“Birds of a feather”:
Natural History and Male Sociability
in 18th-century Jamaica
A paper presented to the
Seventh Symposium of the Social History Project,
March 2006, University of the West Indies, Mona,
Jamaica
April G. Shelford,
American University, Washington, DC
Dear Reader: I spent two years teaching in the History
Department of the University of the West Indies. As a result of that stay, I developed a
number of new research topics. Although
these have taken me into a new century (the eighteenth) and a new national
context (the British Empire), my projects reflect and extend my interest in the
development and functioning of intellectual networks, though now in the context
of the Atlantic World, and the history of science. This paper represents work that is very much
in progress.
Please do not cite without my permission.
Let man suppose the orbis magnus but a point
compared with the firmament and the orb of the fixed stars. If his sight be limited here, let his imagination,
at least, pass beyond ...
Transcription of a passage from Pascal, Pensées
Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books
I. Thomas Thistlewood, Anthony
Robinson, and the Jamaican Enlightenment
In the late
afternoon of
Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) requires no introduction. His copious, if laconic diaries, have made him a pre-eminent source on life in eighteenth-century Jamaica; the brutal punishments he meted out to the slaves in his charge and his sexual exploitation of female slaves have made him infamous. He has been the subject of two important biographies, Douglas Hall’s In Miserable Slavery – Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-1786 (1989) and Trevor Burnard’s Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire – Thomas Thistlewood and his slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican world (2004);[3] he has figured importantly in other treatments, too.[4] These works do not exhaust the uses of Thistlewood’s papers as scholars in various fields continue to discover and analyze them creatively.[5] What I want to suggest here is how Thistlewood’s diaries and manuscripts may, in combination with other archival and published sources, open up a subject that barely exists at this point – the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Jamaica – and give us insight into the nature of the intellectual and cultural project of “Enlightenment” in a colonial setting.[6]
My approach to the Enlightenment generally and intellectual culture in eighteenth-century Jamaica specifically is deeply informed by my work on intellectual sociability in the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. Particularly relevant here are my interests in reconstructing intellectual networks and exploring the nature of intellectual friendships between men.[7] Thus, I approach today’s topic in two ways. First, I attempt to recover the intellectual endeavors and ambitions of Dr. Anthony Robinson in the context of the network of male Jamaican friends and acquaintances that made them possible. While Robinson concerned himself with all aspects of Jamaican natural history, he concentrated most on botany, which was an Enlightenment passion,[8] and ornithology, which received rather less attention during the eighteenth century.[9] Robinson’s work with other Jamaicans attests to a lively interest in both subjects on the island and the expectation that fruitful work would be furthered by collaborative endeavor. These collaborative efforts did not take place in an intellectual vacuum, however, because a man of relatively modest means such as Thistlewood could – and did – participate in a larger intellectual world, thanks to a robust book trade.[10] Second, I examine more closely Robinson’s friendship with Thistlewood as an instance of male intellectual sociability, seeking aspects that may cautiously be generalized. Before I begin, though, I solicit my readers’ indulgence. As a first attempt to organize research that is scattered both intellectually and with respect to sources, this essay is frequently more descriptive than analytic.
