Joyce E. ChaplinReseñas

Excellent and thought provoking history of Circumnavigation and the impact these voyages have had on history.Whether you are an armchair traveler or a historian you will gain insights into how world travel impacted history, literature, the arts, and science.

In The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, Joyce E. Chaplin argues, “Science did indeed become part of public knowledge in the eighteenth century, and Benjamin Franklin is the ultimate proof of that. His life had the shape and texture that it did because of his abiding curiosity about nature and his interest in science” (pg. 5). Further, “Science is the knowledge of things; politics is power over people. During the eighteenth century, the two enterprises overlapped in fascinating ways” (pg. 8). The First Scientific American “examines the most important ways in which Franklin made his pursuits in the sciences and in public affairs inform and support each other” (pg. 8).
A young Franklin was aware of Newton’s Principia in 1726, though he never read it, and worked to ingratiate himself to Hans Sloane of the Royal Society. Chaplin argues these actions demonstrate that “he wanted to discover new things that would get noticed and get him noticed – hence his curiosity about the timing of eclipses at sea [which was one potential method to measure longitude] and about the way in which animal life was generated” (pg. 38). Returning to Philadelphia, “Franklin used his newspaper to circulate knowledge, including discoveries in the sciences. Indeed, the Pennsylvania Gazette is a very good measure of the popularization of natural science at midcentury” (pg. 49). Franklin also understood the role of society in structuring knowledge. Chaplin writes, “This was the central paradox of knowledge as people in Franklin’s era conceived of it: knowledge was sociable and collaborative, but not everyone could contribute to it” (pg. 55).
Following his invention of a new fireplace and early experiments, “through a series of introductions (some fortuitous, others stage-managed), Franklin slowly inserted himself into an Atlantic network of correspondents interested in natural philosophy. For him, entry into this network was an intellectual goal – and a great deal more” (pg. 93). It would also help him gain patrons. His electrical experiments easily earned him this fame. Chaplin writes, “It is easy to trace the spread of Franklin’s fame – it followed his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751). Initially brief, the essays went through five English editions from 1751 to 1774. Each included the primary electrical writings but then gathered more and more of Franklin’s letters and essays” (pg. 132). Chaplin argues, “Franklin may have been American, but his initial fame as a natural philosopher was not – it depended entirely on European approbation” (pg. 133). She continues, “Within two weeks of his arrival at Craven Street [in London], Franklin presented himself and the Pennsylvania Assembly’s complaints to the Penns; within three weeks, he attended his first meeting of the Society of Arts. He thus marked out the political and cultural paths he would continue to tread for the rest of his London career” (pg. 158). Further, “As Franklin extended his influence – through travel, correspondence, and force of character – his status as a philosopher became an essential passport in multiple realms” (pg. 161).
As the 1770s continued, Franklin’s influence in England waned. Despite this, “Abroad, his reputation continued to spread. In 1772, the Academie Royale des Sciences, the French equivalent of London’s Royal Society, elected Franklin an associé étranger (foreign member)” (pg. 207). Franklin’s interests also remained varied. Chaplin writes, “Franklin also knew that Cook’s first expedition would help answer a big question: how far away was the sun? The 1769 transit of Venus across the sun and the expanded dimensions of the British empire gave Britons a unique opportunity to determine the distance” (pg. 219). Shifting focus, Chaplin writes, “In one way, the American Revolution destroyed Franklin’s scientific career; the event made it impossible for him to maintain even the low level of activity he had managed in London while the crisis was brewing. But in another way, the Revolution guaranteed him immortal fame” (pg. 241). In this way, “he laid his reputation as a philosopher on the altar of the Revolution. He guaranteed his apotheosis as a genius but sacrificed any time to do further work in the sciences” (pg. 242).
Following the Revolution, “Franklin would be less troubled by fame at home. In the United States, he was not quite the idol he was in France” (pg. 312). Chaplin writes, “Because science was becoming somewhat more specialized, it was being divided from other realms of knowledge, including politics” (pg. 312). After Franklin’s death, Chaplin concludes, “Throughout Europe, the idea that men of science should enlist in public affairs was on the wane at the turn of the nineteenth century. If anything, genius was now thought to separate a person from the world” (pg. 343).½

In Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676, Joyce E. Chaplin seeks to answer if, and how, the English conquered America. In the process, she draws extensively on the work of Edward Said and Richard White. Looking at the role of natural philosophy, Chaplin writes, “There was a long delay between 1620, when [Sir Francis] Bacon might have suggested a causal relationship between science and empire, and the eighteenth century, when Europeans would accept that connection” (pg. 1). She concedes that the English viewed similarities between their own and the Indians’ role in nature, but with a key caveat, writing, “The English believed that they shared with Indians the task of subjecting nature to human control, but concluded that the truly inferior material entities in the Americas were the bodies of its native peoples, who were to be subjected to the English” (pg. 9). To that end, her book “reexamines what happened as the English colonized America and as theories of nature were being redefined in order to explore the connections between these developments without making an anachronistic argument about ‘science’ and empire” (pg. 11). In this way, she questions “the tendency of poststructural theory to portray colonizers as components of a cultural or linguistic field of containment, rather than as agents whose creativity and intentionality are worth serious consideration” (pg. 23-24). She concludes of the historiography, “Scholars’ premature differentiation of Europeans and Indians in the early modern era has assumed that a stereotypical pre-scientific ‘savage mind’ predated the Columbian encounter; rather, I will argue, it was a product of it” (pg. 28).
Examining the earliest phase of English colonization, Chaplin writes, “Three sets of ideas were especially relevant for colonizers: hypotheses about the physical nature of new territories, information about technology appropriate to the resources of new places, and assessments of the human bodies suited to these places” (pg. 14). To this end, “Demystifying nature, displaying bodily strength, and using technology all became measures of colonial power” (pg. 15). Chaplin describes the creation of racial identity, writing, “The English were not yet certain that human bodies were intrinsically (rather than superficially) different, nor that their technological abilities made them substantially different from Indians” (pg. 66). Most of the material comparing the English and Indians comes from war, as this was the most common cultural interface that “provided the main opportunity for ethnographic observation” (pg. 81). Chaplin writes, “Fascination with the enemy’s appearance (and weapons) thus operated as a pre-racial assessment of alien peoples; the English in America continued to scrutinize Indians’ bodies without yet concluding that they were intrinsically different from their own. This was a highly gendered comparison, specific to English constructions of masculinity and of war, that would contrast to later settlers’ concern with women and procreation” (pg. 84-85). Gender and the body thus play a key role in her examination. The English, desperate for an advantage in colonization and keenly aware of early Spanish efforts, turned to their physical countenance. Chaplin writes, “The English were finally finding the colonizing strength particular to their nation: their bodies. If other nations had had greater navigational prowess, better ability to discover mines, and swifter military control over native populations, the English could make up for lost time by planting themselves in America and breeding there” (pg. 116-117).
These understandings of nature and their intersection with government continued to develop through the seventeenth century, though the English used them to further justify their occupation of British North America. Chaplin writes, “Increasingly, the English used conceptions of nature as well as of the state to argue that people like the Chickahominy were not as natural to America as the colonists were. Interpretation of Indian reaction to European diseases grounded this claim, and reluctance to intermarry with natives evidenced fear that the weakness of Indian bodies might be passed on generationally” (pg. 157). At the same time, “Gender was particularly important to this perception [of native cultural hybridity]. Indian women’s acquisition of European technology and exchanges between Indian and English women were easy to represent positively, perhaps because for the English these actions seemed the antithesis of the military interface between native and colonial men and safer than sexual relations across cultural lines” (pg. 215). Finally, in terms of religion, “Condemnation of vitalism (the belief that spirit existed in all matter) gave English colonists a new way to criticize native beliefs” (pg. 284). Chaplin concludes that late seventeenth century “definitions of natural philosophy and native ignorance or weakness similarly implied that the superiority of knowledge among the English would work toward the ends of empire without the use of force” (pg. 316).½

