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Food of paradise: Tahitian breadfruit and the autocritique of European consumption
Review
Endeavour
Vol.28 No.2 June 2004
Food of paradise: Tahitian breadfruit and the autocritique of European consumption Emma Spary and Paul White Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge, UK CB3 2RH
In many ways, Tahiti was central to European colonialism, for it was there that European visitors forged a model of primitive nature that served as a comparison to, and sometimes critique of, European civilization. Tahiti was also the place from which a unique plant, the breadfruit, was brought to European colonies and to England and France during the late 18th century, at the behest of naturalists. With the breadfruit travelled contrasting perceptions of the Tahitian way of life. The autocritique of European lifestyles and the naturalization of the breadfruit are closely intertwined. The breadfruit indeed became a radical food of the end of the 18th century. As part of his voyage circumnavigating the globe, the French explorer Louis de Bougainville visited a small island in the south Pacific in 1768, remarkable for its ‘many prospects and beautiful landscapes, covered with the richest productions of nature, in that beautiful disorder which it was never in the power of art to imitate’. Bougainville named the island New Cythera after the Aegean island Kithira, where Aphrodite, it is claimed, rose from the sea. The reputation that Tahiti thereby acquired as a fertile paradise and island of love has never been entirely lost. ‘One would think oneself,’ he marvelled, ‘in the Elysian fields’ [1]. Although the British captain Wallis had been the first European to make landfall on the island, it was Bougainville, together with his companions on shipboard, who helped to forge a lasting picture of the Tahitians as noble savages, living a harmonious pastoral lifestyle [2]. Models of simple, more natural societies, drawn from the classics, were often used to critique contemporary European societies, particularly for their dependency on a copious variety of exotic and luxurious goods. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had included material from travel accounts in his widely-read Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ine´galite´ parmi les hommes (1755), which glorified natural man as a happy, healthy and fearless creature, able to be indolent because nature supplied his needs. Earlier, in a controversial Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), Rousseau had launched a thorough-going critique of the luxurious lifestyle of 18th-century urban consumers, tying political despotism Corresponding author: Paul White ([email protected]).
and physical weakness to the spiralling consumption of luxuries, including the luxury diet of well-to-do Europeans with its burden of spices and imported liqueurs. Rousseau’s dichotomy between savage and civilized, simple and luxurious, was widely adopted by European readers, such as Bougainville’s travel companion, the naturalist Philibert Commerson. Describing the Tahitians in the Parisian newspaper Le Mercure, Commerson portrayed a perfect polity, a nation given to peaceful cohabitation not war (this was just a few years after the end of the Seven Years’ War), a people whose dealings with one another were characterized by total sincerity and trust, with apparently no private property even over their own bodies. Indeed, the best-known 18th-century narratives about the Tahitians concerned their apparent sexual license, the subject of many moralizing treatises both for and against it [3]. Europeans who had visited the island, and who wrote detailed accounts of their sexual exploits and those of their shipmates while there, returned to a barrage of satire and envy. But the exclusive focus on Tahiti as an island of free love tends to obscure its wider significance for contemporaries as a site at which many of the problems and preoccupations of modern 18th-century life were resolved. It formed the imaginary counterweight to the European society of consumption, manners and crime. The Tahitians as consumers were characterized by Bougainville and Commerson as frugal and wise, more interested in exchanging specimens and cultivatory advice than in becoming avid and shallow after the European model [4]. A superior staple Tahiti was enrolled in support of idealizations of the primitive life because of the conduct of its inhabitants and their physical beauty, but also as proof of the beneficent wisdom of Nature, a place where food was available to man without the need to work – a reification, for some, of the Garden of Eden. At the centre of the ideal society was an ideal food: breadfruit (Fig. 1). This staple of the Tahitians was actively pursued by European naturalists and ministers over four decades. In 1775, the British West India merchant and botanist John Ellis published a tract on the advantages of bringing the breadfruit to the West Indian colonies for naturalisation. Speaking from the perspective of a society whose staple food was wheaten
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Fig. 1. Tahitian landscape with breadfruit tree. Reproduced, with permission, from [8].
