Franklin patronized each of the new nation’s learned societies—the APS, in his adopted state, and the AAAS, in his native city. He kept in touch with James Bowdoin, an AAAS organizer. And he was extremely generous to the APS, using his diplomatic skills, money, and influence within Philadelphia to help the society produce its second volume of Transactions and to build a new meeting place. He also solicited new and important foreign members. In Paris, he had met Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Daschkova of Russia. When he learned that Catherine the Great had made Daschkova president of St. Petersburg’s Academy of Sciences, he wrote to congratulate her and send a copy of “the second Volume of the Transactions of our Philosophical Society.” Wheels were set into motion, and the princess became the first female member of the APS, indeed, of any U.S. learned society. In return, Daschkova invited Franklin to become a member of the St. Petersburg society, as he surely must have expected.53
But the brilliant European world of debate and demonstration was now only a memory for Franklin. Lamenting his agonizing bladder stone, Franklin wished he “had brought with me from France a balloon sufficiently large to raise me from the ground. In my malady it would have been the most easy carriage for me, being led by a string held by a man walking on the ground.” What a comedown for the person who had sent an airborne “Philadelphia experiment” to France.54
But perhaps the absence of spectacle would let Franklin concentrate, as he had just managed to do at sea. He assured Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard that, en route, he had “written three pieces, each of some length; one on Nautical matters, another on Chimneys; and a third a Description of my Vase [stove] for consuming smoke.” He intended all of these for “the Transactions of our Philosophical Society.” (Franklin neglected, however, the memoirs Le Veillard wanted. He claimed he could write the essays “out of my own head,” whereas “the little history” of his life required him to consult documents in Philadelphia.) Franklin had also promised Ingenhousz that, via letters, they would continue to do “Plenty of Experiments together.” In Philadelphia, he had his old “Instruments if the Enemy did not destroy them all.”55
It was a false hope. British officers had occupied the Franklin home in 1777 and 1778, and Franklin’s son-in-law had already warned him of considerable losses. All of the musical instruments (including the armonica), some of the “electric Aparatus,” and many of the books were taken, as well as Benjamin Wilson’s oil painting of Franklin (which was not recovered until 1906). Worse, troops had ransacked a friend’s house in Bucks County where Franklin had stored a chest of papers, which has never been recovered. It would be hard for Franklin either to write about his life or to do the experiments he had promised Ingenhousz.56
If he had gone home to “go to bed,” Franklin must surely have wanted to pull the covers over his head at times. He hinted as much when he lamented his idleness to Mary Hewson. By idleness, he meant that he was playing cards with his family. He relieved his guilt by telling himself, “You know that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?” He would then “shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”57
FRANKLIN’S idleness was another person’s diligence. As he shuffled his cards, the American Philosophical Society finally produced the second volume of its Transactions, which contained Franklin’s final philosophical efforts.
With some understatement, the editors explained in their preface that “the peculiar circumstances of America, since the publication of the first volume of the Transactions of this Society, will be a sufficient apology for the long delay in publishing a second.” If the theme of the first volume had been Venus’s transit over the sun, that of its second was Franklin’s career in the sciences. Anyone who wants a crash course in Franklin’s range of scientific interests can begin here, at the end. Of its forty-five essays, four were the ones Franklin had just completed on hygrometers, smoky chimneys, his vase stove, and maritime affairs—no electricity. Eleven essays by other authors were on topics Franklin had addressed earlier: thunder and lightning, waterspouts, electric eels, the aurora borealis, chimneys, meteorology, and maritime concerns. In total, a third of the essays were related to Franklin, and three out of the volume’s four illustrations appeared in his contributions.58
When members of the APS publications committee stated that they had discovered “materials more than sufficient for a second volume of Transactions,” they hinted that the selection of Franklin-related material had been deliberate. Franklin was the society’s foremost patron; of the nine pages that listed donations (books, money, instruments), two came under his name. The list of foreign members likewise showed his influence, including as it did Barbeu-Dubourg (a posthumous honor), Lafayette, Lavoisier, Le Roy, and Vergennes, as well as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, two British men of science who had criticized Britain’s war against the former colonies. In a way, Franklin had become the new James Logan, his old friend who had, decades earlier, been Philadelphia’s premier patron of learning.59
Franklin’s essays got pride of place within the Transactions. His piece on smoky chimneys opened it—very fitting, given that his essay on Pennsylvania fireplaces was his first experimental piece. And of all the volume’s essays, Franklin’s “Maritime Observations” was the most elaborate, comprising the essay, tables of data, illustrations, and a chart.
