Scientific travel in the Atlantic world: the French expedition to Gorée and the Antilles, 1681–1683

Abstract

Although historians have long recognized the importance of long-range scientific expeditions in both the practice and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, it is less well understood how this form of scientific organization emerged and became established in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late seventeenth century new European scientific institutions tried to make use of globalized trade networks for their own ends, but to do so proved difficult. This paper offers a case history of one such expedition, the voyage sponsored by the French Académie royale des sciences to Gorée (in modern Senegal) and the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1681-3. The voyage of Varin, Deshayes and de Glos reveals how the process of travel itself caused problems for instruments and observers alike.

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