The Book Show

Manhatten in the early nineteenth century was a thriving commercial centre and port. Following problems with the quality of fish oil held in casks on the wharves, the State decided to inspect all casks, with a fee of $75 to be paid to the inspector. Samuel Judd refused to pay, saying his casks contained whale oil not fish oil. Kirsten Garrett looks at how this issue led to one of the most sensational and important trials in the history of American law and science, a story dotted with flamboyant court rhetoric, whalers' tales and satire involving the botanist Joseph Banks.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: Now turn your mind to downtown Manhattan in the early 19th century. It's already a thriving commercial centre and port. There's been trouble with the quality of the fish oil held in casks on the wharves, and the state has decided to inspect all the casks for quality and contamination. There's to be a fee of $75 paid to the inspector. One man, Mr Samuel Judd, refuses to pay, saying his casks don't have fish oil, but whale oil, and that's quite a different thing. Kirsten Garrett looks at how this issue leads to one of the most sensational and important trials in the history of American law and science -- a history that is dotted with flamboyant court rhetoric, whalers' tales of their work at sea, and satire involving the botanist Joseph Banks.

Princeton Professor of the History of Science D. Graham Burnett wrote the book, Trying Leviathan, and here he sets the scene in Manhattan in 1818.

D. Graham Burnett: Part of what made this moment important for New Yorkers at the time was that they had recently refigured the downtown square that was the centre of civic life in the city. And the mayor's court was situated in the recently completed city hall building, a magnificent white marble wedding cake of a building. And just across the park, at about 100 yards, stood the New York institution which the mayor of the city had recently configured into a kind of royal society. It was the building in which all of the learned men and learned societies and learned institutions of the city found their homes.

And in the case of Maurice v Judd, the men of science were the expert witnesses. One of them in particular, very important, walks across that park from the New York Institution to give expert testimony in the mayor's court, and he crosses that short path and enters the courtroom that is packed to the gills with New Yorkers of all stripes who've turned out to hear a crazy paradox debated -- whether a whale was a fish.

Kirsten Garrett: And we know why it mattered to the tax inspector, Mr Maurice, and to Mr Judd who had the whale oil in his casks. It was about commerce. But why did it matter so much to all the others -- to the people of New York, to philosophers and scientists and whalers -- why was it such a disturbing idea, that a whale might not be a fish?

D. Graham Burnett: For New Yorkers, like for many in Europe at the time, the most important text that taught about natural order remained the Bible. So for ordinary New Yorkers the creatures of the earth were divided into three categories, the three categories that are given in Genesis. there were birds that fly in the air, there were fish that swim in the sea, and there were beasts that crawled on land.

And this tripartite taxonomy based on environment, on habitus, remained the dominant way of organising ideas of nature in the early 19th century.

Kirsten Garrett: Perhaps we should get the historical spectrum right. This is after Linnaeus, though he was by no means uncontroversial at this stage, and before Darwin. Darwin was a young boy at this time, I've worked out. And Moby Dick had not yet been written.

D. Graham Burnett: All quite right. And it's true that Linnaeus had already considerably nuanced the taxonomic system that is represented in Genesis. But even Linnaeus, interestingly, up through the first nine editions of his System of Nature, retained whales within the category of fish. So it's really only in the tenth edition, in 1758 that he makes this radical move of shifting the whales out from the fish category and inserting them into this new category, the category of mammals. And here's where things get hairy in the most literal sense.

To invent a category into which you're going to slot a large number of living creatures, and to give it the title 'mammal' makes a good number of folks pretty uneasy. We've mostly forgotten that that term 'mammal' hales from the same root as mammary, as in mammary gland, as in breast. And the idea that it was appropriate to base the taxonomic ordering of God's creation according to categories based on these louche and intimate and private and slightly inappropriate features of female anatomy -- this surprised people and struck them as not entirely appropriate.

So part of what people are reacting to with some shock and dismay in that courtroom in 1818 is the idea that the philosophers, the men of learning, have seen fit to replace good old fashioned healthy categories like beasts or like quadrupeds, four-footed creatures, with this new category which is going to be based on intimate details of sexual reproduction and private parts...it's going to be based on internal anatomy, and that includes putting a very fish-like thing, the whale, in this new category and putting that fish-like thing, the whale, in the same category with human beings.

So all of this, well before Darwin destabilises people's understanding of natural order.

Kirsten Garrett: And in the courtroom -- we'll return to the courtroom and the actual trial now -- Mitchell, who was defending Mr Judd, saying that he did have whale oil, he argued strongly that he had no problem and people should have no problem with the way whales feed their calves, that it's got warm blood and it's complex and whatever. But William Samson did a very full-blown attack on this kind of scientific investigation of nature. Can you describe briefly the contest of ideas between those two men, Mitchell and Samson.

D. Graham Burnett: This is some of the juiciest material that comes out of manuscript sources. And Samson is an irrepressible and slightly irresponsible character it's hard not to love -- a radical Irish Jacobean figure. And between Samson and Mitchell, New Yorkers knew that they were in for a rhetorical showdown, because both of those men were larger than life figures, in their error.

