Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century 9781526126399

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Empire and mobility: an introduction
Military print culture, knowledge and terrain: knowledge mobility and eighteenth-century military colonialism
A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782)
The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801–3
‘On their own element’: nineteenth-century seamen’s missions and merchant seamen’s mobility
‘Easy chair geography’: the fabrication of an immobile culture of nineteenth-century exploration
Consorting with ‘others’: vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900
Trekking around Upper Burma: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe’s exploration of the frontier districts, 1903
Reading the skies, writing mobility: on the road with a colonial meteorologist
Grounded: the limits of British imperial aeromobility
Afterword: Westward the course of empire takes its way
Index

Citation preview

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General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester

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Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-​disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-​expanding area of scholarship.

Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century

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SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES ed. Andrew S. Thompson GENDERED TRANSACTIONS Indrani Sen

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EXHIBITING THE EMPIRE ed. John McAleer and John M. MacKenzie BANISHED POTENTATES Robert Aldrich MISTRESS OF EVERYTHING ed. Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent BRITAIN AND THE FORMATION OF THE GULF STATES Shohei Sato CULTURES OF DECOLONISATION ed. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle HONG KONG AND BRITISH CULTURE, 1945–​97 Mark Hampton

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Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century Edited by David Lambert and Peter Merriman

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 2638 2 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Vintage World Map, 2015 © Michal Bednarek, bednarek-art.com Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

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To Alex and Tilly To Eiry and Fflur

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C ONT E NT S

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List of figures—viii Notes on contributors—x Acknowledgements—xiv 1 Empire and mobility: an introduction  David Lambert and Peter Merriman

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2 Military print culture, knowledge and terrain: knowledge mobility and eighteenth-​century military colonialism  Huw J. Davies

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3 A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782)  Innes M. Keighren

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4 The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801–​3  Sarah Thomas

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5 ‘On their own element’: nineteenth-​century seamen’s missions and merchant seamen’s mobility  Justine Atkinson

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6 ‘Easy chair geography’: the fabrication of an immobile culture of nineteenth-​century exploration  Natalie Cox

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7 Consorting with ‘others’: vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900  Catharine Coleborne

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8 Trekking around Upper Burma: Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe’s exploration of the frontier districts, 1903  Nuala C. Johnson

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9 Reading the skies, writing mobility: on the road with a colonial meteorologist  Martin Mahony

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10 Grounded: the limits of British imperial aeromobility  Liz Millward

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11 Afterword: Westward the course of empire takes its way  Tim Cresswell

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Index—225 [ vii ]

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F IGUR E S

4.1 Ferdinand Bauer, Trichoglossus haematodus (Rainbow lorikeet), c. 1811, London, watercolour on paper, 33.6 × 50.6 cm; The Natural History Museum, London (© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London) page 74 4.2 Ferdinand Bauer, Thysanotus patersonii (Twining fringe-​lily), 1806–​10, London, watercolour on paper, 52.5 × 35.8 cm; The Natural History Museum, London (© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London) 75 4.3 Ferdinand Bauer, Acanthaluteres brownii (Spiny-​tailed, or Brown’s, leatherjacket), c. 1811, London, watercolour on paper, 33.8 × 50.5 cm; The Natural History Museum, London (© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London) 77 4.4 William Westall, Views on the South Coast of Terra Australis, engraving on paper, 72.4 × 99.8 cm, from Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, London: G. and W. Nicol, 1814, plate XVII (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra) 81 4.5 William Westall, South Coast, Bald Head, Eclipse Island and Seal Island, [1801], pencil on paper, 20.0 × 36.5 cm (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra) 82 4.6 William Westall, Views on the South Coast of Australia, 1801–​2, watercolour on paper, 31.1 × 44.5 cm (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra) 82 4.7 Ferdinand Bauer, Portunus pelagicus (Blue swimming crab), c. 1802, St Vincent’s Gulf, South Australia, pencil on paper, 52.8 × 35.6 cm (By permission of Naturhistorisches Museum, Wien) 84 4.8 William Westall, King George’s [i.e. George] Sound, View from the North-​West, [1801], pencil and wash on paper, 16 × 26.7 cm (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra) 85 6.1 W. D. Cooley, ‘Map of Dr Lacerda’s Route from Tete to Cazembe’, c. 1845 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)) 120–1 6.2 Letter from David Livingstone to the editor of the Athenaeum, 25 November 1856 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)) 123 6.3 ‘Dr Livingstone at Work on his Journal’, from Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, London: Sampson Low, 1872, facing p. 563 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)) 127 6.4 Chair used by Dr Livingstone during his expedition to Lake Nyasa, 1858–​64 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)) 128 8.1 Map of Burma 158

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Figures

8.2 Dendrobium fimbriatum growing on Bauhinia purpurea over Chaung ta Shé, Mogôk (Courtesy of the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin) 164 8.3 Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe sketching at Mandalay, no date (Courtesy of the National Botanic Gardens Dublin) 167 11.1 Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, mural study, US Capitol, 1861/​62 (Image in public domain, available from Architect of the Capitol, Washington, DC, www.aoc.gov/​art/​other-​paintings-​and-​ murals/​westward-​course-​empire-​takes-​its-​way) 219 11.2 Alexander Gardner, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’: Laying Track 600 Miles West of St. Louis, Missouri, 19 October 1867, albumen silver print, 33.2 × 47.6 cm, 84.XM.1027.37; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) 220 11.3 Frances Flora Bond Palmer, Across the Continent –​ Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1868, New York: Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau Street (Photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/​item/​90708413/​) 222

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N OT E S ON CONT RIBU TO RS

Justine Atkinson is a Conjoint Fellow specialising in colonial histories of maritime mobility, in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she was awarded her PhD in history. Her research interests include transnational and frontier histories, and fringe communities as sites of cultural encounters. Her recent work considers the role of women’s networks in supporting colonial seafaring families in Newcastle. Her current research project focuses on nineteenth-​century seafarers’ missions in the British world, with a particular interest in these missions as contested spaces on the colonial frontier and opportunities for expressing ideas of ‘home’ and place within the empire. Catharine Coleborne is Professor and Head of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interest in mobility studies developed while she was based in New Zealand at the University of Waikato. In 2015, she held a CeMoRe (Lancaster University) Visiting Research Fellowship to examine historical understandings of mobility, with her work published in the journals Transfers and Law Text Culture. Her wider research programme covers the histories of mental illness, institutions, medicine, law and health in colonial Australia and New Zealand. Her books include Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–​1914 (Palgrave, 2010); Insanity, Identity and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2015); and Why Talk About Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation (Palgrave, 2019). She is the co-​editor of six books, including (with Diane Kirkby) Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester University Press, 2001, 2009). Her future study of mobilities, Move On: Regulating Mobility in Australia and New Zealand, 1840s–​1905, focuses on the regulation of colonial mobility in Australia and New Zealand through an examination of vagrancy laws. Natalie Cox is a Project Manager in the British government, specialising in digital transformation and change programmes. Her research interests encompass cultures of travel and exploration, histories of cartography and scientific cultures from the Age of Discovery to the present day, and she currently sits on the Council of the Hakluyt [x]

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Notes on Contributors

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Society as the Royal Geographical Society Representative. She is a former AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award holder at the University of Warwick, and her PhD rethought how geographical knowledge was made and developed by examining the work of nineteenth-​century ‘armchair geographers’ and the ways they expanded knowledge about the world without physically exploring it. She held a Huntington Library Research Fellowship where she worked closely on explorer Sir Richard Burton’s personal library. Tim Cresswell is a geographer and poet. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on themes of place and mobility including, most recently, Maxwell Street:  Writing and Thinking Place (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His two collections of poetry, Soil (2013) and Fence (2015), were both published by Penned in the Margins. He co-​ edits the interdisciplinary journal GeoHumanities and is the first Visiting Professor at the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Tim lives and works in Edinburgh, where he is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Huw J. Davies is Reader in Early Modern Military History at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. He teaches international history and strategic studies at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham. His main research interests focus on military knowledge, learning, adaptation and innovation in the eighteenth-​ century British Army. This expands on his work researching the British Army in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and British India. He has published two monographs  –​Wellington’s Wars:  The Making of Military Genius (Yale University Press, 2012)  and Spying for Wellington:  British Military Intelligence during the Peninsular War (Oklahoma University Press, 2018). His third book, A Wandering Army:  British Military Knowledge and Power, 1750–​1850, is forthcoming, also with Yale University Press. Nuala C.  Johnson is Professor of Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research is both historical and contemporary in focus. She has written extensively on nationalism and the politics of identity; public monuments and collective memory; literary spaces; and the historical geographies of science. Her recent work has been particularly engaged with analysing the development of botanical gardens and their aesthetics and with natural history travel. She is currently working on a project on botanical illustration and empire. She is author of Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2003)  and Nature Displaced, Nature [ xi ]

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Notes on Contributors

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Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens (I.B. Tauris, 2011), and has edited three further books. Innes M. Keighren is Reader in Historical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has research interests in geography’s disciplinary and discursive histories, in book history and in the history of science. He is author of Bringing Geography to Book: Ellen Semple and the Reception of Geographical Knowledge (I.B. Tauris, 2010)  and co-​ author of Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–​1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He is currently working on a new book focusing on the transnational reception of the eighteenth-​century Scottish travel writer William Macintosh. David Lambert is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His research is concerned with slavery and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the Caribbean and its place in the wider (Atlantic) world. He is the author of White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge University Press, 2005)  and Mastering the Niger:  James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and the editor of Colonial Lives across the British Empire:  Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He is currently writing a book on the shifting image of the West India Regiments over the ‘long’ nineteenth century. He edits the journal Slavery & Abolition. Martin Mahony is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Following a PhD at UEA he held positions at King’s College London and the University of Nottingham, alongside visiting positions at Leuphana University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include the politics of climate change and the history of atmospheric science and technology. He is currently investigating the historical geographies of meteorological knowledge-​ making in the British Empire and their intersections with imperial mobilities, and is working on a book on this topic titled Atmospheric Encounters: Historical Geographies of the Aerial Future. Peter Merriman is Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University in Wales. He has published extensively on the geographies and histories of mobility, with a particular focus on the historical geographies of driving and roads in twentieth-​century Britain. He has also undertaken research on theories of space and spatiality, Welsh nationalism and national identity, and port histories and heritage. His books [ xii ]

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Notes on Contributors

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include Driving Spaces (2007); Mobility, Space and Culture (2012); and Space (Routledge, forthcoming) as well as the edited collections Geographies of Mobilities (2011); The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014); Space –​Critical Concepts in Geography (2016); and Mobility and the Humanities (2018). Liz Millward is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Her book Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–​1937 (McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2008) was the winner of the 2010 Canadian Women’s Studies Association Annual Book Prize and received an Honourable Mention from the Canadian Historical Association for the 2009 Wallace K.  Ferguson Prize. Her work has been published in the Journal of Transport History and the T2M Yearbook, and she is currently writing a book about British women’s aviation groups during the interwar period. Sarah Thomas is Lecturer in History of Art and Museum Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She was formerly a curator in Australian art museums, and in 2002 she curated a major international exhibition, The Encounter, 1802:  Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide). Her current research interests focus on the art history and museology of the British Empire, the iconography of slavery and the cultural legacies of British slave-​ownership. Her book, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition, was published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press in 2019. Other publications include: ‘The Spectre of Empire in the British Art Museum’ (Museum History Journal, 2013)  and ‘Violence and Memory:  Slavery in the Museum’, in World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence, edited by Daniel Rycroft (Ashgate Publishing, 2013).

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ACK NOWL E DGEMEN TS

This collection started life as three paper sessions convened by us at the International Conference of Historical Geographers, held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the IBG), London, 5–​10 July 2015. We would like to acknowledge the conference organisers (especially the local organising committee, chaired by Felix Driver) for their hard work in putting together such a fantastic event, and to thank all of the participants in our sessions for their scholarly contributions. While not all of the participants were able to contribute to this volume, they all played an important role in ensuring the success of the sessions. As editors we have benefited from the intellectual support of colleagues in our respective universities and beyond. David would like to acknowledge Frances Steel and Miles Ogborn in particular. Pete would like to acknowledge the support of colleagues in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University, particularly Sarah Davies, Hywel Griffiths, Jesse Heley, Gareth Hoskins, Rhys A. Jones, Rhys D. Jones, Sinéad O’Connor, Mark Whitehead and Mike Woods. During the editing process, we have benefited greatly from the editorial guidance and advice of the series editors Andrew Thompson and Alan Lester, and staff at Manchester University Press, particularly Emma Brennan and Paul Clarke. A final thanks should go to our friends and families. David would like to thank Carolyn, Alex and Tilly, and Pete would like to thank Liz, Eiry and Fflur for their love, support and distractions from matters of empire (and mobility).

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CHA P T E R ON E

Empire and mobility: an introduction Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

David Lambert and Peter Merriman

‘And so Phileas Fogg had won his bet.’ The protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the well-​to-​do English gentleman, Phileas Fogg, had wagered his acquaintances at the Reform Club £20,000 that he could undertake an unprecedented circumnavigation from London to Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New  York and back to London within eighty days. ‘To do so’, Verne explained, ‘he had used all possible means of transport: steamships, trains, carriages, yachts, commercial vessels, a sledge and an elephant.’1 Yet, although Fogg’s winnings were cancelled out by the costs of his peregrination, he had acquired a ‘charming wife’, Mrs Aouda, along the way. Originally serialised in French in 1872 and published in English two years later, Verne’s story unfolded in real time and gripped contemporary audiences. The journey at its centre had been made possible by a series of recent developments in transport infrastructure –​the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the USA (1869) and the linking of railways in the Indian sub-​continent (1870) –​as well as by longer-​established improvements in transport technologies associated with the application of steam power. Exemplifying how life imitates art, the story also inspired real-​world travellers to try to match and even beat Fogg’s fictional accomplishment.2 Unlike the more fantastical forms of transport that featured in Verne’s Extraordinary Journeys, starting in 1863 with Five Weeks in a Balloon, Fogg circumnavigated the globe using familiar modes such as steam trains, sailing ships and animal power. Around the World in Eighty Days also differs from some of Verne’s other works in that it does not involve a journey to an ‘unknown’ part of the world. As Brian Aldiss puts it:  Fogg ‘forges no new pathways; he travels well-​known routes, since his objective is to defeat not space but time’.3 While less [1]

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Empire and mobility

obviously concerned with colonial themes  –​be it the metaphorical treatment of (Western) colonisation in The Mysterious Island or a focus on an implacable enemy of terrestrial empires, Captain Nemo, who first appears in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea  –​ Around the World in Eighty Days is about ‘empire’ nonetheless.4 The novel is a partial tour of the current (and former) British Empire, complete with brief sketches and potted histories of Aden, British India, the Andaman Islands, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as a journey across the USA. As Fogg’s party travel to Allahabad by elephant, they disrupt a sati ceremony and make a chivalrous rescue of the young Indian widow, Mrs Aouda, who will later become Fogg’s wife, thus enacting one of the central justifications for the British colonisation of India. Other imperial themes appear elsewhere in the story: the Hong Kong opium den full of ‘emaciated, stupefied wretches’ in which Fogg’s manservant Passepartout is drugged is an Orientalist set-​piece, while the attack as the party travel on the Union Pacific Railroad by a band of Sioux warriors, who ‘swarmed’ onto the train like ‘enraged monkeys’, evokes commonplace Western ideas about race in the late nineteenth century.5 Moreover, the specific mobilities and immobilities that Fogg and his companions encounter, including the drugged Mrs Aouda upon the funeral pyre, the befuddled opium addicts in Hong Kong and the agile Sioux warriors, also evoke wider imperial movements, whether of reformist sentiment or the antagonistic relationship between Euro-​ American settlement and indigenous peoples. Most broadly, Around the World in Eighty Days is about how the world’s mobilities were being remade by Anglo-​imperial hegemony, a ‘paean to the speeding up of the human world’ that was produced by the ‘global interlocking passenger transport systems’ of the Victorian era.6 It is also a portrait of an English protagonist whose qualities were ideal for travelling across this world and for the business of empire-​ making. Phlegmatic, precise and stiff-​ upper-​ lipped, Fogg possesses ‘better knowledge than anyone else of world geography’ and the mathematical precision with which he travels from one place to another mirrors his machinelike character.7 He is also willing and able to spend money and commit acts of violence to achieve his aims; his rescue of Passepartout from the Sioux raiders was described by Verne as an act in which ‘Phileas Fogg quite simply does his duty’.8 Fogg is, then, an arch-​ imperialist, mastering all he surveys with a dispassionate composure. As such, Verne’s story is concerned both with the imperial (re)making of time and space, and with the actions of an imperial subject. The themes of movement and travel that are central to Verne’s story also serve to articulate its underlying imperial themes. Our argument in Empire and Mobility is that a thorough engagement with questions [2]

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Empire and mobility: an introduction

of mobility  –​and immobility  –​has much to offer to the study of empire more broadly, and not merely in terms of transport technologies and infrastructures, but also the cultures, discourses, practices and subjectivities with which they are associated. As such, this book is intended to serve as the first wide-​ranging collection exploring the intersection of scholarly debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire, with work on mobility and cultures of movement. In this introductory chapter we will outline why the foregrounding of a critical perspective on mobility and movement can reinvigorate histories of imperialism, outlining the different practices, subjects and things which have moved or have enabled or constrained imperial mobilities. As such, this chapter will set out the interdisciplinary, conceptual and historical context for the volume, as well as introduce the chapters that follow.

Movement, migration, travel and empire While this collection makes an argument for the value of an explicit and conceptually informed focus on mobility and immobility within work on empire, themes of movement, flow and circulation have not been absent from the field. A work like Valeska Huber’s Channelling Mobilities, with its multi-​ scalar analysis of the multiple forms of movement associated with the Suez Canal, was among the most explicit moves in this direction (albeit one framed as global, rather than imperial, history), but there have been wider developments too. For example, recent work on empire and metropolitan culture  –​as embodied in the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series of which Empire and Mobility is part –​includes recent books such as Markku Hokkanen’s Medicine, Mobility and the Empire.9 Likewise, themes of flow and circulation have been apparent in research on empire informed by postcolonial approaches. In Moving Subjects, for example, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton make an explicit call for a ‘kinetic model’ of imperial space to be used to examine the intimate collisions and collusions between ‘mobile subjects’.10 In briefly reviewing existing work that anticipates or is broadly compatible with a more overt focus on the theme of mobility, our intention is not simply to acknowledge what has gone before, but to identify familiar starting points from which scholars unacquainted with these ideas might strike out. Andrew Thompson argues that a ‘raison d’être of empire lay in the constant shifting of people between different parts of the world in ways that were likely to destabilise old identities and forge new ones’.11 Indeed, migration has been the most significant theme related to movement in histories of imperialism, be it its causes and especially [3]

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its consequences for non-​metropolitan regions, or the role of population flows in the creation of settler societies and colonial enclaves.12 Complementing overviews and syntheses have been case studies of particular groups of migrants and specific destinations.13 In this way, the relationship between migration and facets of identity such as ethnicity, gender and religion have been examined, bringing greater precision to or complicating broader accounts. The role of the imperial state and non-​ state institutions in promoting, supporting and regulating emigration, such as churches and philanthropic organisations, has also received attention,14 as have migratory phenomena that are sometimes overlooked, such as that to the imperial centre from elsewhere and return migration from the empire.15 Imperial migration was not only a matter of voluntary population movements, as the histories of transportation and convict labour demonstrate.16 The trans-​Atlantic slave trade, which saw more than 12 million African men, women and children forcibly transported to European colonies and their successor states in the Americas from the sixteenth to mid-​nineteenth centuries, is the most infamous example. Its shifting patterns are now understood better than ever before due to the information available from the Trans-​ Atlantic Slave Trade Database –​though the quantitative enumeration of this coercive mass mobility can leave its individual or experiential dimensions obscure.17 The involvement of different empires and states in trans-​Atlantic slave trading ended in the early-​ to-​ mid-​ nineteenth century. Yet, similar forms of movement emerged in the wake of abolition, particularly that of indentured Indian and Chinese workers brought to labour in the Caribbean and other tropical colonies.18 The destinations for enslaved and indentured labourers were plantation colonies, where they were subject to restrictions on their movement, a reminder that mobility and immobility were often entwined.19 Indeed, recent work on the efforts by the British state to supress the slave trade demonstrates that the attempt to end one type of mobility could bring about new forms, whether those of the British naval personnel who served in the West African Squadron or of the ‘Liberated Africans’ seized from slave ships who were subsequently landed at Sierra Leone or St Helena, some of whom were then recruited to work as free labour in the Caribbean or serve in the British military units of the West India Regiments.20 Such work underscores the ‘multiple mobilities’ to which Huber has urged global and imperial historians to attend. As well as settlement or long-​ term migration, trans-​ imperial mobility was also characterised by more temporary forms of movement. These included royal tours made by European monarchs to their colonies, as well as by their representatives, such as viceroys and [4]

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Empire and mobility: an introduction

colonial governors, but also by the indigenous rulers to Europe. Such elite forms of mobility could be highly significant in cultural and political terms, and much attention has been given to their pageantry and surrounding symbolism.21 However, most movements across empire were not so elevated. They included movements by junior officials and administrators in the colonial bureaucracy, as well as all manner of others, from town planners and foresters, to soldiers and sailors.22 Other forms of movement took place against the backdrop of empire, if not always directly in its service. These were undertaken by explorers, missionaries and scientists, and, as the nineteenth century wore on and travel became more routine, they were joined by tourists.23 Unsurprisingly, travel has been a persistent theme in work on empire, not least the role played by travel writing in the articulation of colonial discourses of difference.24 Of course, it was not only Europeans who moved across empires, and while many accounts of non-​European mobilities have been in aggregate, more individuated studies are increasingly common.25 This relates to a wider shift toward biographically orientated work in order to explore the subjective experience of trans-​imperial movement.26 Within studies of imperial migration, a persistent concern has been with the encounters that occurred between people in different places. While often moments of conquest and violent imposition, they were sometimes characterised by resistance and failed efforts to impose metropolitan patterns on the sites of colonisation. Such encounters could also have transformative effects on migrant populations themselves. The interplay of encounter as a locus of imposition and resistance, preservation and change in cultural-​historical work on empire has been explored through concepts such as ‘transculturation’, ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’.27 The notion of ‘diaspora’, though more prominent in postcolonial studies than imperial history per se, is perhaps the dominant one, be it the ‘black’ diaspora created by the trans-​Atlantic slave trade or the ‘green’ diaspora associated with Irish emigration, both forced and voluntary.28 Accounts of singular diasporas have also been replaced by more complex histories of the interplay of multiple ethnicities, both ‘foreign’ and ‘indigenous’, dominant and subaltern, in specific colonial sites.29 Finally, it is important to recognise that imperial encounters with unfamiliar lands and their inhabitants did not only occur after migratory arrivals. Geographical imaginations about distant sites, including the opportunities they might offer to settlers  –​many of which were utterly misinformed and based on wishful thinking –​were also forged prior to emigration.30 As well as the mobilities of people, including the ideas they expressed and the identities they articulated, the movement of commodities and [5]

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goods has also been central to much work in imperial history. Such mobilities are sometimes assumed to be an intrinsic aspect of long-​ distance trade and thus not always addressed directly, but there has also been a rise of more explicit treatments focusing on the circulation of individual commodities –​albeit sometimes under the sign of global rather than imperial history.31 Objects also moved across empires for reasons other than trade, though economic motives often remained central. For example, there were specimens and artefacts associated with scientific expeditions and exchange. Their circulations were central to the establishment of scientific ideas that drew authority from the collection, organisation and analysis of human remains and artefacts, as well as their display in museums and other sites. Such topics have been of major concern to historians of science and empire.32 The collection and transference of objects to the imperial centre were also associated with practices such as hunting, looting or the seizure of war reparations, while others were simply purchased as souvenirs, something entwined with the development of leisured travel and tourism.33 While collecting was central to the movement of objects, artistic and visual practices such as sketching, painting or photography represented ways in which the likenesses of objects could travel –​in other physical forms, of course, such as the sketchbook, journal or album –​be it in the service of science or as an adjunct to travel.34 Imperial mobilities also involved the circulation of news, information, ideas and knowledge through networks of communication.35 While these might be described as ‘intangible’, they were only able to occur by virtue of physical infrastructures, including railways, roads and bridges; overland and submarine telegraphic cables; ports and stations; as well as the vehicles that used them. Transportation has been a long-​established area of historical research, especially the mechanised and industrialised forms that came to the fore in the nineteenth century. Historians of empire have particularly focused on trains, steamships and latterly aircraft, as well as the companies that operated them, which were significant agents of imperialism.36 Such work encompasses both more traditional concerns in transport history, including technology and logistics, as well as questions around popular understanding of new forms of mobility and the ‘imperial culture’ associated with specific modes of transport.37 There has also been a shift from viewing transport as a means of movement from point to point, to examining the practices and spaces associated with being ‘in transit’ and the experiences and encounters entailed in such movements.38 As such  –​and, as will be discussed in the next section, this has been a central argument within Mobility Studies more broadly –​travel should not simply be understood [6]

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as movement or displacement between departure and arrival points.39 Histories of static imperial infrastructures are comparatively less well developed than those of mobile vehicle technologies, as evident in the greater focus on trains, ships and aeroplanes, than harbours, coaling stations and airfields. Nonetheless, the infrastructures that enabled movement are receiving more attention and serve as a reminder that mobilities and immobilities were entangled in complex ways at different sites and at different scales.40 It is evident that movements of people, objects and ideas from place to place, enabled by systems of transport and communication, and impacting on and being changed by their destinations, have been significant themes within work on the history of empire. Partly driven by a desire to contribute a historical understanding of the globalised world, as well as the ubiquity of the vocabulary associated with this present moment, historians have sought to characterise historical flows and the resultant interactions using a language of ‘webs’ and ‘networks’ in order to bring the imperial centre and periphery into a ‘single analytic field’ and to explore the complex ‘circuitry’ of empire.41 Such concepts have been most explicit in the ‘New Imperial History’, in part because of the more self-​conscious spatiality that has characterised this field.42 A different conceptual framework that nonetheless stresses the large-​ scale spaces produced by circulations and flows is provided by the notion of ‘worlds’. Oceanic Worlds –​initially the Atlantic World, but subsequently the Indian and Pacific Worlds  –​have become increasingly common objects of study, though again they are more likely aligned with global history.43 In contrast, the concept of the ‘British World’, which is more closely associated with imperial history, tends to be conceived endogenously, that is defined by common ‘cultural connections and identities’ rather than geographically defined communication systems that usually provide the foundation for oceanic ontologies.44 Whatever their specificities, these spatial conceptualisations share a common focus on circulation and flow, which has led some critics to express concern that there has been an overemphasis on connections and entanglements at the expense of breakages, blockages and disconnections. This is one area where Mobility Studies has much to offer in that it has foregrounded the need to account not only for movement and flow, but also to understand the forces that produce or prevent movements, and the materialities and ‘moorings’ that enable or constrain mobilities. Thus, while the theme of movement is far from new in histories of empire, our argument here is that there is something to be gained by a more explicit conceptualisation of mobility. [7]

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Mobility studies and mobility history Imperial histories are replete then with accounts of mobility, displacement and communication of different kinds, but for many historians the primary focus is not in understanding the distinctive qualities of particular movements, but in examining the subjects and objects who move, and the social and cultural contexts underpinning these events. As a result, mobility is all too often approached by historians and others as a simple displacement between two points, and this fairly straightforward critical observation has underpinned a number of attempts to theorise and ‘centre’ movement and mobility in the social sciences and humanities.45 In his influential book On the Move:  Mobility in the Modern Western World, Tim Cresswell suggested that while movement is frequently taken to be an abstract and easily quantifiable displacement, movements are caught in complex webs or constellations of power, they produce distinctive sensations and meanings, and they therefore generate social, political, economic, cultural and environmental geographies and histories that academics should expose and trace.46 As we have noted, historians of empire have already undertaken much work in this regard, and important research has been completed by scholars of imperial history, travel writing, transport history, media history and migration studies on the geographies and histories of mobility. Nevertheless, in the late 1990s and early 2000s a number of scholars working in cultural geography, sociology and anthropology began advancing more critical and theoretical approaches to mobility and movement underpinned by social and cultural theory. What emerged was the fairly amorphous and plural but tightly networked multi-​disciplinary field of Mobility Studies, which now boasts at least three journals, a handbook, a textbook, several research centres, networks and book series, and a large number of monographs and edited collections.47 This field now extends well beyond geography, sociology, anthropology, transport studies and other social science disciplines, to include scholars who explicitly align themselves with the arts and humanities in fields such as literary and cultural studies, media studies, art and design, architecture, archaeology, history, film studies and philosophy.48 Scholars in long-​ established fields such as transport history, migration studies, media studies and transport studies have also started to reframe their work through the approaches and conceptual frames developed by mobility scholars, with a number of transport historians actively aligning themselves with an expanded mobility history which focuses on the embodied practices and experiences associated with different kinds of

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movement, instead of (or as well as) the infrastructures or technologies that arguably underpin or enable such practices.49 With the forging of a new and diverse multi-​disciplinary field, it is perhaps no surprise that conceptual and theoretical approaches to mobility reflect the breadth of approaches, theories, methods and interests pursued by those scholars. Theoretical ideas associated with feminism, Marxism, phenomenology, queer theory, post-​colonialism, literary theory, visual culture, post-​structuralist and non-​representational theories, science and technology studies, new materialisms and much more have been deployed in studies by mobility scholars.50 Mobility scholars have drawn upon a wide array of methods in their research, from interviews, focus groups, ethnography and participant observation, to archival research, textual analysis and experimental mobile methods.51 Attention has been paid to the distinctive materialities, spaces, qualities and events associated with different mobile subjects, objects, technologies and environments. There has been a focus on how mobile bodies are frequently marked, differentiated and (im)mobilised along lines of gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, class and economic status. Research has been undertaken on the politics of enabling, enacting, regulating and producing different mobilities, examining questions of security, territoriality, sovereignty, military strategy, border control, bio-​ politics, social and political capital, exclusion, affect, identity and surveillance.52 One key focus of mobility scholars has been mobility infrastructures and environments, with the sociologist John Urry emphasising that movements or mobilities are reliant upon relatively static infrastructures or ‘moorings’ to enable them to occur.53 While this broad interest in infrastructure builds upon previous work on transport technologies that was shaped by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the history of science and technology,54 more recent scholarship goes much further, adopting a more ‘lively’ approach to the politics and poetics of mobility infrastructures.55 A  broad focus on mobility systems and mobility environments has also led to a ‘de-​centring’ of the vehicle and attention given to the different subjects, objects, ecologies and socio-​political structures which are important for the enactment of movements of various kinds. Important work has also been undertaken by mobility scholars on the elemental and atmospheric forces and events which may shape or influence mobility practices, including the elemental geographies of air and water.56 Maritime historians and historians of science will be all too familiar with shifting understandings of such elemental forces, but there is further research that can be undertaken to explore the synergies between historical [9]

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research on practices of mobility and navigation, and some of the more recent ‘new materialist’ approaches to the hybrid or more-​than-​human geographies of elemental assemblages.57 Related to this concern with the materialities of mobility systems and the infrastructural practices and relations associated with them, is a concern with theorising the socio-​spatial configurations of mobility systems. Cresswell and Urry have variously argued that mobility ‘systems’ or ‘networks’ are complex, hybrid, relational ‘constellations’, ‘assemblages’ or ‘networks’ formed through the gathering practices of interrelated materials, technologies, environments and bodies.58 There are clear resonances here with imperial histories which have drawn upon actor-​network theories (ANT) to understand the role of communicative technologies and mobile material things in constituting or performing imperialism.59 Following Cresswell, we might argue that there have –​at different moments in time, and in different geographical contexts –​been distinctive imperial ‘constellations of mobility’, namely ‘historically and geographically specific formations of movements, narratives about mobility and mobile practices’ which both actively constitute and dismantle empires in an ongoing, performative manner.60 Indeed, the circumnavigation of Phileas Fogg, as fictionalised by Verne, could be seen as an articulation of a particular mid-​to-​late-​ nineteenth-​century constellation of mobility. Within the humanities and social sciences, movement, circulation and communication are frequently taken to occur in relation to bodies ‘between’ places, and this focus on practices that unfold ‘in-​ between’ –​as well as the practical movements entailed in becoming something, somewhere, at some point in time –​has led many mobility scholars to reflect on the importance of becoming and between-​ness to understanding experiences of mobility. This move may, in turn, allow scholars to attempt to overcome binaries of mobility/​immobility and place/​non-​place.61 Whereas a long line of geographers and anthropologists have characterised certain movements as antithetical to notions of place –​and it has been argued that movements generate ‘non-​places’ and ‘placelessness’,62 and that ‘place is pause’63 –​it is more common in contemporary mobility and geographical scholarship to characterise places as dynamic, open and in process, with movements shaping places and with all places being, in a sense, in movement and flux.64 Meaningful and highly politicised actions and events occur in the spaces of transportation and communication ‘between’ conventional, named, seemingly bounded places, demonstrating how the spaces and qualities of the ‘passage’ have rich geographies, aerographies and oceanographies.65 [ 10 ]

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Bodies and embodied practices have formed a central focus for mobility scholars and mobility historians seeking to understand the complex meanings, sensations and power relations associated with different forms of movement.66 Mobile subjects sense and inhabit the world through highly distinctive, variegated embodied practices, and mobility scholars have very purposefully utilised and experimented with an array of embodied, participative, phenomenological and mobile methods in an attempt to apprehend such experiences and sensations in new and creative ways.67 Historians of empire and mobility do not have the option of advancing new ways to move along with (or be with) their research subjects, although critical reflection upon the politics of the archive and the question of which movements and experiences get recorded and archived (and why), remain important issues. Despite proclamations by key advocates of mobile methods and non-​ representational methods that they are essential for capturing fleeting practices and experiences,68 there is no doubt that documentary and archival records and personal written accounts do provide important sources through which past embodied mobile practices, sensations and experiences can be analysed and understood.69 Bodies move in different ways, exerting forces which may be registered across different scales. Mobility scholars have examined how embodied movements occur at the scale of the body  –​through looks, gestures and expressive movements such as dance  –​as well as through displacements, actions and transportations which are registered at the local, regional, national, imperial or global scale.70 Micro-​scale embodied movements can be just as meaningful, powerful and politicised as movements spanning great distances, and mobilities scholarship suggests that we can and should analyse all of these different movements in similar ways, even if they are treated quite separately by scholars in different disciplines. Imperial movements and circulations have, of course, generated an innumerable number of culturally, economically and politically significant encounters and interactions, and the micro-​scale bodily movements of a range of different groups and individuals have been interpreted as exotic, strange, unnatural, primitive, threatening, passive, immoral and wonderful by observers. Different embodied movements thus become caught up in all manner of scholarly and political debates, including those justifying colonialism, slavery and imperial scientific study. One example, from the mid-​to-​late nineteenth century, would be how the embodied movements, gestures, behaviours and customs of encountered and colonised peoples became interpreted through the overlapping lenses of racial science and climate science.71 Another example, from early twentieth-​century Britain, would be how Black American dance forms [ 11 ]

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such as the ‘shimmy’ and Black American jazz music were labelled by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing as potential threats to standard ballroom dancing, leading to ‘degenerate dancing’ and the proliferation of ‘inappropriate’ forms of embodied dance movement across Britain and its empire.72 Both involved the categorisation and management of racialised moving bodies, with one being widely discussed in historical and geographical literatures on empire, and the other by a scholar working at the forefront of Mobility Studies.

Mobile histories and geographies of the British Empire The chapters in this collection explore the themes of mobility and immobility in the context of the British Empire from the mid-​to-​late eighteenth century to the interwar period. As such, they encompass the break-​up of the ‘First’ British Empire brought on by the subsequent American Revolution; the development and expansion of the ‘Second’ British Empire of settler colonies, India and the dependent empire, as well as the ‘informal’ empire beyond; and the changes that occurred in the aftermath of the First World War, including the acquisition of new colonies and mandates from Germany and the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. While the political and constitutional changes associated with what is sometimes termed the ‘Third’ British Empire are not the focus of this collection, this period witnessed the increasing impact of new imperial mobilities, especially those associated with aviation.73 In sum, the chronological perspective we adopt here is of a very ‘long’ nineteenth century prior to the onset of the post-​1945 phase of globalisation, a period characterised by increases in the speed, scale and size of flows of people, goods and information that have been variously described through such terms as ‘time-​space compression’ and the ‘shrinking’ of the world.74 Moreover, though focused on the British context, the conceptual arguments presented here are of wider relevance, while the substantive case studies offer useful comparative material for other imperial settings. Considering the historical-​geographical context addressed in this collection, a series of central themes relating to imperial mobilities can be identified. First, there were the population flows. Emigration from the British Isles to the empire was a persistent theme in this period, with more than 22  million Britons emigrating between 1815 and 1914. Although the USA remained the overwhelmingly popular destination for migrants from the British Isles, there was a steady stream to British North America, while the colonies of Australia and New Zealand attracted interest with the discovery of gold in the 1850s and 1860s. In addition to voluntary white migration, some 148,000 [ 12 ]

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convicts were transported to the colonies from 1788 to 1853.75 There was also migration within the tropical world, which was ‘strongly linked to the development of new colonies and subsidized European emigration in the southern hemisphere’.76 The trans-​Atlantic slave trade dominated such flows before 1807, with almost a million enslaved people taken from Africa bound for Britain’s colonies in the final three decades of its involvement in the trade; thereafter, the Abolition Act diverted the trade to non-​British territories such as Brazil and Cuba.77 In the decades after abolition, most tropical migration in the British Empire was to augment the labouring populations in the plantation colonies of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. This included the indentureship of mainly Indian labourers from 1838 to 1917.78 Furthermore, 177,000  ‘Liberated Africans’ were also released from 2,000 slave ships by the Royal Navy between 1808 and 1863, and were settled in West Africa, at Sierra Leone, and the British Caribbean.79 However, after 1860 most tropical migration was to plantation colonies where slavery had never existed or to work on the construction of railways and mines elsewhere. Our very long nineteenth century also saw changing debates about mass emigration from Britain: did it represent a loss of ‘manpower’ to the metropole or was it a vital safety valve during periods of economic downturn? Should movement to the settler colonies be guided by the imperial state or left to individuals and private organisations?80 New regulatory measures were introduced too, often grounded in racial discourse, such as the restrictions placed by Australian colonies on Chinese emigration from the 1850s.81 In addition to the large-​scale population flows, the period also witnessed the emergence of other forms of mobility that took place in the context of imperialism. From the mid-​nineteenth century, for example, travel became a leisured activity for the privileged few at least, facilitated by the availability of guide books and the creation of tour companies. Indeed, in 1872, the year that Around the World in Eighty Days was originally serialised in French, Thomas Cook advertised the first tourist trip around the globe.82 Second, the population flows of the long nineteenth century, especially from the 1850s onwards, were greatly facilitated by changes in communication technologies. While we want to resist too easily equating histories of mobility with those of transport, the significant changes were enabled by new technologies, particularly the mechanisation and industrialisation of mass movement. The approach we advocate here seeks not to fetishise the invention of particular technologies, but rather to attend to their geographically uneven effects. For example, while the first successful steam locomotives were in use by the end of the 1820s, the impact of railways in ‘shrinking’ the world [ 13 ]

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was negligible until the final decades of the century: prior to 1870 it was only in Egypt, between Alexandria and Suez, and in the USA, following the completion of the first Pacific railroad, that railways were of more than local importance.83 Steamships were of greater significance earlier on, though here too, the shift from sail to steam should not be exaggerated. Ocean routes operated from the 1830s and 1840s by companies such as Pacific & Orient, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and the Pacific Steam Navigation Company were particularly important in connecting Britain with its overseas possessions, making the steamship the most significant ‘tool’ of empire. Indeed, transport technologies also enabled new ways of projecting imperial power, such as the shore bombardments and riverine expeditions that were central to gunboat diplomacy.84 Changes in transport technologies in this period were associated not only with new forms of powered mobility, but also with new infrastructures. The Suez and Panama canals, opened in 1869 and 1914 respectively, are among the most famous examples from this period, though their impact should not be overestimated. The opening of the Suez Canal did not reduce passage times at first because ships had to travel through it slowly and stop at night. In fact, it was only from 1888, after improvements were made, that British mails were routinely carried through the canal.85 Moreover, it is important not to overlook all the other forms of infrastructure associated with industrialised steam mobilities –​the coaling stations and later oil refuelling bases –​as well as the other, ‘secondary’ mobilities that a reliance on fossil fuel created, such as the bulk coal carriers that were needed to transport coal to these stations. Likewise, the well-​known history of the clippers serves as a reminder that pre-​industrial technologies remained important at sea, while on land, the period covered by this collection is roughly synonymous with what has also been characterised as the ‘last century of the horse’.86 Other infrastructural developments were associated with changes in technologies of communication, such as the introduction and expansion of electric telegraph networks. The systems in Britain and India were connected in 1870 and the worldwide system of submarine cables and overland telegraphs was completed in 1902.87 Third, new technologies of transport and communication not only facilitated all manner of trans-​and extra-​imperial mobilities, but also fuelled the production and flow of new imperial information and ideas. Expanding telegraph networks permitted more rapid dispatch of news, making a household name of new embedded war correspondents or ‘specials’, and bringing the empire and its violence to British audiences more readily than ever before. In more mundane terms, the imperial postal system kept families and friends in touch across [ 14 ]

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the experience of emigration.88 Indeed, along with links of trade and investment, and continuing emigration to the Dominions, a system of global communications that transmitted news, opinions, values and ideas contributed to ‘British race sentiment’ or ‘Britannic nationalism’, what has been described as ‘an aggressive sense of cultural superiority as the representatives of a global civilization then at the height of its prestige’.89 The articulation of ideas about imperial power sometimes also turned on different ideas about mobility, as exemplified by the competing ‘Bricks and Mortar’ and ‘Blue-​Water’ schools of thought that articulated different British ideas about imperial defence.90 At the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of ‘sea-​power’ found particular articulation by the American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan, while a very different understanding was articulated by the British geographer Halford Mackinder, whose ‘heartland theory’ placed emphasis on the geopolitical implications for naval powers like Britain of the railway systems that were expanding across Europe and Asia.91 In the early twentieth century, notions of ‘airpower’ would also find articulation.92 The development of an increasingly integrated and global world of science and commerce, knitted together by railway and telegraph networks, also necessitated the introduction of common standards and metrics, such as the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time as the prime meridian in 1884.93 Although the very long nineteenth century that is the focus of Empire and Mobility saw major developments and changes in relation to patterns of migration, the impact of technologies and the shifting significance of ideas –​which perhaps constituted a specific constellation of mobility –​our individual chapters explore this context in much greater detail.

Imperial histories of movement and mobility Mobility Studies may offer new perspectives to research imperial histories, but there is no doubt that historians of empire –​including the British Empire  –​have examined important themes that warrant further attention by scholars working in mobility studies and mobility history. While this is an inevitable consequence of the different foci of these scholarly communities, we would argue that mobility scholars could very usefully learn from research on the history of empire in order to aid their understanding of a number of issues and to extend the temporal reach of their studies. A  key difference between these fields of study is the very different temporal horizons and mobility practices examined by scholars of empire and mobility. First, the majority of research in Mobility Studies focuses on the present or [ 15 ]

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indeed the future, examining key issues relating to contemporary practices, policies and evolving mobility and transport systems. Those scholars who do study mobility history tend to focus on the past one or two centuries –​since the ‘birth’ of the railway, bicycle, motor car and aeroplane –​with the much longer history of travel by walking, horse-​ drawn vehicles, boat and other modes receiving much less attention.94 A second point, related to this, is that while histories of empire have focused extensively on maritime movements and imperial communication and knowledge networks, there has been a relative neglect of maritime and communications histories and geographies by mobility scholars. The majority of scholarship on mobility is, unquestionably, terrestrial, transport-​ related and urban in its focus, with maritime mobilities and knowledge networks comprising a very small proportion of studies. Nevertheless, research has emerged over the past few years on mobile media, as well as examining the geographies of seas, ships and other watery mobilities in writings, which explicitly builds upon the more established scholarship in historical geography on maritime networks and mobilities.95 Maritime mobilities frequently (though not exclusively) take place in extra-​territorial spaces which are less tightly regulated and policed than sovereign territorial lands or airspaces, but these spaces serve and have served as key sites for a broad range of technologies of movement by states, military powers and commercial agencies, as well as key sites of globalisation, innovation, political power, war and death throughout recorded history. The focus of historians of empire upon mobility cultures and economies has exposed the political histories of imperial mobility constellations and holds important lessons for mobility scholars. First, research by historians of empire on the changing histories and geographies of international geopolitical and commercial relations has helped to trace the history of early globalisation, revealing how the (imperial) history of early globalisation is a story of the mobilisation of people, knowledge, capital and goods.96 This history can hold important lessons for scholars concerned with globalisation today. Second, historians of empire have held a long-​standing concern with understanding the role of military (and naval) forces in imperial rule, and despite recent work by mobility scholars that emphasises the need to move beyond civilian mobilities to examine military movements and mobilisations of different kinds, important research remains to be done in this area.97 Third, research on race and ethnicity is central to work on histories and geographies of empire and imperial mobilities, as well as related work on hybridity, diaspora and Black Atlantic cultures, but it remains a relatively minor (though important) sub-​ theme within mobilities scholarship. Important [ 16 ]

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examples include scholarship by Cotten Seiler, Jeremy Packer and Paul Gilroy on African-American automobility cultures in the USA,98 Gordon Pirie on rail travel in apartheid South Africa99 and Georgine Clarsen on white settler car cultures in colonial Australia,100 but more work needs to be undertaken to examine the politics of racialised movement and mobilities.101

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The chapters The substantive chapters that make up Empire and Mobility range from the Georgian era to the interwar period, and they are organised chronologically. The application and development of military knowledge was vital for the maintenance and expansion of the British Empire across our very long nineteenth century. In Chapter  2, Huw J. Davies examines how military experiences moved between different theatres and conflicts. Focusing on the mid-​to-​late eighteenth century, he examines the mobilities of officers and their writings, and how military knowledge was shared through one-​to-​one exchanges and the coalescence of multiple experiences that sometimes occurred during campaigns  –​what Davies labels ‘personal’ and ‘polysynchronous’ contacts respectively. Innes M. Keighren focuses on the mobile life of the Scots Caribbean plantation owner, political commentator and travel writer William Macintosh in Chapter  3, highlighting the importance of embodied movements and the circulation of ideas to empire in the late eighteenth century. After outlining Macintosh’s life and work in Grenada in the 1760s and 1770s, Keighren discusses the complex reception of his Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782) amongst political commentators in the 1780s, arguing that the credibility of the text and the authority of Macintosh’s view on the failures of the East India Company were inseparable from his individual mobility and his experiences in both the West Indies and East Indies. In Chapter 4, Sarah Thomas examines the works of art produced during the first circumnavigation of Australia (1801–​3) by British landscape painter William Westall and Austrian botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer. The chapter considers not only the status of the peripatetic artist as eyewitness, but also examines the mobility of visual culture itself. In this way, it explores some of the contradictions between mobility and place for how the art of exploration is understood. Indeed, while Westall’s coastal profiles contributed to the British Admiralty’s cartographic project and Bauer’s sketches assisted in the totalising project of Linnaean classification, their mobilities were at odds with the practicalities of producing works of art and, more significantly, [ 17 ]

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with the scientific demands made of the voyager-​artist: precision and immutability. In Chapter  5, Justine Atkinson examines the mission movement that developed from the early nineteenth century to serve the spiritual and material needs of British seamen at home and across the world. Focusing on the Pacific and Indian oceans, she reveals shifting and sometimes conflicting attitudes towards merchant sailors, who could be seen as vectors for the spread of British and Christian values, but were also feared for being a disruptive onshore presence in settled and indigenous communities. Overall, the chapter demonstrates how maritime mobilities, which were vital to knitting together networks of trade within and beyond the British Empire, also serve as a lens for understanding the dynamic relations between imperial and native authorities, traders and evangelical organisations. In the nineteenth century, the explorer emerged as one of the most celebrated figures of the imperial project, travelling to extend the frontiers of European geographical knowledge. However, the place of such mobile agents within the Victorian culture of exploration was not uncontested. In Chapter 6, Natalie Cox introduces the important, but often overlooked, figure of the ‘easychair geographer’. Focusing on William Desborough Cooley, who ‘explored’ by reading, collating and synthesising texts, and his clashes with missionary-​ explorer David Livingstone, Cox exposes the fabricated dichotomy of mobility and immobility that has often been oversimplified in the history of geography as an active science of empire. In Chapter 7, Catherine Coleborne examines how transient people who stopped in the wrong place were regulated and subject to coercive power through an examination of the development of New Zealand’s vagrancy laws in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Her argument is that these efforts to regulate mobility were a key part of how colonialism operated in terms of the creation of knowledge, the application of control and the construction of social difference. Moreover, Coleborne explains how New Zealand’s vagrancy laws differed from the British metropolitan model by specifically criminalising vagrant Pakeha/​Europeans thought to be consorting with Māori or ‘aboriginal natives’. In Chapter  8, Nuala C.  Johnson examines the mobilities of the amateur botanist and watercolourist Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe as she travelled around Burma with her husband, the colonial administrator Otway Fortescue Luke Wheeler-​Cuffe. The chapter traces Charlotte’s life-​path between England, Ireland and Burma, revealing the importance of gender, class and colonial relations to her mobilities. Her life and writings resonate with themes of movement and mobility [ 18 ]

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at many levels, from the movements of the couple around Burma and between Europe and Asia, to her movement of plants in the colony and the circulation of her watercolours, letters and various commodities. In Chapter  9, Martin Mahony describes how the mobilities of meteorologists and meteorological knowledge and the siting of weather stations was vital to the development of imperial air routes and networks in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing upon the memoirs of Albert Walter, the founding director of the British East African Meteorological Service, Mahony shows how scientific knowledge of the atmosphere and weather systems was positioned as vital to the success of imperial air routes, with Walter undertaking extensive journeys by car, truck and aeroplane in an attempt to identify suitable locations for weather stations. Liz Millward examines the promises and messy realities of British imperial aviation in the 1920s and 1930s in Chapter 10. After examining the cultures of ‘airmindedness’ advanced by prominent aviators and groups such as the Air League in the inter-​war years, she traces the many hindrances which grounded planes in imperial settings, from weather and crashes, to gender expectations in various societies that could limit the freedoms of female aviators. In a final afterword, Tim Cresswell takes the focus of the collection –​ the British Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century  –​as the launching-​off point for considering the mobility practices, forces and relations that underpinned the territorialisation of what is arguably the most powerful ‘imperial’ state in the world today, the United States of America. After opening his Afterword with a relatively recent observation by the former US Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, Cresswell traces the importance of western movements to visions of a new American empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ranging from political essays to the many painterly representations of the westward course of empire by horse, wagon and railroad, especially in the years surrounding the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869  –​one of the key infrastructural developments that enabled Jules Verne to imagine Phileas Fogg’s triumphant circumnavigation and thus allowed the fictional Englishman to win his bet.

Notes 1 J. Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (London: Penguin, 2004 [1874]), p. 230. 2 R. H. Williams, The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 3. 3 B. Aldiss, ‘Introduction’, in Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, p.  xx. Of course, at the time Verne was writing many social commentators remarked upon the

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Empire and mobility role of new transport and communications technologies in enacting the ‘annihilation of space by time’. See W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), p. 33. 4 B. Ashcroft, ‘Colonisation and speciesism:  Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island’, Kunapipi, 34:2 (2012), 145–​51. 5 Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, pp. 106, 181. 6 Aldiss, ‘Introduction’, p. xii; J. H. Grossman, ‘The character of a global transport infrastructure: Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days’, History and Technology, 29:3 (2013), p. 248. See also M. Chandna, ‘Time is money: spaces of colonial desire and Jules Verne’, Victoriographies, 3:2 (2013), 184–​205. 7 Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, p. 2. 8 Ibid., p. 185. 9 V. Huber, Channelling Mobilities (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013); M. Hokkanen, Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859–​1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 10 T. Ballantyne and A. Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 2009), pp. 3, 5, emphasis in original. 11 A. Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in A. Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2014), p.  10. See also K. Fedorowich and A. Thompson (eds), Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 12 J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth:  The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-​World, 1783–​1939 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); M. Ruiz (ed.), International Migrations in the Victorian Era (Leiden:  Brill, 2018); C. L. Morgan, Building Better Britains? Settler Societies within the British Empire, 1783–​1920 (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2017). See also K. H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-​Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 13 See, for example, P. Panayi, The Germans in India:  Elite European Migrants in the British Empire (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2017); D. Lawrence, Genteel Women:  Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–​ 1910 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015); D. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–​1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); K. Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2012); M. Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the Wars (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009). 14 J. Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790–​1860 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 15 D. Rabin, Britain and its Internal Others, 1750–​1800: Under Rule of Law (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–​2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 16 C. Anderson (ed.), A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 17 ‘Voyages: The Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, www.slavevoyages.org/​voyage/​ about, accessed 13 May 2019. Some scholars have suggested that aggregate and especially quantitative approaches to forced migration –​particularly the trans-​Atlantic slave trade  –​may serve to reproduce the dehumanising nature of the trade itself. See M. Rediker, ‘Introduction’, in R. Hörmann and G. Mackenthun (eds), Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone:  Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Slavery and its Discourses (New York: Waxmann, 2010), p. 11. For this reason, much importance has been attached to ‘slave narratives’, such as that attributed to Olaudah Equiano, even though these are rare and their provenance has not been uncontested:  O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 2 vols (London, 1789). For a discussion see V. Carretta,

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Empire and mobility: an introduction Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-​Made Man (London: Penguin Books, 2006); J. Walvin, The Trader, the Owner, the Slave:  Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). 18 See, for example, A. Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–​1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); W. Look Lai and T. Chee-​Beng (eds), The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery (London: Hansib, 1993). 19 See D. Bissell and G. Fuller (eds), Stillness in a Mobile World (London: Routledge, 2011). 20 R. Burroughs and R. Huzzey (eds), The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade: British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); R. M. Adderley, ‘New Negroes from Africa’:  Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-​ Century Caribbean (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2006); M. Schuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’:  A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–​ 1865 (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); R. N. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats:  The British West India Regiments, 1795–​1815 (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1979). 21 R. Aldrich and C. McCreery (eds), Royals on Tour: Politics, Pageantry and Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); C. Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects and the Making of a British World, 1860–​1911 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2016); D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); D. Cannadine (ed.), Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001). A very different literature focuses on ‘elite mobilities’ in the contemporary era, examining the mobilities of the super-​rich in the late twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. See T. Birtchnell and J. Caletrío (eds), Elite Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2013). 22 C. Prior, Exporting Empire:  Africa, Colonial Officials and the Construction of the British Imperial State, c.  1900–​39 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015); C. Ladds, Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854–​ 1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); J. Rizzetti, ‘Judging boundaries:  Justice Willis, local politics and imperial justice’, Australian Historical Studies, 40 (2009), 362–​75; Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–​45:  Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2005); N. H. Rubin, ‘Geography, colonialism and town planning: Patrick Geddes’ plan for mandatory Jerusalem’, Cultural Geographies, 18 (2011), 231–​48; M. Roche, ‘Latter day “imperial careering”: L. M. Ellis –​a Canadian forester in Australia and New Zealand, 1920–​1941’, Environment and Nature in New Zealand, 4:1 (2009), 58–​77. 23 M. Thomas (ed.), Expedition into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2015); D. Kennedy, ‘Exploration, the environment and empire’, in Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories, pp. 100–​17; A. N. Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–​1914 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2004); R. A. Stafford, ‘Scientific exploration and empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 294–​319; M. Farr and X. Guegan (eds), The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1: Travellers and Tourists (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also T. Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–​1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 24 Classic works are E. W. Said, Orientalism:  Western Conceptions of the Orient (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) and M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes:  Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 25 A. Greenwood and H. Topiwala, Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895–​1940: The Forgotten History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); R. Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902–​10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge

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Empire and mobility University Press, 2013); C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–​1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 26 F. D’Souza, Knowledge, Mediation and Empire:  James Tod’s Journeys among the Rajputs (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015); A. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism:  The Empire of Clouds in North-​East India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); M. Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives. 27 Pratt, Imperial Eyes; V. A. Shepherd and G. L. Richards (eds), Questioning Creole:  Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture:  In Honour of Kamau Braithwaite (Oxford: James Currey, 2002); L. H. Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–​1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 28 R. Segal, The Black Diaspora (London:  Faber, 1995); T. P. Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn:  The Story of the Irish Diaspora (London:  Head of Zeus, 2015). See also R. Mohanram, Imperial White:  Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); T. Bueltmann, D. T. Gleeson and D. M. MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–​2010 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). For a discussion, see S. Amrith, ‘Empires, diasporas and cultural circulation’, in Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories, pp. 216–​39. 29 See, for example, J. M. MacKenzie, with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); L. Proudfoot and D. Hall, Imperial Spaces:  Placing the Irish and Scots in Colonial Australia (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2012); A. McCarthy, Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2010); R. Bickers and C. Henriot (eds), New Frontiers:  Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–​ 1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 30 A. Varnava (ed.), Imperial Expectations and Realities:  El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 31 For example, see M. Sheller, Aluminum Dreams:  The Making of Light Modernity (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2014); G. Riello, Cotton:  The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); M. Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998). 32 J. Poskett, Materials of the Mind:  Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–​1920 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2019); S. Longair and J. McAleer (eds), Curating Empire:  Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); J. McAleer and J. M. MacKenzie (eds), Exhibiting the Empire:  Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); N. Chambers, Joseph Banks and the British Museum:  The World of Collecting, 1770–​1830 (London:  Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 33 J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature:  Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1997); M. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire:  Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–​ 1850 (London:  Harper Perennial, 2006). 34 K. Davidson, Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-​ Century Museum: Exchanging Views of Empire (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017); J. Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 35 S. J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–​1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 36 On railways:  M. Aguiar, Tracking Modernity:  India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (London:  University of Minnesota Press, 2011); E. Spiers, Engines for Empire:  The Victorian Army and its Use of Railways (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015). On steam mobilities and transoceanic networks:  F. Steel, Oceania under Steam:  Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.  1870–​ 1914 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2011); F. Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism:  The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire from its Origins

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Empire and mobility: an introduction to 1867 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013); A. Anim-​Addo, ‘ “The great event of the fortnight”:  steamship rhythms and colonial communication’, Mobilities, 9:3 (2014), 369–​83; D. R. Burgess, Engines of Empire:  Steamships and the Victorian Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); J. Hyslop, ‘Southampton to Durban on the Union Castle Line: an imperial shipping company and the limits of globality c. 1900–​39’, Journal of Transport History, 38:2 (2017), 171–​ 95. On imperial aviation, see P. Ewer, ‘A gentlemen’s club in the clouds: reassessing the empire air mail scheme, 1933–​1939’, Journal of Transport History, 28:1 (2007), 75–​92; L. Edmonds, ‘Australia, Britain and the empire air mail scheme, 1934–​38’, Journal of Transport History, 20:2 (1999), 91–​ 106; G. Pirie, Air Empire:  British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–​39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); L. Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–​1937 (Montreal:  McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2008). 37 Burgess, Engines of Empire; G. Pirie, Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation:  Passengers, Pilots, Publicity (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2012). 38 M. Dusinberre and R. Wenzlhuemer (eds), special issue of Journal of Global History, 11:2 (2016), 155–​62; A. Anim-​Addo, W. Hasty and K. Peters, ‘The mobilities of ships and shipped mobilities’, Mobilities, 9:3 (2014), 337–​49. 39 See T. Pietsch, ‘A British sea: making sense of global space in the late nineteenth century’, Journal of Global History, 5 (2010), 423–​46, here p. 428. 40 While framed as a contribution to new forms of global (or ‘glocal’) history writing, Valeska Huber’s study of the Suez Canal is a fine example here. See Huber, Channelling Mobilities. 41 T. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); A. Lester, Imperial Networks. Creating Identities in Nineteenth-​Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). For recent discussions, see A. Lester, ‘Spatial concepts and the historical geographies of British colonialism’, in Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories, pp. 118–​42; D. Lambert, ‘Reflections on the concept of imperial biographies’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 40 (2014),  22–​41. 42 F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, ‘Between metropole and colony:  rethinking a research agenda’, in F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1–​58, here p. 4; K. Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 17. 43 For a recent review, see D. Armitage, A. Bashford, and S. Sivasundaram (eds), Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 44 R. K. Bright and A. R. Dilley, ‘After the British World’, Historical Journal, 60:2 (2017), 547–​68, quotation on p. 549. Examples of this work include C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003). 45 Some of the most prominent early statements on mobility include:  T. Cresswell, ‘The production of mobilities’, New Formations, 43 (2001), 11–​25; T. Cresswell, On the Move:  Mobility in the Modern Western World (New  York:  Routledge, 2006); M. Sheller and J. Urry, ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38:2 (2006), 207–​26; J. Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); T. Cresswell and P. Merriman (eds), Geographies of Mobilities:  Practices, Spaces, Subjects (London: Routledge, 2011). 46 Cresswell, On the Move; T. Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28:1 (2010), 17–​31. 47 The three leading mobility journals are Mobilities (launched in 2006), Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies (launched in 2011) and Applied Mobilities (launched in 2016), but the Journal of Transport History and Mobility in History also covers important work in this area. Research networks and organisations focussing on mobility include T2M (The International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility), Cosmobilities (the European network of mobilities

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Empire and mobility research), Pan-​American Mobilities Network, Ausmob, the Mobile Lives Forum and the Global Mobilities Network. Current book series include: ‘Changing Mobilities’ (Routledge), ‘Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture’ (Springer), ‘Explorations in Mobility’ (Berghahn), and ‘Mobility and Politics’ (Palgrave Macmillan). The only textbook (at present) on mobility is: P. Adey, Mobility, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2017). For a research-​based overview of current work, see:  P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman and M. Sheller (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2014). 48 P. Merriman and L. Pearce (eds), Mobility and the Humanities (London: Routledge, 2018). 49 G. Mom, ‘Editorial’, Journal of Transport History, 27:1 (2006), iii–​ v; G. Mom, ‘Editorial: “Hop on the bus, Gus” ’, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 1:1 (2011), 1–​13; C. Divall, ‘Mobilities and transport history’, in Adey et al. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, pp. 36–​44; G. Mom, ‘The crisis of transport history: a critique, and a vista’, Mobility in History, 6 (2015), 7–​19; P. Merriman, ‘Mobilities, crises, and turns: some comments on dissensus, comparatives studies, and spatial histories’, Mobility in History, 6 (2015), 20–​34; M. Moraglio, ‘Seeking a (new) ontology for transport history’, Journal of Transport History, 38:1 (2017), 3–​10. 50 See section one of Adey et  al. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, pp. 21–​102. 51 P. Merriman, ‘Rethinking mobile methods’, Mobilities, 9:2 (2014), 167–​87. 52 See Adey, Mobility. 53 J. Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), pp. 125–​36, 138; K. Hannam, M. Sheller and J. Urry, ‘Mobilities, immobilities and moorings’, Mobilities, 1:1 (2006),  1–​22. 54 See, for example, L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); and more recently: E. Van der Vleuten and A. Kaijser, ‘Networking Europe’, History and Technology, 21 (2005), 21–​48; E. Van der Vleuten and A. Kaijser (eds), Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–​ 2000 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2006); F. Schipper, Driving Europe: Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008); A. Badenoch and A. Fickers (eds), Materializing Europe:  Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 55 P. Harvey and H. Knox, ‘The enchantments of infrastructure’, Mobilities, 7:4 (2012), 521–​36; B. Larkin, ‘The politics and poetics of infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (2013), 327–​43; A. Amin, ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31:7–​8 (2014), 137–​61; P. Merriman, ‘Mobility infrastructures: modern visions, affective environments, and the problem of car parking’, Mobilities, 11:1 (2016),  83–​98. 56 P. Merriman, ‘Mobilities II:  cruising’, Progress in Human Geography, 40:4 (2016), 555–​64; P. Adey, D. Bissell, D. McCormack and P. Merriman, ‘Profiling the passenger:  mobilities, identities, embodiments’, Cultural Geographies, 19:2 (2012), 169–​93; P. Adey, Air: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2014); K. Peters and P. Steinberg, ‘Volume and vision: towards a wet ontology’, Harvard Design Magazine, 39 (2014), 124–​9; P. Steinberg and K. Peters, ‘Wet ontologies, fluid spaces:  giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33:2 (2015), 247–​64; P. Steinberg, ‘Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions’, Atlantic Studies, 10:2 (2013), 156–​69. 57 Quite a large proportion of these ‘new materialist’ writings on movement, elements and atmospheres have a ‘hard’ or ‘blunt’ philosophical edge to them, which may not be to the taste of all historians. See, for example: J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London:  Duke University Press, 2010); P. Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture (London: Routledge, 2012); D. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (London: Duke University Press, 2018). See also T. Nail, Being and Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 58 J. Urry, ‘The “system” of automobility’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21: 4–​5 (2004), 25–​39; Urry, Global Complexity; Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’; M. B.

