Voyages of Discovery: Three Centuries of Natural History Exploration. - Review - book review

Voyages of Discovery: Three Centuries of Natural History Exploration Tony Rice, Ph.D. CLARKSON-POTTER, $60.

IN 1689, BOTANY ENTHUSIAST HANS Sloane sailed home to England, bringing with him hundreds of natural curiosities from his 15-month stay on a largely unexamined island called Jamaica. Not all made it to England alive: A crocodile expired from undetermined causes, an iguana "inadvertently" jumped overboard and drowned, and a seven-foot-long snake was shot to death after escaping from its jar and frightening a passenger. Fortunately; the voyage's nonliving cargo, Jamaican plants that Sloane had preserved by drying, survived the trip and the subsequent three centuries in remarkably good shape. Today the Natural History Museum in London houses the specimens--along with finely detailed drawings of them made by artists who had accompanied Sloane to Jamaica.

Many of these renderings are reproduced in Voyages of Discovery, by Tony Rice, a former curator of the museum. Recounted are 10 revelatory natural history expeditions that took place between 1687 and 1876, including Sloane's to Jamaica, James Cook's to the South Seas, and Charles Darwin's to the Galapagos Islands. Visual records from each trip are included.

Some of these meticulous images not only enthralled a nature-curious public more than 100 years ago but also instigated a taxonomic revolution by the great eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus. Previously; scientists wrote up cumbersome Latin descriptions for each specimen without necessarily checking to see whether a previous, more appropriate appellation existed. Linnaeus compared the drawings of different types of plants and animals and recognized that certain flora and fauna shared characteristics. He assigned each such grouping a genus, as well as a species name to distinguish it from other members of its genus.

Rice documents the voyages' serendipitous consequences, such as Sloane's first encounter with a cacao tree, the mother of chocolate. "The nuts themselves are made up of several parts like an ox's kidney, some lines being visible on it before broken, and is hollow within," he wrote. "Its pulp is oyly [sic] and bitterish to the taste." Sloane went on to patent a formula that combined chocolate with milk and sugar, thus making it palatable to Europeans.

Overall, though, Voyages's dry prose fails to impart the exhilaration of exploration. It is the glorious drawings that help readers imagine an explorer's awe and wonder.

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