bread, Ellis marvelled that Tahitians had no grains, pulses or legumes. Two breadfruit trees could support a man throughout the year and one acre of land so occupied gave more nourishment than two acres of any other. Baked in an oven until the rind was black, the inside of the breadfruit, which was soft and white like the inside of new baked bread, even lacking in any seeds or stones, could then be eaten. It was in season for eight months of the year. In effect, the breadfruit was a plant ‘bestowed by providence without the common tax of annual labor’ [5]. The regulation of European consumption according to the annual cycle of the seasons, the Christian account of food as the product of toil and labour, the fundamental political and economic importance of bread for Europeans were here all open to question. Projects to introduce the breadfruit to European cultivation, both metropolitan and colonial, came at a critical juncture. In France, the politics of the grain and bread trades was particularly contested in the 1760s [6]. In European colonies, merchants supplied the white colonists with wheat flour grown in Europe at enormous cost, as part of a long-standing moral contract of early-modern government in which rulers were obliged first and foremost to see to the subsistence needs of the most far-flung of their subjects. Such dependency on European staples is evident in the protests of colonists to the French government during interruptions to supplies in wartime. To present the breadfruit as a possible alternative to wheaten bread was to make a political statement both about bread as the product of an artificial lifestyle, and about Nature as sufficiently provident for the frugal person. As the chorus of voices opposing luxury as the chief cause of the political and physical ills of Europeans rose, www.sciencedirect.com
all enterprises for the introduction and acclimatization of new exotic species were potentially tarred with the same brush, however; they might be viewed with the same suspicion as exotic plants imported or grown as rare luxuries, foods, medicaments or spices. Botanists and agronomists needed an exotic good which was also morally legitimate, and in the breadfruit they found such a one. Since the late 17th century, numerous polemical texts, such as Fe´ne´lon’s Les Avantures de Te´le´maque (1699), written to educate the French Dauphin, had included descriptions of the primitive or savage diet which limited it to the roots and fruits supplied by Nature. The Tahitian people’s status as noble savages was affirmed by ascribing central dietary status to the breadfruit, a staple which came straight from the hand of a beneficent Nature. Ellis was neither the first nor the last European commentator to note the beneficent qualities of the breadfruit – from the late-17th-century travel accounts of Dampier onwards, European voyagers and naturalists had reiterated its marvellous qualities. But his detailed account of the breadfruit gave strict instructions for the packaging and transport of the plants, akin to the advice proffered by botanists on the transport of the valuable clove and nutmeg trees to the islands (Fig. 2). A year after its publication in English, his treatise had appeared in French as well. The New World colonies offered a location for European experimentation upon plants collected from distant parts of the world for their useful properties. In the 18th century, such programmes of plant acquisition were pursued by European botanists and governments in formal programmes, which continued the more casual introductions of previous centuries [7].
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Fig. 2. Breadfruit and wired case. Reproduced from [5].
But the status of the breadfruit – curious luxury, providential staple, or humble slave food – required clarification. Many previous introductions of exotic plants, such as pineapples, had largely served the purposes of curiosity. The botanical improvers had wider ambitions. Ellis’s account of the breadfruit was relatively limited in scope, principally designed to draw it to the attention of European planters who could use it as a cheap food for their slaves. Others sought to break the dependence of their societies upon the limited range of foodstuffs produced
Fig. 3. Banks meets the Tahitians. Reproduced, with permission, from [2]. www.sciencedirect.com
within Europe itself and render breadfruit a staple for all colonists or even Europeans in warm climates. The illustration of the breadfruit that accompanied Ellis’s treatise had a famous source. It was probably based on a drawing made on the voyage of H.M.S. Endeavour, captained by James Cook. Another agronomically minded botanist was on board: Joseph Banks (Fig. 3). Thanks to his intimacy with the Tahitians and his sexually charged encounters with the island’s women, Banks found himself to be the butt of an extended series of jokes on his return
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from the voyage in 1769. His sexual exploits on Tahiti, described with some wit in the published account of the voyage by his travelling companion John Hawksworth, formed the basis of a substantial comical literature in the 1770s [8]. Banks worked hard to distance himself from these sorts of criticisms, however. He settled down to a respectable marriage, and cultivated the friendship of ‘farmer George’ III. Within several years of his return from Cook’s voyage, Banks became the unofficial botanical advisor to the King, and accompanied him on Saturday morning walks around the royal garden at Kew [9]. Amidst concerns about the food supply of the British Caribbean colonies in the wake of the disruptions caused by the American War and a series of droughts and hurricanes during the 1780s, West Indian planters and merchants offered a gold medal and cash prize for anyone able to supply them with breadfruit plants. The programme outlined by Ellis, and supported by the West Indian colonists, became a pet project of Banks [10]. By now, Banks had become President of the Royal Society, with enormous resources and authority at his disposal. At Kew, he had embarked upon a series of ambitious agricultural projects, transforming the garden into Britain’s centre of global botanical exchange, animal breeding