The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  The termites themselves also fascinated him. It no doubt cost him many a nip on the hand, but Smeathman finally dug deep enough into the mounds to reach the “royal apartment” and glimpse the grotesque termite queen. 5 She was little more than a tiny torso grafted onto a three-inch-long, pulsating egg sac, which pumped out eighty thousand ova every day, nearly one per second. (He estimated that the queen weighed thirty thousand times her average subject, the equivalent of a five-million-pound pregnant woman.) Other termites were no less amazing. In one chamber, Smeathman discovered small white pellets that he mistook for more eggs. But under his microscope, they revealed themselves to be tiny mushrooms. To his shock, he realized the termites were raising crops for food. Scientists now know of several other animals that do the same, but Smeathman was the first person to realize that Homo sapiens were far from the first farmers in Earth’s history. (Ants, in fact, have been farming for sixty million years.)

  In doing this research, Smeathman was following in the footsteps of the German naturalist Maria Merian, once known as the “mother of entomology” for her pioneering studies in Suriname in the late 1600s. (Being wealthy, Merian paid her own passage to South America, showing a remarkable independence of spirit. While she did employ slaves to collect for her, she at least acknowledged their help in her papers, unlike most naturalists.) Merian was among the first scientists to study the full life cycle of insects, including the foods they ate at each stage. She was also a gifted artist, and recorded some gruesome scenes in her notebooks, including one where a tarantula the size of a sasquatch paw pins down a hummingbird and feasts on it.

  In the same spirt, Smeathman studied termites from eggs to adulthood, and made several drawings of termite mounds that are still celebrated today for their dramatic flourishes. The pictures are intriguing sociologically as well. Rather than portray himself as the hero at the center of the action, Smeathman shows his African guides smashing open the bugga bug hills, tacitly crediting them for their help. Historians have also noted that, unlike later reproductions of the drawings, Smeathman’s originals don’t alter the guides’ features to conform with European standards of beauty; his men are recognizably African.

  All this stands in accord with the general respect that Smeathman paid his guides. Rather than scoff at their knowledge of natural history, as most Europeans did, he let them correct him on some points—like the fact that a certain winged termite he’d seen wasn’t a separate species, but a stage in the life cycle of an already known species. (Linnaeus himself got this wrong.) Even more remarkable, considering how deep this prejudice runs even today, Smeathman put aside any disgust he might have felt and indulged in the local practice of eating insects. His guides showed him how to skim termites off pools of water and roast them like nuts over a fire. As Smeathman wrote, “I have eat[en] them dressed this way several times, and think them both delicate, nourishing, and wholesome. They are something sweeter, but not so fat and cloying as the caterpillar or maggot.”

  To be sure, Smeathman shared some of the biases of his day. At different points in his letters, he describes Africans as overly “cunning” and “full of sloth and full of villainy,” among other insults. But he’s much harsher on European slavers, calling them “beasts” and “monsters” and the “outcasts of France, Holland, Denmark, [and] Sweden.” He also respected local Africans’ knowledge of medicine; they had “valuable secrets in the vegetable way.” He even praised their oratory skills after observing them at their local courts, dubbing them “black Ciceroes and Demosthenes” who in many ways surpassed English barristers.

  Smeathman’s work on bugga bug mounds eventually won him respect among European biologists—as well as a delightful nickname, Monsieur Termite. And if that’s all there was to Smeathman’s story, he would have gone down in history as both a sharp scientist and a tolerant and forward-thinking fellow. Unfortunately, there is more to unpack here. Smeathman’s guides were mostly local freemen, not slaves. So during his first months in Sierra Leone, he could insulate himself from slavery and console himself that his ties to it were minimal, involving just trade and transport. But keeping his distance proved harder than expected. As his initial funds ran low, he began to make friendly with slavers in order to secure better trading terms. Then, gradually, he began to let his guard down around them for an all-too-human reason. He got lonely. By April 1773, his seventeenth month in Africa, he was openly lamenting his isolation in letters to his sponsors. Despite having three wives by then, his heart ached for the company of a fellow countryman, someone who spoke the same language and worshipped the same god and was stirred by the same hymns. So bit by bit, Smeathman began taking advantage of the slave-traders’ offers of hospitality. He told himself this was just a palliative—temporary relief for solitude.

