ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Corals, Butterflies and a Sailing Yacht: The Making of the Scientific Voyage of the St George in the Pacific, 1924-25

• In Event: Sea-Work and Modern Science 1900-1939 2

English Abstract

The St George, a 1000-ton sailing yacht equipped for a scientific expedition, departed the English port of Dartmouth on 9 April 1924 for the Pacific Ocean. The ship’s company of nearly sixty included scientists, women and men – a marine zoologist specializing in corals, an ethnographer, a geologist, a botanist, an ornithologist and three entomologists; a filmmaker and a marine artist; plus a number of paying guests along for the ride, and crew. The voyage was spearheaded by a private company, the Scientific Expeditionary Research Association, and advised by an executive council drawn from leading British scientific institutions who hoped to profit from the voyage.
The company’s promotional literature boasted that the voyage opened a new chapter in scientific research, that the rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge could co-exist with a leisurely, exclusive and exotic sailing cruise, public and private interests mixing harmoniously. But all was not as the promoters imagined it. Focusing on three competing practices experienced during the voyage – collecting corals, butterflies and sailing a large yacht – this paper will open up the financing of the voyage as well as the science on board in order to ask who makes scientific knowledge. It will explore the competing interests and tensions as participants aimed to define a new post-Challenger era in the nature of sea-work and the island habitats of the oceans in the 1920s

Authors

• Janet Browne, Harvard

• Jordan Goodman, Hon. Research Associate, STS, UCL