Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

Part 1

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Perceiving the Colonial Environment

1

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The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments:

Advice on Health and Prosperity

Andrew Wear

Agriculture must be the foundation of every settlement.

—New Zealand Company settler

PROSPERITY AND HEALTH WERE, if we believe the literature produced for potential settlers, on the wish list of anyone who was thinking of migrating and settling in strange new environments. This conjunction of wealth and health, usually ignored by historians of medicine, lasted across the whole period of British colonization. If a colony was to survive, both wealth (or at least a prosperous subsistence) and health were essential and were also factors likely to shape how the environment was envisaged. In this chapter I will be arguing for stability or continuity in the discourse about health and wealth. Whether this discourse was as applicable to tropical as to temperate areas is discussed in the last part of the chapter.

Places, People, and Health

In the early years of a colony, the way its environment produced health and wealth was to a greater or lesser extent perceived as comparable to England’s, especially if the colony was in a temperate area. (In the rest of the chapter I will refer more often to England rather than to Britain, as England was usually the home model, analogy, or metaphor in descriptions of new settler environments.) There were a number of reasons for the almost universal impulse in this literature to portray a colony as a home away from home for people, plants, and animals. There was the perceived need for English bodies—and likewise, English plants and animals, given the agricultural nature of most colonies from the seventeenth to the twentieth century—to fit their new place. More generally, prospective settlers were believed to need the psychological reassurance that there was something of the mother country in the new country. Set against this was the growing realization that new colonies were different both in their environments and in their developments of increasingly distinct identities.

The idea of the fit between people and places was often expressed through a discourse that linked health and climate. It is important to note at this point that climate and health were set out together along with the economic resources of a place in geography books, and in the accounts and letters that urged people to come to a new settlement. This conjunction of health with resources made up the prospectus for a colony and is something that I will discuss further in the chapter.

As is well known, health was seen as being affected by a place and, in particular, by its climate. This belief was long-lasting. It is found in Hippocratic writings and was only starting to end by the beginning of the twentieth century, after the bacteriological revolution and then the development of scientific tropical medicine. It was based on the humoral and qualitative view of the body developed by Greek medicine and philosophy. The body, being composed of four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), which in turn were each made from pairs of the four primary qualities of hot, cold, dry, and wet, was shaped and influenced by the external force of climate that essentially consisted of the same four qualities. This also had a cultural significance. It was believed that people’s countries of birth shaped their constitution, and that there was a fit between people and their home country. This was a popular view among lay as well as medical writers. It was also a belief that echoed the English nationalism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries along the lines that England had the most equable or temperate climate and so produced the best people.¹ In the nineteenth century that nationalism took on an explicitly racial character. Such perceptions helped to produce the desire to find or create something of the mother country in a new colony. What was alien in a colony could be threatening, while the familiar spelled safety and provided a sense of reassurance about one’s identity in body, character, and race.

The attempted re-creation of a home environment, whether in tropical niches or enclaves or wholesale in the temperate new white land, became an imperative for British colonists. Ideas of health fed into this imperative, and as we shall see later in the chapter, they were allied to an agricultural economy that transformed alien places into home-type environments or at least environments that had European characteristics.

Initially, fear was often present in the minds of those intending to settle. One aspect of fear was the belief that going to a strange place that differed constitutionally from one’s own country was dangerous to health. For instance, William Bradford reported the debate among the Pilgrim Fathers in 1617 as to What perticuler place to pitch upon in America. They rejected Guiana or some of those fertill places in those hott climats. Although some saw Guiana as rich frutfull and blessed with a perpetuall spring, and a florishing greenes [greenness], where vigorous nature brought forth all things in abundance and plenty without any great labour or art of man, others concluded, It would not be so fitt for them. This was an early example of the British fear and suspicions of hot climates that lasted into the early twentieth century. Specifically, the Pilgrim Fathers believed that such hot countries are subject to greevuos diseases and many noysome [unwholesome] impediments, which other more temperate places are freer from, and would not so well agree with our English bodys.² Nevertheless, the more temperate areas still posed dangers in English minds. Moving their bodies from the home environment that had shaped their nature to a strange one was feared. The Pilgrim Fathers, Bradford noted, believed that in North America, the chang of aire [here also meaning climate], diate, and drinking of water, would infecte their bodies with sore sickneses and greevous diseases (W.T. Davis 1982, 47).