II. With a little help from his friends
Details of the life of Dr. Anthony Robinson are skimpy. We know the date of his death (1768) but not the dates of his birth or of his arrival in Jamaica. Thistlewood estimated that he lived about twenty years on the island and that “he was not much older than me.”[11] A surgeon and apothecary, he apparently hailed from Sunderland-by-the-Sea in Durham, England, and he reportedly practiced medicine in St. Catherine parish in Jamaica for some years.[12] In his account of their first meeting, Thistlewood relates that Robinson received ₤200 annually from the governor of the island, funds received from the Royal Society in England for “collecting curiosities and making remarks, etc., in this country.”[13] In The History of Jamaica (1774), Edward Long describes at length the achievement that brought Robinson, “a very able botanist,” a ₤140 reward from the Jamaica House of Assembly: a new method of manufacturing soap from the native aloe.[14]
Robinson had two enthusiasms in natural history: botany, a subject of obvious interest to a doctor, and birds. Robinson reportedly prepared copious notes and illustrations on both subjects, but little survives, especially of his botanical work. Robinson bequeathed his “collection of drawings and writings on plants and other natural productions … to my good friend Robert Long,” brother of Edward Long.[15] Some time after Robert Long’s death in Jamaica, Robinson’s papers apparently passed to Alexander Aikman, who was representing St. George parish in the Assembly of Jamaica when he made them available to the naturalist John Lunan early in the nineteenth century.[16] The National Library of Jamaica today possesses more than 150 illustrations catalogued as Robinson’s birds, though a few were probably not part of Robinson’s collection (nor did he draw them). Though noted in the table of contents of the illustrations, Edward Long’s portrait of Robinson is missing.[17] D.B. Stewart wrote that it depicted Robinson as “a lean-faced, humourous-looking man wearing what appears to be a very untidy ‘scratch-wig,’ … [with the] look about him of a good doctor and a good crony.”[18] Several manuscript notebooks (five?) contained transcriptions that Robert Long ordered of Robinson’s notes on birds and other aspects of Jamaican natural history. T.D.A. Cockerell reviewed these notebooks in the early 1890s, all but one of which have disappeared from the Institute of Jamaica’s collection. The one that remains contains notes for the early 1760s, that is, the early years of Robinson and Thistlewood’s friendship.
That much, if not most, of Robinson’s work now appears lost is a great pity.[19] Those who had the opportunity to use his papers in preparing their own publications praised him highly. John Lunan, who relied heavily on Robinson’s notes in Hortus jamaicensis (1814), described him as having
made many ingenious observations on the natural subjects of this island, … and whose untimely death, before his manuscripts were properly arranged, was a great loss to science, and to this island; for it is evident, from the specimens of his labors still preserved, that he was a man of real genius, and possessed uncommon talents for industrious research and just discrimination.[20]
Philip Henry Gosse, author of The Birds of Jamaica (1847) and A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851), reviewed Robinson’s manuscripts and drawings in the Library of the Jamaica Society; he described them as “valuable” and quoted them frequently and sometimes extensively.[21] In 1894, Cockerell wrote that, while much of Robinson’s information had been superceded by later natural historians, “[Gosse’s extracts] sufficiently testify to the scientific zeal and knowledge of Dr. Robinson, although his methods were rather those of an age now past.”[22]
Cockerell is certainly correct from the point of view of state-of-the-art scientific information. But Robinson’s notes have other uses that are not so readily superceded and that makes their loss that much more unfortunate. First, from what little survives and from what I have been able to piece together from the work of other naturalists, they contained much more than descriptions of botanical and ornithological specimens. His notes functioned not only as a record of “scientific observation,” a problematic enough notion in the eighteenth century, but as a sort of diary – indeed, a travel diary, given how peripatetic Robinson was. Precisely because he did not edit his notes for publication, they probably included much more ancillary information than a published work would have. Robinson’s notes provide snapshots of the eighteenth-century Jamaican environment and give glimpses into the lives of the island’s inhabitants, slave and free. Especially important here, they convey the many disparate sources of his information.
Because Robinson
traveled the island so extensively, he connected many individuals who had a
serious interest in the island’s natural history. His work would have been much more difficult,
if not impossible, without a network of friends and acquaintances to provide
him with shelter, sustenance, and specimens.
Regarding the plants and birds he observed and sketched, some of the
information he compiled was anecdotal, and some resulted from his own
observation, “experiments,” and dissection.
Thus, in Robinson’s notes, the project of natural history emerges as a
fundamentally collective endeavor. It is
constructed from local information subsequently confirmed or rejected, and
local information in dialogue with the published accounts of earlier
naturalists such as Patrick Browne or Mark Catesby. As encountered in Robinson’s notes,
“knowledge” is epistemologically inchoate, occupying a middle space between
personal account and established “fact.”
