Analysis: While terard Boate's book was a propagandistic commodification of Ireland, it opened the way for a more scientific interpretation of the country
Edmund Spenser’s book A View of the Present State of Ireland has been the subject of much debate about its importance in setting the agenda for the political and social transformation of Ireland that accompanied early modern English conquest and colonisation. But the significance of another book of that period, which set the agenda for the economic and landscape transformation of the country, has been neglected. This is all the more surprising when its legacy in environmental and climate breakdown is becoming all too evident today.
Gerard Boate’s Irelands Naturall History was published posthumously by English scientist Samuel Hartlib in 1652 and dedicated to Oliver Cromwell and his Irish deputy Charles Fleetwood. Boate was a Dutch physician and intellectual based in London when he became 'an adventurer’ - an investor under parliamentary legislation in the reconquest of Ireland following the 1641 Rebellion - and arrived in Ireland as Cromwell's state physician in January 1650.
Boate originally envisaged a far bigger book to include the flora, fauna and people of Ireland. This would presumably have been something akin to the elaborate scholarly project being undertaken on Brazil, which the Dutch were then trying to conquer from the Portuguese, entitled Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden/Amsterdan,1648).
The Dutchman was supplied with information by his medic brother Arnold, who had spent eight years in Ireland and had travelled around the country, and Sir William Parsons and his son Sir Richard who were refugee planters from the war there and provided 'a very perfect insight into that land and into all matters belonging to the same'.
Boate died within a fortnight of landing in Ireland, perhaps from one of the Irish agues described at the end of his book. Only the first part of his planned Irish work on the land of Ireland, its environment and natural resources, was complete, yet it was perfectly suited to the utilitarian, commercial and colonising aspects of the project that the Cromwellian regime had in mind for Ireland.
As the publisher Hartlib told the dedicatees, 'to advance husbandry either in the production and perfection of earthly benefits, or in the management thereof by way of trading, I know nothing more useful, than to have the knowledge of the Natural History of each Nation advanced and perfected'. He hoped the book would encourage the replanting of Ireland, not just by English adventurers but also by Dutch settlers and by exiled Czech Protestants.
Boate’s book opened the way for a more scientific interpretation of Ireland. This involved rejecting notions about many of the wondrous places such as holy wells for which Ireland was famed in the medieval tales of Giraldus Cambrensis. It also involved him applauding the recent destruction of the St Patrick's purgatory pilgrimage site in Donegal on the orders of the Protestant Lord Justices. He dismissed ‘the miraculous and fearful cave’ as ‘a mere illusion’ reasoning it to be neither the entrance to purgatory nor a tradition associated with St Patrick.
The special nature of another site – the reputation of Lough Neagh’s waters for petrifying wood – was also rehearsed and questioned. Like the 12th century Giraldus, Boate also based his account on second-hand information but, unlike the latter, he was living in a more sceptical age where the level of knowledge available had been scaled up hugely into a critical mass. Whilst not based on direct observation, Boate's conclusions were reflective of a world of materialism consciously seeking to slough off the older view of landscape informed by native superstition and Catholic spirituality.
Like other Dutchmen of the age, Boate had a keen interest in maritime and commercial matters. The coasts of Ireland received detailed treatment with the harbours, anchorages, dangerous rocks and sandbars being itemised as if from a sea chart. The country was clearly wide open to commerce, though he noted the sea passage into Dublin was silting up and that many rivers had impediments, such as salmon leaps, weirs and fords, hampering navigation into the interior.
Boate's conclusions were reflective of a world of materialism seeking to shake off the older view of landscape informed by native superstition and Catholic spirituality.
What made Ireland so attractive was its temperate climate, its fertile soil and in particular the grass it could produce. All sorts of livestock thrived on its pastures and Boate claimed that the meat produced there, whether from the small Irish breeds or larger English ones, surpassed all countries in the world including England ‘in sweetness and savouriness’.
Boate said more superb pastureland could be made available if Ireland’s bogs were drained. He went into considerable detail on this topic, discussing the different types of bog land and claiming that the Irish caused most of the bogs in the first place through carelessness and bad land management (and were still doing so). He evidenced this by ancient trees that had been found at the bottom of bogs when the English drained them.
English planters had already drained 300 or 400 acres of bog and made it fertile through careful nurture and maturing. Boate reckoned not one acre of bog would have been left in English-owned land if 'this detestable rebellion had not come between‘. Indeed he went so far as to assert that English possession and management was changing the climate: ‘in some parts of the land well inhabited with English, and where great extents of bogs have been drained and reduced to dry land, it hath been found by the observation of some years one after another, that they have had a drier air, and much less troubled with rain, than in former times’. This claim - quite erroneous in itself - stands out nonetheless as a remarkably confident prediction on Boate’s part of man’s capability as an economic actor to alter the weather.
Boate said more superb pastureland could be made available if Ireland's bogs were drained
Boate was also very interested in the mineralogical and metallurgical potential of the rock and stone in Ireland and its suitability for quarrying and mining. He was impressed by the number of profitable iron smelters that that had been set up across the country by the planters. Even though the latter had contributed to the rapid depletion of woodland and timber reserves, he nonetheless provided information for how the new Cromwellian settlers could establish ore-smelting operations of their own. There was a silver mining project to be re-established in Co Tipperary and there were prospects of gold in Co Tyrone.
This good land, Boate averred, could not be left in the hands of ‘one of the most barbarous nations of the whole earth’. Whereas the enterprising English were acclaimed as ‘the introducers of all good things in Ireland’, the feckless Irish had after their own brutish fashion engaged in a frenzy of rewilding, not only driving out and massacring the settlers but also wantonly destroying their houses, ore-smelters and properties, even including the new breeds of cattle they had brought in.
After Boate’s death and the Naturall History’s propagandistic commodification of the country, his family received confiscated lands in Tipperary from the Commonwealth regime, in what was the biggest land grab up at that point in the history of the British empire. His book was republished in Dublin in 1726 by Thomas Molyneux as the main component of The Natural History of Ireland, in three parts. The additional parts came from members and associates of the Dublin Philosophical Society and indicated how Boate’s work had spurred scientific thought on a hotchpotch of subjects.
The enterprising English were acclaimed as 'the introducers of all good things in Ireland'
These included more on bogs, the qualities of Lough Neagh and the availability of slate and marble. There was also, among other things, reports of severe flooding, sightings of the Northern Lights, accounts of ancient Irish Elk and other paleontological and archaeological discoveries, including the Giant's Causeway (omitted by Boate), swarms of insects in Connacht and various cases of physical deformities and extremities in people and animals. The book ended with Molyneux’s own extended essay on ancient forts and tumuli. Molyneux lived long enough to see the Dublin Philosophical Society formalised as 'Dublin Society for improving Husbandry, Manufactures and other Useful Arts’ (now the RDS).
The eventual post-Famine breakup of the great plantation estates under the Land Acts in late 19th and early 20th centuries and their transfer into the hands of small proprietors did not stop the capitalist exploitation of Ireland. Indeed, the remodelling of ownership was a Faustian pact which compounded the exploitation and saw it become increasingly scientific and industrial in pursuit of productivity and profit.
We are still discussing the ecological death of Lough Neagh and other water bodies as a result of agricultural pollution. We are still disputing the potential for gold and its possible side-effects in mid Ulster. We are still wondering how to save the remainder of our bogs with their capacity as a last-ditch carbon sink. All of this speaks volumes for what Boate discussed many centuries ago.
Follow RTÉ Brainstorm on WhatsApp and Instagram for more stories and updates
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
