For the curious and interested

Today, 'curiosity' is a trait often associated with wonder and inquisitiveness. In many cultures, a questioning nature is seen as something to be encouraged in children from a young age and to be nurtured throughout our lifetimes. But this was not always the case. Before the mid-17th century, in many Western cultures curiosity was widely considered an intellectual, social and moral vice, rather than a virtue.  

Think of the cautionary tale of Pandora, whose curiosity led her to open the box given to her by the God Zeus, releasing woe into the world. Or the biblical story of Eve, whose curiosity resulted in terrible consequences for mankind. Curiosity was seen as something that prioritised personal gain at the cost of society. As the cultural historian Barbara Benedict has shown, in 17th-century England it was seen as a mark of discontent and threatening ambition. It indicated that an individual was 'looking beyond the norm and seeing a way out of their place'. Curious scientists, journalists, women, social reformers and collectors challenged the status quo and this was considered dangerous.

But in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the meaning of curiosity began to evolve. As Enlightenment thinkers debated the rational nature of man and natural philosophers explored the history of the world and humankind, curiosity started to become 'a trademark of progress' and a sign of the free intellect that propelled Enlightenment culture. The term 'curiosities' was used in a derogatory and racist way to describe non-Western people, but in this period anyone who appeared to transgress or challenge the norms of polite society in Britain, either in appearance or behaviour, could also be considered 'curious'. 'Curious persons' were in fact the intended audience of numerous books on scientific topics published in the early 18th century and were addressed directly in the title pages of such books.

For Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), the Ulster-born physician, naturalist and collector whose vast collection was the catalyst for the creation of the British Museum (and eventually the Natural History Museum and British Library), the act of collecting made him a 'curiosity' or 'curious person'. If you have ever collected stamps, books or pressed flowers, you might understand the impulse to acquire, categorise and share a collection. Between 1680 and 1753, Sloane assembled an enormous collection, including more than 50,000 books and manuscripts, around 120,000 plant specimens, and over 71,000 man-made and natural objects including antiquities, coins, paintings, cultural artefacts, fossils, corals and more. Many were acquired from European sources, including Roman candle holders and amphoras, English Bronze Age axes, Venetian glass and Etruscan ceramics. His 'paper museum' of prints and drawings numbered over 11,000 and included everything from etchings and drawings made in Britain and Europe to colour woodcuts by Chinese artists. A herbarium or 'hortus siccus' (dried garden) held dried plants from Europe, the Americas and Asia. Other objects have more complex histories of cross-cultural exchange, such as a carved elephant ivory horn with imperial Portuguese iconography that was made by Sapi artists in West Africa, in around 1490–1530, most likely for a European patron. Another example is the Akan drum acquired by a Reverend Mr Clerk for Sloane in Virginia, in about 1729, which is likely to have been taken from West Africa to the Americas on a slaving ship. As Sloane's reputation grew, people involved in global maritime trade and European colonial and imperial enterprises sent things to him, both at his request and unsolicited.

During his lifetime Sloane's collecting did not go unchallenged. His collection was viewed as both encyclopaedic and eclectic, and he was often derided for accumulating objects with no perceived or immediately apparent function. In 1700, William King's The Transactioneer described Sloane as the emblem of excess, 'so Curious that nothing almost has pass'd him', suggesting that Sloane collected indiscriminately. But by bringing together naturalia (natural) and artificialia (man-made) objects from across the globe, Sloane hoped to better understand the world and its history. It was a working collection, made available to friends and acquaintances. His faith that each object in his collection had intellectual value, whether it revealed itself in his lifetime or to a future researcher, was central to his assembly of objects and plants from across Europe and around the world. 

When Sloane died in 1753, he bequeathed his enormous collection to the British nation. It was offered to King George II for the reduced price of £20,000 which was an extraordinary amount of money but a fraction of its worth (it was valued at £80,000). A public lottery raised money to enable the purchase for the nation. In 1753, an Act of Parliament was made to create the British Museum and six years later the Museum opened its doors in Montagu House, Bloomsbury Square, in the centre of London. It was a radical act to take a private collection and open it to the public, but Sloane wanted his collection to be used to improve knowledge and 'satisfy the desires of the curious'. And so the world's first public museum was born.

In doing so, Sloane moved the quest for knowledge about the history of the world and humankind's place in it from the private sphere to the new Museum and its public. The author of the first guidebook of the British Museum placed learning firmly at the heart of the Museum and praised the 'universal… Curiosity' of the public. By stipulating that the collection should be free to access (although visitors did need to apply for entry to visit or use the collection), Sloane distinguished it from disrespectable commercial, trade ventures in which 'curiosities' were viewed – this was to be a respectable venture, one that was free and existed to further useful and intellectual interests.