and acclimatization [11]. The plan to transplant the breadfruit to the West Indies was one of the most ambitious and sensational of these schemes, perhaps the ultimate extension of the projects for food substitutes upon which European naturalists were engaged throughout the 18th century. The food of natural man, cohabiting in peaceful prelapsarian fruitfulness, was to become the ration of Europe’s slave labourers on islands half a world away. Breadfruit on the Bounty The history of the failed British Bounty voyage is known to most, if the historical significance of its cargo of breadfruit is not. Banks personally worked on the alterations of the Bethia, the ship which, later renamed the Bounty, became a floating breadfruit plantation. Plant transplantation enterprises of this sort, while not uncommon, were costly and complex affairs, analogous to many large-scale research technologies of today. Banks converted the great cabin of the 215-tonne vessel into a plant nursery with two large skylights and three scuttles for air on each
Fig. 4. Plan of H.M.S. Bounty. Reproduced from [12]. www.sciencedirect.com
side (Fig. 4). To protect delicate seedlings from fluctuating climatic conditions, salt-laden breezes and generalized water shortages on voyages that lasted many months, a false floor was cut in the main deck, full of holes to contain pots. The deck itself was covered with lead, to allow excess fresh water to run off into fixed pipes draining into tubs, for reuse. To command the ship, Banks chose William Bligh, formerly master of the Resolution, one of the vessels accompanying the Endeavour to Tahiti (Fig. 5). More recently, he had served in the merchant navy, transporting goods between England and the West Indies. Banks also recommended David Nelson, who had been a gardener and botanist on Cook’s last voyage. He wrote detailed instructions for Nelson on the care and cultivation of the precious cargo, and fixed the terms of Nelson’s contract, so that the survival of each breadfruit plant would entail a financial reward. The voyage’s mission was to procure breadfruit from Tahiti, then proceed to the West Indies to deposit half the specimens at the leading British colonial botanical garden on the island of St. Vincent, and next to Jamaica. The remainder were to be deposited at Kew. Bligh’s notes and narrative suggest that he viewed the botanical mission of the ship as lending importance to the voyage, and as placing him in a position similar to other renowned scientific travellers of the period. Bligh quoted his famous predecessor, James Cook, on the virtues of breadfruit for civilization: ‘If a man plants ten of them in his life-time, which he may do in about an hour, he will as completely fulfil his duty to his own and future generations as the native of our less temperate climate can do by ploughing in the cold winter, and reaping in the summer’s heat, as often as these seasons return’ [12]. The process of obtaining the breadfruit was similar to the bartering practices employed in similar encounters on long-distance exploratory voyages, but Bligh was under orders to conceal the intensity of British desire for this plant in particular from the Tahitians. The trade was to be conducted on false premises: it was no less than an attempt to cheat the noble savage out of the value that Europeans ascribed to the plant. Accordingly Bligh presented gifts to the islanders’ ‘chief ’, Tinah, and asked him whether he would not make a return offering in kind to the English monarch. The conversation was carefully brought around to the question of breadfruit: ‘Seizing an opportunity, which had every appearance of being undesigned and accidental, I told him the bread-fruit trees were what King George would like’ [13]. After spending over five months on the Island – three and a half months longer than any previous voyage – the Bounty left Tahiti on 4 April 1789, laden with nearly 800 containers. The remodelling of the Bounty placed the crew under considerable constraints of space. To accommodate the breadfruit, the crew’s living quarters were moved forward and down, and even the captain and master were squeezed into tiny cabins of seven by eight feet. All told, 33 men slept, cooked and rested in a space 22 £ 36 feet, with a headroom of five and a half feet [14]. Adding to the burden of demands, precious shipboard resources such as water were sacrificed for the care of the plants.
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Fig. 5. William Bligh. Reproduced from [12].
The famous mutiny occurred less than four weeks later, taking Bligh completely by surprise. His log book describes the ship in perfect order, well stored and prepared for any natural calamity, every person healthy, and plants successfully preserved and flourishing. Bligh attributed the crew’s treachery to the lure of Paradise: ‘they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on one of the finest islands in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived’ [15]. In fact, he ascribed the mutiny to the breadfruit itself: the irresistible temptation of food obtained without the Scriptural ‘sweat of man’s brow’. That his crew did not share this perception is attested to by the mutineers’ first act on taking control of the vessel: to throw the breadfruit plants overboard. Bligh returned to England in March 1790. He was immediately court-martialed, though subsequently exonerated, promoted to the rank of captain, and awarded 500 guineas by the West Indian planters. Banks’ confidence in Bligh and in the breadfruit scheme remained undaunted. Just over a year later, a new expedition was mounted with Bligh in command. On this occasion he was successful, arriving in the West Indies on H.M.S. Providence at the end of 1792, shortly after the outbreak of war with France [16]. www.sciencedirect.com
