by Sam Kean
1 The late 1600s and early 1700s were the peak times of piracy for a reason. Several long wars in Europe had ended recently, meaning there were plenty of skilled sailors out there without jobs. While they could have joined the navy, many chafed at the harsh regulations then. There was also so much wealth zipping back and forth across the oceans, and so little way to police the vast seas, that it would have been shocking had pirates not flourished.
2 We take writing for granted nowadays, but Dampier couldn’t just grab a pen and start jotting. Every single time he found something worth recording, he had to dig out a quill from his chest below deck, hand-sharpen it with a knife, prepare some ink from powder and water, and find a place that wasn’t too dark or damp or crowded with rowdy sailors—all just to get a few words down. The work didn’t stop there, either. After writing, he had to sand the paper to sop up extra ink or risk it smearing, then stow it all away again and hope to god that vermin didn’t devour it in the meantime. Writing is never an easy racket, but back then it was work.
3 Pirates got 600 pieces of eight for losing a right arm, 500 for losing a left arm or right leg, 400 for losing the left leg, and 100 for losing an eye or finger. This was all drawn up in official documents, since a surprisingly high percentage of pirates could read (around three-fourths), largely because they need to understand charts. Pirates also held elections on where to sail next for plunder (a simple majority ruled), and their mealtimes were surprisingly democratic as well. They shared all food equally and, unlike in the snobbish navy, the officers couldn’t poach the choice bits.
4 There’s no doubt Dampier would flunk any modern test of enlightenment; like all people then, he had his prejudices. But his biographer referred to him as a “humane man in a not very humane time,” which sums things up pretty well. In fact, if you take the time to actually read his works, what stands out most is his tolerance of foreign cultures. Whenever he saw a (to him) strange custom or rite, he always refrained from judgment and strived hard to understand it. He was also much harsher in judging his own countrymen. He rolled his eyes, for instance, when other officers refused to trust a mixed-race female prisoner as a guide, simply because of who she was. So while hardly woke by modern standards, the buccaneer biologist seems remarkably tolerant for his time, and he recognized that Europeans usually brought violence on themselves: “I am of the Opinion that there are no People in the World so barbarous as to kill a single Person that falls accidentally into their Hands, or comes to live among them, except they have before been injured, by some outrage, or violence committed against them.”
5 If you like Nazi stories—and let’s be honest, every story is better with some Nazi villains—then I encourage you to check out my podcast, called The Disappearing Spoon, for a heckuva tale. It explains how a few crooked Nazis probably saved more American lives than anyone else in all of World War II by supplying us with quinine at a desperate time. Overall, the podcast contains all new stories, ones that don’t appear in my books. You can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, or any other platform, or visit my website at samkean.com/podcast.
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SLAVERY: THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLYCATCHER
When the Englishman Henry Smeathman set sail for Sierra Leone in October 1771, he had every reason to think his expedition would be a triumph. At twenty-nine, he was the perfect age for a naturalist—old enough to have experience, young enough for adventure. And given all the outlandish specimens pouring into Europe then from across the globe—orangutans and goliath beetles, Venus flytraps and “flying cat-monkeys” (i.e., flying squirrels)—he had high hopes of making his own grand discoveries in Africa.
Wasting no time, Smeathman and his assistant started collecting on the voyage down, breaking out their nets on deck and snagging butterflies and locusts blown out to sea. True, most of the specimens were soon devoured by the ants and cockroaches on their filthy ship, the aptly named Fly. Yet the ever-cheerful Smeathman devised a workaround in no time. After placing his specimens atop a tapped keg of rum, he found that the fumes discouraged vermin. He jotted this down in his journal as “a useful tip for naturalists.”
The Fly finally reached Africa on December 13, dropping anchor at the Îsles de Los, an offshore trading post for ivory and lumber; Smeathman described it as “little mountainous islands covered with trees & shrubs.” It should have been a satisfying moment: the end of the cramped voyage, the commencement of his scientific work. But Smeathman tensed as he descended the gangplank. For the Îsles were more than just a marketplace for luxury goods. They were also a place of chains and whips—the epicenter of the Atlantic slave trade.