Sloane was a polymath – he was interested in and knowledgeable about a huge variety of things, and this influenced his collecting. As a child growing up in County Down in the North of Ireland he developed a curiosity in the natural world, studying and collecting flora and fauna from around nearby Standford Lough. He likely grew up studying books in the library of the Hamilton family at Killyleagh Castle, thanks to his father's position as a tax agent for James Hamilton, 1st Viscount Claneboye (who served King James I and VI). He later published his own books and built an extensive library, spending lavishly on rare editions and illuminated manuscripts, as well as contemporary publications. He even had a book wheel that allowed him to read multiple books at the same time. Sloane's Protestant upbringing was rooted in rationalism and eschewed religious ideas that he perceived as supernatural or magical (which for him included Catholicism). He would later collect objects with purported 'supernatural' or mystical qualities for the purpose of disproving them. This included objects such as the famous Elizabethan physician Dr John Dee's scrying crystal ball and objects used as protective amulets.

Sloane began collecting on a large scale in 1687–89 when he became the personal physician to the Governor of Jamaica, then an English colony. As historians such as James Delbourgo have shown, he relied greatly on the knowledge and experience of the inhabitants of Jamaica, including enslaved and free African and Indigenous people as well as white enslavers and medical men. He travelled all over Jamaica, except for the Blue Mountains which were controlled by people called Maroons, who had freed themselves from enslavement. He collected hundreds of plant specimens and objects, including some objects made by Taino people (the original inhabitants of Jamaica) that had been excavated from archaeological sites. He acquired glass vessels and coins that were salvaged from Spanish shipwrecks in Port Royal and bought live and dead animals from African and Indigenous people in local markets.  

Sloane collected and exchanged knowledge of plants and medical practices with multiple people on the island of Jamaica, including Black healers and doctors who were trusted by many people on the island (their treatments did not include the unpleasant bloodletting and purging often prescribed by European doctors). In an exchange with a Black woman who is described as having 'been a Queen in her own country', Sloane records the woman treating an infection in his foot and sharing the name for the insect causing the infection. He visited the small plots of land where enslaved people grew food for themselves, noting their cultivation of potatoes, yams and plantains. Such spaces enabled African botanical traditions to survive in Jamaica.

He later published his travels and observations, with hundreds of illustrations based on drawings of plants that he collected. Featured in For the curious is Sloane's own annotated copy of his A Voyage to Jamaica, generously loaned for the first time by the Natural History Museum. On its pages, you can see where he has written notes about plants including plantain, a type of green banana that continues to be important in Caribbean cooking, and cacao (he is sometimes mistakenly credited with inventing hot chocolate).

Not all of Sloane's collecting was object- or plant-based. After seeing a musical performance by enslaved people from different parts of West and Central Africa, (recorded as 'Angola', 'Papa' and 'Koromanti') he had it transcribed to include in his book. It is a frustratingly scant fragment from a distorted view, but the piece of music testifies to the richness of African musical traditions in the Americas. It has since been performed and reimagined as a musical passage by contemporary musicians and scholars. 

Sloane collected knowledge of all kinds, including that held by African and Indigenous peoples, freed and enslaved – and his collecting was possible through European imperial and colonial networks. Sloane was Secretary of the Royal Society and later its President. The Royal Society and the Company of Royal Adventurers in England (later the Royal African Company, or RAC), which traded enslaved people, were considered sister organisations, with those involved in scientific activities in the Royal Society also operating in various ways in the commercial activities of the RAC.

On returning from Jamaica, Sloane's professional and personal successes grew, and his collecting increased. He built up a successful medical practice as a private physician, increasing his income with fees from wealthy clients. In 1695, he married advantageously to the sugar heiress Elizabeth Langley Rose, whom he likely met during his time in Jamaica. On the death of her first husband in 1694, Elizabeth had inherited a third of his property in Jamaica, including land, enslaved people and profits from sugar plantations. According to the laws of the time, her property became Sloane's when they married and it subsequently provided a substantial income that enabled his collecting. He proudly called himself a 'planter', which was a name for a landowning enslaver in the Caribbean. Further income came from land that he owned and rented in Chelsea, annual salaries from his Royal Appointments (including Queen Anne and King George I and II), and investments in the RAC and the South Seas Company.

