Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
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Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
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Overview
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures.
When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400833986 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Trying Leviathan The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
By D. Graham Burnett Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12950-1
Chapter One Introduction
The Peace Offering That Stank
On the 9th of November, 1819 the distinguished New York physician-naturalist, Samuel Latham Mitchill, received at his Barclay Street chambers a malodorous packet containing an over-ripe orange file fish (Aluterus schoepfii, Walbaum, 1792) that had run afoul of a Long Island boating party several days earlier and had succumbed to "the stroke of an oar" on the beach near Bowery Cove. This rank offering arrived in the company of an explanatory letter from the Irish Jacobin lawyer William Sampson, the doctor's fellow member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, and his sometime adversary in the courts of the city.
"The fish begins to have an ancient and more than fish like smell," wrote Sampson by way of greeting, and he continued, "I send it to you, that you may either pass judgement upon it or record its characters before it undergoes more alteration." Could the specimen be a hitherto unknown species, something strange and new? To assist Mitchill on this question, Sampson had gone so far as to enclose a "colored drawing" prepared by his daughter to capture the creature's appearance in its fresher state.
Dr. Mitchill knew better, and he made aterse note overleaf, identifying the genus and species. Not only was it not new, Mitchill himself had already published on it, and in his annotation on the letter he cited his 1815 monograph on "The Fishes of New-York," writing across the covering flap, "... already described in the Lit. & Ph. Transactions of NY."
It was, in a way, a familiar ritual. Mitchill's ichthyological knowledge was, by 1819, legendary in New York and beyond, so much so that he could be satirized in doggerel in the New York papers as the "Phlo'bombos of our Icthyology [sic]," a title cobbled out of Mitchill's inelegant (if erudite) neologism for Robert Fulton's wondrous new invention, the steamboat, which the doctor proposed might properly be known as the "phlogobombos." Moreover, Mitchill's boosterism for natural-historical investigation in the young Republic had garnered him an expansive circle of correspondents who frequently sent him unusual animals, plants, and rocks as accessions to his collections, or for classificatory consultations. Mitchill-who would go on to be memorialized as the "Nestor of American Science"-had lectured on zoology at Columbia College and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons from their inceptions, and he was famous for offering his students a Cuvier-esque declaration of his taxonomic mastery of sea creatures, announcing boldly to them, "Show me a fin, and I will point out the fish." Nor was this simply the encyclopedism of a cabinet natural historian, one who hid among his dusty books and old specimens: Mitchill was well known for taking his ichthyology to the street. A familiar of the New York fish market, he brought his students to the docks to practice their skills of identification on the catch of the day, and he boasted that more than half of the new fish species he had discovered could be found in that piscatorial emporium.
But this particular specimen of New York waters represented more than just another missive from some friendly fisherman. This fish, rightly understood, was nothing less than a subtle peace offering from the legal establishment of the city. For that boating party on Bowery Cove had included not only the highly visible attorney, belletrist, and serial pamphleteer Sampson, but also Richard Riker, the City Recorder, who sat as the presiding official in most of the trials held in the Mayor's Court of New York City. Together these two men had elected to deliver their odd catch up to Mitchill "as a tribute to science and a token of continuing friendship." Swelling to oratorical excess (as he was wont to do), Sampson, Mitchill's "humble servant," sang the praises of New York's philosopher-king:
What an empire is that of a man of learning. The King of England by his prerogative gets royal fish and very few indeed of them. You get from all quarters the willing tribute of sea and land, and I sincerely hope this that we send may be an acquisition to you and an addition of the stock of knowledge you have treasured up for mankind, and with which you have so much enriched science and the arts.
It was an elegant rhetorical flourish, this invocation of the "royal fish" of the English Crown, and a delicately oblique gesture at the subtext of Sampson's letter. The "royal fish" was, as any Edinburgh-trained ichthyologist (or Lincoln Inn lawyer) knew, the whale, which had been the special possession of the throne since the fourteenth century. For the English, a king, and for that king, tribute in the form of each beached whale; for the citizens of the land Mitchill had dubbed "Fredonia," no royal prerogatives, only the preeminence of Jefferson-style political sages (like Mitchill, himself a former senator and a state representative, with almost a decade of service in Washington), men whose leadership would forever be founded on an intimacy with the natural productions of American shores. For Mitchill, then, philosophical tribute in the form of a wizened file fish from the Fredonian strand.
