The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Upon his death in 1753, Sloane did something unusual. He wanted to provide financially for his daughters, but he also wanted to keep his collection intact, rather than let it get dispersed at auction. So in his will he offered everything to the British government for £20,000 ($3.1 million today) to establish a museum. To raise the money, the government set up a lottery with £3 tickets ($470), and despite some shady dealings—including the organizers buying tickets in bulk and scalping them—the lottery raised £300,000 ($47 million). Because government officials wanted the museum to serve the public, they called it the British Museum. It quickly became one of the most renowned institutions on Earth. Later, most of Sloane’s items were transferred to the Natural History Museum in London, another beacon of civilization. Sloane’s specimens—many of which had a direct link to slavery—thereby became founding collections for some of the most famous cultural institutions in the world.

  To be fair, there’s no reason to single those museums out. Other specimens linked to the slave trade can be found in Oxford, Glasgow, and Chelsea. In fact, almost every natural history museum in any major European city—Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Amsterdam—probably has items of similar origin. These aren’t just dusty curiosities, either. Scientists still consult these collections to study plant domestication and historical climate change. They also extract DNA from specimens to study how plants and animals have evolved across the centuries. Most scientists, however, remain oblivious to the origins of the items they use.

  Even many historians remain ignorant. But some, at least, unable to look away any longer, have started to untangle the origins of museum collections. A few even want to bring science into the larger discussion about slave reparations and the cultural legacy of slavery. As one put it, discussions about the profits of slavery are usually framed “in terms of just dollars and cents, pounds and pence. Yet [the profits] can also clearly be measured in specimens collected and papers published.”

  Acknowledging this legacy can be painful for scientists. After all, isn’t science progressive—a force for good in the world? Absolutely. But it’s also a human endeavor, full of well-meaning but fallible people, people who get fixated on their research and ignore their nagging consciences. People like Henry Smeathman.

  Ultimately, Smeathman’s compromises got him what he wanted in science—up to a point. Dabbling in slaves secured him enough supplies and trade goods to make several long expeditions to the bugga bug mounds, and he collected so many specimens overall that one sponsor later complained about the glut: “My house could not possibly contain one half.” By late 1775, after four years in Africa, Monsieur Termite felt sure enough in his scientific reputation to return to England, where he imagined that a hero’s welcome would await him. So he packed up his specimens and booked passage for the Caribbean aboard the slave ship Elizabeth.

  The moment Smeathman stepped onboard, the captain seized his personal chest of bugs and plants and dumped everything out. The captain then packed the ships’ pistols inside, since the chest had a good solid lock to keep the guns secure in case of mutiny or a slave revolt. But the captain soon had bigger things to worry over, since the Elizabeth leaked like an old roof and required constant pumping to stay afloat. (A few weeks after their arrival in the West Indies, she was condemned as unseaworthy.) Of the 293 slaves aboard the Elizabeth, 54 died en route to the Americas.

  Smeathman had planned to depart for England immediately after arriving, but another bout of malaria had wiped him out on the journey over, and he didn’t want to face the harsh winter winds on the return Atlantic voyage. He decided to rest for a few months instead. By the time he felt shipshape, however, the Revolutionary War had broken out, and American privateers were seizing British ships left and right. Suddenly marooned, Smeathman ended up settling in Tobago and spent the next four years doing natural history on different islands. Most notably he studied Caribbean fire ants, which were sweeping through various islands in swarms so large that Moses himself would have hesitated to call them down on Pharaoh. The ants attacked even animals on the islands, skeletonizing horses and cows overnight. Locals referred to the swarms as ant “blasts.”

