Franklin also met Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, who would become his main French translator. Barbeu-Dubourg had trained for the priesthood but had instead become a physician. He also took an interest in legal reform, and he and Franklin would discuss both nature and politics. Though the two men had evidently been corresponding for some time, the first surviving letter between them is dated 1768. In it, Barbeu-Dubourg mentioned his bold criticism of France’s legal order, Code de l’humanité . . . , published in part in 1768. In 1773, Polly Stevenson Hewson (with Franklin’s advice) translated the essay, and Barbeu-Dubourg published it in full in London, beyond the reach of French censors.19
Two other European friends were more substantial figures in the sciences. Franklin corresponded about electricity with the natural philosopher Giambattista Beccaria (for whose musical language Franklin had named his glass armonica). And he discussed an astonishing range of topics with Dutch physician and experimenter Jan Ingenhousz. Ingenhousz had developed some improved methods of inoculation that won him the patronage of the imperial family in Austria. Whenever the court in Vienna would allow it, Ingenhousz lived in England. He joined the Club of Honest Whigs and became such a frequent visitor at Craven Street that he corresponded with the Stevensons, as well as their lodger. Legendarily genial, Ingenhousz got along with everyone and helped connect Franklin to everyone as well.20
These people and connections conveniently intermingled. When Le Roy became a foreign member of the Royal Society, Franklin greeted him as his “dear double Confrere,” referring to their shared memberships in the Royal Society and Académie Royale. Congratulating Lord Kames on his election as president of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, Franklin artlessly segued into a discussion of his own accomplishments. “I think I formerly took Notice to you . . . that I thought there had been some Similarity in our Fortunes, and the Circumstances of our Lives.” Franklin offered a “fresh Instance”: his and Kames’s simultaneous elections as presidents of their provincial learned societies. He then mentioned the impending delivery of “a little Box,” just big enough for “a few of the late Edition of my Books for my Friends in Scotland,” including one for Kames and one for the society he now headed. Le Roy tidily summarized Franklin’s multiple roles in the republic of letters when he addressed a missive to the “Deputy Post Master of North / America, Fellow of the Royal / Society.”21
HE WAS FETED as a philosopher throughout Britain and Europe, but Franklin’s shining reputation mostly depended on things he had already done. His continued revisions to his collected essays indicated that he wanted to do more. Franklin’s correspondence made clear that he managed to read about and keep up with an astonishing range of issues. But he had limited time to conduct new experiments and to revise the essays he had not managed to get into the 1769 edition of his writings.
He was too busy with political affairs. Franklin now tended multiple colonies’ interests. To London’s newspapers, particularly William Strahan’s London Chronicle, he sent a steady stream of essays that took shots at British policies. Again, all this was done within the bounds of loyal criticism of public affairs (Strahan would not have published anything that ventured further), but it was time-consuming. Meanwhile, Franklin watched younger men conquer new areas in science, ones he could only admire.
This was especially the case with the emerging field of chemistry. Chemical experimentation was to the second half of the eighteenth century what electrical experimentation had been to its first: fascinating, revolutionary, and widely reported. Sober experiments jostled with dramatic public demonstrations featuring flashes, crashes, and small animals dying horribly. For the sciences, these experiments mattered because they described elements other than the ancient quartet of air, earth, fire, and water.
