Exploring our archives

Next month I’m taking the RMS ship to St Helena, following the route taken by several members of the Royal Society. This small Atlantic island was originally discovered in 1502-5 during Vasco da Gama’s journey to the East Indies and during the sixteenth century was visited (willingly and unwilling) by travelers as diverse as two teenage Japanese princes en route to visit the Pope and an unlucky follower of Afonso Albuqueque, who was marooned there after defecting to his enemy Prince Khan. It was also the site of what can be described as the first ever ’sci-fi’ novel, Francis Godwin’s 1638 ‘Man in the Moone’. The island passed between Dutch and English settlement before 1673, at which point the East India Company established their ‘government’ there. Edmund Halley visited in 1676 to determine the positions of stars in the northern hemisphere and to observe the transit of Mercury across the sun, for which purpose he built an observatory on the island (1). Halley’s trip to the island was also important for his observations of the magnetic declination of the earth, which would later form the basis of his atlases of the Atlantic and the world as well as making an important contribution to Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Perhaps frustrated by having his observations so frequently interrupted by poor weather, Halley also wrote an article about the ‘watery vapours’ on the island, a piece sometimes hailed as an early example of climate environmentalism (2). Halley was followed almost a century later by Dixon and Mason, sent to observe the 1761 transit.

As an important transit point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, St Helena was a site for experimentation with agricultural and manufacturing techniques drawn from both worlds: growing different types of rice and wheat as well as coffee, which is still produced on the island. Many of these experiments were drawn from Asia, which remained far ahead of Europe in terms of manufacturing techniques in the seventeenth century (the most obvious example being textiles). Having tried unsuccessfully to persuade some of the Indian inhabitants of Madras to visit and demonstrate the making of indigo, the Company was forced to rely on the experience of their servants of agricultural and manufacturing techniques used in the East and West Indies. The Governor Isaac Pyke was a frequent correspondent of the Society and published a piece in Philosophical Transactions entitled ‘The Making of Mortar at Madras’ (3), which details the technique and his efforts to reproduce it on St Helena. I recently found the manuscript copy of this paper among the manuscripts held in Senate House, along with Pyke’s ‘hydrostatick’ method of calculating the composition of metals. Weighing composite metals in water and air was another frequent obsession of the Society’s during the seventeenth century, the results of these experiments being painstakingly recorded in the Hooke folio. Pyke’s MS alerted me to the practical applications of the method; showing the composition, and thus relative values, of different types of gold and silver coins.
1) Alan Cook. ‘Edmond Halley and the Magnetic Field of the Earth’. Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 55 (3), 473–490 (2001)

2) Edmund Halley. ‘An Account of the Circulation of Watry Vapours of the Sea, and of the Cause of Springs. Philosophical Transactions, 192:17 (1694), 468-73.

3) Isaac Pyke. ‘The Method of Making the Best Mortar at Madras’. Philosophical Transactions, 37 (1731/1732), 231-235.

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Robert Knox was a close correspondent of the Royal Society, and a particularly close friend of Robert Hooke. His ‘Historical Relation of Ceylon’, published under the auspices of the Royal Society and the East India Company in 1681 provides an in-depth commentary on the social and political life of the Kingdom of Kandy in the period. Looking at a manuscript in the British Library, I discovered that in the same year his ‘Relation’ was published, Knox had begun another account of a journey to Tonqueen (Vietnam), where the East India Company were attempting to establish a factory (trading post) at the time. Unfortunately, the narrative breaks off before Knox reached his destination. Nevertheless, he does give some interesting descriptions of two islands in Cape Verde, an archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean off the West coast of Africa. The archipelago was unpopulated until its discovery by Portuguese sailors in the late fifteenth century, after which it became a sugar cane plantation and transit point in the Atlantic slave trade, remaining a colony until 1975, when it became the current Republic of Cape Verde. I’ve marked the location of the islands Knox mentions on a map here. Knox arrived in the ‘Isle of May’, Maio, on the 28 October 1681. His description concentrates on the plants that he recognises from Sri Lanka, which he details, speculating that the difference in longitude makes less difference to the climate, and hence the types of plant species that flourish, than the latitude. On leaving Maio, Knox sailed to the neighbouring island of ‘St Iago’, Santiagu, where he gives a description of the city and villages, also noting that although they referred to themselves as Portuguese and followed the religion and accepted the monarch of that country, the majority of inhabitants seemed to have come from Guinea. Again, Knox makes comparisons between the flora of the island and that of Ceylon, perhaps scouting for potential sites for the East India Company, he also comments on the scarcity of wood and the growing of cotton on the island and the possibilities affored by the iron stone he observes. He records that the journey to ‘Bantam’, Banten, took around six months, noting with approval that a watermelon he had acquired in Santiagu retained its freshness all the way. Banten, a province of Java where the East India Company had a factory, was a natural transit point for Knox’s final destination, ‘Tonqueen’, Vietnam, but it is at this point that the manuscript breaks off.

