Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay (review)

From its inception, the Hudson's Bay Company kept records that have served historians well. Among the data collected by the company, a good deal concerned natural history which, in its eighteenth-century acceptance, concerned not only plants and animals but much of what today would be termed anthropology, geography, geology, climatology, and so on. So in addition to furnishing the company with a steady supply of pelts (and feathers and quills), Hudson's Bay employees and visitors also provided measurements of temperature, rain and snowfall, the freezing point of mercury, the transit of Venus, as well as observations on Native language and custom, and samples of new species of plants, birds, and other wildlife.

The present work offers a history of the data-gathering activities of eight Hudson's Bay Company employees whose employment spanned the eighteenth century. The method used in this study is resolutely biographical. Following an introduction to the Hudson's Bay Company, we are given brief biographies of six European naturalists such as Sir Hans Sloane and Karl Linnaeus who constitute the background, so to speak, for natural history in the eighteenth century. This contextualization, such as it is, is followed by eight more biographies of the aforementioned Hudson's Bay employees who collected data for their European masters. The book concludes with four more biographies of British naturalists in Charles Town, SC, who also supplied specimens and observations to Sloan and Linnaeus.

Sandwiched in between this onslaught of biographies is a short chapter on climatology, which describes some of the weather observations made by both the naturalists and Native peoples, and some of the issues involved in interpreting the observations, given the limits of the instrumentation used. As it stands, however, it is more a collection of notes than a chapter with a coherent thesis.

The biographical approach allows the authors considerable leeway in their choice of facts, and in this respect, they are often like their natural history predecessors, unable to resist the odd fact or unusual observation. While much of the content of the biographies concerns the collection of natural history data and natural historical observations, both of which will usefully serve a future history of natural history in Canada (and elsewhere for that matter) or a history of the environment, there is an irritating tendency to stray off topic and to raise issues of peripheral interest (number of wives, Native and otherwise, number of children, alcoholism, etc.). Sometimes the detail borders on the whimsical, as when we are told, for example, that in order to join James Cook's ship the Resolution, for which he had been hired as a naturalist, Johann Forster took a post chaise to Plymouth (from where?), 'reaching Plymouth dock on 29 June' (22), only to be told in the same paragraph that he needn't have done so since the ship didn't leave until two weeks later. The importance of reporting Forster's undue haste is not explained, and it seems likely that there is no explanation. Why we are told that John Latham's mother was 'a Sotheby from Yorkshire' (28) remains equally mysterious. Ultimately, the intellectual content of the subject as well as the institutional context is largely drowned out by the often dreary flow of biographical minutiae, recurrent priority disputes – the authors are fastidious in their tracking of attributions across different editions of Arctic Zoology – and value judgements of questionable value; do we really know that Thomas Pennant was a 'refined gentleman' or that 'the 1770s was an exciting decade, notable for intellectual ferment' (127)?

What I have described so far occupies merely half the book. Aside from the notes and indices, the other half is composed entirely of appendices. While I do not deny that there is much information contained herein (for somebody), I do not understand the principles behind their inclusion. Why, for example, is there a list of all the boats that sailed into York Factory between 1716...