  Natural history wasn’t the only scientific field to exploit the slave trade. The first major astronomical observatory in the southern hemisphere, in Cape Town, was built with slave labor. Edmond Halley of comet fame solicited data about the moon and stars from slavers in different colonies, and geologists collected rocks and minerals in such places. The Royal Society sent questionnaires to slave ports asking for observations and profited from its investments in slave companies.

  Even a field as rarified as celestial mechanics benefitted. For the most part, Isaac Newton was a solitary, stay-at-home crank— scribbling down equations at his desk and hiding them from colleagues. But when putting together Principia Mathematica, which includes his famous law of gravity, Newton made a radical and very public prediction: that the gravitational tug of the moon causes tides. To prove this, he needed data about the height and timing of tides from across the globe, and one crucial set of readings came from French slave ports in Martinique. Celestial mechanics is literally otherworldly, about as far removed from grubby human life as you can get. But slavery was such a fundamental part of European science then that not even the Principia could escape its shadow.

  Still, there’s no question that natural history benefitted the most from slavery—and in some cases even helped slavery expand its reach. Colonial merchants eagerly sought out natural resources abroad, like dyes and spices, and they consulted with scientists about the best way to hunt for and cultivate such goods. In addition, medical research into quinine and other drugs helped white Europeans survive in tropical locales. And the safer and more profitable a colony was for Europeans, the more that commercial activity there, including slavery, thrived. Scientific research, then, not only depended on colonial slavery but opened up new markets for it.

  Some European naturalists in the Americas also forced slaves to collect specimens for them, especially in dangerous places. They sent slaves shinnying up trees or diving into frigid pools; other slaves negotiated tangles of thorns or fatally slippery slopes. Surprisingly, a few collectors actually paid slaves for their help—a half-crown for every dozen insects ($18 today) and twelve pence ($7) for every dozen plants, provided they weren’t ragged. Most collectors were stingier, and the vast majority of Africans who gathered specimens received neither money nor acknowledgment. Only glimpses of these men and women survive today in plants like Majoe bitters, named after a gray-haired slave in Jamaica who used its bark to treat yaws, a syphilis-like skin disease.

  The best-known African naturalist was Kwasi, a lockoman (sorcerer) who was active in Suriname in the 1700s. Although a slave himself, Kwasi often sided with white Europeans at the expense of Africans, and he remains a controversial figure even today. As one European observer noted, Kwasi crafted amulets out of “pebbles, sea-shells, cut hair, fish-bones, feathers, &c., the whole sewed up with a string of cotton round the neck.” Kwasi then sold these amulets to slaves fighting for their freedom, assuring them that the magic inside would render them invincible in battle. It didn’t, but that didn’t stop Kwasi from profiteering. According to oral histories, he also infiltrated a troop of escaped slaves in the jungle, then betrayed their position to white soldiers. For deeds like this, Kwasi was granted his fr
eedom, as well as given expensive European garments, including a gold breastplate inscribed, “Quassie, faithful to the whites.” In retaliation, one troop of escaped slaves ambushed him and hacked off his right ear.

  A slave named David is forced to climb a tree and skin a boa constrictor for his master, John Stedman. Oddly enough, this drawing was by the poet William Blake.

  However controversial, Kwasi was nevertheless regarded as a botanical genius. He was especially famous for a preparation of root powder that quieted stomach pain and quelled fevers. Many white Europeans actually submitted to medical treatment from him rather than trust their own doctors,6 a striking vote of confidence. For thirty years, Kwasi refused to identify the root, until he finally led a disciple of Linnaeus into the forest one day and pointed to a shrub with vibrant red flowers. The disciple brought the shrub back to Linnaeus, who dubbed it Quassia amara. It’s a rare example of a species named after a slave.

