De la Beche and slavery

De la Beche and Slavery

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The frontispiece to De la Beche's 1825
Notes on the Present Conditions of the Negroes in Jamaica.

As described by McCartney (1977), despite its overt appearance as being
a sketch from life, this image presents the plantation as
De la Beche wants you to think of it: clean, orderly, peaceful, and without
violent coercion. Were the individuals in the picture not enslaved, it could 
be mistaken for the romantic portrait of a pastoral idyll.

De la Beche believed himself to be an unbiased observer and recorder
of facts, but his cartoons and drawings are, unavoidably, polemical. In this
case that polemic supports an institution of murderous exploitation that
he himself claimed to oppose, yet even more desperately feared losing
income from.

It is worth keeping in mind that while we can hear De la Beche speak to us
today through his writings, drawings, letters, and so on, we cannot hear
the voices of the slaves held in bondage at his family's plantation.

Image via McCartney (1977)
Click image to see larger

Henry De la Beche is primarily remembered to history as a geologist. Today being a "geologist" is a profession, but in the early 1800s it was the hobby of the geologically-inclined well-to-do. Independent wealth was required, and in De la Beche's case that wealth came from his ownership of a 4,500-acre Jamaican sugar plantation, Halse Hall, a plantation which held over two hundred people as slaves. He had inherited the plantation when his father died in 1801, when he was 5 years old. From that point until slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830s, Henry De la Beche was a slave-owner.

Some biographies attempt to downplay De la Beche's involvement in this system of brutal exploitation. While De la Beche himself protested that his "accidental inheritance" of the plantation did not imply a support for slavery, and that he disliked the practice, his actions show he was nevertheless quite willing to profit from it. He did ban the use of whips by overseers on his plantation and he argued in favor of conditions being "gradually bettered", but remained opposed to immediate abolition. He even went so far as to write and publish a book arguing against immediate abolition. How should we understand biographies which downplay De la Beche's role as a slaveowner? Ultimately, the problem may be that biographies of scientists tend to be written by scientists or historians of science, who are naturally are more interested in an individual's professional output, while a historian of slavery might have little reason to care about one particular English geologist. Halse Hall is a world away from De la Beche's English geology, both geographically and conceptually.

Nevertheless, De la Beche's legacy is intimately tied to slave ownership. He spent the year of 1825 visiting Jamaica, perhaps drawn there by concern about Halse Hall's shaky finances. While there he continued his geological research, and when he returned to Britain he published Remarks on the Geology of Jamaica. This publication turned him into the "accepted authority" (McCartney, 1977) on Jamaican geology. No doubt this publication boosted his growing scientific reputation in the years leading up to the Devonian controversy, a wide-ranging and intense battle of scientific wits in which he would play a central role, and which would put that newly-won reputation on the line.

In the early 1830s, with sugar prices falling and a slave rebellion in Jamaica, De la Beche found his income from Halse Hall dwindling fast. Much is made of the fact that De la Beche, just at the moment when he found himself embroiled in the Devonian controversy, was forced to seek public employment as a surveyor. He thus became the founder of the British Geological Survey.¹  Forced out of the rungs of gentlemanly hobbyists, his new public role represented a hit to both his social standing and his income. Practical necessity required him to live in Cornwall, close to his field area, removing him from the intellectual center of British geology, London. His opponents, who did live in London, were able to communicate readily with each other, discuss data, and strategize. They had access to the Geological Society and the ears of other geologists. De la Beche could only keep abreast of what was happening in the capital by mail. Only rarely could he afford the train fare to attend Geological Society meetings to defend himself, and in any case he had to focus on his official work. His dependence on the public purse gave his struggle a desperate edge, since if it was shown (or a politician believed it was shown) that he was an incompetent mapper, he could lose his position and his ability to do geology entirely. The politicians were of course in London, precisely where De la Beche's enemies were, and where he was not. The young geological survey, meanwhile, was viewed by the gentlemanly hobbyists as a threat. The Devonian Controversy has been portrayed to be as much about the role of class in the early 19th century British science establishment as it was about the science itself.

The essential thing for this discussion is that De la Beche was only able to indulge in geology pre-1830 because of his slave-derived income. His later struggles came about because that slave-derived income began to diminish. One cannot feel sympathetic.

The question, then, is how does one grapple with an historical figure who is known best for one thing (in this case, geology) but also directly engaged in dehumanizing cruelty (in this case, slavery). Beyond an honest accounting of the past, this is not a question the curator of this website is prepared to answer. We like to think of science as enterprise for progress, and in many ways it is, but the history of science is also history, with all the baggage that entails.

The natural sciences retain a grim debt to slavery and the slave trade. For more on this topic, see "Historians expose early scientists' debt to the slave trade" by Sam Kean in Science (2019).

Footnotes:

1: Indeed, one article makes the claim that because (1) the slave rebellion was rooted in Britain's tepid steps toward abolition not moving fast enough, and (2) that rebellion was one cause of De la Beche seeking government funds, that therefore the Geological Survey has its roots in abolition!

Sources:

McCartney, Paul J. (1977). Henry De la Beche: Observations on an Observer. Friends of the National Museum of Wales.

Probably the most information of a single source on this topic

Rudwick, M. J. (1975). Caricature as a source for the history of science: De la Beche's anti-Lyellian sketches of 1831. Isis, 66(4), 534-560. Link [journals.uchicago.edu]

Contrasts De la Beche's views on slavery to his other social views and to his view of the scientific method

Rudwick, M. J. (1988). The great Devonian controversy: the shaping of scientific knowledge among gentlemanly specialists. University of Chicago Press.

Bate, D. G. (2010). Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche and the founding of the British Geological Survey. Mercian Geologist, 17(3), 149-165. Link [nora.nerc.ac.uk]

Sharpe, T. (2008). Slavery, sugar, and the Survey. Open University Geological Society Journal, 29(2), 88-94. 

A disappointing work that despite its name does not discuss slavery in any great detail. It also argues one one point that the Survey's founding was rooted in abolition.

Sharpe, T. (2009). The De la Beche archive at Amgueddfa Cymru for the National Museum of Wales website [museum.wales]

A 2009 article that removed its reference to "fair-minded" slave ownership in 2017, showing the development of the discussion online.

De La Beche, H. T. (1825). Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica. T. Cadell. Free ebook on Google Books [books.google.com]