Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural Histories

Frieda Beauregard and Mallory Novicoff (McGill)

Frieda Beauregard, curator of the McGill University Herbarium, and Mallory Novicoff, history PhD student and former research assistant for the Hidden Hands in Natural History project, discuss a rare collection of mounted plant specimens collected by British immigrant to Western Canada, Frances Simpson, in the early 1830s. The two introduce a biography of Simpson, who at just 18 embarked on a canoe journey across Canada with her husband, George Simpson, then Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Dr Beauregard delves into Simpson’s collection of plant specimens, which represents one of the earliest known collections from the prairies of Western Canada. The plants are all native to the region and were collected by Simpson with an eye for their possible garden cultivation after her stay in Western Canada had concluded. Novicoff then discusses her work as a research assistant, focusing on connections between Simpson’s plant specimens and floral Métis beadwork in the McCord Museum collections. As a concluding note, Dr Beauregard invites discussion on how to engage with similar historical collections, using Simpson’s collection as a case study, and opens a broader conversation about herbaria and herbarium-based research. Together, Beauregard and Novicoff also invite further discussion of Simpson’s Red River plant collection and related contemporary collections.

Frieda and Mallory's article on the subject is available open access at https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/scientia/2024-v45-n2-scientia09842/1121273ar/ 
 

NOTE SPECIAL TIME

Geoff Bil (University of Victoria)

A Tale of Two Naturalists: Hidden and not-so-hidden histories of Indigenous botanical translation in nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand

That nineteenth-century colonial scientists contributed to the knowing of peoples, territories and resources in abstracted, imperial terms, exploiting their acquaintance with Indigenous cultures and knowledges in the process, is well established in the scholarly literature. One common means through which they did so was through the studied exclusion of the Indigenous plant experts on whom they relied from the published scientific record. Archival records, on the other hand, often tell a very different story. This paper examines this dynamic in the work of Karl von Hügel, who collected plants in Pēwhairangi (Bay of Islands) in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1833-1834. In the unpublished diary of his travels, Hügel meticulously recorded his interactions with Māori plant experts, describing in detail their names and their methods of communicating with him. The richness of Hügel’s account is especially noteworthy in comparison with the published and archival records of the missionary naturalist William Colenso, whose self-described acquaintance with Māori peoples and knowledges, should, I argue, be read as performative and essentially tropological in nature.

Henry Noltie (RBGE), ‘Flora Indica: Recovering lost stories from Kew’s Indian drawings’

In the talk I’ll discuss the retrieval of 5, 500 drawings from Kew’s worldwide illustrations collection, their rearrangement into their original collections and subsequent cataloguing. This work lies behind the exhibition of the same title, co-curated with Dr Sita Reddy, on show at Kew from October 2025 to April 2026, which will also be discussed.

Victoria Dickenson (McGill)

The Saint-Domingue Albums: Hidden Hands, Lost Names and Local Knowledge

On 19 February 1766, a French engineer who had lived almost half his life in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) sat down to paint a moth. This would not have been a remarkable event, if it had not heralded the beginning of an enterprise of natural history that was to occupy René Gabriel de Rabié (1717-1785) for the rest of his life. 

By the time he left the island to return to France in 1784, de Rabié painted over 300 watercolours of the flora and fauna of Saint Domingue, as well as notes on habitats, habits and local names. Now bound in four albums, the watercolours were acquired in 1930 by Dr Casey Wood for the Blacker Wood Collection at McGill University Library in Montreal. 

Though it is de Rabié’s signature on the paintings, he did not work alone. He was assisted in this enterprise of natural history documentation by his family and by the many enslaved people who worked as gardeners, cooks, household servants, fishers, paddlers and divers. Sara Johnson in her 2023 book Encyclopédie Noire urges historians to write the biographies not only of individuals like de Rabié who have left their traces in the documentary record, but also of the unnamed, the hidden, who are “lost or known only through fragments”. 

Close reading of the de Rabié albums and other archival records, paintings, and published works from the period reveals a world of others, slender biographies pieced together from fragments but lives worth knowing and recording. 