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The global eradication of smallpox is viewed as one of the major achievements of twentieth century medicine. However, the history of inoculation against smallpox is much older. The technique of inoculating against the disease by using a small amount of bodily fluid from an infected person was well known in China and India for many centuries and had reached modern Turkey by the seventeenth century.

From: Library of Zhongguo zhongyi yanjiu yuan (China Academy for Traditional Chinese Medicine), Sun Shi yi’an (Doctor Sun’s Casebook)
By: Sun Qishun (Qing period, 1644-1911)
Published: 1817
Collection: Wellcome Images
Library reference no.: External ReferenceWang Shumin II 659, External ReferenceShen 13/1817 Qiu 659 and External Reference Vivienne Lo

The technique of inoculation against smallpox came late to Europe, where it was first promoted by Lady Wortley Montague who had seen women in the marketplace in Constantinople (Istanbul) practicing it and had her own children inoculated. Her espousal of the technique on returning to England caused controversy among her peers, many of whom argued that not only was deliberately infecting someone with a virus dangerous, but that attempts to prevent the disease were unchristian.

The Royal Society made extensive investigations into the novel technique. As Dr Rim Turkmani noted in her recent talk on Arabic in Britain, the Society consulted one of their fellows with first hand experience; the Ambassador of Tripoli, Cassam Aga. The response from the Ambassador, translated from the original Arabic and read to the Society in 1729, gives a brief overview of the technique: “If any one hath a mind to have his children inoculated, he arrives them to one that lies ill of the smallpox all the time when the pustules are come to full maturity. Then the surgeon makes an incision upon the back of his hand between the thumb & forefinger, and puts a little of the matter, squeezed out of one of the largest & fullest pustules into the wound. This done, the child’s hand is wrapt around with a handkerchief to keep it from the Air, and he is left to his liberty till the fever arising confines him to his Bed, which commonly happens at the end of three or four days. After that, by God’s permission, a few pustules of the smallpox break out upon the child.” He then recounts his own experience of being inoculated as a child, concluding that this practise is “so innocent, & so sure, that out of an hundred persons inoculated not two die, whereas on the contrary out of a hundred persons, that are infected with the smallpox in the natural way there die commonly about thirty”.

The origins of the technique in Constantinople are unclear. A 1713 report from Emanuel Timonius dated its introduction to about forty years previously and ascribed its introduction to ‘the Circassians Georgians and other Asiaticks’. On the other hand, the Ambassador’s account indicates that inoculation had been practiced for a longer period: “It is withall so ancient in the kingdoms of Tripoly, Tunis and Algier, that no body remembers its first rise, and it is generally practised not only by the inhabitants of the Towns but also by the wild Arabs.”

The Royal Society also monitored the progress of inoculation in England: Hans Sloane was present when the Royal Surgeon Claud Amyand administered infected matter to the young Princesses Amelia and Carolina in 1722. Amyand was clearly convinced of the efficacy of inoculation, as the next subject appearing on his list appears to be his own son. Others were less impressed, however. Volume 23 of the Classified Papers of the Society, into which statistics and case reports on inoculation were gathered contains a letter from the Mayor and Corporation of London explaining that the practice was being banned because it was thought to spread smallpox.