Robinson might have had a permanent residence at some point, but his surviving notes give the impression that, if so, he spent little time there. He seems, rather, to have traveled the island extensively, frequently on horseback, and no doubt packing various tools of the naturalist’s trade – instruments for taking measurements and dissecting, a pocket-sized edition of Linnaeus, a hand microscope, and supplies for sketching and painting. Perhaps his little spaniel accompanied him sometimes, perhaps a slave boy to assist him. Along the way, he enjoyed the hospitality of friends and (I suspect) friends of friends. He drifted down the Cabaritta River in Westmoreland, encountering “this rare shrub [the hippocratea] … whose seeds are excessively bitter, as are the leaves, but not so much.” He observed the blossoming of the seaside plum tree in the morass at Manchioneal Bay. In Elizabeth, a “gentleman” and “gentlewoman” shared information about the medicinal qualities of one plant and the food value of another for slaves.[23] He ascended the Liguanea mountains behind Kingston where,
after you get
about a Mile and a half beyond the said Merryman’s Hill, the Air suddenly turns
Cool, and the Plants and Trees are entirely different from what you observ’d before,
excepting Two or Three which continue all the way up. There also you hear the Black Bullfinches
first begin to whistle which are contin’d all the way up to the Top of the
Mountains, and indeed they are the only Birds you hear, For there are hardly
any Nightingales, but they have the Grey-Ey’d Thrush whose Notes are not much
inferior in Sweetness but longer.[24]
Because Robinson’s endeavors depended on collecting specimens and information, he needed a variety of people to supply him with both. Robinson usually identified by name the medical men, planters, and clergymen (very few) who assisted him – indeed, by naming them at all, he set them apart in importance and credibility from other informants. Very occasionally, Robinson singled out someone for special notice, for example, “my much esteemed friend, Jasper Hall, Esq.”[25] He had entrée, too, into the upper reaches of Jamaican officialdom. Thus, he experienced firsthand the audacity and bad temper of a banana bird whom Benjamin Hume, Esquire, former receiver general of Jamaica, had (barely) domesticated.[26] He apparently received extensive support from Edward Long (1734-1797), member of a prominent Jamaican planter family who managed the family estate in Clarendon and became the private secretary to his brother-in-law Sir Henry Moore, Lieutenant-Governor of the island (see below).[27] According to Thistlewood, the governor sought out Robinson’s opinion when a disagreement arose over a particular plant at a dinner among friends, asking, “What says the Botanist to it.”[28]
Physicians naturally had a lively interest in botany, because they wanted to know as much as possible about locally available medicinal plants. They passed on to Robinson insights that they had gleaned from their own medical practices and by observing what other residents of the island, including slaves, actually did.[29] For example, Robinson learned of the “styptic virtues” of the “pseudo ipecacuanha” (the Bloodflower or Asclepias curassavica) from “Mr. Thomas Nicol, a practitioner in physic.” But Nicol himself only learned of the plant’s virtues when all the remedies in his cupboard failed to staunch the hemorrhaging from a wounded mule’s thigh, which “was stopped instantaneously by a negro applying a handful of the bruised blossoms and leaves of this plant.”[30] But medical specialists were not the only source of information, even if second hand, on medicinal plants. The “gentleman” from St. Elizabeth referred to above had long been afflicted with “violent pains in his left ear,” which were “instantaneously relieved” when, upon “the advice of a negro woman,” he squeezed a few drops from the leaf of the bastard mustard into the afflicted ear.[31] And the interests of medical men transcended what they could immediately apply in their practices. Thus, Dr. Gorse of Savanna-la-Mar sent an account to Robinson of “a large cotton-tree, between Mr. Wallo’s and the Cave, by the sea-side,” where many frigate birds came to roost “about four o’clock in the evenings, which tree may be easily approached by a canoe, when the Man-of-War and other sea-fowl may be shot, either in the evening, or before sunrise; for the Man-of-War birds will not leave their roosting-places before sunrise, in this resembling the Noddy.”[32] One “learned” Dr. Anderson of Hanover parish informed Robinson that, after holding a green-backed tree toad in his hand for a half hour and rubbing his eyes with the same hand, he “was seized with a violent pain and smarting” similar to that inflicted by the nettlefish.[33]