This research is part of the three-year research project Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural History Collections, funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Catarina Madruga (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin), Archival collections and specimens from German “Kamerun" in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin 

Museums are not simple recipients, but rather authoritative managers of collections which contributed to enlarge both their catalogues as their position in society. Furthermore, they are implicated institutions which actively contributed to, and gained from, the development of racist and violent political agenda, particularly when it comes to items collected in the Global South and kept in the Global North. Natural history museums, through the accumulation of specimens extracted, pulled, hunted, and mined from the natural world, indeed function as sites of entanglement and disruption across species, continents, societies, landscapes, and bodies.

In this talk, I will discuss the methodologies, research instruments, and challenges from the experience of producing the document "Cameroon in Berlin" which holds some of the results of my research on the project "Colonial Provenances of Nature" (2020-2024). This work provides context to the collection policies, management practices, and political landscapes that constituted the colonial collections of the mammal department of the MfN. Collections and practices of collecting of the past are mirrored in the associated data contained in the historical administration archives and in manuscript inventories and catalogues. The many "hidden hands" of those who hunted, killed, packed, sold, transported, administered, evaluated, paid, wrote, mounted, photographed, measured, and assisted in translating these discrete specimens into systematic "knowledge about nature" are actually captured in the materiality of the specimens, their conventions, and their labels, accompanying receipts, reports, and inventories. In this talk I will also add to current reflections on how digital metadata and digital "global biodiversity" platforms mediate access and contribute (or not) to transparency.

Jovita Yesilyurt (Natural History Museum London) and Christina Welch (University of Winchester) "Unearthing the contribution of Indigenous and enslaved African knowledge systems to the Saint Vincent Botanical Garden under Dr Anderson (1785-1811)"

This talk provides a history of St Vincent Botanical Garden, under the Superintendentship of Alexander Anderson, a Scottish naturalist. Established in 1765, Anderson took charge in 1785 and remained there until shortly before his death in 1811. Anderson wrote regular plant catalogues as well as natural histories of islands in the Caribbean region, and dried and pressed plant specimens which he sent to London. These form the basis of this talk, which as well as contextualising the Garden in the colonial era and Anderson’s time there, also situates the Garden as a global plant hub. Additionally, the talk will highlight both the contributions to the Garden by enslaved Africans, and the botanical knowledge Anderson gained from enslaved Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the island.

Akosua Paries-Osei (Royal Holloway, University of London), "Seditious Seed of Forbidden Flowers: The legacy of Okra in the Reproductive Resistance of Enslaved women"
The utilisation of African medicinal knowledge during slavery has historically been overlooked and often dismissed, but contemporaneously, it disrupted the business of slavery and the authority of Western doctors and slave owners. This was particularly pertinent regarding African women's knowledge of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives. This paper examines the use of African botanical abortifacients and contraceptives by enslaved women as sites of reproductive resistance in Jamaica.
 
Botanical knowledge of abortifacients and contraceptives was transferred from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean with the enslaved. Slavery rendered the enslaved female's body the legal possession of her owner; her womb and her reproductive capacity became a site of contestation and control. The ability to bear children was, for her owner, the ability to reproduce wealth in the form of human stock. The ability to control her fertility, for the enslaved woman, was often an act of political defiance, in the face of overwhelming violence and coercion. 
 
This paper highlights the use African plants enslaved women used in African and Jamaica Abelmoschus esculentus. L, to manage and control their fertility. The abortifacient and contraceptive qualities of Okra was utilised during slavery and beyond. It has been incorporated into modern Western contraceptive treatments; the enduring legacy of enslaved women’s reproductive resistance and knowledge has continued to shape and control women’s fertility, now as it did then.

Hugo Rueda (SSOM, McGill), "Taxonomical Clashes. Indigenous Material Culture in the Natural History Museum of Chile during the 19th century"
My presentation analyzes the role of museum practices in the nation-state building process in Chile during the nineteenth century, highlighting their contribution to the symbolic annihilation of local indigenous communities. It argues that the National Museum of Chile reinforced the republican project of internal colonization by collecting, classifying, and exhibiting indigenous material culture under the taxonomical category of "Chilean Antiquities." To corroborate this idea, it demonstrates that the allegedly “ancient” nature of these materials is not an inherent condition but rather the result of political and intellectual maneuvers where the Museum had an active participation. During the second half of the century, Indigenous artifacts were curated to represent subjects relegated to a bygone era—simultaneously framed as “ancient,” “curious,” “monstrous,” and yet distinctly “Chilean.” By uncovering these practices, this work not only validates its hypothesis but also interrogates the enduring influence of 19th-century museum practices on contemporary Chilean institutions.