Air now came in parts. In 1766, Henry Cavendish had isolated “inflammable air” (hydrogen), and Joseph Priestley did the same with “dephlogisticated air” (oxygen) in 1774. Anything that burned or altered when heated was believed to contain phlogiston, an inflammable substance. Priestley believed that by burning ash derived from mercury, he had produced a version of air separated from phlogiston. In 1775, a mouse confined to a glass vessel with this new air survived longer than a mouse shut up with ordinary air. Priestley also managed to impregnate water with air, inventing soda water, which he and other people soon could not stop drinking. Franklin had collaborated with Priestley in electrical investigation, but when it came to chemical experiments, he could only marvel—and drink the fizzy water.22
A dawning sense that several chapters of his life were over may have motivated Franklin, at the age of sixty-five, to record the events of that life. He had long used portraits to craft his image; now he used his pen. In 1771, during his second summer visit to the home of Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, Franklin wrote the first of four sections of what would be his posthumous (and incomplete) autobiography. He claimed to be writing a private account, describing it later as “several little family Anecdotes of no Importance to others” and composing the first section as a letter to his son. The writing of this autobiography was an odd and unconvincing retreat into private life by a man who remained a highly public figure.23
But Franklin might have felt himself in an odd position. He was still highly visible but not only for his philosophical work. His political reputation now announced him to the world. And even in areas where he had done stunningly new work, as with his Gulf Stream chart, he was already losing ground to competitors. First and foremost among them was William Gerard De Brahm, whose work on the Gulf Stream would eclipse Franklin’s efforts for 200 years.24
De Brahm belonged to the lesser German-speaking nobility and had trained as a military engineer. He had emigrated to Georgia in 1751 and became surveyor to the colonial governments of South Carolina and Georgia. In 1764, he was appointed Surveyor General for the Southern District of North America. Shortly thereafter, in 1767, De Brahm served, with Franklin, on a royal commission to determine the New York–New Jersey boundary. (The commission never convened, so its members knew each other by name only.) De Brahm also became surveyor general of lands for newly acquired British East Florida. There, he learned of the Gulf Stream and began studying it. But he ran afoul of the colony’s governor, James Grant, who complained to the Earl of Hillsborough, Secretary of State for colonial affairs, that De Brahm spent money faster than he produced work. Hillsborough summoned De Brahm to London to explain himself.25
In London, De Brahm published his preliminary “Observations on the American Coast” in the Gentleman’s Magazine. During his recent passage, he recounted, he had “traced” a great current from Florida “along the Atlantic coast to the Newfoundland bank.” Knowledge of this Gulf Stream would “not only guide [vessels] clear of all shoals projected from the Capes on the coast of North America, but also accelerate their voyage [away from America] in a near incredible measure.” At a stroke, De Brahm proved that he had indeed been working on behalf of the expanding empire, in much the same way Franklin had done with the Gulf Stream. But De Brahm, unlike Franklin, published his efforts in a newspaper read both in Britain and all over the colonies.26
The following year, De Brahm published The Atlantic Pilot (1772), a portable guide that coaxed navigators through the tricky currents of the Florida straits. The book included a “Hydrographical Map of the Atlantic Ocean” that traced De Brahm’s passage from Florida to the English Channel, with the Gulf Stream accompanying him most of the way. In his canny dedication to Hillsborough, De Brahm expressed concern for “the safer conduct of ships in their navigation from the Gulf of Mexico along Cuba and the Martieres, through the New Bahama Channel, to the northern part of his Majesty’s dominions upon the continent of North America, and from thence to Europe.”27
De Brahm’s assessments of the Gulf Stream were bolder than Franklin’s in three respects. First, the engineer described the current’s place in a full circle around the North Atlantic. He narrated its course out of Cape Florida, through the New Bah
ama channel, and then north and northeast along North America; it then joined the currents coming from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Baffin Bay, and Hudson Strait, which forced it southeast toward the Azores and thence to Africa. The trade winds along Africa then sent it back, “after its rotation in the ocean, to the gulf of Mexico.” This statement was either a rational deduction (as it had been for Franklin in the 1750s) or something De Brahm heard from sailors. It was not the result of direct observation—only when he returned to Florida in 1775 did De Brahm finally see that the current crossed westward from Africa to America, “as I always supposed.”28
The Gulf Stream, another view. William Gerard De Brahm, The Atlantic Pilot (1772). JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY.
