Riches” in the Early Modern German Territories’, History of Political Economy 35 (annual supple-ment, 2003), p.129-53.
38. ‘Lecture: Introductory on Natural History, October 12, 1810’, Folder c. 16.4, BW-HML. Waterhouse hadrecited this principle in his lectures since the 1780s.
39. Letters and Papers on Agriculture: Extracted from the Correspondence of a Society Instituted at Halifax forPromoting Agriculture in the Province of Nova Scotia, (Halifax: John Howe, 1789), p.5-6.
40. Draft of inaugural address to Harvard Corporation (1805), Folder – Papers 1805-7, Box 2 HUG 1677,WDPP; ‘Lecture: Introductory on Natural History’, BW-HML; Titus Smith, ‘Notes on Botany’, Folder 5, item 24,MG1 Vol. 1664B, NSA.
41. George Dixon to Joseph Banks, 27 August 1784, 4.47-8; Joseph Banks to George Dixon, 29 August 1784,DTC-BMNH.
42. On natural history and improvement in Britain, see Fredrik A. Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: TheScottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
43. Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire, vol. III.42, 54.44. Thomas Caulfield to Board of Trade, 21 November 1715, MG1 v. 1520, Folder K, NSA.45. R. Philipps to Board of Trade, ‘An Account of the Situation in Nova Scotia, November 26, 1730’, MG1,
v. 1520, Folder S, NSA.46. Titus Smith, Survey of the Eastern and Northern Parts of the Province in the Years 1801 & 1802, 3rd edn
(Halifax: 1857).47. Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America, vol. I.556-8, vol. II.120.48. S. H. Jeyes, The Russells of Birmingham in the French Revolution and in America, 1791-1814 (London: George
Allen, 1911), p.174-5, 237-41.49. Fragment of a letter to James Clarke, Secretary of NSSPA, n.d., FOLDER 5, item 27, MG1 v. 1664A-B, NSA.50. Letters and Papers on Agriculture, 9.51. Letters and Papers on Agriculture, p.5-6. On natural history and acclimatisation in early modern Sweden,
see Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).52. William D. Peck to Lydia Peck, April 1806, Box 2: Folder 1805-07, WDPP.
anya zilberstein is assistant professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal. She is completing ATemperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America, a book that uses early modern debates about climateas a frame for analysing British confrontations with the environments of north-eastern North America,emphasising the unique limits that cold, long winters and short summers posed to the colonial project ofsettling and improving land in the region.
Making and Unmaking Local Knowledge in Greater New England 569