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The happiness of mankind? National rivalry had been a crucial part of the breadfruit quest from the beginning. The British were not the only European colonial nation to seek to introduce the breadfruit to the West Indies. Because of the Bounty mutiny, the French pipped Bligh to the post. As in Britain, French botanists and ministers worked together to prepare the d’Entrecasteaux expedition of 1791. Ostensibly, this voyage was to travel in search of a lost expedition headed by Lape´rouse, but on board was Felix Lahaye, a young gardener trained by Andre´ Thouin, head gardener to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the leading centre for French natural history. Thouin exhorted Lahaye to employ all the means in his power to procure himself the greatest number that he can take away of saplings of the best variety of the Breadfruit Tree and to do the impossible by cultivating them carefully to transport them alive to the Isle de France [Mauritius] or other French or European colonies which he meets en route, and finally to bring them back to Europe. And he continued: ‘If [Lahaye] succeeds in enriching us with this tree, he will make the most useful of all presents to his fatherland, and by himself he will have done more for the happiness of mankind than all the naturalists of the world’ [17]. Lahaye was successful in bringing back plants of the breadfruit, which were flourishing in a botanical garden on Martinique a year before the return of the Providence. The breadfruit had always possessed far more radical significance for French botanists and ministers than for the British. It was envisaged as a domestic staple as well as a colonial good, and as a food for Europeans as much as for slaves of African origin. During the French Revolution, the breadfruit was taken to symbolize the possibility of naturalizing the idealized Tahitian society in Revolutionary France. By implication, the shortcomings of Nature, in her lack of liberality towards Northern Europeans, were rectified through human endeavour. The gifts that had been supplied to other nations could be appropriated by France and other European nation-states thanks to the skills marshalled by botanically informed cultivators. A report on the d’Entrecasteaux expedition made by the Parisian Society of Natural History to the French government described the breadfruit as able to ‘replace all the plants necessary for life’. The breadfruit thus figured prominently in botanists’ promises to be able to resolve political problems of famine and scarcity by naturalizing new staples that would serve as alternatives to wheat. Breadfruit experiments continued throughout the Revolution: in late 1795, one newspaper reported attempts to naturalize the plant in the South of France. But unlike the British, French naturalists sought out the seeded form of the breadfruit tree, holding that cultivation would produce an infertile form within a short time. Despite such extensive interest, and despite the private and governmental effort lavished upon the race to naturalize the breadfruit in European colonies, in the wake of the French Revolution the breadfruit failed to become the universal staple envisioned by the French in particular. Like yams, taro and sweet potato, it did become a part of the diet of the black inhabitants of the West Indies, a ‘poor’ food, despised by Europeans. Like its ‘savage’ consumers,
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the breadfruit declined in status as it travelled from Tahiti to St Vincent. If its acquisition was prompted by imperialist agendas in which natural productions like nutmeg and pepper were seen to possess growing commercial and economic importance in the second half of the 18th century, it failed to fulfil them, and indeed no staple crop naturalized by Europeans would ever yield the financial benefits or possess the political importance of the spice monopolies. Transplantation and colonial cultivation of exotics continued through the 19th century, but such colonial produce simultaneously declined in importance as part of national and international trade.
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7 8
9
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References 1 Bougainville, L.A. de (1772) A Voyage Round the World, (Forster, J.R., trans.), J. Nourse, 244 – 255 2 Smith, B. (1985) European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768– 1850, (2nd edn), Yale University Press 3 For example, Diderot, D. (1772) Supple´ment au Voyage de Bougainville 4 Taillemite, E. (1978) Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde 1766 –1769. Journaux de Navigation, (2 vols) Imprimerie Nationale, I: 326 – 327 and II: 506– 508 5 Ellis, J. (1775) A Description of the Mangostan and the Bread-fruit: the
12 13 14 15 16 17
First, Esteemed One of the most Delicious; the Other, the Most Useful of all the Fruits of the East Indies, Edward and Charles Dilly, 41, Bouton, C.A. (1993) The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Re´gime French Society, Pennsylvania State University Press Crosby, A.W. Jr (1972) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Greenwood Publishing Company Bewell, A. (1996) On the Banks of the South Sea. In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Miller, D.P. and Reill, P.H., eds), Cambridge University Press, 173 – 191 Gascoigne, J. (1994) Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture, Cambridge University Press Mackay, D. (1974) Banks Bligh and breadfruit. The New Zealand Journal of History 8, 61 – 77 Drayton, R. (2000) Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, Yale University Press Bligh, W. (1792) A Voyage to the South Seas, George Nicol, 12 Bligh (1792) 73 Denning, G. (1992) Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge University Press Bligh (1792) 161 – 162 Oliver, D. (1988) Return to Tahiti: Bligh’s Second Breadfruit Voyage, University of Hawaii Press Spary, E.C. (2000) Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 128 – 130
