Coral Fisheries, Neglected: Peter Lund Simmonds, H.M.S. Challenger, and the Economics of Depth-Dependent Research, 1873

• In Event: Explorations, Expeditions, and Extractions

English Abstract

During the decline in the fashion for coral jewelry in Britain in the late 1860s and continuing through the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian-era periodicals and magazines followed global trends in international coral markets. Statistician Peter Lund Simmonds looked beyond changing British tastes and preferences to forecast future demand for polished coral in colonial regions. Scholars note Simmonds’s impact on Victorian-era resource management. Overlooked in these discussions, yet recognized by Simmonds’s contemporaries, was the author’s adept use of statistics to frame coral as a colonial resource in need of scientific oversight. In an 1873 article in Art-Journal, he chided the H.M.S. Challenger research teams for focusing on deep ocean exploration at the expense of efforts to enhance the economics of shallow-water coral fisheries, and he encouraged the application of British technology in Mediterranean regions. Keeping with conference themes of “Sustainability, Regeneration, and Resiliency” concurrent with 150th anniversary of the Challenger expedition (1872-1876) this talk assesses Peter Lund Simmonds’s polemics as the public use of science to frame the British economic stake in coral trade networks in foreign regions and colonial geographies.

Author

• Anne Ricculli, Morris Museum