The planters whom Robinson visited were not interested in natural history to the same degree. The third volume of the History of Jamaica attests to the seriousness of Edward Long. There he described much of the island’s flora and argued forcefully for establishing a botanical garden.[34] I do not know whether Robinson met Edward or Robert Long first, but he appears frequently to have been a guest of Edward, who shared both his botanical and ornithological interests. Long’s lengthy discussion of the Jamaica cabbage tree or mountain cabbage included the “experiments” of the “ingenious Mr. Robinson” to establish the relationship between the West Indian palm and the East Indian sago. These consisted of successfully manufacturing a kind of flour from the mountain cabbage’s pith, which, Long noted with approval, resulted in a foodstuff that might prove useful to “settlers in the interior parts, where these trees are so abundant … by which they can furnish their families with so nourishing and restorative an aliment, with very little trouble.”[35] Long similarly praised Robinson’s manufacture of soap from aloe. This probably would never become an export of the island, Long wrote, because it “was likely to interfere with the soap manufacture in the kingdom.” Nevertheless, Robinson had performed a public service, as
the settlers, especially of the poorer class, may find their account, in being able to furnish themselves with so necessary a domestic article, for their own private use, by so easy a process, and at the expence of very little troubling in procuring a plant which abounds everywhere, and will thrive without any care bestowed upon it, after being once set in the ground.[36]
As Long’s comments make clear, both men adhered to the scientific ethos of the age – the acquisition of “useful” knowledge.
Yet though the
study of birds generally lacked such practical applications, comments from
Thistlewood’s diary (see below) and Robinson’s illustrations prove how much
Long and Robinson prized the endeavor.
Courtesy of Long, Robinson observed a ringed gowrie or collared swift up
close, as “Mr. Long had this bird alive … [It] was brought to me
Figure 1: Petchary Legends within
the illustration indicate that this was a collaborative effort between Anthony
Robinson, who sketched the image, and Edward Long, who colored it in 1757. Robert Long probably wrote the assessment,
“This is a good Figure from Life & the nat’l size.” Courtesy of the National Library of
Jamaica.
Robinson had contacts with another planter who was also important in Jamaica’s botanically inclined community for nearly five decades and whose story I have been piecing together for a long time: Matthew Wallen of St. Thomas in the East. Wallen surfaces as an informant in Patrick Browne’s A Natural History of Jamaica (1756).[40] In February 1763, Robinson apparently drafted Wallen into his experiments with the mountain cabbage alluded to above.[41] In the 1780s, Wallen was corresponding with Sir Joseph Banks.[42] Olof Swartz, the Swedish botanist who visited Jamaica in the 1780s, named a plant after him in gratitude for Wallen’s assistance.[43] Bryan Edwards related a visit to Wallen in his history of Jamaica, first published in 1793.[44] Wallen apparently had good enough connections with Hispaniola to secure bamboo for transplanting in Jamaica (a dubious gift to the island’s environment, as we now know),[45] and he had at least one exchange with the governor of St. Domingue about providing Jamaican specimens for the French botanical garden.[46] With his friend, Hinton East, Wallen was an indefatigable proponent of establishing a Jamaican botanical garden; as a member of the Assembly in the 1790s, he no doubt continued to argue its benefits after the garden’s foundation.[47]
Long and Wallen were men of intellectual commitment among the planter class. Yet Robinson enlisted the assistance of planters who had little or no intellectual curiosity, but whose pursuit of the manly art of hunting served his purposes well. Robinson required more than one specimen of any given bird, as he was not satisfied to describe, even sketch a species once. “This is the sixth [green-backed] Coot of my describing and the fifth of my figuring,” he wrote after receiving a specimen shot at Bower’s River in Clarendon in December 1760.[48] In April 1760, he received a “curious bird,” a white curlew that had, like the coot, been shot at Bower’s River; “I saw it while alive, it wanted to peck at the Boy’s hands and face who held it.”[49] Robinson had already “figur’d” another type of coot, but he nevertheless welcomed a specimen shot at Paul’s Island in May 1761 to “[endeavor] to make a better.”[50] In April 1761, the distiller Mr. Smith at Paul’s Island sent him yet another coot, which he had caught in a spring near his still-house.[51] One January, Robinson received a gaulding shot by Master Hawkes Hay near the mouth of the Rio Cobre River,[52] and Thistlewood frequently sent him birds from Westmoreland (see below).