Under ordinary circumstances the courtesy might have seemed strained (if not odd), the conceit labored. But Mitchill would have had no difficulty understanding the allusion: Sampson was offering, in the stinking packet, in the elaborate invocation of the Praerogativa Regis, a small token of deference to the man who had recently become the butt of considerable public ridicule where whales and fish were concerned, ridicule occasioned by a very public zoological showdown with Sampson himself.
For on the 30th of December of 1818 Mitchill had appeared in the packed chambers of the Mayor's Court in City Hall as the star witness in the case of James Maurice v. Samuel Judd, a dispute arising under a New York State statute that obliged purveyors of "fish oils" to ensure that their casks had been gauged, inspected, and certified. Maurice v. Judd had taken shape earlier that year, in the sweltering summer, when the well-known candle maker and oil merchant, Samuel Judd, had refused to pay the inspector's fee on three casks of spermaceti oil- protesting that the oil was not "fish oil" but "whale oil" and that whales were not, in fact, fish. The inspector, James Maurice, gave a derisive snort (whales not fish? ha!) and issued Judd a summons. The stage was thus set for a legal action that would ballot twelve sworn jurors to determine whether, in the state of New York, a whale was a fish. Sampson represented the plaintiff, Maurice, who was suing to collect the statutory fines. Mitchill, ichthyologist extraordinaire, appeared as the heart of the defense, carrying the standard of modern taxonomy. The recorder, Richard Riker, presided as judge. This two-day trial, which became a pageant of natural historical erudition and a sensational agon for settling natural and social order, would represent a remarkable instance of science at the bar in the nineteenth century, and it would live in popular memory and in the works of classifying naturalists for decades, not least because of William Sampson's transcript of the trial, Is a Whale a Fish? An Accurate Report of the Case of James Maurice against Samuel Judd. This pamphlet appeared in bookshops in the summer of 1819.
The autumn of 1819 was thus a very suitable moment for the author of Is a Whale a Fish? (which would open Mitchill to new ribbing) to make gracious gestures toward one of the most powerful and politically connected men of learning in the city of New York.
Maurice V. Judd and the History of Science
This book takes up the unusual case of Maurice v. Judd, reconstructing the trial itself from available published and manuscript sources, rehearsing (wherever possible) the biographies of the persons involved, tracing textual allusions and references, situating the legal, political, and scientific arguments made in the proceedings, and detailing the public response to, and enduring legacy of, this event. Broadly, I aim to recover the trial and reveal its larger historical significance.
Why bother? This case merits the reader's attention for three reasons. First (and most narrowly), Maurice v. Judd represents a telling episode in the history of science in the early Republic, and in New York in particular. Where New York itself is concerned, the trial sheds light on the status of "philosophy" (and "philosophers") in general, and natural history specifically, during critical years in the emergence of the city's learned institutions and intellectual culture. Broadening the focus to the Republic as a whole, the case invites us to revise a dominant theme in the literature treating the history of the natural sciences in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, a theme that relentlessly emphasizes the way that natural history served as a tool (and proxy) for an emerging "American identity" rooted in a kind of nature-nationalism. Qualifications to this thesis are overdue.