Endeavour the quarterly magazine for the history and philosophy of science You can access Endeavour online either through your BioMedNet Reviews subscription or via ScienceDirect, where you’ll find a collection of beautifully illustrated articles on the history of science, book reviews and editorial comment. Featuring Resisting Insects: The Evolution of Scientific Approaches to the Chemical Control of Insect Pests, 1914–1960 by J. Ceccatti The City as a Context of Scientific Activity: Creating the Mediziner-Viertel in the fin-de-sie`cle Vienna by M. Rentetzi Sharing the Winnings: the 1946 Nobel Prize for Chemistry by K. Manchester ‘I Got Rhythm’: Gershwin and Birth Control in the 1930s by P. Viterbo Astronomers against Newton by R. Higgitt Looking at J.B.S. Haldane by P. Fara Mary Boole and Curve Stitching by S. Innes and coming soon Sverre Petterssen and the Contentious (and Momentous) Weather Forecasts for D-Day, 6 June 1944 by J.R. Fleming Food of Paradise: Tahitian breadfruit and the Autocritique of European Consumption by P. White and E.C. Spary Two Approaches to Etiology: The Debate Over Smoking and Lung Cancer in the 1950s by M. Parascandola Learning from Education to Communicate Science as a Good Story by A. Negrete and C. Lartigue The Traffic and Display of Body Parts in the Early-19th Century by S. Alberti and S. Chaplin The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Group Selection by M. Borrello The Prehistory of the Periodic Table by D. Rouvray The Future of Electricity in 1892 by G.J.N. Gooday The First Personal Computer by J. November Sherlock Holmes the Scientist by L. Snyder and much, much more . . . Locate Endeavour in the BioMedNet Reviews collection (http://reviews.bmn.com) or on ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) www.sciencedirect.com
Endeavour
Vol.28 No.2 June 2004
Food of paradise: Tahitian breadfruit and the autocritique of European consumption Emma Spary and Paul White Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge, UK CB3 2RH
In many ways, Tahiti was central to European colonialism, for it was there that European visitors forged a model of primitive nature that served as a comparison to, and sometimes critique of, European civilization. Tahiti was also the place from which a unique plant, the breadfruit, was brought to European colonies and to England and France during the late 18th century, at the behest of naturalists. With the breadfruit travelled contrasting perceptions of the Tahitian way of life. The autocritique of European lifestyles and the naturalization of the breadfruit are closely intertwined. The breadfruit indeed became a radical food of the end of the 18th century. As part of his voyage circumnavigating the globe, the French explorer Louis de Bougainville visited a small island in the south Pacific in 1768, remarkable for its ‘many prospects and beautiful landscapes, covered with the richest productions of nature, in that beautiful disorder which it was never in the power of art to imitate’. Bougainville named the island New Cythera after the Aegean island Kithira, where Aphrodite, it is claimed, rose from the sea. The reputation that Tahiti thereby acquired as a fertile paradise and island of love has never been entirely lost. ‘One would think oneself,’ he marvelled, ‘in the Elysian fields’ [1]. Although the British captain Wallis had been the first European to make landfall on the island, it was Bougainville, together with his companions on shipboard, who helped to forge a lasting picture of the Tahitians as noble savages, living a harmonious pastoral lifestyle [2]. Models of simple, more natural societies, drawn from the classics, were often used to critique contemporary European societies, particularly for their dependency on a copious variety of exotic and luxurious goods. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had included material from travel accounts in his widely-read Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ine´galite´ parmi les hommes (1755), which glorified natural man as a happy, healthy and fearless creature, able to be indolent because nature supplied his needs. Earlier, in a controversial Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), Rousseau had launched a thorough-going critique of the luxurious lifestyle of 18th-century urban consumers, tying political despotism Corresponding author: Paul White ([email protected]).
and physical weakness to the spiralling consumption of luxuries, including the luxury diet of well-to-do Europeans with its burden of spices and imported liqueurs. Rousseau’s dichotomy between savage and civilized, simple and luxurious, was widely adopted by European readers, such as Bougainville’s travel companion, the naturalist Philibert Commerson. Describing the Tahitians in the Parisian newspaper Le Mercure, Commerson portrayed a perfect polity, a nation given to peaceful cohabitation not war (this was just a few years after the end of the Seven Years’ War), a people whose dealings with one another were characterized by total sincerity and trust, with apparently no private property even over their own bodies. Indeed, the best-known 18th-century narratives about the Tahitians concerned their apparent sexual license, the subject of many moralizing treatises both for and against it [3]. Europeans who had visited the island, and who wrote detailed accounts of their sexual exploits and those of their shipmates while there, returned to a barrage of satire and envy. But the exclusive focus on Tahiti as an island of free love tends to obscure its wider significance for contemporaries as a site at which many of the problems and preoccupations of modern 18th-century life were resolved. It formed the imaginary counterweight to the European society of consumption, manners and crime. The Tahitians as consumers were characterized by Bougainville and Commerson as frugal and wise, more interested in exchanging specimens and cultivatory advice than in becoming avid and shallow after the European model [4]. A superior staple Tahiti was enrolled in support of idealizations of the primitive life because of the conduct of its inhabitants and their physical beauty, but also as proof of the beneficent wisdom of Nature, a place where food was available to man without the need to work – a reification, for some, of the Garden of Eden. At the centre of the ideal society was an ideal food: breadfruit (Fig. 1). This staple of the Tahitians was actively pursued by European naturalists and ministers over four decades. In 1775, the British West India merchant and botanist John Ellis published a tract on the advantages of bringing the breadfruit to the West Indian colonies for naturalisation. Speaking from the perspective of a society whose staple food was wheaten
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.01.019
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Fig. 1. Tahitian landscape with breadfruit tree. Reproduced, with permission, from [8].