It was a gift. Franklin could have published the essay in Europe, as he had done with others quite recently. Had it appeared abroad, the piece might have circulated even more widely and been recognized for what it was, the most extensive study of sea-surface temperatures to date. Instead, Franklin used the essay patriotically, to anchor a U.S. publication and to proclaim the virtues of his nation and its people.
He had originally composed the piece as a letter to Julien-David Le Roy, architect and ship-building brother of his steadfast friend. The epistolary genesis shows. Even in published form, the piece drifts over a variety of salty topics, mostly on existing problems of navigation and nautical technology. All were harvested from Franklin’s extended engagement with the sea.60
Franklin pleaded with sailors to entertain “the advice of landmen,” and he poured out over thirty-one pages of it. He offered his own ship and sail designs and had, of course, tested his model sails with an “experiment.” (He subjected a ship’s model to a “steady current of air” from a hole in his “kitchen chimney.”) Franklin recommended ways of loading ships. He advised captains to carry lightning rods and a sailcloth brake to be used in the water “on almost the same principles with those of a paper kite used in the air. Only as the paper kite rises in the air, this is to descend in the water” and slow the ship. He commented on a design to use a jet of water to propel a boat and proposed a steam engine to assist the water’s force. He also recommended ways to prevent a ship being flooded (lessening insurance costs) and considered William Petty’s seventeenth-century design for a double-hulled ship, much like the “outriggers” of “the islanders in the great Pacific.”61
An ominous amount of the essay recommended ways to preserve lives at sea. During his many passages, Franklin must have thought about this subject a great deal. He extolled the ways in which Captain Cook had secured “the health of the sailors” he commanded on his Pacific voyages and how he had, on his final voyage, followed Franklin’s advice on preserving breadstuffs. Franklin outlined how a shipwreck survivor could make an emergency compass with a needle in a cup of water. If facing a “long traverse” to swim, the survivor could also rig a kite from a handkerchief to help drag his or her body through the water. He told passengers how to keep and prepare food at sea, warning that ships’ fowls and biscuit were “tough” and “too hard for some sets of teeth.” And he stressed the importance of selecting, whenever possible, a “sociable, good natured” captain.62
Parts of the essay were surprisingly moralizing. Franklin restated his convictions that Atlantic migration should be voluntary and should lift up the deserving
. He recommended that private passengers take extra stores, not merely for their own comfort but to relieve the “poorer passengers.” These “super fluities distributed occasionally may be of great service, restore health, save life, make the miserable happy, and thereby afford you infinite pleasure.” Conversely, Franklin deplored the “pillaging [of] merchants and transporting slaves” from Africa; both, he implied, were forms of piracy. The slave trade was “clearly the means of augmenting the mass of human misery.” Its common end product, sugar, was “thoroughly dyed scarlet” in human blood.63
Then, deep within the “Maritime Observations,” Franklin devoted about three pages to the Gulf Stream, appending, as well, four pages of data and the fold-out chart. Here, he finally offered an authoritative account of the current, one he had not provided on either of his earlier charts. In this piece, he established that he had used a thermometer to investigate the Atlantic before anyone else. By embedding his discussion within some impressive slabs of knowledge about ships and the sea, he made clear that he had thought long and carefully about his topic.