Before setting out, Smeathman had known that slavery would form the backdrop for his journey. He was a determined foe of slavery, and when pitching his trip to his sponsors, he’d vowed to tell the truth about “those little-known and much misrepresented people, the Negroes.” But even this determination couldn’t prepare him for the shock of seeing slavery for himself.
Upon arriving at the Îsles, Smeathman and his fellow passengers toured a slave ship, the Africa. The sensory assault began even before entering, Smeathman wrote: “Our ears were struck at some distance with a confused noise of human voices & the clanking of chains, which… affects a sensible being with inexpressible horror.” Onboard, the male slaves had been stripped naked, supposedly for health reasons, while the women wore just loincloths. Smeathman was especially distressed to see two women breastfeeding their infants amid the chaos; he said he’d never seen sorrow “more strongly marked in the human face.” The rest of his group kept strolling and chatting, as if on a garden tour, but Smeathman kept glancing back at the mothers. “They would undoubtedly have shed tears,” he added, “if they had had hopes of compassion, or their nature had not already been exhausted. I was absorbed in a thousand melancholy reflections and bore a very small part in the conversation.”
He also met the Africa’s captain, John Tittle. Tittle was vicious even by the standards of slave traders, a trait that led to his grisly demise a few years later: After dropping his hat into a harbor one day, Tittle ordered a small Black boy in his employ to dive in and retrieve it. The boy refused; he feared sharks and couldn’t swim. Tittle threw him in anyway and he drowned. Had this been a slave boy, no one would have dared confront him. But Tittle had murdered the son of a local chief, who demanded recompense in the form of rum. Tittle responded by sending several barrels—filled not with rum, but with “emptyings from the tubs of his slaves,” possibly including excrement. The enraged chief hunted the captain down and clapped him in irons. He then starved Tittle and tortured him to death while local villagers—who were equally sick of Tittle’s crap—gathered around and howled in delight.
Despite Tittle’s sadistic reputation (or perhaps because of it) slave companies happily entrusted him with the lives of their “cargo.” The Africa was designed to hold 350 slaves, but not long after Smeathman’s visit, Tittle packed 466 souls into his hold and sailed for the Caribbean. Eighty-six men, women, and children died en route.
To Smeathman’s relief, his party soon quit the Îsles and sailed for Bunce Island near the African mainland. But he couldn’t escape slavery there, either. Bunce was an odd, almost schizoid place, once described as half slave port and half “country estate,” complete with a two-hole golf course. The fort there boasted cannons and sixteen-foot walls, a defense against Dampier-like pirate raids.
The slave-traders on Bunce, always eager for news from home, buttonholed Smeathman and peppered him with questions. If they were dressed like typical slavers, they wore checked shirts and black handkerchiefs tied around their necks or waists. Smeathman chatted happily about England for a few minutes, but the conversation soured for him as soon as they asked his reasons for visiting Africa. When he revealed his interest in natural history, they laughed in his face. As one slaver said, “The longer one lives the more one learns! To think now of anybody coming two or three thousand miles to catch butterflies and gather weeds.” Some began openly
mocking him.
Smeathman snorted and turned his back on them—consoling himself with the thought that, while they’d come to Africa to sell women and children into bondage, he’d come as a scientist, to advance knowledge and improve the lot of humankind. He’d have nothing to do with these barbarians.
That superiority would prove hard to maintain, however. In coming to Africa, the young naturalist had been sailing not only toward something but away from something—the old Henry Smeathman. The old Smeathman was a pauper, a failed striver, someone he wanted to abandon and bury back in England. This expedition marked the debut of the new Smeathman, the gentleman-naturalist. Much like with William Dampier, he felt science was his best shot at creating a better life for himself. In rejecting the slavers, then, he was rejecting both their morals and their lowly station in life.