bread, Ellis marvelled that Tahitians had no grains, pulses or legumes. Two breadfruit trees could support a man throughout the year and one acre of land so occupied gave more nourishment than two acres of any other. Baked in an oven until the rind was black, the inside of the breadfruit, which was soft and white like the inside of new baked bread, even lacking in any seeds or stones, could then be eaten. It was in season for eight months of the year. In effect, the breadfruit was a plant ‘bestowed by providence without the common tax of annual labor’ [5]. The regulation of European consumption according to the annual cycle of the seasons, the Christian account of food as the product of toil and labour, the fundamental political and economic importance of bread for Europeans were here all open to question. Projects to introduce the breadfruit to European cultivation, both metropolitan and colonial, came at a critical juncture. In France, the politics of the grain and bread trades was particularly contested in the 1760s [6]. In European colonies, merchants supplied the white colonists with wheat flour grown in Europe at enormous cost, as part of a long-standing moral contract of early-modern government in which rulers were obliged first and foremost to see to the subsistence needs of the most far-flung of their subjects. Such dependency on European staples is evident in the protests of colonists to the French government during interruptions to supplies in wartime. To present the breadfruit as a possible alternative to wheaten bread was to make a political statement both about bread as the product of an artificial lifestyle, and about Nature as sufficiently provident for the frugal person. As the chorus of voices opposing luxury as the chief cause of the political and physical ills of Europeans rose, www.sciencedirect.com
all enterprises for the introduction and acclimatization of new exotic species were potentially tarred with the same brush, however; they might be viewed with the same suspicion as exotic plants imported or grown as rare luxuries, foods, medicaments or spices. Botanists and agronomists needed an exotic good which was also morally legitimate, and in the breadfruit they found such a one. Since the late 17th century, numerous polemical texts, such as Fe´ne´lon’s Les Avantures de Te´le´maque (1699), written to educate the French Dauphin, had included descriptions of the primitive or savage diet which limited it to the roots and fruits supplied by Nature. The Tahitian people’s status as noble savages was affirmed by ascribing central dietary status to the breadfruit, a staple which came straight from the hand of a beneficent Nature. Ellis was neither the first nor the last European commentator to note the beneficent qualities of the breadfruit – from the late-17th-century travel accounts of Dampier onwards, European voyagers and naturalists had reiterated its marvellous qualities. But his detailed account of the breadfruit gave strict instructions for the packaging and transport of the plants, akin to the advice proffered by botanists on the transport of the valuable clove and nutmeg trees to the islands (Fig. 2). A year after its publication in English, his treatise had appeared in French as well. The New World colonies offered a location for European experimentation upon plants collected from distant parts of the world for their useful properties. In the 18th century, such programmes of plant acquisition were pursued by European botanists and governments in formal programmes, which continued the more casual introductions of previous centuries [7].
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Fig. 2. Breadfruit and wired case. Reproduced from [5].
But the status of the breadfruit – curious luxury, providential staple, or humble slave food – required clarification. Many previous introductions of exotic plants, such as pineapples, had largely served the purposes of curiosity. The botanical improvers had wider ambitions. Ellis’s account of the breadfruit was relatively limited in scope, principally designed to draw it to the attention of European planters who could use it as a cheap food for their slaves. Others sought to break the dependence of their societies upon the limited range of foodstuffs produced
Fig. 3. Banks meets the Tahitians. Reproduced, with permission, from [2]. www.sciencedirect.com
within Europe itself and render breadfruit a staple for all colonists or even Europeans in warm climates. The illustration of the breadfruit that accompanied Ellis’s treatise had a famous source. It was probably based on a drawing made on the voyage of H.M.S. Endeavour, captained by James Cook. Another agronomically minded botanist was on board: Joseph Banks (Fig. 3). Thanks to his intimacy with the Tahitians and his sexually charged encounters with the island’s women, Banks found himself to be the butt of an extended series of jokes on his return
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from the voyage in 1769. His sexual exploits on Tahiti, described with some wit in the published account of the voyage by his travelling companion John Hawksworth, formed the basis of a substantial comical literature in the 1770s [8]. Banks worked hard to distance himself from these sorts of criticisms, however. He settled down to a respectable marriage, and cultivated the friendship of ‘farmer George’ III. Within several years of his return from Cook’s voyage, Banks became the unofficial botanical advisor to the King, and accompanied him on Saturday morning walks around the royal garden at Kew [9]. Amidst concerns about the food supply of the British Caribbean colonies in the wake of the disruptions caused by the American War and a series of droughts and hurricanes during the 1780s, West Indian planters and merchants offered a gold medal and cash prize for anyone able to supply them with breadfruit plants. The programme outlined by Ellis, and supported by the West Indian colonists, became a pet project of Banks [10]. By now, Banks had become President of the Royal Society, with enormous resources and authority at his disposal. At Kew, he had embarked upon a series of ambitious agricultural projects, transforming the garden into Britain’s centre of global botanical exchange, animal breeding and acclimatization [11]. The plan to transplant the breadfruit to the West Indies was one of the most ambitious and sensational of these schemes, perhaps the ultimate extension of the projects for food substitutes upon which European naturalists were engaged throughout the 18th century. The food of natural man, cohabiting in peaceful prelapsarian fruitfulness, was to become the ration of Europe’s slave labourers on islands half a world away. Breadfruit on the Bounty The history of the failed British Bounty voyage is known to most, if the historical significance of its cargo of breadfruit is not. Banks personally worked on the alterations of the Bethia, the ship which, later renamed the Bounty, became a floating breadfruit plantation. Plant transplantation enterprises of this sort, while not uncommon, were costly and complex affairs, analogous to many large-scale research technologies of today. Banks converted the great cabin of the 215-tonne vessel into a plant nursery with two large skylights and three scuttles for air on each