Benjamin Franklin has always been a fascinating figure to me. Of course, that was just the created folk-hero persona of the man flying his kite in the rainstorm, napping during the Continental Congress and waking to shout one-liners he created during his period as a printer of Poor Richard's Almanac. Seeing this book, I hoped to get more on the scientific side of Mr. Franklin, and that's exactly what I got.

This book goes through Franklin's entire history from the viewpoint of his scientific observations. He was a man of learning, though he never went to college (lack of funds). That didn't stop him from pursuing knowledge in all forms for his entire life, though. Benjamin Franklin was a visionary, an observer of natural phenomenon, a man in search of answers. He helped shape many of the major theories of the day, especially those relating to electricity and the study of the Gulf Stream.

What I found fascinating is how little he wanted to be involved in politics, even though that is primarily what he is remembered for now. He was forced by circumstance (and the power of the positions in society he worked his way into) to often set aside his experimental mind in order to help his fledgling nation make its way in the world. Imagine how much more he could have done if politics hadn't gotten in the way.

A New World: England’s First View of America. By Kim Sloan. With contributions by Joyce E. Chaplin, Christian F. Feest, and Ute Kuhlmann. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2007. Pp. 256. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-0878-5825-07; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3125-0.)

In a year when events commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the permanent English settlement at Jamestown are occupying a prominent place in the public eye, these two volumes are a welcome reminder of the importance of the short-lived English settlements at Roanoke in what is now North Carolina. Both books use the well-known watercolors of John White and the copper engravings of White’s paintings made by Theodor de Bry for Thomas Hariot’s 1590 tract A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia to examine what the English knew—or thought they knew—about the New World. They are both also useful and informative scholarly inquiries into how Europeans used visual representations of North America’s plants, animals, and people to win support for ongoing colonization efforts. English adventurers and investors, operating under Sir Walter Raleigh’s leadership, made several successive voyages to the Virginia’s shores during the 1580s, with the intention of making money by preying on Spanish treasure shipping. The early Roanoke settlements were primarily military bases intended to hide English privateers, but some investors had a more permanent presence in mind. To that end, Roanoke expeditions (like other English exploratory missions) carried scientists, naturalists, cartographers, and artists to record the land’s inhabitants and its possible commodities.

The participation of gentleman-artist John White in several of these voyages has left us with powerful images of southern coastal Algonkian people, as well as the region’s flora and fauna. Kim Sloan’s A New World: England’s First View of America is a magnificently presented catalogue of White’s watercolors, accompanied by essays meticulously presenting the most recent scholarship on White, his times, and the impact of his famous watercolors. The catalogue itself occupies most of the volume, and includes White’s watercolors, accompanied by the eighteenth-century copies made for Sir Hans Sloane. Sloan is careful to point out changes in the coloring and pigmentation due to water damage and chemical alterations in some of the pigments—the watercolors we now know are probably only a pale shadow of their sixteenth-century selves. The catalogue is also careful to provide context for White’s drawings and their copies by including the work of other European painter-observers of the New World, with the intent of providing “consideration of John White and his artistic milieu” (229). Thus White’s watercolors take their place in the pantheon of early modern natural history illustration and ethnography. The result is a catalogue that is much more sensitive and sophisticated understanding of John White’s art, his times, and his gentlemanly circle. Most usefully, though, the catalogue places different renditions of the watercolors together, allowing for a simultaneous comparison of the different versions.

