Abstract
This chapter uses tropical plant photographs as a starting point to scrutinise botanical knowledge production in the late nineteenth century, including botanical nomenclature, field work procedures, amateur and professional scientific networks, biological material exchange and circulation. Plant photography and its contexts of production, usually regarded as illustrative elements, sheds light on the various steps of species discovery. These complex processes, in time and space, of obtaining and interpreting biological material raise conflicting views on scientific objectivity and highlight the fact that choice and selection in scientific representations of nature often relies on the judgement of non-specialists. In the process, the analysis of these botanical photographs within the scientific process provides valuable, if unforeseen, information on black photographers operating in western Africa’s Gulf of Guinea.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert J. Mayhew, Charles W.J. Withers, “Introduction: Thinking geographically about science in the nineteenth century”, in Geographies of knowledge: science, scale and spatiality in the nineteenth century, ed. Robert J. Mayhew, Charles W.J. Withers, 1–25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- 2.
Tanja Hammel, Shaping Natural History and Settler Society (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- 3.
See for instance, Konishi, Shino, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam, eds. Indigenous Intermediaries: New perspectives on Exploration Archives. ANU Press, 2015.
- 4.
The project Tracking the naturalists produced four documentaries on Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the Philosophical Voyages, freely available at http://naturalistas.pt.
- 5.
Jorge Varanda, “O Biombo de Fotos/The Screen of Photos”, in Missão Botânica: Transnatural – Angola 1927–1937, ed. Paulo Bernaschina & Alexandre Ramires, 5–35. Coimbra: Artez, 2007.
- 6.
The photographic archive of Luís Wittnich Carrisso (1886–1937) belongs to the Archive of Botany of the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra and is being progressively made available. A recent collaborative transcription project led by A.C. Gouveia, “Plant Letters” at Zooniverse made available and searchable the manuscript content of over 1000 documents at https://cartasdanatureza.uc.pt/.
- 7.
On several instances, Antonino Vidal, Henriques’s predecessor as director of the Botanic Garden (BG) of the UC, already describes acclimation experiments in the BG’s greenhouse with the most productive species of the quinine tree (genus Cinchona, for extraction of quinine, at the time the only effective compound for malaria treatment) and records the exchange of living plant material between São Tomé and UC.
- 8.
Isabel Castro Henriques & Alfredo Margarido, Plantas e Conhecimento do Mundo nos Séculos XV e XVI (Lisboa: Biblioteca da Expansão Portuguesa, Edições Alfa, 1989).
- 9.
Ângela Guimarães, Uma corrente do colonialismo português. A Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1875–1895 (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1984).
- 10.
Júlio Henriques, “Contribuições para o estudo da Flora d’Africa. Flora de S. Thomé,” Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana IV, (1886): 129–158.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Figueiredo, Estrela, Jorge Paiva, T. Stévart, Faustino Oliveira, Gideon F. Smith, “Annotated catalogue of the flowering plants of São Tomé and Príncipe,” Bothalia 41, no. 1 (2011): 41–82.
- 13.
Custódio de Borja (1849–1911), through whose official correspondence we can assess the interest of the government and certain influential figures of São Tomé in the preparation of the 1885 expedition of Adolfo Möller, and subsequent botanical prospecting work on the island. Original documents and copies were consulted at the Botany Archive of the Department of Life Sciences of the UC, and in the Historical Archives in the city of São Tomé; several ordinances on the botanical exploration of the island by Möller and Quintas were also published in the Official Bulletin of the Government of the Province of São Tomé e Príncipe.
- 14.
José António Dias Quintas (1839–1898), owner of the roças Nova Moka, Bom Sucesso and Benfica, in São Tomé; for further details see Jorge Forjaz, Genealogias de São Tomé e Príncipe. Subsídios. (Amadora: DisLivro, 2012). Quintas established important quinine tree plantations and it was at his house in Nova Moka that Adolfo Möller stayed while on the island. It was Quintas who recommended Möller to collaborate with Francisco Quintas, on whom, unfortunately, no clear biographical information could be obtained.
- 15.
Lawrence Dritsas, “From Lake Nyassa to Philadelphia: a geography of the Zambesi Expedition, 1858–64,” British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 1 (2005): 37 (35–52).
- 16.
Daniela Bleichmar, “The geography of observation: distance and visibility in eighteenth-century botanical travel,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston & Elizabeth Lunbeck, 373–395. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pg375.
- 17.
Júlio Henriques, “Contribuições para o estudo da Flora d’Africa. Catálogo da Flora da ilha de S. Thomé,” Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana 5, (1887): 196–220. The photograph of Pandanus thomensis on Fig. 2.1 appears here for the first time in print in 1887. As described, the picture was sent from São Tomé in 1888. This incongruity is due to the fact that the Bulletin of the Broterian Society of 1887 was published in the following year, as shown by references to other plants identified in letters from 1888, or references to events from December 1887.
- 18.
In the species description, Júlio Henriques alludes to the similarity of the inflorescence and male flowers of P. thomensis with those of P. lais, which he had confronted in the description and illustrations contained in Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien by Engler & Prantl, 1887.
- 19.
Lorraine Daston, “Type specimens and scientific memory,” Critical Inquiry 31, (2004): 153–182.
- 20.
Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Even the widespread use of botanical illustrations in floras and popular science books was at a point contested as opposed to the presence and careful observation of plants themselves. As Anne Secord details, “the aim [of illustrations] was not to teach beginners how to look at pictures but, rather, how to use pictures to develop the observational skills necessary for looking at plants and other objects of nature”. Anne Secord, Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis 93 (2002), pp. 28–57.
- 23.
Jennifer Tucker, in her work Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) cites the negative remarks of William Hooker, at the time the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew and leading botanical institution, to a proposal of collaboration on a publication by William Henry Fox Talbot saying of a photograph that “Your beautiful Campanula hederacea was very pretty as to general effect – but it did not express the swelling of the flower, nor the calyx, nor the veins of the leaves distinctly.”
- 24.
Almeida, Carmen. A divulgação da fotografia no Portugal oitocentista. Protagonistas, práticas e redes de circulação do saber. (PhD Thesis, University of Évora, 2017.
- 25.
Francisco Quintas. Francisco Quintas to Júlio Henriques, 22 April 1888. Letter. Series PT-UC-FCT-BOT/A/09-FJDQ-6, Department of Life Sciences, Botanical Archive of the University of Coimbra.
- 26.
Francisco Quintas. Francisco Quintas to Júlio Henriques, 29 June 1888. Letter. Series PT-UC-FCT-BOT/A/09-FJDQ-8, Department of Life Sciences, Botanical Archive of the University of Coimbra.
- 27.
Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
- 28.
Luciana de Lima Martins, O Rio de Janeiro dos viajantes (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2001).
- 29.
The “fruit” of the species in the genus Pandanus is what in botanical terms is called infructescence, or multiple fruit, of globular form, consisting of several individual fruits containing a seed (a classic example of this type of structure is the pineapple).
- 30.
Michael Simpson & Jen Bagelman, “Decolonizing Urban Political Ecologies: The Production of Nature in Settler Colonial Cities,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (2018), 558–568.
- 31.
Sophia Frances Kitlinski, “To unweave the sugar plantation: memory, landscape, and photography in Terry Boddie’s sugar plantation landscape,” Nierika. Revista de Estudios de Arte, 14 (2018), 8–20.
- 32.
Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
- 33.
Sarah Besky & Jonathan Padwe, “Placing Plants in Territory,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 7 (2016): 9–28.
- 34.
Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
- 35.
The first scientific collector of the monkey-staff (bordão-de-macaco; ukwêtê-nglandji: common names in Portuguese and Forro Creole, respectively) was Friedrich Welwitsch (1806–1872), an Austrian physician and botanist, and a mythical figure for subsequent Portuguese naturalists, who at the service of the Portuguese crown made important botanical collections in Angola, from 1853–1861. On his return trip to Portugal, he collected the monkey-staff at Roça Monte Café on the island of São Tomé.
- 36.
Júlio Henriques, “A Ilha de S. Tomé sob o ponto de vista historico-natural e agricola,” Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana 27, (1917): 1–197.
- 37.
Starr Douglas & Felix Driver, “Imagining the tropical colony: Henry Smeathman and the termites of Sierra Leone,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver & Luciana Martins, 91–112. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 112.
- 38.
Sandra Xavier, “Numa estreita vereda aberta na floresta: botânica, iconografia, território,” in Missão Botânica: Angola 1927–1937, ed. P. Amaral, A. Ramires, F. Sales & H. Freitas, 77–96. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2005.
- 39.
Official Bulletin of the Government of the Province of S. Thomé and Príncipe, 7 (1888).
Notwithstanding the quantity and diversity of data that can be derived from this bulletin, it should not be taken at face value. By cross-referencing the information from the lists of passengers entering and leaving the island, with the lists of vessels arriving or departing the São Tomé port, several inconsistencies can be found. By way of example, as mentioned in the text, the gunboat Pourvoyeur would have arrived in S. Tomé carrying five passengers, but only three names are recorded as entering the island. Similarly, when the same gunboat left for Gabon on 23 January, we are told that it takes on board the 76 soldiers who entered, some suitcases, but no passengers. However, under the heading “List of individuals who were granted passports or guides to leave this island during the month of January 1888”, only four names are listed, including that of Alphonse Owondo. If it is true that Owondo left on 23 January (on a Monday, three days after arriving), he was not the author of the picture of the screw pine. However, it is likely that the authorisation to leave did not imply immediate departure (especially since trips from São Tomé to Gabon were frequent), or that passengers’ entries and exits were not exhaustive. Maria Estela Guedes, while tracking the wanderings of naturalist Francisco Newton who lived in São Tomé for several years, detected several similar situations in the Bulletin: Newton often entered the island without ever officially leaving, or vice-versa, and some ships left before they even arrived (Maria Estela Guedes, ed., Francisco Newton: Cartas da Nova Atlântida, https://www.triplov.com/newton).
- 40.
Pierre-André Dürr, “Le concours agricole de 1902 à Conakry en texte et en cartes postales,” Bulletin Images & Memoires 25 (2010): 17–21.
- 41.
Odile Goerg, Pouvoir Colonial, Municipalités et Espaces Urbains: Conakry-Freetown des Années 1880 à 1914 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997).
- 42.
Bulletin Officiel Administratif du Congo Français, n. 8 (1893), pp. 145–200.
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Gouveia, A.C. (2023). Photographing Tropical Plants in the Late Nineteenth Century: Scientific Practices and Botanical Knowledge Production. In: Vicente, F.L., Ramos, A.D. (eds) Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_2
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