Fig. 4. Plan of H.M.S. Bounty. Reproduced from [12]. www.sciencedirect.com
side (Fig. 4). To protect delicate seedlings from fluctuating climatic conditions, salt-laden breezes and generalized water shortages on voyages that lasted many months, a false floor was cut in the main deck, full of holes to contain pots. The deck itself was covered with lead, to allow excess fresh water to run off into fixed pipes draining into tubs, for reuse. To command the ship, Banks chose William Bligh, formerly master of the Resolution, one of the vessels accompanying the Endeavour to Tahiti (Fig. 5). More recently, he had served in the merchant navy, transporting goods between England and the West Indies. Banks also recommended David Nelson, who had been a gardener and botanist on Cook’s last voyage. He wrote detailed instructions for Nelson on the care and cultivation of the precious cargo, and fixed the terms of Nelson’s contract, so that the survival of each breadfruit plant would entail a financial reward. The voyage’s mission was to procure breadfruit from Tahiti, then proceed to the West Indies to deposit half the specimens at the leading British colonial botanical garden on the island of St. Vincent, and next to Jamaica. The remainder were to be deposited at Kew. Bligh’s notes and narrative suggest that he viewed the botanical mission of the ship as lending importance to the voyage, and as placing him in a position similar to other renowned scientific travellers of the period. Bligh quoted his famous predecessor, James Cook, on the virtues of breadfruit for civilization: ‘If a man plants ten of them in his life-time, which he may do in about an hour, he will as completely fulfil his duty to his own and future generations as the native of our less temperate climate can do by ploughing in the cold winter, and reaping in the summer’s heat, as often as these seasons return’ [12]. The process of obtaining the breadfruit was similar to the bartering practices employed in similar encounters on long-distance exploratory voyages, but Bligh was under orders to conceal the intensity of British desire for this plant in particular from the Tahitians. The trade was to be conducted on false premises: it was no less than an attempt to cheat the noble savage out of the value that Europeans ascribed to the plant. Accordingly Bligh presented gifts to the islanders’ ‘chief ’, Tinah, and asked him whether he would not make a return offering in kind to the English monarch. The conversation was carefully brought around to the question of breadfruit: ‘Seizing an opportunity, which had every appearance of being undesigned and accidental, I told him the bread-fruit trees were what King George would like’ [13]. After spending over five months on the Island – three and a half months longer than any previous voyage – the Bounty left Tahiti on 4 April 1789, laden with nearly 800 containers. The remodelling of the Bounty placed the crew under considerable constraints of space. To accommodate the breadfruit, the crew’s living quarters were moved forward and down, and even the captain and master were squeezed into tiny cabins of seven by eight feet. All told, 33 men slept, cooked and rested in a space 22 £ 36 feet, with a headroom of five and a half feet [14]. Adding to the burden of demands, precious shipboard resources such as water were sacrificed for the care of the plants.
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Fig. 5. William Bligh. Reproduced from [12].
The famous mutiny occurred less than four weeks later, taking Bligh completely by surprise. His log book describes the ship in perfect order, well stored and prepared for any natural calamity, every person healthy, and plants successfully preserved and flourishing. Bligh attributed the crew’s treachery to the lure of Paradise: ‘they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on one of the finest islands in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived’ [15]. In fact, he ascribed the mutiny to the breadfruit itself: the irresistible temptation of food obtained without the Scriptural ‘sweat of man’s brow’. That his crew did not share this perception is attested to by the mutineers’ first act on taking control of the vessel: to throw the breadfruit plants overboard. Bligh returned to England in March 1790. He was immediately court-martialed, though subsequently exonerated, promoted to the rank of captain, and awarded 500 guineas by the West Indian planters. Banks’ confidence in Bligh and in the breadfruit scheme remained undaunted. Just over a year later, a new expedition was mounted with Bligh in command. On this occasion he was successful, arriving in the West Indies on H.M.S. Providence at the end of 1792, shortly after the outbreak of war with France [16]. www.sciencedirect.com
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The happiness of mankind? National rivalry had been a crucial part of the breadfruit quest from the beginning. The British were not the only European colonial nation to seek to introduce the breadfruit to the West Indies. Because of the Bounty mutiny, the French pipped Bligh to the post. As in Britain, French botanists and ministers worked together to prepare the d’Entrecasteaux expedition of 1791. Ostensibly, this voyage was to travel in search of a lost expedition headed by Lape´rouse, but on board was Felix Lahaye, a young gardener trained by Andre´ Thouin, head gardener to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the leading centre for French natural history. Thouin exhorted Lahaye to employ all the means in his power to procure himself the greatest number that he can take away of saplings of the best variety of the Breadfruit Tree and to do the impossible by cultivating them carefully to transport them alive to the Isle de France [Mauritius] or other French or European colonies which he meets en route, and finally to bring them back to Europe. And he continued: ‘If [Lahaye] succeeds in enriching us with this