Liverpool University Press Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850): 2

In 1771 Joseph Banks and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. Henry Smeathman's expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married into the coast's ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a `stranger' bound to his landlord and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman's life as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts-Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection between science and slavery. We also see the hardening of Smeathman's pity for the slaves, a change of sentiment which was reversed by four years in the West Indies. The book concludes with the flycatcher's celebrity in London as a termite specialist, eager to return to West Africa where his natural history knowledge had shaped his plan for a free, antislavery settlement in West Africa.