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Empire and mobility: an introduction Salter, ‘To make move and let stop:  mobility and the assemblage of circulation’, Mobilities, 8:1 (2013), 7–​19; N. Glick Schiller and N. B. Salazar, ‘Regimes of mobility across the globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39:2 (2013), 183–​200. 59 J. Law, ‘On the methods of long-​ distance control:  vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India’, Sociological Review, 32:s1 (1984), 234–​63; M. Ogborn, ‘Writing travels: power, knowledge and ritual on the English East India Company’s early voyages’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27:2 (2002), 155–​71. 60 Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, p. 17. 61 Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture; P. Merriman, ‘Molar and molecular mobilities: the politics of perceptible and imperceptible movements’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37:1 (2019), 65–​82. 62 M. Webber, ‘The urban place and the nonplace urban realm’, in M. M. Webber, J. W. Dyckman, D. L. Foley, A. Z. Guttenberg, W. L. C. Wheaton and C. B. Wurster (eds), Explorations into Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 79–​153; E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); M. Augé, Non-​Places:  Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London:  Verso, 1995). For a critical reading of these literatures, see:  P. Merriman, ‘Marc Augé on space, place and non-​place’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 9 (2009), 9–​29. 63 Y.-​F. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 6. 64 D. Massey, ‘A global sense of place’, Marxism Today (June 1991), 24–​9; N. Thrift, ‘Steps to an ecology of place’, in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today (Cambridge:  Polity, 1999), pp. 295–​322; P. Merriman, ‘Driving places:  Marc Augé, non-​places and the geographies of England’s M1 motorway’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21:4–​ 5 (2004), 145–​ 67; D. Massey, For Space (London:  Sage, 2005); Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture. 65 On the geographies of ‘the passage’ see:  E. Wallin, ‘Geography and the realm of passages’, in P. Gould and G. Olsson (eds), A Search for Common Ground (London: Pion, 1982), pp. 252–​9; Adey et al., ‘Profiling the passenger’, 177–​80. 66 See T. Cresswell, ‘Embodiment, power and the politics of mobility: the case of female tramps and hobos’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (1999), 175–​92; T. Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion, 2001); Cresswell, On the Move; T. Cresswell and P. Merriman (eds), Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2011); M. Sheller, ‘Bodies, cybercars and the mundane incorporation of automated mobilities’, Social and Cultural Geography, 8:2 (2007), 175–​97. 67 See, for example:  M. Büscher and J. Urry, ‘Mobile methods and the empirical’, European Journal of Social Theory, 12:1 (2009), 99–​116; M. Büscher, J. Urry and K. Witchger (eds), Mobile Methods (London:  Routledge, 2011); B. Fincham, M. McGuinness and L. Murray (eds), Mobile Methodologies (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Merriman, ‘Rethinking mobile methods’. 68 N. Thrift, ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18:2 (2000), 213–​55; N. Thrift, ‘Introduction: Dead or alive?’, in I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor and J. R. Ryan (eds), Cultural Turns/​Geographical Turns (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2000), pp. 1–​6; N. Thrift, ‘Summoning life’, in P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds), Envisioning Human Geographies (London: Arnold, 2004), pp. 81–​103. 69 For responses to the claim that conventional methods and textual sources fail to articulate dynamic and mobile embodied practices and experiences, see: C. J. Griffin and A. B. Evans, ‘On historical geographies of embodied practice and performance’, Historical Geography, 36 (2008), 5–​16; Merriman, ‘Rethinking mobile methods’. 70 For an exemplary multi-​or cross-​scalar approach to mobility, see:  Cresswell, On the Move. 71 D. N. Livingstone, ‘Race, space and moral climatology: notes toward a genealogy’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28:2 (2002), 159–​80. 72 T. Cresswell, ‘ “You cannot shake that shimmie here”:  producing mobility on the dancefloor’, Cultural Geographies, 13:1 (2006), 55–​77.

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Empire and mobility 73 J. Darwin, ‘A third British Empire? The Dominion idea in imperial politics’, in J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis (eds) The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press:  1999), pp. 64–​87; Viscount Templeton, Empire of the Air: The Advent of the Air Age, 1922–​29 (London: Collins, 1957). 74 C. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–​ 1914:  Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2004), p.  1; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution:  Europe, 1789–​1848 (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–​1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–​1914 (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1990); B. Warf, Time-​Space Compression (London: Routledge, 2014). 75 K. Fedorowich and A. S. Thompson (eds), Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); M. Harper, ‘British migration and the peopling of the empire’, in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, pp. 75–​87; P. Manning, Migration in World History (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 149. 76 D. Northrup, ‘Migration from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific’, in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, p. 88. 77 D. Eltis, ‘A brief overview of the trans-​Atlantic slave trade’, Voyages:  The Trans-​ Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org/​voyage/​about, accessed 27 April 2019. 78 D. W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Oxford:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); H. Tinker, A New System of Slavery:  The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–​1920 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1974); L. Roopnarine, The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018); B. Samaroo and A. M. Bissessar (eds), The Construction of an Indo-​Caribbean Diaspora (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies, 2004). 79 D. B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–​ 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); K. O. Laurence, Immigration into the West Indies in the 19th Century (St Lawrence, Barbados:  Caribbean University Press, 1971), p. 14; Schuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’; J. U. J. Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, 1787–​1861: A Study of Liberated African Emigration and British Anti-​Slavery Policy (Harlow: Longmans, 1969). 80 Harper, ‘British migration and the peopling of the empire’. 81 M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008). 82 P. Brendon, Thomas Cook:  150 Years of Popular Tourism (London:  Secker & Warburg, 1991). 83 Y. Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the world:  improvements in the speed of information transmission, c. 1820–​1870’, European Review of Economic History, 5:1 (2001), 1–​28. 84 A. Anim-​Addo, ‘Place and Mobilities in the Maritime World: The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in the Caribbean, c. 1838 to 1914’ (PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2011); Steel, Oceania under Steam; Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism; R. Kubicek, ‘British expansion, empire, and technological change’, in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, pp. 247–​69; D. R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1981); B. Gough, Pax Britannica:  Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 85 Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the world’, p. 16. 86 B. Lubbock, The Colonial Clippers (Glasgow:  Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1948); U. Raulff, Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship. Translated by R. Ahmedzai Kemp (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 5. 87 W. R.  Louis, ‘Introduction’, in Brown and Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, pp. 1–​46.

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Empire and mobility: an introduction 88 L. Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler-​Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press, 2019). 89 Darwin, ‘A third British Empire?’, p. 72. 90 J. F. Beeler, ‘Steam strategy and Schurman:  imperial defence in the post-​Crimean era, 1856–​ 1905’, in G. Kennedy, K. Neilson, and D. M. Schurman (eds), Far-​ Flung Lines:  Essays on Imperial Defence in Honour of Donald Mackenzie Schurman (London:  Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 27–​54; M. Taylor (ed.), The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, 1837–​ 1901:  The Sea and Global History (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); D. G. Morgan-​ Owen, The Fear of Invasion:  Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880–​1914 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2017); K. Nelson and E. J. Errington (eds), Navies and Global Defense: Theories and Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995); R. Parkinson, The Late Victorian Navy: The Pre-​Dreadnought Era and the Origins of the First World War (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008). 91 See P. M. Kennedy, ‘Mahan versus Mackinder:  two interpretations of British sea power’, in P. M. Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–​ 1945:  Eight Studies (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 43–​85. 92 D. E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control:  The Royal Air Force, 1919–​1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); D. Killingray, ‘ “A swift agent of government”:  air power in British colonial Africa, 1916–​1939’, Journal of African History 25: 4 (1984), 429–​44. 93 C. W.  J. Withers, Zero Degrees:  Geographies of the Prime Meridian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 94 Interesting mobility histories which examine other ‘alternative’ modes of transport and mobility include: C. McShane and J. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); R. Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 95 Historical geographies of maritime spaces include:  D. Lambert, L. Martins and M. Ogborn, ‘Currents, visions and voyages:  historical geographies of the sea’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32:3 (2006), 479–​93; M. Ogborn, ‘Atlantic geographies’, Social and Cultural Geography, 6:3 (2005), 379–​85. On maritime mobilities, see P. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); P. Vannini, Ferry Tales:  Mobility, Place and Time on Canada’s West Coast (London:  Routledge, 2012); K. Peters, ‘Future promises for contemporary social and cultural geographies of the sea’, Geography Compass, 4:9 (2010), 1260–​72; J. Anderson and K. Peters (eds), Water Worlds:  Human Geographies of the Ocean (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2014); Anim-​Addo et  al., ‘The mobilities of ships and shipped mobilities’. Historical studies include:  Anim-​Addo, ‘ “The great event of the fortnight” ’; A. D. Davies, ‘Learning “large ideas” overseas: discipline (im)mobility and political lives in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny’, Mobilities, 9:3 (2014), 384–​400. 96 P. Merriman, ‘Mobility’, in A. Tickell, N. Thrift, S. Woolgar and W. Rupp (eds) Globalization in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 31–​4. 97 P. Merriman and K. Peters, ‘Military mobilities in an age of global war, 1870–​1945’, Journal of Historical Geography, 58 (2017), 53–​60; P. Merriman, K. Peters, P. Adey, T. Cresswell, I. Forsyth and R. Woodward, ‘Interventions on military mobilities’, Political Geography, 56 (2017), 44–​52. 98 P. Gilroy, ‘Driving while black’, in D. Miller (ed.), Car Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 81–​ 104; J. Packer, Mobility without Mayhem:  Safety, Cars and Citizenship (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2008); C. Seiler, Republic of Drivers:  A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). See also:  T. Cresswell, ‘Black moves:  moments in the history of African-​ American masculine mobilities’, Transfers:  Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 6:1 (2016), 12–​25. 99 G. Pirie, ‘Colours, compartments and corridors: racialized spaces, mobility and sociability in South Africa’, in C. Divall (ed.), Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), pp. 39–​51.

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100 G. Clarsen and L. Veracini, ‘Settler colonial automobilities:  a distinct constellation of automobile cultures?’ History Compass, 10:12 (2012), 889–​900; G. Clarsen, ‘Special section on settler-​colonial mobilities’, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 5:3 (2015), 41–​8. 101 J. Nicholson and M. Sheller, ‘Race and the politics of mobility introduction’, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 6:1 (2016), 4–​11.

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CHA P T E R T WO

Military print culture, knowledge and terrain: knowledge mobility and eighteenth-​century military colonialism Huw J. Davies The experience of warfare in different geographies and climates, and against and alongside different cultures and societies, profoundly affected its practice. Britain’s army experienced war in multiple forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a result of imperial expansion in America, Asia and Australasia. The methods and techniques which evolved in response to geographical or socio-​cultural challenges in one theatre had an inevitable impact on the practice of war in another. The question, therefore, arises, as to how knowledge and experience was exchanged between one theatre and the next. In this context, eighteenth-​ century British military personnel were among the most travelled of the British Empire. As a result, these individuals collectively generated and mobilised knowledge on a vast scale. In 2004, Natasha Glaisyer argued that if empire could be ‘thought of as a set of networks of exchange then … the scientific, cultural, social, political, and intellectual histories of empire’ were inextricably linked.1 It is curious that the military dimension is rarely, if ever, considered. This chapter aims to begin to correct this imbalance by exploring the different imperial military networks that enabled the exchange of knowledge within the British Army and across space and time. The way in which knowledge was transferred was multifaceted and complex; the most common manifestation being linear in nature:  knowledge was exchanged in a personal encounter between two people, and then one of them carried it across time and space. In the process of experiencing conflict, new knowledge was constructed and then exchanged in a new personal encounter. Evidence of this exchange can be found in journals, diaries, and both official and unofficial correspondence. A small but important minority of officers throughout the eighteenth century emphasised the importance of professional reading for [ 29 ]

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the purpose of self-​development. Some senior officers made unofficial recommendations to junior personnel and new entrants. In 1756, for example, General James Wolfe recommended an aspiring young officer read ‘Of the ancients, Vegetius; Caesar; Thucydides … There is an abundance of military Knowledge, to be pick’d out of the Lives of Gustavus Adolphus, & Charles 12th King of Sweden.’2 By the 1750s, a modest cadre of young officers viewed their service as a profession, and sought to improve through self-​education and reading.3 As such, knowledge generation, innovation and adaptation happened informally, rather than formally, and usually as a result of personal experience, interaction, correspondence or memoir writing.4 British officers communicated with each other in a variety of ways, and thus information and knowledge was transmitted, more often than not, ‘horizontally’. Tony Ballantyne sees this phenomenon in social and cultural spheres as a ‘web of empire’, with information passing from colony to colony, around the periphery, as well as between the periphery and the centre.5 This web was composed of a ‘range of personal, institutional and textual connections’ carrying new ideas, thinking and experiences across the empire.6 The composition of the networks, particularly the complexity of a multifaceted military network, ensured that more than mere knowledge exchange took place. The interaction of different personnel, with different experiences in different cultures and geographies, ensured that, as with other colonial discourses, military knowledge was ‘made and remade, rather than simply transferred or imposed’.7 Ballantyne’s research focuses on the relationship between British India and New Zealand, but this chapter will argue that certain individuals, places (usually of military significance) and objects acted as nodal points within a military network, which facilitated knowledge mobility –​specifically military knowledge mobility –​across the empire, as well as between the empire and the centre. If the most common form of knowledge exchange was through a personal encounter, thereby facilitating a linear transfer of knowledge from person to person, often from different generations, then there were also occasions when knowledge was exchanged simultaneously between multiple individuals. These instances might be termed ‘polysynchronous’ exchanges, and in effect new knowledge was generated by the interaction of multiple experiences in one space. The military, in particular the environment of the regiment or a deployed army, provided the perfect conditions for the development of polysynchronous knowledge exchange, evidence of which exists in diaries and journals, particularly those that recount daily life. [ 30 ]

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Besides the exchange of knowledge between personnel, knowledge was also conveyed in less personally embodied ways:  books and published memoirs proved vital vessels of knowledge exchange. Furthermore, the physical environment also enabled knowledge and experience to be transferred across space and time. In times of peace (and occasionally during wars) junior officers visited the sites of previous battles, learning directly from the terrain and environment. Proving the existence of personal and polysynchronous knowledge exchange is problematic, primarily because of what officers chose to record in their diaries and correspondence. There is some evidence to suggest that this was facilitated through correspondence networks, which were the primary means of knowledge and information mobility in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century empire.8 Although possessing an immediate impact, personal correspondence was limited in scope to the author and their intended reader (and whoever the latter chose to share the information with), so whilst this offers proof of personal encounters, it does not easily chart the wider movement of that knowledge. Next to correspondence, journals and diaries provided an opportunity for similar knowledge exchange. This form of communication had a limited immediate effect, though perhaps greater longer-​ term impact, as later generations absorbed the experiences of their predecessors more readily than they could through access to private correspondence. Even so, in order to achieve wider dissemination, these journals would need to be published, and in some cases, publication changed the nature of the journal: readers consumed published material in a different way to private, unpublished, material. In short, then, correspondence and journals were, in fact, significantly limited as a means of facilitating knowledge mobility within the military. Indeed, military personnel infrequently wrote about their day-​to-​day experience on campaign. Military life was marked by lengthy periods of dull monotony, punctuated by moments of intense, and brutally violent, activity. Battles were uncommon, but understandably, it was soldiers’ experience of them that excited most attention. Such infrequent and fleeting experience would prove of limited value for generating useful military knowledge and information. Where correspondence might prove useful is in identifying how military personnel interacted with other cultures, but even here, the writing is tinged with pejorative racial connotations:  Native Americans were frequently referred to as ‘savages’, whilst the Indian sepoy was seen as loyal and trustworthy on the battlefield, but incapable of independent action. Even other European powers were the subject of propagandist denunciations: the French were portrayed in satirical print as effeminate, for example.9 [ 31 ]

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If correspondence networks are imperfect records of the nature and character of knowledge networks, where else might we look for evidence of knowledge mobility? Military personnel were perhaps unique among a large set of travellers throughout the British Empire, in that soldiers and officers were expected to travel to multiple locations across the empire. Rather than correspondence networks which were anchored at the centre and the periphery, military personnel themselves acted as mobile, ‘ephemeral and even fleeting’ networks, moving between and within colonies.10 In place of correspondence, such personnel linked their experiences to their reading, their physical experience of war and the societies they were interacting with. Networks were composed and driven by the interaction of books, experience and terrain  –​the latter viewed ‘with a military eye [and] rendered memorable by having been the theatre of brilliant achievements in war’.11 These individuals were translating the static physical experience of war into a conceptual, mobile manifestation. This chapter will explore the role of the study of military literature and terrain, as well as the personal experience of war, in the generation and mobility of military knowledge across the empire. It will then study the manifestation of linear and polysynchronous knowledge exchange, and explore the impact these networks had on the prosecution of military campaigns.

Military geography and the mobilisation of knowledge In 1811, the nineteen-​year-​old Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell arrived in Lisbon commencing a three-​year deployment to the Iberian Peninsula as part, initially, of the 95th Rifles. Almost immediately, he was spotted as a talented draftsman and seconded to the Quartermaster General’s department. Mitchell held some strong views on the importance of military history and geography to the modern officer. In his fieldnotes from the year of his arrival in Portugal, we can glimpse some of those beliefs: Modern Historians do not describe with sufficient precision & exactness the countries wherein the wars were carried on nor the particular spot upon which some great transaction happened; the number, species and quality of the troops which composed the respective armies are generally omitted, as well as the plan of operations; and the operations themselves, excepting those which appeared extraordinary. They do not explain minutely as they ought, why, how and when every operation was transacted. They only in general terms, give the history of a campaign, without explaining sufficiently the motives by which the Generals were activated, how the various operations of it were conducted; and lastly,

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what was the nature of the ground where they happened. The knowledge however of these points is so necessary, that it is impossible to form an exact view of the propriety or impropriety of any military transaction without it.12

Mitchell was not alone in believing that an understanding of terrain was central to success for officers and generals. Eleven years earlier, another headstrong soldier, Major Christopher Hely-​ Hutchinson, had a stopover in Gibraltar during an extended deployment to the Mediterranean. Hely-​Hutchinson kept a meticulous diary of the whole expedition –​recording a variety of events, from dinner conversations to the battles against the French or Spanish. On 7 June, after a hearty breakfast, Hely-​Hutchinson went on a tour of Gibraltar ‘attended by the Chief Engineer, Colonel Fryers’. Hely-​Hutchinson’s party went to view the works and natural defences of this most celebrated rock, we first visited the works upon the North end, where the galleries worked through the rock, and at intervals through the galleries –​cannon placed, directing and pointed upon the neutral ground and Spanish lines, form a most tremendous defence at this point. There are also here batteries as you advance up the Rock. From the galleries we ascended until we reached the Rock gun, which is placed at the North pinnacle of the rock and pointed to the neutral ground. Here there is a view of both seas, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Bay, the Spanish Coast and also that of Barbary. In the galleries there is an excavation much more considerable than any of the rest which is called St George’s Hall. It is a large nearly round room nearly at the end of one of the Galleries, in which are placed several guns pointing on the Spanish lines. Descending from the Rock gun we passed by the Excavation in the Rock where General Elliot inhabited for some time during the siege [of 1779–​83]:  he left it  –​this cave –​on account of the dampness, it looks upon the Spanish Ground.13

It is reasonable to speculate that Hely-​Hutchinson and his comrades discussed with Colonel Fryers the progress of the siege between 1779 and 1783 at the climax of the American Revolutionary War. It goes without saying that armies learn from terrain: the experience of terrain in battle, in operational manoeuvre, in the very art of survival, all inform the way military personnel learn about war. Military geography itself becomes a means of knowledge transmission and exchange; a book whose pages when unfolded illustrate the complexity of battle. Most obviously, army personnel learned from the personal experience of military geography  –​the experience of battle, and the tactics most suitable for that terrain. Beyond this, though, the question remains how personnel learned from terrain outside of the experience of warfighting itself. Military knowledge is intimately linked to military geography  –​the latter contextualises and illustrates the former. [ 33 ]

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Whether individually or collectively, military personnel gained knowledge from geography and the experience of geography helped generate and mobilise new knowledge. The terrain itself, therefore, became a nodal point in a wider military knowledge network  –​not just for those who experienced the battle fought there, but for succeeding generations. Diaries and journals, as well as private correspondence, indicate that in both peacetime and wartime, military officers visited battlefields out of professional self-​interest. This occurred during the eighteenth-​ century military enlightenment. The way military personnel individually and organisations collectively thought about and viewed their role in society began to evolve, and with it, so did the way they thought about their own history. Debates about military campaigns emerged as written histories began to question decisions taken. At the same time, different schools of thought began to emerge about the tactics and strategies that the British Army should adopt. Veterans of Europe or America or India unsurprisingly viewed war from different perspectives, views often driven by particular geographical and environmental considerations and influences. Such debate was a symptom of an intellectually healthy officer corps, at the same time that popular caricature suggested intellectual bankruptcy.14 This period therefore saw an increase in the number of travelling officers who simultaneously pursued a professional interest in the history of the British Army. In 1770, for example, a captain in the 10th Dragoons embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe. His journal belies the military twist he applied to his travels. In every major town and city he visited –​from Lille to Strasbourg to Breisach to Ulm to Munich to Vienna  –​he commented on the nature of the fortifications, and the strength and quality of the garrisons. At Breisach, the unnamed captain was moved to note that the town ‘lies so snug that you are almost on the fortifications before you even see them. This is reckon’d a very complete fortress tho’ not upon a scale of any considerable extent. It is the work of that celebrated French Engineer M. Vauban.’15 Indeed, this was a view widely shared. Four decades later, Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell recorded in his field book on terrain, engineering and generalship, that ‘Neuf-​Brisack [sic], built in 1697 by Marshall Vauban, may be considered as the true system adopted by this celebrated engineer, being the result of his long experience, and except in some slight changes of construction, it is that generally received now by the French engineers for superior polygons.’16 Terrain, geography and military structures can be seen in this way to be the means of the transmission of knowledge and learning, as the visible and undying reminder of past military experience. [ 34 ]

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At Strasbourg, the captain was grateful for the hospitality of Louis Georges Érasme de Contades, the celebrated Marshal of France and commander of French forces at the Battle of Minden in 1759. ‘I was very glad to see a man of whom I had heard so much in our last War in Germany’, wrote the captain. ‘He received me very kindly, & invited me to dine with him whilst I stay’d’, though there is no record of the things the two officers might have discussed.17 The captain was clearly interested in positional warfare:  lengthy descriptions of fortifications and garrisons intersperse his social commentary on the odd fashions of German women, and the extraordinary ability of French soldiers to keep their hair in place in strong winds. By contrast, he missed the opportunity to visit the site of the Battle of Blenheim, which a short detour would have enabled him to view as he travelled between Ulm and Augsburg. It is unclear if said captain even knew Blenheim was close-​by. From this, we can provisionally conclude that the anonymous captain was interested in studying the profession of arms insofar as it related to the popular themes of the period –​notably that the main objectives of warfare were focused on the acquisition of enemy fortifications: set-​piece battles were the product of rather than an alternative to sieges. Our anonymous captain was not alone in holding these views. Other similarly themed travel journals –​grand tours with a focus on military sightseeing –​also focus on descriptions of fortifications. One journal writer travelled along the coast of Valencia and Catalonia in 1754. As he passed through Morviedro, he commented on the huge castle overlooking the settlement: ‘anciently Saguntum,’ he wrote, ‘so famous for its siege’.18

Linear knowledge exchange The focus on positional warfare was reflected in a key debate that ran throughout the military enlightenment, and which was energised by the exchange of knowledge between military personnel. The debate, which juxtaposed positional warfare  –​based on sieges and battles  –​ and manoeuvre warfare  –​based on achieving tactical and strategic success by manoeuvring into advantageous positions –​was catalysed by the exchange of military knowledge throughout the empire. The juxtaposed views of two prominent British military officers illustrate the evolution of this debate. James Wolfe, who fought in Europe in the 1740s and in North America until his death in battle at the siege of Quebec in 1759, was a proponent of positional warfare and believed the main objective of an army should be to seek battle. Henry Clinton, who served in Europe in the 1750s before his appointment as Commander-​ in-​Chief in North America during the American Revolutionary War, [ 35 ]

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practised manoeuvre warfare and perceived battle to be an option only in the last resort. In 1751, Wolfe was posted with his regiment to Inverness, having previously fought in Scotland during the Jacobite uprising of 1745–​ 46. He had served in the British Army during the War of the Austrian Succession. Garrison life in winter in Scotland was relentlessly dull. ‘Besides the multitude of evils yet this Town contains’, he wrote in frustration to his father, ‘we have the additional mortification that the Country about us affords very little relief.’ To alleviate the boredom, Wolfe ‘surveyed the Field of Battle of Culloden with great exactness’. Unsurprisingly, he found ‘room for a military criticism’. Wolfe had fought at Culloden in April 1746, so it is particularly interesting to note his observations taken from different perspectives. ‘The actors shine in the world too high & bright to be eclipsed, but it is plain they don’t borrow much of their glory from their performances upon that occasion’, he wrote to his father, ‘however they may have distinguished themselves in later events.’19 At the end of the battle itself, Wolfe had come away with a positive view, but on return to the battlefield had identified seemingly avoidable errors in the judgement of his superiors. ‘The more a soldier thinks of the false steps of those that have gone before him, the more likely is he to avoid them; on the other hand The Examples worthiest of imitation should never be lost sight of, as they will be the best & truest guides in every undertaking.’20 Clearly Wolfe believed it possible to learn lessons from the terrain on which a battle had been fought, and for Wolfe, battle was the ultimate object of an army. In February 1759, as he prepared for the expedition to Quebec –​an expedition that would simultaneously make his name and cost him his life –​Wolfe complained that recently published drill regulations failed adequately to prepare soldiers for the complexity of modern battle. ‘[’T]is unlucky’, he wrote to his friend and mentor, Lord George Sackville, ‘that our great master in the art of war, Frederick of Prussia, was not preferred upon this occasion. He has made the exercise simple and useful.’21 As one of the most successful tacticians and strategists of his age, Frederick the Great had made the pursuit and destruction of an enemy’s army in battle the defining feature of his military leadership.22 Like Wolfe, Sir Henry Clinton took opportunities to visit historical battlefields, analyse the decisions made by the participants and gain a wider understanding of military geography. In 1774, he travelled from England to the Balkans as part of the entourage of Henry Lloyd, a military theorist and volunteer staff officer in Catherine the Great’s army. Lloyd held the rank of major general in the Russian Army, and dressed appropriately –​a green great coat and bearskin cap.23 En route, [ 36 ]

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the party visited the battlefields of Lauffeld (2 July 1747), Bergen (13 April 1759)  and Dettingen (27 June 1743). In contrast to Wolfe, the prudent-​minded Clinton clearly saw battle as an extreme risk and only to be fought in optimum circumstances. For example, at Lauffeld, he remarked that ‘the whole turned upon the village, both being open behind & too far from our line to be sustained; the battle ought not to have been fought at all; better have put the Maas between you and the enemy by which Maastrict would have been safe’.24 Indeed, were it not for the quick action of General John Ligonier, the British cavalry commander, the British infantry, which had been pushed out of their defensive position at Lauffeld village, would have been annihilated by French cavalry.25 Flank security was uppermost in Clinton’s mind when the party visited Bergen. There the French had been the defenders, and successfully fought off repeated attacks by the British and Hanoverian army. In Clinton’s view, ‘the village of Bergen might have been turned by the left, a column of infantry might have penetrated close under the wall of that village, unexposed to a single shot in flank’, though this path was laced with jeopardy ‘owing to a marshy rivulet which still kept you from the town, & on which there was only one stone bridge close to the Glacis of the place’ which would have exposed the attackers to severe fire.26 Bergen, a fortified town, overlooked the floodplains of the River Main. It was therefore difficult to avoid a frontal assault. Given the circumstances Clinton described, it is likely that had he been in command of the British and Hanoverians at Bergen in 1759, then no attack would have been made.27 The difference of interpretation on the application of military power between Wolfe and Clinton, both students as well as practitioners of war, is stark. Wolfe saw battle as the primary objective of an army in the field, whilst Clinton sought to avoid battle in all but the most favourable of circumstances. The creation and mobilisation of knowledge during the military enlightenment influenced and expanded the debate. A keen advocate for military professionalism, it is unsurprising that Wolfe also argued that to be successful, soldiers had to be well-​read. The mid-​eighteenth century saw a fundamental shift in the way military history was thought about, written and read. Reading patterns changed, but by and large, officers read material with similar themes:  military history was superseded by military theory and detailed study of contemporary campaigns. ‘In general’, Wolfe initially recommended, ‘the lives of all the great Commanders and all the good Histories of Warlike Nations’ before noting that the best new continental military theory could be found in ‘the King of Prussia’s Regulations for his Horse & Foot, where the economy & good order [ 37 ]

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of an army in the lower branches, is extremely well established’.28 Clinton, likewise, read a similar range of material.29 It is stark that two significantly different positions on war emerged from similar career paths and study. Wolfe and Clinton both saw the writings of continental practitioners and historians as the solution to Britain’s military difficulties in the 1750s and 1770s respectively. For them, military history was to be read in order to understand contemporary challenges, to learn what worked and what did not; to get inside the mind of the decision-​takers, whilst theory could be used to apply that knowledge in a modern setting. In the 1740s and 1750s, The military history of the late Prince Eugene of Savoy, and of the late John Duke of Marlborough was among the most popular texts, but so too were Caesar’s Commentaries, which arguably reflected the hubristic stagnation which was afflicting British arms in the wake of Marlborough’s outstanding successes.30 The experience of embarrassing and humiliating defeats in both Europe and America in the mid-​eighteenth century helped change the way in which British military personnel studied their own profession. Competing schools of thought began to emerge about how to utilise force and bring arms to bear. Military history declined as preferred reading material, to be replaced by treatises and essays on the art of war itself. Among the works consulted, perhaps inevitably, given his role inflicting heavy defeats on British arms in Europe, was Maurice de Saxe’s Reveries or Memoirs on the Art of War, which discussed, among other things, the costs and benefits of shock action versus firepower in conventional battle, as well as the merits and utility of irregular infantry units for intelligence collection, camp security and the employment of ambuscade tactics. The combination of erudition on the art of war and the apparent successful application of those ideas made Saxe a compelling choice for the British military reader. Saxe had a long and distinguished career in the French Army, eventually receiving his marshal’s baton in 1743. Saxe suggested new and alternative ways of thinking about war that were the product of varied experience in different theatres against enemies on varied terrain.31 But it was a British member of Saxe’s staff in 1745 who was to help define how the British profession of arms met the challenges of war in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was none other than Henry Lloyd, whom Clinton would accompany on a tour through Europe in 1774. In the early 1740s, Lloyd, a young Welshman aspiring to join the British Army, was defrauded of his inheritance by his unscrupulous step-​ father. This propelled Lloyd onto an unconventional path to a military career. Bereft of the money required to purchase a commission [ 38 ]

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in the British Army, Lloyd fled abroad, first to Spain, where he was taken under the wing of prominent Spanish military thinkers and where he picked up considerable knowledge and began to realise the importance of military geography. A natural draftsman, Lloyd was also an avid military historian, devouring histories of campaigns from Caesar to Marlborough. He next travelled to France, where he became the military tutor to the son of the prominent Scottish Jacobite, Lord John Drummond. When the War of the Austrian Succession broke out, Drummond joined the French Army under the command of Marshal de Saxe. Lloyd went with him. Saxe was so impressed with Lloyd’s drawings of the terrain in the Low Countries that he brought him onto his staff, and reputedly the drawings influenced Saxe’s choice of terrain for what became the battlefield of Fontenoy (11 May 1745). A Jacobite sympathiser, Lloyd spied for Prince Charles during the uprising of 1745/​46, before participating in the siege of Bergen-​op-​Zoom in 1747. From the 1750s to the 1770s, Lloyd served on the staffs of various European armies, including that of Catherine the Great’s Russian Army during the Russo-​Turkish War. Lloyd, then, had a somewhat distinctive military career, but he is famous because of his intellectual commentaries on the art of war, some of which were heavily influenced by the writings of his old patron, Saxe.32 Saxe’s and Lloyd’s writings differ from other military manuals and treatises of the eighteenth century. Rather than intricate studies of the mechanics and science of tactics, techniques and procedures, Saxe and Lloyd are significant because of their identification of the importance of human nature on the course of war.33 Saxe believed that this needed to be incorporated into the military model, rather than thrashed out as per the rigorous training and discipline policies of the age. ‘It is much easier to take men as they are’, he wrote, ‘than to make them as they should be.’34 In the wake of the Seven Years War, Lloyd wrote an expansive history of the conflict in Germany, entitled The History of the Late War in Germany; Between the King of Prussia, and the Empress of Germany and Her Allies. This work is important because included in the second volume was an essay, ‘Reflections on the General Principles of War; and on the composition and characters of the different armies in Europe’. In this essay, Lloyd elaborated on Saxe’s ideas and developed the concept of ‘National Character’. In part he used this argument to criticise the adoption by the British Army of the Prussian system of drill. ‘Nature must be improved, not annihilated’, he cautioned.35 Rather than merely adopt wholesale tactics, techniques and procedures that worked well for one army, Lloyd argued that a nation must find its own [ 39 ]

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way in war.36 Lloyd’s point was that what suited one national character in the conduct of war might not necessarily sit well with a different national character. Lloyd’s work was widely read. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, took Lloyd’s work with him to India in 1798,37 and there is evidence Lloyd was read amongst the cadre of junior officers at the beginning of the Peninsular War (1808–​14).38 Lloyd, then, is a good example of a key node in a linear military knowledge network. He highlighted the importance of adaptability, not least to terrain. It was no good imposing one national doctrine on another national army, because differing circumstances, whether geographically, politically or culturally, might render the doctrine invalid. For the British Army, operating as it was in the American wilderness and India, as well as Europe, the imposition of a centralised doctrine was particularly difficult. Whilst Saxe and Lloyd helped transform thinking about war, framing the experiences of the inquisitive and critically engaged officer, the tension that developed between the emerging European and American schools of warfare fuelled a debate that would generate significant discourse on the subject from those who served in both theatres and sought to reconcile the competing agendas of both camps. Just as political discourse between proponents of competing philosophies generated a debate that helped transform political thought, so it was in military discourse, where competing perspectives helped fuel debate and innovative thinking about war. This manifested in several ways, but of interest here is the evolving way in which military personnel conceptualised the geography and environment in which they were to fight. In the thirty years between the 1770 cavalryman’s tour of Europe and Hely-​Hutchinson’s journal of the British expeditionary force in the Mediterranean, the character of war had changed significantly, moving away from the positional siege-​based warfighting studied by the captain, toward a mixture of manoeuvre and siege warfare. Lloyd’s influence on Henry Clinton’s thinking about war is particularly instructive. The debate between positional and manoeuvre warfare was at the heart of British military thinking in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Those in favour of positional warfare –​diarists like the Dragoon, Wolfe and students of Marlborough’s campaigns –​saw battle as the main object of an army. For them, wars were won through the occupation of territory, which meant the capture of fortifications, and if a resultant siege was not executed swiftly, battle would be joined when an enemy sought to raise a siege. This is why the Dragoon spent so much time inspecting European fortifications:  for him military success lay in [ 40 ]

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expert siegecraft. As the century progressed, the emphasis gradually shifted to the defeat of the enemy army rather than the capture of key fortifications. Proponents saw direct action against enemy forces as the key to victory. Those who favoured manoeuvre warfare sought to avoid sieges and battles, and would fight only on terrain which offered significant advantage and only as a last resort. Rather than direct confrontation, for proponents of manoeuvre warfare, the key to victory lay in manoeuvring the enemy out of their chosen defensive positions and forcing them to retreat. On the battlefield, flanking attacks were preferred to frontal assaults. The diverse experience of British military personnel from the 1750s onwards meant that examples of the success of both positional and manoeuvre warfare were evident, not just in history books, but from the personal experience of campaigns and battles, the record of these different ideas by military theorists and in the exploration of the terrain on which sieges and battles occurred. With no central doctrinal apparatus, there was room in British military thinking for the consideration and application of both approaches to warfare. Military knowledge from across the empire helped drive the vicarious nature of the debate. Clinton and Lloyd’s friendship and resultant discussions about the character of war is a case in point. Lloyd accepted that direct confrontation in battle was inevitable, but he emphasised prudence in planning and executing campaigns. ‘It is a certain rule, from which a General ought never to depart, to shorten continually as he advances his line of operation, by forcing new depots behind him’, whilst ‘an army whose line of operation is considerably too long can execute no solid enterprize, though it be ever so powerful.’39 Within this context, an officer needed to be aware of the geography in which he was operating, and the national character of both his own army and that of the enemy. In a letter to Clinton written in 1767, one year after the first edition of his Principles of War was published, Lloyd noted that ‘one of the great errors committed by all those who write and speak of manoeuvres is that they never think of the enemy, & always propose doing this, or that motion, without asking themselves what the enemy would or might do’.40 For Lloyd, a soldier must ‘be taught everything that is absolutely necessary for him to know, in every case that may happen’, including geography, natural history and national characters.41 The linear exchange of knowledge between Clinton and Lloyd helped to refashion the former’s perspective on war, who came to recognise that prudence was paramount in warfare decision-​making and planning, and that significant attention needed to be paid to geography, history and enemy character. In 1791, nearly a decade after [ 41 ]

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Lloyd’s death, while reflecting on his own career, Clinton made notes on Lloyd’s Principles of War. Writing in a conversational style, as if in dialogue with his deceased friend, Clinton commented that ‘there is no doubt but that the best possible disposition that can be made is that by which a number of men can move with simplicity, safely to transition and act with the greatest velocity to the front, rear & flanks’. When planning campaigns ‘with respect to marches the first thing to be attended to is that to invade with all the celerity possible consistent with safety, the more columns you can march in the better’.42 In a career spanning half a century, Clinton was firmly of the view that direct confrontation was the last resort. Far better for an army to cleverly manoeuvre the enemy out of their positions than risk defeat.43 This is reflected by Clinton’s campaign planning in America. The knowledge generated by his correspondence and relationship with Lloyd was mobilised by Clinton’s deployment, first, as a subordinate to General William Howe, and then as Commander-​in-​Chief. Between 1775 and 1777, Clinton constantly advised caution, preferring flank attacks where battle was necessary and advising against direct confrontation where he thought it unnecessary. He failed to press his case sufficiently, however, and a frontal assault at Bunker Hill (17 June 1775), for example, succeeded only at great cost, whilst Howe’s ill-​advised operation to capture Philadelphia in 1777 diverted vital resources needed to support General John Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada. The latter was defeated at Saratoga and surrendered on 16 October. The British defeat precipitated French entry into the war. Howe resigned shortly afterwards and Clinton was appointed his successor.44 Despite achieving overall command, and now seeking to prosecute a campaign based on raids and manoeuvre designed to wear down American strength and with it the will to continue the war, Clinton still found it difficult to win support for his plans from his subordinates, notably Charles Cornwallis.45 The latter was a proponent of direct confrontation, and sought to pursue the Continental Army and bring them to battle, eventually deciding upon a flawed ‘domino strategy’ that expected South Carolina to be conquered only when North Carolina was successfully repressed, and for North Carolina’s conquest to be dependent on that of Virginia.46 The product of this plan was an ill-​ fated march into Virginia and the eventual capitulation of Cornwallis’s force at Yorktown (19 October 1781), and with it Britain’s attempts to end the American Revolution. Rather than arriving at the conclusions that Wolfe might have reached, Lloyd and Clinton interacted with a combination of diverse study and experience of war, culture and geography to arrive at very different conclusions about the character of war. Lloyd was the key [ 42 ]

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conduit for bringing a vast range of experience to bear that even Wolfe could not match. As an example of linear exchange, the correspondence and relationship between Lloyd and Clinton helped to remake military knowledge in the eighteenth century, transforming the study of terrain and history.

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Polysynchronous knowledge exchange The loss of the American colonies did not mean the end of American influences on British military thinking. In Europe, in the wake of Britain’s tactical defeats and the emergence in Frederick the Great’s Prussia of strong and disciplined infantry which relied on massed firepower, a dramatic tactical re-​evaluation in the British Army began. In America, meanwhile, a different school of thought had begun to emerge, which emphasised flexibility and adaptation in the face of challenges born of enemy and terrain.47 Whereas in Europe the emphasis was on mass, discipline and drill regulations, in America, the concept of irregular tactics and light infantry began to emerge, and with it different operational practices. The crux of the argument came down to the differing nature of terrain, with the European school arguing that tactics developed in the American wilderness were irrelevant in Europe, and the American school arguing that the British Army might benefit from a combination of regular and irregular tactics on any battlefield. Few officers appeared to consider the value of both in a European context. One Scottish author, Lewis Lochee, wrote an ‘Essay on Military Education’ which was published in 1774, and argued for a curriculum that combined physical education (including dancing, fencing, walking and riding) with theory. Lochee looked to Britain’s enemies and allies for guidance on what should be taught. ‘A most necessary quality in a soldier’, Lochee wrote, is the coup d’oeil, which consists of judging so precisely of a country, as to tell, at first view, the number of troops which the whole or any assigned part of it will contain, the best situation for an encampment, and the best possible dispositions for the order of battle. It is from hunting that the Indians in America have derived their chief knowledge of the art of war; and it has made them compleat masters of the coup d’oeil, and enabled them to contrive uncommon ambuscades, safe for themselves and dangerous to their enemies.48

The incorporation of military knowledge from the former colonies and empire was far from straightforward. It proceeded in fits and starts in the ten years between the end of the American Revolutionary War and [ 43 ]

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the commencement of the French Revolutionary War. By 1800, having suffered a series of calamitous defeats at the hands of the French, the appetite for learning from Britain’s diverse experience was increasing. An opportunity for polysynchronous exchange arose in June 1800, when an expeditionary force was deployed to the Mediterranean. The force was composed of nearly 30,000 troops, and, when not ashore at Gibraltar or Minorca, sailed aboard no fewer than 160 troop carriers, escorted by five Royal Naval warships. Unlike the linear exchange between Lloyd and Clinton, this expeditionary force was part of a polysynchronous exchange or network. In contrast to other expeditionary operations, which were assembled for a specific purpose, this one had been dispatched to the Mediterranean to acquire targets of opportunity in the ongoing war with Revolutionary France. Many of the officers aboard this large flotilla were despairing of its misuse. ‘Never did so large and effective a force leave the ports of England’, wrote Brigadier General Sir Eyre Coote in his journal on 2 October 1800, ‘and never was a year so completely wasted away without advantages to the country. We must consider ourselves as a wandering Army, not knowing where to go or what progress to pursue.’49 Deployed in June 1800, the expeditionary force remained in the Mediterranean for eighteen months. This was an uncharacteristically lengthy deployment, in which officers of different rank and with varied experiences were forced to cohabit. Senior personnel with extensive experience of imperial and colonial conflict, notably in America, commanded relatively junior officers at the dawn of their careers. This eighteen-​month deployment might be seen as the definition of a polysynchronous network, with multiple linear exchanges of knowledge occurring at the same time, converging in one space, creating multiple interactions and remaking military knowledge. Polysynchronous networks manifested in multiple ways, whether in the form of an experienced soldier training inexperienced subordinates, professional discussions about war or the simple act of conversing over dinner in the mess. The expeditionary operation of 1800–​1 is important because this deployment offered a concentrated opportunity for such events to occur repeatedly. This allowed the development and maturation of ideas. Proving the existence of such networks is deeply problematic. Circumstantial evidence becomes apparent from collections of diaries and correspondence. It is possible to speculate, for example, that officers held conversations about previous experiences:  even if there was an aversion to the discussion of ‘business’ in the mess, this becomes more likely the longer officers spent together. Thus, we begin to see evidence of conversations about wartime experience emerge five [ 44 ]

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months after the deployment of the expeditionary force. In November 1800, for example, Hely-​Hutchinson, whose earlier visit to Gibraltar illustrated terrain-​based knowledge exchange, recorded in his diary a conversation he had with a fellow major. ‘Dined at the 63rd mess’, he wrote. ‘Talked over the action of the 6th October last year in North Holland in front of Egmont op zie [sic] when this regiment was under my Brother [John Hely-​Hutchinson] who was then wounded.’50 This battle was part of the Anglo-​Russian invasion of Holland beginning in August 1799. The battle referred to by Hely-​Hutchinson had begun as an armed reconnaissance, and degenerated into a series of skirmishes that had undermined the Anglo-​Russian position and eventually led to an armistice and ignominious withdrawal.51 In his journal, Hely-​ Hutchinson is reflective, observing that independent action among mid-​ranking personnel had avoided complete catastrophe.52 The content of the conversation is less important than the fact it took place. The fact that the participants were discussing their experience of war was indeed unusual. At the outset of the deployment in June, after arriving in Gibraltar, Hely-​Hutchinson recorded the details of a dinner laid on at the Governor’s residence, ‘which was tedious, dull and anything but magnificent. Nobody spoke but the Governor who was as injudicious and wild in his conversation as he appeared little polished in his manners.’53 Clearly, then, time was needed for the personnel to settle into the rhythm of the deployment, and learn to trust each other before confiding their experiences. Conversations over dinner were not the only medium through which knowledge was exchanged, however. As we have seen, Hely-​ Hutchinson took advantage of his visit to Gibraltar to inspect the two-​ decade-​old siege works. Three months later, the expeditionary force had moved to Minorca. On 18 September, Hely-​Hutchinson ‘rode with John [his brother], General [John] Moore, Colonel Dyer and Anderson to Adaya 8 miles from Mahon where the British troops under Sir C[harles] Stuart landed in November 1798 when this Island was taken by them’.54 It is inconceivable that two generals, two colonels and a major with reputations as thinking, intellectual officers did not consider and discuss the challenges and problems which Stuart encountered in his assault in 1798 –​particularly as these officers would in less than six months be conducting their own amphibious assault, this time against the French in Alexandria, Egypt. John Moore, in particular, is of interest here. He had a reputation as an innovative and thoughtful officer. His first deployment was to Minorca in 1777, where he served as an ensign in the 51st Regiment. There, he read a copy of James Wolfe’s posthumously published Instructions for Young Officers.55 Besides this, Moore’s experience, so [ 45 ]

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far, was largely based on fighting in the West Indies, where he was introduced to, and became an advocate for, the use of light infantry –​a concept derived from the American school of military thinking, and frowned upon in the European school in the 1790s. In 1796, Moore was deployed on an operation to take St Lucia. There, having recently arrived and been given command which on ‘its success my character would be judged … in an army where I was unknown’, Moore led four companies of grenadiers and light infantry on a dawn assault up a hill overlooking the main French position on St Lucia. ‘The enemy were … drawn up crowning the hill’, Moore recorded in his diary. ‘They fired upon us with great effect.’ Despite this, ‘our men were always rather gaining ground … We at last reached the summit, and put to the bayonet such as had not had time to escape.’56 Despite the inexperience of the troops, and the initial reluctance of the men to conserve their fire and use the bayonet, the use of light troops proved decisive. This is a small example of Moore’s use of light infantry tactics. He became a passionate advocate of the American school and on return to Europe was given command of units which specialised in light infantry roles. However, in the lead-​up to the attack on Egypt, Moore was detached to liaise with the Ottoman Army  –​due to act in support of the British landing. He was therefore not present when the army was trained in Marmarice Bay, on the coast of Turkey, in January and February 1801. During this period, the troops had a rare opportunity to practise an assault landing. On 21 January, for example, Brigadier General Coote’s ‘brigade with the reserve landed, and after having formed in line, fronting the country, and with the right towards Marmarice, re-​embarked immediately. The whole’, Coote commented in his diary, ‘was well conducted and with very little confusion.’57 A  week earlier, part of Coote’s brigade had some much-​needed drill practice. On a ‘fine plain’ just behind the British encampment, ‘sufficiently spacious to allow one or two brigades to manoeuvre at the same time’, Coote ‘saw the 1/​54  … form square, four deep, at several different times, & filing from the right of companies, and afterwards forming line’.58 The army was thus trained in a manner which incorporated light tactics into the general order of battle. As Moore was not present for the training, he clearly imparted his knowledge and convinced others of its importance. Military knowledge was thus remade:  European tactics and American tactics were successfully amalgamated, and allowed the British, when they did land at Abukir Bay in March 1801, to defeat the occupying French Army on difficult and broken terrain. Appropriate tactics were selected for appropriate situations. In contrast, the same army two years earlier, humbled in Holland, had been unable to meet [ 46 ]

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a similar challenge. Deployed together for nearly nine months before the assault on Egypt commenced, the knowledge and capability necessary had been generated and exchanged through a combination of discussion, physical interaction with terrain and resultantly innovative training. In 2005, Kaushik Roy argued that British success in India had resided in Britain’s ability to adapt to the nature of warfare on the subcontinent, which was superior to the indigenous power’s abilities to respond to the nature of European warfare forced upon them by the appearance of Western forces on their shores. This adaptability Roy labelled ‘military synthesis’.59 This adaptability was clearly the result of knowledge networks, and the generation, mobilisation and exchange of new and remade military knowledge: ‘military synthesis’. Crucially, this was not a phenomenon unique to the subcontinent, but evident in Europe, America and the Middle East. This chapter has illustrated that the generation, mobilisation and exchange of military knowledge was complex and multifaceted. The mid-​ eighteenth century onwards proved a particularly important period for the mobilisation of military knowledge. The so-​called military enlightenment saw the publication and distribution of volumes of memoirs, histories and treatises on war. The expansion of the Grand Tour to include military landscapes enabled the exchange of knowledge gained from the site of historical battles. The imperial context, too, was important, forcing officers with diverse experiences to contemplate alternative characters of war and how these might be incorporated in different environments and geographies. The linear exchange of knowledge and polysynchronous networks helped to remake knowledge based on experience and thinking about warfare. Such networks were composed of individual and collective interaction with the published military histories and treatises on the art of war, physical interaction with terrain and geography, and written and spoken discussion of it. Given time, multiple networks formed which allowed for the development of sophisticated knowledge mobility, the product of the discussion of prior experience of war and its contemporary application.

Notes 1 N. Glaisyer, ‘Networking:  trade and exchange in the eighteenth-​ century British Empire’, Historical Journal, 47:2 (2004), p. 459. 2 Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa (hereafter LAC), MG18/​L5/​4, Wolfe Extracts from Sabine Collection, Wolfe to unknown, Devizes, 18 July 1756. 3 See, for example, I. Beckett, Britain’s Part-​Time Soldiers:  The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–​1945 (London: Pen & Sword, 2011). 4 See R. T. Foley, ‘Dumb donkeys or cunning foxes? Learning in the British and German armies during the Great War’, International Affairs, 90:2 (2014), 279–​98; and A. Fox, ‘ “Thomas Cook’s tourists”: the challenges and benefits of inter-​theatre

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Empire and mobility service in the British Army of the First World War’, Journal of Historical Geography, 58 (2017), 82–​91. 5 See T. Ballantyne, Webs of Empire:  Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Auckland:  Bridget Williams Books, 2014), in particular, ‘Introduction:  Relocating colonial histories’. 6 For a wider discussion, see D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 7 A. Lester, Imperial Networks:  Creating Identities in Nineteenth-​ Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 5–​6. 8 For more on correspondence networks in early modern Britain, see L. O’Neill, The Opened Letter:  Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 9 See, for example, Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT (hereafter LWL), MS 791.08.12.01, French Barracks, etching and aquatint drawn by Thomas Rowlandson, 12 August 1791. 10 Lester, Imperial Networks, pp. 5–​6. 11 R. H. Thoumine, Scientific Soldier:  A Life of General Le Marchant, 1766–​ 1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 256. 12 State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (hereafter SLNSW), C11, Mitchell Fieldnotes 1811, fo. 5. 13 Trinity College Dublin Library (hereafter TCD), Donoughmore Papers, E/​10c, Diaries of the Hon. Christopher Hely-​Hutchinson during the Expedition to Egypt, fo. 9. 14 See Thoumine, Scientific Soldier, pp. 248–​67. 15 LWL, MS 55, European Military Tour Journal, 1770, fo. 22. 16 SLNSW, C11, Mitchell Fieldbook, 1811, fo. 2. 17 LWL, MS 55, European Military Tour Journal, 1770, fo. 21. 18 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter BRBML), Osborn, c200, European Travel Diary, 1754–​55, fo. 2. 19 LAC, MG18/​L5/​3/​1, Wolfe to his father, Inverness, 17 October 1751. 20 Ibid. 21 Wolfe to Sackville, 7 February 1759, in R. Wright, The Life of Major-​General James Wolfe … Illustrated by his Correspondence (London:  Chapman & Hall, 1864), pp. 418–​19. 22 See T. Blanning, Frederick the Great:  King of Prussia (London:  Allen Lane, 2015), especially ch. 7. 23 John Rylands University of Manchester Library (hereafter JRUML), Clinton Papers, Lot 185, Notebook 3, 1768–​76; 1778–​79. 24 William L.  Clements Library, University of Michigan (hereafter WCL), Clinton Papers, MS 286, Memoranda Book, 1774, fo. 82. 25 See R. Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (Stroud: Sutton Publishing,  1993). 26 WCL, Clinton Papers, MS 286, Memoranda Book, 1774, fo. 83. 27 W. B. Wilcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1964), pp. 1–​33; I. D. Gruber, ‘The education of Sir Henry Clinton’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 72:1 (1990), 131–​54. 28 LAC, MG18/​ L5/​ 4, Wolfe Extracts from Sabine Collection, Wolfe to unknown, Devizes, 18 July 1756. 29 Gruber, ‘Education of Clinton’, p. 137. 30 See I. D. Gruber, Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 31 M. de Saxe, Reveries or Memoirs Concerning the Art of War (Edinburgh: Printed for A. Donaldson, 1759), p. 96. 32 See P. J. Speelman, Henry Lloyd and the Military Enlightenment of Eighteenth-​ Century Europe (London: Praeger, 2002). 33 N. Ramsey, ‘Military history and eighteenth-​ century print culture’, unpublished paper delivered at ‘New Directions in War and History’ conference, Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society, Canberra, 5 February 2016.

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Military print culture, knowledge and terrain 34 H. Lloyd, ‘Reflections on the General Principals of War; and on the composition and characters of the different armies in Europe’, in The History of the Late War in Germany; Between the King of Prussia, and the Empress of Germany and Her Allies (London, 1778). 35 Ibid., p. 310. 36 See Speelman, Lloyd and the Military Enlightenment, ch. 2. 37 See P. Guedalla, The Duke (London:  Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), Kindle location 1152–​ 1286; R. Muir, Wellington:  The Path to Victory, 1769–​ 1814 (London:  Yale University Press, 2013), Kindle location 1417–​1434. 38 SLNSW, C11, Mitchell Fieldbook, 1811, fo. 6. 39 Lloyd, ‘Reflections on the General Principals of War’, pp. 89, 157–​8. 40 WCL, Clinton Papers, MS 3/​23, Lloyd to Clinton, Windsor, 29 March 1767. 41 Lloyd, ‘Reflections on the General Principals of War’, p. 7. See also Speelman, Lloyd and the Military Enlightenment, p. 123. 42 JRUML, Clinton Papers, Lot 185, Notebook 14, 1791–​92. 43 Gruber, ‘Education of Clinton’, p. 143. 44 Ibid. See also, David Smith, William Howe and the American War of Independence (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Wilcox, Portrait of a General, pp. 1–​33. 45 See J. Black, ‘British military strategy’, in D. Stoker, K. J. Hagen and M. T. McMaster (eds), Strategy in the American War of Independence (London:  Routledge, 2011), pp.  58–​72. 46 See J. S. Pancake, This Destructive War:  The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780–​82 (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993), p. 139. 47 For more on this debate, see J. Grenier, The First Way of War:  American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–​ 1814 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008); G. Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness:  The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast (Boston:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); M. C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry:  The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–​1765 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); S. Brumwell, Redcoats:  The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–​1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); M. H. Spring, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only:  The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–​ 1783 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). 48 L. Lochee, An Essay on Military Education (London: Printed for J. Nourse, B. White and G. Riley, 1776), p. 38. 49 WCL, Papers of General Sir Eyre Coote, 28/​6, Journal of Sir Eyre Coote, 2 October  1800. 50 TCD, Donoughmore Papers, E/​10c, Diaries of the Hon. Christopher Hely-​Hutchinson during the Expedition to Egypt, fo. 47. 51 For more on this expedition, see P. Mackesy, Strategy of Overthrow, 1798–​1799 (London: Longman, 1974). 52 TCD, Donoughmore Papers, E/​10c, Diaries of the Hon. Christopher Hely-​Hutchinson during the Expedition to Egypt, fo. 48. 53 Ibid., fo. 8. 54 Ibid., fo. 29. 55 LAC, MG18/​ L5/​ 8/​ 1, James Wolfe, ‘Instructions for Young Officers’ (handwritten copy in the hand of Ensign John Moore, 51st Regiment, Minorca, 1777). 56 J. F. Maurice (ed.), The Diary of Sir John Moore (London: John Murray, 1904), vol. 1, pp.  202–​3. 57 WCL, Papers of General Sir Eyre Coote, 28/​ 6, Journal of Sir Eyre Coote, 21 January 1801. 58 Ibid., 14–​18 January 1801. 59 K. Roy, ‘Military synthesis in South Asia:  armies, warfare, and Indian society, c. 1740–​1849’, Journal of Military History, 69:3 (2005), 651–​90.

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A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782) Innes M. Keighren On 14 January 1810, two outcasts met over breakfast –​one a disgraced American politician, the other a highland Scot under house arrest on the orders of Napoleon.1 Both were far from home; neither was where he wanted to be. A hearty breakfast ‘à la fourchette’, at the home of a local merchant, provided the men with respite from the cold outside and an opportunity to compare their predicaments.2 The American politician was Aaron Burr, whose chequered career had seen him kill a political rival, Alexander Hamilton, in an illegal duel and stand trial for treason having allegedly plotted with conspirators to establish an independent state in North America.3 The highland Scot was William Macintosh, an erstwhile Caribbean planter turned global traveller and author whose efforts to furnish the British government with strategically valuable information during the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars had earned him Napoleon’s antipathy.4 In different ways, and for different reasons, Burr and Macintosh were personae non gratae; they were exiles (respectively, voluntary and involuntary) whom fate and the currents of transnational mobility had brought to rest, momentarily at least, in Eisenach in the kingdom of Saxony. For an hour on that January morning, the lives of Burr and Macintosh overlapped  –​a brief meeting that is preserved only in Burr’s private journal. Burr found Macintosh to be a ‘very intelligent, amusing man’, notwithstanding the fact that he was ‘a prisoner on parole’ and had lost ‘an immense fortune’ as a consequence of the French Revolution.5 Macintosh, it seems, was striving to put on a brave face; perhaps he did not wish to admit to Burr that he felt trapped in Eisenach –​that a life that had otherwise been defined by the freedom of mobility

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was ultimately being constrained by stasis. Macintosh had, however, confided his concerns elsewhere; writing in 1803 to James Talbot, then first secretary to the British Embassy at Paris, Macintosh complained that his ‘age, and bodily infirmities … render me incapable of obtaining even a straightened competency [limited income] by honourable industry’; he pleaded with Talbot (unsuccessfully) to lobby the government for a pension of £50 a quarter.6 Macintosh’s will  –​written in Eisenach in December 1807, shortly after his seventieth birthday –​ likewise lamented the fact that he was ‘in a very advanced Age and infirm of body’.7 In the course of their brief meeting, Burr may have sensed Macintosh’s hopelessness and recognised the apparent futility of his appeals to the British government; his journal entry for 14 January 1810 concludes with a simple commendation: ‘I admire his constancy and his loyalty’.8 Two days later, Burr left Eisenach for Frankfurt, continuing his journey through Europe; Macintosh remained, unable to procure the political support or financial means by which to effect an escape. He died there at an unrecorded date between 18 October 1810, when he added a codicil to his will, and 13 April 1816, when that will was proved in London at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.9 The obscure and uncertain terminus of Macintosh’s life mirrors his subsequent treatment by historians; with the exception of a short biography written by his great-​ nephew, and a summary of his life published as part of The New Statistical Account of Scotland (1845), he has escaped serious scholarly attention.10 Macintosh’s historiographical invisibility is explained, in part, by the peculiar fate of his personal archive. At the time of the French Revolution, Macintosh was resident in Avignon. In 1795 his papers and possessions were seized by the revolutionary authorities and he left the city.11 His books and personal papers  –​spoils of the so-​ called confiscations révolutionnaires –​remain in Avignon, respectively at the Bibliothèque Ceccano (part of the Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon) and at the Archives départementales de Vaucluse.12 That Macintosh has slipped into historiographical obscurity is, in this practical sense, explicable. That obscurity does, however, stand in distinct contrast to his visibility and relative notoriety during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The anonymous publication in 1782 of his book Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa –​a work devoted in large part to documenting the perceived failings of the East India Company under the direction of Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal, and proposing a new system of colonial governance in India –​was a cause célèbre; it sparked a pamphlet war, informed parliamentary attempts to bring India under direct control and was presented as evidence in Hastings’s eventual [ 51 ]

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impeachment trial.13 Through translation and reprinting, the book reached a large and influential audience of politicians and intellectuals across Europe and North America; Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried Herder, Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith were among those who owned or read Macintosh’s book.14 Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa was a work that divided opinion and aroused passions; whether seen as a ‘scandalous lying story’, or as a compelling text written by an ‘intelligent sentimental traveller’, the book was understood by most readers to be incendiary –​a volume liable to disrupt, for good or ill, the operations of the East India Company and damage the reputation of Warren Hastings.15 In this respect, Travels was most often read with its ‘political object in view’, rather than as a narrative of travels per se.16 Yet perceptions of Macintosh’s status as a traveller and firsthand witness to the apparent failings of the East India Company and its servants –​the profit-​minded ‘nabobs’ –​mattered to readers’ assessments of the authenticity and reliability of his claims.17 For those who opposed his criticisms, Macintosh was thought to have travelled in India neither long enough nor widely enough to have seen the failings he purported to describe; for those who placed their faith in his testimony, it was on the basis of his status as a firsthand witness (albeit a transitory one) to abuses by company servants. Although Travels presented a detailed and considered plan for British colonial rule in India, it was a vision that had been shaped by Macintosh’s earlier experience as an itinerant colonial subject in the West Indies. Having been witness to the uncertain and troubled application of British sovereignty in the southern Caribbean following the Seven Years War (1756–​63), Macintosh developed a series of strongly held opinions as to the most effective and just means by which Britain could manage the process of colonial rule. Macintosh communicated that vision in letters, pamphlets and a book –​texts that moved, more or less freely, within trans-​hemispheric networks of political and intellectual exchange. Personal mobility likewise provided Macintosh with the opportunity to apply principles forged in the West Indies in the 1760s to the political problems of the East Indies in the 1770s. Macintosh and his ideas were, therefore, rarely stationary in Britain’s eighteenth-​ century empire. The circulation and reception of Macintosh’s political vision, particularly as it was outlined in Travels, depended on specific assessments of his candour and authoritativeness; who he was, and what his experience of empire had been, were vital questions in determining his credibility as a witness to the perceived failures of imperial policy and in assessing the value of his remedy. This chapter considers how Macintosh’s political principles were moulded by his experience of British colonial policy (and its perceived [ 52 ]

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failings) in the Caribbean and how he sought to communicate the insights he had gained through correspondence and pamphlet publication. The subsequent application of those principles to the political problems of India in the 1770s resulted in the publication of a controversial book whose circulation and reception (and, therefore, the mobility of the ideas it contained) was informed by uncertainty over its authorship. In examining these uncertainties, this chapter reflects on the contested status of Macintosh as traveller and mobile witness and shows how different assessments of the value of his testimony coloured perceptions of the book’s authority and its importance in informing debates over Britain’s colonial policies.