  It’s probably not a coincidence that Kwasi, so faithful to the whites, was immortalized by European scientists, while so many other talented men and women were lost to history. But for every European name attached to some plant or bug, it’s worth remembering that there were probably one or two or a dozen unnamed helping hands.

  Unlike Kwasi, Smeathman was no botanist. He was a bug guy, and trying to sort through all the unfamiliar flora in Sierra Leone left him frustrated and overwhelmed. He was thrilled, then, when a letter in early 1773 informed him that another disciple of Linnaeus, the botanist Andreas Berlin, would be joining him on the Banana Islands. Not only could he offload the botany, but he’d have another gentleman-scientist to keep him company.

  Although just twenty-seven years old, Berlin already had an impressive resume, having sailed with Captain James Cook on one of his celebrated scientific voyages. It didn’t take Berlin long to prove his worth as a botanist, either. On his first expedition with Smeathman, in April 1773, Berlin discovered three species new to European science within fifteen minutes, a haul that delighted him. “I am like a blind person who, having just had his eyes opened,” he gushed in a letter, “sees the sun for the first time. He falls down in wonder… ” For all his talent, however, Berlin had one major vice: liquor. Every hour not spent botanizing was spent boozing, which made Smeathman furious—especially because his other assistant was also a sot. “To have two assistants, and neither of them sober,” he complained, “is rather unfortunate.”

  Smeathman’s native helpers were giving him fits as well. Most were local villagers who snickered behind his back at his habit of picking up contemptible little bugs and weeds. Snickered, that is, until Smeathman announced that he was willing to pay for these specimens. After that, he had more “help” than he could handle: “Men, women, and children crowd in to stare, to ask questions, and bring things to sell: every plant with a flower… every commonest insect, even cockroaches and spiders in the houses.” Smeathman eventually started turning people away, to their confusion and disgust. Some exacted revenge by stealing specimens from under his nose and making him pay for them twice.

  Increasingly frustrated, especially with Berlin, Smeathman began blowing off steam through one of the few outlets he had—socializing with slavers.

  To be sure, Smeathman never warmed up to the lowlifes who manned the slave ships—the crude, foul-mouthed sort who, as he once sniffed, stirred their tea with a “rusty, dirty, greasy knife” and ate butter so rancid that it was fit only to grease wagon wheels with. Instead, Smeathman cottoned onto the merchants and ship captains, the aristocrats of Sierra Leone slavery.

  In truth, these “gentlemen” were every bit as cruel as the sea dogs. Worse, they were the ones actually profiting on slavery. But they had some polish to them, and Smeathman began dropping by their “country estate” on Bunce Island for games of whist and backgammon. He also played golf on the rugged, two-hole course there. (Smeathman called the game “goff,” and it was a tad different than today. The ball was the size of a tennis ball, and the holes, he said, were “the size of a man’s hat crown.”) In a callous choice of words, Smeathman described golf as “a very pretty exercise for a warm climate, as there is nothing violent in it except the single blow” of the swing. Meanwhile, actual violence was taking place a quarter-mile away, on the far side of the island, where slaves were chained up in pens and flogged. In May 1773, Smeathman also went hunting for goats on the Îsles de Los, and bent his rules on imbibing to enjoy a grog-soaked feast on the beach. One of his companions on this lark was none other than John Tittle, the slave captain who would soon toss a boy into the sea to retrieve his hat and send a barrel of feces to the father. But for that day at least, he and Smeathman were chums.

  Shortly after the feast, Smeathman hitched a ride back to the Banana Islands on Tittle’s slave ship, and sketched a harrowing portrait of a disease outbreak there. One historian aptly described it as “Dantesque”: “[T]wo or three slaves thrown overboard every day dying of fever, flux, measles, worms,” Smeathman wrote. “Here the Doctor dressing sores, wounds, and ulcers, or cramming the men with medicines, and another standing over them with a cat[-o’-nine-tails, i.e., a whip] to make them swallow.”