  Mostly, though, Smeathman spent those years ruminating over slavery. The West Indies were idyllic in many ways—lush, green, full of novel specimens—and he spent many a happy day tramping about collecting flora and fauna. Every so often, though, he’d wander near a plantation, and the crack of a whip would rend the air, followed by a scream. He also witnessed public whippings of slaves, both men and women, and the long, twisting scars that crisscrossed their bodies haunted his sleep. (Slave owners often dripped candle wax or rubbed chili peppers into the wounds to make the sting worse. Some put chilis directly into slaves’ eyes.) In Africa, Smeathman could still keep slavery at a distance. But the cruelty of plantation life righted his moral compass and he disavowed slavery once again.

  Smeathman finally traced the last leg of the triangular trade and sailed for England in August 1779. Naturally, pirates seized his ship on the way and dumped all his remaining specimens—years’ worth of labor—into the sea. He returned to England broke, and the hero’s welcome that he’d envisioned never materialized. He did present a well-regarded paper on termite mounds to the Royal Society. But the snooty president of the society decided that Smeathman wasn’t enough of a gentleman for their ranks and effectively blocked his election as a fellow. Smeathman was no doubt heartbroken, his dream of becoming a gentleman-scientist dashed.

  Instead he struck out on his own and became a scientific lecturer, speaking to sold-out crowds about his adventures with ants and termites. Smeathman became a bit player in the abolition movement as well. In fact he always ended his scientific lectures with a short sermon on slavery, “that infamous policy,” as he once put it, “which degraded one species [i.e., race] of human beings to pamper the luxury of a few of the others.”

  Perhaps feeling guilty about his slave-trading days, he also began raising funds to start an agricultural colony in Sierra Leone for free Blacks. This included loyalist slaves in North America who’d fought with the British against their masters during the Revolutionary War. Hundreds of men and women signed up, including dozens of mixed-race couples who simply wanted to live somewhere free of harassment. Smeathman even traveled to Paris to meet Benjamin Franklin and seek the famous American’s endorsement for the plan. (While there, Smeathman happened to observe the world’s first balloon flight in 1783, courtesy of the Montgolfier brothers. The spectacle inspired Smeathman to design his own, cigar-shaped balloon with wings, which he hoped would prove more steerable than the spherical Montgolfier one.)

  In July 1786, however, just months before the settlers planned to depart for Africa, Smeathman was felled by another bout of malaria. South American countries were still hoarding quinine then, and a mere three days later—before anyone could procure some for him—he died. Four hundred colonists still set sail later that year, but they arrived in the middle of the rainy season, and without Smeathman’s contacts and expertise, they had to beg food to survive. Within three months, a third of them were dead. Eventually a local chief evicted the remaining colonists and burned down their shacks, sending Henry Smeathman’s grand dream of redemption up in smoke.

  Despite his premature death, Smeathman did advance the abolitionist cause in one real, albeit indirect, way. In early 1786 he’d written a tract about his vision for the Sierra Leone colony, and two Swedish scientists who read it, a mining engineer named Carl Wadström and a botanist named Anders Sparrman, were inspired enough to travel to Africa themselves in late 1787. They had vague plans to visit the interior of the continent, but ended up stranded at a French slave port in Senegal. What they saw over the next few months appalled them—and unlike Smeathman, they didn’t stick around long enough for their outrage to erode.

  Instead they stormed back to London and began regaling people with tales of “slave dungeons” and men and women “lying chained in their own blood.” They also revealed a diabol
ical French scheme to capture slaves on the cheap. Rather than risk their own necks in raids, the French would sell arms to two rival tribes and provoke a war between them. Inevitably, one side would take their enemies prisoner, at which point the French would sweep in and buy up the captives. Wadström described the aftermath of one such war, when the victorious tribe marched into port with the soon-to-be slaves, singing and clapping and blowing horns: “Taking in the shrieks and agony of the one, and the shouts and joy of the other, with the concomitant instruments of noise, I was never before witness to such an infernal scene.” Perhaps most scandalous of all, Sparrman and Wadström hadn’t had to dig much to expose these machinations—the French slavers practically bragged about them, proud of their cleverness.