Second, De Brahm elaborated the Gulf Stream’s geomorphic significance—it had the power to wear away the edges of continents. He hypothesized that Florida’s reefs and keys were parts of two ancient peninsulas that the Florida Current had long since gnawed off, and he provided a chart that ingeniously reconstructed this land, “Ancient Tegesta, now Promontory of East Florida.” Indeed, the current continued to erode land. Mariners had to be wary: a stream of water that beat peninsulas to tatters could leave “many vessels wrecked.”29
Finally, De Brahm presented the Gulf Stream as a variable current rather than the fixed one Franklin had described. De Brahm argued that wind, lunar cycles, and seasonal meteorologic conditions all affected the Gulf Stream. His manuscript map of East Florida, from which he prepared his published charts, noted that the places where the current altered course would themselves shift over the different seasons. The published “Hydrographical Map of the Atlantic Ocean” noted these variable conditions. The parallel lines that indicated the current on this chart hinted that the current’s width and path were only approximate—navigators had to look up from the chart and peek at the actual ocean. De Brahm also identified an interior, southwest “eddy” between the Gulf Stream and Florida; navigators could stay in the stream proper or in the countercurrent hugging the shore, depending on which way they headed.30
With the publication of The Atlantic Pilot, De Brahm made himself the recognized expert on the Gulf Stream. It was he, not Franklin, who put the name “Gulf Stream” on the map. Franklin’s 1768 letter to Anthony Todd, in which he had described the Gulf Stream, had circulated much less widely. The printed Franklin and Folger chart, produced in small numbers, had an only slightly larger audience. And then, for reasons that are not clear, it vanished from the public record. So much did De Brahm eclipse Franklin that by the early twentieth century, he was assumed to have charted the Gulf Stream first. Not until 1978, when a determined oceanographer turned up a copy of the Franklin and Folger chart in Paris, was Franklin’s priority recognized.31
It is impossible that Franklin did not notice what De Brahm had done. (Though De Brahm might not have known of Franklin’s work.) De Brahm advertised his findings in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and at least two other London newspapers reviewed his Atlantic Pilot. Franklin, an old newspaper man, seems to have read most of the main London papers. Without someone to tidy them, he confessed, “they lie about in every Room, in every Window, and on every Chair, just where the Doctor lays them when he has read them.” Hillsborough and probably others in the colonial office kept track of Franklin’s correspondence with Todd and of De Brahm’s work in Florida. Finally, both Franklin and De Brahm lived in London between 1771 and early 1775 and encountered many of the same people. De Brahm’s foremost patron was George Legge, Lord Dartmouth, British politician and Fellow of the Royal Society. Dartmouth and Franklin shared a doctor, the ubiquitous John Fothergill, and they corresponded at several points on colonial policies.32
But despite their overlapping lives, the two rival hydrographers differed crucially over questions of social rank. Franklin, the American arriviste and champion of colonial rights, had pointedly observed that simple, hardworking Americans best knew the northern stretch of the Gulf Stream, and he credited one source, Timothy Folger, by name. De Brahm gave no one credit, though it was clear he had talked to ordinary sailors in America. The current in question was, he explained, “commonly called [the] Gulf stream.” He differentiated this colloquial name from the Florida Current known to cartographers.33
De Brahm made his loyalties clear when he wrote the dedication of his Atlantic Pilot: “To the Right Hon. the Earl of Hillsborough.” Franklin despised the sycophancy. “My Character,” he summarized himself: “Costs me nothing to be civil to inferiors, a good deal to be submissive to superiors &c. &c.” He also loathed Hillsborough. Franklin felt that English aristocrats, including Hillsborough, had not always respected him, despite his philosophical status. In 1768, he had sought a ministerial appointment under the earl, which would have been a real coup, placing him at the center of colonial administration. But Hillsborough chose another man. Thereafter, when Franklin pilloried British ministers in his pamphlets, Hillsborough had good reason to take offense. “Our new Haman, the S[ec-retar] y” of colonial affairs, Franklin mocked him. The abuse was a risk. He published such pieces under pseudonyms (“Daylight,” “Twilight,” “Homespun,” “N.M.C.N.P.C.H.,” and so on), but people suspected him as the author.34