  The victims of the outbreak included Andreas Berlin. Drink had already ruined his constitution, but even when laid low with fever and diarrhea, he demanded his daily ration of grog onboard the ship. (He also ate loads of pineapple, possibly as a folk cure.) Smeathman withheld the booze at first but soon gave in—to his regret. Berlin died shortly afterward, just three months into his African adventure.

  After that blow, Smeathman leaned even harder on slavers for company. This descent into moral turpitude wasn’t simple or linear; as the disease passage above shows, the man who’d been rendered mute with grief by the sight of two Black mothers nursing their infants was still there, and still recognized the evils of slavery. But the overall trend was unmistakably downward. At first he’d relied on slavers for material support only—equipment, food, mail. Then he made friendly with them to secure better trading terms. In time, making friendly led to actual friendships, to fight off the loneliness darkening his days. As any psychologist could have predicted, increased contact with slavers also led to sympathizing with their views, even defending them.

  Things only deteriorated from there. A year and a half into Smeathman’s expedition, very few specimens (beyond some insects) had reached England. This wasn’t all Smeathman’s fault. Specimens took time to prepare, and because the triangular trade ran in one direction only, his boxes had to be packed onto slave ships and returned to England via the Caribbean, delaying their arrival by months. Plus, ocean voyages weren’t exactly the safest environment. If the sunlight, heat, humidity, or saltwater swells didn’t destroy his specimens, then the worms, ants, and rodents onboard usually did.

  As a result, Smeathman’s empty-handed sponsors began grumbling about their poor investment in him. He in turn realized that his reputation as a scientist—and his hopes of becoming a gentleman-scientist—would be in shambles unless more specimens started reaching them, and soon. To this end, Smeathman began working as an agent for a Liverpool-based slaver, to help grow the slaver’s business in Sierra Leone. In exchange, Smeathman secured space for his specimens on the rare ships returning straight from Africa to England. Preserving dead bugs and plants meant more to him than preserving his morals.

  By mid-1773, Smeathman was dabbling in the slave trade himself. Hard currency was somewhat useless in Africa, as people there preferred to barter with goods—including slaves. A captain delivering some packages to Smeathman from England, for example, once demanded a slave as payment. The local economy ran on slaves as well. As Smeathman rationalized it in his letters, he was chronically short on “candles, sugar, tea, butter,” shoes, nails, and other necessities. However much he regretted this fact, slaves were a sort of universal currency in Sierra Leone, the one “commodity” that he could trade for anything. This included goods like tobacco and rum that he needed to pay off chiefs and secure guides. W
ithout their help, he would have had to suspend his scientific expeditions—an idea he would not countenance. So he began trading slaves for goods when necessary.

  Predictably, by 1774, Smeathman had moved beyond merely trading slaves locally to selling them to plantations in the Americas, to help fund his research. Smeathman would continue to defend his participation in the slave trade in letters: the economic reality of life there, he insisted, pushed him into the market. But his conscience does break through here and there. In one passage, he confesses, “My scruples in regard to the slave trade are vanished.” He’d become part of the system he despised.

  It would be nice to believe that the scientific sins of Henry Smeathman’s day are dead and buried—after all, the transatlantic slave ended in the early 1800s. But the truth is, we owe our modern, scientific worldview to books like Principia Mathematica and Systema Naturae, both of which depended on slavery for their completion. Even more acute, many specimens collected via the slave trade still reside in museums to this day.

  The most important museum goods trace back to Hans Sloane, a London doctor and naturalist.7 As a young man, Sloane collected on plantations in Jamaica, and he later married into a rich slave-owning family. Using that wealth, Sloane then bought up collections from other naturalists, and he eventually amassed the largest natural history collection in the world, tens of thousands of items. Disturbingly, these included human specimens, as he recorded in a private catalogue: “the Skin of the arm of a black injected [with] red wax & mercury”; “the foetus of a negro from Virginia”; “stones extracted from the vagina of a negro African girle.” Sloane used this collection as a springboard to become president of the Royal Society in 1727, taking over for none other than Isaac Newton.