Health, Prosperity, and Agriculture

One response to such concerns was to assert that a new colony was even more like home than the home country and so was healthier. Evidence of healthy people, animals, and plants indicated prosperity, and likewise a prosperous community was often a healthy one. Moreover, the ability of the land to allow agriculture to flourish was closely allied to health, for starvation could result when agriculture failed. Thomas Welde, writing to his former parishioners at Tarling in England in 1632 about Massachusetts, urged them to come, see and taste the new country.³ He declared:

Here I find three great blessings, peace, plenty and health, in a comfortable measure. The place well agreeth with our English bodies that they were never so healthy in their native country. Generally all here as never could be rid of the headache, toothache, cough and the like are now better and freed here, and those that were weak are now well long since.

Health, in accounts of a new colony, was often joined with plenty and wealth, or at least a comfortable living, and Welde immediately went on to report: Here is plenty of corn and that the poorest have enough. Corn is here five shillings six pence a bushel (Emerson 1976, 96).

Health, agriculture (in the form of plants and animals), markets, and wealth were linked. For instance, the Reverend Francis Higginson, in his letter to his Friends at Leicester of 1629, published as New-Englands Plantation. Or, a Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of That Countrey (1630), stressed as Welde how healthy New England was.⁴ He also emphasized that a healthy environment had economic consequences. Higginson noted how the fertility of the soil is to be admired at, as appeareth in the abundance of grass that growth everywhere both very thick, very long and very high. Agriculture was the central economic activity that the English transported to America and reproduced, thus changing the environment. But the original environment had to be favorable to agriculture. Hence the mention of the fertility of the soil and Higginson’s following comment: It is scarce to be believed how our kine and goats, horses and hogs do thrive and prosper here and like well of this country (Emerson 1976, 31).

The end results of agriculture (apart from subsistence) were trade, markets, and profit, and without them the motive for large-scale rapid transformation of the environment would have been largely absent. Big outputs and crop yields were always good for profit, and Higginson took care to point out how:

In our plantation we already have a quart of milk for a penny, but the abundant increase of corn proves this country to be a wonderment. Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty [fold] are ordinary here.… Our planters hope to have more than a hundred fold this year.… It is almost incredible what great gain some of our English planters have had by our Indian corn. (Emerson 1976, 31)

The more land cleared for planting, the greater the trade and the profit. In a similar vein, the natural products of a place were praised. The fruit trees, the timber trees, and the abundant fish were all viewed by Higginson as natural resources to be used at will (Emerson 1976, 32–33, 35–36). The nineteenth-century settler literature likewise emphasized the presence of land and the opportunities for trade. In other words, the reports being sent back to England declared that the environment was right for exploitation and change, and the economic conditions were favorable for such a transformation.

This type of discourse continued into and throughout the nineteenth century. Despite wide differences in climates and environments, the new white lands of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were presented as healthy and not so different from home as to be completely alien and frightening. The discourse about new colonies also gave the sense that settlers’ bodies and the environment were being incorporated into a familiar economic system. For instance, settlers reading about nineteenth-century Canada found health linked to climate and, as in the seventeenth century, to the agricultural products of the place. The numerous guides providing Information for Intending Settlers published by the Canadian government and provinces set out to provide reassurance that Canada’s climate, despite misconceptions, was good for health and agriculture. As the Guide … for Intending Settlers of 1887 declared:

There is no more important question for an intending emigrant than the nature of the climate to which he proposed to go. The climate of Canada … is more misconceived abroad than any other fact pertaining to the country. Perfectly absurd impressions prevail respecting the rigours of Canadian winters.

The Guide pointed out that the dry winter atmosphere is bracing and pleasant, dryness being an accepted marker of health compared to dampness and humidity. It also declared that besides being pleasant, there is no healthier climate under the sun. There are no endemic diseases in Canada. The Guide stressed that snow, far from being a hindrance, helped in communications and played a role in agriculture: Canada’s snow, it stated, is perfectly dry and packs under foot, making the best roads, and forming a warm covering for the earth and has an important manurial influence on the ground (Dominion of Canada 1887, 10). The agricultural perspective was never far away from the settler literature. The Guide emphasized, like early seventeenth-century writings, the link between climate and agriculture, fertility and productivity. The warm and bright summers meant that

fruits and vegetables which cannot be ripened in the open air in England, such as the grape and tomato will here ripen to perfection. The summers are much more favourable for the horticulturalist and agriculturalist than those in England, with the single exception of length of time in which outdoor work can be done.