Second, this case offers a unique point of departure for a more general consideration of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) as "problems of knowledge" in the early nineteenth century. In these years whaling in the open ocean was rapidly becoming the young Republic's strongest claim to global preeminence and indefatigable enterprise. As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had pontificated in Parliament that the Yankee whalemen were sweeping the globe, and humiliating British seafarers with their daring. By the 1840s some 600 American whaling vessels were plying the Pacific, vanguards of U.S. geopolitical ambitions, and a major source of national wealth. In short, whales mattered to the early United States. And at stake in the trial of Maurice v. Judd was the essential nature of these unusual (and economically vital) animals-their form, habits, and place in the natural order. For this reason the testimony of different witnesses-European-educated men of science like Mitchill, New England whalemen, merchants and agents in the whaling industry, artisans and craftsmen accustomed to work with whale products- provides unique insights into who knew what about these creatures, and how they authorized their claims. In this book, then, the trial will afford the occasion for several brief departures, detours, loops out and away from the courtroom, in which we pause to consider, for instance, what whalers knew about the anatomy, physiology, and natural history of their quarry during this period. Other similar issues will receive attention: Where could New Yorkers (like the members of the jury) have seen whales or whale parts in 1818? What was the status of the whale in parlors, primers, and schools in the period? Such digressions and amplifications will help contextualize the trial itself, even as they offer opportunities for a walk though the world of learning in the early Republic.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Maurice v. Judd will serve as a window onto the contested territory of zoological classification in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here whales are only part of the story, albeit a more important part than has generally been recognized. According to a dominant narrative in the history of science, the second half of the eighteenth century represents the golden age of the classifying imagination, the period during which, under the presiding spirit of Linnaeus, nomenclature and systematic taxonomy reduced the oozy, Protean organism of the Renaissance world to a proper natural order, an order in which things had names and places in schematic hierarchies that were themselves (to a greater or lesser degree) reflections of the nature of things. By the early nineteenth century, as this account goes, the labors of the enlightened classifiers had settled the lineaments of this natural tableau, and in so doing created the conditions of possibility for a series of iconoclastic and revisionist theories of the living and non-living world-theories less wedded to fixity and rigid types, and more interested in accounting for time, change, and the genealogy of a world increasingly seen as deeply, rather than superficially, contingent (cue the Darwinian revolution). In an imaginative series of essays published as The Platypus and the Mermaid, Harriet Ritvo has worked to destabilize this familiar account of the "heroic age of scientific classification." It is her claim that historians of science have largely overlooked "quite a different zoological enterprise-one in which consensus was rare, in which authority was uncertain and fragmented, and in which the very principles behind the construction of taxonomic systems and the assignment of individual species to their niches were vaguely defined and of obscure or questionable provenance." By focusing on problematic cases and anomalous organisms, and by situating the debates of learned classifiers in the broader context of lay expertise among turn-of-the-century English animal breeders, hunters, farmers, and fanciers, Ritvo is able to suggest that, as she puts it, "a great deal remained up for grabs" in the period:
To participants in a project conventionally hailed as demonstrating the intellectual conquest of nature, the internal history of zoological classification might seem as much a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of competing systems and principles, as a steady evolution and collaboration of a dominant paradigm.
Ritvo's discussion of broader public resistance to Linnaean classification certainly enriches our sense of the period, revealing that, to many literate Britons, the classificatory sciences looked less like philosophy rampant than philosophy rudderless. But she has still bigger fish to fry: it is her more ambitious assertion that the "membrane" between specialist and lay communities was, as she puts it, "highly permeable in both directions." To support this argument she gathers evidence that certain significant categories of analysis-for instance "savage" and "domestic"-amounted to "taxonomic differentia smuggled into systematic zoology from a lay world of utilitarian and anthropocentric discrimination." To the degree that she succeeds here, Ritvo's "bottom up" history of systematics does more than provide a nuanced cultural history of the classificatory sciences in pre-Origin Britain; it has the potential to shed valuable light on issues central to the content of the sciences of life in the nineteenth century-saliently, Darwin's ideas about hybridity and artificial selection.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett
Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Figures xiChapter One: Introduction 1
The Peace Offering That Stank 1
Maurice v. Judd and the History of Science 5
From Dock to Docket 14
Chapter Two: Common Sense 19
Manhattan and Its Whales 19
Chapter Three: The Philosophical Whale 44
Samuel Latham Mitchill and Natural History in New York City 44
“No More a Fish than a Man” 61
Taxonomy at the Bar 72
Chapter Four: Naturalists in the Crow’s Nest 95
What the Whalemen Knew 95
Chapter Five: Men of Affairs 145
The Whale in the Swamp ?145
Chapter Six: The Jury Steps Out 166
The Knickerbockers Slay a Yankee Whale 166
Who Decides Who Decides? 167
Picking Up the Pisces 178
Chapter Seven: Conclusion 190
New Science, New York, New Nation 190
Epilogue:Whales and Fish, Philosophers and Historians, Science and Society 210
Acknowledgments 223
Bibliography 225
Index 247
What People are Saying About This
Burnett shows the conflicted heart of nineteenth-century American science by looking at the complicated, amusing, and well-publicized trial of Maurice v. Judd, in which the question at stake was whether a whale is a fish. This makes a fascinating story, Burnett writes uncommonly well, and the final chapter is one of the most interesting pieces on popular science that I have ever read. Trying Leviathan is a powerful and brilliant addition to the history of American science and culture.
