The sea-road of good intentions.(Citizen Labillardiere: A Naturalist's Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834))(Book Review)

Citizen Labillardiere: A Naturalist's Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), by Edward Duyker; Melbourne University Press, 2003, $59.95.

IN HIS NEW BOOK, Citizen Labillardiere, Edward Duyker offers an informative and considered account of one of the pioneers of modern botany and a significant figure in the development of the life sciences. Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardiere was a naturalist on the French expedition to the South Seas, undertaken in 1791-93 in order to find La Perouse, whose expedition had vanished after leaving Botany Bay in 1788. He published an account of the voyage in his Relation, which is not only one of the classic works of French travel literature, but also, as Duyker suggests, a work that "helped to usher the southern continent into the European imagination and may even have helped precipitate British pre-emptive settlement of Van Diemen's Land".

In 1772, at the age of seventeen, Labillardiere began studies in medicine at the prestigious university of Montpellier, which numbered amongst its graduates Rabelais and Nostradamus. Labillardiere studied under the distinguished natural historian and advocate of Linnaean classification, Antoine Gouan. Like his teacher, Labillardiere also based his research on the Linnaean system of classifying plants into classes according to the number and proportion of stamens. Yet he differed from the more traditional Gouan in his attitude to classical sources. Gouan held true to the views of the ancients, but Labillardiere was more sceptical of classical learning.

Duyker quotes from Labillardiere's Relation, where he commented on the "very incomplete descriptions" of the Greek and Arab physicians. Labillardiere broke with the traditionalists, who based their theories upon writers such as Hippocrates and Galen, preferring a more empirical approach that had affinities with such revolutionary figures as Galileo, Newton and Harvey. As Duyker writes, intimating the significance of Labillardiere's research in the context of the newly emerging scientific paradigms:

 
   Relation and his botanical and zoological 
   publications had taxonomic, systematic, 
   biogeographic and morphological significance, 
   and it was upon such foundations that later 
   evolutionary ecology was built. 

Duyker notes that Darwin referred to Relation in the first chapter of The Voyage of the Beagle.

A great deal of current research in postcolonial studies gives the impression that the ships that ventured to the New World were packed with Eurocentric hegemonists whose desire for exploitable land was insatiable. One writer who has avoided such a homogenising impulse is Richard Grove, whose Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, represents a study of dissenting voices within Colonial culture itself. It was the doctors and scientists aboard the vessels of the Dutch East India Company and the British government, who first noted the devastating effects of colonial settlement upon not only the environments of the New World, but also the indigenous inhabitants. A number of colonists inaugurated a counter-tradition that represented a critique of the economic experiment of which they themselves were a part.