Others beyond prosperous planters found their way into Robinson’s notes, because he accepted information from everyone. In contrast to those cited already, though, most of these sources remain anonymous. Robinson did sort some socially as “gentle” and indicated others’ reliability (“gentility” and reliability amounted pretty much to the same thing, as a generation of historians of early modern science have taught us).[53] The “gentlewoman” from St. Elizabeth referred to earlier explained to Robinson how she used the fruit of the breadnut tree to supplement the diet of her slaves in times of scarcity.[54] A “Gentleman of St. Elizabeths who has been a Great Sportsman in his time” reported to Robinson that he “had often seen hundreds of the Red Curlews, that they are the size of a Common Coot.”[55] A “person of credit” confirmed someone else’s account of how the “subtile Dame” of the Whistling Duck skillfully drew a hunter away from her ducklings.[56] From “some very creditable persons,” Robinson learned how Jamaican crows “attack and destroy a yellow-snake; their method is to fly upon him one after another, and tearing away a mouthful of his skin and flesh, retreat. This they do with great nimbleness, and with impunity, till they have devoured the poor animal alive.”[57] Robinson interviewed slaves, too, recording the terms they used for the local fauna and the medicinal uses they made of it. Thus, he learned that the slaves living in the Liguanea mountains called the dodder the “love-bush,” which he saw “winding about a young tree where a negro woman had thrown it, on purpose to propagate it.”[58] They identified the Yellow Saunders as the “Negressee, and use the decoction of its bark to cure venereal taints.”[59] Slaves in Clarendon called the little red-eyed crakes, birds “so foolish as to hide their heads, and, cocking up their rumps, think they are safe,” as “Cacky-quaw, by reason of its cry,” while those of Westmoreland “call it Johnny Ho, and Kitto Go, for the same reason.”[60]
Robinson’s curiosity extended beyond birds and plants to Jamaica’s fauna, though very few notes on that topic survive. His discussions of the gulliwasp (Celestus occiduus), an extinct large lizard, and of the Jamaican alligator (actually Crocodilus americanus) demonstrate how he compiled, then evaluated information from many sources – hearsay and personal observation, the results of dissection and “experimenting” – to the end of generating the most comprehensive and accurate descriptions.
A very small and unlucky alligator fell into the hands of one Mr. Walker of Old Harbour, who determined to see how long it would live submerged in rum (about fifteen minutes “according to the nicest reckoning with a watch or other time’s measure”). Robinson dissected another specimen, enumerating the contents of its stomach and determining that the “guts measuring from the stomach to the end of the intestinum rectum were fifteen feet long, uncoil’d.” This specimen apparently expired after a variety of “experiments” that Robinson performed with at least one other unnamed person to see how long it could survive immersed in water. His spaniel had more of a taste than Robinson for the “tail’s extreme [which] I caus’d to be broil’d.”[61]
Robinson never saw a gulliwasp himself, so he depended on others’ description and his own ability to sort truth from fantasy. Thus, he doubted the lizard’s literally poisonous reputation, though a fellow professional, Dr. David Miller, asserted it. Miller had penned a small gulliwasp with an alligator, which immediately consumed his guest. “About four hours after, the alligator was observ’d to jump and flounce about the square, knocking its head and tail against the stockades, seeming to be quite mad and frantic with pain, and continued in the manner till night, when he died.” Miller concluded that the gulliwasp had poisoned the alligator, confirming the wisdom of those animals that “by a natural instinct shun the carcass.” But Robinson questioned Miller’s conclusion,
first because the negroes at Egyp[t] Plantation [where Thistlewood worked] often eat them, and secondly, I cannot think that any of the fleshy part could be dissolved in the cold stomach of the alligator in so short a space of time as four hours, besides the hard scales of the Gully Asp’s skin would hinder the digestion not a little. What part of this animal is poisonous? Perhaps the viscera, but which? This might be known by giving some creature, as a dog or cat, the different parts of the animal to eat at separate times.