The ceded islands: a political apprenticeship Almost four decades before his meeting with Burr, and half a world away from Eisenach, Macintosh was troubled not by the restrictions of stasis, but by the risks of mobility. Writing from Grenada shortly before Christmas 1771, he confided his apprehensions to his close friend John Townson, a London merchant and later East India Company director: ‘You will easily conceive the anxious & uneasy state of my Mind, on account of the Ship Pearl, wherein the dearest part of my family … are passengers [bound for Britain].’18 Anxiety over the health of their daughter, Betsy, and the wellbeing of their son, William, was sufficiently great that Macintosh’s wife had opted to ‘bring out’ the children from Grenada and travel to Britain with them.19 Macintosh was conscious of the risks associated with the trans-​Atlantic crossing, but apprehension over his daughter’s health, particularly, was greater; ‘if I have the Misfortune to lose that sweet Infant’, he told Townson, ‘I shall lose much of the relish which I  have had in endeavouring to obtain an easy Independency’.20 The oceanic mobility on which Macintosh relied for the sale of his coffee, sugar and rum, and that supplied the plantations he managed with the slave labour on which they depended, assumed an altogether more intimate urgency when it came to his family’s wellbeing. Mobility across Britain’s eighteenth-​ century empire had defined Macintosh’s life to that point; in 1771 it held the prospect of diminishing it irreparably. Although Macintosh’s wife and children survived the crossing, the family life that they had known in Grenada ended; from that point forward, separated from his family by the Atlantic, Macintosh performed his paternal role as ‘protector & monitor’ via correspondence and through the proxy guardianship of ‘men of virtue, friendship, & liberality of sentiment’.21 Macintosh remained in Grenada with the intention of obtaining the financial security he desired for his family. He [ 53 ]

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had been among the thousands of highland Scots who had settled in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century.22 At the age of seventeen, Macintosh left Scotland with the ambition of becoming, as he later described it, ‘an Independent Adventurer in Life, trusting to industry & capacity, in a strange country, near 4000 miles distant from family, relations, & acquaintances’.23 There, Macintosh developed a successful career as a planter, managing estates on Antigua, Dominica, Grenada and Tobago, while also ‘mingling indiscreetly … in the political establishments of the community’.24 Macintosh’s business and political activities became focused on Grenada following its ceding from France to Britain at the end of the Seven Years War.25 Writing to his brother, the Glasgow merchant George Macintosh, in February 1763, Macintosh sensed the opportunity that the political change promised:  ‘Now the islands of Dom[inic]o [sic], Granado [sic], & St Vincent are annex’d to the Crown of Britain, it will give a new turn to our Trade & … an opening to the Manufactors of Scotland.’26 The same year he purchased a plantation, Post Royal, in Grenada and, during the next decade, assumed various official roles under the colonial administration: first as justice of peace for the parish of St Andrew, later as Comptroller of His Majesty’s Customs at the Port of Grenville. In his twin role as planter and colonial authority, Macintosh was witness at first hand to the political schisms that divided the island. As one historian of eighteenth-​century Grenada has noted, there were ‘few colonies that possessed a more fractured –​and fractious –​population than tiny Grenada. The island … had criss-​crossing fault lines dividing Catholic and Protestant; French-​ speaking and Anglophone; slave and free; black, white, and mixed raced.’27 These fault lines were exposed, from 1763, by the uncertain question of colonial subjecthood and, particularly, the degree to which the political and legal rights that were afforded to British Protestants in Grenada should extend to French Catholics.28 Although the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris had safeguarded certain freedoms of religious worship and property ownership –​being designed to enable ‘as many as possible of the largely Catholic French inhabitants to remain’ on the island –​the issue of political integration and loyalty to British rule remained live.29 These difficult-​to-​resolve questions –​which had significant implications for the nature of the emerging British Empire –​ dominated political discourse in Grenada and ‘threatened to tear apart this British colony throughout the 1760s and 1770s’.30 Just as Grenada was ‘one of the empire’s hottest crucibles of subjecthood’, so too was it where Macintosh’s identity as a political thinker and commentator was forged.31 Macintosh was –​as one contemporary press commentator put it –​‘zealous in the cause of the Roman [ 54 ]

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Catholic French subjects at Grenada’ and was also critical of the administration of Grenada under the governorship of Robert Melville, whom he considered incompetent and divisive.32 ‘I never knew this Island in such a state of distraction’, he told one correspondent in 1770, ‘nor so charged with Pique & Resentment as at this instant, nor can it possibly cease as long as Mr. Melvill [sic] continues to govern.’33 The characterisation of Macintosh as ‘zealous’ with respect to Catholic rights in Grenada reflects a degree of journalistic hyperbole, but the archive nevertheless makes it clear that he was out of step with the strongly pro-​Protestant –​and anti-​Catholic –​position of many of his contemporaries.34 Although Macintosh’s family had been Protestants ‘since the reformation’, he considered the division between the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches to be primarily a political rather than a theological question.35 For Macintosh, Catholicism and Protestantism were much the same thing –​‘I think liberally of, & respect each [denomination], considering them merely as different roads leading alternately to the same object [heaven].’36 Macintosh’s political position was, in this respect, not one defined by national-​religious affiliation but, more simply, by a pragmatic concern over the effective and inclusive administration of Britain’s new Caribbean possessions and their European inhabitants. The furore over Melville’s governorship, and the wider implications of the Catholic question, ‘drifted across the Atlantic’ in correspondence exchanged between interested parties in Grenada and London and was ‘replicated in the press’.37 Melville, for his part, considered Macintosh to be the ‘Chief Instrument’ in this process of trans-​Atlantic information exchange.38 The concerns Macintosh expressed in private took public form in at least one political pamphlet, Audi Alteram Partem (1770).39 Published anonymously in London, the pamphlet was attributed by one contemporary periodical to ‘Mr. Mackintosh [sic], Col. [Alexander] Johnstone, and Mr. Scott’, whom it described –​in somewhat histrionic terms –​as ‘agents and abettors of the Romish party’ in Grenada.40 The principal argument of Audi Alteram Partem (and an approach that the Board of Trade largely advocated) was that colonial rule depended upon ‘integration, not alienation and punishment’ and that the loyalty of colonial subjects ‘rested on the ability of all subjects to participate in the system irrespective of their origin or religion’.41 This argument is one that Macintosh would later make, albeit in a modified form, in respect to colonial India. As Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa would later do, so Audi Alteram Partem then divided opinion and widened the schism between Melville’s opponents and his supporters. The pamphlet also further exposed the ideological differences between those Protestant settlers who considered the granting of rights to Catholics [ 55 ]

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to be a pragmatic compromise to the particular political and demographic conditions of Grenada and those who considered that ‘Rigging the laws of Granada to integrate its French inhabitants’, as the Board of Trade was thought to have done, ‘made a mockery of the principle that Britons abroad bore the same rights as Englishmen at home.’42 Read in this divisive context, the reception of Audi Alteram Partem was likewise polarised. In the view of one Protestant planter, for example, the pamphlet was so full of ‘the most horrid, daring and shameless lies’ that he hoped its authors would ‘sink into total Oblivion’.43 For the Monthly Review, by contrast, Audi Alteram Partem was ‘elaborate, well-​digested, and very important’ –​an ‘ample and spirited representation of the contents and dissentions that have subsisted in Grenada’.44 The Grenada crisis was watched carefully not only by colonial officials in London but also by North American Protestants in the thirteen colonies. For ‘American patriots’, the events in Grenada –​particularly after the Board of Trade permitted Catholics to vote in elections to the island’s assembly in 1766 –​provided ‘further evidence … of the deterioration of colonial rights and constitutional principles’.45 For concerned Protestants, the ‘Grenada episode’ was both a worrying portent and an unwelcome reminder  –​it ‘raised the spectre of government sympathy toward Roman Catholicism, and with it … memories of Stuart rule’.46 Put simply, North American Protestants saw British concessions to French Catholics in the ceded islands –​and elsewhere in the empire  –​as a fundamental threat to ‘Protestant freedom’ and as evidence of an unwelcome slide towards ‘despotism and Popery’.47 Through his promotion of the Catholic cause at Grenada, Macintosh was, then, contributing to a wider political discourse whose ultimate resolution would consequently precipitate his own commercial failure. While Macintosh claimed to have foreseen ‘at a very great distance, the fatal direction of the storm … brewing in America’, the American Revolutionary War (1775–​83)  –​compounded by some poorly timed financial transactions –​had a detrimental and ultimately fatal effect on his business interests in the Caribbean.48 In 1775, in seeking a loan of £20,000 from the Dutch bank Hope and Co., Macintosh had computed his assets  –​variously composed of bonds, mortgages, plantations, property, salaried income and slaves  –​at £45,400.49 He was then thirty-​eight years old. Within five years, those assets had been ‘irrecoverably lost’ and, with them, had gone Macintosh’s hopes of securing ‘an Independency’ before ‘the Decline of Life’.50 For Macintosh, this was a very real, deeply personal mid-​life crisis. The events of his life were, both by accident and by design, inescapably bound up with and shaped by the economic and political currents of the British Empire –​ Macintosh was an imperial careerist; his was a global life.51 [ 56 ]

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By the middle of the 1770s, conscious of the precarious state of Grenada and of his own future, Macintosh made efforts to advertise his strategic value as a source of political and economic information to colonial officials in London. In a series of letters sent to Lord Dartmouth, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, Macintosh promised ‘much information’ on the ceded islands as well on ‘the British, Dutch and Portuguese trade on the coast of Africa’ (which he had obtained during a recent visit to Holland) were he to be granted an audience.52 Here, Macintosh was attempting to position himself as a colonial information broker and go-​between –​an individual who, as a consequence of his commercial relationships and political experience, might further the imperial ambitions of the British state.53 Whether as a result of a specific commission, or on the basis of an independent plan (the archive does not disclose which), Macintosh committed to the role of information broker in travelling to India with the intention of offering ‘some hints for the establishment of such political arrangements in India, as may be equally conducive to the interest of that country and those of England’.54 Writing to his son from Madras in 1779, Macintosh explained the sequence of events that had, by that point in his peripatetic life, again led him half a world away, from the West Indies to the East Indies: I disposed of the principal part of my West India property [prior to the war], & had a good right to think myself an easy independent man … Even sooner than I  dreaded, the troubles in America burst out into an unextinguishable flame, & shut up the avenues to credit. The purchasers of my estates were unable to perform their engagements to me, & solemn securities of high estimation not many months before, became useless as waste paper. As my mind for several years has been fixed on America, so the troubles in that country, now frustrated my most favo[u]‌red plan of ease & retirement. I  resolved therefore for these several reasons, to make trial of my judgment & experience in this part of the world [India], leaving all my West India & Europe concerns in the possession of confidential friends, as well as in a state of uncertainty, so long as the original causes subsisted.55

The publication of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa three years later was, in various respects, a logical progression and ultimate expression of the political vision that Macintosh had developed in the Caribbean during the 1760s and 1770s –​one that held that successful colonialism depended on a commitment to the ‘accommodation of … differences’.56 This basic principle of political pragmatism was, in the case of Travels, fully worked up into what the subtitle of the book advertised as A New System for the Government and Improvement of British Settlements in the East Indies. As Macintosh summarised it in the book’s preface, [ 57 ]

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his plan (exemplified in and elaborated upon across the book’s two volumes) was [t]‌o compose the distractions of the Mogul empire, by restoring the king of Delhi [Shah Alam II] to his hereditary imperial throne; by forming an alliance between that prince and the British nation, on principles of mutual security and advantage; and by fixing the limits, and settling the claim of subordinate states  –​To restore to deserted lands their inhabitants; to erect, among a much-​injured people, the standard of liberty and justice; whence improvements in agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, would flow of course: to raise the drooping spirits of the sad ryot [husbandman] and artisan to confidence and hope; to rescue millions of mankind from savage anarchy and oppression; and to restore them to the enjoyment of property, liberty, and life.57

Hyperbolic as the expression of this vision was, there was nothing intrinsically provocative about it. Set within the context of the book’s wider claims of colonial misrule under the East India Company, however, this was an inflammatory vision of empire, the response to which mirrored in its polarisation that which had attended the publication of Audi Alteram Partem a dozen years earlier. While Macintosh’s antagonist had changed –​from Melville in Grenada to Hastings in India –​his fundamental vision of empire based on pragmatic inclusion had not.

Anonymity and authority in the reception of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa The anonymous publication of Travels provoked speculation as to the book’s true authorship. In certain quarters of the critical periodical press, Travels was seen to display a greater degree of stylistic coherence and literary polish than might reasonably be expected from an author who had ‘chiefly devoted their time to the pursuits of commerce’; it was suspected that Macintosh had ‘received the assistance of some person more accustomed to writing’ in the making of his book.58 Although this supposition was correct  –​Macintosh had secured the services of a Grub-​Street writer, William Thomson, to assist him in putting his ‘sundry papers’ into a intelligible order and ‘clothing them in tolerable language’  –​such editorial mediation was entirely commonplace in travel publishing during this period.59 Thomson’s role as editor, one that would ordinarily not be publicised, was made obvious during a long-​running public dispute between John Murray, publisher of Travels, and Innes Munro, author of A Narrative of the Military Operations, on the Coromandel Coast (1789).60 Murray accused Munro of having plagiarised from Macintosh’s Travels and [ 58 ]

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from Thomson’s own Memoirs of the Late War in Asia (1788), which Murray had also published.61 The net effect of this controversy was to diminish Macintosh’s perceived status as the author of Travels. After Thomson’s death in 1817, Travels became, for obituarists and biographers, part of his canon of ‘avowed works’ –​an attribution that consequently informed works of bibliographical reference throughout the nineteenth century and that saw Travels routinely catalogued under Thomson’s name (or, yet more erroneously, under the name of Macintosh’s more famous contemporary, the politician and author Sir James Mackintosh).62 What this case shows is quite how slippery and uncertain authorial attribution was for works of travel in this period, particularly when editorial intervention was routine in the process of turning in-​the-​ field observations into printed accounts. That the sedentary editor, Thomson, could  –​albeit on the basis of an uncritical understanding of his contribution  –​come to be elevated above the mobile witness, Macintosh, raises questions about the relationship between mobility and authority. At what point did the travel text cease to be the work of the traveller and become that of its editor? To what extent does this (mis)attribution explain the lack of historiographical attention to Macintosh and his work? What is clear is that uncertainties over the authorship of Travels have coloured historians’ attempts to understand the book and its significance. Writing in 1844, six decades after the publication of Travels, the historian of British India Charles MacFarlane was sufficiently uncertain as to express doubt as to whether ‘such an individual [as Macintosh] had existed’ –​if he had been more than simply a ‘nom de guerre’, MacFarlane reasoned, then surely Macintosh ‘would have been heard of again’.63 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Macintosh had become, for certain scholars, not simply an uncertain author, but an existential puzzle and a pseudonymous ghost. Discussions in sections of the periodical press over the literary merits of Travels had no obvious impact on the sale of the book nor on its public reception in the period immediately following its publication. In September 1782, the London Magazine reported, for example, that, despite the complaints of ‘some hyper critics’, The public … who seldom subscribe to the arbitrary dogmas of these literary dictators have treated this ingenious book with the greatest liberality and attention. Its rapid and extensive sale, the use made of it, by the first political characters of the age, and the frequent references, both directly and indirectly made to it, in the debates of both Houses of parliament [sic], are proofs of its merit and utility, which no scribbling or carping can invalidate.64

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Far less liberality was afforded by readers, such as the Bombay merchant Joseph Price, who supported Warren Hastings and who regarded Travels as an unsubstantiated calumny against him. Price’s indignation over Travels was given full vent in a 1782 pamphlet in which he exposed Macintosh’s authorship of the book and offered a rebuttal of the various criticisms that had been levelled against Hastings. Much of Price’s condemnation was based on the presumption that Macintosh was simply a mouthpiece for the views of Hastings’s more established critics, such as the Whig politician Philip Francis, whom one scholar has called ‘Hastings’s greatest enemy on the Bengal Council’.65 Price’s pamphlet was, however, also an ad hominem attack. Among other aspersions Price cast on Macintosh’s authority was the inaccurate claim –​one designed to trade on racial prejudice –​that ‘Mr. Mackintosh [sic] being the son of a Scotch Planter, by a French Creole, of one of the West India Islands, is as swarthy and ill-​looking a man as is to be seen on the Portuguese Walk, on the Royal Exchange.’66 The reality of Macintosh’s parentage was altogether more prosaic: his father, Lachlan, was a Ross-​shire tacksman (in effect, a tenant farmer); his mother, Barbara (née Macpherson), was the daughter of a Caithness clergyman.67 For Price, Travels was not what it purported to be; it was a political treatise  –​‘calculated to serve the views and purposes’ of Hastings’s opponents  –​masquerading as a travel narrative.68 Although Price levelled his criticism against Macintosh on various grounds, it was focused on two fronts in particular: first, that Macintosh’s knowledge derived not from the direct evidence of his senses, but was drawn primarily from ‘histories, voyages, and party pamphlets’; and, second, that Macintosh was, as the Monthly Review summarised, simply ‘an agent employed by Mr. Francis to traduce the character of Governor Hastings’.69 This first criticism sought to disrupt Macintosh’s claims to authority as a firsthand witness to the places, people and events he sought to describe. Macintosh could, in Price’s view, at best be regarded as ‘a moving magazine of knowledge’, a traveller in a world composed of others’ texts, but one unable or unwilling to lift his nose from his books to see what was directly before him.70 The second criticism was, perhaps, more profound  –​that Travels was not simply an aggregate of ‘most of the histories which have been written on Asiatic affairs’, but in fact communicated a political proposition that originated with Francis rather than Macintosh. Just as Macintosh’s status as author of Travels was the subject of doubt on literary grounds, so too was its political message subject to doubt on intellectual grounds. For Price, Macintosh demonstrated a great capacity for reading, but when he put pen to paper, it was Francis’s voice that the reader heard. [ 60 ]

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Francis is reported to have denied the involvement Price alleged in a letter sent to Edward Wheler, member of the Supreme Council of Bengal, dated 18 January 1782. Reproduced in Joseph Parkes’s posthumously published Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis (1867), the letter states: In answer to a thousand lies, which you will have heard about Mr. Macintosh, I declare to you, most solemnly, that I never did employ or authorise him, directly or indirectly, to say or do anything for me, or on any account in England; yet I approve and applaud his zeal in what he thinks is a good cause.71

Parkes’s book –​which was completed and edited following his death by Herman Merivale –​presents evidence that casts doubt on Francis’s disavowal. According to Merivale, ‘Mr. Parkes discovered … in a cash book among his [Francis’s] private papers’ two entries that indicate payments were made to Macintosh: 1782. Feb. –​Draft of Mackintosh [sic] paid Jan. 18, 1,078l. 4s. 10d. [1782] Dec. 6. –​Paid Mr. Almon (the bookseller) in full for Mackintosh [sic], 56l. 18s. 6d.72

The second entry in the cashbook lends credence to (but does not prove) Price’s secondary allegation that Macintosh was also the anonymous author of ‘a pamphlet on the causes of the Maharatta [sic] war, published by Almon and Debrett’, possibly The Origin and Authentic Narrative of the Present Maratta War (1781).73 The first and much more substantial payment to Macintosh is, circumstantially at least, evidence in support of Price’s accusation of close collusion between Francis and Macintosh in the making of Travels  –​that Macintosh was, as some commentators have subsequently described him, ‘a miniature Francis –​quite as reckless, quite as malignant’.74 Equally plausible, however, is that this sum was a payment made to Macintosh for his support in an altogether more intimate matter: the messy after-​effects of Francis’s scandalous 1778 affair with Catherine Grand (née Worlée), the sixteen-​year-​old wife of his East India Company colleague, George Grand.75 Following his affair with Catherine Grand, Francis was convicted of criminal conversation. Thereafter, Catherine was placed ‘briefly under Francis’s “protection” ’, having presumably been abandoned by her cuckolded husband, an obligation from which Francis tried rapidly to extricate himself.76 Among Francis’s various ‘schemes for disposing of Catherine Grand’ was a plan to send her ‘to a convent in France’.77 There is evidence to suggest, however, that the course of action upon which Francis ultimately settled was to have Macintosh accompany Grand back to Europe [ 61 ]

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and that Francis’s payment to him was in recognition of relieving him from a responsibility that he found both shameful and burdensome.78 Opaque as these issues appear at a distance of more than two centuries, they were –​for the most part –​equally difficult to disentangle for contemporary readers of Travels and Price’s counterblast. The question of who one should trust, when issues of imperial policy coincided with individual ego and muddied the water as a result, was often difficult to answer. While most contemporary reviewers of Price’s pamphlet thought his criticisms were splenetic to a self-​defeating degree, they were also at a loss to pass judgement as to their validity. The Critical Review was typical in noting ‘Whether these allegations are well or ill founded, it would be improper for us to determine. We have laid before our readers a general state of the case, and must leave them to form their opinion by that authority to which they are inclined to give the preference.’79 Only the Morning Chronicle  –​then under the editorship of its Whig-​leaning owner-​publisher William Woodfall –​was sufficiently sure of its footing to characterise Price’s criticisms as ‘so notoriously false, that they cannot fail to mark the malignancy of the libellers [sic] heart, or the distempered state of his brain’.80 Although the archive does not contain evidence that disproves Francis’s involvement in Travels, it does demonstrate Macintosh’s status as an active and prolific thinker on political and mercantile issues and shows, particularly, the development of his ideas on British India. One notebook in the Archives départementales de Vaucluse, begun in 1778, contains –​under the heading ‘Ideas’ –​an early draft of the proposition that would later be put forward in Travels, namely that ‘The Crown to have the Sovereignty of all the Companys [sic] Territorial Dominions in Asia, as colonies of Great Britain, and their revenues, and commerce to be limited in the Crown & Nation.’81 That ambition as it appeared in print some four years later was remarkably similar: ‘That the crown of Great Britain shall be invested with an independent sovereignty over the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa … with all their rights, properties, prerogatives, privileges, emoluments, immunities, and dependencies.’82 Even before Macintosh communicated his proposal in print, he sought to bring it directly to the attention of the Prime Minister, Lord North. On 2 August 1781, Macintosh wrote to North requesting an opportunity to present his ‘plan for constituting a Comptrolling Power on the part of the Government over the provision of the Company’s investments and … revenues in India’, declaring that he had ‘knowledge of the politics of Hindostan, [and] the state of the affairs of the East India Company … founded in actual facts and the result of experience, information and observation’.83 Here, Macintosh sought to demonstrate his authority through his status as a traveller [ 62 ]

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and a firsthand witness. What the archive shows unequivocally, in this respect, is that Macintosh had the courage of his convictions; simply put, he believed what he was saying.

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Conclusion In 1904, the novelist Hilda Gregg, writing under the pseudonym Sydney C. Greir, published The Great Proconsul –​a work of ‘historical fiction’ that documented the governorship of Warren Hastings through the epistolary memoir of Mrs Hester Ward, an almost certainly fictional character presented in the book as a widow living in Hastings’s household.84 Ward’s letters, which blend historical fact with poetic licence, were intended to ‘give readers both a general survey of historical events at the time’ and to ‘further develop the character of famous individuals’.85 One of the individuals on whom Gregg alighted was William Macintosh, the focus of the book’s thirteenth ­chapter –​‘A Traveller’. In this fictionalised recollection, Macintosh is presented as a well-​ meaning but self-​righteous bore whose attempts to infiltrate Calcutta society in order to present his political proposals to Company servants are met with a combination of bemusement and embarrassed pity. One vignette in the memoir recalls a visit supposedly paid to Hastings by Macintosh in October 1779. Hastings, on finding that Macintosh ‘desired to read … a complete plan for revising the government of India’, makes his excuses and leaves Macintosh to be entertained by his wife, Marian, and her friend Hester Ward.86 Marian and Hester are told by Hastings to ‘smooth the fellow’s ruffled feelings for me, and get rid of him’.87 ‘Don’t permit him to weary you’, Hastings advises. ‘He carries with him a pile of writings as big as a church.’88 The man they eventually meet is ‘a short, broad-​shouldered person of a very swarthy complexion’ who wastes no time in ‘unfastening a sort of portfolio’, and bringing out his stack of papers.89 Macintosh then outlines –​apparently oblivious to the polite protestations of Marian and Hester –​his ‘profound scheme for a complete revolution, based upon the principles of justice and humanity, the first point being to reverse every the [sic] slightest act of every British authority in India up to this time’.90 Here, Macintosh is presented as a comic foil; somewhat ridiculous, somewhat deluded. He is, as Hastings explains to his wife before departing, simply the ‘strangest creature’, the ‘greatest oddity in the world’.91 From a historiographical point of view, Macintosh is, unquestionably, an oddity; despite being at the centre of debates over British colonial policy in both the West Indies and East Indies during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, his presence in the historical record is fragmented, uncertain and, in several important respects, erroneous. [ 63 ]

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In beginning to write Macintosh back into the narrative of these debates, as this chapter has attempted to do, it becomes apparent that mobility mattered to the development and expression of his political perspective –​both Macintosh and his ideas were shaped by their circulation within trans-​hemispheric networks of cultural and economic exchange.92 Macintosh’s personal politics arose from his experiences in (and between) particular locations in Britain’s eighteenth-​century empire; his ideas circulated in (and beyond) those same locations and were subject to a variety of responses –​in different places, Macintosh’s ideas meant different things. While historical geographers have been attentive to work in book history concerned with the production and circulation of knowledge in print, and cultural geographers have developed productive theoretical perspectives on mobility, these twin foci are not routinely combined (at least not explicitly so).93 What the example of Macintosh does is to show how –​by extending the geography of the book to directly address the mobility of the book  –​we might conceptualise the linked significance of individual mobility and the mobility of ideas in print. As we have seen, mobility was the generative spark of many of Macintosh’s ideas; mobility was the basis upon which Macintosh’s credibility as a witness to the failures of empire depended; mobility was the process upon which the circulation and diffusion of Macintosh’s ideas depended. As a historical actor, Macintosh was defined by –​and depended upon –​mobility, both literal and epistemic. While Macintosh’s life raises historiographical questions about the nature and consequences of forgetting, it also encourages attention to the always-​contested nature of Britain’s empire and to whose voices mattered in debates over its direction and purpose. Macintosh’s status as a commentator on empire was closely related to perceptions of his authority as a witness to that empire; the value of his testimony was seen to depend on his firsthand experience as an itinerant imperial subject. Mobility within and beyond Britain’s empire shaped Macintosh’s life and defined his contribution (ambiguous and disputed as it was) to political thought in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Notes 1 G. Macintosh, Biographical Memoir of the Late Charles Macintosh, F.R.S. of Campsie and Dunchattan (Glasgow: W. G. Blackie & Co., 1847). 2 A. Burr, The Private Journal of Aaron Burr, During his Residence of Four Years in Europe; With Selections from his Correspondence, ed. Matthew T. Davis (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), vol. 1, p. 398. 3 N. Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007); B. F. Melton, Jr, Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

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A contested vision of empire 4 M. Durey, William Wickham, Master Spy (London:  Pickering & Chatto, 2009); Macintosh, Biographical Memoir. 5 Burr, The Private Journal, vol. 1, pp. 398–​9. 6 Quoted in Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.  163. This letter indicates that Macintosh was born in August 1737. 7 The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), PROB 11/​1579/​257, Will of William Macintosh of Eisenach and Dutchey, Germany, fo. 265. 8 Burr, The Private Journal, vol. 1, p. 399. 9 TNA, PROB 11/​1579/​257. 10 Macintosh, Biographical Memoir; D. Carment, ‘Parish of Roskeen’, in The New Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. 14: Inverness –​Ross and Cromarty (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1845), pp. 262–​79. 11 Archives départementales de Vaucluse, Avignon (hereafter ADV), 1 L 452, Inventory of Macintosh’s books, 19 Pluviôse an III (7 February 1795); ADV, 3 Q 6, Inventory of Macintosh’s furniture, 1 Floréal an III (20 April 1795). 12 ADV, E titres de famille 83–​6 and 96. On the confiscations révolutionnaires in Avignon and the Vaucluse, see F. de Forbin, ‘Aux origines de la bibliothèque d’Avignon: les confiscations révolutionnaires’, Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse, 9 (1989), 99–​ 112 and B. Thomas, ‘Archives et révolution en Vaucluse:  l’œuvre de Jean-​Étienne Néry (1750–​1837)’, La Gazette des Archives, 146–​7 (1989), 387–​407. 13 [W. Macintosh], Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa; Describing Characters, Customs, Manners, Laws, and Productions of Nature and Art:  Containing Various Remarks on the Political and Commercial Interests of Great Britain: And Delineating, in Particular, a New System for the Government and Improvement of British settlements in the East Indies: Begun in the Year 1777, and Finished in 1781 (London: John Murray, 1782); I. M. Keighren, ‘Circulating seditious knowledge: the “daring absurdities, studied misrepresentations, and abominable falsehoods” of William Macintosh’, in H. Jöns, P. Meusburger and M. Heffernan (eds), Mobilities of Knowledge (Cham: Springer International, 2017), pp. 67–​83. 14 S. Deane (ed.), Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 8: Politicians (London:  Mansell, 1973), p.  224; B. L. Herling, The German Gītā:  Hermeneutics and Discipline in the Early German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–​ 1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 82; J. P. Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10: 22 June to 31 December 1786 (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 201; H. Mizuta, Adam Smith’s Library: A Supplement to Bonar’s Catalogue with a Checklist of the Whole Library (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 58. 15 [J. Price], A Third Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Esq (London: Printed for the author, 1782), p. 59; Anonymous, ‘Art. II. Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa’, Monthly Review, 67 (October 1782), 247–​56, p. 247. 16 Anonymous, ‘Art. III. Some Observations and Remarks on a Late Publication Intitled, Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa’, Monthly Review, 67 (October 1782), 256–​8, p. 256. 17 On the figure of the nabob, see N. B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006); T. W. Nechtman, Nabobs:  Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18 Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon (hereafter BMA), MS.1297, Macintosh to John Townson, 23 December 1771, fo. 141. 19 BMA, MS.1297, Macintosh to John Townson, 7 July 1771, fo. 131. 20 Ibid. 21 ADV, E titres de famille 85, Macintosh to William Macintosh (son), 17 July 1779. 22 S. K. Kehoe, ‘From the Caribbean to the Scottish Highlands:  charitable enterprise in the Age of Improvement, c. 1750 to c. 1820’, Rural History, 27:1 (2016), 37–​ 59; D. J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–​1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 23 ADV, E titres de famille 85, Macintosh to William Macintosh (son), 17 July 1779, fo. 2.

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Empire and mobility 4 Ibid., fo. 3. 2 25 T. G. Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves:  Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–​1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 26 BMA, MS.1297, Macintosh to George Macintosh, 1 February 1763, fo. 6. 27 C. Anderson, ‘Old subjects, new subjects and non-​subjects: silences and subjecthood in Fédon’s rebellion, Grenada, 1795–​96’, in R. Bessel, N. Guyatt and J. Rendall (eds), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–​ 1830 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 201–​17, p. 202. 28 D. Hamilton, ‘Robert Melville and the frontiers of empire in the British West Indies, 1763–​1711’, in A. MacKillop and S. Murdoch (eds), Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers c.  1600–​1800:  A Study of Scotland and Empires (Leiden:  Brill, 2003), pp. 181–​204; S. M. Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 29 Kehoe, ‘From the Caribbean to the Scottish Highlands’, p. 41. 30 H. W. Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-​Century British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 121. See also, T. Murphy, ‘The Creole Archipelago:  Colonization, Experimentation, and Community in the Southern Caribbean, c. 1700–​1796’ (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2016). 31 Anderson, ‘Old subjects’, p. 202. 32 Anonymous, ‘A narrative of the proceedings upon the complaint against Governor Melville’, Political Register, 6:38 (May 1770), 277–​82, p.  282. See also, J. Munro (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England. Colonial Series, vol. 5: A.D. 1766–​1783 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1912), pp. 221–​7. 33 BMA, MS.1297, Macintosh to L. Mac Leane, 9 October 1770, fo. 23. 34 K. C. Engel, ‘Connecting Protestants in Britain’s eighteenth-​century Atlantic empire’, William and Mary Quarterly, 75:1 (2018), 37–​70. 35 ADV, E titres de famille 85, Macintosh to William Macintosh (son), 17 July 1779, fo. 13. 36 Ibid., fo. 12. 37 Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, p. 157. 38 TNA, CO 101/​4, fo. 66, Robert Melville to Lord Hillsborough, 31 October 1770. 39 Anonymous, Audi Alteram Partem, Or a Counter-​Letter, to the Right Hon. the E-​-​-​l of H-​-​-​ll-​-​-​gh (London: Printed for W. Nicoll, 1770). 40 Anonymous, ‘A narrative of the proceedings’, p.  282. See also, E. Rothschild, The Inner Lives of Empires:  An Eighteenth-​Century History (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2011). 41 A. Willis, ‘The standing of new subjects:  Grenada and the Protestant constitution after the Treaty of Paris (1763)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42:1 (2014), 1–​21, p. 16. 42 Edelson, New Map of Empire, p. 242. 43 This description appears in an anonymous letter signed by ‘A Grenadan Proprietor’, published in The Middlesex Journal; Or, Chronicle of Liberty, 138 (6–​8 February 1770), p. 4. 44 Anonymous, ‘Art. 34. Audi Alteram Partem’, Monthly Review, 42 (February 1770), 150–​6, p. 151. 45 Willis, ‘The standing of new subjects’, p.  18, n.  27. See also, A. J. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided:  The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 46 P. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–​1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 185. 47 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–​1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 205. 48 ADV, E titres de famille 85, Macintosh to William Macintosh (son), 17 July 1779, fo. 4. 49 ADV, E titres de famille 84, Macintosh to Hope and Co., 15 December 1775. 50 Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.  164; BMA, MS.1297, Macintosh to Robert Cutlar, 25 October 1765, no fo.

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A contested vision of empire 51 D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006); M. Ogborn, Global Lives:  Britain and the World, 1550–​ 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 52 Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, vol. 2: American Papers (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1895), p. 542. 53 On the figure of the go-​between in this period, see S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, K. Raj and J. Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-​Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–​ 1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). 54 [Macintosh], Travels, vol. 1, p. 266. 55 ADV, E titres de famille 85, Macintosh to William Macintosh (son), 17 July 1779, fos  4–​5. 56 [Macintosh], Travels, vol. 1, p. viii. 57 Ibid., pp. viii–​ix. 58 Anonymous, ‘Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa’, Critical Review, 53 (June 1782), 424–​32, p. 424. 59 [J. Murray], The Defence of Innes Munro, Esq. (London:  Printed for J.  Ridgeway, 1790), p.  17. On editorial practices during this period, see I. M. Keighren, C. W.  J. Withers and B. Bell, Travels into Print:  Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–​1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 60 I. Munro, A Narrative of the Military Operations, on the Coromandel Coast (London: Printed for the author, by T. Bensley, 1789). The plagiarism case is described in W. Zachs, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-​Century London Book Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 195–​8. 61 W. Thomson, Memoirs of the Late War in Asia (London: Printed for the author; and sold by J. Murray, 1788). 62 R. Chambers, Lives of Illustrious and Distinguished Scotsmen (Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1837), vol. 4, p. 353; S. A. Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased (London: Trübner & Co., 1871), vol. 3, p. 2405; E. M. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1955), vol. 4, p. 144. 63 C. MacFarlane, Our Indian Empire; Its History and Present State (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1844), vol. 1, p. 279. 64 Anonymous, ‘Article XLII. Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, &c.’, London Magazine, 51 (September 1782), 434–​5, p. 435. 65 M. Ogborn, Indian Ink:  Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 213. 66 J. Price, Some Observations and Remarks on a Late Publication, Intitled, Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in Which the Real Author of this New and Curious Asiatic Atalantis, his Character and his Abilities are Fully Made Known to the Publick, 2nd edn (London: Printed for the author, and sold by J. Stockdale, 1782), p. 13. See also, A. Clark, Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets, 1780–​1917 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 81. 67 Macintosh, Biographical Memoir. 68 Price, Some Observations, p. 9. 69 Ibid., pp. 16–​17; Anonymous, ‘Art. III’, p. 256. 70 Price, Some Observations, p. 35. 71 J. Parkes, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, K.C.B. with Correspondence and Journals (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867), vol. 2, p. 206. 72 Ibid. 73 Price, Some Observations, p. 158; Anonymous, The Origin and Authentic Narrative of the Present Marratta War (London: Printed for J. Almon and J. Debrett, 1781). 74 Anonymous, ‘Art. VI. Correspondence of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke’, Calcutta Review, 2 (December 1844), 561–​608, p. 589. 75 L. Colley, ‘Gendering the globe: the political and imperial thought of Philip Francis’, Past & Present, 209:1 (2010), 117–​48. 76 Ibid., p. 118, n. 4.

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Empire and mobility 7 Ibid., p. 132, n. 50. 7 78 This claim is made in Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.  162 and finds support in H. Beveridge, The Trial of Maharaja Nanda Kumar (Calcutta:  Thacker, Spink and Co., 1886). It is opposed, however, in H. E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1882). 79 Anonymous, ‘Some Observations and Remarks on a Late Publication, Intitled, Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa’, Critical Review, 53 (June 1782), 432, p. 432. 80 Anonymous, The Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, 4081 (14 June 1782), p. 3. 81 ADV, E titres de famille 96/​1, notebook, 1778, fo. 86. 82 [Macintosh], Travels, vol. 1, p. 417. 83 Quoted in S. Weitzman, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1929), p. 143. 84 [H. C. Gregg], The Great Proconsul: The Memoirs of Hester Ward Formerly in the Family of the Honble. Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor-​ General of India, ed. Sydney C. Grier (Edinburgh and London:  William Blackwood and Sons, 1904); C.  Casey, ‘Subjects and Sovereigns:  The Husbands and Wives Who Ruled British India, 1774–​1925’ (PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2017), p. 223. See also, S. K. Jain, ‘Appendix:  A select bibliography of Indian short stories and historical fiction in English’, Indian Literature, 12:2 (1969), 76–​92. 85 Casey, ‘Subjects and Sovereigns’, p. 223. 86 Ward, The Great Proconsul, p. 163. 87 Ibid., p. 162. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., p. 163–​4. This description of Macintosh’s appearance recalls Joseph Price’s erroneous assertion that Macintosh was mixed-​race. Writing in 1920, N.  L. Hallward described Macintosh in similarly erroneous terms as ‘the half-​caste son of a Scotsman and a French bride’. See N. L. Hallward, William Bolts: A Dutch Adventurer under John Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 196. 90 Ward, The Great Proconsul, p. 164. 91 Ibid., p. 162. 92 Keighren, ‘Circulating seditious knowledge’. 93 M. Ogborn and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of the Book (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman and M. Sheller (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2014).

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CHA P T E R FOUR

The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801–​3 Sarah Thomas At the dawn of the nineteenth century the mapping of Australia, or New Holland as it was still known, remained incomplete. It was still far from certain as to whether the British colony of New South Wales was indeed part of the same unclaimed southern landmass that the Dutch had already charted. This gap in the map on the continent’s southern coast –​present day South Australia –​prompted the Admiralty in 1801 to dispatch a young but experienced naval officer, Lieutenant Matthew Flinders RN, to complete his exploration of New Holland, and to ‘[examine] the natural productions of the island’,1 much of which remained unknown to European science. What served as the catalyst to this now famous voyage –​the first to circumnavigate the continent –​was the known fact that the French had already dispatched a rival voyage several months earlier, led by Nicolas Baudin, raising British suspicions that they were seeking potential sites for a base, or even spying on the young British colony. Flinders duly set out from Portsmouth on 18 July in his ship HMS Investigator, accompanied by his crew and a scientific team selected by the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks (1743–​1820): naturalist Robert Brown (1773–​ 1858); a gardener, Peter Good (d. 1803); a miner, John Allen (b. 1775); an astronomer, John Crosley (1762–​1817); and two artists, William Westall (1781–​1850) and Ferdinand Bauer (1760–​1826). As Flinders proceeded to map the Australian coastline, the two artists on board were occupied sketching. Empirical observation was key: as the topographical draughtsman Westall worked on deck with Flinders, recording the delicate form of the coastline as instructed, the natural history painter Bauer was for much of the time holed up in his cabin drawing the plant and animal specimens that he and Brown had been busy collecting. When the captain gave instruction for the ship to berth, the scientific team were provided with welcome [ 69 ]

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opportunities to botanise and explore the geology of particular coastal regions in greater detail. Yet the surveying and cartographic priorities of Flinders, which demanded hasty passage given the intense political rivalry between the two competing nations during a time of war, were frequently at odds with those of the ‘scientific gentlemen’ on board. Flinders’s navigational objectives ultimately took priority over those of natural history: ‘The circumstances connected with navigation’, wrote one commentator, ‘and the great object of nautical and geographical discovery must often counteract the possibility of complete investigation of natural rarities.’2 Such investigation was equally painstaking, yet it required protracted periods of time on land to conduct field observations and collect specimens (both dead and alive). When the scientists were able to disembark, the meticulous, sometimes laborious, process of collecting specimens required frequent periods of stasis. Henry de Freycinet, lieutenant on Baudin’s voyage, famously said later to Flinders: ‘if we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies at Van Diemen’s Land, you would not have discovered the South Coast before us’.3 In his initial instructions for the voyage, Banks recommended that the ship’s tender be used frequently, ‘in order to Favor science … & at the same time to Render the survey more than usualy [sic] accurate … This will give the naturalists time to Range about & Collect the Produce of the earth, and also allow the Painters Quiet & Repose, even for finishing a certain Quantity of their works on the Spot where they have been began.’4 By the completion of the voyage, Banks acknowledged the very real tensions between the landings required by the naturalists and the mobility needed to complete the survey. In a letter to Brown dated April 1803, he commended Flinders for the sacrifices he had made in this regard: Your Commander deserves, in my opinion, great credit from the Public for the pains he must have taken to give you a variety of opportunities of Landing & Botanising. Had Cooke [sic] paid the same attention to the Naturalists as he seems to have done, we should have done much more at that time … Capt. Flinders will meet with thanks & praise for every sacrifice he makes to the improvement of natural knowledge.5

On the subject of the rival French voyage, Banks noted: ‘They do not … appear likely to prove formidable rivals to you as Investigators. They seem too much afraid of the Land.’6 In short, it was the exigencies of imperial politics –​here a maritime race between rival nations to complete a cartographic project –​that saw mobility pitted against the stasis required of scientific observation.

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Mobility was clearly at the heart of this scientific endeavour, yet it was utterly at odds not only with the practicalities of producing drawings under such trying circumstances, but more significantly, with the scientific demands made of the voyager artist: namely, precision and immutability. As Paul Smethurst notes:  ‘Mobility is in conflict with imperialism’s paradigms of order and control, and yet disorderly mobility is inherent in the idea of travel. It is essential to the traveller’s encounters with difference, with serendipity, and with motion in a psychological and ontological sense.’7 The pervasive tensions between the paradigm of a staid imperial order –​political stability, pre-​ordained social and racial hierarchies, ‘on-​the-​spot’ observational authority –​and the profoundly disorienting experiences of travel, produced new scientific and artistic approaches to the production of imperial knowledge. Mobility had been equated with the pursuit of knowledge at least since the Renaissance: travellers had long learned to impose familiar order onto ‘exotic disorder’.8 Yet it was a great challenge to the artists on board Investigator, forcing them to devise an array of ingenious visual and material strategies that invested their drawings with epistemological authority. We shall see that while Westall’s coastal profiles and landscape sketches made a notable contribution to completing and authenticating Flinders’s cartographic project for the British Admiralty, Bauer’s encrypted sketches assisted in the equally totalising project of Linnaean classification. During and following the voyage an enormous number of pencil sketches and subsequent watercolours, prints and oil paintings were produced to assist with the mapping and classifying missions of the voyage. The drawings of Westall and Bauer are shown here to function as Bruno Latour’s ‘immutable mobiles’, in which the stability, mobility and combinability of material gathered and inscribed ‘in the field’ are significant.9 Latour argues that it is the aggregation of such materials –​ their collectability, combinability, stability and mobility –​that allowed ‘a centre to dominate faraway lands’.10 Mobility was key: ‘the history of science’, he wrote, is in large part the history of the mobilisation of anything that can be made to move and shipped back home for this universal census.11 It is the ‘shipping back home’ aspect of mobility –​ the double movement of going there and coming back  –​that is particularly significant for the history of science, and that will concern us in this chapter.12 Ultimately, it was the drawing’s superb facility for reproduction, as well as its popular appeal to a wide audience, that ensured that of all the data collected and recorded by Flinders and his team, the graven image was disseminated most widely. [ 71 ]

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Drawing was recognised by the scientific establishment as an integral part of a much wider range of literary and graphic notations. Flinders’s 1801–​3 voyage alone resulted in an enormous quantity of detailed, coded observations of the natural world, unrivalled in the period: these included maps, charts, logbooks, diaries and other private journals, survey sheets, a ‘bearing book’, pencil sketches, watercolours, and subsequently oil paintings, engravings and illustrated books. Data was collected on a great range of nautical and geographical matters –​ tides, atmospheric pressure, ocean temperatures, meteorology, latitude and longitude –​as well as detailed observations of local geology, flora, fauna and ethnography. Not only was there much continuity between these different textual and visual forms,13 even more significant was the fact that each type of notation could be systematically cross-​referenced with others, a process that served to both develop and legitimise European scientific knowledge. The drawings of Bauer and Westall participated in this process. Bernard Smith has argued that a new respect for drawing emerged in the eighteenth century, derived in part from the growing appreciation of the medium in its own right, but also due to its new status as the supreme medium for documenting the world.14 Following the Cook voyages in particular, observational drawing was valued for its unique contribution to the production of knowledge, and Banks was keen to ensure that artists be employed on voyages of exploration as a matter of course. In this sense he played an important role in bringing together various professional skills, and he was highly directive in terms of how individual collections were deployed. Prior to the Investigator’s voyage he had invited his chosen scientists and painters to his house at 32 Soho Square, London, and instructed them on how their individual findings might be utilised, both during the voyage and afterwards. While Banks directed the astronomer to make his data available to the ship’s captain for the purposes of navigation during the voyage, Brown and the artists: have no instructions to communicate [to Flinders], for as it cannot be determined till the ship returns home what part of their works ought to be inserted in the general narrative, it would be to occupy their time, which will be well fill’d up, in an useless manner if they were called upon to transcribe or otherwise employ themselves than in marking original observations and drawings.15

Thus, while image and text were designed ultimately to be aggregated in modular fashion, Banks was concerned that the scientific crew not waste their time creating copies of their sketches for Flinders during the voyage. Voyager artists were expected to work both quickly and accurately, adhering to a combination of scientific and aesthetic conventions. [ 72 ]

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Their work raises well-​rehearsed epistemological questions not only about the role of image-​making in the larger production and circulation of imperial knowledge, but also about the capacity of images to document and convey scientific ‘truth’.16 Westall and Bauer were carefully selected for Flinders’s voyage for their specialised training and distinct skills.17 The topographical draughtsman did not have the botanical or zoological knowledge required of a natural history artist: he had been trained in the then still lowly art of landscape painting as a probationer at the Royal Academy Schools. Conversely, Bauer had little experience of conveying the vista, but had been trained in botanical drawing in his native Austria. While Westall’s forte was the long-​distance view, Bauer’s was the microscopic detail. Both were equally integral to the scientific mission of the voyage, yet we shall see that in each case the mobility of the enterprise was fundamentally at odds with the scientific demands of drawing. As a consequence, both artists developed distinctive strategies that effectively effaced all traces of mobility. The art of empirical observation, with its emphasis on clarity and detail, demanded stasis and poise: this was no place for blurred vision. Bauer worked closely with the naturalist Brown. Over the course of the voyage he amassed a huge collection, of over 3,000 plants and hundreds of animals, many of which he carefully prepared for the long and hazardous return journey to England. On numerous occasions when the ship anchored, Bauer joined Brown and the other scientific gentlemen in rowing ashore for the purpose of botanising, sometimes covering a great deal of rugged terrain and often in searing heat. Plant specimens were collected, as well as seeds for planting in the portable greenhouse that would be erected on board the ship: living plants retained their colour and form in ways that dried specimens could not. Speed was of the essence. Animal specimens were shot and brought on board for the artist to sketch, their bodies then prepared for the long journey home, destined for further study and deposition in the museum.18 Bauer shot birds, including a rainbow lorikeet, the subject of one of his most striking finished watercolours (Figure  4.1).19 The mobile subject presented obvious challenges to the natural history artist, and it would not be until advances in serial photography, particularly the pioneering work of Edweard Muybridge in the late 1870s, that images were able to capture animals in motion with any real success. While Bauer was involved in collecting specimens, for much of the time he remained in his cabin, his pencil darting over paper with great precision.20 He worked indefatigably, keenly aware of the enormity of the project and his significant role within it. Natural history specimens are inherently unstable, susceptible to shrinking and deterioration almost as soon as they are collected. Writing to Banks in 1803, Bauer [ 73 ]

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4.1  Ferdinand Bauer, Trichoglossus haematodus (Rainbow lorikeet), c. 1811

said: ‘I resolved that in such an expedition it will be the best by every opportunitie [sic] to preserve as many subjects of Natural history in sketches as shall be in my power to execute, for fear to loss [sic] some which might be new or rare before they are ascertained [sic].’21 Time was the obstacle: even when Bauer’s specimens had been immobilised by being shot, or plucked from the soil, they continued to mutate. The sketch purported to eliminate the effects of time, visualising natural history in an apparently immutable form, despite the obstacles, as we shall soon see. While Bauer’s pencil captured the form of hundreds of species then unknown to European science, it was the fidelity of colour that most preoccupied him. The influential taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had advised in the mid-​eighteenth century that in classifying plants:  ‘Colour is remarkably changeable, and so is of no value in definitions.’22 Rather, it was the number, shape, position and proportion of a plant’s organs that were most reliable indicators, as ‘[they] are constant everywhere, in the plant, in the herbarium, in an illustration’.23 Bauer was a keen participant in the Linnaean project and closely heeded his mentor’s advice, providing magnified details of the flower and its constituent parts, artfully arranged, usually towards the bottom of his pencil sketches and finished watercolours (Figure  4.2).24 Yet where he deviated from [ 74 ]

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4.2  Ferdinand Bauer, Thysanotus patersonii (Twining fringe-​lily), 1806–​10

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Linnaeus’s instruction was in his ingenious solution to the problem of colour’s mutability, expanding a system of colour coding devised earlier in his career. Bauer’s strategy for mitigating the disadvantages of mobility was to encrypt his pencil sketches in a skein of minute numbers that, by the time of Flinders’s voyage, correlated to almost a thousand different shades on a chart.25 Fixing the colour of a specimen before it faded was the bane of all natural history artists of the period, and the problem was only intensified by their distance from home, as well as the searing heat of an Australian summer. Colour charts can be dated to as far back as Albrecht Dürer in the sixteenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth century several such charts had been published in Bauer’s native Vienna.26 While the actual chart, if it ever existed, has been lost, we know from the annotated pencil sketches and their corresponding watercolours (literally coloured ‘by number’), that Bauer’s code was unrivalled in its scope and sheer quantity of shades. Walter Lack exemplifies the artist’s obsession with accurate colour recording by pointing to his sketch of a white-​bellied sea eagle, whose iris alone was inscribed with no less than five numbers.27 The system allowed Bauer to work primarily in pencil over the course of the one-​and-​a-​half-​year voyage, and on return he spent the following thirteen years working up his sketches into finished watercolours and engravings for publication. Banks later said that the sketches were ‘prepared in such a manner by reference to a table of colours as to enable him [Bauer] to finish them at his leisure with perfect accuracy’.28 In addition to being a rapid and reliable method of recording colour (speed and precision were required in equal measure), Bauer’s chart also had the advantage of freeing him from the less stable properties of watercolour whilst on the voyage: pencil was a more water-​resistant medium than watercolour, and a real advantage when humidity and water damage were constant threats to ship-​ borne artists, and the spectre of shipwreck hovered.29 Damp conditions on board the leaky Investigator prompted him to complain in a letter to his brother: ‘The paper which I took with me on this cruise has gone mouldy because of the dampness and warmth of the cabin and is covered with spots of mould and can no longer be painted on or used for any kind of painting.’30 The stability of the colour chart system helped Bauer to overcome the great disadvantages of mobility in the imperial age –​the tyranny of distance, and its corollary, an urgent lack of time. On its eventual return to Britain in October 1805, after extensive refurbishment and without its captain, the Investigator was carrying thirty-​eight cases of natural history specimens and drawings.31 Bauer had completed 2,073 sketches on the Australian voyage, most of them [ 76 ]

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life-​size, and he was anxious to start working them up into finished watercolour drawings. When Banks arranged for the Admiralty to pay his post-​ voyage salary, the drawings were transferred from Bauer’s possession to Banks’s house, and he was set to work. The reunification of the drawings with Brown’s specimens had the key advantage of allowing both men to continue cross-​referencing their collections. Between 1806 and 1819 Bauer worked tirelessly on his elaborate watercolours, taking up to a week to complete each one, according to instructions from the Admiralty, and with careful reference to the preparatory drawings encrypted with minute numbers.32 In addition to his colour chart, he also consulted some of the Antipodean plants that by then were growing at Kew, and specimens kept in the herbaria of both Brown and Banks.33 In certain cases where the specimens themselves had been lost or damaged Bauer’s drawings took on particular scientific significance, formally authorised as ‘types’, and used as the basis for the first published description and naming of the species in question. This is the case, for example, with Bauer’s watercolour of Brown’s leatherjacket, Acanthaluteres brownii (Figure  4.3), from which Scottish naturalist Sir John Richardson subsequently named and described the species for the purpose of classification.34 This circumstance raises a multitude of questions regarding the nature of ‘evidence’ in the quest for scientific ‘truth’, and the relationship between the real and the copy. Yet more relevant here is what it reminds us about the relationship of mobile images to the production of imperial knowledge. The sketch on paper

4.3  Ferdinand Bauer, Acanthaluteres brownii (Spiny-​tailed, or Brown’s, leatherjacket), c. 1811

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had several advantages to the specimen. First, as we have seen, it was inherently more stable: Bauer was keenly aware of his role in the production of stable records. Time was of the essence, as he sat sketching specimens in his cabin week after week with speed and accuracy, covering his pencil forms in numbers that would later unlock a world in colour. Sketches also occupied less precious storage space on board the ship than their referents, and were thus an ideal form of mobile knowledge. But what ultimately gave drawings their best advantage over specimens, in terms of the dissemination of scientific knowledge, was their supreme suitability for reproduction:  first in watercolour form, and subsequently as engravings that circulated around the globe in illustrated books, and often as individual plates. In the case of Bauer, ten of his botanical drawings were engraved by other artists and included in the atlas which accompanied Flinders’s formal account of the voyage, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814). Fifteen of his plates (seventeen drawings) were also published in his sole publication, Illustrationes florae Novae Hollandiae (1813–​16), for which he engraved the copper plates himself. Like the publications that had resulted from Cook’s voyages a few decades earlier, A Voyage to Terra Australis was widely disseminated, infiltrating popular consciousness well beyond the highest echelons of the British scientific community: its geographic and scientific influence across Europe was also considerable (Flinders’s General Chart of Terra Australis or Australia, for example, would stay in widespread use until the early twentieth century). Bauer’s method of preserving the stability of his plant and animal specimens was ingenious. By recording them quickly in two dimensions, following Linnaean taxonomic conventions, in coded monochrome that would later materialise into a thousand consistent colours, he effectively mitigated the disadvantages of the floating studio, always on the move. A master of both line and colour, Bauer set about reproducing the elements of Australia’s natural world that could then in turn be reproduced as engravings and mobilised across Europe and beyond. While birds, animals, rocks, human remains and effects were all avidly collected by such scientific voyages, the land itself could not be, and for it to become mobile in any sense it needed to be coded and drawn.35 The map and the coastal profile were two key tools for the visualisation and consolidation of imperial power, functioning as Latourian ‘immutable mobiles’. The young Westall lacked the extraordinary drive of the much older artist Bauer.36 Nevertheless, the topographical artist produced over 120 detailed landscape sketches during [ 78 ]

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excursions ashore, plus numerous coastal profiles. Westall worked under Flinders’s direct command, available to sketch a particular view when requested, the sketches thus giving visual form to the captain’s painstaking survey as recorded in the voyage’s logbook.37 Flinders noted prominent points such as headlands (the captain referred to ‘Westall’s head lands’38), approaches to inlets and other navigational features: he gave the draughtsman the bearings and instructed him to note the time at which the view was ‘taken’. In this way the artist carefully fixed his graphic notations in time and space, creating modular blocks of empirical ‘evidence’ that could serve to substantiate other forms of visual and textual data. Unlike Bauer, who was able to consult specimens once back in London (growing in Kew Gardens for example, or preserved and collected), Westall had no recourse to other visual sources when working up his sketches into oil paintings (photography would not be invented for another four decades). Westall’s drawing instruction at the Royal Academy Schools had included classes on linear perspective, chiaroscuro and other European pictorial conventions: these played an important role in regulating the production of knowledge. It was common for naval officers to have studied the art of marine sketching to record coastlines, harbours and fortifications as quickly and accurately as possible:  many were educated in the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital in the arts of navigation.39 Westall, on the other hand, aspired to becoming a fine artist in the footsteps of his Royal Academician half-​brother Richard, from whom he had originally learned to draw. When he was appointed a probationer at the Academy Schools just before he was invited to participate in the voyage, Henry Fuseli was Professor of Painting. Echoing the disquisitions of the Academy’s first President Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fuseli looked down upon the topographical artist, whose ‘tame delineation of a given spot’ he deemed unworthy of the creative artist.40 Westall’s well-​ known disappointment in the ‘barren’ coastlines of Australia no doubt reflected some of the frustrations he felt not only about the difficult conditions and tedium endured on such a long voyage of exploration, but also about his artistic aspirations: isolated at sea, as far away as it was possible to get from London’s prestigious art world, and working in the service of empire for a master navigator, and with little artistic autonomy, the young Westall found it impossible at times to hide his despair.41 His training in linear perspective was significant because, as Latour reminds us, optical consistency was a key determinant of science.42 The homogenisation of graphic representation following the introduction of perspective during the Renaissance, he argued, made it possible for graphic images to be recognised immediately as representations of [ 79 ]

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real space. Regardless of how far away the object lies, and from what angle it is viewed, perspective allows for its visual transcription: such drawn objects are immutable. Perspective also facilitated a new ‘set of movements’: ‘[Y]‌ou can go out of your way and come back with all the places you passed; these are all written in the same homogenous language (longitude and latitude, geometry) that allows you to change scale, to make them presentable, and to combine them at will.’43 Westall’s coastal profiles were an integral part of Flinders’s running surveys, a series of observations made as the ship sailed, during the process of charting unknown coastal expanses:  for this purpose he needed to sail as closely as possible to the shore (‘so closely’, he wrote, ‘that the washing of the surf upon it should be visible, and no opening, or anything of interest, escape notice’).44 The coastal profile was a standard navigational practice employed by seamen in the period, and had its roots in fifteenth-​century Flanders.45 The shape, size and colour of the coastline were of vital significance: in the words of Alexander Dalrymple, the Admiralty’s first official hydrographer, ‘It is obvious no Plan can be well constructed without having a View of the Land, at least in the mind’s eye: and therefore much better to have it recorded, and always present to refer to.’46 Here the combinability and commensurability of notational forms is again in evidence, as Dalrymple exalts the seaman to keep his drawing as a stable point of reference, an immutable mobile. The most careful attention was paid to the uncharted southern coast, and fourteen individual profiles of this coastline were selected to be published across a double page in the atlas of the Voyage (plate XVII) (Figure 4.4). Like much of the imagery produced by both artists on Investigator, there were various iterations of these, as Westall developed methods of adapting to the challenges of recording the natural world from a floating vessel. Like Bauer, Westall too first deployed his pencil to capture the segment of coastline most rapidly (Figure 4.5), darting across the paper with a flurry of lines and dots, and with Flinders’s guidance noting bearings and place names, and always including the date and time at which the ‘snapshot’ was ‘taken’. Westall most likely developed these drawings into more finished watercolours on board Investigator, not using Bauer’s colour-​ by-​ number system, but rather following standard navigational practice of the day  –​by recalling colours from memory as soon as possible after the initial drawings had been made (Figure  4.6). While colour was a vital marker of difference for Bauer in his classification project, it held less of interest to the navigator, for whom line was a much more powerful tool. It would be many years later that a selection of [ 80 ]

