Abstract: Ordinary sailors played a significant role in natural history collecting on board late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French exploring ships in the Pacific Ocean. The price paid by natural historians to the sailors for their work collecting specimens created problems, however. It destabilized the ship, undermining the captain's control of provisions and subverting economies of violence and discipline. This article explores the tension between economies of scientific collecting and the economies that normally governed sailor labor. It tracks how French naval natural history, in response, reconfigured how (and which) sailors could contribute to collecting. Over time, instead of employing sailors en bloc, officers and doctors on board naval exploration missions began instead to employ individual sailors with recognized experience and/or expertise. Those individuals were offered a range of incentives that did not destabilize discipline on ship. The price French naturalists were not willing to pay, however, was a share of scientific credit. The story of sailor-collectors reveals how an overlap of multiple, competing economies – scientific and non-scientific – affected the work of collection. It demonstrates the power of local non-scientific economies – financial and political – to affect and transform the practices of European natural historians in the field.
Ralph Kingston (2026) studied this question.