An independent observer was reported as witnessing to the fine growth of wheat, barley, oats, and maize. Extraordinary plant growth was continually cited as evidence of a country’s fertility. The observer saw a field-grown squash of eight feet three inches weighing 150 pounds. The Guide added: We have seen them 350lbs; open air growth. No better illustration could be given of a summer, semi-tropical in heat of great duration, than the maturing of the pumpkins and squash of such great size (1887, 10–11).

In other new white lands a similar discourse was being used to entice migrants to the colonies. Behind it lay the economic impulse to take and transform vast areas of land into fields, as the nineteenth century expressed the immigration and agricultural enterprise.

Tasmania was presented in Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide of 1823 as having perhaps, the most salubrious and congenial climate of any in the known world for a European constitution … similar to that of the south of France. This luxuriant island (1, 12) was depicted at the same time as both beautiful and rich in agricultural potential. Scenery that appealed to European notions of pastoral beauty was often part of a package that advertised a place’s healthiness for Europeans and the wealth to be got by farming its land. Godwin’s Guide pointed to the luxuriance of the grass on pastureland,

while the cinquefoil and trefoil, with which the valleys abound, intermixed with wild flowers, give a brilliancy to the scene which is truly delightful. The soil is every where rich, and the plains plentifully watered with streams and ponds; the whole forming a picture no less captivating to the eye of a farmer than to that of the painter: indeed, any farmer ascending one of these hills must acknowledge, that nothing can be more inviting to the hand of the cultivator than the beautiful plains of rich and valuable land exposed to his view; each, perhaps, of 50,000 acres in extent. (1–2)

Good health, beautiful scenery, and rich, profitable farmland effectively empty of previous owners were brought together to create a tempting picture of Tasmania for prospective immigrants. What accounts like Godwin’s Guide were doing was directing prospective settlers toward what seemed at the time to be an unarguable direction: changing the land into an agricultural environment. Its exotic products (emu birds and aborigines) were depicted, but the stress was on how British occupation was transforming the place by land clearance, by farming, and by the production of familiar goods such as cheese, wheat, barley, oats, peas, and meat; and by global products suited to the place such as cattle: a cross breed, between the Bengal cow and the English bull; the sheep between the Teeswater and the Merino; the horse between the Arab stallion and the English mare. In a land of plenty, a land recently created by the British, where all the Fruits of England or France attain perfection in the open air,⁵ it would have been surprising if either the health or the pockets of the newcomers would suffer. Exotic, but not too exotic, French fruits such as grapes, peaches, nectarines flourished, as well as the more familiar apples, pears, plums. In what was a standard trope, yields and sizes of plants were often emphasized, suggesting that if plants did well, so would people as well as profits. Parsnips, turnips, and potatoes often weighed one to two, and sometimes five pounds weight each, and averaging at 350 bushels per acre. Moreover, wheat, barley, oats, beans, and peas all flourished.⁶

In other words, and this is the main point I want to make here, prospective settlers were seen as being attracted to a country that was being changed to a white land and, by being presented with pictures of a place already partially transformed into agricultural country, they were being urged to buy into the project. We can also note that, from the point of view of health, it was emphasized that since English settlement, "the harvest has never once failed."⁷ Good harvests meant profits, but failures for isolated colonies led not only to poverty but also to ill health and starvation, whether in early seventeenth-century America or early nineteenth-century Australia.