The technique would also prove a contentious issue in India. The first report of inoculation there reached the Society in 1731 in a letter preserved among the Royal Society’s papers in the British Library from Robert Coult giving an ‘account of the diseases in Bengal’ and by 1767 J Z Holwell was reporting widespread inoculation in Bengal. However, as in England the practice also tended to be regarded as a public health risk, and there were some attempts to suppress it under colonial rule.

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Snake venom is still a poison that is hard to combat and presents a real public health problem in tropical countries. Treatments are still often sought in naturally-occurring antidotes, as the focus of a recent book on the antivenomous properties of plants reveals. Snake venom, like other poisons, can also have medicinal properties. The early Royal Society collected accounts of snakes, samples of venom, and possible cures. One widely debated idea was that venom could be combated by the use of stones found in the heads of snakes. These stones were highly valued across the Indian Ocean and had begun to be brought back into Europe in the 1650’s by Jesuit missionaries [1].

One of the places where the Hooke folio provides a slightly different account to that of the Journal Book concerns these snake stones. The story begins with the minutes for the meeting of 20 May - a date on which the Journal Book records that the Society ‘did not sit’. The folio records that the stone had been brought to the East India Company to the Royal Society, who had received it from the King of Bantam as a present and were ‘unsure of its virtues’. One of the agents, a Mr Hublon, referred the Society to a translation of a Portuguese work printed in 1582. mentioning the medicinal properties of a stone found in the head of a snake, or ‘Piedra de Cobra de Mombasa’, which was thought to cure various ailments. Interestingly, although the Journal Book minutes for 27 May 1680, a date missing from the folio, mentions ‘Hublon’s stone’, it does not mention that the Company agents were present at the meeting, or refer to the Portuguese book. Dr Tison is recorded as giving an account that the dogs he had attempted to poison with snake venom did not become ill in the first place and that he had therefore abandoned the experiment - although he then added that he had tried one such stone on the hand of an unfortunate servant who had been bitten by a viper (it is not clear whether he encouraged the viper in this case!) This is in contrast to the folio which records in the draft reply to the Company - one of the sheets in the folio not in Hooke’s hand - that the two dogs given venom and nux vomica died despite the administration of the antidote, a passage that is missing from the copy of the letter in the Journal Book.
The Society’s draft reply to the EIC describes the use of the stone, found in ‘the province of Zanguobar (used to refer to the East Coast of Tanzania) in Africa’ and used there as a treatment for colic, in childbirth and against depression and in Europe and the East Indies as an antidote to poison. The description of how to prepare a medicine from the stone, ‘to rub it on a hard smooth stone till a cream comes of it’, is given, apparently derived from the use in Africa or the East Indies. The letter then contains an assurance that Francesco Redi ‘a virtuoso of Ferdinand grand Duke of Florence’ had not found the stone useful. The report of the Society’s own experiments, at first inserted in the middle of the letter, have been crossed out and moved to a tentative appendage in the draft in the Hooke folio, and omitted completely from the copy in the Journal Book. As well as providing an interesting example of the divergence between the folio and the official records, this incident illustrates firstly just how important it was to the East India Company to discover the medical properties of new vegetable, mineral and even animal substances. The agents of the Company were at the mercy of newly encountered diseases. European medicines were often powerless to combat these problems or did not survive the long journey to their destination. Those medicines that were found to be effective, such as the anti-malarial, ‘Jesuits’ bark’, were also a potential source of revenue for the Company. Secondly, it shows that the Royal Society was already becoming seen by this stage as a port of call for queries involving unfamiliar objects. Finally it shows why the Society often had to rely on the testimony of their network of contacts rather than their own experiments - although the records are unclear the attempt to poison the dogs seems to have failed in some way and such poison, as well as instructions on how to administer it, would have been scarce and the medical effects would have been difficult to gage - depressed dogs being still more scarce
Ironically, despite the complete failure of their own experiments, the reference to Redi may serve to reassert the Royal Society’s commitment to experimentation. Snakestones had become a mainstay in the debate between two rival natural philosophers in Italy: Athanasius Kirchner and Francesco Redi. While Kirchner was an advocate of the Aristolean philosophy and had close ties to the papacy and the College Romano, Redi, an fearsome opponent of Aristotle, was his rival at the Medici court. While Kirchner used a single trial to confirm, as he claimed, the reports of the missionaries of the stone effecting miraculous cures, Redi performed hundreds of experiments to support his claims that the stones were not effective against poison. The verdict of the Royal Society here therefore shows a more theoretical than practical commitment to experimentation. This did not diminish their interest in various types of poisons and their antidotes, however, the search for toxins derived from plant and animal matter continues throughout the early records of the Society [2].