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4.4  William Westall, Views on the South Coast of Terra Australis, from Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, 1814, plate XVII

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4.5  William Westall, South Coast, Bald Head, Eclipse Island and Seal Island, [1801]

4.6  William Westall, Views on the South Coast of Australia,  1801–​2

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these watercolours was engraved for the Voyage, and reduced again to a series of monochromatic lines. While Westall’s role in the Flinders’s surveying project demanded specificity of place (in the form of place names and geographical coordinates), it is worth mentioning that Bauer was much less concerned with recording the exact locations where his specimens had been discovered. While in many cases we can ascertain this by cross-​ referencing with Brown’s diary entries and other written records, there are many gaps in our knowledge.47 However on some occasions, Bauer was careful to inscribe both dates and place names (such as ‘Sydney /​ March 3 1804’), or very occasionally, the location of anchorages (as indicated by Roman numerals).48 This is the case, for example, in Bauer’s extraordinary drawing of a blue swimmer crab (Figure  4.7), which bears the inscription ‘South Coast XIIII’, thus locating its origins as St Vincent’s Gulf (where the city of Adelaide now stands). That geographic bearings were less significant to Bauer than classifying the specimen according to Linnaean principles comes perhaps as little surprise, and reminds us that each artist was involved in a distinct scientific project. While the coastal profile thus provided data for Flinders’s running surveys, the panoramic views made from high points of land were an important component of his triangulation surveys, in which bearings of prominent points were noted at regular intervals, recorded on the ship’s track and then drawn as triangles which allowed distance and position to be calculated, and thus the shape of the coastline.49 Strategic subjects included prominent coastal headlands, or approaches to an inlet: as the artist sketched, Flinders conveyed the bearing of the headlands and identified key features.50 A major early site was Princess Royal Harbour in King George Sound (Western Australia), into which Flinders sailed Investigator on 12 December 1801, anchoring until 3 January 1802 while the ship’s rigging was refitted. As Flinders occupied himself preparing a new chart of the Sound and its two harbours, Westall was busy climbing the highest points for the best vantage points from which to sketch his panoramic views. King George’s Sound: View from the North-​West (1801) is one of several pencil and wash drawings made in this period, showing the layout of the headlands (Point Possession, Bald Head, Peak Head [?]‌) and several islands (Seal, Mistaken and Break-​sea), all carefully coded with a key (Figure 4.8).51 Here Westall clearly enjoys a little more artistic licence, drawing on the skills of chiaroscuro, linear perspective and an economy of line learned from his older brother, as well as his brief time as probationer at the Royal Academy. He seems to delight in the business of creating a picture, his pencil delicately [ 83 ]

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4.7  Ferdinand Bauer, Portunus pelagicus (Blue swimming crab), c. 1802, St Vincent’s Gulf, South Australia

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4.8  William Westall, King George’s [i.e. George] Sound, View from the North-​West, [1801]

flitting across the page, conveying as much about the local vegetation (with which he fills over half the sheet, perhaps inspired by his contact with Bauer and Brown), as he does about the shape of the coastline. Investigator is shown to the left of the mid-​ground, with the suggestion of the three boats within which Flinders and his scientific team had disembarked. The sense of ‘on-​the-​spot’ authority and ‘Picturesque’ interest is reinforced too in the right foreground, in which can clearly be seen two muskets (perhaps it was one of these used only a year later to kill an Aboriginal man at Blue Mud Bay in the Gulf of Carpentaria, in retaliation for the spearing of Investigator’s master’s mate), a billycan for boiling water and a folder to protect the artist’s precious drawings. The rules of perspective thus served a regime of Truth, promoting what Barthes later called the ‘reality effect’.52 Crucially, they demanded a static subject, the observing ‘eye’ of the artist. Yet in the case of Westall’s coastal profiles, drawn from direct observation through a telescope from the deck and on some occasions from the small rowing boat in which the scientific team came ashore, at least a degree of fiction was employed given the fact that the majority of his coastal sketches were made when the ship was underway: like Bauer, Westall too carefully effaced all signs of mobility from his sketches.53 Several were made from an anchorage in locations which were being explored and [ 85 ]

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charted, including Spencer Gulf, Port Bowen and King George’s Sound, and others were executed whilst the ship was anchored (including during the passage through Torres Strait). However, these represent only a small number of Westall’s total output: most were made whilst the ship was mobile, as part of Flinders’s ongoing running survey.54 A stationary observation point was the ideal, as a widely read navigational manual of the late eighteenth century pointed out: Having brought the ship to a convenient place, from which the principal points of the coast, or bay, may be seen, either cast anchor if it is convenient, or lie to as steady as possible; or if the coast is too shoal, let the observations and measures be done in a boat. Then while the vessel is stationary in that situation, take the bearings in degrees of such points of the coast, as form the most material projections, or hollows with the azimuth compass; write down these bearings, and make a rough sketch of the appearance of the coast, observing carefully to mark the points of the bearings of which had been taken, with letters, for the sake of reference.55

Yet there were many instances in which the exigencies of war and rivalries between empires meant that Flinders was forced by the constraints of time to modify accepted practices during the voyage, forced to make expedient decisions, aware that time was of the essence.56 Westall on board the floating vessel was an observer in transit. Yet his coastal profiles’ deceptive appearance of absolute clarity, stasis and precision served to enhance their epistemological value: by deploying the conventions of perspective and chiaroscuro, the artist created a series of immutable objects. Furthermore, the method of inscribing the drawings with precise spatial and temporal coordinates also allowed for the cross-​referencing of this visual information with a myriad of other forms of textual and diagrammatic data, including logbooks, charts, maps, diaries and Flinders’s ‘bearing book’. Standard navigational practice ensured that the coastal profile was also modified by expanding the vertical scale of the coastline by one and a half to two times.57 The fiction of a stable observer –​the eye of linear perspective –​is even more striking when we come to consider Westall’s oil paintings and engravings commissioned by Banks over six years after the voyage, on the artist’s return to London. Adhering to standard artistic practice, the oils were composites adapted and idealised from several of the artist’s own sketches. This tradition relied inherently on the mobility of the artist –​the roving visual ‘reporter’ –​despite all traces of such mobility having been carefully erased. The multiple vantage points implicit in such aggregations were carefully merged into a seamless painted illusion, suggesting  –​erroneously  –​that the artist had stood [ 86 ]

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motionless in order to record the scene laid out ahead of, or around, him. The fiction of immobility played a dual role in providing both a plausible view for curious metropolitan audiences, and one that adhered to the Classical precepts of landscape painting as laid out by Claude Lorrain and his contemporaries over a century earlier. That is, the painting was both convincing as a record of place and aesthetically pleasing to the cultivated viewer –​to use the parlance of the day, here were pictorial ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ combined. It is in Westall’s oil paintings that we come closest to being able to discern what we might call the effects of mobility. In fact if we were to see these paintings not simply as composites of individual views witnessed earlier ‘on the spot’, but rather as a means of recording a momentous journey, a specific form of history painting if you will, then what we have is not blurred vision, but a series of images in which time (the journey) has equal billing with space (the conglomeration of individual ‘views’). While these late works were indeed commissioned by Banks in the service of science, it is nevertheless notable that they were hung at the Royal Academy and viewed within the context of fine art. The process of aggregation and aesthetic modification was one that was also repeated in Westall’s engravings. Between 1809 and 1812 Westall made nine paintings that were engraved for A Voyage to Terra Australis, and these were also issued separately under the name of Views of Australian Scenery painted by William Westall. The plate A Voyage to Terra Australis, View from the South Side of King George’s Sound (vol. 1, facing p.  60), for example, was selected by Banks as one of several to be included in the Voyage. Yet here again scientific concessions were made to the public taste for the ‘Picturesque’ view, as the foreground has been populated with ‘a little business for the eye’:58 a grass tree from Port Jackson (near Sydney) and a eucalyptus from Spencer Gulf in South Australia, both of which appear in earlier drawings. Westall had encountered Aboriginal people during the ship’s extended stay in King George Sound (see King George’s Sound, A  Native [1801]), although this Aboriginal couple sitting at a fire is highly reminiscent of other classicised figures that appear in Westall’s drawings of the Port Jackson region, too. The background landscape was largely based on a drawing made in situ in December 1801, King George’s Sound: View from Peak Head, showing the isthmus between the Sound and Princess-​ Royal Harbour.59 Here again, working to Flinders’s exact specifications, the shape of the coastline and geological contours of the headland are carefully recorded, using sparse shading to create shadows and the illusion of form. [ 87 ]

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The scientific demands on Bauer and Westall led them to seek immutability and certainty. They sketched constantly, moving between ship and land to secure the best vantage points, and in Bauer’s case to collect and observe as many specimens as possible. Even when they sketched on board in their floating studios, or on deck (in Westall’s case), Investigator was almost always on the move. They were, in Driver and Martins’s words, ‘perpetually unsettled’.60 Yet it was not only the artists that were so often in motion, but their subjects, too, as the natural world is constantly in flux. When read in conjunction with the other textual and graphic representations produced on board, the pencil sketches of the two artists traced a journey: yet that journey is rendered invisible within the sketches themselves. Rather, the exigencies of imperial politics exerted pressures on time, leading to Bauer’s ingenious ‘colour by number’ system and Westall’s adherence to convention in inscribing geographical coordinates onto his coastal profiles. Imperial mobilities were perceived as a profound threat to the certainties of the stable subject, and thus required regulation. The drawings of Bauer and Westall participated in this regulatory process, suggesting a world of absolutes and certainties, with no signs of blurred vision. They reflect not only the tensions of the age, but also those between the conventions and demands of science and art.

Notes M. Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, vol. 1 (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1814), p. 21. 1 2 C. F. Greville to R. Brown, 14 January 1802, in F. M. Bladen (ed.), Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 1 (Sydney: C. Potter/​Government Printer), p. 678. 3 Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, vol. 1, p. 193. Banks later praised Flinders for allowing his scientists time ashore to botanise: ‘[Flinders] deserves, in my opinion, great credit from the Public for the pains he must have taken to give you a variety of opportunities of Landing and Botanising. Had Cook paid the same attention to the Naturalists as he seems to have done, we should have done much more at that time.’ See P. I. Edwards, ‘Sir Joseph Banks and the botany of Captain Cook’s three voyages of exploration’, Pacific Studies, 2 (1978), p. 28; K. Morgan, ‘Sir Joseph Banks as patron of the Investigator expedition:  natural history, geographical knowledge and Australian exploration’, International Journal of Maritime History, 26:2 (2014), p. 255. 4 This author’s italics. Banks to G. J. Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, December 1800, Letter 82, in N. Chambers (ed.), The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection, 1768–​1820 (London: Imperial College Press, 2000), p. 221. To complete Flinders’s triangulation surveys, he and Westall also needed to go ashore at strategic points along the coast, although the time spent surveying was less than that required by the natural historians. In another example, Bauer wrote to Banks imploring him to allow him and Brown to remain in Sydney while Flinders returned to London to collect a replacement vessel: ‘our stay in New South Wales would add much to the collections and if not new subjects could be procurt [sic] I would be able to finish some from them wath [sic] I have already made, and must bei [sic] done in England’. Bauer to Banks, 8 August 1803, cited by M. J. Norst, Ferdinand Bauer: The Australian Natural History Drawings (London: British Museum), 1989, p. 109.

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The art of travel in the name of science 5 Banks to Brown, 8 April 1803, Letter 91, in Chambers (ed.), The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks, p. 244. This author’s italics. 6 Ibid. Banks credits the rise of popular interest in natural history with Flinders’s decision to allow the scientists more time to botanise than Cook had. Despite Banks’s claim, the naturalists on both voyages were, like their surveying counterparts, also engaged in a race to publish their findings, so many of which were also new to European science. See H. W. Lack, The Bauers:  Joseph, Franz and Ferdinand. Masters of Botanical Illustration. An Illustrated Biography (Munich: Prestel, 2015), pp. 257, 270. 7 P. Smethurst, ‘Mobility and empire’, in J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (eds), Travel Writing, Form and Empire:  The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (New  York:  Routledge, 2012), p. 2. 8 D. Y. Kim, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 95. 9 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 224–​5. 10 Ibid., p. 224. 11 Ibid., p. 225. 12 K. Raj, ‘Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? The birth of British cartography in colonial South Asia in the late eighteenth century’, Global Intellectual History, 2:1 (2017), p. 4. 13 F. Driver and L. Martins, ‘Visual histories: John Septimus Roe and the art of navigation, c. 1815–​1830’, History Workshop Journal, 54 (2002), pp. 149–​50. 14 B. Smith, Imagining the Pacific:  In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 3. 15 Banks to Flinders, June 1801, in Bladen (ed.), Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 4, p. 388; Morgan, ‘Sir Joseph Banks as patron’, p. 245. 16 The work of Bernard Smith is foundational in this regard. See, in particular, B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1985); Smith, Imagining the Pacific. 17 Westall’s talents were spotted by Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, when Banks’s first choice, the experienced travel artist William Daniel, decided not to undertake the voyage due to his impending marriage to Westall’s half-​sister, Mary. See R. J. Westall, ‘Westall, William (1781–​1850)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, January 2008, www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​29107, accessed 3 November 2017. 18 Most of Bauer’s specimens ended up at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, where they remain to this day. 19 D. Mabberley, Painting by Numbers: The Life and Art of Ferdinand Bauer (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2017), p. 94; T. G. Vallance, D. T. Moore and E. W. Groves, Nature’s Investigator: The Diary of Robert Brown in Australia, 1801–​ 1805 (Canberra: Australian Biological Resources Study, 2001), p. 191. 20 Mabberley, Painting by Numbers, p. 86. 21 Bauer to Banks, Sydney, 8 August 1803, British Library, London, Add. MS. 32439, fl. 25. Bauer’s misspellings retained. 22 C. Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, trans. S. Freer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.  229. Cited in K. Nickelsen, ‘The challenge of colour:  eighteenth-​century botanists and the hand-​colouring of illustrations’, Annals of Science, 63:1 (2006), p. 1. 23 Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, p. 224. 24 For these he used a microscope. 25 The Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna holds a colour-​coded drawing of a common sandpiper, Scolopacidae, inscribed with numbers up to 1,000. 26 Mabberley, Painting by Numbers, p. 79. 27 Lack, The Bauers, p. 262. 28 Author’s italics. Edwards, ‘Botany of the Flinders voyage’, p.  160; The National Archives, Kew, ADM 1/​ 4379, Admiralty Correspondence and Papers, Banks to Marsden, January 1806. K. Morgan (ed.), Australia Circumnavigated: The Voyage of

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Empire and mobility Matthew Flinders in HMS Investigator, 1801–​1803, vol. 1 (London: Hakluyt Society, 2015), p. 69. 29 H. Walter Lack and Victoria Ibáñez, ‘Recording colour in late eighteenth century botanical drawings:  Sydney Parkinson, Ferdinand Bauer, and Thadäus Haenke’, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 14 (1997), pp. 97–​8. Westall lost many of his works entirely in the wreck of the Porpoise in 1803, and many others were severely water damaged. 30 Ferdinand to Franz Bauer, 8 April 1803, cited and translated in Norst, Ferdinand Bauer, p. 104. 31 Brown to Banks, 13 October 1805, in Bladen (ed.), Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 5, pp. 711–​12; Morgan, Australia Circumnavigated, p. 67. 32 Morgan, ‘Sir Joseph Banks as patron’, p. 258. Bauer’s pencil sketches were of course much more rapidly executed: in one week, for example, he is known to have produced sixty-​one drawings. Mabberley, Painting by Numbers, p. 125. 33 Morgan, Australia Circumnavigated, p. 72. 34 B. Wittmann, ‘Outlining species: drawing as a research technique in contemporary biology’, Science in Context, 26:2 (2013), p. 366. See also P. Watts, J. Pomfrett and D. Mabberley, An Exquisite Eye: The Australian Flora and Fauna Drawings 1801–​ 1820 of Ferdinand Bauer (Sydney:  Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 1997), pp. 36–​7. Lack also refers to a recent proposal that Bauer’s drawing of the koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, become recognised as the ‘type’. Lack, The Bauers, p. 279. 35 Latour, Science in Action, pp. 224–​5. 36 D. Mabberley, The Nature of Discovery (London:  Natural History Museum, 1999), p. 94. 37 The Admiralty issued a memorandum:  ‘Their Lordships require the draughtsman employ’d for natural history to pay due attention to the directions he shall receive from the naturalist; and the draughtsman employ’d for landscape and figures, to pay regard to the opinion of the commander in the choice of objects most fitting to be delineated.’ Admiralty to Banks, 29 April 1801, in Bladen (ed.), Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 4, p. 350. 38 Matthew Flinders, Private Journal from 17 December 1803 at Isle of France to 10 July 1814 at London, Anthony J. Brown and Gillian Dooley (eds) (Adelaide: Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 2005), p.  388. Email communication from Captain M.  K. Barritt, 1 July 2015. I  am grateful to Captain Barritt for sharing his insights. 39 Driver and Martins, ‘Visual histories’, p. 147. 40 See S. Smiles, ‘Landscape painting, c. 1770–​1840’, in D. Arnold and D. P. Corbett (eds), A Companion to British Art (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016), p. 403. 41 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Westall letter to Banks, 31 January 1804, Banks Papers IV, fo. 149. 42 B. Latour, ‘Drawing things together’, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 27. Latour relies here on the work of Metropolitan Museum of Art print curator William Ivins. 43 Ibid., p. 28. 44 Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, vol. 1, p. 143. 45 D. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 98. 46 This author’s italics. Alexander Dalrymple, Essay on Nautical Surveying (London, 1771), p. 4, cited in Driver and Martins, ‘Visual histories’, p. 147. See also L. Martins, ‘Mapping tropical waters: British views and visions of Rio de Janeiro’, in Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, p. 155. 47 Bauer’s subjects can often be cross-​referenced with the manuscript slips on Robert Brown’s herbarium specimens, thus pinpointing their original location and the date sighted. See ‘Introduction’, in Vallance et al., Nature’s Investigator, p. 19; Lack, The Bauers, pp. 250–​1. 48 Mabberley, Painting by Numbers, p. 79; Lack, The Bauers, p. 259. 49 Smith, Imagining the Pacific, p. 48; Morgan, Australia Circumnavigated, p. 80. 50 Personal communication from Captain Barritt, 1 July 2015.

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The art of travel in the name of science 51 T. M. Perry’s annotated catalogue in T. M. Perry and D. H. Simpson, Drawings by William Westall (London: Royal Commonwealth Society, 1962), cat. no. 8, p. 38. 52 R. Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, reprinted in The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 141–​8. 53 Personal communication from Dr James Taylor, 17 June 2015. 54 Personal communications from Captain Barritt, 30 June and 1 July 2015. The same was also likely for Cook’s Endeavour voyages –​see A. David (ed.), The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988), pp. xl–​xli. 55 J. Robertson, Elements of Navigation (London: J. Nourse, 1780), p. 70 56 M. K. Barritt, ‘Matthew Flinders’s survey practices and records’, Journal of the Hakluyt Society (March 2014), pp. 1–​15. The one period of his life that Flinders would have time to compile and revise his findings, drawing from his extensive field records, was during his six-​and-​a-​half-​year (1803–​10) detention by the French on the Île de France (now Mauritius) on his way back to England. He also made revisions back in London when working on the atlas which was produced to accompany A Voyage to Terra Australis, published in the year of his death, 1814. See also Morgan, ‘Sir Joseph Banks as patron’, p. 249. 57 Barritt, personal communications, 30 June and 1 July 2015. 58 T. Gainsborough, undated letter to W.  Jackson, cited in M. Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough:  ‘A Little Business for the Eye’ (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1999), p. 186. In vol. 1 of A Voyage to Terra Australis, Flinders talks about diverting the ship to Fiji, ‘to give variety to the painters’, p. 10. 59 Perry and Simpson, Drawings by William Westall, cat. no. 11, p. 38. 60 Driver and Martins, ‘Visual histories’, p. 65.

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CHA P T E R FIVE

‘On their own element’: nineteenth-​ century seamen’s missions and merchant seamen’s mobility Justine Atkinson The spread of evangelical seamen’s missions in the nineteenth century, from the 1820s onwards, raised questions regarding the role of the merchant sailor within a British Christian empire and how his mobility might best serve the expansion of vital religion to the colonies and beyond. These missions first appeared in Britain in response to the perceived spiritual and material needs of British sailors. However, advocates for seamen’s missions also saw an opportunity to advance Christ’s empire by utilising the maritime network that was essential to the maintenance and expansion of the British Empire. The seamen’s welfare movement considered sailors’ mobility vital to the growth of Christianity in non-​ Christian foreign cultures, not just through the transport of missionaries and religious tracts, but through the converted sailors’ own agency as Christian ambassadors. To achieve this goal, these seamen’s welfare organisations looked to current theories regarding the relationship between metropole and peripheries, some confident that their movement would naturally progress from the centre of the empire while others preferred a proactive localised approach in the colonies. This evangelical movement in turn advanced British imperial interests, as efforts to accommodate the sailor, seen as a transient agent of empire, provided an avenue through which colonial communities could assert themselves as permanent settlements. For those colonial spaces situated in areas that shared territory with other empires and with indigenous communities, appreciation of the sailor’s mobility at sea was often negated by misgivings regarding how to govern his movements ashore. This can be demonstrated through an examination of the seamen’s missionary movement in Guangdong Province. As a place of cultural encounter between two empires, shifting trends in the spiritual and physical welfare of British seamen in the region reflected the changing dynamic between merchants, missionaries and mariners dependent on Britain’s relationship with China. [ 92 ]

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Recent research into the mobility of seamen in the nineteenth century has considered attempts to control their on-​shore movements within particular ports. Harald Fischer-Tiné’s exploration of reactions to British sailors in Kolkata has found that the British authorities were often anxious about the possibility of merchant seamen outstaying their welcome.1 Rather than allow sailors’ behaviour to discredit European claims of ‘superiority’ over the local population, the British elite sought to confine sailors to their ships whenever possible and quickly move them on to another port. Evan Lampe’s study of Western merchants and sailors in Guangdong Province identifies a growing divide between the two, as merchants housed in the foreign factories of Canton, amongst the Chinese elite of the city, disassociated themselves from their seamen stationed at the island anchorage of Whampoa, alongside the local working classes of the river community.2 As well as sailors’ mobility within a port, this chapter will consider sailors’ mobility between colonial ports and attempts to harness this for the advantage of global evangelical mission. The efforts and ideas of the Bethel movement were key in shaping the progress of seamen’s missions throughout the British Empire, based on theories regarding how sailors might act as agents of vital religion, and the ports that were most likely to benefit from and contribute to their conversion. The Bethel movement sprang from a number of Nonconformist societies that began with seamen’s prayer meetings on the Thames in 1814 and culminated in the formation of the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society (BFSS) in 1833. While it was important for these ‘dissenters’ to portray their work as loyal to Britain, established for the benefit of merchant seamen who were transient agents of British colonialism, essential to the Bethel movement’s progress was the idea that it looked beyond the temporal, in pursuit of Christ’s empire and the evangelical goal of global conversion to vital religion. Hence, at general meetings of the Bethel Seamen’s Union and Seamen’s Friend Societies, the Bethel flag was often displayed above the Union Jack and any other nations’ flags present, symbolising the superiority of the realm of Christ over all earthly domains.3 That the Bethel flag was able to transcend national borders in the name of Christian duty was also evident in the frequent collaboration between the BFSS and the American Seamen’s Friend Society (ASFS). It was deemed only a matter of time before the networking potential of Britain’s maritime fleet would allow Christian sailors to act both as ambassadors for Britain in foreign lands, and as agents for spreading Christianity amongst fellow seamen and foreign cultures. This was due to the sailor’s links to the sea, and a belief in the connecting power of the sea, as a means of global mission by the will of God: [ 93 ]

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Consider the sea as it connects the remotest realms of the universe, by facilitating an intercourse between their respective inhabitants … instead of being a bar of separation, it is the grand bond of union … By means of this element … we cultivate an acquaintance with the sun-​burnt negro and the shivering Icelander … Astonishing ordination of Eternal Wisdom! yet most graciously contrived for the benefit of mankind!4

The Rev. Mr Edwards of Greenock observed that converted sailors would not only act as missionaries abroad ‘at a cheap rate’, but ‘instead of carrying, as many of them have done, a disgrace to the Christian name, they will be an honor to it. They will exhibit a Christian spirit, and shew that in Britain there is a spirit which, if generally extended, would be a blessing to the world.’5 There was already evidence as early as 1820 that ‘serious-​minded’ seamen attending weekly Sabbath prayer-​meetings in the Lower Pool of the Thames in the ‘worst neighbourhood’ in Rotherhithe ‘had been the means of the conversion of many depraved watermen and abandoned women’.6 There were differences in opinion regarding how best to advance this vital religion amongst the sailor class, which reflected differing views within London society as to the relationship between the metropole and the rest of the empire. It was generally assumed that Britain was the centre of a global network underpinned by maritime mobilities, driven by its success in both defence and trade, and its ‘duty’ as a Christian nation. However, there was disagreement as to whether a centralised or localised approach should be adopted when attempting to control and channel the groundswell of evangelicalism amongst British seamen. The merchant-​ controlled Port of London Society for Promoting Religion among Seamen (PLS) adhered to the centralised approach. It considered its floating chapel, known as the Ark, and regulated prayer-​ meetings in the tiers of the Lower and Upper Pools of the Thames as sufficient to answer the spiritual needs of seamen who served the empire’s shipping industry. As its name suggests, the PLS was focused on London and the ships entering and leaving its port. Its attitude was symptomatic of a prevailing theory of London as the centre of the known world. In 1826 the Rev. Dr Adam Clark theorised that ‘God, by a particular providence, appeared to have selected London as the spot whence the gospel should be disseminated through the whole world.’7 He supported his argument with geographical evidence that suggested that God had ‘marked’ London as ‘the spot whence the healing waters of life were to flow, to water the whole earth’.8 Hence there was no need for the PLS to exert itself beyond the ministry to sailors in the immediate vicinity of the Thames as, by God’s providence, their work would naturally spread to the rest of the world. [ 94 ]

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Three years later, similar imagery was used by the Rev. Joshua Leavitt in regard to China. In a letter to the ASFS about preaching to Westerners in Canton, including sailors, so that their Christian living might be a means of indirectly preaching to the Chinese, he proposed: ‘Only let a bright Christian example shine in the conduct of the residents and seamen … Only let the living waters rise high and flow over, and they will soon pass the bounds set by intolerance and bigotry; and the thousand streams of China shall transmit streams of salvation to the remotest bounds of the celestial empire.’9 When he first put forward this idea in 1829, Leavitt speculated, ‘[p]‌robably a sea missionary would thus contribute as much as a China missionary, to the evangelization of that interesting country’.10 The Bethel Seamen’s Union, however, had visions of a united Bethel movement with outposts sprouting up in ports throughout the empire and beyond. Reported sightings of the Bethel flag in foreign waters came to symbolise this growth. By November 1820, the flag had been seen in the Bay of Honduras, Philadelphia, New York, New Brunswick, Hamburg, the Scilly Islands, Madeira and St Petersburg.11 It began to appear in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as early as 1822. The first of these appearances was in the Indian Ocean, on board the Duke of Lancaster in the port of Kolkata on 9 June 1822. That same year, Sydney, New South Wales was the first Pacific port to see the Bethel flag flying in its harbour, when divine service was held on the Lynx on 17 November. This was quickly followed by a sermon on 8 December aboard the American ship Pacific docked at Whampoa, China.12 Hence, while the Bethel movement was based in Britain, its proponents’ interests also lay in the growth of seamen’s missions beyond Britain –​ unlike the PLS –​made possible through the movements of sailors on their ships. From the BFSS’s point of view, the flow of sailors from the metropole to and between colonies was an important element in determining which ports were a priority in the Bethel movement’s mission. Ports that acted mainly as conduits, transferring seamen between points, appear to have been deemed more productive in fulfilling God’s work than destination ports that were identified as the end point in the transfer of goods and people, even though for sailors the voyage rarely ended at these ports. Hence, a chaplain was posted at the Cape of Good Hope as early as 1835: ‘As a station, this is one of great importance. The difficulty of access to our foreign-​going sailors at home, renders it indispensable, that since so many of them visit the Cape, there should exist an agency which may be brought to bear upon them, in their progress to other lands.’13 By comparison, nineteen years passed between the raising of the Bethel flag for the first time in Sydney Cove and [ 95 ]

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the appointment of a seamen’s chaplain to the Sydney Bethel Union, through the intervention of the ASFS. It was Cape Town’s position as the gateway to the Indian Ocean that made it so significant in the eyes of a movement concerned with the seaman’s eternal salvation, outweighing any worldly strategic value in trade or migration that might be applied to destination ports such as Sydney. As a channel through which most British sailors’ souls had to pass on their way to Asia or Australia, Cape Town can be seen as an extension of the premise of the metropole as the centre of the empire from which everything flowed to the colonies, as it was hoped that through this port sailors could be reached who had not heard the Word while in London. As well as ports that contributed to the spread of vital religion amongst sailors, the seamen’s welfare movement concentrated its efforts on those ports where a sailor presence was detrimental to the progress already made there in the name of evangelical global mission. With regard to the Pacific islands, the BFSS observed that, ‘as soon as an English or an American ship comes in sight, instead of hailing, or being gratified by its approach, the missionary deprecates and dreads it’.14 For evangelical foreign mission organisations such as the London Missionary Society, when it came to converting seamen, islands such as Tahiti and New Zealand took precedence over settler colonies. The need to preserve the missionary work among native populations on these islands made ministry to sailors in contact with them paramount for the BFSS. Recognised ‘as the chief Missionary station in the South Seas’, Tahiti was under ‘most anxious consideration’ by the BFSS directors, due to the threat of intemperance and ‘grog-​shops’ in Wilks’s Harbour.15 Hence a request made in a letter dated 7 October 1835, to assist the local missionary there, was complied with by December, with the Society ‘granting Rev. G.  Pritchard a Bethel Flag, a Sailors’ Library, and a supply of Bibles, tracts, &c. to aid him in his important work to benefit sailors’.16 Likewise, the speed with which a permanent Bethel presence was established in Wellington was due to New Zealand’s significance in the evangelical grand scheme. There was a strong missionary presence in the North and South Islands, working to Christianise the Maori population. Anxiety among the missionaries, particularly with regard to British sailors, meant that the newly established colony of New Zealand was relatively quick to respond to the call for the spiritual reform of sailors. The Bethel flag was regularly hoisted above the ‘Scotch Church’ in Lambton Quay, Wellington, to especially welcome ‘seamen and persons connected with shipping’ from February 1844 onwards, only four years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi under which New Zealand became a British colony.17 [ 96 ]

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For the seamen’s mission movement to be successful in these ports and other colonial maritime communities, it required something more permanent than the occasional raising of the Bethel flag over the water, which was reliant on an empathetic captain willing to host a religious service or prayer meeting on his ship, and seamen willing to respond to the signal, preferably from surrounding vessels as well as the host ship. To achieve a regular and uninterrupted presence it was important to negotiate a space within a harbour community, whether on land or on water, where there was a sense of acceptance for the sailor ashore. An underlying issue with regard to how seamen should be received into colonial port communities was the question of balance between a sailor’s mobility and his right to a sense of permanence among the colonies he served –​whether to re-​create his home at sea or provide a sense of home on land reminiscent of that which awaited his return to Britain. A popular phenomenon in the Bethel movement’s campaign to meet the spiritual needs of seamen in port was the floating chapel. The first of these, the PLS’s Ark, was a decommissioned navy vessel decked out for public worship and ‘launched’ in 1818 to be permanently anchored at Wapping on the Thames. These structures reinforced the idea of the sailor as transient, most at home on his ship. There was the perception that sailors felt uncomfortable with conventional places of worship, compared to the ‘alacrity and delight’ they displayed when approaching shipboard worship, ‘leaping from the boat by the chain plates, a rope, or a ladder, to the deck, and taking their stations on the rigging or gangways, where they felt more at home than they could be in the most elegant cushioned pews on shore’.18 Hence, while the floating chapel aimed to accommodate the sailor spiritually, it also served to mark him as distinct from the rest of the community. The type of physical structure adopted for the spiritual instruction of seamen also reflected a community’s own sense of itself within empire. A  floating chapel was the logical space for worship in Port Louis, Mauritius, which was all about channelling seamen to other locations, compounded by its association with naval activity and ship-​building while under French rule. Like Cape Town, the island of Mauritius sparked interest among Nonconformist evangelicals due to its influential role in the disbursement of seamen to British ports in India and Australia, as well as Great Britain. While captains and crews had been content with shipboard prayer meetings, the local missionaries, stationed there to convert the indigenous population, lobbied for a floating chapel to provide a focal point for the spiritual welfare of sailors, as ‘the want of a stated place of worship for seamen, had been constantly felt and deplored’.19 Officially ceded to Britain by the [ 97 ]

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1814 Treaty of Paris, Mauritius was an important strategic port for the advancement of British trade, its positioning along the trade routes between Europe and Asia earning it the nickname the ‘Star and Key of the Indian Ocean’, although its strategic value decreased with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. In growing settler communities where colonial ports were often final destinations in the movement of people, the question of a floating or onshore place of worship for sailors could depend on the degree to which settlement had been established. For example, in the newly formed city of Melbourne, Australia, a floating chapel was preferred for fear that sailors going ashore to worship would desert, and the ex-​ hulk Emily was launched on 1 July 1857.20 In Sydney, on the other hand, the renewed Sydney Bethel Union’s decision to build a Mariners’ Church on shore in 1844 shows that by then sailors in port had earned a claim to the city’s own sense of permanence and an inclusiveness, which a floating chapel would have denied.21 This indicates a confidence that was lacking in the 1820s, when the Society was unable to decide between a floating chapel and a land-​based structure. A fixed structure on land could also make clear to others that this British settlement was here to stay. An iron-​clad church built in Apia, Samoa was evidence of a permanent British maritime presence. Samoa was another example of a missionary outpost where the spiritual welfare of sailors was deemed vital to continued evangelical progress amongst the islanders. The missionary William Mills had argued for the erection of a permanent chapel for British seamen in Apia ‘owing to the direct influence which their conduct [had] on … Missionary work either for good or evil so that in benefiting them it promote[d]‌ in a great measure the progress of the Gospel among the Heathen’.22 However, it was also an island regarded by several European powers as a strategic access point to trade in the Americas and the rest of the Pacific. The same could be said of Singapore, where, while there was no land-​based place of worship specific to seamen, the residents did opt for a permanent structure in the form of a sailors’ home, which opened in 1854.23 The degree of permanence allowed to seamen within a British colonial community depended to a large degree on the extent to which the colony felt secure within that settlement, a security for which the colony often had seamen to thank. The idea that a community had a responsibility to provide temporal as well as spiritual accommodation for the sailors who brought it provisions and peace of mind was first put into practice in 1835, when the first sailors’ home opened in Welles Street, London. Calls for sailors’ homes were often couched in expressions of gratitude towards seamen for contributing to a [ 98 ]

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community’s permanence and prosperity. The inaugural meeting of the Sailors’ Home and Seamen’s Friend Society in Cape Town highlighted the need for seamen to have a sense of belonging when in their port:

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[T]‌he whole set of kind feelings associated with our homes, and the whole set of kind feelings associated with our sailors, are, at once, brought together by this simple phrase –​the Sailors’ Home, and we cannot but feel, from the name itself, that it was a noble thought to try and provide for sailors, who stand so much in need of them, the comforts of a home.24

However, while the presence of a sailors’ home was a sign of tolerance towards seamen within a port community, it was at the same time indicative of their continued segregation from that community. As the Attorney-​General of the Cape Colony pointed out, ‘[r]‌espectable houses of entertainment will not receive the common sailor, and if they would, their prices would not suit the common sailor’.25 The sailors’ home in Kolkata boasted various recreational attractions, and a shop ‘in which every thing which Jack can require is kept, and from which he may be supplied with every article suitable for his kit’, so that theoretically there was no need for the sailor to interact outside of the home.26 In this sense the sailors’ home was not an attempt to make seamen stay within a community, but to make them feel ‘at home’ during their stay, with a limited middle-​class evangelical view of what that home should offer. A prime example of how the acceptance or restriction of seamen related to a colony’s sense of a secure space within the empire was the trading port of Canton in Guangdong Province, and the movement of British sailors from the harbour to the anchorage of Whampoa and eventually to Hong Kong as the century progressed. The struggle to establish British sovereignty in the region would be an underlying factor in the progress of the seamen’s mission movement there. Britain was only able to gain a foothold in China through the conflict of the Opium Wars (1839–​42 and 1856–​60) and the subsequent treaties of Nanking in 1842 and Tientsin in 1860. However, from the 1820s onwards, merchants and missionaries looked to providing the sailor with a permanent space on the waters of the Pearl River, and eventually on land, as a means of breaking the stagnation they faced under the rigid rule of the Qing Dynasty. The problems and anxieties usually associated with seamen on shore were exacerbated in Canton due to the strict rules of segregation between Westerners and Chinese under the ‘Canton system’. This system confined foreigners’ movements to the ‘Thirteen Factories’, which physically divided the outsiders according to nation and commercial company. These factories were established to accommodate [ 99 ]

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foreigners and their trade, which was the sole purpose of allowing any foreign presence in Canton, as far as the Chinese authorities were concerned. The prominent British merchant and seamen’s welfare advocate, James Matheson of Jardine Matheson and Company, was very vocal regarding the injustices, as he saw them, of the restrictions the Canton system placed on foreign merchants like him: It has pleased Providence to assign to the Chinese … the possession of a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth … It has been the policy of this extraordinary people … to monopolize all the advantages of their situation … They permit to Europeans no intercourse but of a commercial character, and that only of the scantiest and most ungracious description.27

European women and families were not permitted in the city. Merchants’ movements on the river were to be strictly trade-​related. They could not interact with Cantonese outside of the factories. They were housed under the roofs of hong merchants, through whom all business with China was conducted, and who were themselves often answerable to the Qing authorities if their guests disregarded the law. Once the trading season was over, they were supposed to return to their country of origin; although many stayed for nearly the whole year or retired only as far as Macau or Hong Kong, in the case of the British, until the season reopened.28 Hence the Chinese took deliberate steps to ensure that the relation-​building assimilation process that helped foster trade in other ports on the frontier of the British Empire, by way of its traders taking root within another culture, was crippled in the case of early nineteenth-​century China. The white settlements taking shape in New South Wales and the ornate palaces of the British Raj in Kolkata were inconceivable under the rigid system in Canton. European missionaries fared no better, with the progress of Christian mission in China stifled by Qing Dynasty law, under which Western missionaries were forbidden from venturing beyond the Thirteen Factories of Canton. Indeed, between 1826 and 1860, preaching Christianity to the Chinese anywhere in China was punishable by death. At his first sermon to seamen at Whampoa in 1822, the Rev. Robert Morrison admitted to the congregation gathered on the Pacific to ‘having been fifteen years in this country, and during that time having rarely preached’.29 Hence preaching to seamen was an opportunity to assert a presence in a country where Christian missionaries had had little success. Likewise, attending to seamen’s spiritual and material needs offered British merchants a chance to assert a lasting presence. The movement of sailors to, from and within the city was a contentious issue between Chinese authorities and British residents [ 100 ]

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in Canton. While all parties appear to have been in agreement that restrictions should apply, control over those restrictions was much contested. Qing law forbade foreign sailors from visiting Canton, ‘excepting as boat’s crews’.30 The British merchants’ and missionaries’ response to this can be seen as an attempt to balance the diplomatic need to comply with these laws and the need to advance British and Christian interests within this frontier space of the empire. As with other missionary outposts and ports primarily established for exploitation, the behaviour of British sailors in cultural exchanges with the indigenous population was cause for concern in China. Fears that their actions were a danger to themselves, however, were heightened with regard to the consequences should foreign sailors fall foul of Chinese law. There was the very real possibility of capital punishment, for ‘The Chinese law will not excuse a man who kills another in a fight, because the other man struck him first, or insulted him by words or looks. The English law does not allow of slight pretexts for killing a man; and the Chinese law is more strict than the English law is.’31 The sentence of ‘life for life’ had become mandatory in 1749 for crimes against the Chinese, and in 1754 for crimes against other foreigners.32 Hence Chinese law had grown less tolerant of foreigners over the last hundred years, and the ability of foreign powers to appeal had diminished. In such cases, the great concern for British authorities was that the consequences of seamen’s behaviour drew attention to the fact that Britain was not the dominant partner in its relationship with China, and not as influential as it would have liked. The practice of ‘liberty days’ is an early example of the struggle between British and Chinese authorities to control the movement of seamen in the region in order to stem bad behaviour. The preface to Robert Morrison’s 1822 sermon to seamen at Whampoa, published in 1823, gives an example of these days from a few years before, when ‘a whole ship’s company of Christian seamen’ was allowed to come ashore for three days and nights:  ‘Their liberty was, however, most grossly turned into licentiousness. Intoxication, and riot, and wounds, and homicides, were the result.’33 This was in contrast to the ‘ship shape and Bristol Fashion’ order demanded by officers before a crew was allowed any such shore leave. Once ashore, sailors were drawn to the liquor on offer from the local merchants in Hog Lane, where shopkeepers used English signs and names.34 Thus the seamen’s visit and any bad behaviour was contained within one area of the foreign quarters, an area recognised as the space to be frequented by foreign sailors when they came ashore. The officers then waited to return the men to their ship, once all their money had been spent on alcohol, and so any means or motive to come ashore again had been exhausted. [ 101 ]

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According to Morrison, sailors’ behaviour during these outings was such that liberty days were reduced to ‘a walk on shore at Whampoa, on Sundays’, where ‘the Pagan Chinese established a sort of Sunday police … to keep the Christians in order’.35 Lampe identifies the liberty days as an exercise in control by the British authorities.36 However, with the removal of these days from a very public display in the dedicated space of Hog Lane in mainland Canton, to the less public ambiguous island space of the grog shops of Whampoa, and eventually to the privacy of their own ships, we see a decline in Britain’s authority over its own subjects, as control over sailors on shore was transferred to the Chinese. In time, the ‘Sunday police’ became redundant as liberty days generally became confined to being taken on board ship, although still an occasion for ‘hard drinking, and every form of excess’.37 Seamen’s behaviour could be damaging to the reputation of British traders competing with other foreign nations for business with China, and to the image of Christianity as a civilised religion. The ‘Address to Sailors’ which accompanied the publication of Morrison’s sermon was a call for seamen to do their duty to themselves and their country, as well as to God, as British Christians in a foreign land.38 A sailor who drank to excess in Hog Lane ‘expose[d]‌his person, his country and his religion to the scorn of the Pagan Chinese’.39 Hence the seamen’s behaviour was seen as a matter of national pride, especially when it put Britain to shame before a pagan, and therefore perceived to be inferior, nation:  ‘The sailors of other countries are commended as more reasonable and better behaved than you are; and even the Chinamen are preferred before you, as an orderly sober people.’40 Morrison’s solution was for sailors to become Christian ambassadors, whose example might assist the missionaries in China in their primary concern, which was the souls of non-​Christian Chinese. It was a hope shared by American missionaries. In his address to a public meeting shortly before his departure for Canton, the ASFS’s second seamen’s chaplain to the city, Edwin Stevens (posted 1832 to 1836), expressed similar sentiments to the theory put forward by Leavitt a few years before of streams flowing forth from a single source, bringing salvation: ‘The claims of this mission I view in three aspects; as promising great and eternal good to the seamen who are there; as removing a standing and effectual barrier to the introduction of Christianity into the adjacent countries; and as tending actually to introduce it into the great nation itself, populous China.’41 Morrison’s sermon can be seen as a step towards reasserting British authority, by way of reasserting a public space for sailors. Although delivered on board ship, it was publicly advertised with the unfurling of the Bethel flag and its contents published, along with recommendations [ 102 ]

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for ‘Bettering the Morals and Condition of Sailors in China’ in the shape of a floating hospital and floating chapel for seamen. A major advantage suggested by Morrison, for both hospital and chapel, was that they would be ‘perfectly unconnected with the natives’, and the sailors would not need to go ashore.42 Hence, Morrison openly mused that the Chinese government would not object, and there was no chance of ‘curiosity, or insolence of the populace’ interfering with divine service.43 However, privately he may well have hoped for such ‘curiosity’ when one considers the missionaries’ theories on indirect preaching, and the large amount of indigenous boat traffic around Whampoa.44 In any case, it was felt that the community as a whole would benefit from the chapel, since ‘from the moral and orderly behaviour of the sailors, which would in all probability follow; the interests of all who trade to China would be subserved, and the respectability of Foreigners in the eyes of the Chinese, would be promoted’.45 As with other colonial ports, the use of floating establishments served to isolate seamen from mainland society. However, whereas elsewhere they were a deliberate reminder of the sailor’s transience, in this case it was important for the merchants posted in Canton that these structures instead were steps towards providing a sense of permanence. Not surprisingly, the two attributes of permanence and isolation, which British authorities considered as positive, were regarded as a threat to Chinese law by Chinese authorities. Officials certainly cited infringements against the law in their objections to the short-​ lived floating hospital, which they closed down within two years of its 1836 opening, under the suspicion that it was merely a front for smuggling.46 There were already laws in place which the Chinese felt sufficient to deal with sick foreign seamen. Any sailors or merchants who fell ill were to report to the Hoppo, the Chinese official responsible for dealings with European traders. He would then arrange for their removal to Macau, where, according to the Viceroy, there ‘has hitherto been a place (or temple?) for curing people’.47 There were deeper issues at stake, however, than simply failure to follow procedure, and the hospital ship in effect became a struggle for British space in Chinese waters. In his proclamation linking the presence of the hospital ship to the alleged opium-​smuggling activities of sampans anchored in front of the foreign factories, the Hoppo noted, ‘There is now at Whampoa Baker’s foreign ship which has been lingering there for a long time.’48 The desire for continual movement was a key element in Chinese officials’ arguments against the hospital. Foreign vessels visiting the anchorage at Whampoa were only supposed to stay for several months at most. Once they had unloaded, made any necessary repairs and taken on new cargo, they were obliged [ 103 ]

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to move on to their next destination. Strictly speaking, the same fluidity also applied to foreign merchants in Canton. The objections of the Chinese officials to the seamen’s hospital hint at a desire to maintain the Qing empire’s deliberately stifling relationship with foreign traders. The reaction of British merchants like Matheson was to take an active interest in such benevolent causes in the name of sailors. Not only was he an active member of the committee for the hospital ship, but he can also be found on the committee of the British Seamen’s Friend Association in China in 1839, which sought to establish the floating chapel proposed by Morrison seventeen years earlier, and on the committee of the Hong Kong sailors’ home. The closure of the floating hospital under the edicts in China forbidding foreign ships from loitering in Chinese waters, denying the British a fixed and independent presence, shows how ineffectual British powers were in the area at that time. In the face of such local resistance, for many years the missionary Morrison, his American counterpart Bridgman and a number of seamen’s chaplains would have to be content to visit ships’ decks for Sunday service with the consent of sympathetic captains, until the time when a floating chapel could be built.49 This would not be merely a case of waiting until the funds were available to purchase a vessel and fit it out for that purpose, as was the experience in other ports. It would require a complete overhaul of the relationship between local and foreign powers. This change in power dynamics would eventually come in the form of the Treaty of Nanking, finalised in 1842 after the first Opium War. Under the treaty, Hong Kong was ceded to Britain and five ‘treaty ports’, including Canton, were opened so that British merchants and their families could take up residence there while conducting business, and were no longer compelled to deal solely with hong merchants.50 Many British traders, however, chose to stay in Hong Kong, where they were relatively free to defy Chinese demands including continued pressure to abandon the opium trade.51 This was despite the fact that the treaty itself appears to treat Hong Kong as a conduit rather than a settlement, ‘it being obviously necessary and desirable, that British Subjects should have some Port whereat they may careen and refit their Ships, when required, and keep Stores for that purpose’.52 Hence, although ‘possessed in perpetuity’, the public stance of British authorities maintained the fluidity that China desired, while in reality providing British merchants a space in which to achieve permanence. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Nanking a divide begins to appear between merchants and missionaries with regard to which area –​mainland or island  –​best suited their purposes. The new colony at Hong Kong allowed British merchants to re-​establish confidence in their [ 104 ]

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identity in the region. Within months of the signing of the 1842 treaty, a seamen’s hospital had been opened on the island. This time it was not a floating structure, ambiguous in China’s eyes as to its purpose, but a building erected on solid land granted by the British government, the opening of which was to coincide with the closure of the Portuguese Catholic hospital for foreign seamen in Macau.53 This was just one of several charitable works set up by missionaries, which British traders contributed to in order to build their esteem in the newly established colony. With the island of Hong Kong now firmly in British hands, the need among British merchants to establish similar permanent philanthropic institutions in Canton appears to have waned, at least as far as their sailors were concerned. The first quarterly report of the Seamen’s Friend Association in China, published in Canton in the prelude to the war, appears also to have been its last. Missionaries, on the other hand, continued to concentrate their seamen’s mission work in Whampoa and Canton’s harbour. The sheer numbers of Chinese populating those locations made them more attractive than Hong Kong, due to the missionary’s primary objective to convert the Chinese to Christianity. The Seamen’s Friend Association and the BFSS appeared to be unable to give priority to Hong Kong as a site for a seamen’s chaplain at this time, despite recommendations that ‘this place [would] have more advantages, and fewer difficulties than Whampoa’.54 The demand was instead met in Canton by the ASFS, which sent out George Loomis in early 1848. This American seamen’s chaplain continued the campaign to build a floating chapel at Whampoa, which was eventually launched in 1850, and named the Morrison in honour of the man who first proposed the idea. In 1856, however, the Morrison was destroyed by fire at the beginning of the second Opium War, as it had come to symbolise British and Western interference in Chinese affairs. With the changes in availability of space for the British and other Westerners in China came a change in the way sailors were to be negotiated within that space. In Canton, even with the successes of Britain’s treaties, the merchants continued efforts to reduce their contact with the British sailor, revealing misgivings about their situation there. British residents not only proposed a wall or ‘good high railing’ west of their public square, to block out the refuse and crowds of ‘rabble Chinese’ attracted by lowly local traders; but on the east side, with the addition of sailor traffic heading for Hog Lane, they proposed a paved passage that would accommodate the seamen, ‘some provision for which it [was] absolutely necessary to make’, while effectively keeping them out of view of the merchants, who would use an overpass for ‘private communication between the old and new factories’.55 [ 105 ]

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However, in Hong Kong the British merchants began a movement with local chaplains and missionaries in 1861, post the Treaty of Tientsin, to in effect ensure a permanent sailor presence on the island by way of establishing a sailors’ home, which eventually opened in 1864. While the sailors’ home was proposed to provide safe and comfortable lodgings for sailors in port, it was also a statement of the stature of the men behind it, and the staying power of the settlement they were building. The first public meeting called to establish the sailors’ home was ‘attended by the most influential members of the mercantile community’.56 One commentator noted with the progress being made by the sailors’ home committee that Hong Kong had ‘advanced a grade in the scale of colonial seaports’.57 Like the sailors’ hospital built there nearly twenty years earlier, it was a more stable and permanent structure than any floating institution. For missionaries such as Dr James Legge, the sailors’ home was a means for removing the negative effects of sailors from their work. With Hong Kong ceded to the British, Legge was able to erect a permanent structure, ‘built entirely of brick, and situated in an eligible position in the thickly populated Upper Bazaar’.58 This chapel was specifically for the purpose of converting Chinese on the island to Christianity, without fear of the death penalty. At the public meeting of February 1861, Legge spoke of ‘the great desirableness’ of a sailor’s home, as his services in the Chinese chapel were often interrupted by drunken sailors frequenting the many taverns in the neighbourhood.59 Hence the need for attending to seamen’s spiritual welfare as a way of indirectly preaching to the indigenous population was now outweighed by the need to protect indigenous converts from the retrograde effects of sailor behaviour. Like the deliberate attempts by officers to direct the flow of sailors towards Hog Lane during liberty days in Canton, sailors would now be encouraged to make their way towards the sailors’ home near West Point, with the promise of a variety of attractions and comforts: ‘well-​ ventilated rooms, good bath-​ rooms, reading-​ rooms, canteens where Jack may have his pipe and glass of grog’, as well as several games rooms, ‘and other conveniences suitable to the good health and happiness of the tar’.60 The location of the sailors’ home was on land deemed useful in its proximity to the shipping, but not prime real estate.61 Hence the home was still a means of avoiding contact with the sailors, keeping them close enough to exert paternal influence over them, but not so close as to inconvenience the more respectable classes to whom the merchants belonged; and lessening the impact should such encounters occur:  ‘We ourselves residing here, may look for the spectacle of a [ 106 ]

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clean well-​conducted sailor on our streets, oftener than we have hitherto done.’62 It was not until British sovereignty was established in Hong Kong after the 1860 Treaty of Tientsin that Anglican seamen’s welfare began to find a presence in the region, choosing the island rather than the mainland for the posting of the Missions to Seamen missionary Alfred Gurney Goldsmith in 1884. Hong Kong was typical of the Anglican approach to seamen’s spiritual welfare. Although there was an Anglican church, St Peter’s, built within the grounds of the sailors’ home in 1871, it had not been erected specifically for seamen. As with other Anglican churches situated within coastal communities, the Church of England expected that sailors would simply attend divine service under the same roof as local parishioners. This was despite the many anecdotes showing sailors often felt uncomfortable amongst and were rejected by these parishioners. Any preaching specific to seamen could be provided on their ships, as suggested by the Missions to Seamen’s original title, the ‘Society for Promoting Missions to Seamen Afloat at Home and Abroad’. Goldsmith was first granted permission to preach at St Peter’s in 1885, and it came to be known as St Peter’s Seamen’s Church. Spiritual sustenance for seamen at the sailors’ home itself had been non-​existent until his arrival. In the first year of his work, Goldsmith visited the sailors’ home daily, and took weekly divine service. He also organised ‘a modest entertainment’ every Tuesday evening, ‘chiefly by the help of a few ladies’.63 Hence homely influences began to make their way into the heady atmosphere of the home. Goldsmith also began to turn attention back to the mainland, to the British seamen in Kowloon, just across Hong Kong harbour. With the influx of British shipping at Kowloon, which had been ceded to the British on 24 October 1860 under the Convention of Peking, there had been an increase in ‘grog shops of infamous reputation passing as hotels’ in the area.64 The official opening of the Kowloon Institute in April 1896 was significant, in that it extended seamen’s missionary work back to mainland China, although in much closer proximity to Hong Kong than Canton. In doing so, it also moved the mission away from the influence of the merchants, with more and more meetings and concerts taking place at the Institute rather than using the sailors’ home facilities. The move to Kowloon also moved seamen’s missionary work to within the sphere of Chinese mainland inhabitants. Hence any positive outcomes of the mission might be witnessed by those members of Chinese society other British and American missionaries were most keen to influence. The idea of the British sailor as Christian ambassador to ‘heathen’ civilisations was [ 107 ]

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thus put into effect, with the added bonus of the seamen’s chaplain being present to provide direction. The arrival of this Anglican seamen’s missionary in Hong Kong, preaching in the local Anglican church as well as in the sailors’ home and on ships in the harbour, and always with the support of the Bishop of Victoria, Hong Kong (who was also the mission’s treasurer), can be seen as confirmation by the Missions to Seamen that Hong Kong was now seen as a secure port within the British Empire. This idea was echoed in a speech written for the annual general meeting of the Hong Kong Mission to Seamen, given at St Peter’s in 1896. The address celebrated the mission’s progress over the past year in ‘this port of Hong Kong the 3rd port of the Empire, with its 126,000 British Seamen annually passing thro’ it –​& representing [Christ] & [Christianity] to the Worshippers of other gods’.65 The same speech also recognised the importance of the recently opened Kowloon Institute, ‘the greatest monument of this year’s successes’.66 The establishment of the mission at Kowloon on the mainland was a further statement of the newfound confidence of British Empire in China. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong was a key port of the empire. More importantly for the seamen’s mission movement, it had become a major conduit through which passed weekly thousands of potential ambassadors for Christ’s empire. The mobility of sailors, and control over that mobility, was central to the struggle of British traders and missionaries to advance their position in Guangdong. Before the Treaty of Nanking, while British and other foreign interests were bound by the strictures of the Canton system, attempts by missionaries to establish spiritual and welfare institutions for sailors doubled as campaigns, supported by the mercantile classes, to challenge Chinese authority over British subjects encroaching on Chinese territory. Morrison’s sermons, the floating hospital and the floating chapel were all attempts to supply space for British sailors in China’s waters, with the hope that their example might spread Christianity to the Chinese. These campaigns were informed by theories of the pious seaman as evangelical ambassador, able to bring others to Christ’s empire through the example of his Christian living as he passed from port to port. These theories were reliant on the transient nature of the sailor. Hence contested spaces in Guangdong, whether seamen’s welfare institutions or more ambiguous areas recognised as belonging to the sailor class, such as Hog Lane, emphasised the perception, reinforced in many British ports, that the sailor’s connection with the sea, while setting him apart from the rest of British colonial society, was an integral part of that society’s stability. In seeking to provide some sense of home for the sailor, contrary to Chinese policy, British merchants [ 108 ]

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and missionaries in Guangdong sought to validate their own continued settlement in the region and the progress of a Christian British Empire.

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Notes 1 H. Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Flotsam and jetsam of the empire? European seamen and spaces of disease and disorder in mid-​ nineteenth century Calcutta’, in A. Tambe and H.  Fischer-​Tiné (eds), The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 121–​53. 2 E. Lampe, ‘ “The most miserable hole in the whole world”: Western sailors and the Whampoa anchorage, 1770–​1850’, International Journal of Maritime History, 22:1 (2010), p. 23. 3 ‘Bethel Seamen’s Union, British and Foreign’, Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Miscellany (hereafter Sailor’s Magazine), 1:1 (January 1820), p. 22. 4 ‘The Sea’, Sailor’s Magazine, 1:3 (March 1820), p. 82. 5 ‘British and Foreign Seamen’s Friend Society and Bethel Union’, Sailor’s Magazine, 1:12 (December 1820), p. 461. 6 ‘Bethel Seamen’s Union, British and Foreign’, p. 25. 7 ‘London the Centre’, New Sailor’s Magazine, 1:6 (June 1827), p. 201. 8 Ibid. 9 Rev. J. Leavitt, ‘Sea Mission to Canton’, Sailor’s Magazine, and Naval Journal, 1: 9 (May 1829), p. 270. 10 Ibid. 11 ‘Interesting particulars of religious worship among seamen within the last twenty years’, Sailor’s Magazine, 1:12 (December 1820), pp. 448–​9. 12 R. Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors, at Wampoa [sic], in China, on the Deck of the American Ship Pacific, intended to have been preached November 3, 1822 (Malacca: Mission Press, 1823), p. 1. 13 ‘Foreign chaplaincy’, Sailors’ Magazine and Nautical Intelligencer, 1 (1839), p. 93. 14 R. Ferguson, Affecting Intelligence from The South Sea Islands. A Letter addressed to the Directors and Friends of Bible and Missionary Institutions in Great Britain and America (London: W. Tyler, 1839), p. 6; Supplement in Sailors’ Magazine and Nautical Intelligencer, p. 1. 15 ‘Tahiti Bethel flag and sailors’ library’, The Pilot, or Sailors’ Magazine, and Record of the Transactions of the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society, 1:12 (December 1835), pp. 414–​15. 16 Ibid., p. 415. 17 ‘Seamen’s Friend Society’, New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator, 4:322 (7 February 1844), p. 1. 18 ‘The British Ark’, Sailor’s Magazine, 1:5 (May 1820), p. 165. 19 Council for World Mission Archive, London Missionary Society, E.  Baker, ‘Brief Account of the Appropriation of the Hulk “John Marsh” lying in the Harbour of Port Louis, Mauritius, for a Seaman’s Chapel, or Bethel’, 1, part of correspondence to the Rev. J. J. Freeman, Port Louis, 16 July 1842, Mauritius, Incoming Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 1, Jacket B, 49. 20 Seamen’s Mission in Hobson’s Bay, Melbourne, First Half-​ Yearly Report of the Victoria Bethel Union: with proceedings of The Public Meeting held in Melbourne, on 25th February, 1858 (Melbourne: William Fairfax & Co., 1858), p. 13. 21 ‘Opening of the Mariners’ Church’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 August 1844, p. 2; R. Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth. A Contribution to the History of the Church Maritime (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1986), p. 380. 22 Council for World Mission Archive, London Missionary Society, W.  Mills to the Directors of the London Missionary Society, Glasgow, 10 July 1847, Home, Incoming correspondence, Box 9, Folder 5, Jacket A, 6. 23 ‘Singapore sailors’ home’, The Straits Times (22 July 1856), p. 5.