  The Swedes ended up appearing before the House of Commons and British Board of Trade, and their testimony caused a sensation in London—both for what they revealed and also because of who they were. This was the 1780s, the high tide of the Enlightenment, and scientists at that time were considered beyond reproach—utterly unimpeachable witnesses on the big issues facing society. (Different times… ) As a result, many people who’d hesitated to condemn slavery before were suddenly swayed to the abolitionist cause. Because if scientists said the slave trade was evil, who were they to argue?

  To be sure, the Swedes didn’t end the slave trade in the British Empire by themselves. Africans did a lot. Freed slaves like Olaudah Equiano and the Sons of Africa provided their own damning testimony, and the long, bloody, and ultimately successful slave revolt in Haiti in the 1790s left the British public questioning what their government was supporting. The Quaker church also deserves credit for its long, lonely fight for abolition. But as leading abolitionist Thomas Clarkson said, as soon as the Swedish scientists went public, “The tide… which had run so strongly against us, began now to turn a little in our favour.” In this way, Wadström and Sparrman helped science redeem itself a little after its long entanglement with slavery, and become a positive force for ending it.

  Smeathman died before he could fulfill his dream of becoming a member of the august Royal Society. It must have been especially galling to know that, in skipping over him, the society had tapped other scientists with highly dubious reputations. One in particular, a medical doctor and rough contemporary of Smeathman’s, led the most flagrant organized-crime spree in science history, robbing hundreds of graves to procure bodies for anatomical dissections.

  In fact, doctors deserve their own special section in the annals of sinful science. Because physicians work directly with human beings, they often give science a human touch. But working with people also introduces new ethical dilemmas and new opportunities for abuse.

  Footnotes

  1 Stay-at-home collectors were sometimes scorned as “armchair naturalists” because their ignorance of real, living plants and animals could lead them to absurd conclusions. For instance, when one species of Papuan songbird first reached Europe in the mid-1700s, collectors named it the “bird of paradise,” both for its lovely plumage and the fact that it lacked feet—an indication, they decided, that the bird never needed to land. It spent its entire life aloft instead, swooping through the heavens. In reality, the natives who’d captured the bird simply used the feet for ornaments and had lopped them off. Any wounds were concealed beneath the puffy tufts of feathers. The natives then handed the footless carcasses to European naturalists, whom they never imagined could be so naïve. “The love of the marvelous, and the fondness for conjecture prevailed,” said one historian, and a scientific myth was born.

  2 Although they likely had some scientific training, ship surgeons didn’t always know the ins and outs of collecting specimens. So one London collector helped out by providing starter kits with jars for insects and special paper for pressing plants. He also included unconventional advice in letters to his aides, including the importance of rooting through the digestive tracts of predators for half-digested species: “Whenever you catch any of these,” he emphasized, “look into their gutts & stomach & take out Animalls you shall find there.” Actually, this is good advice even today: in 2018, scientists in Mexico discovered a new species of snake inside the bowels of another.

  3 Some historians have suggested that Wallace’s work in Malaysia might even have pushed him toward his co-discovery of evolution by natural selection. After all, being a collector involved scrutinizing thousands of bugs for variations in color, size, and other traits, and variation is the raw material on which natural selection works.

  4 James Cleveland’s father William had come from a respectable family in England; William’s brother was Secretary of the Admiralty. But William had a rascally streak, and after being shipwrecked near the Bananas in the 1750s, he staggered ashore and declared himself king. He married several local women there and eventually sired James, who built a robust slave-trading business despite being half-African himself. To keep Cleveland happy, Europeans on his island had to supply him with a steady stream of guns, rum, cloth, and iron goods, not to mention the odd golden belt buckle or decorated drinking horn. At one point, Henry Smeathman ordered for Cleveland a wildly expensive “electrical machine” from England, which built up charges (presumably with friction) and used a glass orb to shock people for amusement.