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Overseeing the current polar exhibition at the Royal Society is a lone penguin. Percy, who normally guards the manuscripts in the basement, is one reminder of the large collection of animals that once inhabited part of the Royal Society. The animal specimens sent to the Society from around the world were catalogued along with the plants by Nehemiah Grew (1641 - 1712) in his Musaeum Regalis Societatis or catalogue of the natural and artificial rarieties belonging to the Royal Society, to which he added his ‘comparative anatomy’ of stomachs and guts. At this time, the repository was housed in Gresham College, depicted here by Grew himself.

Grew is normally remembered for his work as Curator of Plants for the Society between 1672 and 1673, during which time he produced his best known work, ‘The Anatomy of Plants Begun’, which was pioneering in its use of microscopy and meticulous description. As Bolam pointed out in her article on this work (1), Grew’s use of comparison and his investigation of the specific functions of different parts of plants were also highly original. In his catalogue of rarities, Grew takes similar approach to his descriptions of animals - most of which he had never seen alive. For example, he not only describes the tail of an elephant in detail, but also tries to explain its purpose:

One that considers the Teeth of a Horse, sees the reason why he hath so long an upper Lip; which is his Hand, and in some sort answers to the Proboscis of an Elephant; whereby he nimbly winds the Grass in great quantities at once into his Mouth. . .That being much pestered by flies he should have a long brush tail to whisk them off. Whereas the Ass, which either for the hardness or drynesse of his Skin, or other Cause, is less anoy’d with them, hath no need of such a one.’

Thinking about a leopard, he reconstructs its movements by comparing it to a cat: ‘If they are well compar’d, he is in every way, shape, like a Cat: his Head, Teeth, Tongue, Feet, Claws Tail all like a Cats; he boxes with his forefeet as a Cat doth her Kitlins; Leaps at the prey like a Cat at a Mouse; and will also spit much after the same manner.’

Often Grew makes use of the accounts of travel that the Royal Society received from around the world to correct older assumption about animals. Describing the hippopotamus he notes:

‘Aristotle falsly gives him a Maine, like that of the Horse: deluded, ’tis likely by the Name [i.e. ‘River horse]. Kirchner falsly gives him Horses Teeth’ using Linschoten: ‘Several Teeth, both of the upper and nether Jaw of the Hipopotamus. Some so big, that they seem to have belonged to a much bigger skull, than this here’.

Grew, of course was not immune from the dangers of extrapolating from second or third hand accounts of far-off places, in one passage he warns, based on the account of the Dutch physician Bontius’ account of the wildlife of Java that a rhinoceros ‘will licking a Man to death by raking away the flesh to the Bone with his sharp and rough tongue’!