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Empire and mobility 4 ‘A sailors’ home at Cape Town’, The Empire (Sydney) (28 December 1854), p. 6. 2 25 Ibid. 26 ‘Calcutta sailors’ home’, Sailors’ Magazine and Nautical Intelligencer, 2 (1840), p. 350. 27 J. Matheson, The Present Position and Prospects of the British Trade with China; together with an Outline of some Leading Occurrences in its Past History (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1836), pp. 1–​2. 28 J. A. Farris, ‘Thirteen Factories of Canton:  an architecture of Sino-​Western collaboration and confrontation’, Buildings and Landscapes:  Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 14 (Fall 2007), p. 68. 29 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. 5. 30 Ibid., p. 29. 31 Ibid., pp. 24–​5. 32 R. Morrison, ‘Remarks on homicides in China’, in Matheson, Present Position and Prospects, pp. 117–​19; Matheson, Present Position and Prospects, p. 103. 33 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. iii. 34 Lampe, ‘Western sailors and the Whampoa anchorage’, p. 37. 35 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. iii. 36 Lampe, ‘Western sailors and the Whampoa anchorage’, pp. 33–​4. 37 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. iii. 38 Amicus, ‘An address to sailors’, ibid., p. 22. 39 Ibid., p. 24. 40 Ibid., p. 25. 41 ‘Proceedings of the fourth anniversary of the Seamen’s Friend Society’, Sailor’s Magazine, and Naval Journal, 4:46 (June 1832), p. 304. 42 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. 28. 43 Ibid. 44 Lampe, ‘Western sailors and the Whampoa anchorage’, pp. 20–​1. 45 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. 28. 46 ‘Art. III. The cause of seamen in China; 1, formation of a Seamen’s Friend Association; 2, statements respecting the British seamen’s hospital’, Chinese Repository, 7:9 (January 1839), pp. 480–​4. 47 ‘Tăng viceroy of Kwangtung, proclamation to hong merchants’, 27 December 1837, cited ibid., p. 481. 48 ‘Wăn hoppo of Canton, proclamation to the hong merchants’, 3 April 1838, cited ibid., p. 483. 49 Morrison, A Sermon to Sailors at Wampoa, p. 29. 50 ‘Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) 1842’, USC US-​China Institute, University of Southern California, http://​china.usc.edu/​treaty-​nanjing-​nanking-​1842, accessed 29 July 2016. 51 M. C. Lazich, ‘American missionaries and the opium trade in nineteenth-​century China’, Journal of World History, 17:2 (2006), p. 204. 52 ‘Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) 1842’. 53 ‘Art. III. Religious and charitable institutions in Hongkong [sic]: churches, chapels, schools, colleges, hospitals, &c.’, Chinese Repository, 12:9 (August 1843), p. 442. 54 Ibid., p. 440. 55 ‘Art. V.  Local Correspondence, between H.B.M.  consul Mr Macgregor and British residents in Canton, regarding public nuisances, etc. From the local papers’, Chinese Repository, 15:10 (October 1846), pp. 516–​17. 56 China Mail (7 February 1861), p. 22. 57 China Mail (4 July 1861), p. 106. 58 J. Lewis Shuck, ‘Letter from China’, General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer, 5:52 (April 1843), p. 126. 59 China Mail (7 February 1861), p. 22. 60 China Mail (4 July 1861), p. 106. 61 China Mail (7 February 1861), p. 22. 62 China Mail (4 July 1861), p. 106.

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3 ‘Hong Kong seamen’s chaplaincy’, Hong Kong Daily Press (24 January 1887), p. 6. 6 64 G. A. Gollock, At the Sign of the Flying Angel: A Book of the Sailor at the Coastline (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), p. 79. 65 National Maritime Museum, London, ‘The Annual Meeting of St Peter’s Branch of the Missions to Seamen Society’, file 18, in ‘Chaplain’s Notebook’ kept by the Reverend C. R. Hughes, HMS Mercury, China Station, 1891–​96, REC/​56. 66 Ibid., file 19, ‘Chaplain’s notebook’.

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C HAP T E R SIX

‘Easy chair geography’: the fabrication of an immobile culture of nineteenth-​century exploration Natalie Cox Of all the sciences, geography finds its origin in action.1

In the nineteenth century, geographical knowledge-​making came to be increasingly defined by large-​scale movements of exploration: the practical act of moving across unknown and distant spaces. The ‘explorer’ emerged as the missionary of this purportedly robust and manly science, travelling to extend the frontiers of European knowledge. As the century progressed, the ‘unexplored’ spaces on maps were rapidly colonised with the lines of expeditionary routes taken and the names of the explorers who had penetrated the interior, recasting the topography as one of European authority.2 Under the presidency of Roderick Murchison, the newly founded Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London set upon an exploratory programme that sought to promote its explorers as celebrated public figures and worked to persuade the government of the political importance of scientific exploration. The determination of the interior geography of central Africa became the focus of this scientific campaign, as it captured and reflected wider national, geographic and commercial interests. Exploration was no longer merely a ‘knowledge-​producing’ practice, but it came to be an ideological and imperial enterprise that was defined by the imperative of movement into and through the field.3 Its histories are commonly associated with famed explorers such as Dr David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke, who travelled across Africa. However, the status and purpose of geography as an active science of empire was the focus of heated debates throughout the century. Despite being categorised by their stationary status, the ‘critical’ or ‘comparative’ geographer was also an important aspect of the Victorian culture and practice of exploration. These sedentary practitioners explored in their cabinet through textual collation and synthesis, without physically going to the places they wrote about. Whilst they [ 112 ]

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played a crucial role in the expansion of geographical knowledge, the development of methodological procedures and the promotion of exploration, their intertextual practices have been typically understood as leftovers from the early modern age, leaving their contributions to the construction of geographies during this period mostly effaced.4 The representation of these critical practitioners of science has been traditionally structured within historical accounts through a cultural discourse and physical grammar of the ‘still’, being placed within the bounded interior space of the ‘cabinet’. Their reputation as ‘geographer’ has been defined by a curious unmoving nature, which has led to them being referred to as ‘armchair geographers’; the inspiration for this ‘immobile’ category can be traced to missionary explorer David Livingstone’s caustic label: ‘those easy chair geographers’.5 Facilitated by a growing imperial infrastructure, the effect of increasing Western mobility on the discursive terrain of the newly emergent ‘geographical science’ was the imposition of a division between the enlightening work of the field explorer and the stasis of the stay-​at-​home man of science. Such representational practices were part of what Felix Driver styles a modern ‘culture of exploration’.6 The ‘contest’ between the mobile explorer leading the ‘active life’ and the ‘immobile’ geographer ‘languidly discoursing on theoretical and speculative geographies from a comfortable seat’ has become a great theme in modern literature on exploration, casting a long shadow in histories of geography and consigning the ‘easy chair’ geographer to a position of inaction and inferiority.7 Yet sitting behind this shadow, obscured by this rhetoric, are many bundles of movement and non-​movement that produced geographical knowledge, and this chapter seeks to bring them to light. Whilst ‘armchair travel’ has a long history within both scientific and literary realms, it has received relatively little critical attention in histories of science as both a trope and technic of mobility.8 The sustained historiographical focus on ‘exploration’ has seen the work of geography typically defined by travel and its efforts to facilitate large-​scale movements through the ‘field’. Where once Joseph Conrad heralded triumphantly that ‘geography finds its origin in action’, studies have begun to break down this adventurous action into the many specific motions, postures, places and peoples that made geographical science happen.9 Specifically, the recent recasting of exploration in histories of geography and histories of science militates against the romanticised narratives of the heroic and tragic lone explorer who set out to conquer harsh climates and natures.10 Taking its lead from these accounts and cross-​cutting them with academic scholarship on mobility, this chapter moves beyond clear-​ cut spatial distinctions [ 113 ]

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between ‘field’ and ‘easy chair’ to focus on the bodily comportment of the nineteenth-​century geographer, narrating a far more entangled and complex tale of movement and non-​movement than has previously been told. The contentious relationship between field and cabinet is not novel to historians of geography, yet in drawing on ‘mobility’ as an analytical concept, a unique perspective can be offered on the multiple histories, diverse geographies and material forms of ‘exploration as practice’. It is a view that is not only concerned with the large-​ scale movements of people, objects and information or their spatial boundaries, but also with everyday micro-​movements.11 This chapter draws upon recent studies which expand the discourse of mobility and engages more critically with notions of fixity, stasis and immobility in order to ‘re-​move’ stillness and present ‘new appreciations of mobile relations’.12 It is therefore critical to open up the multiple modalities of stillness beyond the relatively stationary infrastructures that drove and sustained global exploration in this period and to dismantle the static binary between the stilled site of ‘easy chair’ geography and the mobile space of ‘field’ exploration.13 In tracing the physical contours of these debates, this chapter is concerned with uncovering not just how and where nineteenth-​century geography was made but rather, more critically, how such actions were represented, received and experienced. Whilst these elements of mobility are not always easy to disentangle, in being aware of these different aspects of moving, this chapter seeks to illustrate how the body of the geographer became increasingly politicised and bound up with meanings of both action and stasis, and location and dislocation. In doing so, it expands ‘easy chair geography’ beyond a mere footnote or an interesting tale of ‘conflict’ in exploration and presents a critical examination of the many spatial and physical manifestations of ‘fieldwork’ in geography’s disciplinary history that contributed to its reputation as an imperial science.

The cabinet as a repository of movement The nature and organisation of science was significantly transformed in the early decades of the nineteenth century with the rise of ‘professional’ disciplines and the development of prescribed scientific methodologies, which scripted particular bodily movements and specific modes of engaging with the physical and human world, prizing direct observation and methods of instrumentation and precision. Yet, against the backdrop of an increasingly mobile ‘field’ science, a topology of stillness remained apparent. Indeed, what was held to be ‘credible’ scientific knowledge over this period ‘varied’, being constructed through a range of epistemic practices with different systems of mobility.14 [ 114 ]

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This was clear in the founding of the new Geographical Society of London in 1830, which had its origins in both literary scholarship and adventurous travel. Its aim to cultivate a modern geographical science and take a central role in promoting the ‘new age of exploration’ had broad-​based support, being born from the interests of both the Literary Gazette and the Raleigh Travellers’ Club, alongside subsuming the commercial expansionist interests of the African Association when they merged in 1831.15 At the Society’s inaugural meeting, Chairman Sir John Barrow outlined a particular politics of locomotion that would power its activities. He stated that the work of geography would not be limited to ‘actual observation and experiment’ in the field and he welcomed the ‘great benefits’ that could be derived from the sedentary practices of what was termed ‘speculative geography’. This was a form of geographical labour that was concerned not simply with collating and comparing evidence, but with cultivating critical suppositions.16 Whilst the description of such work as ‘speculation’ could be read as a form of marginalising textual practice as pure conjecture, such labour played a significant role in the process of constructing geographical knowledge. It marked a move from those ‘armchair swashbucklers’ and administrators of science, such as Sir Joseph Banks, who oversaw flows of information across space for both the Royal Society and the African Association in the preceding decades, to the ‘seated speculator’ who was called upon to excite curiosity and stimulate enquiry.17 One of the first voices to answer the call to incite exploratory activity was William Desborough Cooley. A geographical scholar and somewhat eccentric character, Cooley developed his literary reputation in travel and exploration during the 1820s, contributing articles to the Foreign Quarterly Review and Athenaeum and founding the Hakluyt Society in 1846. He was among the first fellows to be elected to the fledging Geographical Society and quickly positioned himself in its inner social circle, being unanimously elected to the Council in 1832, becoming vice-​president in 1835 and its acting secretary for a short period.18 This institutional platform enabled Cooley to cultivate his credibility as an authority on geography, and he used his positions of influence to promote his own subject of interest: African exploration. The first expedition to Africa sponsored by the RGS is an example of Cooley’s speculations being put into motion. From his reading of published travel accounts, naval survey reports and verbal exchanges with naval midshipman Lieutenant Rozier, Cooley promoted an expedition to Delagoa Bay in 1835, securing RGS funding and drafting its instructions.19 Initially, therefore, the RGS did not define the field ‘out there’ and the study ‘in here’ in opposition to one another, but each space was charged with critical purpose and held the [ 115 ]

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potential for movement. Yet, the role of stationary critical geographers like Cooley in driving and overseeing scientific exploration should not be overstated. With the Delagoa Bay expedition facing practical setbacks in the field and its leader, Captain James Edward Alexander, choosing not to follow Cooley’s instructions, the original expedition was abandoned in the field.20 In constructing its knowledge network, the RGS acted more as a site for ‘information exchange’ than as a ‘centre of calculation’, being formed and maintained through bundles of movement and flows of knowledge between the field and metropole, rather than directing exact control over them.21 Despite his desire to make ‘the chief physical features of that hitherto dark interior … shine forth with incontrovertible evidence’, Cooley never visited the continent.22 Rather, his journey involved transforming static objects of contemplation –​books, papers, maps –​ into modes of expanding geographical knowledge from within his cabinet in Bloomsbury, London. This had begun in the years prior to the Delagoa Bay expedition and continued until his death in 1883. He set off by laying the foundations of his knowledge of non-​European places and peoples, compiling a catalogue of 7,000 geographical works from the ancient world to contemporary exploration. Cooley saw this as vital for clearly identifying what information was available and highlighting specifically where it was deficient.23 Whilst this was regarded as useful for practical reasons of trade and communications, for Cooley, this was his own literary map to fix ‘the relative position of places’.24 He aimed to establish the geography of regions on a more rigorous and reliable basis through what he termed the ‘rectification of sources’.25 In establishing his methodical approach to collecting and reading multiple testimonies, Cooley went beyond forming a compendium of geography’s history and attempted to improve the scientific foundation of the nascent discipline. With his focus on the African interior, Cooley gathered as much information as he could from the five types of testimony available to him: ancient authorities; Arab travellers of the tenth and eleventh centuries; Portuguese travel accounts from after the voyage of Vasco de Gama in the late fifteenth century; indigenous information collected by travellers and merchants; and accounts by recent travellers.26 In approaching these, Cooley first examined the authors he deemed to be of ‘greatest value’, looking for internal consistencies in their work. This enabled him to positively identify ‘clear, natural, and consistent’ statements and mark them as correct within that text. When statements were ‘obscure, absurd, or contradictory’, Cooley would apply his method of ‘rectification’, which involved four principles of inquiry for determining credibility and, if correctly followed, placed [ 116 ]

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the scholar in a position to correct the errors in a textual source.27 This ‘rectified’ information could then be reconciled with more recently retrieved information to produce a systematic geographical description. It was the correction of such ‘unscientific’ materials that Cooley claimed made it possible to move them ‘from mere conjecture towards a rule of reason’.28 This was an opinion that was also held by other critical geographers of the time, such as James MacQueen, Charles Tilstone Beke and Alexander George Findlay, who similarly advocated for a comparative approach to textual and oral sources.29 The RGS positively reviewed Cooley’s approach as a mode of ‘strict scientific examination’ that offered ‘acuteness and sound judgement’, indicating the potential of his ‘method’ for navigating between the ‘facts’ of travel and the physical act itself.30 The summation of his approach came in 1845, when, citing a ‘harmony of authorities’, Cooley asserted an ‘objective’ view of what could be found in the East African interior and this was most notably a large lake: the ‘N’yassi’.31 Despite his map being ‘hopelessly wrong in most of its particulars’, Cooley’s control of his source material did provide evidence as to the existence of a ‘Great Lake’.32 Of course, this was not a ‘new’ discovery, as a hundred years before Jean-​Baptiste D’Anville and Guillaume Delisle had also found evidence for what is today Lake Malawi. Yet, his original contribution was in making the body of water extend in a northwesterly direction. Whilst he had ‘discovered’ the existence of Lake Tanganyika, Cooley would not even consider the possibility that there could be two separate waters. Cooley firmly positioned himself in opposition to the ‘immobile … geographical dinosaur’ who compiled and copied, and instead he viewed his role as a critical and corrective reader, who could explore without having to leave his chair.33 His principles of rectification therefore can be viewed as a process of decentring the previously stable subject of a travel account in order to track the recorded movements and reconstruct a new geography from the text’s captured mobility. Through the formal conventions of travel writing and the presentation of a narrative, the sense of mobility becomes spatialised and synchronised into an ordered account. Such narrative movement embodies a state of travel and translates into an overwhelming sense of simultaneous motion, whereby the reader’s reaction becomes an intersection of literal and metaphorical journeys.34 Texts recounting travels do not simply sit as repositories of memory, but are poised to become sites infused with movement; they do not just capture the act of travel, but also enable it to be followed and remobilised. In this way, Cooley differentiated himself from the idea of a stationary, outdated scholar by venturing beyond the remit of ‘speculative geography’: he did not simply present [ 117 ]

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guides to discovery, but ‘travelled’ through texts in an effort to make the discoveries himself.35 Cooley’s reading of the journal of Luso-​ Brazilian astronomer Dr Francisco de Lacerda e Almeida, who led an expedition into the African interior, illustrates how textual objects hold expressive agency and could be used not just as literary, but also as material conjurors of place. Lacerda was appointed to the Rios de Sena (a Portuguese colony on the Zambezi) in 1797 for the specific purpose of ‘fixing the geography of that region by astronomical observations’, and thereby establishing a trade route through the interior.36 He never completed his mission to reach his final destination of the capital of the Cazembe and his journals were delayed in their publication, which meant that Cooley was unable to draw on Lacerda’s accounts when preparing his ‘Geography of N’yassi’. Yet, following the release of parts of the journal, Cooley examined them to demonstrate how they related to the topography he ‘had imagined’.37 Originally proposing that the route in question went parallel to the shores of ‘N’yassi’ at a distance of about 50 miles, Cooley produced an itinerary map to visually examine and compare Lacerda’s ideas against his own, marking out two configurations of the route and direction between Tete and Cazembe on the same sheet (Figure  6.1). The first line, populated with Portuguese place names and landmarks, depicts Cooley’s fixing of locations, whilst the second line, drawn from Lacerda’s observations, takes a sharper northwesterly path. The materiality of the map attests that Cooley undertook a metaphorical journey across this space with Lacerda as his guide. This product of cabinet ‘textwork’ appears as layers of inks and pencil, with an undertext of rough workings-​out, smudges and erasures. These particular micro-​movements communicate how Cooley was intimately connected with the motions of Lacerda as he sought to understand and reconstruct his experience, whilst he physically remained in London. Such suggestions of postural sensation give credence to Benjamin Morgan’s assertion that ‘Victorians read books with their bodies’.38 From this comparative exploration of Lacerda’s text, Cooley admitted that his route had ‘fallen short of the truth by about 150 miles’. He claimed that he had been cautious in his own fixing of the positions where he did not have sufficient data, and this caused him to bring the route closer to a straight line. Cooley cleverly tried to consider the displacement in latitude as being ‘completely within the limits of errors’ and maintained that even ‘though I  have missed the exact points, you will, I trust, see sufficient proof in the general soundness of my reasoning in the fact that I have hit on the exact line’. Despite his rather weak justification, Cooley felt it would ‘dissipate all doubts’ as to the ‘reasonableness’ of his original conclusions.39 He used Lacerda’s [ 118 ]

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account to not only reaffirm his case in the face of questions raised from the account of Portuguese explorers Monteiro and Gamitto, who also travelled to the Cazembe kingdom in 1830–​31, but also as a means to justify the apparent success of his stationary methods, without needing to undertake an expedition himself. The result of this work was the emergence and apparent confirmation, in Cooley’s mind, of a clear configuration of the East African interior and the location and course of the great lakes therein. His geographical labours prompted RGS President Murchison to declare that Cooley had formed an ‘extensive acquaintance with everything relating to Southern Africa’ and that he was to be consulted by ‘the mass of geographers’ who were ‘entirely ignorant’.40 Evidently, despite not having firsthand experience of the continent, Cooley was recognised as having attained significant knowledge and particular skill from remobilising texts in his cabinet. Yet, it is in engaging with how these ideas were received by the wider scientific community that we are able to open up further and expose the contested relations between ‘cabinet’ and ‘field’.

‘Easy chair geography versus field geography’ In the course of advancing his theoretical topography as geographical fact, Cooley became notorious for his derisory and antagonistic approach towards the work of others, and was known as ‘the lynx-​ eyed detector of geographical frauds and fallacies’.41 The politics of this vision is significant, not just because Cooley would confidently assert that explorers had not seen what they attested to have seen, but because the body, its senses and movements, became a critical factor in assessing the credibility of various claims to knowledge within mid-​ nineteenth-​ century geographical debates. These disputes coalesced around the relationship between the sites of field and cabinet; or, as missionary explorer Livingstone put it provocatively, it was ‘Easy chair geography versus field geography’.42 In a letter to the editor of the Athenaeum in 1856 Livingstone responded to Cooley’s criticisms that he had made grave ‘geographical errors’ during his fifteen years spent in Africa as a medical missionary, in which time he crossed the continent from the west to the east coast.43 Whilst Livingstone had been in Africa, Cooley was in London rectifying sources and preparing his own geography of inner Africa, beginning in 1835 until he declared it was ‘laid open’ in 1852.44 Livingstone was no doubt aware of Cooley’s researches as they appeared in prominent scientific and literary publications, alongside his disparaging assessments of the accounts of travels that were being presented to the wider [ 119 ]

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6.1 (top)  W. D. Cooley, ‘Map of Dr Lacerda’s Route from Tete to Cazembe’, c. 1845

scientific community back in Britain. Whilst the details of this dispute are complex, Cooley essentially claimed that the vague and ‘obscure’ narration of Livingstone’s journey delivered to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science did not improve Britain’s knowledge of African geography, but rather left it in ‘deep darkness’.45 [ 120 ]

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6.1 (bottom)

The deprecatory tone of these criticisms was such that Murchison, who had presented the redacted version of Livingstone’s report at the meeting, stated that he never imagined that this ‘brief notice … would have elicited such comments as those which have necessarily arrested my attention’.46 Unsurprisingly, Livingstone’s response was not quite so diplomatic. [ 121 ]

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Livingstone firstly addressed Cooley’s contention that he had not relayed enough information about the ‘wholly novel part of the route’, that being the course of the Leeambye and Zambezi rivers, to ascertain if they were connected.47 He teased how Cooley remained dissatisfied that Livingstone had not ‘thrown a “flood of light” ’ on work that Cooley already claimed was conclusive and ‘surely needed not any glimmerings [Livingstone] could give’. It is clear that Livingstone believed Cooley had not only failed in his task, but that he also wanted ‘to enter a gentle protest against putting Easychair [sic] geography on a level with that of actual observation’. The direct juxtaposition of these two ‘geographies’ immediately sets up a combative spatial dialectic, which exposes the fragility of the geographical labour network and its epistemological foundations. This response was not simply a reaction to counter and correct the points posed by Cooley, but a total dismissal of his ability as a geographer. In almost every reference to Cooley’s 1852 publication, Livingstone underlined ‘laid open’ (Figure 6.2). Such a stress on this statement can be read as a sarcastic swipe at Cooley for his apparent audacity in making such a claim ‘without even pretending to have visited the scenes which the title seems to promise’.48 This grew as a point of contention amongst the geographical community, with Cooley repeatedly being ridiculed by explorers for the confidence he held in his assertions despite their physical exertions in the field contradicting his conjectures from the cabinet. These were physical and spatial distinctions that went beyond simply sedentary versus active geography, and encompassed wider debates concerning evidentiary value, knowledge and power. The use of ‘chair’ was a way of displaying hierarchy and, in this context, signified a place of privilege, where the individual passed judgement and asserted the validity of particular geographical knowledge claims over others. It was a disdain shared by many explorers, with Nile explorer John Hanning Speke referring scornfully to those ‘geographers … who sit in carpet slippers, and criticise those who labour in the field’.49 A similar grievance had been voiced thirty-​ five years earlier by John Barrow following the 1821 publication of ‘armchair geographer’ James MacQueen’s A Geographical and Commercial View of Africa.50 Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty and a central figure in the co-​ordination and promotion of British exploration in the Arctic and Africa, dismissed MacQueen’s comparative approach as ‘no less curious than convenient system of its rivers, which Mr M’Queen [sic] has ingeniously laid down … from materials collected in his closet’.51 The semantic shift here from ‘cabinet’ to ‘closet’ is significant as it signals the politicisation of the body and the space it inhabited. [ 122 ]

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6.2  Letter from David Livingstone to the editor of the Athenaeum, 25 November 1856

Notably, the closet was ‘the feminine counterpart’ of the ‘masculine library or study … a place of contemplative isolation, a place for activities of the mind’.52 Barrow’s use of the term ‘closet’ was therefore particularly disparaging as it evoked ‘meanings of effeminacy, introspection, safety, and textuality’.53 These characteristics stood in direct opposition to what Barrow held, at that time, as the essence of geographical discovery, and it was a specific form of ‘field geography’ that

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‘require[d]‌not only personal presence and actual and minute observation, but for the most part great patience and perseverance, much bodily fatigue and danger, and but too frequently loss of health and life itself’.54 These highly charged exchanges highlight the epistemological issues lying at the core of making geography, as the body of the geographer became increasingly politicised. Through physical stoicism and the primacy of senses, the explorer was cast as a master of the physical environment and of ‘the field’. The body of the sedentary geographer was also drawn into these debates and there was a discursive shift from geography formed in the ‘closet’, to the geographer confined to an ‘easy chair’. These examples present a ‘body’ of knowledge that was defined by its mobility, or indeed immobility. This went beyond the ‘closet culture’ habits of privacy and solitude for a feminised reader, as the ‘easy chair’ implied something far more sinister; it was a malady. From Livingstone’s representation, ‘easy chair geography’ was both a disease and a serious problem that was purportedly weakening the emergence of geography as a strong, masculine and imperial science.55 The meaning of ‘ease’ in ‘easy chair’ originally denoted the absence of physical stress, rather than the direct connotation of ‘comfort’.56 From this definition, the material reality of the ‘easy chair’ implied that geographers working in the cabinet with texts were inactive and impotent. There are elements within Livingstone’s letter that suggest that those ‘easy chair’ geographers should be characterised as physically and, at times, psychologically abnormal. Whilst Livingstone makes reference to the speculative minds of these sedentary scholars, he also suggests that they were disorderly fantasists, remarking that ‘a geographer on an easy chair with a bowl of punch before him may see greater marvels than any traveller in the field’.57 The pathologised figure of the ‘sickly scholar’ also emerged in wider literary and scientific culture at this time. In particular, the Victorian novel came to poetically cast the ‘scholar of antiquity’ as having ‘semicolons and parentheses in his blood’. With the novel being promoted as the dominant literary form, it was positioned as opposite to and in competition with classical genres, such as the epic. Such literary motives led certain novelists to castrate or dehumanise their ‘scholar’ characters as a means of symbolically renouncing ancient genres and embracing modern consciousness.58 The presentation of the sedentary sickly figure was drawn from an established practice of painting satirical portraits of scholars troubled with ‘all such diseases as come by over-​much sitting’, such as a sullen complexion, pains and even madness.59 The sense that the non-​moving body reflected deformities of mind and emotion was a marker that they were unfit to belong to the ‘normal’ world. Livingstone drew a similarly manic [ 124 ]

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image of Cooley exhibiting symptoms of ‘cacoethes scribendi’, which means an uncontrollable urge to write, as an accusation that Cooley was compulsive in his tasks.60 Contemporaries also observed that he suffered ‘peculiarities of temperament’ and Cooley himself admitted that the ‘allurement of discovery’ easily became a chronic condition of obsession.61 Livingstone’s sardonic references to ‘our comfortable friends’ was a charge that they lacked the manly qualities of field explorers and inhabited the safe space of comfortable domesticity.62 Whilst the easy chair was designed specifically for the immobile body, the chair was also part of the emergent modern sensibility of comfort. The implied snugness within a domestic setting contrasted with the danger, disease and violence encountered in the field. In turn, these contrasting environments were inhabited by contrasting masculine identities. This was a period when the notion of ‘manliness’ was coming to replace the figure of the ‘polite gentleman’.63 By noting how Cooley lacked the embodied experience of travel, Livingstone asserted that Cooley did not display any of the active virtues of ‘manliness’, such as courage, endurance and personal integrity. When commenting about his approach to work, Cooley suggested that he was anti-​risk, both physically and mentally, with the tenets of ‘reserve and circumspection’ guiding his approach to settling geographical questions.64 Whilst it is not known whether Cooley ever saw Livingstone’s 1856 letter as it went unpublished, the debate it raised places into relief the entangled relations between the sites of the field and the cabinet. The complexity of this argument is compounded further when consideration is given to how similar gestures of comfort, repose and privacy extended into ways of being in the field.

From motion to repose: unfolding David Livingstone’s ‘easy chair’ Livingstone’s own account of travel was one of resolute physicality, noting how ‘the mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is very great … when on lands of a couple of thousand feet elevation, brisk exercise gives health, circulates blood, and the mind works well’.65 In observing how he proceeded in the field, Livingstone stripped his movements down to the pure physical act of walking. As a technology of travel, his physical frame became integral to his credibility as an explorer. Unlike other scientific discoveries, travel reports were not immediately demonstrative, and an explorer’s remote observations had to be proved credible in order to be trusted. Whilst this trust was often bound to an individual’s ‘epistemic virtue’, [ 125 ]

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namely that they were of proven good character and moral standing, exploration was also ‘a kind of ritual in manly virtue’.66 Livingstone became a walking ‘body of evidence’, physically showcasing what he had acquired and the act of acquiring.67 His figure was often represented in moments of active encounter, typically emerging as a ‘heroic figure’ or as an ‘exemplar of civilization, order, and culture’.68 The most famous of these came from his Missionary Travels, in which Livingstone recounted the lion attack that left him with a significant elbow fracture. This episode would serve as a lasting physical testament to his image as an explorer-​hero in the eyes of the public, and one that spoke of his life in ‘perpetual motion’ to the metropolitan scientific community.69 However, the material remnants of Livingstone’s expeditions attest to a more complex mobility that disrupts his own clear distinction between the activities of the ‘field’ and the inertia of the ‘easy chair’. As Felix Driver has noted, a tension existed between his representation as a (mis)adventurer, imperial hero and exacting scientist, and this is apparent not just in how his body was discursively positioned in the field, but through its full range of physical movements and postures.70 Whilst Livingstone’s travels were driven by fortuitous energy, they were also punctuated by moments of stillness. Livingstone was well known for his aversion to deskbound work and often declared that he found travelling easier than reading and writing. Yet, Henry Morton Stanley sketched a sedentary moment, observing that Livingstone exhibited ‘great care’ of movement.71 With this account, Stanley captured a very different image of Livingstone and he used the apparent novelty of this scene to ‘correct the gentleman who informed me that Livingstone takes no notes or observations’ by stating that he was an industrious and diligent writer, who composed ‘sheet after sheet, column after column, carefully written, of figures alone’ (Figure 6.3).72 Whilst keeping a journal was a practice that had long been habitual among navigators and explorers, it became an explicit requirement for major expeditions. The discipline of regular writing in the field was closely connected with expectations of observational rigour and bodily discipline.73 Livingstone’s written notes ‘were often flecked with blood or stained by drops of sweat’, reflecting the bodily trials he faced.74 One particular item is his ‘Manyema Field Diary’ (1870–​ 71) from his final African expedition (1866–​73), which Livingstone creatively crafted from whatever paper he had at hand when he ran out of pocket-​ books.75 The formation of this ‘scrapbook’ contrasts with the more convenient state of being at home, where paper and ink were not in short supply. This fragile manuscript is perhaps the closest embodiment of the circumstances under which Livingstone travelled, serving [ 126 ]

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6.3  ‘Dr Livingstone at Work on his Journal’, from Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 1872

as a material testament to geographical knowledge being captured in a state of continual transition, transformation and transference; even when performed in moments of stillness. Another surviving object that tells a tale of such bodily transitions through its materiality is Livingstone’s travel chair (Figure 6.4). This mahogany Victorian folding chair with brass fittings and a pull-​out reading rest was used by Livingstone on his Zambesi expedition (1858–​ 64). It was loosely based on the portable Douro chair and was a rather inventive piece of travel equipment for the time. This ‘camp chair-​bed’ would have enabled a full range of motion to suit the needs of the field traveller, with the ability to recline due to the deck-​chair-​like prop that was hinged to securely fix it in place and the folding mechanism which allowed for collapsibility and portability.76 The chair served to mediate its occupant’s experience of space, as the action of unfolding the chair signalled a transition from active explorer to sedentary observer, fixing Livingstone in a physical mode of study. Whilst not a mobile study in the same way as larger nineteenth-​ century collecting wagons, Livingstone’s chair provided what could be termed ‘an improvised study’; a transitory, portable and compact workplace that could be unfolded and positioned wherever Livingstone desired, without being [ 127 ]

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6.4  Chair used by Dr Livingstone during his expedition to Lake Nyasa, 1858–​64

bounded to any interior space. Fellow explorer Sir Charles Fellows viewed the chair as a facilitating instrument that enabled moments of objective sight in a private space, with opportunities for bodily ease. Fellows recorded that he occasionally had to represent himself ‘as an invalid, in order to get time for writing’ and mental and physical ‘repose’.77 Significantly, Livingstone’s chair offered this sense of respite. With cushioning and a reclining position for relaxed reflection, it held the body in place to view up and out, not down, hunched over a desk. Whilst this cannot be classified as an ‘easy chair’, it worked to facilitate a form of what could be termed ‘at-​ease observation’. The posturing allowed Livingstone to be still, without losing any of the multi-​sensory intimacy of being in the physical reality he was trying to capture. The chair also speaks to a wider geography of ease by demonstrating how this ‘culture of comfort’ extended into the field. The growing demand for a new material culture fitted for travel created what has been referred to as Britain’s ‘portable empire’. High-​ranking British [ 128 ]

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officers during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to re-​create the same standard of living whilst out on military campaigns in Africa or India that they experienced at home. ‘Campaign’ furniture was designed to support this itinerant lifestyle, retaining the style of the period and a body posture that was culturally dictated by metropolitan norms.78 The arrival of Western-​style furniture into the field was therefore not just a symbol of imperial strength, but served as a prominent marker of cultural difference. As Major Henry Barkley Henderson declared:  ‘a Chair is a visible sign of our civilisation’.79 By sitting in his chair, Livingstone demarcated himself as an outside observer, separate from the geographical and social scenes he surveyed. The purpose of campaign furniture was portability. A travelling chair was to be ‘light’ and ‘of a very firm and simple construction’, yet, in many cases, mobility was much less a concern than sustaining a Western hierarchy of power.80 Despite having a reputation as an explorer who travelled lightly, Livingstone’s chair, even folded down, was extremely heavy. Its transportation in the field attests to the vital role played by porters and local intermediaries, showing Livingstone’s movements to have been undertaken as a collective and collaborative exercise. These actions open up further questions regarding the wider network of imperial mobility; namely, the logistics of movement out in the field and the involvement, structure and work of a larger expeditionary party physically exerting themselves, alongside Livingstone, to carry such a cumbersome piece of equipment. Whilst the Livingstone legacy is kept alive through many ‘iconic images’ that have been constructed to fit and bolster a range of imperialisms as political developments demanded  –​Livingstone as ‘muscular Christian’, as a ‘paradigm of fortitude’ and as ‘liberator’ –​this chair has not been drawn into any of these numerous representations.81 The design disrupts the romanticised image of Livingstone as the heroic and suffering traveller. This was explicitly voiced when the chair was returned to Britain in 1903, after Livingstone had given it and one belonging to his wife Mary as a ‘departing gift’ to Colonel Galdino Jose Nunes in Quelimane. The Commissioner in British Central Africa, Alfred Sharpe, wrote to RGS Secretary John Scott Keltie that whilst it was an authentic item, ‘it has not by any means the appearance of such a chair one would expect Dr Livingstone to have with him on his travels … I would suggest that if you desire to keep it, you should cut off all these upholsterings and trimmings.’82 These comfortable flourishes were obviously felt to signify that in his moments of repose, Livingstone inhabited a bodily condition too close to his ‘comfortable friends’ in their ‘easy chairs’. However, Keltie did not take this advice and the chair exists today with these trimmings intact. In unfolding [ 129 ]

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it here, the chair troubles the notion of the exploring body as being in ‘perpetual motion’, demonstrating that it did, in fact, pause for periods of time. As Livingstone travelled, this chair moved with him, it did not simply remain as an object of stationary reflection. With its recline mechanism broken, the fabric ripped, faded and discoloured, and the desk no longer being secure, the chair, like its owner, displays the marked body of a life in motion.

Conclusion As the pace of African exploration accelerated over the course of the nineteenth century, the explorer emerged in the popular imagination as the ‘foot-​soldier of geography’s empire’, whose physical efforts were celebrated and drawn on as evidence of their authority and credibility to make knowledge claims.83 Yet, whilst this heroic image continues to circulate, sustained attention has been paid to adding critical depth to this cultural representation and in complicating the relationship between geographical knowledge, scientific practice, exploration and empire. It is a history that has a far more elaborate spatiality than one of distance and proximity, entailing physical movements that extended beyond there being boots on the ground. With most of these accounts continuing to privilege mobile subjectivity, the present chapter demonstrates that the idealisation of movement is dependent on the slowing down or ‘stilling’ of others: the progress of the moving explorer against the apparent impotence of the sedentary figure. In tracking these discourses and practices of mobility, a much more intricate understanding of the newly emerging ‘geographer’ in the nineteenth century can be recovered. The ‘field’ as a site of study was produced and reproduced through both material and cultural practices and a range of physical postures that highlight the tensions and contradictions that existed between the ‘mobile’ and ‘immobile’ body. The spatial referents of ‘chair’, ‘cabinet’ and ‘closet’ are counterpoised against knowledge ‘actively’ gathered in the field, consigning these places of textual synthesis to sites of inaction, inferiority and immobility. In many ways, the ‘chair’ has been employed as a catch-​all term to capture a wide array of different forms of study for those that did not venture ‘out’ into the field. Yet, it was an anachronism within the context of mid-​nineteenth-​century geography, as sedentary labours were largely termed ‘critical’ or ‘speculative geography’ within contemporary discussions. On the occasions when it was used, it formed part of a critical discourse to discredit or antagonise. This stilled man of science therefore cannot simply be characterised by an absence of active travel or by their critical opinion [ 130 ]

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of others, and we should be attentive to the differing speed, form and geography of their approach to scientific labour and geographical discovery. From this evidence, the cabinet emerges not as a site of non-​ movement, but as a crucial space in which knowledge was formulated and transformed. Yet, the critical purpose of this chapter was to move beyond the preoccupation with these spatial boundaries in order to focus on the bodily comportment and movements of geographers within these spaces. By animating the geographer’s body and unsettling the notion that the fixed and static critical geographers such as Cooley only ‘thought’ and active and mobile explorers like Livingstone only ‘did’, we can begin to complicate the entrenched images of both masculinity and imperial encounter, and mobility and scientific exploration. Whilst the ‘chair’ has formed the focus for identifying the sedentary practitioner within the historiography of this period, this should neither be viewed as a discrete categorisation nor as a physical restriction. Rather, it has been shown to be productive, with its own relations and politics of movement. Historical understanding of geographical science must recognise that a focus on the dialectic of stasis and movement neglects other registers and modalities of movement that ‘being still’ inhabits. The process of exploration is not necessarily reducible to a static binary of mobile/​immobile practice. By refusing to simply consign past geographical authors to a shelf labelled ‘palaeo-​ geography’, we not only recover a richer history of geographical practice, but can also complicate notions of distance from and proximity to metropolitan and colonial places in spatial imaginings of the network of imperial knowledge production.84

Notes 1 J. Conrad, ‘Geography and some explorers’, in H. Ray Stevens and J. H. Stape (eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad: Last Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–​17, at p. 3. 2 For example, see W. W. Reade, ‘A map of African literature’, in W. W. Reade, The African Sketchbook, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1873), vol. 2, n.p. On the projection of British imperial power in Africa, see J. McAleer, Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2010). 3 D. Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces:  Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 1. 4 R. J. Mayhew, ‘The effacement of early modern geography (c. 1600–​1800): a historiographical essay’, Progress in Human Geography, 25:3 (2001), 383–​401. 5 Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London (hereafter RGS-​ IBG), DL/​ 2/​ 12, D. Livingstone, ‘Letter to the editor of the “Athenaeum” discussing “easy chair versus field geography” ’, 25 November 1856. 6 F. Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 8–​10.

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Empire and mobility 7 F. Driver, ‘The active life: the explorer as biographical subject’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), online edn, January 2016, www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​theme/​94053, accessed March 2016. 8 B. Stiegler, A History of Armchair Travel:  Travelling in Place, trans. P. Filkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 9 Conrad, ‘Geography and some explorers’, p. 3. 10 D. Kennedy (ed.), Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 11 On the relations between field and cabinet in science, see D. Outram, ‘New spaces in natural history’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 249–​65. On mobility, see T. Cresswell, On the Move:  Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006). 12 D. Bissell and G. Fuller (eds), Stillness in a Mobile World (London:  Routledge, 2011), p. 4. 13 J. Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). On infrastructures of exploration, see R. A. Stafford, ‘Scientific exploration and empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire:  The Nineteenth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 222–​38. 14 C. W. J. Withers and D. N. Livingstone, ‘Thinking geographically about nineteenth-​ century science’, in D. N. Livingstone and C. W.  J. Withers (eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-​Century Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 1–​19, at p. 14. 15 Driver, Geography Militant, p. 24. 16 ‘Prospectus of the Royal Geographical Society’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 1 (1831), vii–​xii, at p. xi. 17 P. J. Stern, ‘ “Rescuing the age from the charge of ignorance”: gentility, knowledge, and the exploration of Africa in the late eighteenth century’, in K. Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History:  Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Late Empire, 1660–​1849 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 115–​35. See also, N. Cox, ‘Armchair Geography: Speculation, Synthesis and the Culture of British Exploration, c. 1830–​c. 1870’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2016). 18 For biographical treatment of Cooley, see R. C. Bridges, ‘W. D. Cooley, the RGS and African geography in the nineteenth century’, Geographical Journal, 142 (1976), 27–​47; 274–​86. 19 W. D. Cooley, ‘A memoir on the civilization of the tribes inhabiting the highlands near Dalagôa Bay’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 3 (1833), 310–​24, at p. 311. 20 RGS-​IBG, JMS/​2/​5 (a–​g), ‘Notes on the intended expedition to Delagoa Bay’, 1834. 21 Driver, Geography Militant, p.  37. For the concept of ‘centre of calculation’, see B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 22 W. D. Cooley, Inner Africa Laid Open in an Attempt to Trace the Chief Lines of Communication Across that Continent South of the Equator, with the Routes to the Muropue and the Cazembe, Moenemoezi and Lake Nyassa; the Journeys of the Rev. Dr Krapf and the Rev. J. Rebmann on the Eastern Coast; and the Discoveries of Messrs. Oswell and Livingstone in the Heart of the Continent (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852), p. 1. 23 Roy C. Bridges, ‘William Desborough Cooley (1795–​1883)’, in Charles W. J. Withers and Hayden Lorimer (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 27 (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2008), pp. 43–​62, at p. 49. 24 W. D. Cooley, The History of Maritime and Inland Discovery, 3 vols (London: Printed for Longman Rees, Orme Brown and Green, John Taylor, 1830–​31), vol. 3, p. 2. 25 W. D. Cooley, The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained: Or, an Inquiry into the Early History and Geography of Central Africa of Central Africa (London: J. Arrowsmith, 1841), preface.

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‘Easy chair geography’ 26 These sources are discussed in detail elsewhere, see L.  Dritsas, ‘Expeditionary science: conflicts of method in mid-​ nineteenth-​ century geographical discovery’, in Livingstone and Withers (eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-​ Century Science, pp. 255–​78. 27 These principles are outlined in Cooley, Negroland of the Arabs, pp. ix–​x. 28 Ibid., p. x. 29 For examples of these methods, see J. MacQueen, ‘Construction of the map’, in The Journals of C. W. Isenberg and J. L. Krapf. Detailing Their Proceedings in the Kingdom of Shoa and Journeys in Other Parts of Abyssinia in the Years 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1842 (London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1843), pp. 1–​95; C. T. Beke, ‘On the Nile and its tributaries’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 17 (1847), 1–​84; A. G. Findlay, ‘On Dr Livingstone’s last journey, and the probable ultimate sources of the Nile’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 37 (1867), 193–​212. 30 ‘Review: The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained; Or, an Inquiry into the Early History and Geography of Central Africa. By William Desborough Cooley’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 12 (1842), 120–​5, at pp. 121, 125. 31 W. D. Cooley, ‘The geography of N’yassi, or the great lake of Southern Africa, investigated; with an account of the overland route from the Quanza in Angola to the Zambézi in the government of Mozambique’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 15 (1845), 185–​235, at p. 235. 32 Bridges, ‘W. D. Cooley, the RGS and African geography’, p. 35. 33 A. Downes, ‘The bibliographic dinosaurs of Georgian geography (1714–​ 1830)’, Geographical Journal, 137:3 (1971), 379–​86, at p. 386. 34 J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (eds), Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (London: Routledge, 2008). 35 ‘Prospectus of the Royal Geographical Society’, p. xi. 36 [W. D. Cooley], ‘Art. III –​A Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia, Performed in His Majesty’s Ships Leven and Barracouta, from 1822, to 1825, Under the Command of Capt. W. F. W. Owen, R. N. By Capt. Thomas Boteler R. N.’, Edinburgh Review, 61 (1835), 342–​64, at p. 349. 37 W. D. Cooley, ‘Further explanations in reference to the geography of N’yassi’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 16 (1846), 138–​43, at p. 140. 38 B. Morgan, ‘Critical empathy:  Vernon Lee’s aesthetics and the origins of close reading’, Victorian Studies, 55:1 (2012), 31–​55, at p. 31. 39 Cooley, ‘Further explanations’, pp. 139–​43. 40 R. I. Murchison, ‘Address to the Royal Geographical Society of London’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 14 (1844), xiv–​cxxviii, at p. cxix. 41 R. F. Burton, ‘The lake regions of Central Equatorial Africa, with notices of the Lunar Mountains and the sources of the White Nile; being the results of an expedition undertaken under the patronage of Her Majesty’s Government and the Royal Geographical Society of London, in the years 1857–​ 1859’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 29 (1859), 1–​454, at p. 3. 42 RGS-​IBG, DL/​2/​12, Livingstone, ‘Letter to the editor of the “Athenaeum” ’. 43 W. D. Cooley, ‘Dr Livingston’s [sic] remarkable journey’, Athenaeum, no. 1507 (13 September 1856), 1141–​3, at p. 1143. 44 Cooley, Inner Africa Laid Open. 45 Ibid., pp.  1141–​2. The paper read was D. Livingstone, ‘Geography and Ethnology Section: Rev. Dr D. Livingston’s [sic] return journey across Southern Africa [read by R. I. Murchison]’, Report of the Twenty-​Sixth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Cheltenham in August 1856 (London:  John Murray, 1856), pp. 113–​14. 46 R. I. Murchison, ‘Dr Livingston’s [sic] letters from South Africa’, Athenaeum, no. 1509 (27 September 1856), p. 1189. 47 Cooley, ‘Livingston’s remarkable journey’, p. 1142. 48 RGS-​IBG, DL/​2/​12, Livingstone, ‘Letter to the editor of the “Athenaeum” ’. 49 National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), MS 4185, fos. 282–​3, ‘Letter from Speke to Blackwood’, n.d. [c. 1863].

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Empire and mobility 50 This episode is examined in D. Lambert, Mastering the Niger:  James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 123–​9. 51 [J. Barrow], ‘Review of A Geographical and Commercial View of Northern Central Africa’, Quarterly Review, 26 (1821), 55–​6. 52 E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-​Century England:  Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 134–​5. 53 Lambert, Mastering the Niger, p. 126. 54 [J. Barrow], ‘Recent discoveries in Africa, made in the years 1823 and 1824, by Major Denham, Captain Clapperton, R.N. and the Late Dr Oudney, extending across the Great Desert to the tenth degree of Northern Latitude, and from Kouka in Bornous to Sackatoo, the Capital of the Soudan Empire’, Quarterly Review, 33 (1826), 543–​4. 55 On the connection between geography, masculinity and imperial science, see R. Philips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997). 56 John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp.  145–​6. 57 RGS-​IBG, DL/​2/​12, Livingstone, ‘Letter to the editor of the “Athenaeum” ’. 58 E. Hale, ‘Sickly scholars and healthy novels: the classical scholar in Victorian fiction’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17:2 (2010), 219–​43, at p. 219. 59 R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1 (London, 1806 [first published 1671]), p. 201. 60 RGS-​IBG, DL/​2/​12, Livingstone, ‘Letter to the editor of the “Athenaeum” ’. 61 ‘Obituary:  William Desborough Cooley’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, 5 (1883), 232–​3, at p. 233; W. D. Cooley, Geometrical Propositions Demonstrated: or, a supplement to Euclid, being a key to the exercises appended to Euclid’s Elements (London: Whittaker and Co., 1840), p. 6. 62 RGS-​IBG, DL/​2/​12, Livingstone, ‘Letter to the editor of the “Athenaeum” ’. 63 J. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain:  Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005). 64 Cooley, Negroland of the Arabs, p. xii. 65 H. Waller (ed.), The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa from 1865 to his Death. Continued by a Narrative of his Last Moments and Sufferings, Obtained from his Faithful Servants, Chuman and Susi, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1874), vol. 1, p. 13. 66 S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-​Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 201–​2; M. Heffernan, ‘ “A dream as frail as those of ancient time”: the in-​credible geographies of Timbuctoo’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19:2 (2001), 203–​25, at p. 219. 67 J. D. Livingstone, ‘A “body” of evidence:  the posthumous presentation of David Livingstone’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40:1 (2012), 1–​24, at p. 1. 68 H. Waller, ‘The universities’ mission to Central Africa’, Quarterly Review, 168 (1889), 229–​48, at pp. 229–​30; J. D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 77. 69 D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London:  John Murray, 1857), p. 13; Livingstone, ‘A “body” of evidence’, p. 20. 70 Driver, Geography Militant. 71 H. M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa, Including an Account of Four Months’ Residence with Dr Livingstone (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1872), p. 563. 72 Ibid., p. 430. 73 On explorers’ notebooks, see M. Bourguet, ‘A portable world:  the notebooks of European travellers (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)’, Intellectual History Review, 20:3 (2010), 377–​400. 74 M. Dugard, Into Africa:  The Retelling of the Stanley–​Livingstone Story (London: Bantam, 2003), p. 17; Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’, p. 126.

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‘Easy chair geography’ 75 The folia that make up the Manyema Diary (1870–​71) are variously held by the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, Scotland; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Rhodes House Library, Oxford. These previously illegible documents form part of the ‘The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project’: http://​livingstone.library.ucla.edu. 76 RGS-​IBG, CB/​7/​77, ‘Formal letter of donation to RGS from Henrique Cesar da Costa’, 11 January 1903. 77 C. Fellows, A Journal Written during an Excursion in Asia Minor (London:  John Murray, 1839), pp. 63; 158; NLS, MS 40395, ‘Letter from Charles Fellows to John Murray’, 5 June 1840. 78 N. A. Brewer, British Campaign Furniture, Elegance under Canvas, 1790–​ 1914 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). 79 H. B. Henderson, The Bengalee:  Or, Sketches of Society and Manners in the East (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1829), p. 329. 80 ‘No. V FOLDING CHAIR’, Transactions of the Society, Instituted at London, for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, 43 (1824), 99–​100, at p. 99. 81 J. M. Mackenzie, ‘The iconography of the exemplary life:  the case of David Livingstone’, in Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 84–​104, at p. 102. For examples, see Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’ and F. Driver, ‘Old hat, I presume? The history of a fetish’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996), 230–​4. 82 RGS-​IBG, CB/​7/​77, ‘Letter from Alfred Sharpe to John S. Keltie re. chair belonging to Livingstone’, 14 January 1903. 83 Driver, Geography Militant, p. 3. 84 R. F. Burton, ‘Captain Burton and Mr Cooley’, November 1874, in C. R. Markham (ed.), Ocean Highways: The Geographical Record, vol. 1 (London: Trubner and Co., 1874), pp. 432–​4, at p. 432.

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CHA P T E R SEVEN

Consorting with ‘others’: vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900 Catharine Coleborne Historically, vagrancy was defined by the problem of those unwelcome, mobile transients who ‘stopped’ in settled places. In the early modern worlds of England and parts of Europe, localities were places symbolically bounded and fixed by relations of power, kin and family networks, as well as tradition and memory.1 The perceived threat of the free movement of the mobile people who moved between these localities as mendicants, pedlars or healers signalled a fear of social change and the dissolution of social borders. This was evidenced by laws regulating vagrancy, and through the many categories becoming visible to lawmakers by the eighteenth century.2 Such movement seemingly threw accepted systems and structures of local power into question. It was their motility, the potential for vagrants to move across boundaries –​social, spatial, legal –​that signalled their dangerousness.3 It is a paradox that vagrants were most feared for their out-​of-​place identities, because they were prosecuted in places where they stopped.4 When understood through the ‘mobilities turn’, as described by sociologists and geographers, vagrants become symbolic of the production of social relations, and also represent the impact of social distancing; in addition, they exemplify the fluidity inherent to cultural practices of nomadism. Their experiences offer us a glimpse of the role of liminality in defining mobility.5 As Tim Cresswell puts it, ‘mobility seems to have a furtive and transgressive character to it’, much like the historical figure of the vagrant.6 The ‘politics of mobility’ in the imperial past offers historical scholars a new lens through which to view vagrancy in colonial settings, especially since the laws of empire were shaped and influenced by both imperial practices and ideas.7 Despite the fact that it was the movement of white European peoples that was a defining feature of the colonial period –​waves of mass migration from the old world to the new –​this motility was also regulated and policed by lawmakers and institutional [ 136 ]

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authorities, and constituted through and by gender, class and ethnicity. Coerced by the police to ‘move on’, white vagrants were among those in the settler world whose mobility and freedom to stop was not celebrated. The relative freedoms of movement possessed by new settlers and vagrants seemed different, in part because the popular view was that ‘settlers’ looked to find homes, and aimed to contribute to collective worlds and communities in formation. By contrast, the vagrant was stopping and starting, seeking a more mobile identity, either by accident or by design. In this pattern of movement, the vagrant came to represent a threat to nascent settler politics. Transience was therefore perceived as undesirable mobility. As this chapter shows, the vast majority of those prosecuted for vagrancy in New Zealand were poor white Europeans. Their status in the new colony, with its priority the development of white, middle-​ class ideals for social cohesion, was at best precarious. A  process of making distinctions between vagrants and the deserving poor had come to shape the colonial world of New Zealand and Victoria, Australia and other colonies by the 1870s.8 In a world without a Poor Law, and an acute rejection of pauperism, the array of indoor and outdoor welfare relief was patterned by immigrants’ homes, homes for the aged poor, Christian missions, benevolent societies and asylums and social institutions such as hospitals for the insane.9 Many of those people who became inhabitants and inmates of these institutions cycled through their doors and wards and out again, and were known to the legal and welfare authorities; yet evidence suggests that their lives were also difficult to monitor, despite a wealth of colonial record keeping.10 The colonial population was growing, and during the gold rush era of the 1850s–​70s across Victoria and New Zealand included men from many different countries, including single Chinese men who came as miners. Similarly, the forcible displacement of Indigenous peoples created social tension and dissent, with episodes of fringe-​dwelling and undesirable sexual and cultural fraternisation. It followed, then, given the colonial-​world context, that poor whites who occupied transgressive in-​between spaces, and who moved more freely in colonial towns and cities than their more privileged middle-​class counterparts, would take on the negative identity of the ‘nomad’ once reserved for non-​ whites in the colonial world. Imperial ideas about racial difference created the conditions for colonialism. Differentiating peoples by race, the creation of social categories, and the marking out of the ‘impoverished white settlers’, had become a critical colonial project by the early decades of the twentieth century.11 Yet long before the nineteenth century, the poor, dangerous classes of Europe had symbolised the fear of the racialised [ 137 ]

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‘others’, the non-​whites, as expressed by white elites in the empire at large.12 We can see the production of discursive connections between these ideas in many places. One example demonstrates the maturity of these ideas for the imperial world. In London in 1911, the Social Welfare Association published a report from the special committee of representatives of public authorities and voluntary agencies.13 A conference was held to mark the occasion of the report’s findings, which turned on the necessity of a distinction between the ‘homeless poor’ who sought shelter, and those who were truly ‘vagrant’. There was some discussion of the possibility of a central register of the homeless poor, and of a better classification of different applicants for assistance. The report examined the populations of casual wards, licensed and unlicensed lodging houses, free shelters, homeless in the streets, people who paid for shelter per night and then ‘habitual loafers’, who were distinguished from the unemployed, homeless women and children, homeless and destitute workmen and other ‘deserving’ types.14 This report echoed the many reports of similar institutions and inquiries across the imperial world. Images of the men and women who became the inhabitants of the immigrants’ homes in Victoria, Australia, or the Costley Home for the Aged Poor in Auckland, illustrate the need for social assistance as a result of imperial mobility between the 1870s and 1890s, when a deep economic depression shaped the lives of colonial populations in these places.15 The central objective of this chapter is to examine a specific aspect of the legal regulation of mobility in nineteenth-​century New Zealand vagrants: the consorting clause. The concept of consorting has a longer history in law. Andrew McLeod writes about the very old concept of ‘conditioning criminal liability on the company a person keeps’ in his account of consorting laws as these developed in the Australian and New Zealand colonies.16 Consorting –​meaning being in the company of those who were potentially criminally idle  –​was defined in the imperial world against Poor Law measures, and was also part of repressive legislation from the sixteenth century designed to ‘punish vagrancy’.17 Interestingly, consorting clauses in vagrancy laws draw attention to the fear of predatory behaviour, rather than to any act of criminality. This in turn highlights criminality as defined through vague association or identification, for instance, as ethnically other, or as out-​of-​place, or as from the ‘wrong’ social class. While McLeod sets out the colonial precursors to consorting offences –​such as ‘occupier offences’ which empowered police in the Scottish context to manage public houses18  –​he also shows that the colonial clauses regarding the ‘mingling between indigenous and non-​indigenous peoples’ were [ 138 ]

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unusual in law from the NSW legislation (1835), to the Victorian (1865) and New Zealand (1866).19 In this chapter, then, the consorting clause therefore draws attention to the particular fear of liminality in settler colonial polities, and the potential for cultural border-​crossing afforded by mobility and social change. To understand this aspect of the law, this chapter also defines the colonial ‘population’ of vagrants, showing how this population might be understood through the history of movement and patterns of migration across the British Empire.