So Mitchell is on the stand to inform New Yorkers about the latest and best scientific ideas coming out of Paris about natural history and taxonomy. He himself was educated at Edinburgh and knew all the newest stuff. Samson is a polemicist and a brilliant lawyer who needs to defend the good old-fashioned position that in New York whales were fish, and that nobody could tell New Yorkers otherwise. And so he very cleverly deploys a set of rhetorical tools to unmake Mitchell's argument. Signally, he tars and feathers that argument as a kind of untrustworthy encroachment of atheistical ideas from France.

It's important to remember here that we're still within sniffing distance of the French Revolution and it was not difficult for Samson to associate these radically revised ideas about natural order with the kind of radically revised social order of France, and with the agnosticism and possibly atheism of French thinkers.

Kirsten Garrett: Professor Burnett, talk a little bit about the witnesses that were called. I was absolutely fascinated and could hardly believe it that one of them had the glorious name of Captain Preserved Fish. Tell me that that is true.

D. Graham Burnett: Yes, when I first found the records of this trial I confess to myself having had to make a couple of passes through the material before I believed it was something other than a hoax and Captain Preserved Fish was one the red flags in my margin.

Kirsten Garrett: Preserved Fish, though, he had a long history in whaling, had no problem at all with the fact that the whale was a mammal.

D. Graham Burnett: It's absolutely true that he toes the line of the learned doctors and zoologists. But it's interesting that when Samson cross-examines him and throws him back on to what basis he makes this claim, he points out, Captain Fish does, that he is 'a reader of the encyclopaedia,' he says. So he doesn't base his claim that they are non-fish so much on his personal experience, although he does say that he's seen them bout and that they come to the surface and as a result he believes they believe air, unlike fish. He says those things, but when he's really cornered he points out that he is a man of a certain erudition who is exposed to the learned texts that inform one about such things.

Now there was another whale man, who also gave testimony in the trial, who is not a captain, but an ordinary sailor before the mast, and interestingly he took the opposing position and argued that as far as he knew whales were very much fish and that in the industry everyone had insisted that they were and that's how they'd referred to them.

I just want to point out that part of what makes this case so interesting to someone who's a historian of science, is that it's rare that we have an opportunity to see into the minds of people in the past and see the diversity of views that people had about nature. And that's what makes the records of this trial particularly engaging for anyone who wants to make sense of changing ideas about nature.

And the way that I go after telling the story of the trial is both narratively -- it's just a great trial drama -- but also to open up the different groups of people and try to show how they made their claims, how they authorised what they knew.

Trials are good spaces to see people not just make claims but then defend the grounds of those claims, because of the agonistic cross-examination environment of a courtroom.

Kirsten Garrett: The vernacular history's quite moving in your book. You get stories both fictional and true -- or verbal accounts of the thoughts of the whalers as they were going about their work. There was one story about...well, it was pretty bloody and violent, where they're yelling out 'Death to the living and long life to the killers!' But also Basry's dream, which was fictional, where he was kind of making a case for the whale. He writes, 'I dreamed I was a whale. Skinned, dismembered and melted,' and went on to say that he felt whales feel things very deeply. When was that written?

Bill Garner: My recollection is that was drafted about 1840. And part of what I set out to do, was exactly as you say, to recover the experiential world of these men and try to describe the way they knew nature through labour. We have spent a great deal of time in history of science talking about the way people engage nature in laboratories and through libraries. And we're more and more interested in the kinds of knowledge that can be achieved through work. And that was really the project of that chapter.

Sea Shanties and ballads and the poetry of the whale men also provide windows into the way they understood the animals.

Kirsten Garrett: Back to the actual case; after all that, and it went over quite some time, the jury took only 15 minutes to decide and they decided that the whale is a fish, and this was seen as a victory for plain people who didn't have any truck with all sorts of philosophical nonsense. But that wasn't the end of it, was it?

D. Graham Burnett: It wasn't quite, although it is an important omen. There was a large question at stake in the early republic. The US is at this time still very much an experiment in a kind of democratic republican governance. And there's a curious question that floats over the first decades of the 19th century, which is precisely what role will experts -- and specifically science -- play in the republic. That hearkens back in an important way to ideas about aristocratic privilege and elite knowledge, all of which were up for grabs again in the early years of the republic.

So one of the ways that the verdict can be read is as a kind of rejection of one possible relationship between scientific expertise and democracy in the early republic. And I do think that is part of what's at play. While at one moment it had seemed that science and the civic life of the early republic would be held very close together; in the wake of Maurice v Judd there was a commitment to a different relationship, and in fact a pressing of scientific expertise away from the civic heart of the republic.

Kirsten Garrett: And that tension between plain folk and educated elite and experts, scientific experts hasn't entirely gone away to this day.

D. Graham Burnett: Certainly not. Whether it's -- in our country of course the perennial and difficult issues of science and religion reflected in our debates over intelligent design and over the ethical quandaries of new scientific technologies -- these are issues that remain enormously contentious here. The book has an epilogue that takes up those subjects in some detail and examines how it is that we tried to work out different possible relations between scientific experts and policy making and political order.

Ramona Koval: And that's Professor D. Graham Burnett of Princeton talking to Radio National's Kirsten Garrett. Trying Leviathan is published by Princeton University Press.

Guests

D. Graham Burnett
Professor of the history of science
Princeton University

Publications

Title: Trying Leviathan
Author: D. Graham Burnett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 9780 6911 29501

Presenter

Kirsten Garrett