Grew’s catalogue was far more than a simple list of the contents of the Royal Society’s repository, it also contains some important work towards classifying species of animals and plants. Grew named many of the species he describes for the first time and unlike Linnaeus, who choose his names based on places and sometime people as well as appearences, Grew argued that ‘For so, every name were a short definition’, rather than the place it is found – ‘For it often falls out, that the same Thing breeds in many Places’.
(1) Jeanne Bolam. ‘The Botanical Works of Nehemiah Grew, F.R.S. (1641-1712).’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (1938-1996) Volume 27, Number 2 / 1973

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I’m constantly finding papers relating to the Royal Society outside of the Society’s archive. This week I’ve been looking at some of the letters of Thomas Smith FRS (1638-1710), which are kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A series of letters to his friend Edward Bernard, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, give some informal opinions about members of the Society which really bring them to life as characters. For example, after the death of Robert Boyle, Smith reminiscences about taking walks with his friend, and recalls the times when Boyle had asked Smith, the former Ambassador to Constantinople, ‘to give some accompt of the Turks, who hee called my parishioners’. In 1689, Smith also describes to Bernard a chance encounter with Robert Hooke, which demonstrates the closeness of the circles of ‘virtuosi’ of London and Oxford: bumping into Hooke by chance, Smith had asked about ‘the Malabar &c. character’, upon which subject Bernard had written to Boyle, Hooke ‘told me that Mr Boyle had spoken to him about the same curiosity, and putting his hand in his pocket, pulled out your letter which I had conveyed to Mr. B. on coming to town’. Other pen portraits Smith gives of early members are less flattering: for example, Halley’s pretensions to succeed Smith’s friend Edward Bernard as Professor of Astronomy at Oxford are mocked as presumptuous, although Halley is apparently regarded as preferable to Flamstead, who is dismissed as ‘a grievous Whig’. Smith’s letters also reveal some concern about the fortunes of the Society in its early days. For example, in 1677, he wrote ‘there will be methods found out of retrieving the glory of such an excellent institution, which some idle and malicious persons have lately given out was a sinking’.

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Japan is generally thought to have had few dealings with foreigners between the early late seventeenth- and mid-nineteenth centuries. The Dutch and Chinese were the only outsiders allowed to establish trading stations in the period and as these scrolls from the British Library show, their activities were closely monitored. The English East India Company tried twice to win equivalent privileges, both ending in failure. Robert Boyle, who acted as an adviser to the Company, seems to have been involved in gathering background information for at least one of these attempts. Vol. 39 consists mostly of copies from accounts of travel, like Purchas’ ‘Pilgrimages’ and of copies of directives concerning the Committee for Plantations of which Boyle and Evelyn were members. It also includes some notes on the various trade items that could be supplied to Asian countries. The list for Japan is particularly interesting. Like many of the others it goes into considerable detail about the colour and texture of cloth favoured there, but it then goes on to list ‘burning glasses, spectacles, perspective glasses and watches’ from European as items required in Japan. Although Chinese and Japanese glass making was advanced at an early stage, it has generally been assumed that this skill was not used in making eye glasses and no trade in them has previously been noted. The references to burning and perspective glasses suggests that, despite their isolation, the Japanese had some interest in European scientific equipment. Another clue that some kind of exchange was taking place can be found in Vol. 6 of the Record Book: Between 1683 and 4, Robert Hooke experimented with several types of instruments for weighing, making different types of balances and stilliards (also spelled ’stillyard’ and ’stiliyard’, according to the OED this refers to ‘a balance consisting of a lever with unequal arms that moves on a fulcrum; the article to be weighed is suspended from the shorter arm, and a counterpoise is caused to slide upon the longer arm until equilibrium is produced, its place on this arm (which is notched or graduated) showing the weight’). On January 23rd 1684, the Record Book (Vol. 6 f. 143-4) records Hooke experimenting with Japanese scales and weights ‘made and adjusted in that country with great care and curiosity’. Hooke describes the brass weights as bearing the seal of the Emperor and, although does not name the person who had brought him the weights, notes that ‘[t]hese (as I was informed by the person who brought them from the Indies) are by a severe penalty prohibited to be exported to any other place and are of great Value in the place itself’. Presumably from the same source, Hooke had acquired a Japanese stilliard ‘made upon the same principle as our Common Stilyards but with greater curiosity and for smaller weights than we generally use them’ with a beam of tapering ivory and the scale or disk suspended by a silk thread, which passed through a hole in the beam. The use of silk ‘bows’ rather than handles also made it easier to reposition the weight as needed and, Hooke concluded made ‘the whole instrument as exact for weighing silver as our Seals with severall weights and consequently less troublesome’. As a result of his examination of the Japanese stilliard, Hooke made another ‘of my own invention by which the weight of any Body might be found without the trouble of removing the weight which is necessary both in the Indian and in our common stilyard’. Hooke’s story about the Emperor’s guarding of the instruments bearing his seal alongside the evidence for European instruments entering Japan seems to have been part of a wider policy of monitoring developments among the Europeans while keeping them at a distance: an undated and unattributed folio among the Boyle papers in Vol. 39 gives an account, apparently from a Dutch factor there of a visit to the court to be reprimanded for interfering in the affairs of the Chinese factory, also based at Nagasaki. The Dutch were also warned that although their nation was now at peace with Portugal, that the factors should ‘keep a strict watch ouer ye Portugueez & ye Spainards yt if they should conscribe anything against Jappan, presently make it known to the Governor at Nagasaki, whereby we shall doe great service to the Imperial ma[jes]tie.’ The Dutch factory therefore seems to have been a channel for some exchange of information between Japan and Europe: the Royal Society’s questions for Japan (part of an early series of inquiries sent all over the world) were sent via the Hague. The answers, received in French from ‘MI’ are published in translation in Philosophical Transactions vol 24, no 293, p 1723 (PDF). M Peron and M del Boe are named as the recipients of another set of questions from Henry Oldenburg in 1671 and a further link was Wilhelm ten Rhine, a member of the Dutch factory.