The legal regulation of vagrants Elsewhere, I  describe the background to lawmaking in the colony with reference to old world legality and sentiment, also examining the mobility of law itself in the imperial world.20 This present chapter narrows in on the legal regulation of mobility in order to detail the risks and limitations of the mobility paradigm as applied to the historical context, and it alludes to more specific ideas about the histories of mobility, and specific spatial, political and social sites to identify past mobility. In doing so, it provides an account of mobility witnessed through prosecutions for vagrancy as reported in the national New Zealand Police Gazette (NZPG) from 1877. It argues that the politics of mobility was produced, as Tim Cresswell and others suggest, through power relations: in this case, those relations of power inherent to the laws of a settler colonial mobility within a wider framework of Britain’s Pacific empire.21 The histories of colonial New Zealand and other colonies arguably make especially interesting case studies for the analysis of vagrancy. During this period, New Zealand was part of the trans-​Tasman, Pacific world traversed by mobile peoples. ‘Mobility’, defined here as population movement, transience and the occupation of new social and physical space, therefore offers us a new way of interpreting the histories of colonial ‘settler’ society. ‘Settled’ in 1840, New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), was challenged by the practice of land alienation and land wars of the 1860s–​90s. As well as helping to define social class and levels of poverty in the new society, and therefore the formation of the ‘class’ of European vagrants, the vagrancy laws in place from the 1860s can also be considered as an aspect of the regulation of Māori–​Pākehā relationships in the wake of the forced mobility of Māori in the colonial period.22 As described above, colonial legislation created what legal historians consider a ‘novel’ aspect in the laws regulating vagrancy, and highlights [ 139 ]

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the colonial preoccupation with managing relationships between Indigenous and European people.23 This clause was not entirely new, but was modelled on imperial legislation about ‘consorting with gypsies’, which translated as associating with Aborigines in the colony of New South Wales in 1835.24 The relationship between vagrancy and the regulation and control of convicts and ex-​convicts was also expressed in the New South Wales legislation, illustrating the specific needs of that colonial legal context.25 In the Australian colonies, a convict class circulated and was viewed as a source of ‘social instability and vice’, and Aboriginal peoples were perceived to pose additional but also different threats to life and property.26 The introduction of vagrancy laws across the Australian colonies can be read in light of the origins of New South Wales as a penal colony, with historians drawing links between the policing of unwanted movement and cycles of poverty, need and settlement.27 In New Zealand, the Vagrant Act contained a provision to prosecute vagrant Europeans who were viewed to be consorting with Māori or ‘aboriginal natives’.28 This arguably spoke to the anxieties in 1866 about law and order and perceived ‘chaos’ on the frontier in the context of land alienation and acquisitions of Māori land by the Crown.29 By situating this provision inside a wider historical context and literature, this chapter examines the meanings of this consorting clause. Vagrants were, we might say, reminders of literal and figurative thresholds crossed; they represented ‘matter out of place’, the dirt of social detritus, and the presence of social liminality. Prosecuted for unauthorised movement, stopping and loitering with intent, and in the context of a society intent on settler respectability, the mobile lives of vagrants during economic depression reveal much about the everyday mobility that was part of their repertoire. Told to ‘move on’ by police and in the court of law, vagrants were vulnerable to the surveillance that had come increasingly to define colonial settler society, which was at the same time policing the boundaries of social difference. This vulnerability can be found in other new societies in formation; for example, Cresswell writes about the ‘tramp’ in America, foregrounding the production of a social, medical and visual knowledge about vagrants, and arguing that legal codes also created a social and pathological ‘type’.30 Although the vagrancy laws are regarded as flexible, designed to sweep up a range of offences, they did also fashion a coherent set of ideas about disorderly persons for contemporaries, functioning to identify low-​level loitering with criminality and predatory behaviour, by degrees.31 As Susanne Davies writes about Victoria, the law proscribed over a hundred offences, including limiting the movement of people who had no visible means of support, [ 140 ]

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begging, consorting, occupying public spaces at night without lawful excuse and so on. However, those arrested were often older, ill, poor, unemployed, as well as juveniles and prostitutes.32 In the Australian colonies and in New Zealand, vagrancy legislation derived from the Vagrancy Act of 1824 (England and Wales).33 This law required local parishes to fund the removal and return of vagrants to their home parish. Although colonial governments did not apply this 1824 law directly to the colonies, due to differing ideas about paupers and the absence of any specific law to cover paupers in the community, they drew upon the principles of the law. Vagrants, as defined in separate colonial acts, were divided into three categories: ‘idle and disorderly persons’, ‘rogues and vagabonds’ and ‘incorrigible rogues’. The Vagrant Act of 1866 (New Zealand) was introduced into New Zealand’s parliament for debate in mid-​ 1866. The parliamentary debates revealed levels of serious opposition to the bill on the grounds that it might interfere with civil liberties, that it was too broad and all-​ encompassing, risked the criminalisation of the poor and indigent and that it might penalise both travellers and gold rush miners who were present from the 1860s in the Otago region.34 The major critique of this Act was that it accentuated the ‘worst’ aspects of the English model.35 The vociferous debate was still referred to in the press in the 1880s during the discussions of amendments to the Act as the new Police Offences Statute was passed into law in 1884, with reports noting ‘the extraordinary rumpus created in the public mind’.36 These were all valid claims, given the way the Act was later used in urban and non-​ urban areas. Interestingly, some members of parliament questioned the definitions of the ‘undesirable groups’ mentioned in Sections 2 (2) and 2 (4)  of the Act, meaning ‘aboriginal natives’ and ‘reputed thieves’.37 The passage of the legislation in October of 1866 occurred despite the criticism and public reporting, with letters in the newspapers of the period also drawing attention to the possibility that this new law would become draconian.38

Consorting: intimacy, wandering and the ‘experience’ of vagrancy There are parallels with the laws of vagrancy across the colonies of New Zealand and the Australian colony of Victoria. In Victoria, Aboriginal people were given the label of ‘vagrant’ in the 1860s, where vagrancy was governed by a law of 1852, because of perceptions of their nomadism and food-​ gathering practices.39 Christina Twomey writes about Aboriginal people in Port Phillip (later Victoria) in the 1830s and 1840s. She highlights what contemporaries referred to the [ 141 ]

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‘perambulation’ of the Aboriginal peoples, seeing this as similar to the movement of vagrants in the English context, and argues that the reasons for the Indigenous peoples’ seasonal movement were misunderstood or misrepresented.40 Indigenous peoples moved around because of their quest for food in European camps and farms, and their traditional labour in hunting. However, settlers tended to associate their movement with a lack of productivity or purpose. Over time, vagrancy laws were used to prevent the fraternisation between male European newcomers to Melbourne and the women in Aboriginal camps. Aboriginal people came to be identified among the ‘inconvenient’, ‘wanderers’ and ‘nuisances’.41 Intimacies between vagrants and aboriginal peoples were highly circumscribed; furthermore, the implied unease about vagrants suggested a lack of tolerance for intimacy, or at least, unwanted close encounters with both poverty and mobility in colonial society. The theme of intimacy points to another interpretation of the ‘consorting’ clause in the law:  namely that it aimed to prevent miscegenation (Māori–​European, Chinese–​European), and was also used to control movement of prostitutes under both the Vagrant Act and, later, under the Police Offences Statute (1884). In New Zealand, again similar to colonial Victoria, women who consorted with Chinese men were ‘deemed immoral by association’.42 By the 1930s, the Act was routinely used to punish women who associated with Chinese men on the assumption they were prostitutes.43 Intimacy could happen in rural locations between Europeans, as portrayed in narrative accounts of vagrant men charming domestic servants: the ‘adventures’ of these men who stopped at huts and homesteads for temporary shelter and food were cast as romantic and transgressive, also raising the prospect of the dangerous allure of the free-​spirited wanderer in a settler society.44 The act of wandering has had a variety of associations in colonial settings. In India, it was the movement of Europeans creating suspicion in the 1860s. David Arnold notes the alarm and unease caused by high numbers of European vagrants in India in the 1860s, leading to the 1869 European Vagrancy Act.45 However, the unorthodox or unusual movement of Indian peoples also created concerns in the minds of British administrators. As I comment elsewhere, in different colonial societies, the mobility of indigenous women earned them an uneasy identity as ‘women interrupted’. For instance, mobile women were arrested for being ‘out of place’ in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), while in India, studies show the distrust and legal censure of ‘wanderers’ in that context; these were women who were sometimes taken into asylum care.46 [ 142 ]

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In New Zealand, wandering was seen as a ‘Māori’ activity in the eyes of Europeans, who viewed Māori as embodying an idea of movement rather than being a settled population.47 Yet, as historians have shown in both Victoria and New Zealand, Aboriginal and Māori peoples had communities with settled lives in districts and areas, and in the case of Māori, also practised cultivation of the land. Moreover, many Europeans were themselves highly mobile, and it was their undesirable movement –​men for seasonal work, the fear of male poverty and destitution, urban drunkenness and crime and the fear of predation –​that triggered much of the anxiety about vagrancy mobility. The prosecution of European peoples under vagrancy legislation in New Zealand also confirms this, as this chapter goes on to illustrate. In other words, the idea of prosecuting and thus preventing interactions between indigenous and European peoples focused on the prosecution of Europeans, not on the criminalisation of either Aboriginals or Māori via these particular laws. This theme highlights the differential structural relations of power in the policing of the indigenous populations. The prosecution of vagrancy laws was, then, at least symbolically being used to prevent mixing and interaction between different social groups  –​drawing a line  –​to prevent further social blurring in societies intent on moral safety, especially around the use of public spaces. These different groups might include the very poor, women soliciting for prostitution or inhabiting public spaces at night, those people who had no fixed address and certainly non-​ Europeans in predominantly European locales. This concern about blurring is reinforced by the example of the ‘moral policing’ of space in both England and in colonial Victoria in this period, another aspect of the development of police work in this period, also relevant to New Zealand localities.48 Furthermore, nineteenth-​ century cities were being designed for civic life, yet some people transgressed expectations about the acceptable use of such public areas.49 Caroline Daley writes that the Auckland Domain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was ‘home, a refuge for the city’s vagrants’, including Samuel Briggs, a man who was middle-​aged, ‘shabbily dressed’ and homeless in 1911, as reported by the New Zealand Herald.50 While the consorting clause had discursive power, it is much harder to find out how often it was used in the prosecution of vagrant Europeans. This chapter draws on a database sample of all vagrants prosecuted under different laws from 1877 using the NZPG, which was first published as a national weekly gazette in 1877. Prior to 1877, the NZPG in New Zealand was published in provincial Canterbury and Otago in the South Island (1861–​76), rather than covering the national policing scene. In addition, the NZPG from 1877 is fully indexed, [ 143 ]

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and includes photographs of discharged prisoners, including vagrants, between 1908 and 1914. The sampled data shows that we can examine the population of prosecuted vagrants in terms of its ethnic, gender and class identifiers. The NZPG itself can be understood as a technology of the surveillance of mobility, what Cresswell might describe as a ‘new practice’ of mobility and its regulation.51 The weekly publication described crimes, ships’ deserters, missing persons, husbands accused of wife desertion, children avoiding public education and also profiled criminals. The NZPG also functioned as professional news for the police, and included details of police appointments and promotions. The techniques of description and later photography gave nineteenth-​century police the capacity to monitor populations who presented challenges in terms of their motility and predilection for instability of lifestyle, at least in some cases, as the evidence of vagrancy cases suggests. The NZPG also included tables of returns of prisoners convicted of specific crimes under relevant legislation. Using these tables, it is possible to plot the full extent of convictions for vagrancy from 1877 onwards. The current research database includes all recorded prosecutions in the NZPG during the years 1877, 1879, 1881; all recorded prosecutions from 1884, when the Police Offences Statute encompassed vagrancy; and all recorded prosecutions for 1886, 1888 and 1900. This range allows for a large sample of more than a thousand prosecutions, representative of the array of people prosecuted for vagrancy over time.52 The prosecution data for vagrants from the NZPG is detailed:  it contains the names, ages, occupations, birthplaces, physical characteristics, sentences, as well as the places of arrest and trial. Convictions provide us with some sense of what the colonial vagrancy laws introduced in the 1860s enabled the colonial authorities to achieve by the turn of the century. The policing of women and men in public places for wandering, idling and stopping, being offensive or predation and acts of solicitation for prostitution was, by 1900, commonplace. The descriptions of the convicted vagrants occasionally referenced other forms of mobility such as transfers between social institutions, or were intertextual, drawing attention to repeat convictions and thus entries in the NZPG itself. Vagrancy as an ‘activity’ or experience was not restricted to the lives of wandering men looking for work during these years of economic depression. Roughly equal numbers of men and women over the period were sentenced, and many had numerous prior convictions for vagrancy. The New Zealand Official Year Book printed the figures for offences between1886 and 1891, showing that the arrests for ‘acts of vagrancy’ fluctuated between 205 arrests in 1886 and 225 arrests in 1891, but [ 144 ]

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most arrests occurred in 1899 and 1890, with 351 and 333 arrests in those years respectively.53 Over time, the Year Book argued, there was a decrease in the number of convicted persons per head of population by 1891. The data collected from the NZPG shows that overall, 54.5 per cent of arrests were men, and 45.2 per cent were women. Most of the women were designated as prostitutes; the male vagrants were from different walks of life. More women were prosecuted in urban centres, particularly Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand, and more men were prosecuted in rural areas. The vagrants were mostly from England, Scotland and Ireland, with some from Australia. The New Zealand Official Year Book was also interested in the birthplaces of convicted felons. By 1891, the vast majority of convicted persons had been born in New Zealand, with the statistics exclusive of Māori, as with other official population statistics of the period. Many women and men had numerous prior convictions for vagrancy. Over thirty categories of offence appear in the database, but vagrants were most often prosecuted for assault, being a rogue, being a vagabond, combined with drunkenness and using obscene or threatening language, and damaging property. The variation in sentences makes this a difficult area to analyse quantitatively. Sentences consisted were either custodial or labour, or a combination of the two. They ranged from a minimum of seven days in gaol to two years’ hard labour. Recidivist offenders, having collected a variety of scars, tattoos and wounds, became known over time to the police in their various locales. Additional newspaper research shows that very few Māori were themselves prosecuted for vagrancy. This was not always driven by Europeans themselves. Early in the twentieth century, the condemnation of the Māori practice of Tohungaism (Māori spiritual and physical healing) appears to have led to the prosecution of a very small number of Māori as vagrants.54 In 1887, Auckland Māori expelled one of their own people because he had ‘bewitched’ a community member who died. Their treatment of the accused, a man named Tango, involved restraint and starvation as punishment; they viewed him as an outsider capable of more dark magic. Police arrested Tango as a vagrant to bring him into custody.55 Wiremu Te Whitu was designated in the newspaper as ‘an impudent vagrant’ in 1904. He was castigated by other Māori in the Waikato area in the North Island of New Zealand for his practices of treating disease, including using claims of traditional healing methods to violate women. Accused of entering into ‘improper relations’ with these women who suffered from ‘internal complaints’, Te Whitu was also criticised for his use of hot baths (mineral waters) and hauhau (religious) incantations.56 [ 145 ]

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The data shows that vagrants did move from town to town, but that they did not always move far, in geographical terms. It also perhaps shows that even in the late nineteenth century, New Zealand police had a means to trace these people, and even though vagrants themselves may not have left a written record of their own, we can learn much about their lives through the policing of their movements and stagnation. Alexander Campbell was convicted of vagrancy first at Ashburton in the South Island on 20 February 1881, and then again in July of the same year. Ann Gahan (alias Fowler) was convicted twice in the North Island in 1900, and Archibald McAlister attracted police attention five times between 1899 and 1900.57 The motility of vagrants also echoed the English practice of moving vagrants on, between parishes, to place the burden of care on the vagrant’s own original place. Critics of the Act in New Zealand during parliamentary debates in 1865 and 1866 had also commented that the Act would force such movement between places, noting the likelihood of this approach to force mobility on convicted vagrants. Several cases bear out this fear. In 1875, the ‘noted vagrant and drunkard’ Shields was told to leave the district where he was arrested. On his way to the Waikato, he was hit by a train and killed.58 In 1878 in Akaroa in the South Island, two vagrants, Peter Cook and Catherine Wilson, were ordered to ‘leave town’.59 Among the other serious offenders heard in court that day, on 15 June 1892, John Cameron was sentenced for an assault on a child; he had earlier been charged with vagrancy but had promised to ‘leave the district’.60 The ‘very old offender’ Frederick Lynas, also known as John Thompson, pleased the court when he was charged and described as ‘incorrigible’, saying he ‘promised to go into the country. If let off he would never come up again.’61 Finally, the case of one self-​avowed mobile man of empire in 1909 reminds us of the way people’s ability to move across places rendered them agile in the face of the law. Francis Priestly defended himself as a man who had ‘been all over the world’ but never once been called ‘a rogue and a vagabond’. His pledge to ‘clear out’ of Auckland gave him a reprieve from the magistrate.62 Despite being able to draw a range of conclusions about the data collected from the NZPG, the absence of information about vagrants prosecuted under the consorting clause frustrates any certainty about its use in the New Zealand context.63 However, the NZPG highlights a range of examples of newsworthy vagrancy cases of vagrants as consorting with known criminals, including those described in this chapter. For example, in 1904, Ernest G.  Kelly was charged with vagrancy on the grounds that he ‘habitually consorted’ with thieves [ 146 ]

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and prostitutes. He was known to police, who observed his associations over five years; detectives gave detailed evidence from their notebooks about these criminal associations in court.64 Similarly, in 1898, Mary Turnham was ‘alleged to be an associate of a gang of burglars, and one of the most clever pickpockets in Australia’ and was given a three-​ month sentence for her crime of vagrancy.65 A closer investigation of judges’ notebooks, and archival sources located in former provincial location archive collections including Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand, would likely shed some light on whether consorting with Māori featured much in the prosecution of European vagrants. One case in the late 1860s is suggestive of the larger narrative connecting arrests for vagrancy and the meaning of consorting. In 1868, James Woolley was convicted under the relatively new Vagrant Act (1866). He was a recidivist, and had been found living in an empty dwelling known simply as ‘the Maori Club’, squatting in the building after breaking a window to get inside. He was charged as ‘having no visible, lawful means of support’, was given a nine-​month sentence, based on his previous arrests (for resting on farming properties in haystacks) and convictions, and described as an ‘incorrigible loafer’.66 Woolley associated with places designated as marginal, non-​European, and was likely to have also spent time with Māori circulating in these spaces. Likewise, in 1881, the Evening Post reported that Frank Folland, aged seventy-​two, had been living in a brothel located in the Maori Pah (fortified area) ‘kept by one of the most degraded women in the city’, probably Wellington, given the newspaper.67 Such close association with Māori by Europeans in poverty and vastly reduced circumstances aligned them with the otherness of the indigenous inhabitants, and with their marginal status as citizens in the colonial world.

Conclusions: understanding mobility through vagrancy prosecutions These brief accounts of vagrants, available to us through their recorded prosecutions, allow us glimpses of the intimacies across social class, ethnic and gender lines in colonial New Zealand through the prism of the boundary-​crossing lives of mobile people. As stated earlier in this chapter, mobilities scholarship reminds us that vagrancy was defined not only by movement but also by stopping, the ‘moorings’ provided by legality and its practices.68 Vagrancy became an object of the legal gaze when it was prosecuted; but it was the acts of loitering and temporary stasis, always inappropriate, that drew attention to the movement of [ 147 ]

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the vagrant. To put it another way, and drawing from Urry’s notion of the ‘immobile structures’ of social institutions such as law which act to encode an array of identities and social practices, vagrancy prosecutions offer us a means of understanding mobility because law made this mobility highly visible in the public eye.69 In addition, the theoretical lens of mobility is useful to better appreciate the process of vagrancy: what it meant to be mobile, what its implications were, what the experience of mobility suggests and how historians might enter into the imaginary worlds produced by mobility in specific places or concentrations of power relations. This allows us new insights into the movement of vagrants.70 Tony Ballantyne has suggested that the many forms of mobility across the empire produced a friction between the different aspects of the political economy of mobility:  the importance of place and settlement, and community, and the need to regulate unwanted elements who infiltrated that settled world at specific moments of the thickening and multiplying of connections of settlers.71 For instance, and highlighting this friction, vagrancy laws in New Zealand were used to regulate the influx of gold prospectors at a specific time of social upheaval, with the heavy rate of prosecution declining after the 1880s (and an amendment to the Act which abolished habitual drunkenness as a definition for the offence).72 Finally, to illuminate the constellation of mobility around, within and through the British Empire, this chapter shows that New Zealand’s legal regulation of vagrancy highlights the discursive meanings of the laws which circulated around empire and operated to police subaltern peoples: both Māori peoples and poor white Europeans. Revealing the sorts of transgressions that provoked colonial surveillance and control tells us more about how the lives of mobile peoples collided with colonial authorities, as well as about the kinds of meanings produced by their appearance in legal settings. The meanings of mobility itself were socially produced in space and time, and inside particular relations of imperial and colonial power, where the ‘diagnosing’ of legal identity categories and difference was critical to state formation. The period between 1877 and 1900 provides insights into the histories of the region inside a mobile imperial world context. The identities of mobile populations were produced, shaped and transformed through mobile laws, institutions and policies in a dynamic process that, in different places, and over time, acted to regulate, marginalise and criminalise the vulnerable among these peoples. Therefore, their historical contexts are also important, because new forms of mobility, such as that suggested by colonial vagrancy, gave rise to new state interventions, legal surveillance and controls. [ 148 ]

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Acknowledgements I remain grateful for the past and present research assistance contributions by former students at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and current research and editorial assistance at the University of Newcastle (Dr Jan McLeod). The ideas in this chapter developed following the ICHG conference panel in London, 2015, and during a ‘Colonial Economies, Violence and Intimacy’ workshop in Hobart, Tasmania in November 2016, and I thank the organisers of both events for including me.

Notes 1 D. Rollinson, ‘Exploding England: the dialectics of mobility and settlement in early modern England’, Social History, 24:1 (1999), 1–​16. On memory and landscape in the early modern period, see A. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); see also D. MacKinnon, Earls Colne’s Early Modern Landscapes (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). 2 C. J. Ribton-​Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy, and Beggars and Begging (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972 [London: Chapman & Hall, 1887]). 3 John Urry characterises motility as the potential for mobility which can be constrained or appropriated; J. Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge:  Polity, 2007), pp. 38–​ 9. See also V. Kaufmann, M. M. Bergman and D. Joye, ‘Motility:  mobility as capital’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28:4 (December 2004), pp. 749–​50. 4 A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagancy Problem in England 1560–​1640 (London and New York: Methuen, 1985); T. Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion, 2001); A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (eds), Cast Out:  Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, OH:  Ohio University Press, 2008); C. Coleborne, ‘Mobility stopped in its tracks: institutional narratives and the mobile in the Australian and New Zealand colonial world, 1870s–​1900s’, Transfers, 5:3 (Winter 2015), 87–​103. 5 Urry, Mobilities, pp. 20–​1, 32–​3, 52. 6 T. Cresswell, ‘The production of mobilities’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/​ Theory/​Politics, 43 (2001), p. 15. 7 C. Coleborne, ‘Law’s mobility: vagrancy and imperial legality in the trans-​Tasman colonial world, 1860s–​1914’, in K. Pickles and C. Coleborne (eds), New Zealand’s Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 91. 8 See the discussion of immigrants’ homes and charity in the colonies in C. Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire:  Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–​1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 51–​83. 9 Ibid., pp. 56–​74. 10 Ibid., pp. 100–​4. 11 A. L. Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 5. 12 A. L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC and London:  Duke University Press, 1995), p. 125. 13 Social Welfare Association for London, ‘The problem of the homeless poor and vagrants in London’, Report of the Special Committee of Representatives of Public Authorities and Voluntary Agencies, March 1911.

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Empire and mobility 4 Ibid., Appendix B. 1 15 Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, pp. 59, 63, 66. 16 Andrew McLeod, ‘On the origins of consorting laws’, Melbourne University Law Review, 37 (2013), p. 105. 17 Ibid., p. 107. 18 Ibid., p. 121. 19 Ibid., p. 124. 20 See Coleborne, ‘Law’s mobility’. See also Coleborne, ‘Mobility stopped in its tracks’, pp. 87–​103; Catharine Coleborne, ‘Regulating “mobility” and masculinity through institutions in colonial Victoria, 1870s—​1890s’, Law Text Culture, 15 (2011), 45–​71. 21 Cresswell, ‘The production of mobilities’, p.  16. See also T. Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28:1 (2010), 17–​31; Coleborne, ‘Law’s mobility’, p. 90. 22 On Māori mobility and migration, see M. Barcharm, ‘The politics of Māori mobility’, in J. Taylor and M. Bell (eds), Population Mobility and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia and North America (London and New  York:  Routledge, 2004), pp. 163–​83. 23 McLeod, ‘On the origins of consorting laws’, pp. 103, 124. 24 Susanne Davies, ‘Vagrancy and the Victorians: The Social Construction of the Vagrant in Melbourne, 1880–​1907’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1990), p. 131. 25 Ibid., pp.  131–​ 3. See also P. Byrne, Criminal Law and Colonial Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 163. 26 Davies, ‘Vagrancy and the Victorians’, p. 129. 27 Julie Kimber provides a useful historiographical overview of different colonial Australian vagrancy laws; see J. Kimber, ‘Poor Laws: a historiography of vagrancy in Australia’, History Compass, 11:8 (2013), 537–​50. 28 The Vagrant Act 1866, New Zealand, Section 2 (2), www.nzlii.org/​nz/​legis/​hist_​bill/​ vb1866107.pdf, accessed 18 May 2018. 29 M. Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society, 1850–​1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989). 30 Cresswell, The Tramp in America, p. 50. 31 G. Curry, ‘A bundle of vague diverse offences:  the vagrancy laws with special reference to the New Zealand experience’, Anglo-​American Law Review, 1:4 (1972), 523–​36. 32 Davies, ‘Vagrancy and the Victorians’, pp. 169–​172. 33 Curry, ‘A bundle of vague diverse offences’, 537–​50. 34 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 1864–​66, Volume E, Friday 3 August 1866, p. 849; Friday, 10 August, 1866, p. 868, https://​babel.hathitrust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=uc1.32 106019740213;view=1up;seq=5, accessed 18 May 2018. 35 ‘The Vagrant Act’, New Zealand Herald, 23 February 1865, p. 4. 36 Inangahua Times, 14 January 1885, p. 2. 37 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 1864–​66, Friday, 3 August 1866, p. 809. 38 See Coleborne, ‘Law’s mobility’, pp. 94–​5. 39 C. Twomey, ‘Vagrancy, indolence and ignorance: race, class and the idea of civilization in the era of Aboriginal “protection”, Port Phillip 1835–​49’, in T. Banvanua-​ Mar and J. Evans (eds), Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 93–​113. 40 Ibid., pp. 99–​101. 41 See P. Edmonds, ‘The intimate, urbanising frontier:  native camps and settler colonialism’s violent array of spaces around early Melbourne’, in P. Edmonds and T. Banvanua-​Mar (eds), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 138. 42 P. Law, ‘ “Too Much ‘Yellow’ in the Melting Pot?”: Perceptions of the New Zealand Chinese, 1930–​1960’ (Honours thesis, University of Otago, 1994), pp. 16–​17. 43 See also J. Bol Jun Lee, ‘Eating pork bones and puha with chopsticks’, in M. Ip (ed.), Unfolding History, Evolving Identity:  The Chinese in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), pp. 99–​100.

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Consorting with ‘others’ 44 S. Ell (ed.), The Adventures of Pioneer Women in New Zealand: From Their Letters, Diaries, and Reminiscences (Auckland: Bush Press, 1992), pp. 53–​6. 45 D. Arnold, ‘European orphans and vagrants in India in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7:2 (1979), pp. 120–​1. 46 Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, p. 157. See also L. A. Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–​1968, Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 17, 99–​128, 189; J. H. Mills, Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism:  The ‘Native-​Only’ Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–​1900 (London and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s, 2000), pp. 68–​9. 47 N. Seuffert, ‘Civilisation, settlers and wanderers: law, politics and mobility in nineteenth century New Zealand and Australia’, Law Text Culture 15 (2011), pp. 17–​19. 48 D. Taylor, ‘Melbourne, Middlesbrough and morality:  policing Victorian “new towns” in the old world and the new’, Social History, 31:1 (2006), 15–​38. See also D. Wilson on policing in Melbourne, The Beat: Policing a Victorian City (Beaconsfield, Victoria: Circa, 2006); P. Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-​Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); S. Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Inter-​war India (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014). 49 On the way cities developed in the imperial world, see F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities:  Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2003). 50 C. Daley, ‘A gendered domain:  leisure in Auckland, 1890–​1940’, in C. Daley and D. Montgomerie (eds), The Gendered Kiwi (Auckland:  Auckland University Press, 1999), p. 89. See ‘Charge of vagrancy’, New Zealand Herald, 24 June 1911, p. 5. 51 Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, p. 27. 52 Selected cases in this data will eventually be cross-​referenced and matched with an array of sources such as criminal trial records, prison records, census records, official returns and police records, images and institutional records to both trace mobility and to create a composite of the ‘vagrant’ in the past. Some entries in the database are duplicate or repeat offenders. 53 The New Zealand Official Year Book 1893, www3.stats.govt.nz/​New_​Zealand_​ Official_​Yearbooks/​1893/​NZOYB_​1893.html#id3688FB0, accessed 28 October 2017. 54 ‘Arrest of a Tohunga’, Wairarapa Daily Times, 17 September 1904, p. 5. 55 Ashburton Guardian, 16 February 1887, p. 3. 56 ‘An impudent vagrant’, Southland Times, 22 September 1904, p. 2. 57 Entries in database. 58 Taranaki Herald, 26 May 1875, p. 2. 59 Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, 1 October 1878, p. 2. 60 Christchurch Press, 15 June 1892, p. 5. 61 Daily Telegraph, 12 April 1889, p. 3. 62 Police Court News, New Zealand Herald, 8 June 1909, p. 7. 63 Newspaper research using the online digitised newspaper collection PapersPast in New Zealand does not reveal much more about the use of this legal clause. 64 ‘Police Court’, Christchurch Press, 25 March 1904, p. 2. 65 ‘Female pickpocket’, Colonist, 15 February 1898, p. 3 66 Reports of James Woolley’s vagrancy arrests appeared in newspapers in the Hawke’s Bay district: see Hawke’s Bay Herald, 3 September 1868, p. 2; 7 July 1868, p. 2. 67 ‘An old vagrant’, Evening Post, 5 July 1881, p. 2. 68 ‘Moorings’ are described by Cresswell as just as important as mobilities; see Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, p. 18. 69 Urry, Mobilities, p. 19. 70 T. Cresswell, ‘The vagrant/​vagabond:  the curious career of a mobile subject’, in T. Cresswell and P. Merriman (eds), Geographies of Mobilities:  Practices, Spaces, Subjects (London: Ashgate, 2011), p. 251. 71 T. Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, empire, colonisation’, History Australia, 11:2 (2014), 7–​37. 72 Fairburn, The Ideal Society, p. 248.

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CHA P T E R E IG H T

Trekking around Upper Burma: Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe’s exploration of the frontier districts, 1903 Nuala C. Johnson Historical geographies of knowledge:  circulation and mobility The multiple courses in which science has been produced historically has anchored some recent debates on global histories of science where the challenge ‘to reconsider the globe presents an opportunity to think in fresh ways about issues of commensurability, translation and circulation’ and where ‘connected histories will uncover the web of linkages and intermediaries that made science travel’.1 Avoiding approaches which dwell exclusively on the overseas, national or local as the unit of analysis, the turn to a global perspective converges more centrally around the zones of contact, the routes of mobility and the mechanisms of inclusion or erasure that went into the making of scientific knowledge across the world.2 In several ways, this literature maps on to a lateral move by those working on the historical geographies of science who have spearheaded the ‘spatial turn’ in grappling with the material and intellectual production, circulation and consumption of scientific knowledges.3 In this context site, venue, location, region and situatedness have significance in moulding our understanding of how specific layers of knowledge emerge, gain currency and circulate in the public sphere while other forms of knowledge remain peripheralised, unrecognised or confined to the private arena.4 As Livingstone has pointed out, ‘The importance of circulation to the geography of science is not restricted to the movement of species and specimens … Ideas and instruments, texts and theories, individuals and inventions  –​to name but a few –​all diffuse across the surface of the earth.’5 Moreover, understanding how scientific knowledge moves is not as easy as claiming it as ‘simply a consequence of its inherent universality’.6 Mobilising travel and establishing trust were at least two areas in which moving knowledge around the globe presented theoretical, [ 152 ]

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cultural and material challenges. For a woman in particular, working in the colonies in the late nineteenth century, achieving that trust and having the material and social capacity to practise travel herself and in association with others, was far from straightforward. Yet as Forsyth has tellingly observed, ‘The where of scientific practice at times was liberating, the colonies in particular affording women space for practicing science.’7 Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe certainly relished the prospect of the freedom she might enjoy on overseas service, noting on her arrival in Burma in 1897 that she ‘delight[s]‌in the life out here, it is so full of interest, and the freedom and unconventionality of it suits me down to the ground’.8 Moreover, studies by historical geographers, who have focused on the spaces in which scientific enquiry takes place, have demonstrated the importance of location and movement in the development of particular types of knowledge.9 The laboratory, botanic garden, naturalist field club, field site, published text, professional association and public lecture theatre are all locales through which scientific knowledge travelled and where particular ways of knowing about the earth were mobilised for popular consumption.10 In parallel with the insights provided by historical geographers, and developing from the work of John Urry, we have witnessed a growing attention to the practice of everyday mobilities and the role of technological and materially embodied expressions of human agency.11 Geographers have significantly contributed to this research by engaging with the embodied experiences, practices and representations of everyday mobilities at a variety of scales, and through their infrastructures such as airports, roads and railways in particular.12 But as Merriman, in a review of the field, recently observed, although ‘[a]‌ few scholars have worked hard to overcome the Euro-​American focus of much mobilities research’, there is still an overwhelming stress on the ‘West’ and on studies centred on twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​ century mobilities.13 Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe’s experience of conducting natural history around Burma, as well as the reciprocal movement of materials and knowledge she produced between empire and home, underlines the interrelated trajectories of movement at a variety of different scales, and across different cultural and political boundaries. In this light her work can be placed within a framework that ‘directs attention to the geographical mobilities for knowledge in the process of its production and of knowledge as part of its dissemination and transfer, while stressing that geographical and epistemological movement across different places and fields of knowledge are closely intertwined’.14 As a female ‘amateur’ naturalist working in the tropics at the turn of the twentieth century her work exemplifies how she mobilised [ 153 ]

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herself in this environment in order to collect botanical materials and produce visual illustrations, while also marshalling the movement of both knowledge and material objects between Burma and the United Kingdom. But what of Wheeler-​Cuffe’s genealogy, and its significance, in transporting her to the colonies? Her family links to Ireland add a layer of complexity to the relationship between her service to empire and botany, and the island’s knotty connection with the imperial centre. As Jackson adjudicates, ‘Ireland was simultaneously a bulwark of the Empire, and a mine within its walls. Irish people were simultaneously major participants in Empire and a significant source of subversion.’15 More broadly, the status of Ireland as kingdom or colony within the larger British colonial realm, after the Act of Union in 1800, has generated considerable historiographical debate over the last few decades.16 Moreover it is only since the 1980s that the general literature on settler colonialism and imperialism has made more than scant reference to Ireland as part of this story. However, from claims that, if economic exploitation was a condition of colonialism, Ireland could not be conceived as a financial asset to Britain in the nineteenth century,17 to suggestions that the Irish constabulary became a model of policing in most colonial police forces,18 and that the national education system introduced in 1831 was an exercise in cultural imperialism,19 all studies indicate that Ireland’s position within Britain’s empire was complex, at times contradictory and operated on a number of diverse registers. As Fitzpatrick puts it, ‘The imprint of Ireland may thus be detected in virtually every colonial institution, ranging from schools and police forces to land law, fraternities, political parties, and churches. Likewise, the imprint of Britain may be found in every Irish institution, signifying the ambiguity of Ireland’s location in the Empire.’20 Clayton has described the island as a ‘mixed colony’, reflecting its religious, political and geographical diversity, with Ulster representing the ‘imperial province’ and the remainder of the island representing ‘rebel Ireland’.21 Others have claimed that Ireland’s geographical proximity to Britain meant it was too near to be left alone, and rather than proposing an exceptionalist explanation of its place in the empire, have suggested that all parts of the empire were in their own way distinctive, and that ‘Ireland’s defining peculiarity was that it stood at the world’s metropolitan centre; but it was no less a British possession for that.’22 Moreover, this location in part helps us understand the role of Irish people as both imperial subjects and active participants in the construction, management and maintenance of Britain’s non-​European empire. As Jackson notes, ‘the Empire was simultaneously a chain and a key: it was a source both of constraint and of liberation’.23 It is within this [ 154 ]

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context that I wish to examine the work of Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe as a botanical collector and illustrator, who spent twenty-four years in Burma, and whose own genealogy represents the hybridised complexity of connections and movements between Britain, Ireland and the overseas empire.

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Locating Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe In April 1922 Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe, known affectionately through her lifetime as ‘Shadow’, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. While women were admitted officially as members from 1913 onwards, by 1922 they still only represented 7.7 per cent of the Society’s total membership.24 It is estimated that about half of these members were explorers/​travellers, and the remainder were equally divided between scientists/​teachers and professional women. Wheeler-​ Cuffe received this honour in recognition of her contributions to botanical art and natural history; her collection and dissemination of plant species between Burma and home; and the geographical knowledge she had accumulated about Burma from the quarter of a century (1897–​1921) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service. Such recognition echoes Maddrell’s observation that ‘Those who travelled with husbands or family on imperial duty … represent a continuation of the strong link between the RGS and state institutions and interests.’25 Charlotte Isabel Williams was born in Wimbledon on 24 May 1867, and through her maternal lineage was a granddaughter of the Rev. Sir Hercules Langrishe (1782–​1862), third baronet of Knocktopher in Co. Kilkenny. It was this Irish connection that brought her regularly to Ireland in childhood and stimulated a long-​standing relationship and eventual residency on the island. Her father William Williams was a solicitor and one-​time President of the Law Society. As well as their London residence they also had a country house, Upperfold, in West Sussex. Wheeler-​ Cuffe spent many vacations in Ireland, with her sister, Rosabelle Mary (known as Monie), and often stayed with her mother’s youngest sister, Charlotte Langrishe (known as Aunt Cha), who had a residence in Fir Grove, Thomastown, as well as with other relatives at Woodstock in Inistioge, both in Co. Kilkenny. While there is little extant information about her childhood, in all likelihood a governess educated her and she may have considered training as a nurse as she attended lectures on first aid and domestic hygiene as well as surgical nursing between 1888 and 1891. During the First World War she volunteered at the military hospital in Maymyo and her correspondence indicates that she was well acquainted with nursing procedures.26 [ 155 ]

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Some of her earliest surviving watercolours are of scenes in Ireland, around Fir Grove and from excursions she undertook to the Atlantic seaboard. Although there is little evidence of any prolonged formal training in art, there are indicators that she undertook some painting classes at William Frank Calderon’s art school on Baker Street. Annotations on the reverse of a few watercolours she produced in the 1880s contain instructors’ comments, including one by Calderon himself on a landscape scene she produced of Connemara.27 At Fir Grove she had her own bedroom, which suggests that she spent much time in Ireland with her aunt. There are also hints that she learned woodcarving and French polishing during her adolescent years, skills she would later employ in Burma. Her connections to Ireland were solidified in 1897 when she married her childhood friend, Otway Fortescue Luke Wheeler-​Cuffe. Although Otway Wheeler-​Cuffe was born in Southsea, Hampshire in 1866, his father, Major Otway Cuffe, lived at Woodlands, a house located outside of Waterford. His uncle, Sir Charles Wheeler-​Cuffe, was the second baronet of Leyrath, an estate situated a few miles from Kilkenny. This baronetcy, established in 1800, was the last ever created in the baronetage of Ireland, and, on the death of his uncle in 1915, Otway Wheeler-​Cuffe inherited the title and land at Leyrath (with Charlotte assuming the title of Lady Wheeler-​Cuffe).28 In the absence of children the title became extinct on his death in 1934, but Charlotte continued to live on the estate until she died in 1967. He trained as a civil engineer at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill, Egham, Surrey, and was initially employed on a ship canal, before entering the Indian Public Works Department (PWD hereafter) and being stationed in Burma. In an 1897 letter to Aunt Cha about their immanent engagement, Wheeler-​ Cuffe observed:  ‘I think it argues well for our future happiness that we have never since childhood disagreed about anything … we know each other off by heart.’29 On 3 June 1897 they married in Lodsworth parish church, near her family’s house Upperfold, and spent their honeymoon on the River Thames before leaving on 16 June on the Bibby Line’s SS Staffordshire, destined for the colonies. They would spend the following twenty-​four years of their lives stationed in Burma, but they made regular trips home when leave was obtained from the PWD. Otway was appointed Executive Engineer in 1906 and later became Superintending Engineer in 1913, before retiring back to Ireland in 1921 to take up residence at Leyrath. He also served as honorary aide-​de-​camp to the Viceroy of India between 1911 and 1918. It was during this quarter of a century in Burma that Wheeler-​ Cuffe refined her botanical hunting and drawing skills, and where she [ 156 ]

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produced several hundred watercolour illustrations of the local flora and landscape. In a letter to the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland in 1937 she informed the Keeper that she would like her paintings to be permanently held at the gardens. She maintained a lively correspondence with her cousin the Baroness Pauline Prochazka, who resided at the family seat in Leyrath, as well as with her Aunt Cha in Waterford and her mother in Wimbledon. She wrote regularly to Sir Frederick Moore (1857–​1949), the Director of the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, and they became close friends, and she had intermittent correspondence with other scientific institutions. She also donated these letters, as well as her day diaries and other documents accumulated during her time in Burma, to the gardens. It is through these textual sources, alongside her paintings, that we can gain some insight into her life as a botanical hunter, collector and illustrator in Burma in the first decades of the twentieth century. Moreover we also begin to appreciate her role in the early exploration by Europeans of one of the remoter corners of Britain’s Indian empire.30 The Wheeler-​ Cuffes spent much of their initial time resident in central Burma but they travelled extensively around that district, Otway in his capacity as civil engineer and Charlotte to accompany and assist him. She also, however, undertook expeditions on her own or in the company of other colonial wives, where she independently engaged in plant hunting and sketched species new to her.31 During their time in Burma the Wheeler-​ Cuffes were stationed in a variety of different places, initially in Thayetmyo in central Burma, but relocated to Toungoo, Rangoon, Meiktila, Mandalay and Maymyo –​moving as Otway’s career necessitated (see Figure 8.1). In this chapter I will focus on their first year stationed in Mandalay, a new posting that began in 1903.

On the move: from Toungoo to Mandalay After a furlough spent in Britain and Ireland the Wheeler-​ Cuffes returned in September 1902 to Toungoo, where they had been posted since January 1901. While they were settling back into life in the town, and were rebuilding their house which had been destroyed in a storm, they were informed in February 1903 by telegram of a further transfer, Charlotte writing that ‘to our immense surprise, [we] received orders for immediate transfer to Mandalay’.32 Having to move at short notice anywhere across Britain’s Indian empire was an occupational hazard for any PWD engineer, and Charlotte was inclined to adapt quickly to her new circumstances and see the positive possibilities of a transfer. In March Otway went briefly to Mandalay to prepare for their departure and reported to her that their ‘house is very roomy and nice, and he is [ 157 ]

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8.1  Map of Burma

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delighted to get back among his old haunts’.33 She began to enthuse about the move, particularly emphasising its superior status in the social and political pecking order of Burma. She claimed: Everything in Toungoo is second rate  –​work, office, govt establishment –​and society! And in Mandalay it is first rate –​and it does make a difference. I  don’t think I  am a snob but one does get sick of second rate people, though one feels a beast for they are often kind and good –​ and then there is the Eurasian element of which no one at home can in the least realize the drawbacks and which one can not put into words without being ill mannered.34

While she maintained her aristocratic preferences throughout her life in Burma, she was also receptive and sensitive towards the diverse cultural milieu she encountered and in which she operated. However, the question of mixing ‘races’ was forever a thorny issue in the discourses of empire at home and overseas. Even among historians, the category ‘Anglo-​ Indian’ has been an imprecise one that has connoted anything from British residents living in colonial India to those of ‘mixed-​race’ lineage.35 It regularly referred, at some level, to the hybridity of those settled in colonies at the height of empire, and often to the offspring of marriages between colonials and locals, most particularly between British men and local women. Under colonial rule this Eurasian community found itself caught between the categories of ‘civilised’ and ‘less civilised’ in the calibration of their position along a continuum between tradition and modernity.36 While the East India Company, in the seventeenth century, attempted to proscribe interracial liaisons, by the eighteenth century the unworkability of such a policy saw the British authorities encourage their employees to marry native women provided they converted to Protestantism.37 The New Charter of 1833 offered enhanced public recognition of English-​ speaking and better-​educated Eurasians. Their role in the development of the telegraph and railway infrastructures, coupled with their instrumental role in restoring British authority during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, secured them advantage over natives in almost every aspect of colonial society. Nonetheless, their status remained ambiguous and fragile, and as the emerging indigenous nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century gathered pace they witnessed a shift in imperial policy towards the Indianisation of the colonial services. Consequently, the Eurasian community found itself increasingly marginalised within both the indigenous and imperial power structures.38 The source of Wheeler-​Cuffe’s unease with the Eurasian population partly stemmed from this wider political transformation, but also reflected local and personal circumstances. [ 159 ]

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During the previous six months her cousin, Rosie Langrishe, had been their houseguest at Toungoo. In this time she had become acquainted with a Major Charles Norman Bensley, an English-​educated, widowed doctor, of Spanish and Bengali descent. As their relationship developed and their engagement was announced Charlotte wrote to her Aunt Cha in Ireland, expressing her disapproval. She claimed: ‘[as] the hard facts of life out here as the wife of a very dark Eurasian begin to press [I dread] that she will resent it to him, poor man. He can’t help being black, of course, and as Eurasians go, he is rather nice, but there is (often alas! with too good cause), a very strong feeling against them out here, and prejudices of that sort are not discriminating.’39 She did not elaborate on the source of those prejudices, but in a letter to her mother she reiterated her disapproval of the proposed marriage. While her views were informed by the prevailing attitudes of the British settlers of her acquaintance, they may also have reflected her own anxieties as a white colonial of Irish ancestry. She had continued her close familial connections with the island in an era when Irish nationalism was strengthening, and allegiances to the British state were being challenged and diluted. When Britons travelled to the colonies on imperial service their genealogies moved with them, and political events at home could be deeply connected with identities abroad. In a later letter to her Aunt Cha she sought to clarify her position: Personally I have no prejudice against Eurasians at all, and I know some charming ones; but such a prejudice does exist and very strongly and is often most cruel … I always liked the Bensleys, and used to stick up for them when people said nasty slighting things about them for being ‘so black’ –​In fact my stock phrase always was ‘I don’t care if they are pea green or sky blue or any other colour, I don’t see why one should not be nice to them’.40

Her attempt to distance herself from any overt racist prejudices was achieved through projecting the negative disposition on to the colonial community itself but acknowledging that it is the one in which she operates. She continued, ‘[t]‌o hear a roomful of people laughing and joking at Rosie’s expense, and stop short and change the subject when they see me coming isn’t a pleasant experience, and will be even less so for Rosie herself’.41 Her anxieties about her cousin’s social acceptance seemed to shape her attitude; nonetheless Rosie did marry Bensley in 1903 and they had a daughter. Her husband rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before they returned to live in Ireland after his retirement. However, when the Irish Free State was established in 1922 they moved to England. It was in the context of this disquiet about the marriage that the Wheeler-​Cuffes prepared for their move to [ 160 ]

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Mandalay, and fears of transgressing accepted racial boundaries, if not class ones, even in the colonies, animated their perspective on potential conjugal arrangements. Despite their opposition to the marriage the Wheeler-​Cuffes maintained a friendship with the newly married couple and visited them regularly during their service in Burma. Charlotte noted that Otway was relishing the prospect of Mandalay and ‘rejoicing in the proposal of good polo and a very nice lot of British officers to associate with’.42 Much of her time was spent getting ready for the move and she noted that the train to Mandalay had transported their personal effects –​furniture, piano, great quantities of plants. She claimed that ‘I shoved orchids and lilies and ferns into every hole and corner in the railway trunk, and will take all I can besides when I go’,43 as their replacement in Toungoo ‘doesn’t care a pin for a garden … I shall just dig up and take all that will move. I can’t bear to have them die for want of water.’44 On 5 March the Wheeler-​Cuffes took the 6.25 p.m. train on the 230-​mile journey from Toungoo to Mandalay accompanied by their two cats, three dogs, servants and two dun ponies. They all arrived safely in Mandalay, although Maisie, the pointer, arrived a few days later, having been taken by a guard off the train at Thayi and sent onward to Myingyan. Charlotte reported that that she should be able to develop a nice garden at their new house, noting that, at present, it is a ‘howling wilderness’.45 The plants she had brought from Toungoo would provide her with a foundation, and because her husband was in charge of Government House he was permitted to have as many flowers and vegetables as he liked from its garden when the Lieutenant Governor was away. She noted that her gardener was likely ‘to be a treasure –​He is half Burman and half Gurkha –​an excellent hybrid’, quite in contrast to her attitudes towards hybridity where Eurasians were concerned.46 On arrival she set about the task of establishing a new home and garden in the knowledge that their new posting represented ‘one of the most important divisions in the country both socially and officially, with a lot of interesting country’.47 While maintaining a conventional gendered division of labour in the domestic sphere, as expected of the wives of colonial officials,48 Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe also immediately began to undertake excursions outside of Mandalay in the company of her husband. This continued a practice she had developed since her arrival in Burma. Travel and the pursuit of her botanical interests was an integral part of her life in the colonies, and each new stationing provided fresh opportunities for exploration.49 In this sense she stepped outside the customary roles afforded to colonial wives and travelled a more independent path. This mobility was partly facilitated by the fact that the Wheeler-​Cuffes had no children, but it is also indicative [ 161 ]

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of her desire to explore the territories of Burma, to advance her knowledge of the natural history of the area and to use such excursions to further her artistic and textual interpretation of the land and peoples she encountered. The new posting to Mandalay meant that her husband had a new district to inspect and supervise, and this brought them to visit new parts of Upper Burma and to find their way into the interiors of the Shan and Kachin states. Movement, whether it resulted from new postings or expeditions with her husband as he inspected the districts for which he was responsible, was integral part of her everyday life. This continual commitment to local and regional travel was punctuated by more long-​ distant intercontinental excursions when they made regular trips home during Otway’s leave. As well as being personally mobile the knowledge she acquired was also travelling through the materials she collected such as seeds and plants; the paintings she produced that were sent between Burma and the UK; and the textual representations of her experience she related through her letters, telegrams and postcards.

Mandalay: trekking around Upper Burma, 1903 A few days after their arrival in Mandalay the Wheeler-​Cuffes undertook their first journey of exploration, a road inspection trip to the well-​known ruby mining district of Mogôk, 70 miles north. The first leg of their trip was made by steamer, in the Indian Marine Ship Bhamo up the River Irrawaddy to Thabeitkyin, which took a day and a half. From there they made the four-​day trek overland to Mogôk, with nine mules in tow. They marched the next day over 18 miles by road to Shwenyaungbin through what Charlotte described as ‘lovely mountains’.50 The following morning they continued their trek to Kyabin, over a 5,000-​feet-​high pass where, she claimed, ‘there is the most glorious view from the top in all directions. From there the road descends to 3,700ft … surrounded by high peaks.’51 She commented that the rubies, sapphires, garnets, moonstones, amethysts and aquamarines were all found in the alluvial deposits in the valleys below. At Mogôk various employees of the Ruby Mines Company and other colonial officials met them. During the day Otway inspected the Mainglon road while Charlotte and one of the local wives ‘rode the mule track, 12 miles, and all camped there for the night’.52 The following day the men went to Mainglon itself, while the women accompanied them for 6 miles before returning to Mogôk. Wheeler-​Cuffe remarked that there were several projects underway in the area, including erecting a jail and developing a water supply scheme from the springs on the nearby slopes. Of the botanical life in the area she observed, ‘There are the loveliest great [ 162 ]

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creamy yellow dog roses and white rhododendrons all over the hills; and huge trees of Bauhinia (the white flower with a striped petal like a pelargonium Monie has the drawing of), and a lovely scarlet tree whose name I don’t know, and any amount of orchids, so I am in my glory.’53 As well as botanising, Wheeler-​Cuffe also played a significant role in assisting, on an unofficial basis, with her husband’s work. She rode up to the source of the water supply with Otway and took rough measurements. She felt confident that the scheme would be successful, calculating that a supply of 20 gallons per day per head of the 1,200-​ strong population would be more than achievable. She also recorded that she found four new orchids on one tree, three on another and three more on a knoll of limestone rock and ‘have been painting hard all day!’.54 On finishing this letter she promised to send her mother some seeds from the Bauhinia tree, which she thought might survive in England ‘in the open, in a sheltered place’.55 They spent about a week before leaving Mogôk for home riding back through the pass at Kyabin and then dropping down the ‘short though very steep’56 mule path on the other side. She noted the sudden change in the biogeography of the region: ‘It is curious how the vegetation changes at the top of the pass –​ The tropical plants have crept up the western side from the plains, but directly you get to the top they cease, and you get into a region of wild roses, rhododendrons and buttercups. The orchids don’t seem particular and flourish equally on both sides of the pass.’57 She worried, though, that the orchids she had brought back to Mandalay wouldn’t thrive as the ‘air is so frightfully dry –​and they require a moist atmosphere’.58 She also commented, however, that the dry heat of their new posting suited her and that she did not mind the high temperatures, which rose to 105 degrees Fahrenheit daily.59 This first trip to Mogôk yielded some plants which she painted and some which she brought back to grow in her new garden. The orchids she collected included Dendrobium crepidatum, a species she had painted in Toungoo from an earlier expedition, and she also collected Cymbidium aloifolium and Dendrobium fimbriatum, which she sketched (see Figure 8.2). Her first trip in their new posting proved a success and was the beginning of many excursions she made around the district and further afield. The Wheeler-​Cuffes were to visit Maymyo for their first Easter in their new posting. They would spend time inspecting the first 12 miles of road on their journey, and from the seventeenth mile they would travel by rail to the hill station, while their ponies would slowly ascend the remaining 25 miles. Visiting hill stations during holidays to escape the most intense heat of a tropical climate was an important part of the colonial calendar of British India. The hill station often resonated with nostalgia for home that was echoed in the landscape aesthetics [ 163 ]

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8.2  Dendrobium fimbriatum growing on Bauhinia purpurea over Chaung ta Shé, Mogôk

and cultural practices found in these places.60 Wheeler-​Cuffe noted that there would be a polo tournament organised but she was unsure if their ponies, Monkey and Spar, would be fit enough to take part. In a letter sent from Maymyo she observed, ‘The gardens up here are lovely and make one green with jealousy! [One] is a perfect show –​like an English garden with orchids and plantains and bamboos thrown in. My dust heap in Mandalay nearly makes one weep, but I may get a few plants to grow in the rains.’61 Duncan, in his discussion of British travel writers’ interpretations of the Kandyan Highlands in Ceylon, and in particular the hill station at Nuwara Eliya, claimed that a vocabulary of romanticism and an aesthetic of English landscape taste informed their interpretation of this place. He observed that, ‘The mountainous topography of the area around the capital and the relatively cool

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climate, for a tropical location, lent themselves admirably to a peculiar type of cultural production, the re-​creation of a bit of Britain in the tropics.’62 While Wheeler-​Cuffe was not a transient traveller to Burma, and had, over time, deepened her understanding of the complexity of the region, she nevertheless occasionally adopted the language of the picturesque for home consumption. The hill station, in particular, could provide an easy frame of reference to audiences at home, where the language of polo competitions and the beauty of English gardening practices could be readily understood. In Mandalay she and Otway swam daily at a bathing pool ‘filled with crystal clear water … and big trees around. The absolute bliss of it in hot, dusty Mandalay is beyond description.’63 Thus while she was happy with the move from Toungoo to Mandalay and with their elevated position in the colonial hierarchy, the climate did not readily accommodate her gardening and botanical interests. After their return from Maymyo three of their ponies died in quick succession –​Monkey, John Chinaman and Spar.64 While the ponies were an essential part of their social life in Burma –​ for playing polo and visiting friends around the city –​they were also critical to their explorations of the district and environs, facilitating more intimate forms of mobility and providing important companionship. The Wheeler-​Cuffes quickly acquired replacements including a half Burman and half Arab mare named Bride, and Bhamo, a cream-​ coloured pony possibly of Chinese origin. The heat of Mandalay in early May proved an impediment to Wheeler-​Cuffe’s artistic work, with temperatures soaring to 112 degrees Fahrenheit. She noted that ‘it is almost impossible to paint now, the colours dry in one’s brush before there is time to get them to paper’.65 However, she also declared that the dry heat was more tolerable than the humid conditions elsewhere in Burma and the absence of mosquitoes eliminated the need for bedroom curtains. Her mother regularly sent her supplies from Britain, including clothing and fabrics; furniture and linen; and art supplies. She requested that some cyclamen be sent, commenting that ‘if I find it too hot for them here, will pass them on to Janet at Maymyo’.66 Gardening was proving a challenge in their new location, and while lilies sent from home were glorious, and ‘seem[ed] to thrive here, they are able to hold the moisture in their thick fleshy stems’,67 most plants frizzled up in the hot temperatures, even when watered. The species she had transported from Toungoo, especially the orchids and ferns, she noted ‘have suffered sadly’.68 She had moved her maidenhairs to the covered fernery at Government House, where they would be well looked after. While the weather did not serve her plants well, Wheeler-​Cuffe claimed, ‘There is no doubt this place suits me far [ 165 ]

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better than Toungoo did as regards climate –​it is hotter, but also dry.’69 The high temperatures continued into July and she reported, ‘Still no rain, and the world is burnt dry and brown –​but continuous gales rage night and day, which is exhausting and very trying to the eyes, though mine don’t seem to mind.’70 Not only did Wheeler-​Cuffe have art supplies, plants and small furniture transported from London to Burma, she also, on occasion, sent her clothing back to England for repair. In September 1903, for instance, she sent one of her riding habit skirts to her mother to have dyed as it had faded badly from washing. She was indifferent to the colour, commenting that her ‘riding cape is dark green, and my coat is black, so either green, black or brown would do’.71 She also requested that half a dozen cotton vests be purchased at Standons in London. While the dyed habit skirt and vests could be sent by post, as she wanted them quickly, she also ordered other items that could be transported by acquaintances travelling to Burma. These items included a green Irish homespun dress and coat; her thick brown habit for the ‘cold weather in the hills’;72 black spun silk stockings; a pair of gauntlet gardening gloves; and a pair of tan riding gloves. She also instructed her mother to try to sell her orchid paintings, ideally to Kew Gardens. She pondered over the appropriate price, speculating that £60 for the lot might be a bit cheap while £100 might be excessive and thus somewhere between the two would be ideal.73 She commented, ‘Never having sold drawings before, I am rather at sea about their value.’74 She did, however, posit that their value resided in her firsthand experience of painting them in the field. Establishing a regime of trust as an eyewitness had been a preoccupation of those at home since the age of exploration had begun, and the Royal Geographical Society’s publication Hints to Travellers (1854) underscored the significance placed on disciplined and ordered eye-​witnessing. Although she painted some species from plants brought back from the field, she also regularly sketched in situ. She observed: ‘I fancy their value consists chiefly in their being painted in the place the orchids grew  –​so that they are perfectly natural as regards position and surroundings. Lots of people can paint as well and better than I can; but not many of them have the opportunity of painting orchids in their natural habitat.’75 Thus while she was a keen amateur illustrator and botanist concerned with the natural history of Burma, she also recognised the commercial potential of her work and the scientific value of it to centres of accumulation such as Kew Gardens. She noted that she would be soon sending a further six or seven paintings, accompanied by her notes about where she had found the species and their growing habitat, including a pink variety of Vanda cerulia [coerulea] (see Figure 8.3). [ 166 ]

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8.3  Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe sketching at Mandalay, no date

Through the late summer she continued to develop her garden. She made a vegetable plot close to the house and planted a hedge of cactus around the perimeter to keep out marauding animals. By September she had undertaken another excursion with Otway. They had travelled by the government steamer, the Buccaneer, on another expedition to inspect the Mogôk road project. The boat was almost empty so it felt like she was travelling by private yacht, and the party consisted [ 167 ]

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of her ‘own cook and servants and camp furniture’, while their four ponies and fourteen coolies, along with their ganger, travelled alongside by barge.76 Recruiting native labour was consistently part of her trips around Burma. Locals facilitated the practicalities of travel while also providing intimate knowledge of the geography and botany of particular regions. The party stayed overnight at Kyauk Myaung and arrived at Thabeitkyin on Sunday morning. From there they rode out in the evening to War Hpyu Taung and on Monday they rode on to Kyabin and inspected the road west of the twenty-​third mile. On Wednesday they rode back to Thabeitkyin and slept on board the Bhamo mail boat as it sailed northward to Tagaung, on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, now 127 miles north of Mandalay. She observed that Tagaung was supposed to be the oldest settlement in Burma, having been the capital of the first Burmese dynasty and ‘was a large walled and moated city, but all that remained were some shapeless mounds of old brick work, except where the Burmans have re-​built one of the most sacred pagodas’.77 The teak merchants Darwood and Co. leased the land between the Irrawaddy and Shweli rivers. The government Forestry Department felled trees of sufficient girth and Darwood extracted and traded the timber. Tagaung was one of their principal stations and the Wheeler-​Cuffes were acquainted with some of the company employees and consequently dined with them and participated in their shooting parties. For their homeward journey they borrowed ‘a beautiful little boat’78 from Mr Summers, one of the Darwood employees, to take them to Thabeitkyin, where they embarked on the regular mail boat to Mandalay. This general region would continue to be a key destination for their travels and for her botanising excursions until they were relocated to Meiktila in 1905.

Conclusion Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe’s long residency in Burma proved to be an important factor in her efforts to gain expertise in natural history more generally, and in particular in the botany of this part of Britain’s overseas empire. Plant-​hunting, seed collecting and botanical illustration were the key areas of scientific knowledge-​making upon which she focused, and in which she became an important distribution node within a larger network of collectors in southeast Asia. The pattern of her residency in the colony, and the frequent transfer to different locations within Burma, enabled her to gain competency over a wide range of districts and habitats in Upper and Lower Burma. This chapter has focused on one brief period of the twenty-​four years she spent in [ 168 ]

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the colony, stationed in Mandalay, and provides some insights into the historical geographies of science and the circulation of natural history knowledge between empire and home in the context of one female colonial resident. Firstly, being mobile was central to Wheeler-​Cuffe’s experience of Burma. Although the wife of a colonial official, she did not confine herself to the conventional gendered divisions of labour within the colonies, and she did not remain solely within the domestic sphere of the compound. While she undertook her orthodox duties as the wife of an official, she also liberated herself from a life of domesticity by participating in regular and sustained travel across Burma. Secondly, she regularly accompanied her husband in his work as a civil engineer in the PWD responsible for the development of the transport network within the colony and especially its roads. Ponies and mules proved to be their central means of transportation as they undertook inspections around the districts of Mandalay. While the railway and waterway networks provided the broad infrastructure of mobility for the Wheeler-​Cuffes, it was their animals that enabled them to penetrate the more remote regions of the colony and facilitated their treks over major mountain ranges and river systems. Thirdly, their movement was also reliant upon the entourage of native servants, cooks and coolies, as well as camping and surveying equipment that also formed part of these expeditions.79 The local knowledge and labour provided by the Burmese population were inextricably bound up with Charlotte’s capacity to travel. Moreover, the knowledge she acquired about the natural history of the region was recorded by the materials she collected (e.g. plants, seeds and cuttings) that were transported to Mandalay by her native workers in the field, as well as through the materials she brought with her on expedition to record and represent the botanical life she encountered. Her sketchbooks, pencils and painting materials, as well as her writing equipment, all moved with her as she strove to accurately record and represent the physical features of the landscape and plants she observed in the field. Together these provided her with the architecture of authenticity that was necessary to make her eye-​witnessed accounts legitimate and trustworthy, especially at the imperial centre. Finally, the knowledge she transferred back to Britain and Ireland was facilitated by her relatives, acting as redistribution centres for plants she collected and paintings she produced in Burma. Regular shipments of seeds, plants and botanical illustrations home allowed her work to circulate between the colony and the imperial centre, while at the same time the reciprocal movement of art equipment, clothing and people from Britain to Burma provided her with the necessary means [ 169 ]

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to pursue her commitment to producing scientific knowledge about the colony. Her ancestral ties with Ireland also rendered her position as a loyal servant of empire equivocal at home and in the colonies, and the networks and routes through which the knowledge she acquired travelled were inflected by this complex set of cultural and social relationships. The botanic gardens in Dublin proved a more important node in her botanical network than Kew, and ultimately her archive of paintings and correspondence was donated to the Glasnevin gardens. As a Protestant, with unionist political leanings, and opposed to the Irish independence movement, she and her husband might have sold their estate in Kilkenny and moved back to London on their return from Burma, yet they decided to settle in Leyrath, where she remained until her death in the 1960s. Ultimately Burma and Ireland were the places she settled on a long-​term basis rather than her place of birth at the epicentre of Britain’s empire.

Notes 1 S. Sivasundaram, ‘Introduction’, Isis, 101 (2010), p. 96. 2 See the ‘Focus’ section on ‘Global histories of science’, Isis, 101, (2010), pp. 95–​158, which contains a series of essays which address this issue. 3 For an overview of this literature see D. Finnegan, ‘The spatial turn:  geographical approaches in the history of science’, Journal of the History of Biology, 41 (2008), 369–​88. 4 D. N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003); C. W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); D. A. Finnegan, Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (London:  Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 5 Livingstone, Putting Science, p. 138. 6 Ibid., p. 140. 7 I. Forsyth, ‘The more-​than-​human geographies of field science’, Geography Compass, 7 (2013), p. 529. 8 ‘Letter from Charlotte Wheeler-​Cuffe to Aunt Cha’, Thayetmyo, 12 August 1900, National Botanic Gardens Archive, Dublin (hereafter, CWC and NBG). 9 S. Naylor, ‘The field, the museum and the lecture hall:  the spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27 (2002), 494–​513; C. W. J. Withers and I. M. Keighren, ‘Travels into print: authoring, editing and narratives of travel and exploration, c. 1815–​c. 1857’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (2011), 560–​73; L. Veal, G. Endfield and S. Naylor, ‘Knowing weather in place:  the Helm Wind of Cross Fell’, Journal of Historical Geography, 45 (2014), 25–​37; D. A. Finnegan and J. J. Wright (eds), Spaces of Global Knowledge:  Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire (London: Ashgate, 2015). 10 N. C. Johnson, Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens (London:  I.B. Tauris, 2011); N. C Johnson, ‘Botanical gardens and zoos’, in J. A. Agnew and D. N. Livingstone (eds), The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge (London: Sage, 2011), pp. 99–​110; D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-​ Century Science (Chicago:  Chicago University Press, 2011); M. Ogborn and C. W.  J. Withers (eds), Geographies of the Book (London: Routledge, 2010); Finnegan, Natural History Societies.

