Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination by Joyce Appleby (review)

Placing the development of science in a global setting is an understandable preoccupation of historians of science—a natural response to the dynamics of an increasingly globalized age. Responding to this leaven of world history, Joyce Appleby’s attractively written book sets out to demonstrate how European contact with the new Worlds of both the Atlantic and the Pacific provided the stimulus for a new mentality conducive to the growth of science. The bulk of the book is concerned with how Europe responded to the seismic event of the encounter with the Americas. This brought with it much new data and, more fundamentally, a questioning of the assumptions of the ancients and the church fathers, which had hitherto constituted the boundaries of knowledge. Going outside the Mediterranean meant access not only to new goods and territories but also to new ways of looking at the world—a transformation captured in iconic form by the frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s plea for the promotion of the new sciences in his Great Instauration (1620) with its depiction of ships venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the gateway to the Mediterranean. As Appleby shows, assimilating the knowledge that the Columbian encounter brought with it was the work of some centuries. In her interpretation the impact of the New World was the catalyst for such an increase in the pace of scientific activity that it helped to promote the development of new instruments (such as the microscope) for the study of nature. The growing volume of specimens was also a stimulus for the development of systems of classification, notably that of Linnaeus. With the fruits of the Atlantic encounter having become more and more an accepted part of the European mental universe in the age of the Enlightenment, there was, then, a shift of focus to the Pacific. This in turn gave rise to the great nineteenth-century global synthesizers of the natural world, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, to whom the book devotes its last chapter. Though Humboldt’s fame has greatly faded, Appleby underlines the enormous impact his work had on contemporaries—including one Charles Darwin whose fame becomes ever brighter.

Such a broad sweep is covered with aplomb and elegance. The framework that holds it together, however, is open to some questioning. The connecting thread through these diverse historical episodes is that Europe, before the contact with the New World, was intellectually blinkered and dominated by an obscurantist church, the hold of which it took the shock of the New Worlds to loosen. Once again we see the persistence and prevalence of the basic paradigm of the trope of the warfare of science and religion which was established in the Enlightenment and given wide currency in the nineteenth century by figures such as John Draper and Andrew White (though it has been subject to much revision in recent historiography). Yet Appleby’s own exposition should give some pause to such a way of understanding the emergence of science in a largely Christian Europe. As she indicates, the Spanish encounter with the New World was given scholarly form by some clerics who eagerly sought to integrate the novel wonders before them into the established body of knowledge. The intellectually omnivorous Jesuit José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), for example, receives a glancing mention but much more could be made of the way in which it viewed the acquisition of new knowledge not as a departure from religion but as a study of the work of the creator, a reinforcement of it. Acosta also challenged some of the obstacles to science that derived not from Christianity but from its pagan classical heritage: Thus, Acosta refuted Aristotle’s claim that the Southern Hemisphere would be largely uninhabitable because it was a “burning Zone” with firsthand evidence from South America.

Indeed, a subterranean theme of the book is the persistence and importance of the...