Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

1. The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments: Advice on Health and Prosperity

19 1 The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments: Advice on Health and Prosperity Andrew Wear Agriculture must be the foundation of every settlement. —New Zealand Company settler Prosperity and health were, if we believe the literature produced for potential settlers, on the wish list of anyone who was thinking of migrating and settling in strange new environments. This conjunction of wealth and health, usually ignored by historians of medicine, lasted across the whole period of British colonization. If a colony was to survive, both wealth (or at least a prosperous subsistence) and health were essential and were also factors likely to shape how the environment was envisaged. In this chapter I will be arguing for stability or continuity in the discourse about health and wealth. Whether this discourse was as applicable to tropical as to temperate areas is discussed in the last part of the chapter. Places, People, and Health In the early years of a colony, the way its environment produced health and wealth was to a greater or lesser extent perceived as comparable to  | Andrew Wear England’s, especially if the colony was in a temperate area. (In the rest of the chapter I will refer more often to “England” rather than to “Britain ,” as England was usually the “home” model, analogy, or metaphor in descriptions of new settler environments.) There were a number of reasons for the almost universal impulse in this literature to portray a colony as a home away from home for people, plants, and animals. There was the perceived need for English bodies—and likewise, English plants and animals, given the agricultural nature of most colonies from the seventeenth to the twentieth century—to fit their new place. More generally, prospective settlers were believed to need the psychological reassurance that there was something of the mother country in the new country. Set against this was the growing realization that new colonies were different both in their environments and in their developments of increasingly distinct identities. The idea of the fit between people and places was often expressed through a discourse that linked health and climate. It is important to note at this point that climate and health were set out together along with the economic resources of a place in geography books, and in the accounts and letters that urged people to come to a new settlement. This conjunction of health with resources made up the prospectus for a colony and is something that I will discuss further in the chapter. As is well known, health was seen as being affected by a place and, in particular, by its climate. This belief was long-lasting. It is found in Hippocratic writings and was only starting to end by the beginning of the twentieth century, after the bacteriological revolution and then the development of scientific tropical medicine. It was based on the humoral and qualitative view of the body developed by Greek medicine and philosophy. The body, being composed of four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), which in turn were each made from pairs of the four primary qualities of hot, cold, dry, and wet, was shaped and influenced by the external force of climate that essentially consisted of the same four qualities. This also had a cultural significance. It was believed that people’s countries of birth shaped their constitution, and that there was a fit between people and their home country. This was a popular view among lay as well as medi- The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments |  cal writers. It was also a belief that echoed the English nationalism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries along the lines that England had the most equable or temperate climate and so produced the best people.1 In the nineteenth century that nationalism took on an explicitly racial character. Such perceptions helped to produce the desire to find or create something of the mother country in a new colony. What was alien in a colony could be threatening, while the familiar spelled safety and provided a sense of reassurance about one’s identity in body, character, and race. The attempted re-creation of a home environment, whether in tropical niches or enclaves or wholesale in the temperate new “white land,” became an imperative for British colonists. Ideas of health fed into this imperative, and as we shall see later in the chapter, they were allied to an agricultural...