British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 200626 April 2006 AbstractsDr Ralph KingstonSigned, Sealed and Delivered: Floating Laboratories, Paperwork and Pacific Voyages, 1792-1817This paper uses three French expeditions to the South Pacific to examine the crisis of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cartography and thesubsequent redefinition of ‘geography’. Ships of exploration at the time were ‘floating laboratories’ where zoologists, botanists, mineralogists, hydrographers and astronomers worked together in limited conditions. The relationship between these different scientists is reflected in the functions and dysfunctions of their paperwork. As Latour and Woolgar have shown, the work of the laboratory is a governed by inscription, as notes, reports, and files are transformed into 'scientific facts'. The material communication of such facts plays a central role in organising the work of scientists and engineers. Voyagers returning during the Old Regime knew what to expect. According to royal ordinance, all ship journals were handed to the port authorities. Subsequently, naval captains could expect the privilege of writing up the voyage memoir: Bougainville, on his return to France in 1769, immediately set about publishing his Voyage autour du monde with aid from the Ministry of Marine. The scientists who joined d’Entrecasteaux (1792-4) and Nicolas Baudin (1800-4), however, brought not only their instruments, but also their professional baggage on board. As these expeditions obeyed a cartographic imperative, the natural scientists were infuriated when they spent the voyage coasting the Australian shoreline. On d’Entrecasteaux’s voyage in 1792-3, naturalists challenged the captain’s authorial privilege: rebelling against the navigators, Labillardière and Riche planned their own voyage account. It was Labillardière who produced the first expedition narrative, trumping the official version by the expedition’s senior surviving officer, de Rossel. Similarly, an account of the first leg of Baudin’s voyage was published in Paris even before his flagship returned, despite the fact that the Ministry of the Marine had imposed tighter regulations on paperwork. Scientists and officers had been forbidden to communicate their observations to others: they were ordered to send them to the Ministry of the Marine signed and sealed. Onboard, Baudin’s own writing – and particularly the journal he kept on public display – was also the cause of several disputes. Learning from his experiences as a lieutenant with Baudin, Louis de Freycinet established a new system of paperwork during his own voyage of 1817. Making accurate mapping a secondary goal, he recast the role of the ‘geographer’ from one of cartographic description to one of mediation between the physical, social and natural sciences . Dr Ralph Kingston is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History, University College London. He previously held a temporary lectureship at Trinity College Dublin, a position he took up after completing a doctoral thesis at UCL on the development of new administrative cultures during and after the French Revolution. This project forms the basis for a monograph entitled Office Politics: Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society in France, 1789-1848, for which he is currently seeking a publisher . Dr. Kingston’s British Academy project tackles the question of how geographers modified their tools, techniques and professional networks to serve the Nation during the French Revolution and Empire.
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