The opening three essays of the catalogue, all written by editor Kim Sloan, examine White and his techniques. The John White that emerges in this catalogue is a complicated, interesting, and somewhat enigmatic figure. Using new evidence and reevaluating older evidence, Sloan concludes that White “…was a well-educated, well-connected and an accomplished artist.” (33) In exploring her understanding of White, Sloan leads readers through the intricacies of gentlemanly art in the late sixteenth century.

The other essays in the catalogue examine the reception of White’s drawings in Europe. Joyce Chaplin’s contribution on John White’s watercolors as theatre and propaganda rightly notes that English colonists are completely absent from the drawings. White, Chaplin writes, “presented the Indians as if they were performing for an audience.” (58) These theatrical drawings of Indians and their surroundings was a way for White to communicate the fecundity of American land and people to English observers. Christian Feest’s piece examines White’s watercolors in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth-century ethnographic drawing, including those by Hans Staden and Jacque Le Moyne de Morgues. By giving White a thoroughly European context, Feest is able to show that White’s complete scenes of coastal Algonkian life are remarkable and unique. Ute Kuhlemann’s concluding piece follows John White’s watercolors through their second incarnation in Theodor de Bry’s copper engravings accompanying Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). “These prized volumes,” Kuhlemann writes, “were given highly individualized treatment in the arrangement, display, and colouring of de Bry’s engravings, which were amended according to personal taste and utilized for individual purposes.” (83) Though marketability, rather than accuracy in color and detail, was de Bry’s goal, Europeans still learned much from the engravings.

As Sloan notes in her introduction, some of the essays do provide contradictory interpretations of White and his drawings (8). The overall result, though, is a fascinating set of essays addressing the latest scholarly interpretations of White and the Roanoke venture. The goal of the catalogue is to induce readers to rethink White and his contributions, and in this the volume succeeds admirably. Sloan’s work is an able addition to, and dare one suggest, even a replacement for David Beers Quinn and Paul Hulton’s 1964 two-volume catalogue of the drawings, and an essential addition to libraries.

--Rebecca A. Goetz in the Journal of Southern History, vol. 74, no. 3 (August 2008), 707-709.

Franklin had at least five successful careers: writer, businessman, scientist, civic leader, international statesman. Biographers could probably write book length accounts on each of them as if they were separate people. I’ve been looking for something about Franklin the scientist.

I just finished The First Scientific American by Harvard professor Joyce Chaplin. It billed itself as a biography that uniquely examined his science career. Most Franklin bios run the course I laid out in the middle of my last blog, so I was hoping Chaplin’s book would dwell on his scientific period. It didn’t. At first. The first seven chapters, although enjoyable to a Franklinophile like myself, followed the normal outline of most Franklin biographies.

In one of the last chapters, however, Chaplin managed to tie up many little threads she had been quietly weaving into the narrative all along. She accomplished it by presenting Franklin nearing the end of his life and longing for time to answer questions he had posed years earlier; to finish projects he started to research but got called away; to investigate theories he had toyed with.

Americans think of him as a Founding Father. Chaplin maintained that he was first and foremost a scientist. He was on par with Newton among the greats, but all his other “successful distractions” pulled him away from accomplishing even more. He never completely stopped doing science, but it was limited to times when it was convenient. His charting of the gulf stream, for instance, and the world’s first deep sea temperature studies were done while en route to handling pesky international conflicts like the American Revolution.

There’s even a passage Chaplin quotes from 1782, where Franklin — steeped in thoughts of fluid dynamics, the circulation of heat, and the choppy landscape of England — imagines the earth’s interior to be a dense liquid churning about an iron core with the surface “swimming in or on that liquid.” The surface, therefore, was a “shell, capable of being broken and disordered.” It was just conjecture “given loose to imagination,” for which Franklin regretted observation was “out of my power.” But what he wrote is a fair description of modern plate tectonics — almost 150 years before Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory was laughed at, and almost 200 years before it became established fact.

How can you not be amazed by this guy when book after book reveals something new like that?

Find more of my reviews at Mostly NF.

2/16/23