He Created Science from the Slave Trade...

5fish

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Here is a British Naturalist who had a network of collectors riding on slave ships... The collectors were usually the ships surgeons... it a detail look at Petiver actions...

https://www.science.org/news/2019/04/historians-expose-early-scientists-debt-slave-trade

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Although he rarely left London, Petiver ran a global network of dozens of ship surgeons and captains who collected animal and plant specimens for him in far-flung colonies. Petiver set up a museum and research center with those specimens, and he and visiting scientists wrote papers that other naturalists (including Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy) drew on. Between one-quarter and one-third of Petiver's collectors worked in the slave trade, largely because he had no other options: Few ships outside the slave trade traveled to key points in Africa and Latin America. Petiver eventually amassed the largest natural history collection in the world, and it never would have happened without slavery.

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But one of the most important scientists alive then was someone few people have ever heard of, an apothecary and naturalist named James Petiver. And he was important for a startling reason: He had good connections within the slave trade.

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Murphy's research shows Petiver employed mostly ship surgeons, who cared for slaves on the voyage across the ocean. The surgeons were scientifically educated, she says, and had plenty of free time at ports such as Cartagena, in modern Colombia, and Portobelo, in modern Panama, while their fellow crew members sold slaves and provisioned the ships. Petiver usually supplied recruits with kits that included jars for insects and brown paper for pressing plants. Compensation included books, medicines, and cash.

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Strikingly, some naturalists also instructed their contacts abroad to train slaves as collectors. Slaves often knew about specimens that Europeans didn't and visited areas that Europeans wouldn't. Those slaves virtually never got credit for their work, though Petiver did offer to pay them a half-crown ($18 today) for every dozen insects or 12 pence ($7) for every dozen plants.
 

5fish

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He is the Father of British Butterflies...


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Petiver has become known as “the father of British butterflies” because he was the first to systematically allocate English names to British butterfly species. Some of the names he coined have fallen by the wayside, but we can still thank him for choices such as the brimstone (named for its sulfurous colour) and the various admirals, arguses, fritillaries, hairstreaks and tortoiseshells that we may see flutter by during a country walk.
 
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