De Brahm took no such risk. His dedication to Hillsborough extolled the earl as “ever attentive to the welfare of his Majesty’s American subjects,” and he craved his “Lordship’s protection and patronage.” (He would go even further, eventually insisting that the current he studied should be called the George Stream, after the king.) It is hard to imagine Franklin ever begging anyone’s patronage for his work in science—he wrote that one of Hillsborough’s faults was that he was “fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him.” Franklin’s attitude was a bit stiff-necked, if not narcissistic. Patronage made the sciences possible, as he knew very well from Collinson’s attentions to him. Several friends, including Fothergill and Ingenhousz, relied on aristocratic or royal patrons.35
Patronage had its costs. In 1772, Franklin watched Joseph Priestley agonize whether to accept William Petty the Earl of Shelburne’s offer to serve as his paid librarian. It was a good job, but the patronage would compromise Priestley’s independence. He turned to Franklin for advice. “Wishing sincerely that you may determine for the best,” Franklin recommended to Priestley his “Prudential Algebra .” He should list pros and cons against each other and then see which column was longest. Maybe it helped—Priestley accepted the offer, though he would later leave Lord Shelburne’s employ. Franklin refused to weigh in on the question itself. Perhaps he feared he would offend his friend by admitting that he would never accept such support, a daily reminder of dependent status.36
De Brahm’s and Franklin’s preferences were deep-seated. De Brahm was, after all, a nobleman himself and could play the patron-and-client game without a sense that he might be groveling. Franklin knew how to be extremely polite to the political leaders with whom he worked as a colonial agent, but unless they had worked on questions of philosophy, he expected the gentlemen and lords to respect his standing in the republic of letters. In that realm, the colonial commoner and self-made philosopher could not have flattered an aristocratic patron without feeling the man’s boot on his neck. Indeed, it is telling that Franklin, unlike most other authors in the British Atlantic, never dedicated any of his philosophical works to anyone. He sought no more patrons. His belated publication of his thank-you note to Peter Collinson was the closest he came. Eager to minimize his reliance on anyone, let alone a social superior, he may have sacrificed opportunities to become more firmly embedded in Britain’s social hierarchy.
Thus, by the early 1770s, Franklin was accomplished and influential but a bit touchy about his philosophical reputation and somewhat slippery politically. Endlessly conciliatory, he was critical of Britain yet clearly relished his place in its centers of learning. Could he really have it both ways? As debate over British colonial policy mounted, so, too, did speculation about Franklin’s intentions.
C
onsider a 1770 engraving. “Political Electricity” traces an evil current along an electric chain. The charged chain starts with Lord Bute (at upper right), former prime minister and George III’s hated pet adviser (who was mocked for his interests in science) . Making many connections along the way, the chain terminates at a gun aimed at a supporter of John Wilkes (at center). Thus, Lord Bute, “in ye Character of Doctor Franklin,” uses electricity to pervert royal authority, ultimately murdering a loyal, if protesting, British subject. Or is the point that extreme authority is needed to maintain order? Anything was possible in this topsy-turvy Atlantic world. London appears under the label “Boston,” fulfilling Franklin’s prophecy that the center of the empire must move westward. Yet the ships sit idle, as had indeed happened during the controversies over Wilkes and over the taxes on colonial imports. Meanwhile, opposite Bute, Franklin flies a kite in France.37
Necessarily anonymous and deliberately ambiguous, this remarkable cartoon restated, visually, every possible problem that was besetting the empire: political corruption, violence, conspiracy, waste of wealth and resources, and abuse of ordinary subjects.
Whoever concocted the engraving was keeping up with electrical discoveries. One year earlier, Joseph Priestley had reported, in his second edition of The History and Present State of Electricity (1769), some experiments with a metal chain that he had performed in 1766. Priestley laid the chain atop a sheet of paper and then electrified it. He discovered that it left a telltale stain along the paper (and reported the finding to Franklin). The cartoon marked on paper a stain of another sort, one over the British nation and empire.38
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