Anna Toledano (Los Altos History Museum), "Black and native laborers at the Viceregal Botanical Garden in late 18th-century Mexico City"

Spanish naturalists established the Viceregal Botanical Garden of New Spain in Mexico City in 1788 to advance agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine, while also cultivating agents of empire. Rather than build on the robust tradition of American botany, the Spanish appropriated this space, employing Creole students and servant workers to Europeanize local botanical knowledge. This talk revisits archival materials and methodologies used to uncover the contributions of Black and Indigenous laborers, whose roles remain obscured in official accounts. I will apply these techniques to examples from my current work with a small local history museum collection, demonstrating practical approaches for recovering marginalized voices. Attendees are invited to share their own experiences and methods to foster a collaborative dialogue on how such approaches can illuminate the contested legacies of colonial institutions and their labor histories.

Caroline Cornish (Kew), "Hidden hands and the development of economic botany"
Abstract:
Economic botany as a term first appeared in print in the early 19th century and is now generally understood by historians of colonialism as that set of extractive practices whereby plants with commercial applications were mobilised from their natural habitats to plantations within colonial territories; and where cheap labour – local or imported – was an essential element in the economic formula. The role of enslaved and indentured labour in this process is well documented, as is the role played by gardens such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which provided the botanical and horticultural expertise required to successfully identify, transport, and acclimatise plant species in this way.
In this paper, however, I consider other forms of captive or coerced labour – including prisoners, the mentally ill, and child vagrants - who were deployed in the creation of items in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection. Taking an object-based approach I examine who was involved, and how, and what this can add to our knowledge of economic botany as it evolved over the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ranee Prakash (Natural History Museum, London), "Samuel Browne- a cross-cultural study of medicinal plant use in India"
Prakash, R. 1, Carine, M.1, & Hawkins, J.A.2
1 Natural History Museum, South Kensington, UK
2 University of Reading, UK
In 1697 the English physician Samuel Brown (Browne) sent to London a collection of several hundred pressed and dried plant specimens that were prepared in India in the region of Fort St George (Chennai). These were incorporated as bound books (two volumes) and are now held in the historic collections of the Natural History Museum, London. Along with his original handwritten notes mentioning the medicinal and other uses of the plants, Browne also recorded their vernacular (native names).
Browne’s collection is a notable survivor from the late 17th century and provides unique insights into plant use in south India at the time. We compared Browne’s collections cross culturally with other contemporary plant uses of Hortus Malabaricus (Kerala) and Paul Hermann (Sri Lanka) in relation to today’s uses. This study provides a unique insight in the study of medicinally useful plants, highlights value of historic herbaria and shows new ways of looking at ethnobotanical data.
Current work at the Museum involves identifying the remaining collections from Samuel Browne (and other collectors from the Indian region) that we have in the Historic Collections room where we are reconstructing flora of Madras from late 17th to early 18th century (funded by Royal Society).
 
Link to the paper Samuel Browne’s late 17th century Indian herbarium: identifications and early modern taxonomic practice
in Botany Letters:
https://doi.org/10.1080/23818107.2023.2296095

Victoria Dickenson and Anna Winterbottom (McGill), "Hidden hands in colonial natural histories: lessons from four case studies at McGill"
In this opening session, we will reflect on the concept of “hidden hands” and why we believe it is useful to describe people who were important to making natural history collections, but whose knowledge and skills have rarely been discussed. These include women, servants, and enslaved people as well as local and Indigenous experts and “go-betweens”. We will introduce our four case studies, which focus on Canada, Haiti, India, and Sri Lanka, and include herbarium specimens, natural historical drawings, palm-leaf manuscripts, and material belongings. Some of the practical approaches to these materials that we will discuss include, cataloguing, digitisation, and the identification of species. The theoretical approaches that we bring to the materials range from communal biographies to animal histories to a focus on material culture and the material aspects of artwork and manuscripts. We will also talk about some of the partnerships we have made during our study, including working with visual artists, inviting experts for study visits, and hosting study days within museum collections. At the end of the session, we would like to invite group members to introduce themselves and their interests and approaches to hidden hands and hidden histories of natural history.