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Since my earlier post on mapping, I’ve been thinking about how modern mapping tools could be used to represent historical situations. Google is releasing several ‘mashup’ tools at the moment and one of the most useful is ‘My Maps’, which allows you to ‘tag’ certain points on a map and associate them with text, pictures or media files. I’ve begun experimenting with using this tool to map the correspondents of the Royal Society during the period of my interest, 1660-1670. This is very much a work in progress and undertaken very unscientifically (just using the contacts that I noted while going through the Hooke folio) but it still gives a visual idea of the scope of the Society’s interests in the period. The map is here. You can also view it in Google Earth by exporting the KML file by pressing the blue button at the top of the screen.

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Today I’ve escaped from the depth of the Royal Society archive to the lofty heights of the British Library map room to look at a map made by James Rennell entitled ‘A map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire from the latest authorities’. The map was dedicated to Joseph Banks, who was President of the Royal Society at the time of its publication in 1788.

Rennell was first Surveyor-General of India appointed by the East India Company in 1767. Rennell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1781, around which time he also published two accounts of his mapping experiences in Bengal and the empire of the ‘great Mogul’. These make it clear that Rennell compiled his map using a wide range of informants, including Indian and British soldiers, missionaries, and local people as well as the tables compiled of districts under the Emperor Akbar, who ruled India for the last half of the sixteenth century and who had used them to levy taxes.

The map itself is a beautiful creation and tells us a lot about European conception of India at the time. Of course this is true for any attempt at cartographical representation; as Siddharth Varadarajan points out in his essay India Tertia and the mapping of the colonial imaginary ‘in the very act of rendering intelligible the world with lines and shapes on stone, parchment or vellum – is always and everywhere an attempt to fashion new social boundaries and domains from the arid reality of geography.’

Rennell’s map is particularly interesting from this perspective as it is positioned on the boundaries of ‘modern’ methods of map-making, including the method of triangulation developed by his contemporary William Topping, and the older reliance on a collation of previous authorities and local informants. The idea of shifting boundaries and regions of influence is also evident in the map: Rennell shows both the subas, the divisions used by the geographical tables of Akbar in 1598 and the new divisions labeled according to their current rulers. These overlapping boundaries are distinguished by different typeface giving the map an almost three-dimensional effect. The scale of the map also speaks of transition and borrowing; adegree is given in reference to ‘Geographic miles’, ‘British miles’, ‘Cosses of Hindoostan’, ‘Carnatic Cosses’ and ‘Pliny’s road map, reduced to horizontal distance’.