— James Gilbert, University of Maryland
Graham Burnett's pathbreaking book teems with lively accounts of a notorious legal conflict between different kinds of people and different kinds of knowledge played out in New York in the early years of the nineteenth century. Disputes like these vividly illuminate the preoccupations of past societies and make us more conscious of our own. An important and thoroughly engaging book.
— Janet Browne, author of "Charles Darwin: The Power of Place"
I can't remember reading a more intelligent and well-written book than Graham Burnett's Trying Leviathan. He is a brilliant writer, and he has transformed a nineteenth-century legal battle over the taxonomic classification of whales into a wonderful and engaging book.
— Richard Ellis, author of "Men and Whales"
'Is a whale a fish?' Melville famously wrestled with the question in Moby-Dick, but as Graham Burnett reveals in Trying Leviathan, the question had already been argued in—of all places—a Manhattan courtroom in 1818. In addition to providing a fascinating and provocative look at the relationship between science and culture in early nineteenth-century New York, Burnett writes eloquently about how the whalemen regarded their mysterious and awe-inspiring prey. This is a fun, surprising, and, in the best sense, challenging book.
— Nathaniel Philbrick, author of "In the Heart of the Sea"
"Graham Burnett's pathbreaking book teems with lively accounts of a notorious legal conflict between different kinds of people and different kinds of knowledge played out in New York in the early years of the nineteenth century. Disputes like these vividly illuminate the preoccupations of past societies and make us more conscious of our own. An important and thoroughly engaging book."—Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: The Power of Place"'Is a whale a fish?' Melville famously wrestled with the question in Moby-Dick, but as Graham Burnett reveals in Trying Leviathan, the question had already been argued in—of all places—a Manhattan courtroom in 1818. In addition to providing a fascinating and provocative look at the relationship between science and culture in early nineteenth-century New York, Burnett writes eloquently about how the whalemen regarded their mysterious and awe-inspiring prey. This is a fun, surprising, and, in the best sense, challenging book."—Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea"Trying Leviathan recounts a remarkable collision of science and law in a New York City courtroom in 1818. Burnett brilliantly parses the case both inside and outside the court, exploring the conflicts it aroused between learned taxonomists and sea-leathered whalers, practical businessmen and everyday citizens. A compelling, provocative work."—Daniel Kevles, Yale University"In this irresistible narrative, full of fascinating characters, Graham Burnett has given us a brilliant, imaginative, often amusing, wonderfully realized study that brings together questions of epistemology, the relation of observation to theory, the era's worship of nature and simultaneous commercial exploitation of it, claims of class to intellectual authority, and the relation of expertise to democracy."—Thomas Bender, New York University"I can't remember reading a more intelligent and well-written book than Graham Burnett's Trying Leviathan. He is a brilliant writer, and he has transformed a nineteenth-century legal battle over the taxonomic classification of whales into a wonderful and engaging book."—Richard Ellis, author of Men and Whales"Burnett shows the conflicted heart of nineteenth-century American science by looking at the complicated, amusing, and well-publicized trial of Maurice v. Judd, in which the question at stake was whether a whale is a fish. This makes a fascinating story, Burnett writes uncommonly well, and the final chapter is one of the most interesting pieces on popular science that I have ever read. Trying Leviathan is a powerful and brilliant addition to the history of American science and culture."—James Gilbert, University of Maryland
Trying Leviathan recounts a remarkable collision of science and law in a New York City courtroom in 1818. Burnett brilliantly parses the case both inside and outside the court, exploring the conflicts it aroused between learned taxonomists and sea-leathered whalers, practical businessmen and everyday citizens. A compelling, provocative work.
— Daniel Kevles, Yale University
In this irresistible narrative, full of fascinating characters, Graham Burnett has given us a brilliant, imaginative, often amusing, wonderfully realized study that brings together questions of epistemology, the relation of observation to theory, the era's worship of nature and simultaneous commercial exploitation of it, claims of class to intellectual authority, and the relation of expertise to democracy.
— Thomas Bender, New York University