Ultimately, though, Smeathman’s ambition to remake himself as a scientist would prove stronger than his morals. Despite his opposition, slavery so dominated the economy of Sierra Leone that he soon found himself trading with slavers for supplies and equipment. Before long, he was doing even worse things. Predictably, too, the more entangled he got, the more he felt a need to defend his trading partners—and by extension, himself. It was a textbook psychological defense: I’m a good person and would never associate with bad people. Therefore, the people I am associating with can’t be that terrible. But once he started down this road of rationalization, it proved slipperier than he ever imagined.
Amid the vast atrocities of the slave trade, the corruption of a single “flycatcher” like Smeathman hardly stands out as tragic. (This should go without saying, but given how charged this topic is, it’s worth being explicit: the Africans were the victims here, not the white European.) Still, Smeathman’s life is worth examining, because it sheds light on an aspect of early science that most historians overlook—how intertwined science and slavery were. Moreover, Smeathman’s story reveals just how easily slavery could corrode the morals of even sincere, well-meaning people. Far from being a backdrop, the slave trade would come to dominate his time in Sierra Leone. Bit by bit, compromise by compromise, it would twist his ethics inside out.
Slavery is as old as civilization, but the transatlantic slave trade between the 1500s and 1800s was exceptionally brutal. Estimates vary, but at least ten million Africans were enslaved during wars and raids, with roughly half dying on the march to local ports or on voyages across the ocean. And statistics alone can’t capture the cruelty of slave ships. Men, women, and children were chained up in holds so hot and filthy that the stench of bodies often caused people to vomit upon entering. Toddlers sometimes stumbled into the “necessary tubs” of human waste and drowned. Diseases ran rampant, and the sick were often tossed overboard to spare the others. (Sharks in fact followed slave ships sometimes, for easy meals.) Slaves might also be tossed to the sharks for disobedience—or subjected to worse punishments. After one failed slave revolt onboard a ship in the 1720s, the captain forced two of the instigators to kill a third and eat his heart and liver.
So why did scientists align themselves with this horror? Access. European governments did sponsor scientific expeditions now and again, but the far majority of ships visiting Africa and the Americas then were private vessels engaged in the so-called triangular trade—a tripart exchange that sent guns and manufactured goods from Europe to Africa; slaves to the Americas; and dyes, drugs, and sugar back to Europe. Outside that trade, travel options to Africa and the Americas were nil. Field scientists determined to visit those lands therefore hitched rides on slave ships. Upon arrival, they also depended on slave merchants for food, supplies, local transport, and mail.
Naturalists who stayed behind in Europe1 took advantage of the slave trade as well. In many cases they deputized the crews of slave ships to collect on their behalf—especially ship surgeons,2who had scientific backgrounds and enjoyed plenty of free time on shore while their crewmates sold slaves and bought provisions. The specimens collected—ostrich eggs, snakes, butterflies, nests, sloths, shells, armadillos—were then transported back to Europe on slave ships, before eventually finding their way into research institutes or private collections. Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy and one of the most influential biologists in history, drew upon such collections when putting together his monumental Systema Naturae in 1735—the book that introduced the genus-species naming system of Tyrannosaurus rex and Homo sapiens that we still use today. Overall, these collections were the “big science” of their time—centralized repositories that were crucial for research projects. And they were all built on the infrastructure and economics of slavery.
Henry Smeathman, however, thought he could sidestep this moral morass. No known portrait of Smeathman exists today, and the one surviving description of him is enigmatic: “tall, thin, lively, and very interesting, but not handsome.” As a boy he’d loved collecting shells and insects, but his formal education was cut short when his tutor, a curate, killed himself. After that he tried his hand at making cabinets, upholstering furniture, selling insurance, distributing liquor, and tutoring. He failed at all of it, and he seemed destined for a dead-end career. He finally got a lifeline in the summer of 1771 when a physician and botanist named John Fothergill announced a specimen-collecting expedition to Sierra Leone. Fothergill was a Quaker and a determined foe of slavery. He nevertheless compromised and sent Smeathman to a slave colony because there were no other settlements in Sierra Leone to choose from.
