HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 120

menfolk lacked virile strength and failed to assert themselves over the wilderness: “Nature
has withheld from them the most precious spark of her torch.” Further proof of New World
degeneration lay in the fact that animals transported from Europe to America failed to thrive
there, becoming “shrivelled and diminished.” 14
Buffon belonged to the first generation of European naturalists with access to substantial
samples of global flora and fauna. For such ambitious men of science—eager to subsume
nature's bewildering variety within a single grand theory—climate supplied a most attractive
explanatory power. For example, one needed only compare the mean temperatures of Quebec
and Paris—located near the same line of latitude—to conclude that “in the new world there
is much less heat and more moisture than in the old.” Temperature alone, Buffon argued, had
made the Americas a “perfect desert,” where “the men are cold and the animals diminutive.” 15
To promoters of the early republic, the most offensive implication of Buffon's argument was
that Anglo-Saxon settlers of North America were destined to “degenerate” in the supposed
manner of the native flora and fauna. And all because of a bit of cold weather! This serious
controversy also offered abundant material for humorists. In the opening pages of his Sketch
Book (1819), Washington Irving gave as his reason for touring Europe in 1815 an “earnest
desire … to visit this land of wonders … and see the gigantic race from which I am degener-
ated.”
Buffon's theories of New World degeneration appeared as ridiculous to Americans of the
early republic as they do to us now. But their impact on the educated European public—as
a theoretical bedrock of anticolonial opinion—was long-lasting. The image of North America
as a cold and inhospitable continent, where nature could not thrive and Europeans ought
not venture, became an idée reçu , to be rehearsed again and again in such texts as William
Robertson's much-reprinted History of America (1788), where he translated Buffon's passages
on American climate almost word for word. Buffon's influence even shows up in the radical
poetry of the teenage Percy Shelley. 16 His first major poem, Queen Mab (1813), rehearses the
Buffonian New World pessimism of the early 1760s, long settled as a mainstream European
view:
Man, where the gloom of the long polar night
Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,
Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost
Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,
Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;
His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,
Insensible to courage, truth, or love,
His stunted stature and imbecile frame,
Marked him for some abortion of the earth,
Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around. 17
—and so on (in unedifying strains). In this passage from Queen Mab it is easy to see how the
Enlightenment anthropology of climate developed its reputation as the insidious intellectual
precursor to nineteenth-century theories of race. If a self-proclaimed radical and humanitari-
an such as Shelley could believe this nonsense, who would not believe it? Even Mary Shelley
was reading Buffon in 1817. In Frankenstein , her Creature, a wretched “abortion of the earth,”
naturally wishes to flee civilized Europe to the “degenerated” Americas.