Franklin began with his faulty recollection that his first cartographic effort came “about the year 1769 or 70,” when the Boston Board of Customs had complained about different travel times across the Atlantic. (Had he forgotten his 1784 discussion, with Pownall, of the 1768 publication of his chart?) Franklin explained that, to solve the problem, he had consulted “a Nantucket sea-captain of my acquaintance,” who told him of “the gulf stream,” marked it on a chart, and added “directions for avoiding it in sailing from Europe to North-America.” This information was then “engraved” for the Post Office “on the old chart of the Atlantic, at Mount and Page’s.”64
Franklin concluded that the gigantic Atlantic current was “probably generated by the great accumulation of water on the eastern coast of America between the tropics, by the trade winds which constantly blow there.” The winds “heaped up” water that then issued “through the gulph of Florida, and proceeding along the coast to the banks of Newfoundland, where it turns off towards and runs down through the Western islands.” He listed the three aspects of the stream he had seen in his several voyages: its gulfweed, its being “always warmer than the sea on each side of it,” and its failure to “sparkle in the night” with phosphorescence. Franklin also noted the warmth of the air above the stream; when it collided with colder air from the north, it would “form those tornados and water-spouts frequently met with, and seen near and over the stream.”65
If Franklin was restating his many efforts to study the Atlantic’s winds, waterspouts, and currents, it was a restatement with a difference. This time, he slighted global causes in favor of local ones. Decades earlier, he had speculated that the earth’s rotation must matter. And in his manuscript version of the “Maritime Observations,” he likewise stated that the globe’s “Diurnal Motion” helped explain “the expediting and retarding [of] the Voyages between N. America and England.” But Franklin deleted this phrasing at the last minute. He explained to Jonathan Williams Jr. that he was “on Consideration convinc’d that its Effect is equal both ways,” eastward and westward. Franklin’s preference for the local was evident, as well, in his new reticence to trace Atlantic circulation past the “Western Islands.”66
It is significant that he was not forsaking the larger world entirely, just in this one essay. He had speculated on the composition of the globe and on global weather patterns as recently as 1784. And he wrote Ingenhousz in 1785, “with regard to the Tides, I doubt the Opinion of there being but two High Waters and two Low Waters existing at the same time on the Globe. I rather think there are many, and those at the Distance of about 100 Leagues from each other.” Observations of the Pacific would “confirm or refute” the idea and allow the eventual charting of tidal patterns over the entire globe. The world retreated, however, as Franklin found one final meaning for the Gulf Stream—as evidence of the United States’ independence.67
The chart that illustrated “Maritime Observations” shows just how much Franklin was shrinking his world for this essay. He had given Philadelphia engraver James Poupard a copy of his Le Rouge chart, but the result was a free interpretation of the original. Poupard was no cartographer, and his limited abilities showed, especially in his crude rendition of the American coastline, with a drooping Florida. Yet Poupard captured quite well the politics of mapping in the early Republic. Only the territory of the United States was in sharp focus.
The arrangement of land and water was the key to the map—and to the nation. Poupard placed a landmass, the territory of the United States, between two fluid crescents, the Mississippi River in the west and the Gulf Stream in the east. Each waterway led the citizens of the United States out to the rest of the world. In this cramped space, Poupard could barely include the Mississippi—a bend of the river announces that it is indeed there, though the rest of it runs off the map. This rendition was a contrast to the two charts Franklin had produced earlier. The first, Mount and Page’s of 1768, had gloried in distance, recklessly representing entire oceans, whole continents, and a vast British empire. The second, Le Rouge’s of circa 1783, had emphasized the whole ocean between the United States and France, though it had excluded the Mississippi, probably because it was the object of contention at the Paris peace negotiations.
Franklin’s third chart of the Gulf Stream. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 2 (1786). PRIVATE COLLECTION.
