Sailors, philosophers, and scientists

Alison Gopnik writes a fun essay on Hume, Buddhism, and life’s turns. The mystery, not fully resolved, is whether Hume when residing in La Flèche about 1730 ever encountered a Jesuit named Pierre Dolu, and through him read the records of another Jesuit who studied Buddhism in India. Part of what struck me was the old-style research Gopnik had to do in unraveling this, in book room and with card catalogues, reading manuscripts not printed, asking friends to translate from languages she doesn’t read. “The 17th century, which often leaves the 21st looking staid by comparison,” is not yet fully digitized. Every sailor will nod at this:

Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous).

David Hume was born at the start of the 18th century. Nicolai Olaus Lossius was born at its end, on a Norwegian farm in 1790. Cheated out of his pay by the captain, he was kicked off his ship in Liverpool at the age of 16. Fortunately, he had been sailing for four years, and no doubt knew his way around docks and ships. Over the coming decades he would sail for several navies and in private ventures, eventually ending up as Vice-Governor on the Galapagos, by then having Anglicized his name to Lawson. It was Lawson who knew that the tortoises there were different on each island, who pointed it out to a geographer aboard The Beagle, which geographer recalled that in his journal a decade later as he was making theories on natural history:

I had not as yet noticed by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago; it is, that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings. My attention was first called to this fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands.

The accidental crossings of sailors and scientists have been fruitful indeed.