The map retains many of the blank spaces that were said to have inspired Conrad’s hero: a large area of the interior is marked ‘unexplored by Europeans’ and the Coast between Bombay (Mumbai) and Goa is dubbed ‘pirate coast’. The blank spaces are also strategic, however, and the exceptions often reveal the commercial interests of Rennell’s employers, the East India Company. For example most of Burma is blank apart from the painstaking depiction of the area of ‘teek (teak) forests’ in the south. Such forests were always of interest to the European merchants given rising concerns about provision of wood for shipping.

Rennell produced many other maps, including the one below which shows the currents and patterns of wind as an aid to the circumvention of Africa. Oceanography was another subject on which Rennell corresponded with the Royal Society, writing to Blagden to ask for further information about the gulf stream.

Rennell’s connection with the Royal Society followed from an interest of many of the members in cartography and a concern to produce accurate maps for seafarers. This had been evident since their involvement with incomplete the ‘English Atlas’ project of Moses Pitt between c. 1675 and 1683. As Banks wished when he presented Rennell with the Copley medal, the map of India went on to inspire other large-scale projects of this nature, including the mapping of England.

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Last Sunday marked two hundred years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Like many men of their social class at the time, the members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had connections to the slave trade. As Govier has pointed out, the Royal Society invested their first substantial endowment, 1,300 pounds from the sale of Trinity College, in the Royal Africa and East India Companies, both of whom were involved in enslaving Africans for sale or work on their plantations. Several members of the Royal Society were involved with these companies: for example Paul Neile FRS was prominent in the RAC, while Jeremy Sambrooke and Sir John Lawrence are prominent in both the Council meetings of the early Royal Society and the correspondence of the East India Company, of whom both were Commissioners.

References to slavery in the early records of the Royal Society also reveal some degree of practical involvement in the mechanics of the trade. One example that occurs in the Hooke folio appears to refer to the making of ‘trade beads’ or ’slave bead’, glass beads used to trade with Africans in exchange for slaves. For example, at a meeting of April 22 1680 Robert Hooke presented his efforts to replicate a bead made of a blue stone said to be ‘much esteemed by those of Guiny’, which was testing along with some glass beads designed to counterfeit these beads. Apparently the fake bead was unconvincing, being reportly ‘[in] noe wise soe beautyfull & cleer of colour as that of Guiney’. An experiment of heating the bead in the flame also proved the superiority of the real stone, while it ‘could not be melted but it flawed & crackd like a Stone. the counterfeit ones melted very easily.’ Hooke promised to make a more convincing replica of the stone.

Some of the implications of slavery were a cause for concern for the deeply religious mathematician, Robert Boyle, as papers in his collection reveal. A copy in the Boyle Papers (Vol. 4 f. 118) of a draft Act of Parliament proposed in 1670 notes that the principle that a Christian should not be enslaved by another men of the faith has led to planters and owners of slaves actively discouraging the conversion of slaves for fear of losing their property and investment. The proposed solution was not the abolition of slavery, however, but the provision that the baptism of slaves would not affect the ’service’ due from them to their ‘former masters’. Proposals (f. 127-8) that seem to have been drafted by Boyle himself the same year list two proposal, which may have been regarded as alternatives, as their provisions are otherwise contradictory. The first allows for the freeing of a Christian slave but not the offspring of this slave while the second proposes rights for a Christian slave, including the ownership of goods and the right to seek legal redress against mistreatment by a master. The final document (f. 144) refering to slavery in this collection of papers is a copy of a letter of the East India Company to their colony at St Helena dated 9 December 1670. This orders that Christian slave who are able to demonstrate their knowledge of the faith should remain slaves for seven years, after which they should become free planters. There does not seem to be any evidence that this command, remarkably enlightened for its time, was followed and slavery continued to be a mainstay of the income Britain received from its plantations for over a century.

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