Yet even if the flesh of the gulliwasp was inocuous, other informants held that its bite was anything but. An overseer at St. Tooley’s, Mr. Watson, assured Robinson that “the Gully Asps about that estate were very fierce and would sieze a man, and that their bite … was certainly venomous.” A “gentleman in St. Elizabeth’s” reported an entirely black gulliwasp that lived in the mountains and that “if it bite either man or beast they certainly die.” As proof he cited the example of a young girl who died just a few hours after one bit her on the toe. But this same gentleman “and almost all other considerable persons in this parish and the next” regarded another variety, the “Great Morass Gully Asp,” as “an inoffensive creature.” Clearly Robinson had to suspend judgment, because he lacked sufficient information to settle the question of the lizard’s deadliness – or even to establish how many varieties of gulliwasp existed.[62]
Arriving at accurate descriptions of local flora and birds required Robinson to be open to information from all sources, but also skeptical of the information he received. This held true not only of what he learned from local informants, however “creditable,” but what he read in published sources. Robinson referred most frequently to Linnaeus on botany, Hans Sloane’s A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, etc. of the last of those islands (1707-1725), Patrick Browne’s A Natural History of Jamaica (1756), and Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (first published in 1731, again in 1754). Robinson was in constant dialogue with published authorities, constantly comparing what he himself encountered with what others before him had observed and described. Thus, Catesby
made a very great mistake in his discription of his White Curlew for after having compar’d its size to that of an house-Pigeon, he says that its Beak is six inches and half in Length, whereas the Bird I have describ’d although equal to three house-Pigeons is furnish’d with a Beak no longer than six Inches and A half.[63]
Robinson speculated that the Jamaican Tilderdee or Tell-Tale was the same as “Mr. Catesby’s Pluvialis vociferous,” though Catesby “ill express’d” the bird’s beak.[64] It was perhaps easier to depict the smallest species of crabcatcher Robinson encountered (Figure 2) than sort out the identity of the Spring-Gaulding or Great Crab-Catcher that Robinson had from Bower’s River, “where they may be met with every day.” Was it the bird that Browne, quoting Hans Sloane, had identified as an English crabcatcher? Was it Sloane’s and Catesby’s Ispida? Or Browne’s Common Crab-catcher or Ardea septima, which Robinson believed was the bird Catesby identified as Ardea stellaris minima?[65] Robinson took issue with “Dr. Brown’s” measurements of the banana bird’s beak, and was the Butter Bird the same as Catesby’s Cock Padda or Rice Bird (see Figure 3)?[66] Robinson disagreed with Browne’s explanation of the difference in color, sometimes reddish and sometimes yellow, of cashews; he asserted that it resulted not from soil or culture, but that yellow fruit bore yellow, not red, and vice versa.[67] Taking a hint from Linnaeus that the balsam or mecca tree was a species of the sweetwood or rosewood, Robinson identified three species of the latter, “differing only from each other in the size of the trees, dimensions of their leaf, and greater or less aroma of their bark and wood.”[68] But he faulted Linnaeus’s description of the locust tree’s blossom, and he quibbled with him about the genus of the climbing marcgravia.[69]
Figure 2: “Ardea cristata minima … The smallest crab
catcher.” Drawn and perhaps colored by Anthony Robinson,
this is one of the most attractive illustrations in the series. Courtesy of the National Library of
Jamaica.
Figure 3: Emberiza major. The
notes reflect Robinson’s speculation about whether the Butter Bird was the
Cock Padda or Rice Bird as depicted by Catesby. They also refer to the volume of
Robinson’s notes that is extant in Jamaica.
Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.