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Trekking around Upper Burma 1 J. Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 1 12 P. Adey, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010); T. Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006); P. Merriman, Driving Spaces: A Cultural-​Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2007). 13 P. Merriman, ‘Mobilities I:  departures’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (2015), 87–​95. 14 H. Jöns, M. Heffernan and P. Meusburger, ‘Mobilities of knowledge:  an introduction’, in H. Jöns, P. Meusburger and M. Heffernan (eds), Mobilities of Knowledge (Cham: Springer International, 2017), p. 2. 15 A. Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union and the Empire, 1800–​1960’, in K. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 12. 16 T. McDonough, Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-​Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005); S. Howe, Ireland and Empire:  Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005); P. Clayton, Enemies and Passing Friends: Settler Ideologies in Twentieth Century Ulster (London:  Verso, 1996); L. Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996). 17 O. McDonagh, States of Mind:  A Study of Anglo-​ Irish Conflict, 1780–​ 1980 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983). 18 D. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire:  Government, Authority and Control, 1830–​1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 19 J. Coolahan, ‘The Irish and others in Irish nineteenth-​century textbooks’, in J. A. Mangan (ed.), The Imperial Curriculum:  Racial Images and Education in British Colonial Experience (London:  Routledge, 1993) pp. 54–​ 63; J. Coolahan, Irish Education:  Its History and Structure (Dublin:  Institute of Public Administration, 1981); N. C. Johnson, ‘Building a nation:  an examination of the Irish Gaeltacht Commission Report of 1926’, Journal of Historical Geography, 19:2 (1993), 157–​68. 20 D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 85. 21 P. M. Clayton, ‘Two kinds of colony: “rebel Ireland” and the “imperial province” ’, in McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony?, pp. 235–​46. 22 K. Kenny, ‘Ireland and the British empire: an introduction’, in Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, p. 3. 23 Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union, and the Empire’, p. 136. 24 Personal communication with Sarah Evans regarding female membership of the RGS in 1922. 25 A. Maddrell, Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850–​1970 (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), p. 35. 26 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Maymyo, 14 October 1917, NBG. 27 E. C. Nelson, Shadow among Splendours:  Lady Charlotte Wheeler-​ Cuffe’s Adventures among the Flowers of Burma 1897–​1921 (Dublin:  National Botanic Gardens, 2013). 28 J. McGuire and J. Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 29 ‘Letter from CWC to her aunt Cha’, Parkside, Wimbledon, 21 February 1897, NBG. 30 P. Butler, Irish Botanical Illustrators and Flower Painters (Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2000). 31 E. C. Nelson, ‘The Lady of the Rhododendrons  –​Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe 1867–​ 1967’, Rhododendrons (1981/​82),  33–​41. 32 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Toungoo, 8 February 1903, NBG. 33 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Toungoo, 1 March 1903, NBG. 34 Ibid. 35 A. Burton, ‘Review:  Domicile and Diaspora:  Anglo-​ Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home, by Alison Blunt’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 43 (2006), 512–​15.

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Empire and mobility 36 A. Carton, Mixed-​Race and Modernity in Colonial India:  Changing Concepts of Hybridity across Empires (London: Routledge, 2012). 37 A. Carton, ‘Historicising hybridity and the politics of location: three early colonial Indian narratives’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 28 (2007), 143–​55. 38 P. F. Cressey, ‘The Anglo-​Indians:  a disorganized marginal group’, Social Forces, 4 (1935), pp. 263–​4. 39 Quoted by Nelson, Shadow among Splendours, p. 59. 40 Quoted ibid., p. 61. 41 Ibid. 42 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Toungoo, 1 March 1903, NBG. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 8 March 1903, NBG. 46 Ibid. 47 Quoted by Nelson, Shadow among Splendours, p. 59. 48 A. Blunt, ‘Imperial geographies of home:  British women in India, 1886–​ 1925’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (1999), 421–​40; A. Blunt, ‘Cultural geographies of migration: mobility, transnationality and diaspora’, Progress in Human Geography, 31 (2007), 684–​94. 49 N. C.  Johnson, ‘Global knowledge in a local world:  Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe’s encounters with Burma 1901–​1902’, in Finnegan and Wright (eds), Spaces of Global Knowledge, pp. 19–​38. 50 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mogôk, 25 March 1903, NBG. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 5 April 1903, NBG. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 See J. Kenny, ‘Climate, race and imperial authority: the symbolic landscape of the British hill station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85 (1995), 694–​714; J. Kenny, ‘Claiming the high ground: theories of imperial authority and the British hills stations in India’, Political Geography, 16 (1997), 655–​ 73; D. Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). 61 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Maymyo, 11 April 1903, NBG. 62 J. S. Duncan, ‘Dis-​orientation:  on the shock of the familiar in a far-​away place’, in J. Duncan and D. Gregory (eds), Writes of Passage:  Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 153. 63 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Maymyo, 11 April 1903, NBG. 64 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 2 May 1903, NBG. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 10 July 1903, NBG. 71 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 6 September 1903, NBG. 72 Ibid. 73 F. Driver, Geography Militant:  Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 74 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 6 September 1903, NBG.

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5 Ibid. 7 76 ‘Letter from CWC to her mother’, Mandalay, 27 September 1903, NBG. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 F. Driver, ‘Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (2013), 420–​35.

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Reading the skies, writing mobility: on the road with a colonial meteorologist Martin Mahony

During the period immediately following the First World War the spatial reach of the British Empire was growing, as former German colonies and new mandates and protectorates were brought into the imperial fold. For many of those observing the shifting map of colonial geographies, great hope rested on the ability of new aeroplanes and airships to significantly shrink imperial space. By radically cutting travel times between the metropole and distant colonies and dominions, new technologies of aerial mobility were hoped to tie together an empire which, although bigger than ever, was also increasingly marked by new assertions of dominion sovereignty, by anticolonial and nationalist movements, and by anxieties about the military vulnerabilities of all those red areas on the maps of imperial geography. If the future of empire seemed deeply uncertain, aviation boosters made their pitch that the connectivity provided by powered flight could bring the empire’s diverse polities into closer communion, with regular contact enhancing not only governmental and commercial efficiency, but also fostering a reinvigorated sense of a shared British cultural world. As Liz Millward shows elsewhere in this volume, hopes abounded in Britain that the white dominions in particular could be brought back into a closer and loyal relationship with the mother country –​the flying machines of Imperial Airways reinforcing the fraying ties of imperial sentiment. In the 1920s the empire seemed poised on the threshold of the kind of technical revolution ushered in by the railways and the telegraph, revolutions which variously sped up the mobility of people, capital, goods, armoury and information. Aviation seemed ready to usher in a future where the circulation of all these things would be enhanced again, with knock-​on effects for the economics, politics and cultural life of the empire. The future of empire, if it had one at all, was in the air.1 This new aerial imperialism would mean that the technical and scientific infrastructures of empire would be turned towards a new element. [ 174 ]

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Much has been written on the roles of the sciences in aiding the horizontal expansion of empires –​knowledge of the winds and of the stars aiding maritime navigation, the sciences of geography, botany, geology and others assisting in the expansion and consolidation of terrestrial possessions.2 Far less is known about the knowledges and infrastructures which supported this vertical move into the air. Although the existence of ‘airspace’ is often taken for granted, or simply equated with ‘the sky’, Millward points out that airspace ‘was produced. It did not pre-​ exist its articulation in culture or its delineation through techniques of territorialisation such as mapping, defining, observing, writing about and occupying.’3 One such cluster of territorialising techniques was the science of meteorology. A small number of studies have examined the emergence of meteorology as an ‘infrastructural science’ in support of aviation,4 but the geographical focus of much history of the atmospheric sciences has remained European or North American, often with an abiding concern with the pre-​ history of global change science.5 The imagination and practice of aerial mobility, and the production of imperial airspace, would be predicated upon new forms of navigational expertise, an emerging science of aerodynamics and upon the predictive promise of meteorology. This chapter examines the coming into being of new infrastructures of meteorological knowledge-​making as an important contributor to new imperial aeromobilities.6 The chapter aims to contribute to a broader question of how aeromobilities changed imaginations of, and relationships to, colonial space.7 By taking imperial aviation as a distinctive ‘constellation of mobilities’, constituted by particular forms of movement, practice and representation,8 it examines how mobility above was built upon new movements on the ground  –​of data, information, instruments, bodies; the kinds of mobilities which Steven Gray has recently characterised as ‘contingent mobilities’.9 The chapter focuses on the efforts of one meteorologist in British East Africa to render the skies above the British territories of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Northern Rhodesia navigable and traversable. If aeroplanes were to successfully navigate their way along Cape-​to-​Cairo air routes, a new set of ‘infrastructural moorings’ would be required.10 These moorings, although predicated upon fixity and immobility, were nonetheless shaped by related forms of mobility. In this chapter we follow the travels, and the travel-​writings, of Albert Walter, founding director of the British East African Meteorological Service, reconstructing his tours of British East Africa through which he laid the groundwork of imperial aeromobility. His travels, first by car and later by aeroplane, built upon a much earlier culture of imperial mobility which positioned the colonising European subject in a particular relationship [ 175 ]

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to a colonised space. As Georgine Clarsen has recently argued in the context of settler-​colonial societies, mobilities are key to the ‘subtle and never-​ quite-​ finished cultural processes of settler formation:  of making and remaking landscapes, of imagining national spaces and the links between them, and of forging the subjectivities of people who dwell in and pass through those spaces’.11 In exploring the practice and representation of Walter’s movements around East Africa, and how he made sense of his relationships with the East African colonies, their peoples, landscapes and, of course, their climates, the chapter sheds light on the interdependence of different forms of mobility as well as on the transformations wrought by aeromobilities on conceptions of and relationships to imperial space.

Aeromobility and the new spaces of meteorology The First World War was an important watershed for the science of meteorology. The privations of the war meant that a group of Norwegian physicists could work in quiet isolation on the theories and equations that would later shape the practice of air mass analysis and the possibility of weather prediction by numerical process.12 More immediately though, the war brought home to military commanders the significance of the weather and its predictability. Gas warfare, high-​flying artillery shells and, of course, military flying saw the atmosphere become a key space and medium of military conquest.13 Early scoffing at the need for military weathermen when a few umbrellas could protect an army from the elements quickly gave way to an acceptance of meteorology as an essential military service. Some of the British Meteorological Office’s most senior officers worked at the frontlines, offering forecasts to both the makers of tactical decisions and to the gunners and pilots facing an immediate encounter with the elements. The new prominence of the air as an elemental and conditioning force,14 along with the new links between the military and the meteorologists, was cemented with the move of the Meteorological Office into the newly formed Air Ministry. Sir Napier Shaw, director of the Office from 1905, oversaw the move and dealt with the flak which arrived from various sides. In 1920 he gave way to George Simpson, formerly the meteorologist on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica and later a senior weatherman in India. It was Simpson’s experience of working through a network extending over a vast imperial space that suited him to his chief task back in London: putting meteorology, in Britain and the empire, on an aviation footing, ready to support the expected expansion in flying not just within Europe, but inter-​continentally between Europe and North America, and between Britain and its empire. One of the final [ 176 ]

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acts of Shaw’s tenure was to chair a meeting of the chief meteorologists of the British dominions, at which the requirements of aviation were top of the agenda. This was to be followed ten years later in 1929 by a much larger Conference of Empire Meteorologists, where the dominions were joined by the colonies, again with aviation the centre of attention. Both meetings focused on questions of standardisation, and on the semiotics of circulating data. The weather data being collected across the empire needed to be collected at the same times, against the same units and with calibrated instruments, if a unified meteorology of the emerging air routes was to be achieved. The large-​scale maps of weather conditions which would result would be the basis of forecasts issued to pilots before they set off into the sky, while coded updates would be offered en route, the details of things like relative humidity collapsed into short strings of letters and numbers whose meanings would, in theory, remain stable across the globe.15 Not every colony was considered ready for the demands of aviation meteorology. While some colonies, such as Mauritius, had meteorological traditions which stretched back to the nineteenth century,16 others  –​and not always the younger colonies  –​had never supported meteorology themselves (though there were a few observatories where meteorology could piggy-​back on what had been seen as the more important sciences of astronomy and magnetism).17 Against maps of expected imperial air routes was compared the state of meteorological infrastructures on the ground below. Somewhere like British Malaya, for instance, was considered one of several ‘non-​meteorological countries’ at the end of the 1920s.18 When Alan Cobham made his famous flight to Australia in 1926, he found in Malaya that it was ‘most difficult to ascertain anything definite about the weather … The extraordinary thing was that nobody could forecast the weather for an hour. No one seemed to care what it was going to be, and, so far as I could gather, it might be anything at any moment at any time of the year.’19 Although the British had held territory in the area for well over a century, and despite the establishment of an observatory at Singapore in 1840, there was no system for co-​ordinated weather observation across the Malay states as a whole, save for a few dedicated climatological observers attached to local hospitals, whose concern was less the navigability of the air above, and more the effects of the tropical climate on human bodies and minds on the ground below.20 Colonial government surveyors and the London meteorological establishment collaboratively hatched a plan for a new weather service,21 and a young English meteorologist was dispatched to Singapore in 1929 to establish new observing stations, recruit observers, and prepare for the overflight of airships and aeroplanes en route from India to Australia.22 [ 177 ]

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The establishment of the Malayan service meant securing the support of both the Federated and Unfederated Malay states, which meant convincing the sultans of largely rural territories, who might experience little direct benefit from planes stopping at Singapore, to stump up the cash for a federal meteorological service. The idea had to be sold not just as a rather prosaic piece of a wider, imperial infrastructure, but as a marker of what a ‘modern’ state looked like: It is proposed that stations be established in Malaya to study the climate –​two of these stations would be in Kedah. The information which will be obtained from these stations will be of great value to aviation. As Your Highness is aware, aviation is of great importance both for military and industrial purposes, and aviators who have been to Malaya invariably complain that no information with regard to climatic conditions is available here. It is an accepted principle that such information should be provided by Government free to those who wish to make use of it. The statistics are also of great importance to agriculture in dealing with problems of irrigation and the fixing of the planting season of crops … It must be remembered that aviation is an essential part of any military defence scheme.23

In British East Africa, meteorology likewise had to reach across the borders of different colonial possessions and systems of rule. Founded in 1927, the British East African Meteorological Service was the first governmental organisation to cross colonial boundaries. Although moves towards federation had stalled in the early 1920s, the East African Governors’ Conference continued to function as a loose assembly of inter-​colonial governance, and the direction from London for a new, spatially expansive approach to meteorological knowledge-​ making meant that a ‘federal’ arrangement appeared the most propitious, if the recently achieved uniformity of European meteorological practice was to be replicated in Britain’s colonies.24 In 1925 Albert Walter was appointed to head up the statistical service under the East Africa Governors’ Conference. Walter was primarily a meteorologist who had learned his craft in Mauritius, where he had risen from meteorological assistant in 1897 to head the Royal Alfred Observatory.25 In Mauritius, Walter earned a reputation as a reliable cyclone forecaster, using a set of ‘rules’ laid down by earlier meteorologists in the region to detect and predict the behaviour of cyclones from the island observatory. However, his integration into colonial island society was to an equal or perhaps greater extent a product of statistical work on the relationships between climate and agriculture, forests, health and disease, as well as more general statistical work on island censuses and occasional contributions to [ 178 ]

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the measurement and governance of the island’s export economy. As a member of the colonial civil service, Walter fitted a number of patterns: experienced in different lines of government and administration; ambitious; and in many ways a careerist.26 Yet in the history of meteorology and climatology, Walter is more unusual. He combined meteorological and climatological interests at a moment when the two fields were increasingly pulling in different directions.27 Of course this was partly a product of his professional circumstances  –​he was not in a position to dedicate himself to one or the other as his metropolitan colleagues could  –​but even among his colonial contemporaries, Walter’s work and interests were unusually eclectic. More than understanding the weather and climates of Britain’s tropical colonies, Walter’s vocation was to use emerging statistical techniques to make the environments, peoples and processes of colonial territories legible to those in power, to render their government more rational, efficient, and adapted to local physical and social realities. Initially the task of extending a statistical service was tightly coupled with the development of a meteorological network. Aviation was on the horizon, Cairo-​ to-​ Cape trial flights were multiplying in number and Samuel Hoare at the Air Ministry was pushing for Imperial Airways to dominate the new trans-​ African air routes.28 Environmental interconnections between Britain’s all-​red slice of the African continent were also on people’s minds, with the government of Sudan, along with that of Egypt, inquiring about the availability of climatic data for the Nile headwaters, and eventually agreeing to co-​fund what became the British East African Meteorological Service (BEAMS). Weather observations had been made sporadically in the region since the late nineteenth century by missionaries, soldiers, settlers and administrators, but with little co-​ ordination or standardisation of technology and technique. Walter’s first task was therefore to inspect this fragmented network of instruments and observers, and to begin constructing a socio-​technical infrastructure capable of providing reliable, timely information about the East African atmosphere, at the moment that it was becoming a new medium of imperial mobility.

Groundwork Over the next five years Walter embarked on a series of what he called ‘safaris’ around the 1  million square miles of territory for which he was responsible. In his memoirs, completed in the 1960s using diaries and notes kept from his days in East Africa, Walter narrates these safaris through elements of romantic travel writing and pioneer [ 179 ]

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narrative, and describes a process akin to what Mary Louise Pratt calls the ‘anti-​conquest’.29 Through these tropes, Walter describes the construction and maintenance of a new civilising infrastructure of colonial administration. The memoirs, themselves written during a period of rapid decolonisation, seek to naturalise and eulogise British rule. But versions of these stories were also circulated as official memoranda in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Comparing these different narrative presentations of meteorological mobilities allows us to see how the elemental and cultural geographies of empire were shaping new practices and meanings of colonial science. Walter’s early tasks upon his arrival in Nairobi included preparations for demographic census-​taking, and in 1926 he set out on his first safari through Kenya with Colonel Watkins, the Chief Native Commissioner,30 to visit all the administrative districts and to get a feel for the people and economy of the colony. He threw himself into questions of native registration, bemoaning the reluctance of some to cooperate with the bureaucratic reach of the colonial state. He likewise bemoans the ‘deplorable’ state of the existing meteorological infrastructure –​uncalibrated thermometers, leaky rain gauges, all read only sporadically. He narrates striking juxtapositions of intransigent meteorological instruments and intransigent natives; the colony would not yield up its secrets to the inquisitive statistician-​meteorologist without a struggle. Between 1927 and 1930 Walter therefore undertook a number of sporadic journeys by car and boat in order to put things right, and to establish the main weather stations which would be used to support aviation in the region. This generally entailed installing one major weather station, and various minor stations, in each territory, all reporting a range of data to the central office in Nairobi. However, the ponderous nature of this process meant that many of Walter’s early conceptions of East Africa’s climates were products of bodily experience rather than disciplined instrumental observation. On a particularly formative trip to Uganda, Walter encountered a storm while crossing Lake Victoria which would prove to be an important encounter with the complexity and specificity of East African climates. Lake Victoria appears in his memoirs in a number of forms, often through classical promontory narratives which position Walter as a ‘spell-​bound’ observer of the sublime, and which evoke the long tradition of British exploration among the Great Lakes.31 On the night of 18 May 1930 Walter found himself on the Clement Hill, a small passenger and cargo ferry which plied the lake. Lake Victoria is known to have a distinctive micro-​climate, driven by temperature differentials between the lake surface and the surrounding land. Walter was aware of this to some extent, and the stiff breezes experienced early on in the voyage [ 180 ]

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chimed with his understanding of the local atmospheric circulation. However, between 8 and 9 p.m., a heavy swell set in from the south-​ west, caused by the steadily increasing wind velocity. The movement of the boat was becoming very pronounced and even unpleasant; by midnight wind and water had become disquieting, thunder and lightning were incessant and rain was falling in torrents … the noise of moving objects all over the ship was terrifying in spite of their being lashed down; chains and bars were clanging and rattling, tables and chairs broke loose, and everything breakable and movable was moved and broken.32

At 1 a.m. the Captain elected to turn into the wind, to ease the effects of the swell. Walter noted the exact geographic location of the boat at this moment: longitude 33°6’, and dead on the Equator. But with the wind changing direction rapidly, the only option was to head for the leeward side of a small island: [T]‌his change of wind [occurred] so rapidly as to render the most able efforts of seamanship futile … a high confused swell swung the vessel perilously near its rolling limit; to the anxious staff and passengers it seemed impossible that she could right herself after each roll … The maximum angle of tilt could not have been much less than 36°; at this time the complete oscillation of the ship from crest to crest occupied five and a half seconds which I timed myself as the rolling occurred.33

Eventually, at 2 a.m., the ferry made it safely into the lee of Dwaji Island. In this account, Walter’s voice is largely passive. The sounds which are the effects of the boat’s pitching and rolling may be terrifying, but he seemingly is not terrified of the predicament itself. He is only portrayed as active when he is taking measurements. While wind and waves lashed the boat, Walter was standing out on the deck consulting his watch and compass and monitoring the wind direction, drawing bodily lessons in the lake’s distinctive micro-​climate; a figure separate and different from the ‘anxious staff and passengers’ with whom he shared the boat. Many of the passages which ended up in his memoirs were published as a technical memoir of the meteorological service. In this version, he sandwiches the narrative of the storm between statements about its wider relevance. He emphasises risks to nascent air routes posed by such storms, adding the lake to a new ‘red list’ of atmospheric danger zones for passing pilots. He posits the existence of a distinctive system of atmospheric circulation around the lake which needs careful study. But, without the kinds of instruments which would make such study possible, the storm which hit Walter’s ferry provided an ‘excellent opportunity for more detailed observation than could otherwise [ 181 ]

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have been given to it’. Walter uses his ‘personal and non-​instrumental observations’ to build a picture of the wind regime and speculates that one day the occurrence of such storms will become predictable.34 This qualitative, narrative account of local climate was shaped by a distinct intersection of human mobilities; aerial, administrative, water-​ borne. New knowledge of the East African climate was gained through encounters with the elemental mobilities of wind, waves and rain.35 In this ‘pioneer’ space, the observing human subject is positioned as an instrument that was superior to thinly scattered or badly maintained thermometers and barographs. Walter occupies the lake as a curiously detached observer, reporting the storm in both accounts not as a mortal threat to himself, but as an inspiration for further meteorological inquiry. His timing of the swell and his attention to the compass act as a prelude to later investigation, his body a pioneering instrument of observation before the later expansion of his meteorological network.36 Later that year Walter embarked on what he described as his most ‘epic’ safari. While back in London the previous year for the 1929 empire meteorology conference, Walter had purchased a Morris Isis saloon and had a lorry fitted out with camping equipment. In these vehicles would travel himself, his wife Louisa, his newly hired assistant Riley, Fernandez the mechanic, two native assistants –​one of whom was named Abdebi, the other going unnamed –​and a hunter and safari veteran named Harger, ‘to assist with camp equipment and to help in case of trouble with game’.37 This motley crew would aim to find new observing sites, check the suitability of pre-​selected stations, and make arrangements for observers and the installation of equipment. With aviation plans accelerating, Walter argued that he would need four or five new European assistants, and wished to locate these manned stations in ‘places where Europeans could live and work in comfort’.38 The safari was concerned with reconciling this demand for a new, synoptic picture of the East African climate with the forms of immobility which would render such a picture possible –​instruments in the right places for a representative view of the atmosphere, observers dwelling in comfort away from the region’s climatic extremes.

Encountering and producing colonial space In his memoirs Walter revisits the ‘exciting happenings’ of the tour which were largely left out of his official report at the time.39 Through his narration, we can situate Walter’s journeys at the intersection of two distinct mobility cultures. The first represented a pioneer rhetoric of ‘the glamour and excitement of travelling over these almost uncharted regions’, territory constituting ‘what was still very much [ 182 ]

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darkest Africa’.40 This way of seeing and traversing the landscape accords with what John Urry describes as an early automotive culture shaped around ‘inhabiting unpaved roads’, with all its associated bravado, mysticism and homespun engineering. In interwar Great Britain, this would gradually give way to a culture of ‘inhabiting the paved road’.41 Here, the conjoined ‘car-​ driver is part of the environment through which the car travels’, bound in a relationship of sensuality and longing whereby the pursuit of speed and adventure was replaced by a new commitment to motor touring, a ‘slow means of finding pleasure’ through the performed discovery of places and landscapes which eulogised an imaginative geography of nationhood. The car as ‘symbol of speed and erotic dynamism’ was turned ‘into the Morris Minor’, as those wealthy enough struck out to discover new corners and stories of England.42 In Walter’s writings, we see this new form of automotive culture in his enthusiastic and romantic engagement with the pastoral landscapes of the region, the undulating terrain and ‘lovely English homes’43 glimpsed through the window of his Morris Isis. Yet the conjunction of these opposed mobility cultures, organised around their different spatial imaginations of the frontier and the pastoral, is evident in Walter’s case not just in their representation, but in the material practices of his safari. While serenely touring the countryside in a new Morris was a practice enabled by the rapid expansion of paved roads in the British Isles, it is quickly apparent that the Isis is not suited to the uneven, often boulder-​ strewn roads linking Nairobi and the rest of Britain’s East African territory. The camping equipment, purchased in England, is also swiftly discovered to be wholly unfit for the East African climate, and Walter would later have to go to great lengths to justify his and Louisa’s repeated hotel stays to the BEAMS paymasters. On numerous occasions the lorry ends up in riverbeds as it fails to negotiate narrow and rickety bridges, and the party find themselves dependent on local labour to keep mobile. Just as the lorry was extricated from one such river, with the aid of 30 natives, who always gather round any car which is stationary … one of the native boys cried out ‘moto moto’ and in fact the lorry was on fire. In falling [into the riverbed] one of the electric wires had made contact and set fire to some part of the fabric of the vehicle. Fernandez rushed to the cab of the lorry and cut the wires before any serious damage was done.

The engine starts again first time, but then they realise ‘a bush fire was raging and we had to burn a firebreak round us to avoid the chance of igniting the petrol’.44 The caravan eventually limps on, negotiating the [ 183 ]

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heat of the plain, the perils of mountain roads and pontoon bridges, passing through landscapes ablaze with bush fires set by local farmers, the flames licking the sides of the car. While encounters with ‘the natives’ are largely restricted to this kind of unplanned stoppage, the safari calls on a range of people who might assist the construction of a meteorological network. These include obvious candidates like District Commissioners and agricultural research stations, but also settler-​farmers and church mission posts. As devout Catholics, the Walters take every opportunity to visit the White Fathers in their various outposts. Sometimes these social and spiritual calls present new meteorological opportunities, such as at Kondoa-​Irangi, where the ‘Mission fathers were most anxious to have instrumental equipment set up at the mission as the native pupils at the school would be able to get training in taking observations, with advantages to themselves and to the Service.’ The apparently mutual benefits of schooling local children in the virtues of diligence, discipline and scientific rationality were coupled here with a favourable siting:  ‘Wind directions appear to be true directions for the region and the general conditions representative, so far as zonal climate is concerned.’45 But not everywhere was Walter concerned with sites which could represent a wider climate. He called upon farmers who had made a success of orange growing, promising meteorological instruments to help uncover the local climatic secrets of their agricultural success, so that it might be further rationalised and replicated elsewhere. Indeed, the prioritisation of aviation generated a conflict between stations designed to inform pilots of local specifics, and stations designed to create knowledge of average conditions over a wider area. At the new aerodrome in the mining town of Mbeya, Walter observed that ‘It is doubtful whether wind directions observed at this site can be considered representative of the region, but it is urgent that an anemometer should be erected to supply information for aviation.’46 Likewise the observations diligently taken at the Kikori tsetse fly research station appeared to be of little value either for synoptic meteorological or climatological purposes, the local topography rendering them useful only in the experimental conditions of the tsetse fly studies. Walter often bemoaned how the primacy of aviation in the BEAMS mission distracted attention and resources from what he saw as the most fundamental requirements of the colonies  –​the slow development of a detailed picture of the regions’ climates and their shaping of human life and fortunes, so that colonial society and government might be more precisely calibrated with the demands and restrictions of their environments. By contrast, the service would be oriented primarily towards the production of information and [ 184 ]

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forecasts for pilots; information which, as Roger Turner points out, becomes out of date and essentially useless only a few hours after it is produced.47 The pursuit of the statistics of place was overcome by the frenetic re-​production of airspace. Walter’s search for useful and representative weather station sites was far more than an epistemic struggle. Walter narrates his travels in a language of pioneering and exploration, in relation to a colonial landscape which oscillates between ‘darkest’, unexplored Africa and a space of relative order, the Pax Britannica maintaining peace among unruly tribes, settler-​farmers making the land both economically and ecologically productive, administrators administering health and justice. Walter was moving through networks of existing contacts, religious brethren, administrative colleagues and like-​ minded settlers, tying these people together into a new socio-​technical network of weather observation. The larger stations would be staffed by BEAMS personnel, with Mr Riley for example being deposited in Uganda to supervise the construction of a weather station at Kololo Hill. But the service remained reliant on the cooperation of other government employees or volunteers, and the emerging meteorological infrastructure thus had a spatiality shaped by existing administrative geographies, by Walter’s personal and religious connections and by the desires of others to use the practice of weather observation in educational and disciplinary projects.48 Pratt develops the concept of the anti-​conquest in relation to the naturalist-​explorers of preceding years of European expansion and colonial role. The anti-​conquest is a means of ‘narrating inland travel and exploration aimed not at the discovery of trade routes, but at territorial surveillance, appropriation of resources, and administrative control’. Through representational strategies of scientific objectivity, ‘European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony’.49 Walter’s safari travelogues offer many elements of the anti-​conquest narrative form. His search for both widely representative and singular samples of local climate, and his figuring of climate as a potential resource for agricultural exploitation, is narrated in a form which oscillates between the practice and rhetoric of scientific objectivity and the extension and rationalisation of colonial administration. The administrators he meets he casts in heroic terms, but heroic in the genre of anti-​conquest. They are self-​effacing, self-​sacrificing servants of the colonial mission, rather than gallant conquerors. He praises the ‘courage and self-​sacrifice’ of road inspectors, and relates the particular pride he feels in the wives of colonial officers, in the ‘women of our generation exiled from all the amenities of European [ 185 ]

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civilization’.50 Here the innocence of the anti-​conquest is extended beyond the seeing and writing subject, to the administrative kin he encounters on his safaris. In so doing, he places himself in their company, seemingly wanting to boast of his own contribution to this anti-​conquest, but the inherent self-​effacement of the genre perhaps preventing him from doing so. The official account of the safari was sent to the UK Meteorological Office and a copy also reached the Colonial Office. However, the report’s narrative form was greeted with puzzlement in London. One official dismissed it as a ‘library pamphlet’, while others in the Colonial Office decided it would ‘not be desirable to send a copy to the [Air Ministry] who will be likely to enquire why they have not yet been supplied with the scientific data’.51 As Felix Driver has shown, narrative accounts of internal exploration played an important role in colonial administration in the nineteenth century.52 Walter’s representation of his own mobile practices was self-​consciously situated within this tradition. During his safaris Walter sought out the landmarks of an early culture of exploration, revelling in the romance of the town of Livingstone, seeking out the site of the Livingstone–​Stanley meeting and delighting in the company of the relatives of deceased explorers. But if this engagement with a culture of exploration shaped Walter’s own mobility narratives, they were seemingly interpreted as rather anachronistic texts by officials in London, contributing little in themselves towards the administration of the East African colonies.

Taking to the air The Walters were celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary following a visit to the Kondoa-​Irangi mission post when they learned of the loss of the airship R101 in northern France. The vessel had laboured under the weight not only of a cadre of government ministers, civil servants and many of Britain’s aviation experts eager to demonstrate the ship’s ability to reach India, but also hopes for a new system of imperial airship transport which would throw an all-​red girdle around the globe and bring the far-​flung empire into closer communion. Its loss bought to an end Britain’s fitful forays into airship technology and helped cement the place of heavier-​than-​air craft at the centre of an emerging imperial aeromobility. The first flight on the Cape–​Cairo route was completed in 1919, but it was not until the mid-​1920s that serious efforts at route reconnaissance began. Flights by Alan Cobham in 1925 and 1927 emphasised the imperial romance of the airborne version of Cecil Rhodes’s all-​red fantasy of trans-​African transport. Fears of foreign ‘contamination’ of the emerging all-​red route,53 with [ 186 ]

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the French and the Belgians beginning to explore Africa’s skyways, meant that Cobham’s adventures were soon followed by the more mundane tasks of producing airspace: surveying landing grounds, planning logistical support and developing a meteorological infrastructure. Tensions began to emerge between the imperial plans emanating from the metropole, and local (i.e. settler) interests in the African colonies. In East Africa, Wilson Airways emerged as potential local competition to Imperial Airways, while Cobham and the Blackburn Aeroplane Company, with the support of the East African governments, aimed to start up a regular service between Khartoum and Kisumu. By 1929, however, the Air Ministry had persuaded Cobham and Blackburn to submerge their interests into the designated empire carrier, and local pretenders to the imperial crown took on a more diminished role as branch-​line auxiliaries to the imperial trunk routes.54 December 1931 saw the first dispatch of mail down this ‘contested African airway’, with the much-​ delayed regular passenger service commencing in January 1932.55 As aviation steadily became a new norm for long-​distance travel, Walter increasingly took to the air to inspect his far-​flung stations and to distribute equipment where roads posed too many hazards to delicate barometers and thermometers. With Kenya’s settler community being, according to one historian, ‘air enthusiasts almost from the start’, there was no shortage of pilots available in Nairobi to deliver paying passengers to the many airfields which were emerging across the region, and to feed local residents into the imperial network.56 Regular inspection of isolated meteorological stations was an important part of the job of the director of meteorological services in a number of colonial settings. The roving, disciplining eye of the boss was intended to keep observers on their toes, the ever-​present ‘chance of being found out’ ensuring that instruments were correctly maintained, observations made on time and records scrupulously kept.57 There was always a racial politics to this  –​in the East African service, a tripartite hierarchy of ‘Europeans’, ‘Asiatics’ and ‘Africans’ was maintained, with employees in the latter category unable to advance beyond the level of Observer, with the category of ‘Meteorologist’ reserved for Europeans. Bereft of training opportunities to advance further, Observers were subjected to rigorous surveillance of the tasks they were permitted to perform:  ‘with the African and Asiatic observers it was essential to maintain strict supervision’, Walter recalled.58 In British Malaya, where regular inspection proved difficult in the early years of the service, numerous observers and assistants were sacked ‘in circumstances which in all probability would never have arisen, had proper inspection been possible’.59 Assistants were fined and sanctioned for returning [ 187 ]

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incomplete records to headquarters, or if their station was found to be untidy or, worse, unmanned. However, it was not simply non-​European staff who attracted the distrust of their seniors. Mr Riley appears in Walter’s writings as an almost comedic figure, introduced somewhat derogatorily as having ‘held a degree of an Irish University’ and who, despite being ‘a charming young man to work with’, was prone to absent-​mindedness: while the safari team were setting up an observatory at Chukwani Palace in Zanzibar, for instance, Riley tried to help things along by stirring the quick lime with his bare hands, leaving himself badly burned. Although he was often Walter’s right-​hand man in the social work of enrolling volunteers into the expanding meteorological network, he was nonetheless to prove ‘a very inefficient meteorologist and administrator when left in charge of a Territory’,60 and he was sacked shortly after taking on the responsibility for observations in Uganda. Far from the controlling gaze of the Nairobi headquarters, even with Walter being increasingly airborne, the Ugandan part of the service continued to function as something of a rogue element, with unreliable observations, instruments going missing and even physical violence occasionally breaking out between the local staff. As well as the relative efficiency which flight offered Walter as he sought to maintain a disciplinary eye on his volatile observational network, he also relished the opportunities of regular short flights to gain ‘first hand experience of the real drama of the atmosphere’, which were ‘certainly the best way for a meteorologist to learn something of the vast forces controlling the weather’. The trips pushed both his analytics and poetics in new directions: When we shot up through the cloud layer into the brilliant sunshine above, I always felt that I was in fairyland skimming over a sea of pure white iridescent foam with the tiny ring of rainbow-​tinted reflection following us like Titania’s crown, and the plane full of Puckish gremlins who sometimes played wicked little tricks on us, but always seemed to pull us out of trouble in the end.61

Along with his aesthetic eye trained on the dramatic skyscapes in which he was now immersed, Walter took with him instruments of measurement, producing new analyses of temperature and pressure gradients as he rose and sank in the small plane he chartered from a local aviator. Like his earlier experiences on the lake, the elemental exposure to the atmosphere offered opportunities to construct new knowledge of the East African atmosphere. Yet the surety of navigation required for reliable observation in this new vertical, atmospheric field was often hard to come by, whether due to the ‘Puckish gremlins’ inhabiting 1930s aeroplanes, or to the sparse provisions of the broader [ 188 ]

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informational infrastructure of flight.62 Walter’s trips frequently ended with forced landings as the way was lost and fuel ran short. This was an era and place where navigational aids to flyers were scarce, and orientation frequently relied on the aids provided for that slightly more mature form of mobility  –​the car. While in more automotive countries roadmaps proved useful for aviators trying to find their way, on one flight Walter and Grinstead, one of Nairobi’s pilots-​for-​hire, landed on a flat piece of land to check the road signs for directions, while the District Commissioner marshalled some locals to come and clear the road for take-​off. District Commissioners frequently came to the rescue, sending cars to pick up the stricken Walter when planes had not delivered him to his destination. On another occasion, a lost Walter and Captain M. C. P. Mostert –​his favoured pilot, latterly of the South African Air Force  –​circled above a mission post while Walter threw down bits of paper bearing requests that the fathers lay out bedsheets on the ground to form an arrow pointing the way home. Native geographies were also drawn upon, hybridised with aerial way-​finding in roadside encounters by the stranded plane: We had no sooner landed than a crowd of natives gathered round us. Mostert placed a chart of the area on the ground and by questioning the natives as to the direction of certain towns marked on the chart and drawing lines in the directions indicated by them he was able to ascertain, by the intersection of the lines, that we were about 30 miles to the north east of Lake Nyasa.63

The same crowd then helped clear the road for take-​off, and their destination of Mbeya was reached with a dribble of fuel to spare. These stories of aerial derring-​do, when offered for an official audience back in London, were somewhat counterintuitively framed as examples of the ‘safety of flying over these regions of Africa’.64 Despite the frequency of forced landings and fuel shortages, the argument was that no actual harm was ever experienced, and that the good-​natured assistance of those encountered on the ground meant that the aviator could always expect to reach their final destination one way or another. In these early days of colonial aeromobility, the socio-​technical infrastructure which kept machines flying was less the assemblage of expertise and technology that would emerge later,65 and more a motley of chance encounters, improvised knowledges and the assistance of strangers. From the jaws of peril Walter reports snatching lessons in atmospheric geography, adding regions like the Mau Escarpment to his red list of atmospheric danger zones, which already included Lake Victoria following his earlier waterborne encounter with its unique micro-​ climate. This list would go on to shape the organisation of [ 189 ]

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point-​to-​point weather reports delivered to pilots as they made their way across British East Africa. By 1935 Walter’s meteorological network was moving data around with sufficient speed to enable the production of a daily synoptic weather chart for the region. Rather than just offering descriptions of the weather at specific points, the met service could now collate this point data into a wider picture of atmospheric conditions, from which could be read an indication of future weather.66 In 1935 Walter could issue Imperial Airways with early-​morning forecasts for heavy thunder showers in the afternoon, claiming an accuracy rate of up to 90 per cent. However, the competition between aviation and agriculture as the focus of meteorological efforts continued throughout Walter’s tenure. He viewed it as important that the colonial state should monopolise the production and dissemination of meteorological intelligence, to avoid the competition between state and private services which had arisen in South America67 and to ‘oppose strongly any attempt to establish independent organisations to serve foreign trunk services’.68 Yet he regretted how much the production and territorialisation of airspace consumed the activities of the service, to the detriment of agricultural meteorology –​ his main interest since his days in Mauritius. Colonial meteorology in this period had become an infrastructural science, to use Turner’s term, concerned primarily with supporting imperial aeromobility through the enactment of various mobilities upon which aviation was contingent –​movements of instruments and personnel into new locations; rapid and regular movements of data; the roving, disciplining eye of the service director. With this emphasis on movement and mobility, the slow, static work of studying plants and their micro-​climates, of constructing a statistics of place, was squeezed out of the practical grasp of the colonial meteorologist.69

Conclusion Organised, regularised forms of mobility depend upon a number of underlying systems  –​‘infrastructural moorings’ and ‘contingent mobilities’ –​upon which broader systems rest and depend. New forms of imperial aeromobility in the interwar period depended on making colonial atmospheres knowable and traversable spaces. A  new ‘constellation of mobilities’ took shape, a constellation consisting of a ‘fragile entanglement of physical movement, the socially shared meanings ascribed to such movement, and the experienced and embodied practice of movement’.70 Like forms of terrestrial exploration beforehand, this production of colonial airspace rested on new geographies of knowledge and knowledge-​making. Walter’s safaris erected the moorings [ 190 ]

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of new imperial aeromobilities, in the form of new weather stations, standardised instruments and immobile (but not necessarily reliable) observers. Imperial aeromobility was contingent not only on the technology and economics of commercial flight, but on the incessant circulation of information and data rendered usable as weather forecasts, and on the mobilities of figures like Walter in the establishment and maintenance of complex, socially and technically heterodox infrastructures like the BEAMS. But these mobilities were also practised and narrated as a novel kind of exploration, familiarising Walter with East Africa’s climates and with its settler societies to which his service was accountable. His narration of these mobilities betrays how he understood his emergent relationships with the East African colonies, their peoples, landscapes and skyscapes. His employment of the narrative tropes of exploration and anti-​conquest illuminate how these administrative and scientific mobilities were made meaningful for Walter, placing them both discursively and materially within a history of British exploration and colonial rule. Yet despite these continuities, this episode also presents ruptures, the imperial move into the air inviting historians of empire to think anew about the elemental geographies of European expansion. ‘Airs blow through different imaginations, scientific experiments, and technological assemblages, lifting thoughts, hopes, wings, and bodies.’71 The history of meteorology and the making of airspace provide propitious sites to understand how this conjunction of the elemental, the imaginative, the scientific and the technological played out in the making of imperial mobilities.

Notes 1 The most useful overview of British imperial aviation is provided by G. Pirie, Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–​39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). For a trans-​ imperial perspective, see D. R. Headrick, Power over Peoples:  Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 2 See, for example, F. Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (London: Wiley, 2000); P. Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–​1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); B. M. Bennett and J. M. Hodge (eds), Science and Empire:  Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–​1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 3 L. Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace:  1922–​ 1937 (Montreal:  McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 17–​18. 4 R. Turner, ‘Weathering Heights:  The Emergence of Aeronautical Meteorology as an Infrastructural Science’ (PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2010); M.  Henry, ‘Australasian airspace: meteorology, and the practical geopolitics of Australasian airspace, 1935–​1940’, in J. Beattie, E. O’Gorman and M. Henry (eds), Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 233–​50.

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Empire and mobility 5 The classic study of the knowledge infrastructures behind contemporary climate science is P. N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Historical and usually ‘national’ cultures of atmospheric knowledge-​making have been well elucidated by V. Janković, Reading the Skies:  A Cultural History of the English Weather, 1650–​1820 (Chicago:  Chicago University Press, 2000); J. R. Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–​ 1870 (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); K. Anderson, Predicting the Weather:  Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); F. Locher, Le Savant et la tempête: étudier l’atmosphère et prévoir le temps au XIXe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). 6 On aeromobilities in general, see P. Adey, Aerial Life:  Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell,  2010). 7 Important work has been done on how the possibilities of aerial surveillance and airpower were enrolled into projects of colonial rule and subjugation. See, for example, P. Adey, M. Whitehead and A. Williams (eds), From Above: War, Violence and Verticality (London: Hurst, 2013). 8 T. Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28:1 (2010), 17–​31. 9 S. Gray, ‘Fuelling mobility: coal and Britain’s naval power, c. 1870–​1914’, Journal of Historical Geography, 58 (2017), 92–​103. 10 Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry, ‘Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and moorings’, Mobilities, 1:1 (2006), 1–​22. 11 Georgine Clarsen, ‘Introduction:  Special section on settler-​ colonial mobilities’, Transfers, 5:3 (2015), 41–​8. 12 R. M. Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1993). 13 M. A. Doel, Geographies of Violence (London: Sage, 2017). 14 See P. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (London: Semiotexte, 2009). 15 M. Mahony, ‘For an empire of “all types of climate”:  meteorology as an imperial science’, Journal of Historical Geography, 51 (2016), 29–​39. 16 M. Mahony, ‘The “genie of the storm”:  cyclonic reasoning and the spaces of weather observation in the southern Indian Ocean, 1851–​1925’, British Journal for the History of Science, 51:4 (2018), 607–​33. 17 On the nineteenth-​century ‘magnetic crusade’, see J. Cawood, ‘The magnetic crusade: science and politics in early Victorian Britain’, Isis, 70:4 (1979), 492–​518. On links to meteorology, see S. Naylor and M. Goodman, ‘Atmospheric empire: historical geographies of meteorology at the colonial observatories’, in M. Mahony and S. Randalls (eds), Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination: Placing Atmospheric Knowledges (Pittsburgh, PA:  University of Pittsburgh Press 2020), pp. 25–42. 18 Director of the Indian Meteorological Department C.  W. B.  Normand, quoted in ‘Air observatories: meteorologists and flying’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (5 August 1929). 19 Sir Alan Cobham, KBE, Australia and Back (London: A&C Black, 1926), p. 71. 20 F. Williamson, ‘Weathering the empire: meteorological research in the early British straits settlements’, British Journal for the History of Science, 48:3 (2015), 475–​92. 21 The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), CO 273/​541/​1, Sir George Maxwell and Herbert C. Robinson, ‘A Meteorological Department for Malaya’. 22 See also F. Williamson and C. Wilkinson, ‘Asian extremes: experience, exchange and meteorological knowledge in Hong Kong and Singapore c. 1840–​1939’, History of Meteorology, 8 (2017), 159–​78. 23 Arkib Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (hereafter ANM), 1957/​ 0398837, memorandum from the British Advisor, Kedah to Abdul Hamid Halim Shah, Sultan of Kedah, 27 June 1927. 24 TNA, CO 822/​8/​9, G. C. Simpson, ‘Memorandum on the proposal to form an East African Meteorological Service’, 1928.

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Reading the skies, writing mobility 25 J. M.  Kenworthy, ‘Albert Walter, OBE (1877–​1972), Meteorologist in the Colonial Service, Part I:  His Early Life and Work in Mauritius’, Occasional Papers on Meteorological History 12 (Reading: Royal Meteorological Society, 2012). 26 Walter struggled with the decision to leave his primarily meteorological duties in Mauritius for what was initially a more generally statistical vocation in East Africa, but took the post as it was made clear to him that turning it down would prohibit his prospects for future advancement. He therefore makes for an interesting study in ‘imperial careering’. See D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire:  Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 27 P. N. Lehmann, ‘Whither climatology? Brückner’s climate oscillations, data debates, and dynamic climatology’, History of Meteorology, 7 (2015), 49–​70. 28 R. L. McCormack, ‘Imperialism, air transport and colonial development:  Kenya, 1920–​46’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17:3 (1989), 374–​95. 29 M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 30 E. Watkins, Oscar from Africa: The Biography of Oscar Ferris Watkins, 1877–​1943 (London: Radcliffe Press, 1995). 31 Oxford University Commonwealth and African Collections, Oxford, MSS Brit. Emp. r.  9–​10, A.  Walter, ‘Echoes of a Vanishing Empire, Being the Memoirs of a Meteorologist and Civil Servant in the Colonial Empire, 1897–​1947’, p. 140. 32 Ibid., p. 197. 33 Ibid., p. 198. 34 A. Walter, ‘Note on the Storm on Victoria Nyanza, May 18th–​ 19th, 1930’ (Nairobi: British East African Meteorological Service, 1930). 35 P. Merriman, ‘Mobilities II:  cruising’, Progress in Human Geography, 40:4 (2016), p. 557. See also P. Adey, Air: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2014). 36 A growing body of work is examining the role of the human body in the observational practices associated with exploration and territorial surveying, scientific expeditioning and understandings of human health and disease. See D. G. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed:  Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000); K. Matson, ‘ “The ozone of patriotism”: meteorology, electricity, and the body in the nineteenth-​century Yellowstone region’, History of Meteorology, 8 (2017), 35–​53; D. Outram, ‘On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation, and Enlightenment exploration’, in D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), pp. 281–​94; C. T. Wolfe and O. Gal (eds), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge:  Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010). 37 Walter, ‘Echoes’, pp. 199–​200. 38 TNA, BJ 5/​19, ‘Report of the Conference of Empire Meteorologists’ (London: HMSO, 1929), p. 65. 39 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 200. 40 Ibid., pp. 186, 246. 41 J. Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) p. 125. 42 A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), quoted in Urry, Mobilities, p. 126. S. O’Connell, The Car and British society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–​1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); P. Merriman, Driving Spaces:  A Cultural-​ Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2007). 43 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 245. 44 Ibid., pp. 208–​9. 45 Ibid., p. 210. 46 Ibid., p. 215. 47 Turner, ‘Weathering Heights’. 48 For an account of the role of disciplinary tactics and racial politics in the production of meteorological knowledge in India, see Anderson, Predicting the Weather, ch. 6.

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Empire and mobility 9 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 9, 38. 4 50 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 206. 51 TNA, CO 822/​42/​14, Notes accompanying A. Walter, ‘Report on a Journey through East and Central Africa in Connection with the Organisation of the British East African Meteorological Service’, 1932. 52 Driver, Geography Militant, pp. 83–​6. 53 Pirie, Air Empire, p. 96 54 Ibid., p.  162; McCormack, ‘Imperialism, air transport and colonial development’, p. 380. 55 Pirie, Air Empire, p. 165. 56 McCormack, ‘Imperialism, air transport and colonial development’, p. 383. 57 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 331. 58 Ibid., p. 291. 59 ANM, 1957/​0403879, C. D. Stewart, ‘Memorandum on Meteorological Branch’. 60 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 193. 61 Ibid., p. 247. 62 Kohler and Vetter observe that for historians of science, verticality ‘is a key emerging concept for thinking about place in the field. Whereas a horizontal view takes students of place across airy landscapes of towns, forests, farms and ranches, the vertical view upward or downward takes us away from human habitation into depths and heights in which no one lives (for long) yet which are vital to global economy and polity.’ Disciplines like meteorology nonetheless challenge conventional definitions of the scientific ‘field’, being of necessity ‘sciences on the move’. In such a reading, the field ‘is thus a category of people and things in place and in motion’. See R. E. Kohler and J. Vetter, ‘The field’, in B. Lightman (ed.), A Companion to the History of Science (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016), pp. 286–​7. Original emphasis. 63 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 251. 64 National Meteorological Archive, Exeter, Y17.F2, A.  Walter, ‘Report on a Journey by Air over the British East African Territories’ (Nairobi:  The British East African Meteorological Service), p. 4. 65 See Adey, Aerial Life; Urry, Mobilities, ch. 7. 66 Janković narrates a similar process of networking in eighteenth-​century England, where weather as an object of study transitioned from being considered primarily in its relation to place and local distinctiveness, to being approached as a local manifestation of global processes. See Janković, Reading the Skies. 67 See G. T. Cushman, ‘The struggle over airways in the Americas, 1919–​1945: atmospheric science, aviation technology, and neocolonialism’, in J. R. Fleming, V. Janković and D. R. Coen (eds), Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2006), pp. 175–​222. 68 Walter, ‘Echoes’, p. 324. 69 A similar argument is made concerning US aviation and meteorology in Turner, ‘Weathering Heights’. 70 Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, p.  18; M.-​P. Kwan and T. Schwanen, ‘Geographies of mobility’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106:2 (2016), p. 244. 71 Merriman, ‘Mobilities II: cruising’, p. 557.

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C HAP T E R T E N

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Grounded: the limits of British imperial aeromobility Liz Millward

In 1929 Sir Charles Wakefield, long-​time financial backer of British aviation and owner of the Castrol Oil company, wrote that ‘we are not yet by any means a nation of air-​travellers, but we are beginning to be air-​minded’.1 During the interwar period promoters of British imperial aviation such as Wakefield tried to build national air-​mindedness up into a notion of imperial aeromobility, or what Gordon Pirie calls ‘flying imperially’.2 The latter was a form of spatial imaginary: it was a set of ideas about the meaning and role of flying within the British Empire that changed practices and behaviour.3 It was supposed to deliver air control, new forms of tourism, international harmony and even white women’s independence, as well as reorient relations of time and space. However, these dreams of British imperial aeromobility were undercut by the messy materiality of flights, pilots and passengers being ‘grounded’ in two senses:  they could be prevented from flying for a myriad of reasons, and they were embedded in ground-​based networks. Air-​mindedness was a necessary precursor to imperial aeromobility. Scott Palmer proposes distinguishing between the terms ‘air-​minded’ and ‘air-​ mindedness’. He suggests that the term ‘air-​ mindedness’ should be used in reference to the particular set of cultural traditions, symbols, and markers that, combined with existing political culture and social institutions, constitute a given nation’s response to the airplane. Defined in this manner, ‘air-​minded’ retains its accustomed meaning as the semantic equivalent of ‘enthusiastic about flight’, whereas ‘air-​ mindedness’ is used to communicate the specific historical factors that revealed, expressed, and produced that enthusiasm.4

In this sense, ‘air-​mindedness’ refers to a spatial imaginary about the meaning and purpose of flight and includes the infrastructure and institutions that facilitate the development of flying. Air-​mindedness [ 195 ]

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consolidated and built on the enthusiasm associated with flight. Different authors date the beginning of air-​ minded populations to different periods, depending on the national context. Palmer argues that the flight of the Frenchman Louis Blériot over the English Channel in 1909 stimulated air-​minded interest in Russia. Gordon Pirie identifies the tireless efforts of Alan Cobham, following his pioneering flights to India, Australia, Africa and back in the mid-​1920s, as the motor force that helped make the British an air-​minded population. Joseph Corn suggests that in the USA Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and the enormous media hype surrounding it generated widespread enthusiasm for flying as part of the national culture.5 To be air-​ minded suggested an attitude which communicated a modern sensibility but did not necessarily change behaviour, except perhaps in the choosing of brands which marketed themselves as linked to aviation. For example, to be air-​minded might have meant visiting the Selfridges department store when in London to see Alan Cobham’s aeroplane, on show there in 1926.6 It might have meant an excursion to Hendon Aerodrome to see the RAF go through their paces in an air display.7 Thus members of the public were encouraged to be air-​ minded, but that did not mean they took Hillman Airways or Imperial Airways (the British Empire’s flagship airline which commenced service in 1924) instead of the boat train to Paris, and they certainly still took the train within Britain. What Wakefield wanted British imperial inhabitants to develop was what he termed a ‘geographical imagination’ in order to comprehend the way in which ‘access to the air has completely revolutionised our world position’.8 Combining common themes of imagining peaceful cooperation of aerial nations brought closer together via flight while simultaneously preparing for air warfare, Wakefield remarked that ‘increasing air travel should provide one of the strongest motives for the final outlawry of war. Nevertheless, we do need to consider the patriotic reasons for encouraging air progress within our great Empire.’9 Specifically, tighter links and the fresh ‘geographical imagination’ would supposedly strengthen imperial subjects’ sense that they shared a common and unique purpose. It would help them see what he assumed was the value in remaining within and committed to the British Empire. Sir Philip Sassoon noted that ‘sea communities built up the British Empire; air communications must preserve it’.10 Sir Harry Brittain, meanwhile, fretted that ‘delay in this matter might prove dangerous from the British point of view, for the foreigner is continually casting covetous eyes on this great region [of India and Africa] and its innumerable air possibilities’. He ominously warned that progress in establishing air [ 196 ]

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communications should be speeded up if possible, because ‘all should remember that the foreigner has every intention of anticipating our efforts whenever he can’.11 Cobham sounded a similar alarm, encouraging the readers of his book Skyways to ‘remember too it is vital to the safety of the nation that Britain should become a nation of aviators. In matters of defence, we live on an island no longer.’12 Collectively, then, such pronouncements drew attention to the need to harness aviation to the execution of an imperial vision. In other words, they promoted aeromobility. Aeromobility, with its incorporation of the word mobility, translated an air-​minded attitude into a spatial imaginary. A spatial imaginary is a mental map ‘representing a space to which people relate and with which they identify. They are collectively shared internal worlds of thoughts and beliefs that structure everyday life.’13 Aeromobility as a spatial imaginary meant a change in practice in order to go by air, whether as a passenger, a government agent, some cargo or a piece of first-​class airmail. As Cobham put it in the conclusion of Skyways, ‘the coming generation will think aviationally and will take to flying as an everyday means of progression’.14 In considering contemporary aeromobility, Saulo Cwerner breaks it down into three specific components, each of which was in play during the development of imperial aeromobility.15 The first component is altitude, which includes both the aerial view  –​a form of perspective that reorients one’s sense of location in the world  –​and the ability to gain access to otherwise inaccessible locations by air. The second component is speed, with its associated time-​ space compression and time-​ space distanciation. Time-​space compression and the so-​called annihilation of space by time refers to the way that changes in modes of transportation –​specifically mechanisation –​made places seem closer together in space because they could be reached more quickly than before. Time-​ space distanciation explains that speedier forms of transportation made stretching out relations (such as economic, political or personal relations) across space more feasible.16 The final element of aeromobility is a readiness to fly, or aeromobility habitus.17 During the interwar period, when flying was expensive and exclusive, this habitus was elitist and associated with those who were youthful, technologically advanced and forward-​looking. Imperial aeromobility incorporated these components of aeromobility into the framework of British imperialism, fostering the illusion of a natural hierarchy with willing ‘savages’ providing service under the supervision and direction of technologically superior metropolitan officers. In other words, ‘airborne mobility itself expressed imperialism’ and ‘flying became an imperial performance’.18 Typical [ 197 ]

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of such thinking was the claim made by the Air Annual of the British Empire in 1929, that the ‘London–​India air route is the longest organised passenger service in the world, and its development has been entirely brought about by British capital, enterprise and labour’.19 Here British innovation was able to sustain the longest route and the specificity of Karachi, the actual terminus of the service, was elided in favour of the entire subcontinent, opened up by British enterprise. But to effect such a spatial imaginary of imperial aeromobility, flying had –​to some extent  –​to appear frictionless. Speed and elitism were combined to present imperial aeromobility as an exclusive mode of transportation which was the deeply desirable pinnacle of civilisation. A network of men and women actively worked at defining and promoting this concept of imperial aeromobility and its illusion of free aerial passage as a benefit of British imperialism. Toys such as Meccano and Dinky Toys, cigarette cards, campaigns run through youth groups such as the Boy Scouts and organisations’ magazines, such as Air (the magazine of the Air League of the British Empire) and the Woman Engineer (the magazine of the Women’s Engineering Society), all undertook this promotional work. Books such as The Romance of Flight, From India to England by Air, Australia and Back, The Bluebird’s Flight and Imperial Air Routes gave accounts of flights within and across the British Empire and all promoted the idea of a new mobile empire.20 Typical of these texts was the foreword written in 1935 by Frances Shelmerdine, Director-​General of Civil Aviation from 1931 to 1941, to The Romance of Flight by Captain Norman Macmillan. ‘The part which aviation will play in the development of the British Empire is more and more evident each year and it is, therefore, important that every boy and girl in our Empire should grow up possessing a knowledge of civil aviation.’21 The Women’s Engineering Society held speakers’ series on the idea of a new, mobile, airborne empire that provided opportunities for particular women. During their final meeting in their series of aviation debates for the 1935 spring season Pauline Gower, who went on to head the Women’s Division of the Air Transport Auxiliary, ‘emphasised the importance of encouraging air-​mindedness among the young, and suggested that flying over foreign countries was a more practical way of learning geography than studying it at school’.22 Macmillan pointed out that ‘the chief value of flying is to save time’, which would not only aid businesses –​he predicted accurately enough that ‘the time will come when no business man will be able to afford to travel by a slower route’ –​but that the ‘speeding up of the mails will make the British people all over the world into one big family’.23 [ 198 ]

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Imperial Airways conducted publicity campaigns throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s to promote imperial aeromobility. Their potential passenger base was tiny, and so C. F. Bill Snowden Gamble, publicity manager for Imperial Airways from 1931, fostered a ‘wider intellectual vision’ in which Imperial Airways would ‘blend art, education and technology, enabling every citizen to become “a true democrat”. This did not mean everyone travelling on his aircraft, but Imperial could make a huge difference … Gamble saw it as Imperial’s task to help develop the visual language of an emerging international psychology.’24 Given that Imperial Airways was not competitive with other flagship airlines, this approach sold intangible qualities rather than the concrete promise of reliable or rapid service. In addition to such airline publicity, a number of films were also produced that were intended to demonstrate and promote imperial aviation. Pirie notes the emphasis on ethnographic images in these films, in which ‘aeronautical talent and capacity was depicted as elevating and reinvigorating the British imperial order. Empire was seen as continuing to subsume or transform the foreign and the inferior.’25 Scott Anthony and Oliver Green, meanwhile, point out that ‘like the contemporary Soviet propaganda films of the “Five year plan in four years” era, the Imperial Airways films of the 1930s carry a frenetic development message that sees the aeroplane succeeding the elephant track’.26 One of the main organisations involved in promoting imperial aeromobility was the Air League of the British Empire. The Air League, an aviation propaganda group, was formed in 1909 as the Aerial League of the British Empire. After just three months the Air League and the other two British aeronautical societies in existence at that time decided to divvy up their lobbying efforts. The oldest, the Aeronautical Society, founded in 1866, would be responsible for scientific questions; sport would be the focus of the Aero Club, founded in 1901; and the Air League of the British Empire would cover ‘patriotic and education matters’.27 Like other patriotic leagues the Air League suffered a dramatic loss of income during the First World War and in the postwar period it cast around both for a renewed sense of purpose and a solution to its financial woes.28 In a brief history of the Air League written in 1929 for the first Air Annual of the British Empire, itself at 700-​odd pages a hefty lobbying effort by British aeronautical manufacturers masked as a reference work, the Duke of Sutherland acknowledged the series of failed postwar attempts to increase the power and reach of the Air League as it had attempted to recover from wartime setbacks.29 It was struggling to redefine its goals in the new political, economic and cultural [ 199 ]

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context of the postwar period. The Air League’s members could not rouse enough influential interest in their cause, any more than they could persuade the common people to embrace the need for a well-​ subsidised aviation sector. After all, war-​weary citizens were hostile to suggestions that the defence budget should be increased to support the Royal Air Force, and subsidies to civil aviation were ruled out, most famously by Winston Churchill, who said that British airlines would have to fly by themselves (he directed government funding to military aviation in the immediate postwar period).30 Nevertheless, after some dogged propaganda work with the Boy Scouts, offset by a failure to get their materials into London County Council schools,31 the Air League set up a joint committee with the other two aviation societies in 1926 to re-​evaluate their goals. The following May of 1927 saw them all operating with renewed vigour, and the Air League had yet another new Secretary in Brigadier-​General Percy R. C. Groves for an initial one-​year, unsalaried position. He restructured the Air League to concentrate on publicity, including the production of leaflets and materials to accompany public talks and lantern-​slide lectures. He also created an office dedicated to increasing the number of subscriptions. The Air League’s stated aims were now to work towards a strong air force, the full development of British civil and commercial aviation and to promote research into aeronautics. The Air League claimed that the achievement of these goals would provide security and prosperity within the British Empire. At the end of 1927, the Air League also replaced its free Bulletin with a new monthly magazine called Air, for which Groves served as editor from 1927 to 1929. From its inception women took an active role in the League, forming a Women’s Aerial League as a companion to the Young Aerial League. In June 1928, after the restructuring, they formed their own Women’s Committee, whose members took to the lecture platform in order to give speeches to promote Empire interconnectedness through aviation. Lady Mary Bailey, Lady Mary Heath and Amy Johnson all gave such talks. The latter, for example, provided a ‘Links of Empire’ talk at a lunch organised in December 1930 by the Rt. Hon. the Viscountess Elibank. Women also wrote articles on empire aviation for Air. Titles such as the ‘Air Way to India’, ‘Aspects of the Desert Air Service’, ‘Joyous Air Travel’, ‘Real Air Freedom: Three Thousand Miles in Ten Days’ and ‘Africa from the Air:  Unlimited Empire Opportunities’, give a sense of the typical approach: air travel as a form of access to resources and freedom. The Women’s Committee itself was the idea of the Viscountess Elibank, who had already organised aviation-​related events at various London women’s clubs. She decided that ‘some central body of women would be required to focus their activities, their [ 200 ]