tree, he will make the most useful of all presents to his fatherland, and by himself he will have done more for the happiness of mankind than all the naturalists of the world’ [17]. Lahaye was successful in bringing back plants of the breadfruit, which were flourishing in a botanical garden on Martinique a year before the return of the Providence. The breadfruit had always possessed far more radical significance for French botanists and ministers than for the British. It was envisaged as a domestic staple as well as a colonial good, and as a food for Europeans as much as for slaves of African origin. During the French Revolution, the breadfruit was taken to symbolize the possibility of naturalizing the idealized Tahitian society in Revolutionary France. By implication, the shortcomings of Nature, in her lack of liberality towards Northern Europeans, were rectified through human endeavour. The gifts that had been supplied to other nations could be appropriated by France and other European nation-states thanks to the skills marshalled by botanically informed cultivators. A report on the d’Entrecasteaux expedition made by the Parisian Society of Natural History to the French government described the breadfruit as able to ‘replace all the plants necessary for life’. The breadfruit thus figured prominently in botanists’ promises to be able to resolve political problems of famine and scarcity by naturalizing new staples that would serve as alternatives to wheat. Breadfruit experiments continued throughout the Revolution: in late 1795, one newspaper reported attempts to naturalize the plant in the South of France. But unlike the British, French naturalists sought out the seeded form of the breadfruit tree, holding that cultivation would produce an infertile form within a short time. Despite such extensive interest, and despite the private and governmental effort lavished upon the race to naturalize the breadfruit in European colonies, in the wake of the French Revolution the breadfruit failed to become the universal staple envisioned by the French in particular. Like yams, taro and sweet potato, it did become a part of the diet of the black inhabitants of the West Indies, a ‘poor’ food, despised by Europeans. Like its ‘savage’ consumers,
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the breadfruit declined in status as it travelled from Tahiti to St Vincent. If its acquisition was prompted by imperialist agendas in which natural productions like nutmeg and pepper were seen to possess growing commercial and economic importance in the second half of the 18th century, it failed to fulfil them, and indeed no staple crop naturalized by Europeans would ever yield the financial benefits or possess the political importance of the spice monopolies. Transplantation and colonial cultivation of exotics continued through the 19th century, but such colonial produce simultaneously declined in importance as part of national and international trade.
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References 1 Bougainville, L.A. de (1772) A Voyage Round the World, (Forster, J.R., trans.), J. Nourse, 244 – 255 2 Smith, B. (1985) European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768– 1850, (2nd edn), Yale University Press 3 For example, Diderot, D. (1772) Supple´ment au Voyage de Bougainville 4 Taillemite, E. (1978) Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde 1766 –1769. Journaux de Navigation, (2 vols) Imprimerie Nationale, I: 326 – 327 and II: 506– 508 5 Ellis, J. (1775) A Description of the Mangostan and the Bread-fruit: the
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First, Esteemed One of the most Delicious; the Other, the Most Useful of all the Fruits of the East Indies, Edward and Charles Dilly, 41, Bouton, C.A. (1993) The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Re´gime French Society, Pennsylvania State University Press Crosby, A.W. Jr (1972) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Greenwood Publishing Company Bewell, A. (1996) On the Banks of the South Sea. In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Miller, D.P. and Reill, P.H., eds), Cambridge University Press, 173 – 191 Gascoigne, J. (1994) Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture, Cambridge University Press Mackay, D. (1974) Banks Bligh and breadfruit. The New Zealand Journal of History 8, 61 – 77 Drayton, R. (2000) Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, Yale University Press Bligh, W. (1792) A Voyage to the South Seas, George Nicol, 12 Bligh (1792) 73 Denning, G. (1992) Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge University Press Bligh (1792) 161 – 162 Oliver, D. (1988) Return to Tahiti: Bligh’s Second Breadfruit Voyage, University of Hawaii Press Spary, E.C. (2000) Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 128 – 130
Endeavour the quarterly magazine for the history and philosophy of science You can access Endeavour online either through your BioMedNet Reviews subscription or via ScienceDirect, where you’ll find a collection of beautifully illustrated articles on the history of science, book reviews and editorial comment. Featuring Resisting Insects: The Evolution of Scientific Approaches to the Chemical Control of Insect Pests, 1914–1960 by J. Ceccatti The City as a Context of Scientific Activity: Creating the Mediziner-Viertel in the fin-de-sie`cle Vienna by M. Rentetzi Sharing the Winnings: the 1946 Nobel Prize for Chemistry by K. Manchester ‘I Got Rhythm’: Gershwin and Birth Control in the 1930s by P. Viterbo Astronomers against Newton by R. Higgitt Looking at J.B.S. Haldane by P. Fara Mary Boole and Curve Stitching by S. Innes and coming soon Sverre Petterssen and the Contentious (and Momentous) Weather Forecasts for D-Day, 6 June 1944 by J.R. Fleming Food of Paradise: Tahitian breadfruit and the Autocritique of European Consumption by P. White and E.C. Spary Two Approaches to Etiology: The Debate Over Smoking and Lung Cancer in the 1950s by M. Parascandola Learning from Education to Communicate Science as a Good Story by A. Negrete and C. Lartigue The Traffic and Display of Body Parts in the Early-19th Century by S. Alberti and S. Chaplin The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Group Selection by M. Borrello The Prehistory of the Periodic Table by D. Rouvray The Future of Electricity in 1892 by G.J.N. Gooday The First Personal Computer by J. November Sherlock Holmes the Scientist by L. Snyder and much, much more . . . Locate Endeavour in the BioMedNet Reviews collection (http://reviews.bmn.com) or on ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) www.sciencedirect.com