The Poupard illustration omitted the larger ocean and territories that had dominated its two predecessors. It implied a specific and continental destiny for the United States. Clearly, Franklin had the fate of the continent on his mind. As he saw his “Maritime Observations” to press, he scoffed at Spanish offers to allow the United States free ascent of the Mississippi. “The Use of the River for ascending with Ships is worth very little,” he reminded a friend; “but for descending , it is of great Importance to all our Country beyond the Mountains.”68
It is surprising, however, that Franklin did not try to represent the Gulf Stream, either in words or in Poupard’s picture, as part of a larger oceanic circulation. He forsook not only a global explanation of the Gulf Stream but also and even more remarkably the concept of equilibrium. Why was Benjamin Franklin, the connoisseur of balances (hot and cold, negative and positive), still not worried about where all the Gulf Stream’s water went? Why did he accept a chart that did not make any of the big claims about oceans and empires that he had been pondering for decades?
Thrift may be part of the explanation. The APS had limited funds—American learning indeed lacked silver slippers or silver anything. The Poupard illustration served two essays, Franklin’s “Maritime Observations” and John Gilpin’s piece on the migration of herring (they are busy swimming in the upper left corner). It only included as much Atlantic as was needed to show the main crescent of the Gulf Stream, leaving the rest of the ocean to the viewer’s imagination. Yet nearby, all those determined fish swim a rebukingly circular pattern in the whole North Atlantic.69
His tight focus on the Gulf Stream revealed Franklin in a final guise: romantic nationalist. Long before, when he had produced his 1768 chart of the Gulf Stream, he had assured Anthony Todd that Americans had maritime skills that the British should admire. Now, in 1786, Franklin published an even longer version of this claim. He lauded American mariners, especially those plucky Nantucketers. He did not name Timothy Folger, but the cast-off loyalist cousin might have been surprised to see that Franklin ventriloquized him to rebuke British captains: “We have informed them that they were stemming a current, that was against them to the value of three miles an hour; and advised them to cross it and get out of it; but they were too wise to be counselled by [a] simple American fisherman.” Franklin also announced that British packet captains had “slighted” his 1768 chart. (There is no evidence for this.) The French were wiser, he implied to his French correspondent, Le Roy, to whom he had written the letter on which the essay was based. The chart was �
�since printed in France, of which edition I hereto annex a copy.”70
So in the end, Franklin credited mariners, American mariners, for knowing about the Gulf Stream, though (as during the war) he cloaked them in sentimental patriotism—and he still did not name them. Alongside the Poupard chart, he ran a version of Folger’s sailing instructions and gushed about the “whalemen” who knew all about the tricky Gulf Stream. But the name and the initials that accompany the directions are “B. Franklin” and “B. F.” Franklin named only one mariner, the (American) “Captain Truxton” on whose vessel he had sailed in 1785, the man who promised to test, on a voyage to China, a canvas anchor of Franklin’s design.71
Franklin also defined the thermometer as a new hydrographic instrument. His “Maritime Observations” presented three pages of thermal data, from the three years he had collected them (1775, 1776, and 1785). The spread of numbers amply made the points that Franklin had been among the very few naturalists who used thermometers to study the sea’s surface and that he had more and more elaborate measurements of temperature than anyone else. Henceforth, he claimed, “the thermometer may be an useful instrument to a navigator.”72
Franklin was criticizing the existing techniques of navigation. At that point in history, mariners still had to stand on heaving decks, whatever the weather, and use fairly complicated instruments, such as sextants, to figure out where they were. In addition, sailors needed cumulative experience—both as individuals and as a community—of the sea and of ships. Technology, including chronometers and newly detailed charts, would enable them to read the state of nature more quickly. Thermometers would also, Franklin implied, lessen the need for experience or careful training—drop one in the water, and you knew where you were. He predicted a future in which men of science would design the instruments and sailors would then use them. The division between head and hands would widen.
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