Encounter and Exchange
Astronomers and their instruments played their part in new cultures of contact that arose in the 18th-century Pacific world.
Trade and exchange flourished in encounters between British ships and coastal communities, with both sides keen to acquire each other’s artefacts. These transactions were often fraught, exposing tensions over the value of things and the social role of exchange.
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We now have a selection of items available to buy on-site, including pencils, notebooks, and postcards. Drop in and browse our new gifts next time you visit.
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A new range of Henslow-themed products has been launched at the University's 'Curating Cambridge' online shop.
Combining science and art, items from this new Henslow range make the perfect gift for those with an eye for the unusual.
During his tenure as Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, Henslow (1796 - 1861) revitalised the subject and inspired many students of the natural sciences, including a young Charles Darwin. This range of cushions, prints, tote bags, and stationery are based on the Whipple's extensive collection of Henslow's botanical charts.
From January, the AHRC is funding the project 'Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550-1914', based in the Whipple Museum.
Working with an interdisciplinary team, 'Tools of Knowledge' will apply cutting-edge methods of digital analysis to data on almost four centuries of the scientific instrument trade in Britain. The project will provide highly accessible information on the history of science, specifically as it relates to commerce, industry, teaching, and questions of local, national and international geography.
It will be grounded in the existing Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes (SIMON) dataset due to Dr Gloria Clifton and held by the National Maritime Museum, comprising more than 10,000 records on individual instrument makers and firms from Great Britain and Ireland.
The project is in partnership with Royal Museums Greenwich and the Science Museum, London.
In this time when so many people everywhere are working digitally, Tools of Knowledge will provide quick information in addition to deep context on thousands of objects in museum collections all around the world.
Please visit the Tools of Knowledge website for more information.
Profesor Liba Taub (Director and Curator, Whipple Museum), is the Principal Investigator; Dr Alexander Butterworth (University of Sussex), Dr Rebekah Higgitt (National Museums Scotland), Dr Boris Jardine (University of Cambridge) and Dr Joshua Nall (Curator of Modern Sciences, Whipple Museum), are Co-Investigators.
Captain Cook’s sextant
Precision instruments like the sextant shown in Image 1, used by Captain James Cook on his third voyage to the Pacific, played a central role in encounters between Cook’s men and Polynesian islanders. Carried as tools of navigation, instruments could also be desirable objects of trade and appropriation.
When, in October 1777, a sextant was taken from the Resolution’s tent observatory, Cook entered into a heated confrontation with Borabora islanders. The Raiatean landowner Mai, who had returned to Polynesia from London on the Resolution, was a crucial go-between.
As Cook’s journal records, once Mai had re-secured the instrument, Cook exacted a brutal reparation for his prized object:
“The intercourse of trade, and friendly offices, was carried on between us and the natives, without being disturbed by any one accident, till the evening of the 22nd, when a man found means to get into Mr Bayly’s observatory, and to carry off a sextant, unobserved. … I went ashore, and got Omai [Mai] to apply to the Chiefs, to procure restitution. …
"Having employed Omai to examine the prisoner, with some difficulty he was brought to confess where he had laid the sextant [and] it was brought back unhurt. … as to the thief, he appearing to be a hardened scoundrel, I punished him with more severity than I had done any culprit before. Besides having his head and beard shaved, I ordered both his ears to be cut off, and then dismissed him.”(1)
Trade in the Pacific
James Cook had the medals shown in Image 2 struck in Birmingham before his second voyage, to trade and gift to Pacific Islanders. Casts of the originals, like the ones shown here, were then exhibited in Britain to commemorate the journey.
The fine tattooing implement shown in Image 3, made of bamboo, turtleshell, and bone, is just one example from a wide variety of tools and ornaments chosen by Pacific Islanders to gift or trade in return.
Cook’s medals suggest that British officers often took these exchanges as evidence of Polynesian enthusiasm for commerce. But objects like this tattooing instrument may have been offered to the British to integrate them into complex networks of sociability.
Records from the British side of these exchanges certainly indicate that European seafarers viewed the Pacific as a commercial theatre in which judicious trading might make them rich.
The astronomer William Gooch wrote to his parents in June, 1791, before his maiden voyage to the Pacific, detailing his plans to moonlight as a commodities trader:
“I first mention’d taking some Baubles with me for the Savages, as what I suppos’d a trivial Concern; but [William Wales] made it a very material one, and said that there was little doubt of my doubling my salary by exchanging them for Furs which could sell for a great Price to the Chinese.—He particularly mention’d large Sheath-Knives, small Axes, Copper Vessels (Pots, Sauspans Kettles &c.) Spike-Nails &c. … an Ax of 2 shillings will purchase a Sea Otters skin that I can sell in China for two or three hundred Dollars.”(2)
References
1.James Cook, journal entry for 23 Oct. 1777, as quoted in: James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, Vol. 2 (London: W. and A. Strahan, 1784), pp.99–100.
2.Quoted in: Richard Dunn, ‘Heaving a Little Ballast: Seaborne Astronomy in the Late-Eighteenth Century’, in: Marcus Granato & Marta C. Lourenço (eds.), Scientific Instruments in the History of Science: Studies in Transfer, Use and Preservation (Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins, 2014), 79–100, on p.82.
Joshua Nall
Joshua Nall, ‘Encounter and Exchange’, Explore Whipple Collections, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge, 2020.