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interest, and their hospitality in the spheres of aviation alongside the men’.32 This Committee was initially chaired by Lady Heath, then by Lady Bailey, whose various record-​ breaking flights had been reported in British newspapers. It also included other successful women pilots, such as Winifred Brown and Winifred Spooner; significant establishment figures, such as the Duchess of Sutherland and Lady Shelley-​ Rolls; and women who were married to some of the most influential men involved in aviation, such as Lady Cobham (wife of Sir Alan Cobham) and, perhaps most notably, the Hon. Mrs Forbes-​Sempill. She was the wife of Colonel the Master of Sempill, who was Chairman of the (by now) Royal Aeronautical Society and sat on the Executive Committee of the Air League. He was a tireless advocate of aviation as a means to consolidate British imperial and domestic power, views which he extolled in his 1931 book The Air and the Plain Man. He also wrote aviation columns for the Saturday Review, which was owned by the fascist Lady Houston, known in aviation circles because she bankrolled the first flight over Mount Everest in 1931. Sempill’s wife was noted for her equal level of commitment. One article in Air noted that she was ‘one of the most successful members of the Women’s Committee in arousing interest in the work of the League’.33 Another observer commented that ‘nothing could exceed the aptitude for organisation displayed by’ her.34 A reprinted extract from an article on Sempill in The Aeroplane was accompanied by an exclamation that ‘he and his wife between them (taking into consideration all that the Hon. Mrs. Forbes-​Sempill has done for the Air League and the Forum Club as well as for the R.Ae.S) have been the chief energisers of British Aviation of late’.35 Sutherland claimed that as a result of these changes and because the organisation now had a more clearly defined focus, the Air League grew in influence. Members of Parliament, Indian princes and celebrity flyers joined a substantially increased membership, which was in part bolstered by a competition to boost the number of members.36 Affiliates could be found in Canada, India, East and South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and even Japan.37 In addition, the Air League undertook a vigorous publicity campaign, writing articles, providing exhibition flights and leafleting at air pageants. Some of their activities also gave free publicity to Imperial Airways. For example, in 1928 the Air League arranged for the airline to moor one of its flying boats on the Thames very close to the House of Commons and invited various government officials and MPs to view the aircraft. In 1936 the Air League created a series of lectures on ‘Linking the Empire by Air’, which featured Imperial Airways.38 [ 201 ]

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Although the vision of imperial aeromobility promoted in these ways was quite extensive, it had some specific elements. Mass air tourism was still a long way off, but men like Norman Macmillan and Harry Brittain were keen to promote its possibilities. The Air Travellers’ Guide to Europe, by Macmillan, provided itineraries and information on cost in order to start armchair passengers off on their imaginary journeys, although in his case these remained within Europe rather than venturing further afield into the British Empire. In By Air, Brittain wrote of looking at his air ABC guide, which tempted him with possible air routes:  ‘The whole world begins to spread before the eyes as the routes of Imperial Airways are detailed … I can wander through the bazaar of the Mouski in Cairo and then proceed to the temples of Luxor’, he wrote, adding that ‘all the time I  shall be flying British. I  shall be seated in one of those marvellous steel monsters which comprise the great air fleet of Imperial Airways.’39 The potential to be delayed, inconvenienced or –​at worst –​killed in an accident was glossed over. Even Captain Gordon P. Olley, an airline pilot whose A Million Miles in the Air chronicled his often hair-​ raising experiences flying for a civilian airline in the 1920s and 1930s, managed to underplay the contemporary risks and barriers involved in excursions by air.40 Air tourism applied generally to the whole population, but imperial aeromobility would also, apparently, enhance white women’s independence. C.  Griff wrote in the Woman Engineer in 1927 that ‘in a sparsely populated area, where the little townships are perhaps hundreds of miles apart, what a boon it would be to all the women living those isolated lives to have a woman aerial traveller visiting them at regular intervals, bringing goods and news such as women really need, and for which only another woman would know how to cater, and to be able within a reasonable time to undertake various commissions in the cities for these dwellers in the wilds, or at least inaccessible places’. Since small planes, such as the de Havilland Moth, were cheap, ‘a woman owner should be able to make such a venture a paying proposition’.41 In February 1928 Air carried an article on ‘Air League Missionaries’. One of these, Dr Haden Guest in Australia, was a man, but the other three who were featured were women. Lady Carberry, who was killed in an air crash later that year, took lantern slides and Air League literature back to Kenya with her and planned to use one of her husband’s three aeroplanes ‘to do missionary work for the Air League’.42 Lady Heath was distributing Air League literature while touring South Africa, where her husband, Sir James Heath, had business interests. Apparently 3,000 people had attended the lectures that she had given earlier in the year on her Cape Town to London [ 202 ]

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flight.43 A third woman, Mrs Dreschfield, was distributing Air League pamphlets and copies of Air while travelling from Cairo to the Cape.44 As Pirie notes, articles such as these ‘did more than record; [they] inscribed imperialism’.45 Certainly these ‘missionaries’ brought their own perspectives to their travels, rather than learning from those whom they encountered. In this sense they were carrying on a wider tendency in British aviation circles. Pirie records multiple examples of what he calls ‘deeply ingrained attitudes’ among British pilots when they encountered ‘Others’ around the empire. Mrs Forbes-Sempill, for example, could not bring herself to cede aeronautical skill to Indians in general, even after R. N. Chawla had completed an impressive flight from the subcontinent to England in 1930.46 The airmail pilot Roderic Hill provided some insight into the workings of the British imperial mind:  ‘in the event of the Bedou becoming troublesome in a minor way while visiting a force-​landed aeroplane, the thing for the pilot to do is to try and get hold of one of their responsible men, a sheikh if possible … It is essential to treat them with complete confidence and to keep all guns well out of sight. All gestures should be of the most amicable kind.’47 Cobham, by contrast, was more ruthless. Taking off in a de Havilland DH 50 seaplane from a river at Bahawalpur in the Punjab in 1926, he realised that a local man was hanging on to one of the floats. ‘The native took no notice of our shouts so I told Ward to get him off at all costs, whereupon we very cruelly pushed the poor fellow into the water by treading on his hands until he had to leave go.’ Cobham acknowledged that this was inhumane and tried to reassure his readers by first claiming that he assumed the man would be safe ‘for the natives are all wonderful swimmers’, then stating that he saw the man being helped out of the river and finally reporting that on his return flight he ascertained that ‘curiously this poor creature could not swim and had got nervous at the last moment and dared not leave go of the floats’.48 In Khartoum, Cobham had to go to what he called ‘the native quarter’ to find a local tinsmith who could repair a component for his engine. Although without the tinsmith’s skills and ingenuity Cobham would have found himself grounded until a new part could be transported from England, nevertheless he remarked that ‘his equipment was at least four hundred years behind the times’.49 All of these pilots considered themselves intellectually and technologically superior to the people (often referred to as ‘swarming’ when they arrived en masse to witness a flight or assist a stranded pilot) whose physical labour and traditions of hospitality aided the flyers in innumerable ways. The toys, books, airline publicity, films, articles, lantern-​ slide lectures and tireless work by members of the Air League, taken [ 203 ]

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together, promoted frictionless imperial aeromobility with all of its supposed benefits. Because the air was still in the process of being produced as ‘airspace’, with associated air corridors and restricted areas, it appeared limitless –​one could take off from Croydon and arrive in India in five days, South Africa in nine and Australia in a mere twelve. Indeed, writing about Woman and Flying in 1929, the journalist Stella Wolfe Murray commented that Lady Bailey deliberately omitted to mention the many challenges she faced on her African flight because of her determination to present the flight as a ‘summer holiday’.50 This approach was an extreme version of the tone of many of the accounts of imperial flights, where impediments were presented as barriers to be overcome through British derring-​do. However, some authors did acknowledge that achieving aeromobility would take concerted and co-​ordinated effort. A. E. W. Salt pointed out that there was ‘a danger that in this picture of pleasure and comfort and speed we lose sight of some of the difficulties and discomforts of flying, and of the methods which are adopted to solve the problems of the pilot and the navigator’. He detailed the maps, charts, instruments, ‘wireless organization’, lighting and aerodromes that would have to be provided, in addition to ‘efficient organization, navigation, and inspection, and a machine of proved capacity and reliability, such as British aircraft manufacturers are now in a position to supply’.51 Leo Amery, who wrote the first essay in the Air Annual on ‘The Empire and Air Communications’, imagined a new, mobile imperial geography generated via flight. He argued for networks of aerodromes that would allow aircraft and troops to move swiftly between conflict sites.52 Amery was ‘inventing a new imperial geography, as he had been doing since the South African War, one which remained sensitive to Britain’s traditional reliance on sea power but also incorporated his appreciation of air power, and ultimately sought to further his vision of imperial economic development and political self-​government’.53 Amery’s vision was that a large portion of the British Empire could be interconnected through networks of aerodromes as well as through railways and shipping routes. Through these networks no individual member of the empire (notably Britain itself) would have to shoulder the whole cost of providing aerodromes and supplies. However, as Katherine Epstein notes, ‘not carried away by the technological advances embodied in aeroplanes, Amery recognised that they would transcend neither the limits of older technology nor geography itself’.54 In the 1920s, ‘even as he lowered his estimate of the military potential of air power, he gave continued attention to the commercial and civilian potential of air power to overcome the geographical sprawl of the empire and knit it more tightly together, thereby furthering his cherished goal of imperial union’.55 Amery was one of [ 204 ]

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the few to acknowledge that aeromobility was necessarily grounded. Brittain was another, writing in 1929 that:

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[I]‌t must, of course, be realized that before these air lines can be in general use an immense amount of spade work has to be done in the way of ground organization, preparing aerodromes for land machines, fixing suitable moorings where flying boats are used, [and] establishing a meteorological organization along all routes so as to avoid unsafe weather conditions.56

Just as both aeromobility and air-​mindedness have several definitions, so too does the word ‘grounded’. In this context it has two specific meanings. One is the state of not being able to fly. This could occur for myriad reasons:  weather conditions or mechanical failure forestalled take-​ offs or else forced landings. The second definition is to be connected or embedded. Cwerner argues that: [O]‌ne must avoid romanticizing aviation to the point of overstating its impact upon modern life. The new mobilities paradigm allows us to look at aeromobilities in their relations with various social networks and systems, therefore grounding or embedding them in processes whereby these mobilities, and their own distinctive spaces, networks, systems and environments, are effectively produced, reproduced, performed and regulated.57

In terms of the first definition of being grounded, weather frequently grounded flights. Fog, mist, sandstorms, turbulence, rarefied air and the frightening suddenness of ‘furious wind, of intense masses of inky cloud, of cyclonic storms, of torrential rain’ all prevented flight.58 Cobham noted that fog at Southampton had delayed his departure on his 1928 round-​Africa flight by a day, while the tropical storms he managed to avoid en route ‘were veritable “monsters of the elements,” and I was only too thankful to find that they were local and could be dodged, otherwise they might prove a severe hindrance to the regular running of the future air route’.59 Stopping over in Hong Kong during her round-​the-​world flight in 1931, the Hon. Mrs Victor Bruce remarked that ‘the climate was delightful after the heat of the tropics, but Lady Peel warned me not to expect such weather to last at that time of the year, as I had arrived just at the break of the N. E. monsoon, with the consequence that conditions were very unsettled. Sure enough the next morning broke quite heavy, with a fog and ground mist, and it was quite impossible to leave.’60 Prevailing winds also affected the planned routes for airship development. Writing in 1929, before the disaster of the R101 terminated British airship development, C. G. Colebrook claimed in a somewhat convoluted manner that the location of mooring masts for future airship routes ‘have not been chosen without much [ 205 ]

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thought, not only as to their geographical position, but also from a meteorological point of view, and it is in this respect that an immense amount of foresight has been exercised to ensure success’.61 Cobham also discussed winds, explaining how a headwind could make it impossible to reach one’s destination. His goal was to fly from Alexandria to Sollum in 1926, but he remarked that ‘I noticed that there was a very strong west wind blowing, and I estimated that we should have a long and tedious journey flying against it.’ The Meteorological Officer then warned him that because there was a gale blowing at 40 miles an hour at 1,000 feet, it would be impossible to make it to Sollum. Cobham detailed why:  ‘my cruising speed was 90 M.P.H.  or under, and this meant that against such a wind our forward speed would only be about 45 M.P.H., so our petrol capacity would not be great enough to reach Sollum’.62 They ended up waiting for two days until the winds dropped sufficiently. On his flight back from Australia in 1926 Cobham and his two companions had to find somewhere to land in a hurry in order to avoid bad weather which had suddenly sprung up. The only place they could find was a beach on an island, but having landed the men were not sure that they had sufficient room to take off again once the storm abated. Cobham wrote that: For my part I could see no romance about the situation at all. Here we were on an uninhabited island about forty miles from the mainland, right off the beaten track, with no prospect of food of any description other than our emergency ration, which I  calculated would last about three days. We were simply locked in on this tiny beach with a dense wall of jungle behind us and giant rocks running out to sea on either side.63

Bruce had a similarly harrowing experience, although she had to face it on her own. After a forced landing in Laos she found herself trapped in a clearing, worried about tigers: Faced with the problem of getting the machine into the air again … I paced out the greatest length of the rough piece of ground, and found it to be one hundred and fifty yards. The Bluebird required one hundred and fifty yards in which to rise; and there were high trees surrounding the clearing. What was I to do? Stay there and be at the mercy of the jungle, or make a supreme effort to get into the air with the possibility of failing to clear the tree tops?64

Thus wind, fog, storms and the like quickly put paid to flights and consistently undermined the promise of aeromobility. All that pilots could do was wait on the ground for conditions to improve, although their ability to return to the air very much depended on where they were forced to come down. [ 206 ]

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Another way in which flights were grounded was through mechanical failures. These could sometimes ground a whole class of machine. Norman Macmillan tried to spin the disaster of the R101 into the plan of a forward-​thinking imperial power. The airship had crashed into a hillside in France and burst into flames on its maiden imperial flight (bound for Karachi) with the loss of forty-​eight of the fifty-​four passengers and crew, including the Air Minister. Making no reference to this event, Macmillan wrote that ‘to-​day there are no big airships in Britain’, going on to explain that while both the USA and Germany continued to use airships, ‘Great Britain believes that the day of the airship is nearly over and that in the development of landplanes and flying boats lies the great future for aviation.’65 In fact, after the catastrophe of the R101 British airships had been grounded and their further development abandoned. More typically, however, mechanical problems dogged individual flights. Aircraft might remain stubbornly grounded, as when Cobham was stuck at Delhi overnight in 1926 because the engine would not restart after refuelling.66 He was also grounded at Freetown for a month by a failed engine while he waited for a new one to be shipped out from the Rolls Royce factory in England.67 Given that forced landings were relatively likely and that help might have to come via surface transport, in some cases taking weeks, aircraft often carried a range of potentially useful supplies. Hill, for example, listed the 300-​odd pounds of equipment carried by the Vickers Vernon flying the Cairo-​to-​Baghdad airmail across the desert. In addition to signalling equipment, such as a Very pistol, smoke candles and message bags (in which messages could be dropped from the air), the supplies included fabric and dope (to mend holes in the wings or fuselage), spark plugs, magnetos, valves, washers, a jack, foot pump, funnels for pouring both petrol and oil, screw pickets and rope (to tie the machine down), canvas covers, a general tool kit and three days’ rations for every person.68 This additional weight limited the paid cargo that could be flown, but was worth it in terms of making it possible to make sufficient repairs to get airborne again rather than wait for rescuers to arrive. The accounts of forced landings might acknowledge that a specific flight came to an abrupt halt, or be used to showcase British skill, but any acknowledgement that crashes could be fatal was very rare indeed. Such tragic events tended to be relegated to the past, as the inevitable (but now superseded) price of pioneering efforts. Only Salt, in his 1930 book about Imperial Air Routes, seemed willing to admit that aircraft sometimes crashed, but even then his comments were circumspect:  ‘the accidents of June 16, 1929, when GEBBX [sic] crashed at [ 207 ]

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Croydon, as that of October, 1924, and of October, 1929 –​to the “City of Rome” flying-​boat  –​must be regarded as exceptional incidents’.69 Salt’s details were inaccurate and he did not acknowledge that anyone died, but in fact all eight people on board the de Havilland DH 34 (G-​ EBBY) were killed when it crashed shortly after taking off from Croydon on 24 December 1924; seven people died when the Handley Page W.10 City of Ottawa (G-​EBMT) crashed in the English Channel on 17 June 1929; and three people lost their lives when the City of Jerusalem, a de Havilland DH 66 Hercules (G-​EBMZ), caught fire after crashing at Jask in Iran, on 6 September 1929. Overall these accounts are representative of the challenges presented by the weather and terrain, and while their authors typically turn them into tales of resilience and innovation, the physical barriers that could ground flights and undermine imperial aeromobility were clear. In the other sense of being grounded, through embeddedness in complex networks and processes, infrastructure was crucial to imperial flying. Landing grounds or seaplane bases, hangars, uncontaminated petrol supplies, hotels or rest houses and access to mechanics and customs officials were all needed in order to make aeromobility possible. Revealing just how much this new form of mobility was in flux, Cobham explained that on his arrival in Egypt in a Short Singapore flying boat in 1928, ‘the Singapore had to be treated like a ship, there being no special forms for aircraft. Marine papers had therefore to be used.’70 The decision to use a flying boat rather than a landplane for his round-​Africa trip was in large part because the terrain meant that it would have been hard to find suitable places to make an emergency landing. Indeed, ‘the deciding factor in not using aeroplanes for the Southern Sudan section of the air route would be the fact that in the wet season the existing landing-​grounds would become impossible, for their cotton-​soil surface would become a quagmire, and the cost of making an all-​weather aerodrome from a commercial point of view would be prohibitive for many years to come’.71 While the airship programme was still active, Colebrook argued that ‘the whole plan of the Empire operation of airships is based upon the establishment of these masts at suitable points, with sheds only at the terminal points’. Once they were all built, ‘it may be said that the Empire has the ground organisation for any network of Empire airship routes which commercial and Imperial considerations demand’.72 Reflecting on his 1926 flight to Australia, Cobham stated that ‘I have been very fortunate before starting this flight in arranging with three separate petrol companies to lay down supplies between London and Australia. All three of these concerns laid down their supplies from the purely patriotic motive of supporting British pioneer aviation work. [ 208 ]

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It is certainly a long-​sighted policy on their part, for it undoubtedly means much to the development of Empire trade.’73 Such acknowledgement of the need for infrastructure tended to present it as part of a seamless progress narrative rather than the outcome of complex and sometimes failed negotiations between corporations and governments. In 1929, however, Wakefield admitted that the organisation of imperial air routes around Africa was very slow, because the services ‘involve bringing no less than seven Governments of the Empire in Africa into active co-​operation’.74 The challenge of negotiating with various governments was ongoing and continually threatened air expansion, as did the relative lack of subsidies from the British government. Oswald Pirow in South Africa, for example, successfully used South African Airways to limit the reach of Imperial Airways in the region.75 European politics could also have an impact. The Italian government would not permit foreign flights in its airspace, forcing Imperial Airways passengers to take the overnight express train from Basle to Genoa.76 In explaining this, the Air Annual of the British Empire minimised the significance of the interruption to air services, describing it as ‘this short section’ and ‘the only part of the journey in which surface transport is used’. The justification provided was that, ‘firstly, time is saved by travelling during the night, and secondly the difficulty of traversing the Alps by air is too great at the present time to allow of the requisite degree of reliability’.77 No mention was made of the Italian government’s restriction, as this would undermine the illusion that the Air League promoted. Other authors also wanted to encourage the idea that aeromobility created a reciprocal perspective and active co-​operation rather than an opportunity for hard-​ fought political manoeuvres. Brittain, for example, suggested that ‘the airways of the world are now so inextricably linked that only a general international understanding is possible … The result is a fine, helpful spirit of internationalism, which is reflected in the way the ground staff of these aerodromes assist visiting ’planes.’78 Not all pilots agreed with him. Lady Heath, for example, remarked that on landing at Tunis, ‘I found it very hard to get any work done. First of all I had to get permission from the Commandant for  some mechanics  to assist me out of hours, and then I  had to go round promising F100.00 here and F100.00 there before I  could get some help. When it was done, and I had to work myself all day with them, the work was badly done and badly finished.’ Heath contrasted this with her experiences at English and Italian aerodromes, where she claimed that staff worked with ‘enthusiasm and pride in a good job well done’.79 And while she commended the staff at the aerodrome at Naples, she did note that ‘my desire to push off at 6 a.m. was rather [ 209 ]

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frustrated as the officer who arranges payments, and so on, did not come till 8 a.m.’80 Although pilots expressed irritation at waiting for officials to process them, they also relied on local knowledge to prevent them from becoming stuck. When Cobham landed at Nisida Island, in the Bay of Naples, on his flight home from Australia in 1926, ‘the Commandant of Nisida advised us not to stay there, explaining that if the wind got much worse we should never get out of the harbour’. He recommended that they immediately flew on to the Orbetello seaplane base.81 It was not just official ground staff who provided help. In Rangoon, feeling ‘up against it’, during his 1926 flight, Cobham relied on ‘the assistance of scores of willing helpers’, although a racist hierarchy was maintained (at least in his account of events) since ‘Europeans were commandeered to control the natives’.82 In Freetown, Cobham had to rely on ‘an army of some fifty natives [who] worked at scraping our hull clean, while we endeavoured to make good all the corroded rivets’.83 In Italy during one flight Cobham needed to take off with a very short run after a forced landing and called on the assistance of Italian soldiers. He wrote that, ‘I placed four stalwart fellows in front of each wing to hold the machine back against the force of the propeller until I  had got full revolutions. At a given sign from me, they would drop flat and the wings of the machine would shoot over them, thus wasting as little space as possible in getting up speed.’ Having successfully taken off, he ‘turned to look at [his] helpers down below and found that they were waving and cheering wildly, for the sporting chance and excitement of the situation had caught their imagination’.84 In yet another example, during his round-​Africa flight in 1928 Cobham reported that a sandstorm near Berber forced him to land. The District Commissioner came to his party’s aid and put them up for the night because the sandstorm continued for hours. As Cobham reflected, ‘we, a party of seven, with a huge flying-​boat, were suddenly thrust upon [the District Commissioner] unawares in an isolated district in the heart of the Sudan, hundreds of miles from any big town, and yet, a few minutes after our unexpected arrival, not only was every comfort provided for us, but every precaution taken for the safety of what was to the inhabitants of the district an extraordinary craft’. The District Commissioner found additional anchors to secure and soldiers to guard the flying boat, and also provided food and beds for the whole group.85 When they relied on themselves, with no local assistance whatsoever, pilots could find themselves struggling to become airborne at all. Hill, for example, was trying to refuel at an unstaffed petrol dump in the desert: [ 210 ]

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I had never opened the dump myself before, having only watched others do it. Luckily I had brought the typed sheet of instructions with me. Even then we struggled for three-​quarters of an hour without avail. What if we failed to open it? Was I to stay there, or risk getting through, and possibly having to forced-​land? Just as we were abandoning hope, we followed through the instructions once again; and the lid came off. Cheering for joy wasn’t in it!86

These accounts reveal just how much aeromobility was grounded in physical infrastructure, political considerations and the willingness of local people to assist downed fliers. But imperial aeromobility was grounded in more bureaucratic networks, too. Peter Lyth, for example, notes that Imperial Airways ‘was grounded before it had flown a single service’ because its pilots went on strike as soon as the corporation came into existence on 1 April 1924.87 International regulations on the carriage of passengers permitted airlines to ground certain passengers, specifically the ‘mentally diseased and persons afflicted with infectious diseases; or under the influence of drink or drugs’, and of course ‘air traffic companies reserve[d]‌to themselves the right to refuse to carry any passenger or luggage on any service or flight’.88 Illness could preclude aeromobility for pilots, too. Lady Bailey’s flight around Africa was delayed for a month at Leopoldville by her infected mosquito bites, while Lady Heath spent a week in Rome recovering from rheumatic fever.89 Women specifically could find themselves prevented from flying on the basis of their gender. In 1922 the International Committee on Air Navigation introduced a new regulation which prohibited women from holding the ‘B’ or commercial pilot’s licence. This grounded women commercial pilots until the ban was overturned following determined lobbying, although women commercial pilots still had more restrictions placed on them than did men. In the Sudan ‘the military authorities deliberately hold up women fliers and refuse to allow them to continue except under escort’. As Brittain explained, ‘some women fliers have more than once been outspoken regarding what they term official red tape’. The Defence Department in Khartoum claimed that the reason for this grounding was to protect the women and the Air Force from having to search for them if they crashed. ‘We insist that they either take a male passenger in their ’plane or else be escorted by an R.A.F.  machine. It is not enough that they follow an Imperial Airways liner or decide to accompany an R.A.F. machine on some Government mission. The escort must be definitely arranged.’90 The justification for this ban was that in the event of a forced landing women (like men) would be taken prisoner and, since local women’s value was so little, it ‘might be humiliating for some of these fliers’ if [ 211 ]

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their captors treated them in the same way.91 The unspoken assumption behind this statement was perhaps that downed women pilots would be raped. The requirement that women flying over the Sudan should be accompanied by a man meant that Lady Heath ‘was unable to go on without Capt. Bentley as the Sudan Government had forbidden me, as a woman, to fly alone there owing to recent outbreaks among the natives, who killed a district Commissioner in December 1927, and had to be bombed into submission in January’. Lady Bailey was grounded for several months in 1928, in part while she waited for permission to fly across the Sudan, but also while her aircraft was repaired after she crashed just after setting off from Cape Town to fly back to England.92

Conclusion The promotion of imperial aeromobility as the logical outcome of British air-​mindedness was a staple of the interwar period. In 1927 the Air League of the British Empire restructured in order to work towards a strong air force, the full development of British civil and commercial aviation and to promote research into aeronautics. The League claimed that the achievement of these goals would provide security and prosperity within the British Empire. The reality tended to be much more bogged down. The dream of imperial aeromobility was undermined by the many ways in which flights, passengers and pilots could be grounded. Inclement weather and mechanical failure were the most obvious causes of such grounding, but embeddedness in other networks also had a major impact. Political negotiations limited access to preferred routes, a pilots’ strike hit Imperial Airways, women were not allowed to fly under certain circumstances on the basis of their gender and airlines relied on the assistance of local communities around the empire, which could be withheld. Between the wars imperial aeromobility was, to many people, a fantastic but unrealistic dream. They were content to feel that they were air-​minded while sitting in their railway carriages on their way to enjoy an air display. However, for a relatively small network of men and women –​pilots as well as politicians –​that dream could become a reality if they could overcome two challenges. The first was to maintain the illusion of unfettered aeromobility by downplaying how easily flights could be grounded with sometimes fatal consequences. The second was to lobby for the subsidies and support required to set up the extensive aviation infrastructure without which aircraft could go nowhere, while disingenuously promoting a message that British solutions were best and British demands were always met. Organisations such as the Air [ 212 ]

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League of the British Empire as well as numerous books, lectures, articles, toys and films are all indicative of the immense effort expended to conceal the limits of imperial aeromobility.

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Notes 1 C. C. Wakefield, ‘Aviation and the empire’, in C. G. Burge (ed.), The Air Annual of the British Empire, 1929 (London: Gale & Polden, 1929), p. 8. 2 G. Pirie, Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation: Passengers, Pilots, Publicity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 1. 3 For a discussion of the concept of “spatial imaginary” see J.-​A. Boudreau, ‘Making new political spaces: mobilizing spatial imaginaries, instrumentalizing spatial practices, and strategically using spatial tools’, Environment and Planning A:  Economy and Space, 39:1 (2007), 2593–​611. 4 S. W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air:  Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 2–​3. 5 G. Pirie, Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–​30 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900–​1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 6 Pirie, Air Empire, p. 88. 7 P. Adey, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010), pp. 57–​67. Earlier techniques to promote aeromobility in Britain are discussed by L. C. S. Budd, ‘Selling the early air age: aviation advertisements and the promotion of civil flying in Britain, 1911–​14’, Journal of Transport History, 32:2 (2011), 125–​44. 8 Wakefield, ‘Aviation and the empire’, p. 7. 9 Ibid., p. 12. 10 P. Sassoon, ‘Civil aviation: foreword’, in Burge (ed.), Air Annual, p. 123. 11 H. Brittain, ‘Empire air policy’, in Burge (ed.), Air Annual, p. 16. 12 A. Cobham, Skyways (London: Nisbet, 1925), p. 304. 13 Boudreau, ‘Making new political spaces’, pp. 2596–​7. 14 Cobham, Skyways, p. 304. 15 S. Cwerner, ‘Introducing aeromobilities’, in S. Cwerner, S. Kesselring and J. Urry (eds), Aeromobilities (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1–​21. 16 D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 17 Cwerner, ‘Introducing aeromobilities’, pp. 4–​5. 18 Pirie, Cultures, pp. 1 and 3. 19 ‘Imperial air services’, in Burge (ed.), Air Annual, pp. 184–​6. 20 G. Gibbard Jackson, The Romance of Flight (London:  Boy’s Own Paper, 1929); N. Macmillan, The Romance of Flight (London:  Evans Brothers, 1935); H. J.  M. Camac, From India to England by Air (New  York:  Privately published, 1929); A. Cobham, Australia and Back (London: A&C Black, 1927); V. Bruce, The Bluebird’s Flight (London:  Chapman and Hall, 1931); and A. E.  W. Salt, Imperial Air Routes (London: John Murray, 1930). 21 Macmillan, Romance, p. iii. 22 ‘The possible effects of flying on future generations’, Woman Engineer, 4:3 (1935), p. 38. 23 Macmillan, Romance, p. 110. 24 S. Anthony and O. Green, British Aviation Posters:  Art, Design and Flight (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2012), p. 87. 25 G. Pirie, ‘Cinema and British imperial civil aviation, 1919–​1939’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23:2 (2003), p. 129. 26 Anthony and Green, British Aviation Posters, p. 86. 27 D. Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), p. 13.

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Empire and mobility 28 M. C. Hendley, Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War: Popular Imperialism in Britain, 1914–​1932 (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2012). 29 Duke of Sutherland, ‘The Air League of the British Empire’, in Burge (ed.), Air Annual, pp. 38–​41. 30 Pirie, Air Empire, p. 30. 31 Adey, Aerial Life, p. 29. 32 ‘Women’s Committee of the Air League of the British Empire’, Air, 2:6 (1929), pp. 268–​71. 33 Ibid. 34 ‘Air League notes’, 2:8 (1929), p. 407. 35 ‘Colonel the Master of Sempill’, Air, 3:7 (1930), p. 280. 36 ‘Prizes for enrolment of new Air League members’, Air, 1:5 (1928), p. 55. 37 Sutherland, ‘Air League’, p. 40. 38 Pirie, Air Empire, pp. 187–​91. 39 H. Brittain, By Air (London: Hutchinson, 1933), p. 17. 40 G. P. Olley, A Million Miles in the Air (London, 1934). For a discussion of the development of air tourism in the interwar period see G. Pirie, ‘Passenger traffic in the 1930s on British imperial air routes: refinement and revision’, Journal of Transport History, 25 (2004), 63–​ 83; and L. Millward, ‘The embodied aerial subject:  gendered mobility in British interwar air tours’, Journal of Transport History, 29:1 (2008),  5–​22. 41 C. Griff, ‘Aviation notes’, Woman Engineer, 2:13 (1927), p. 264. 42 ‘Air League notes’, Air, 1:3 (1928), p. 49. 43 Pirie, Cultures, p. 76. 44 ‘Air League notes’, p. 49. 45 Pirie, Cultures, p. 77. 46 Ibid., p. 19. 47 R. Hill, The Baghdad Air Mail (London: Edward Arnold, 1929), pp. 77–​8. 48 Cobham, Australia, p. 48. 49 A. Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles in a Flying-​ Boat:  My Flight Round Africa (London: Harrap, 1930), p. 131. 50 Lady Heath and S. Wolfe Murray, Woman and Flying (London:  John Lang, 1929), pp.  208–​9. 51 Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, p. 222. 52 L. Amery, ‘The empire and air communications’, in Burge (ed.), Air Annual, pp. 3–​6. 53 K. C. Epstein, ‘Imperial airs: Leo Amery, air power and empire, 1873–​1945’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38:4 (2010), p. 577. 54 Ibid., p. 576. 55 Ibid., p. 580. 56 Brittain, By Air, pp. 14–​15. 57 Cwerner, ‘Introducing aeromobilities’, pp. 1–​2. 58 Salt, Imperial Air Routes, p. 235. 59 Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles, p. 147. 60 Bruce, Bluebird’s Flight, pp. 140–​1. 61 C. G.  Colebrook, ‘Empire airships:  salient features of the British programme’, in Burge (ed.), Air Annual, p. 36. 62 Cobham, Skyways, pp. 266–​7. 63 Cobham, Australia, p. 107. 64 Bruce, Bluebird’s Flight, p. 104. 65 Macmillan, Romance, p. 31. 66 Cobham, Australia, p. 49. 67 Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles, p. 222. 68 Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, p. 79. 69 Salt, Imperial Air Routes, p. 30. 70 Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles, p. 88. 71 Ibid., p. 103. 72 Colebrook, ‘Empire airships’, pp. 35–​6.

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Grounded 3 Cobham, Australia, p. 119. 7 74 Wakefield, ‘Aviation and the empire’, p. 10. 75 R. L. McCormack, ‘Man with a mission: Oswald Pirow and South African Airways, 1933–​1939’, Journal of African History, 20 (1979), 543–​57. 76 Brittain, ‘Empire air policy’, p. 14. 77 ‘Imperial air services’, p. 183. 78 Brittain, By Air, p. 61. 79 Heath and Murray, Woman and Flying, p. 191. 80 Ibid., p. 194. 81 Cobham, Australia, p. 119. 82 Ibid., pp. 62–​3. 83 Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles, p. 222. 84 Cobham, Skyways, p. 248. 85 Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles, pp. 97–​9. 86 Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, p. 153. 87 P. J. Lyth, ‘The empire’s airway: British civil aviation from 1919 to 1939’, Journal of Transport History, 25:1 (2004), p. 872. 88 Captain Norman Macmillan, The Air Travellers’ Guide to Europe (London: Duckworth, 1929), pp. 14–​15. 89 Heath and Murray, Woman and Flying, p. 213. 90 Brittain, By Air, p. 181. 91 Quoted ibid., p. 180. For a fuller discussion of the ‘B’ licence ban see L. Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–​ 1937 (Montreal:  McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2008). 92 Heath and Murray, Woman and Flying, pp. 160 and 210.

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Afterword: Westward the course of empire takes its way Tim Cresswell

We don’t seek empires. We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.1

In the early part of the eighteenth century, the British polymath and sometime poet George (Bishop) Berkeley was already despairing of the trajectory empire had taken. In 1721, he wrote his Essay toward Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain in which he took his home to task for its corruption and moral decadence. The empires of Europe did not fare much better. It was not ‘empire’ as such that he was despairing of, however. Rather he was envisioning a new form of empire –​one that would take place to the west, in the Americas. In 1728, he penned the elaborately titled Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America. Its closing lines read: Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

The poem’s topic was the British Empire and, despite the uplifting ending, portrayed a dystopian image of Europe as ‘Barren of every glorious theme’ that ‘breeds in her decay’. The future, for Europe, and Britain in particular, was in the Americas and in a new kind of transplanted empire: There shall be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads and noblest hearts.2

The ingredients for this glorious imperial future were a combination of the arts and nature (‘happy climes’, ‘genial sun’ and ‘virgin earth’). The new imperial space would be a ‘seat of innocence /​Where nature guides [ 216 ]

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and virtue rules /​Where men shall not impose for truth and sense /​ The pedantry of courts and schools’. Berkeley attempted to follow his convictions and moved to Rhode Island in the same year, with the intention of eventually settling in Bermuda, where he planned a model city. The money never arrived and he never made it to Bermuda. He did, however, transplant William Kent-​style Palladian architecture to the new continent. He returned to Britain in 1732. Seventy-​four years later, on 22 December 1802, the United States was no longer a set of colonies but a sovereign nation expanding west. John Quincy Adams, a particularly anti-​British statesman who was to become the nation’s sixth president, delivered an oration in Plymouth, Massachusetts to commemorate the landing of the pilgrims from the Mayflower on 21 December 1620. As he was nearing the end, Adams eloquently misquoted Berkeley: Nearly a century ago, one of those rare minds to whom it is given to discern future greatness in its seminal principles, upon contemplating the situation of this continent, pronounced in a vein of poetic inspiration ‘Westward the Star of empire takes its way.’ Let us all unite in ardent supplication to the founder of nations and the builder of worlds, that what then was prophecy may continue unfolding into history  –​that the dearest hopes of the human race may not be extinguished in disappointment, and that the last may prove the noblest empire of time.3

Adams’s address was shot through with the rhetoric of empire. ‘The destinies of this empire’, he proclaimed, ‘disdain the powers of human calculation.’4 Within the poem of Berkeley and the oration of Adams lay the idea of the mobility of empire. In Berkeley’s poem, Europe is decaying and the West offers new hope. In Adams’s address, empire is unfolding into the future and –​referring to Berkeley –​the direction is westward. This idea of empire moving west found possibly its most notable support in the writing of William Gilpin, a journalist and first governor of the Colorado territory. He was the author of many tracts on the movement west of European settlers on the North American continent. In an address to the American Senate in 1846 he proclaimed: The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent  –​to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean  –​to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward … –​ to agitate these herculean masses –​to establish a new order in human affairs … –​to regenerate superannuated nations … to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries –​to teach old nations a new civilization –​to confirm the destiny of the human race –​to carry the career of mankind to its

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culminating point –​to cause a stagnant people to be reborn –​to perfect science –​to emblazon history with the conquest of peace –​to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind –​to unite the world in one social family –​to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity –​to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!5

Gilpin’s hyperbolic rhetoric was expressly in support of the development of a trans-​continental railroad bridging the American continent, passing through his home town of Independence, Missouri and the new state of Colorado. It was the railway that, according to Gilpin, would bring the North American Empire (and thus the destiny of mankind) to fruition. One of the main inspirations for Gilpin’s treatise on manifest destiny was the thinking of Alexander von Humboldt and his notion of an isothermal zodiac. The isothermal zodiac describes a wave-​like temperate region in a band around the northern hemisphere centred roughly around the latitude of 40 degrees north. Gilpin believed that this band of temperate climates provided the basis for the rise of empires –​ starting in the east and moving, inevitably west: China, India, Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, Britain … America. Gilpin’s address linked the movement of empire to the more literal movement of people across the continent from east to west. In a similar way, the two lines, ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way’ (in Berkeley’s poem) and ‘Westward the Star of empire takes its way’ (in Adams’s oration), each became the inspiration and titles for paintings and photographs in the years surrounding the building and eventual completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. The railroad and its accompanying mobilities were positioned at the heart of conceptions of American empire and linked to the idea of empire itself moving westward. The first and, perhaps, best known of the paintings is Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way –​a 20-​by 30-​foot mural painted by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze between 1861 and 1862 behind the western staircase of the House of Representatives chamber in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC (Figure  11.1). The mural depicts the movement of pioneers at an epic scale. The image centres on a wagon train making its way from right to left (westward) and from middle distance to near distance, across the continental divide. There are mountains and a river in the upper right and the whole image has a second, panoramic view of San Francisco Bay (the destination) directly underneath it. The westward mobility of the pioneers and the frontier is clearly central to the iconography. As the Civil War proceeded to its eventual outcome both the stars and stripes and a single African [ 218 ]

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11.1  Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way 1861/​62

American figure were added to the mural. The story of empire moving west was simultaneously the story of a new United States emerging from the Civil War and forged in the West. Its mode of travel was by foot, on horseback and in wagons. In Andrew Melrose’s painting, Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way  –​ Near Council Bluffs Iowa,6 machine mobility becomes much more assertive. The light of a train (perhaps the ‘Star’ in the title) moves aggressively from the centre right of the painting into the immediate foreground. A train track dissects the painting, cutting it in two. Startled deer leap across the tracks from right to left. The landscape to the left appears decimated, trees reduced to stumps  –​ the product of the labour of those who inhabit a solitary log cabin. The painting is dark. A faint light glows on the horizon to the west above the cabin, but the only really bright source of light is the train. To twenty-​first-​century eyes the picture appears as one of grim environmental destruction. At the time, however, the painting may have been seen either in a more triumphant light (in line with Leutze’s mural) or as a romantic affirmation of the wilderness that remains to the right of the bisecting train track. While human figures appear in heroic poses in Leutze’s mural, there are no human figures in Melrose’s painting. The human presence is defined by a transformed landscape centred on [ 219 ]

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11.2  Alexander Gardner, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’: Laying Track 600 Miles West of St. Louis, Missouri, 19 October 1867

the (anti-​)heroic train. The ambiguity of the painting’s message is perhaps resolved by the fact that this painting was commissioned by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad to celebrate the arrival of their line in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The railroad, and railroad mobilities, had become central to the growing narrative of American empire as the frontier moved west. The year 1867 was also when the photographer Alexander Gardner was employed by the Union Pacific Railroad as its chief photographer to record the surveying of the southern transcontinental railroad route and to provide propaganda to convince Congress to approve the route. Gardner was a successful photographer who had emigrated from Scotland to the United States in 1856 and had made a name for himself photographing scenes from the Civil War. His photograph, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’: Laying Track 600 Miles West of St. Louis, Missouri, 19 October 1867, is part of that railroad propaganda exercise (Figure 11.2). [ 220 ]

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A photograph has the advantage of both portability and reproducibility. It shows a desolate-​looking, flat, landscape bisected by a rail bed on which there are wooden ties waiting for the steel rails. In the distance, we see a steam engine which would have been used to supply the material needed for the completion of the tracks. A cosmopolitan crew of railroad workers line the track bed between the train and the point where the bed meets the frame of the photo. To the right-​hand side of the image we see a loaded horse and cart. The site of the photograph was the Union Pacific section of the transcontinental railroad in Missouri. Two years later this line would connect to the Central Pacific rails in Promontory Summit in Utah and the project would be complete. By 1867 there was little doubt that these images had become thoroughly intertextual, with Leutze’s mural and Berkeley’s poem becoming source domains for meanings in the new images. While Leutze’s mural is heroic in size and content, Gardner’s photograph is grimly realistic. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the use of the now-​ familiar title was meant to transfer some of the acquired meaning from the former to the latter. A year later, in 1868, Currier and Ives –​publishers of popular prints based in New York City –​produced Across the Continent –​Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Figure 11.3).7 The lithographic, hand-​ coloured print is based on an original by Frances Flora Bond (Fanny) Palmer –​possibly the first woman in the United States to make her living as an artist. She had emigrated from Leicester, England in 1844, and had already published a series of prints of landscape images of Leicestershire before she moved.8 The Currier and Ives lithographs were sold through stores and by mail and became one of the most popular ways of decorating homes across the United States and further afield. The scene in Palmer’s drawing was thus itself mobile thanks to the technology of printing and the infrastructures of transport and the postal service. While Leutze’s 1861 mural was massive and has become forever associated with its specific location in the House of Representatives,9 Palmer’s image was very much part of an emerging popular culture of landscape images used for domestic interiors. It was produced in sizes that suited mobility. The image itself is cut in half diagonally by a train track emerging in the bottom right and pointing towards the upper left. A  train sits in the lower half, black smoke pouring from its funnel. To the left of the train is a small settlement of log-​built structures. In the foreground men are felling trees. Wagons can be seen leaving the town and heading into the distance along a road that runs parallel to the train tracks. More wagons can be seen in the far distance. Telegraph wires also run alongside the track. On the right-​hand side of the track we have the ‘wilderness’ –​prairie, [ 221 ]

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Empire and mobility

11.3  Frances Flora Bond Palmer, Across the Continent –​Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1868

mountains and trees. A broad winding river makes its way into the distance. A figure, presumably a Native American, can be seen in a canoe. Most dramatically, two Native Americans can be seen on horseback next to the train, the train’s smoke blowing into their faces. The image repeats many of the themes from earlier images but makes more of contrasting mobilities. The train is still central, but the tracks run parallel to a dusty wagon road. There are canoes on the river which winds its way towards the Pacific. The Native Americans in the foreground are on horseback –​still the dominant mode of mobility (other than on foot) at the time. The evocation of empire in these various sites seems strange to the contemporary observer. Empire is being celebrated. This is doubly curious as the United States has often been promoted, since its inception, as a new kind of anti-​imperial world power. While the United States certainly colonised a number of places around the world after the Spanish–​American war of 1898, it has generally not sought to invade, conquer and take over other countries on a permanent basis. This makes the subject of ‘American empire’ different from the focus of this

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Afterword

book –​the British Empire. Indeed, insofar as commentators spoke of an American empire it was in such a way that it was distinguished from its corrupt and decadent antecedents. This was Berkeley’s point in his poem. The blessings of nature would grant a future for empire in the west –​a future that was free of the venality of what the British Empire had become. A central origin moment in US identity is that it fought a revolution against the British Empire and is thus (still) an anti-​imperial project. This was a point still being made by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 when he was interviewed by al-​Jazeera. Despite this, ‘empire’ certainly appears freighted with positive value in the various images described above. This particular form of empire takes place within what would become the continental United States. It was nation-​ building as empire –​a kind of imperialism that saw the expansion of the United States into a west already inhabited by both Native American nations and by Mexico  –​amongst others. And this empire as state-​building process illustrates a number of entanglements between mobility and empire in the nineteenth century. Empire boosterism frequently centred on technologies of mobility to make its claims. Railroads, in particular, were firmly located at the heart of westward movement, both as images and as political and economic actors in the progress of the ‘frontier’. Forms of representation also had differentiated relationship to mobility –​from the vast and immobile (but subsequently reproduced) mural at the heart of the new empire, to the easily moved photographs used to boost railroad development and the lithographs that domesticated empire in homes across the United States. It is also clear that the mobilities of individuals as immigrants played key roles in the movement of empire west. Berkeley, Melrose, Gardner and Palmer all emigrated from Britain.10 These migrations combined with images of mobility and mobile forms of image-​making to make empire itself mobile  –​reaching its ‘final’ destination in the new American empire of the United States. These mobilities also underline the limits to American exceptionalism. While the empire of the west is consistently contrasted with those that came before it, there are clear continuities, too. In addition to the thinkers and artists migrating across the Atlantic there are other connections. The railroad (or railway), for instance, was central to empire management and imagery across the British Empire –​never more so than in India, where the rail network was built to serve the purposes of empire (particularly trade) but still appears in narrative form as evidence of the benefits of empire to those being colonised.11 Empire certainly made its way west, helped by the mobilities of people, ideas, and objects, but as it did so it carried some of the old ways with it. [ 223 ]

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Notes 1 Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, quoted in J. Bew, ‘Americans abroad’, New Statesman (18 October 2013), pp. 46–​7. 2 G. Berkeley, ‘Verses by the author, on the prospect of planting arts and learning in America’, in A Miscellany, containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects (London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson, 1752), pp. 186–​7. 3 J. Q. Adams, An Oration Delivered at Plymouth, December 22nd, 1802, at the Anniversary Commemoration of the First Landing of our Ancestors at That Place (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1802), p. 31. 4 Ibid., p. 30. 5 W. Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1873), p. 124. 6 The painting is held in a private collection. See www.csub.edu/​~gsantos/​img0005. html, accessed 23 April 2019. 7 For further analysis of this image see S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). 8 Ibid., p. 176. 9 It was also reproduced in smaller formats. 10 Emanuel Leutze had been brought from Germany as a child. 11 See S. Tharoor, Inglorious Empire:  What the British Did to India (London:  Hurst, 2017); M. Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

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Note: Page numbers in bold refer to figures Abukir Bay, battle of 46 actor-network theories 10 Adams, John Quincy 217 administrators 5 aerial imperialism 174–5 aeromobility and aviation 6, 19 challenges of 205–8, 212 components 197 cultures of airmindedness 195–213 efficiency 188 impact 174 and imperialism 197–8 infrastructure 208–11 and meteorology 174–9, 186–90, 190–1 promotion of 198–204, 212–13 regulations 211 spatial imaginary 197 territorialising techniques 175 and tourism 202 and weather 205–6 and women 200–1, 202–3, 209–10, 211–12 African Association 115 agency 153 Air League Missionaries 202–3 Air League of the British Empire 199–201, 212 air routes 179 airmindedness, cultures of 19, 195–213 definition 195–6 importance 196–7 promotion of 198–204 spatial imaginary 197 toys 198 women 200–1, 202–3, 211–12

airspace, territorialisation 190–1, 194n62, 204 American Revolutionary War 35–6, 42, 43, 56 Amery, Leo 204–5 Anglo-imperial hegemony 2 Anglo-Indians 159–61 anti-conquest 180, 185 Around the World in Eighty Days see Verne, Jules artists, as witness 17–18, 69–88 Athenaeum 115, 119, 123 Atkinson, Justine 18 Audi Alteram Partem 55–6 Australia 69–88, 98, 137, 138, 140, 140–1, 141–2 automotive culture 183 Avignon 51 Ballantyne, Tony 3, 30, 148 Banks, Sir Joseph 69, 70, 72, 77, 88n3, 89n6 Barrow, John 115, 122–4 Barthes, Roland 85 Baudin, Nicolas 69, 70 Bauer, Ferdinand 17–18, 69, 71, 72, 73–4, 74, 75, 76–8, 77, 80, 83, 84, 88, 90n47 becoming 10 Beke, Charles Tilstone 117 Bergen 37 Berkeley, George (Bishop) 216–17, 218, 223 Bethel movement 93–7 Bethel Seamen’s Union 93, 95 Black American dance forms 11–12 black diaspora 5 bodies, mobile 9, 11

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Index

Britannic nationalism 15 British East Africa 186–90 aeromobility 186–90, 190–1 encounters with the natives 184 groundwork 179–86 meteorologists and meteorological knowledge 175, 178–91 tripartite hierarchy 187 British East African Meteorological Service 179 groundwork 179–86 British Empire 12, 19, 216–17, 223 British and Foreign Sailors’ Society 93, 95, 105 British race sentiment 15 British World 7 Brittain, Sir Harry 196–7, 202, 209, 211 Brown, Robert 69, 73, 77 Bunker Hill, battle of 42 Burke, Edmund 52 Burma 18–19, 152–7, 158, 159–70 Burr, Aaron 50–1

colonial space 182–6 commodities, movement of 5–6 communication technologies 13–14 Conference of Empire Meteorologists 177 Conrad, Joseph 113 consorting 138–48 contingent mobilities 175 convicts 13 Cook, Thomas 13 Cooley, William Desborough 18, 115–19, 119–22, 120–1, 125, 131 Coote, Brigadier General Sir Eyre 44 correspondence networks 31–2 Cox, Natalie 18 creolisation 5 Cresswell, Tim 8, 10, 19, 136, 139, 140, 144 criminality 138–48 Culloden, battle of 36 cultural connections 7 cultural fraternisation 137, 141–3

campaign furniture 128–9, 128 Catholicism and the Catholic question 55–6 China Canton system 99–101 mission movement 99–109 Christianity, mission movement 92–109 Churchill, Winston 200 circulation 3, 7 Clark, Rev. Dr Adam 94 Clarsen, Georgine 176 Clayton, P. M. 154 Clinton, Henry 35–6, 36–8, 40–3 coastal profiles 78–80, 81, 82, 83 Cobham, Alan 177, 186, 187, 196, 197, 203, 206, 207, 208, 208–9, 210 Coleborne, Catherine 18 collecting 6 colonial bureaucracy 5 colonial enclaves 4 colonial misrule 55–8

Daley, Caroline 143 Dalrymple, Alexander 80 Davies, Huw J. 17 Davies, Susanne 140–1 Driver, Felix 113, 125–6, 186 Duncan, J. S. 164–5 East India Company 51–2, 58, 62–3, 159 easychair geography 18, 112–31 vs field geography 113–14, 114–15, 119–25, 120–1, 123, 126, 130–1 practice 114–19 source material 116–17 textual collation and synthesis 112–13 embodied movements 11–12, 17, 50–64 emigration 12–13 empire, mobility of 216–23 empire, raison d’ être 3 encounters 5

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Epstein, Katherine 204 ethnicity 16–17 Eurasians 159–61 exploration 112, 125–30, 130 culture of 113 eye-witnessing 166 Fellows, Sir Charles 128 field geography 113–14, 114–15, 119–25, 120–1, 123, 126, 130–1 Findlay, Alexander George 117 First World War 155–6, 176, 199 Fischer-Tiné, H. 93 Fitzpatrick, D. 154 Flinders, Lieutenant Matthew 69–70, 71, 72, 78, 79, 86, 88n3, 88n4, 91n56 flow 3, 7 Foreign Quarterly Review 115 forgetting 64 Forsyth, I. 153 Francis, Philip 60–2 French Revolution 44, 50, 51 Freycinet, Henry de 70 Fuseli, Henry 79 Gardner, Alexander 220–1, 220 Geographical Society of London 115 see also Royal Geographical Society geography coastal profiles 78–80, 81, 82, 83 comparative 112–13 easychair vs field 113–14, 114–15, 119–25, 120–1, 123, 126, 130–1 immobile 114–19 military experiences 32–5 panoramic views 83, 85, 85 physicality 122, 124, 125–30, 127, 128, 131 textual collation and synthesis 112–13 Gilpin, William 217–18 Glaisyer, Natasha 29 globalisation 16 Goldsmith, Alfred Gurney 107

goods, circulation of 166, 169–70 Gray, Steven 175 Greenwich Mean Time 15 Gregg, Hilda 63 Grenada 17, 55–7 Griff, C. 202 Groves, Brigadier-General Percy R. C. 200 Guangdong Province, mission movement 92–3, 99–109 Guest, Dr Haden 202 Hastings, Warren 51–2, 60, 63 heartland theory 15 Hely-Hutchinson, Major Christopher 33, 40, 45 Henderson, Major Henry Barkley 129 Herder, Johann Gottfried 52 historical-geographical context 12–15 historiographical invisibility 51 Hoare, Samuel 179 Hokkanen, Markku 3 Hong Kong 100, 104–9 Hong Kong Mission to Seamen 108 Howe, General William 42 Huber, Valeska 3 Humboldt, Alexander von 218 hybridity 5 identity 4, 7, 136, 223 imperial histories 15–17 imperial knowledge, and mobile images 77–8 imperial order 71 Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing 12 Impey, Roderick 119 indentured workers 4, 13 India 30, 47, 52, 55, 57, 62–3, 63, 142, 159, 223 Indian Mutiny 159 Indigenous peoples 137, 139–40, 143, 145, 148, 184, 222 industrialisation 13 information and ideas 14–15

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infrastructural science 175 infrastructures 7 intangibles, movement of 6 internationalism 209 interracial liaisons 159–61 Ireland 5, 154, 155–6, 170 isothermal zodiac, the 218 Jackson, A. 154 Jacobite uprising 36 Jefferson, Thomas 52 Johnson, Nuala C. 18–19 Keighren, Innes M. 17 Keltie, John Scott 129–30 Kew Gardens 166 kinetic model 3 knowledge imperial 77–8 pursuit of 69–88 scientific 78 knowledge networks 16 military 29–32 web of empire 30 knowledge transfer 152–3 books 31 journals 34–5 linear 35–42, 47 military experiences 29–47 military geography 32–5 personal correspondence 31–2 personal encounter 30 polysynchronous 31, 43–7 reciprocal 153 Lacerda e Almeida, Francisco de 118–19, 120–1 Lake Victoria 180–2 Lampe, Evan 93, 102 Latour, Bruno 71, 72 Lauffeld, battle of 37 Leavitt, the Rev. Joshua 95 Legge, Dr James 106 Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb 218–19, 219, 221 Liberated Africans 13

linear knowledge exchange 35–42, 47 Linnaeus, Carl 74, 76 Literary Gazette 115 Livingstone, Dr David 112, 113, 119–25, 123, 125–30, 127, 128, 131, 152 Lloyd, Henry 36–7, 38–43 Lochee, Lewis 43 London 94, 98–9, 138 Loomis, George 105 Lyth, Peter 211 MacFarlane, Charles 59 Macintosh, William 17 assets 56 historiographical invisibility 51 imprisonment and death 50–1 status 52, 59, 62–3, 63–4 Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa 17, 50–64 travels to India 57 vision 52 Mackinder, Halford 15 McLeod, Andrew 138 Macmillan, Norman 202, 207 MacQueen, James 117, 122–4 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 15 Mahony, Martin 19 Malaya 177–8, 187 Mandalay 157, 159, 165 maritime mobilities 16, 18 artists 69–88 merchant seamen 92–109 masculinity 125, 125–6 materialities 9–10 Matheson, James 100, 104 Mauritius 97–8, 177, 178–9 Maymyo 163–5 Melrose, Andrew 219–20 Melville, Robert 55–6 merchant seamen 92–109 acceptance 98–9 behaviour 93 isolation 103 mobility 108 networking potential 93–5

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Index

problems associated with 99–100, 101–4 as transient 97 welfare movement 96 Merriman, P. 153 Meteorological Office 176 meteorologists and meteorological knowledge 19, 174–91 and aeromobility 174–9, 186–90, 190–1 groundwork 179–86 territorialising techniques 175 micro-movements 113 migration 3–4, 136–7 military experience 16, 17 battlefield visits 36–8 conversations over dinner 44–5 correspondence networks 31–2 debate 34 diaries 44–5, 46 geography 32–5 journals 34–5 knowledge networks 29–32 knowledge transfer 29–47 life 31 polysynchronous knowledge transfer 31 professional reading 29–30, 38 training 44 travel 29 military geography 32–5 battlefield visits 36–8 military power, application of 37–8 military synthesis 47 Mills, William 98 Millward, Liz 19, 174–5 miscegenation 142 mission movement 18, 92–109 Anglican approach 107–8 churches 98 floating chapels 97–8 missionary work 96 networking potential 93–5 sailors’ homes 98–9, 106–7 spread of 92, 93–7 missionaries 96, 104–9, 202–3

Mitchell, Lieutenant Thomas 32–3, 34 mobile images, and imperial knowledge 77–8 mobile subjects 11 mobilities, remade 2 mobility environments 9 mobility history 8–12 mobility infrastructures 9–10 Mobility Studies 7, 8–12, 15–16 mobility systems 10 Mogôk 162–3, 167–8 Moore, General John 45–6 Moore, Sir Frederick 157 moorings 7 Morrison, Robert 101–2, 102–3, 104 movement 3–4, 4–5, 8 Murchison, Roderick 112 Muybridge, Edweard 73 Nanking, Treaty of 104 Napoleonic Wars 50 National Botanic Gardens of Ireland 157, 170 navigation 80, 86, 188–9 networks 10, 16 merchant seamen 93–5 military 29–32 polysynchronous 44 New Imperial History 7 New Zealand 30, 96 vagrancy laws 18, 136–48 non-places 10 North, Lord 62 opium trade 104 out-of-place identities 136 Palmer, Frances Flora Bond 221–2, 222 Palmer, Scott 195 Panama Canal 14 Pax Britannica 185 Peninsular War 39 photography 220–1 Pirie, Gordon 195, 196, 203

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Index

placelessness 10 plantation colonies 4 polysynchronous knowledge transfer 31, 43–7 population flows 12–13 Port of London Society for Promoting Religion among Seamen 94 postal system 14–15 power relations 11, 139 Pratt, Mary Louise 180, 185 pre-industrial technologies 14 Price, Joseph 60–2 Protestantism 55 race and racial discourse 13, 16–17, 137–8 railways 1, 6, 13–14, 218–22, 219, 220, 222, 223 Raleigh Travellers’ Club 115 reality effect, the 85–6 religious division 55–6 Rhodes, Cecil 186 Richardson, Sir John 77 Roy, Kaushik 47 Royal Geographical Society 112, 117, 155, 166 see also Geographical Society of London Royal Navy 13 royal tours 4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald 19, 223 Salt, A. E. W. 204 Sassoon, Sir Philip 196 Saxe, Maurice de 38, 39, 40 science and scientific knowledge 6, 78, 152, 153 Science and Technology Studies 9 Seamen’s Friend Association 105 sea-power 15 settler politics 137, 139 settler societies 4 Seven Years War 52, 54 Shaw, Sir Napier 176–7 Simpson, George 176 Singapore 177 slave trade 4, 5, 13

Smethurst, Paul 71 Smith, Adam 52 Smith, Bernard 72 Social Welfare Association 138 Spanish–American war 222 spatial turn, the 152 spatiality 7 Speke, John Hanning 112, 122 Stanley, Henry Morton 126, 127 steamships 6, 14 Stevens, Edwin 102 Suez Canal 1, 3, 14 Tagaung 168 Talbot, James 51 Thomas, Sarah 17–18 Thompson, Andrew 3 Thomson, William 58–9 Tientsin, Treaty of 106, 107 Toungoo 157 tourism 13, 202 transculturation 5 transience 137 transport history 6 transportation 6–7, 9–10, 13–14 Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (Macintosh) 50–64 account of colonial misrule 55–8 authorial attribution 58–9 influence 52 publication 51 reception 58–63 status 52 vision 52, 57–8 trust 152–3 Twomey, Christina 141–2 United States of America 19 empire 222–3 First Transcontinental Railroad 1, 218–22, 219, 220, 222 identity 223 imperialism 223 Native Americans 222 westward expansion 216–23, 219, 220, 222 Urry, John 9, 10, 153, 183

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vagrancy laws, New Zealand 18, 136–48 Verne, Jules 1–2 visual culture 17–18 voyager artists 69–88 Waitangi, Treaty of 139 Wakefield, Sir Charles 195, 196, 209 Walter, Albert 19, 175, 178–91 and aeromobility 186–90, 190–1 encounters with the natives 184 groundwork 179–86 wandering 142 weather stations 19, 179, 180, 182, 185, 187 web of empire 30 Westall, William 17–18, 69, 71, 73, 78–80, 81, 82, 83, 85–8, 85, 88n4, 89n17 Wheeler-Cuffe, Charlotte 18–19, 152–70, 159–61, 167

background 154–5, 155–7 botanical paintings 163, 164, 165, 166, 169 career 156–7 commitment 170 contributions 155 excursions 161–2 garden 165–6, 167 and interracial liaisons 159–61 legacy 168–70 in Mandalay 157, 159, 159–62, 165, 169 Mogôk expedition 162–3 support for husband 163 Upper Burma treks 162–8 Wheeler-Cuffe, Otway 156, 157, 162, 167 Wolfe, General James 30, 35, 37–8, 40 women 152–70, 200–1, 202–3, 209–10, 211–12

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