I have so far
focused on passages that indicate how Robinson went about his work: the network of informants upon whom he
relied, from close friends to people with whom he had passing conversations,
and the methods he deployed, from information gathering to dissection. All of this certainly attests to his mental
acuity and diligence. Other passages
reveal more about the inner man and suggest how he regarded the Caribbean
world, whose flora and fauna he had committed himself to recording. He appears always to have been curious, yet
detached, and thoughtful, if sometimes bemused.
The water hen’s ability to extend her toes in such a way that water
plants supported her weight prompted a meditation on the “hints given to man
from animals”:
I think the Coot might have taught him the use of broad-wheels. The Snow Shoes of the Laplander, are upon the same principles, and Xenophon in his Account of the retreat of the Ten-Thousand-Greeks from Persia mentions one Country where the Horses Were, They were oblig’d to put hurdles under their Horses feet to prevent them from sinking too deep in the Rivers.[70]
Other descriptions are appealing vignettes of bird behavior, conveying little more than the pleasure of observation:
The Barbadoes blackbirds are also fond of this honey [the nectar of the agave flower], between which birds happen great dissentions and bickerings. If the blackbirds would hold their tongue, who are naturally very loquacious, they might feed unmolested; but their incessant chattering disturbing the nightingales, who then had young ones, they assaulted the blackbirds with great fierceness and vigour, and soon obliged them to retreat to the neighbouring bushes.[71]
In another passage, a loggerhead – a species whose “pugnatious nature” compelled it to bully even much larger birds – meets “an unhappy tho’ deserved ill fate.” Having worn himself out harassing a Jamaican hawk, it “inadvertently sits down on some Twigg not far distant from his passive, and as he may Foolishly think, inoffensive Enemy, who then keeps his Eye fix’d upon the Loggerhead, and no sooner does he see him begin to prune his Feathers or look carelessly about him, than he springs suddenly upon the unwary Bird seizes him in his Talons and devours him.”[72]
We will see other personality traits emerge in Robinson’s friendship with Thistlewood who, like Jasper Hall, might have become a “much esteemed friend.” But even as I narrow my focus, we must remember that their friendship was only one relationship in Robinson’s network, the nature of whose connections and interactions I have just sketched.
III. The pleasure of
his company
Robinson’s manuscripts attest to the existence of many male friends and acquaintances on whom he relied for hospitality, information, and specimens. It would be an error to consider all of them naturalists, though clearly the scientific interest of some, such as Edward Long and Matthew Wallen, was quite serious. But Robinson’s notes do not tell us much about his relationships with these men beyond the fact that they existed. Although we cannot generalize all aspects of Robinson’s friendship with Thistlewood to his other relationships, we can assume that many aspects would have been typical because it had the same basis, that is, a passion for natural history.
Burnard wondered at Thistlewood’s grief over Robinson’s death in 1768, because “he had not seen Robinson for nearly five years and could hardly consider himself much more than an acquaintance.”[73] In fact, Thistlewood’s journal records an intensity of interaction between the two men much greater than Burnard supposed. Their personal contacts were episodic, however, with the last taking place in September 1765. Figure 4 charts their interactions over the years of their relationship. I cannot explain why their contacts lapsed for months, even years. My general sense is, though, that Robinson visited Thistlewood as much as possible and stayed overnight frequently whenever he was in the area. They also established a correspondence, though Thistlewood appears to have been the more assiduous letterwriter.[74] This makes the loss of Robinson’s notes even more unfortunate as, according to Gosse, Thistlewood was “a copious contributor to his ornithological notes,” and the surviving manuscript notebook suggests that Robinson either conscientiously preserved Thistlewood’s letters or transcribed them into his notebooks.[75]
Thistlewood first
met Robinson at a dinner that Thistlewood hosted at Egypt estate. The only remarkable aspect of their first
meeting is that the company included a woman, Mrs. Robinson (perhaps a relation
of the doctor?). While women were not
strangers at Thistlewood’s table, he more often dined with men. Thistlewood described the group in which he
met Robinson as “very curious,” but he typically did not elaborate. This was