  5 Analogies can help us understand scientific systems sometimes, but using the name “queens” with regard to termites, ants, and bees is misleading. These queens aren’t the “rulers” of the colony in any meaningful sense. In fact, a queen’s life seems pretty miserable. When establishing a new colony, workers essentially wall the queen into a tiny “royal chamber” where she lives out the rest of her life in the dark, unable to do anything more than force food down her gullet and pump out babies all day long. Imagine being in perpetual labor for the rest of your life, and so bloated that you can’t walk or even drag yourself around. Rather than think of them as queens, a more apt name might be the royal gonad.

  6 In contrast to Kwasi, some slaves used their superior botanical knowledge to revenge themselves on their captors by poisoning them. Cassava was an especially popular poison because it’s a delectable dish if cooked properly but toxic otherwise. Slaves would take worms that fed on cassava juice, dry them out and mash them up, and conceal the resulting powder beneath a fingernail. Then they surreptitiously dropped some into a bowl while serving their masters a meal.

  7 Curiously, Hans Sloane also invented milk chocolate in Jamaica; he considered it an easier way to consume cocoa, which was considered medicine then. Upon returning to London, Sloane sold the recipe to an apothecary, who in turn sold it to a little outfit called Cadbury. Every time you nibble a chocolate bar today, you can trace it right back to the scientific-slavery-industrial complex.

  3

  GRAVE-ROBBING: JEKYLL & HYDE, HUNTER & KNOX

  The murders started so innocently. In a snug stone boardinghouse in Edinburgh, nestled beneath the shadow of the city’s famous hilltop castle, an old man named Donald was clinging to life. He had fluid on his lungs (dropsy) and was essentially drowning on dry land. When he finally passed away one night in November 1827, his landlord William Hare arranged for a church burial.

  But then Hare got to thinking. The church couldn’t pick up the body right away, and Hare mentioned to a neighbor, William Burke, that he wished he’d kept his mouth shut and sold the body instead. At that time, possessing and selling a dead body was not illegal, and there was a strong, if seedy, market for them: anatomists in Edinburgh always needed corpses for dissections, and they paid ready money. Burke agreed that this was a missed opportunity. But rather than sulk, the duo simply made their own luck. A carpenter soon came by to seal Donald in a coffin, and left the two men alone with it. Acting fast, they wrenched the lid open with a chisel, hid Donald’s corpse in a nearby bed, and filled the coffin back up with refuse—dead weight. When church officials stopped by later to claim the coffin, they were none the wiser.

  Now the pair had to unload the body. They wandered over to a me
dical school, but the chief anatomist was absent. So they went to one of his rivals, Robert Knox. Knox was also absent, but his assistants told the duo to come back later; so they bundled Donald up that night and schlepped him over for Knox to evaluate. The famed anatomist was bald on the crown of his head, and his left eye was blind from a smallpox attack. He was also something of a dandy, although if he’d been working that night, he would have been dressed in a blood-smeared smock.

  Burke and Hare laid Donald out on a green-felt dissecting table in Knox’s lab and unwrapped him. Then they held their breath while Knox cast his good eye over the corpse. The tension must have been excruciating—would he suspect they’d stolen it?

  I’ll give you seven pounds, ten shillings, Knox finally said.

  The pair took the money and scrammed. Burke felt guilty, but no one had gotten hurt. They needed the money anyway.

  But like money always does, that £7s10 evaporated pretty quickly. And when an old miller named Joseph showed up at Hare’s boardinghouse a few months later, and fell deathly ill with fever, the pair couldn’t help but start thinking again. Hare was anxious to remove Joseph no matter what: He didn’t want his place getting a reputation as pestilent. And given that the old man was practically dead anyway, why not nudge him along? No one knows who first proposed it, or whether they even dared suggest it aloud. But before another day had passed, Burke found himself gently pressing a pillow to Joseph’s face. Hare then lay across the miller’s chest to still his lungs. Just like that, they had a new body to sell.