“There is the Sea, Vast and Spacious: Slavery, Natural History, and Collections of Marine Life in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic”

Christopher Blakley (Rutgers University)

This paper questions how individuals engaged in the slave trade and slavery in the British Atlantic exploited their position and access to enslaved collectors to accumulate specimens and descriptions of marine animals throughout the eighteenth century. Collecting animals below the waterline for patrons offered agents of the slave trade, such as clerks and surgeons, routes to status as naturalists. Such individuals often coerced enslaved people, especially those with a reputation for diving, to capture distant and dangerous fauna. For others, including clergy and poets, gathering sea creatures presented opportunities for cultivating friendship with slaveholders, leisure, and literary celebrity. Through case studies from the Gambia River, Río de la Plata, and the West Indies, this paper investigates collectors who acquired animals such as sea lions, electric rays, and murexes to intrigue their patrons. Asking how these individuals accumulated animals reveals how commercial, scientific, and literary networks assembled under slavery produced and circulated knowledge in natural history. Using travel accounts, natural histories, and an unpublished manuscript, I ask how aquatic animals in particular became central to natural history as objects of curiosity, beauty, and mercantile projecting. Moreover, the paper highlights the hazardous labor of enslaved assistants in producing these collections. Uncovering exchanges of fauna between elite collectors at the metropole and individuals at slave trading forts, during expeditions for slaving companies, and on plantations in the colonies demonstrates how slavery facilitated transatlantic networks of information and the ways in which animals appeared in passages to credit in early modern science.

“The Flounder and the Ray: Flattening Natural History in the Eighteenth Century”

Whitney Barlow Robles (Harvard University)

This paper explores flatness as a method of specimen preservation, a mode of seeing, and a way of animal being in eighteenth-century natural history. Focusing primarily on the British Atlantic, I examine how and why naturalists dried and flattened organisms—such as fishes, corals, snakes, and insects—in order to understand and preserve them. I investigate several collections of fish specimens that were slit in half, dried, and then pressed and sewn or varnished to paper like plants. These specimens literalized the widespread period metaphor of the “page” or “book” of nature, serving as objects of natural theology as well as scientific paperwork. While naturalists would use this technique to standardize nature and render watery worlds (and extensive empires) visible, the habits and material form of fishes could encourage such preservation or confound it, revealing how animals actively shaped what humans learned about their objects of study. I also draw from food history and material culture studies to consider how craft knowledge—such as familiarity with cooking fishes—informed natural historical practice, and I trace struggles between scientists who wanted to preserve their animal specimens and other human and insect actors who wanted to eat them. Finally, I recount my own attempts to make a flattened fish specimen in this tradition using instructions from the 1740s and a European seabass from the grocery store, considering how we might understand historical craft practices by reconstructing specimen preservation techniques and conducting our own embodied investigations of animals.

“Amerindian Natural History in the “Aztec Encyclopaedia

Iris Montero Sobrevilla (Brown University)

At the time of encounter between European and Amerindian cultures, natural history was undergoing profound transformations, fuelled by a renewed interest in the classical iterations of knowledge associated with Aristotle and Pliny. Aristotelian models, discussing concepts such as the scala naturae, served as a template on which to superimpose questions about the New World. Aristotelian framing in works such as Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias helped address a variety of epistemological challenges and assured successful reception, including prompt translation and multiple editions. Plinian models, on the other hand, in their encyclopaedic ambition, often used a proto-ethnographic methodology and negotiated with native views of nature. These works also tended to be longer and, often due to their heavy native imprint, to remain in manuscript form. This indigenous imprint is never more evident than in the treatment of animals. This paper explores the extent of indigenous intervention in natural historical projects in the sixteenth century, focusing on the Mexica or Aztec people of New Spain and their role in shaping the Florentine Codex, often labelled ‘the Aztec encyclopaedia.’ Through the case of the hummingbird, a paradigmatic New World animal, I argue that the notion of indigenous natural history takes on new meaning in the Florentine Codex. No longer referring only to the descriptive genre of historiae applied to the natural world, it came to signify a history where nature, and animals in particular, were central actors, and where human narratives were intertwined and indistinguishable from those centering nonhuman subjects.

“’To Deaden the Memory’: Bestiality and Animal Erasure in Colonial New Spain, 1563–1821”

Zeb Tortorici (New York University)

This paper explores how records of the crime of bestiality—amply recorded and documented in Mexican and Guatemalan colonial archives—can be used by historians to articulate the complex interrelationship between colonialism, environmental change, and human-animal interactions. Based on a corpus of 119 criminal cases and 25 Inquisition denunciations of bestiality throughout New Spain between 1563 and 1821, I explore how these records are demonstrative of environmental change and historical subjectivity in colonial Latin America. With the glaring exception of one case—in which a thirteen-year-old Maya boy named Pedro Na was caught having sex with a Mesoamerican turkey (gallina de la tierra) in 1563 in Mérida, Yucatán—these cases implicate only European domesticated animals such as donkeys, mares, dogs, mules, cows, goats, and sheep. This significant fact challenges colonial tropes and stereotypes that bestiality was an act perpetrated largely by native peoples due to their deviant desires and inherent “rusticity.” This record set also allows us to historicize particular animal deaths, given that colonial authorities ritualistically killed nearly all of the animals implicated in bestiality cases while meting out comparatively lenient sentences to the human offenders who initiated such acts. In the language of the courts, colonial authorities sought to “deaden the memory of the act” through the eradication of the physical evidence—the body of the nonhuman animal—at the same time that they assiduously recorded and transcribed the details of the crime within the documents that eventually ended up in Latin American historical archives.