One important life explored in For the curious is that of an enslaved African child who was sent to Sloane in London in 1710. Not only did the labour of enslaved people in Jamaica produce the wealth that enabled Sloane to build his collection in London, but there is also evidence that he owned an enslaved child in Bloomsbury who lived in Sloane's household for at least five months. A letter to Sloane, dated 4 January 1710, from the Leiden-based Scottish ship surgeon Alexander Stuart evidenced the exchange, previously agreed between the two men. Stuart says that he is sending a child to Sloane's London home as a 'present' – a boy he describes as Black in place of his name. In a later letter between the two friends, Sloane mentions the 'trouble' (code for resistance) the boy had caused him. Stuart suggests the boy be sent to the Caribbean. The harsh realities of slavery in the Caribbean were well known, and this was effectively a death sentence. Little else is currently known about this child, but continued research may reveal more about what happened to him.

For the curious has been on display at the Down County Museum in Northern Ireland, where Sloane himself was from, and is in its final weeks at Ceredigion Museum in Wales. In each location, the exhibition was co-created with local community group members. Each person brought their own unique perspective to the process and these are shared in the final displays.  

Exploring Sloane's upbringing and connections to Ireland was important at Down County Museum. His family was part of the Scottish Presbyterian settlement of County Down in the North of Ireland in 1603. As community member and artist Kieron Black says, '[w]hilst it is true that a lot of Down was settled rather than officially planted, this distinction probably made little difference to the local population. Sloane's privileged position gave him access to education and opportunities that the local population did not have.' The group considered Sloane's exchange of Jamaican and North American plant specimens with Arthur Rawdon (who is sometimes known as the father of Irish gardening) in 1688. They reflected on how Ireland was both colonised and also involved in colonial activities and enterprises at home and overseas. A community member remarked that Sloane's achievements can be acknowledged, but 'true honesty on the cycle of oppression and colonisation is needed and could have a real healing experience in the now'.

Sloane relied greatly on the knowledge of enslaved African and Indigenous peoples and the community group at Ceredigion Museum explored this history through creative responses. In her poem Did you know?, which was featured in the exhibition and an excerpt of which is included below, Shamira Scott imagined those unacknowledged enslaved people whose labour contributed to Sloane's collection of plants and his understanding of their properties:

They sent you to gather and bring forth   
but for what, did you know?... 
And it is he … they would say   
is the one who discovered all these things  
with not much trace of you. No you.   
Did you know?

Reflecting on the tragic history of the young enslaved boy sent to Sloane in London, a County Down community member wondered if there is any way to talk about him 'without anger and sadness'. The members of the group at Ceredigion Museum in Wales decided they wanted to bring the story of the young boy into the exhibition space. Group member Déa Neile-Hopton took a cast of the hands of Scott's seven-year-old son, Noah. The result of a group conversation, the small, delicately painted hand cast holding a flower is intended to embody the child sent to Sloane in 1710. Of the work, which was a collective creation, Neile-Hopton says:

'The hands overlapping and curving together signal the boy's humanity and resistance. The plant fibres he holds are daffodil, symbolising the relative values Sloane placed on the plants he collected and some human lives. They also represent the contribution enslaved peoples made to assembling his collection and growing valuable crops, such as sugar. The wealth they generated elevated Sloane's and Britain's status. In Wales, the daffodil is our national flower and symbolic of how we celebrate and remember the dead.'

The hands of Noah and his two brothers, Uriah and Micah, were photographed holding the unpainted cast and a fresh daffodil. Scott said:

'My sons, Uriah, Noah and Micah (9, 7 and 4 years old), are Welsh boys of Jamaican ancestry. Here, they hold and embody the hands of the boy in the letter to Sloane. The cast both represents this boy as an individual and the thousands of children of all ages who were enslaved. My boys also hold a daffodil in celebration, solidarity and remembrance of him. Children today are still affected by the legacy of the transatlantic enslavement.'

Working with communities to understand the past and explore Sloane's legacy through the collection aligns with Sloane's original intentions for it. Sloane wanted the collection to be a 'working' collection: its purpose was, and is, for the continued improvement of knowledge and understanding of the world. This is why it was so important that it be freely accessible to the public. In the 1800s the 'public' was a fairly narrow slice of society, and 'free' did not just suggest a utopian vision in the way we understand democratised culture for all in the twenty-first century. The meaning of these words has changed and become more inclusive, just as the meaning of 'curious' has shifted over time and the meaning of objects evolves with each generation that studies them. But the collection's purpose – to serve curious people questioning, challenging and seeking to understand the world and humankind – remains the same, and is perhaps more important than ever.

For the curious and interested is at Ceredigion Museum in Wales and closes on 7 September 2024.  

For the curious and interested is a National Touring Exhibition supported by 'Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future collections', an Arts and Humanities Research Council Towards a National Collection Discovery Project which digitally reconnects the collection now cared for by British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library.