At this point a note of realism should be introduced. Contemporaries were aware that new colonies wanted positive reports to be given to potential migrants. Few perhaps went as far as early Virginia, where settlers were prohibited by law from writing negatively about the colony, its leaders, and the intentions of the whole body of Adventurers. More specifically, it was forbidden to detract or calumniate against any encomia of the colony published by its enterprisers or adventurers, including any publique booke, or bookes, which by their nature, advise and grave wisdoms, shall be thought fit, to be set foorth and publisht, for the advancement of the good of this colony. A first offense merited a whipping and a public act of contrition. A third offense was punishable by death.⁸ The early settlers to North America sent many very positive letters home to England, but disasters in the shape of famine and disease acted as a corrective to unbridled optimism. After the brutal winter of 1630, Thomas Dudley, deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote:

In a word, we yet enjoy little to be envied but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. And I do the more willingly use this open and plain dealing, lest other men should fall short of their expectations when they come hither, as we to our great prejudice did, by means of letters sent us from hence in England, wherein honest men out of a desire to draw over others to them wrote somewhat hyperbolically of many things here.⁹

Hyperbolic descriptions of new colonies and new lands continued to be sent back. Three hundred years later a visitor to Canada noted that winter is a touchy topic with the Canadian[;] he never talks about it himself. He will tell you about the peaches grown in Ontario, he will become rather pink with enthusiasm describing the wheat regions of the West.… Canada has a long and severe winter. The Canadian government was also joined in the conspiracy of silence. The Dominion Government sends out millions of publications each year about the suitability of Canada for settlers; but the winter season—certainly the hardship of winter—is practically ignored.¹⁰

Across the centuries, during the whole extent of colonization those concerned with encouraging migration to colonies selectively created images of colonies that represented them as favorable for colonists’ bodies and wallets. As The Settlers’ Guide: Greater Britain in 1914, a publication very favorable to British colonial migration, pointed out, a prospective settler when choosing where to go had either to rely on the reports of friends in a particular country,

or he must seek his solution from literature—and here comes the rub. He will obtain an amazing quantity of well got-up booklets, most of which are admirably written and illustrated, from the various State Agencies in London or elsewhere … [he] will be led to ponder why there is not a general exodus from this old isle of many imperfections to those blissful lands which appear to be free from any. He will, in fact, have been reading through rose-coloured glasses and may have obtained much knowledge of the golden wheat-belt of the West [Canada] without happening on any mention of mosquitoes, and perhaps his study of Australia will not have disclosed any mention of the word drought. (Brown and Brown 1914, 1–2)

The way in which the settler literature sought to counter such skepticism was to emphasize eyesight/eyewitness knowledge and then later statistics, the new criteria for truth from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries onward. But that is another paper.

Perfect and Imperfect Environments

Tasmania’s climate was not as extreme in terms of heat and drought as the rest of Australia. In the coastal areas of continental Australia, where settlement largely occurred, there were enough good climates (i.e., livable and productive) for a positive picture to be drawn, yet other realities such as drought were also present. In some places the type of agriculture—extraordinary large sheep runs—reflected the marginal climatic and soil conditions. In other words, it was not so easy to be completely positive about conditions in Australia, though for early settlers without a knowledge of past Australian climate changes it was easy to be misled by the apparent greenness of a place that could in a short time turn into an arid dustbowl, as with Captain Cook’s Botany Bay.

Parts of Australia notoriously proved a disappointment. Its center did not provide agriculturally productive and healthy places for white settlement. If one turns for a moment from the discourse of the literature for prospective settlers to that of exploration, it is clear that they had much in common. Explorers, like propagandists for settlement, were constantly assessing places for health and wealth—both positively and negatively. For health they used criteria that are found in Greek medical thought and were to be repeated in lay and medical thinking up through the early twentieth century. Prominent were the beliefs that high ground was healthy while low, damp, or swampy ground generated miasma and was unhealthy. For instance, Jefferson Pickerman Stow set out on the voyage of the Forlorn Hope from the Northern Territory to Perth in 1865 because he did not believe that Palmerston, the projected city on Adam Bay, the outlet of the Adelaide River, was viable. As well as having no fresh drinking water, stone for building, or easy access to the hinterland, it was surrounded by swamps and had an elevation of only thirty feet; no healthy spot on the bank [of the Adelaide] could be found, unless at a very great distance from the coast (Stow 1981, 9, 12, 13–15). Moreover:

The moist heat was incessant and debilitating … of course sultry heat and mosquitoes must be looked for in the tropics, but it is no necessary part of life in the tropics to live among swamps, mudflats and scrub, without any occupation or outlook to make such an abode tolerable. There was no redeeming feature in the locality. The grass was rank, but possessed no nourishing qualities.… The well water was bad and produced daily sickness.… There was no escape to better country. (16)