Despite his own qualms about slavery, Smeathman jumped at the offer, since science was a well-trod path to becoming a gentleman then. Part of the incentive was social. If he played his cards right, he might be elected a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. There were financial incentives, too. Each of Smeathman’s three main sponsors put up £100 ($12,000 today) to finance the trip. In exchange, they got to select £100 worth of the specimens he would send back. After that, Smeathman could sell the rest for profit. Arrangements like this were not uncommon for aspiring scientists from lowly families. Eighty years later, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, would engage in a similar hustle in Malaysia. 3
In January 1772, a few weeks after arriving in Africa, Smeathman set up a home base on the Banana Islands, a cluster of two and a half sandy spits off the coast of Sierra Leone. (At high tide there were three isles; but the low tide uncovered an isthmus between two of them, for an average of two and a half.) He spent a few weeks on the Bananas recovering from the first of several bouts of malaria, then went to see the headman of the islands, the colorful James Cleveland.4
With Cleveland’s blessing, Smeathman built an English-style home on one island, complete with a garden. Cleveland also secured the Englishman a wife. The young woman—thirteen years old, Smeathman estimated—was the daughter of a local chief. Mixed-race marriages like this were common in Africa, but unlike many Europeans, Smeathman mooned over his wife. “The nuptials were celebrated by above one hundred discharges of cannon from the shore and… the only bull within many miles was killed on the occasion,” he bragged to one sponsor. “My little Brunetta with her wooly toppin is laid in bed beside me… Gad so! I believe I am in love with her! She [has]… a shape like the Venus of Medicis, with two pretty, jutting, dancing hills upon her breast.” This admission of affection is startling. Most Europeans wanted sex and grub from their women, and nothing more.
Marrying the daughter of a chief also brought Smeathman under the chief’s patronage and protection. This in turn allowed him to recruit local African freemen as guides and start his scientific expeditions. For the most part these expeditions consisted of tramping about the countryside and grabbing plants and animals to ship back to England. There, they’d be dissected and classified according to Linnaeus’s taxonomic system, the dominant paradigm of the day. But Smeathman also went beyond such work and did pioneering research in ecology and animal behavior. This included his studies of the legendary termite mounds of western Africa.
These mounds—known locally as bugga bug hills—stood like small volcanos on the African plains, steep cones up to twelve feet high. Although made of little more than dirt and termite spit, they were sturdy enough for five grown men to stand atop one, and were considered the best vantage point for watching ships enter local harbors.
To study the mounds, Smeathman and his guides would sneak up with hoes and pickaxes and rain down blows on the mud walls. Then they’d claw at the broken dirt with their fingers and scramble for a glimpse of the interior. This haste was necessary because, within a few seconds of the first blow, they’d hear an ominous crackling sound—“shriller and quicker than the ticking of a watch,” Smeathman recalled. It was an alarm call, and a moment later several brigades of termites would erupt out of the hole and attack. The bugs had a vicious bite, and sent the barefoot guides howling for cover. The Europeans fared better at first, but inevitably the termites would wriggle inside their shoes and chomp down, staining their white stockings with bloody red polka dots. (A true man of science, Smeathman later used the stains as data, estimating that an average termite loosed a quantity of blood equal to its own weight with each bite.)
The grotesque termite queen (number 3), a tiny torso grafted onto an egg-laying sac that pumps out 80,000 ova every day. (Drawing by Henry Smeathman.)
Smeathman would soon become a weary expert on the pain of different insect bites, but his forbearance allowed him to study the interior of bugga bug mounds in incredible detail. In fact, Smeathman’s account of them reads like an architecture primer, with references to turrets, cupolas, naves, catacombs, flying buttresses, and Gothic arches. He also speculated (correctly) that the shape of the mounds acts as a bellows, pumping in fresh air and keeping the insides at a consistent temperature. Enthusiastically, if a bit chauvinistically, he declared that each termite mound “gives a specimen of industry and enterprise as much beyond the pride and ambition of men as St. Paul’s Cathedral exceeds an Indian hut.”