An ill-making environment was rarely pleasant or beautiful in European eyes, though the exotic vibrancy of a tropical jungle might be an exception. Aesthetic descriptions of landscape were often fused together with topographies of health. When Stow arrived in Perth, he saw the opposite of the unhealthy desolation of the northern shore. He saw Perth and its surroundings as it had been depicted in the settler literature: a healthy, beautiful, and English type of land:

The landscape was lovely; there were frequent views of the river, hill and dale, fine stately timber, long reaches of water and trees with dense foliage overhanging the banks; extended flats, stretches of undulating park-like scenery, and in the distance the blue range of the Darling. (86)

The people of this environment were flourishing; as Stow observed, it shaped them: That the climate is on the whole temperate is sufficiently proved by the blooming complexions one sees in the metropolis.… Whites born in the colony are commonly tall (96).

The pleasant and beautiful characteristics in the environment were English characteristics, expressed in the language of the pastoral and gentlemanly landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Nathaniel Ogle cited a description of the coastal landscape around Perth in his (1839) The Colony of Western Australia: A Manual for Emigrants: It had an undulating and very pleasant appearance like gentlemen’s parks. Such a pleasant landscape, declared Ogle, possessed an invigorating and healthful air, in which the exhausted European could recover from the enervating climate of Hindostan (18–19).

The optimism of the accounts for settlers to the less-hot colonies was tempered by the reality of Australian conditions. Rather than declaring that the whole country was healthy, fertile, and profitable, the settler literature picked out for praise limited areas and introduced a degree, but only a degree, of caution. Ogle pointed out that irrigation would need to be practiced in Australia rather than drainage as in England, and only in moist grounds was there soil of vegetable origin (i.e., fertile soil); otherwise, the dryness of the climate, the summer conflagrations, and the total want of the aid and skill of man, prevent that accumulation of soil which constitutes richness.

Yet Ogle, like others, saw positive aspects. The dry climate compensated for that want of richness which too often is attended with insalubrity—in other words, a rich soil was the product of a humidity that often led to ill health. Both plants and people prospered in the dry conditions. There was no mildew or worries that rain would saturate crops before they were gathered (1839, 25–26), while a whole list of human diseases were absent, children were healthy, no women had died in childbirth, and the general health of women is improved by the dry and elastic air (27). Ogle did admit that some places were not suitable for settlement. He wrote that the Darling range, with few exceptions, is a great sterile belt, the surface consisting in great measure of hard red sand-stone; in some places the granite appears in masses. There is a profusion of coarse herbage on it, some of which is injurious to cattle (34). Clearly the criteria, the characteristics by which a place was being described, were agricultural in nature.

In contrast, the original environment, if it already possessed the pastoral attributes associated with agriculture, lent itself to be turned in the imagination and in reality into productive land. Aesthetic as well as agricultural qualities became markers of a future agricultural environment and of profit. Even when the land had already been put to agricultural use, there could still be a sense that the land had the potential for further occupation in the future—an important consideration for would-be settlers. William Wentworth, the explorer, radical politician, and landowner, in his (1819) Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, described how after sixteen miles from the coast the aspect of the country rapidly begins to improve. The forest is less thick. Four miles farther, the scene became idyllic:

You are at length gratified with the appearance of a country truly beautiful. An endless variety of hill and dale, clothed in the most luxuriant herbage, and covered with bleating flocks and lowing herds, at length indicate that you are in regions fit to be inhabited by civilized man. The soil has no longer the stamp of barrenness. A rich loam resting on a substratum of fat red clay, several feet in depth, is found even on the tops of the highest hills. (47)

The model again is that of a home landscape with an English type of farming, though on a larger scale. The environment as depicted is naturally fitted for this role. This obviously applied most to sheep and cattle, but it was claimed that arable farming could also take place without improvement, if the soil was rich enough and its richness could be naturally replenished without the need of manuring (Wentworth 1819, 48–49; Ogle 1839, 26). The settler was being presented with a picture of niches of agricultural-type land amid areas of barrenness. Nevertheless, improvement was seen as both the necessary and the natural consequence of colonial