Collecting Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Edinburgh University’s Natural History Museum

ABSTRACT The Enlightenment has long been defined as an age of expanding knowledge. Practices of collection, classification and display of objects, which intensified and spread along with the global extension of European empires and commercial networks, meant that Enlightenment intellectual aspiration became global in scope. This article focuses on the colonial collections of the Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, the Rev. Dr John Walker, who was also the keeper of the university’s natural history museum. This article studies in particular the actors involved in the movement of a large collection of objects from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The collection was provided by an employee of the Company, Andrew Graham who also penned a manuscript about the artefacts and the people inhabiting Rupert’s Land. Graham’s collecting network included other traders, First Nation and Inuit actors and European-based naturalists. The article highlights the importance of conferring historical agency on a diverse cast of figures in the mobile formation and communication of colonial knowledge about humanity. It argues, however, that this movement of knowledge was not frictionless but was conditioned by uneven power relations and violence.


Introduction
Europe's Enlightenment has long been defined as an age of expanding knowledge. 1 Scholars have characterised the age by the promulgation of scientific truths, by quests for experimental rigour, by the networking of knowledge and the (relative) democratisation of information which all served to buttress the celebratory historiography on Enlightenment as an era of intellectual renovation and reform. 2 Practices of collection, classification and display of artefacts and specimens, which intensified and spread along with the global extension of European empires and commercial networks, meant that Enlightenment intellectual aspiration became global in scope. 3 Collecting was a favoured means to enlarge and improve the scientific vision of Europeans overseas, but especially of those who remained at home. The collecting and mobilisation of things that could be brought to Europewhether pressed plants; minerals; taxidermied animals; human remains or even living humanswas fundamental to Enlightenment natural history and this activity increased in tandem with a growing number of scientific expeditions and colonial settlements throughout the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, as Giltrow puts it, experienced an 'information explosion' with data and specimens travelling long distances across the globe. 4 Integral to that 'information explosion' was the rapid spread of European colonial and imperial presence. 5 This article focuses on the colonial collections and networks of the Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, the Rev. Dr John Walker (1731Walker ( -1803, who was also the keeper of the university's natural history museum. The museum was a storehouse of natural-history specimens and ethnographic material, constantly replenished with donations from colonial travellers and collectors, some of whom were Walker's former students, others of whom were eager for the intellectual credibility the Museum bestowed. 6 The Museum was far more than a repository of intellectual curiosities. It brought status to the University by visibly demonstrating the global extension of knowledge to far horizons. Those horizons, as I will show here, incorporated non-European and Indigenous peoples who became facilitators of European collecting and knowledge-gathering about the natural world and ethnography even as they were themselves increasingly subjected to the unfolding of colonisation. The agency and mobility that underpinned this knowledge formation has been emphasised by Simone Lässig, who writes: 'Knowledge does not move on its own volition, hovering over all structures and actors […] It moves through individuals and social groups'. 7 In what follows, I will use Edinburgh's natural history museum as a site for exploring the mobility of knowledge during the era of Enlightenment. My aim is to show how that mobility, and the knowledge resulting from it, was shaped by the layering of voices and assertion of authority imposed by European colonisation. I focus in particular on the actors involved in the movement of a large collection of objects from the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). 8 The collection was provided by an employee of the Company, Andrew Graham (c. 1730s-1815) who also penned a manuscript about the artefacts and the people inhabiting Rupert's Land, the name allocated to the territories in present day Canada to which the HBC held exclusive trading rights between 1670 and 1870. 9 Graham's collecting network included other traders, First Nation and Inuit actors as well as naturalists based in Britain. In common with all HBC employees, Graham was dependent on Indigenous people as sources of knowledge. They were not only guides skilled in traversing terrain unknown to Europeans in all seasons, they were also bearers of knowledge of immense economic value to the HBC. First Nations people in particular were also invaluable to the HBC as carriers, hunters, trappers, and for access to ethnographic artefacts and natural specimens. 10 By focusing on this self-taught naturalist and trader and his extensive networks reaching across the Atlantic, this article underscores the colonial imprint of Enlightenment natural history, a form of knowledge that has conventionally excised the historical agency of the diverse figures who contributed to it through highly mobile encounters and engagements during the late eighteenth century. 11 My argument takes its cue from James Secord's recommendation in 'Knowledge in Transit' that historians of science shift their analytical focus from the making of scientific knowledge, to its mobility. He suggests that they should embrace questions such as 'How does [knowledge] cease to be the exclusive property of a single individual or group and become part of the taken for granted understanding of much wider groups of people?'. 12 Over the last decade global and intellectual historians have employed the metaphor of knowledge circulation to broaden the scope of analysis beyond assumptions of diffusion that prioritised European perspectives. 13 Critics however, have pointed out that the model of circulation obscures moments of friction, discontinuity and violence in knowledge formation. 14 In a seminar at Lund University in 2018, Secord urged scholars to avoid frictionless narratives of circulation and pay due regard to moments when knowledge or artefacts were misconstrued or did not circulate. 15 Responding to this call, I demonstrate here how the uneven distribution of power and influence was incorporated within the knowledge that Graham made mobile. This unevenness also impacted on Graham himself who found himself excluded from the scientific societies who eagerly consumed the knowledge and artefacts he procured. Graham's story further indicates the multiple overlay of assumptions, cross-purposes, and conflict in making knowledge mobile. Graham encapsulates the role of personal interest, of misunderstanding and suppression of First Nations knowledge, of their resistance, and the impact of colonial violence, as well as the role of intimate sexual and marital relationships between HBC company men and Indigenous women.
The knowledge Graham conveyed was so valued in Britain and Europe precisely because he opened a window onto the spatial and temporal diversity of Enlightenment humanity. 16 By recording Indigenous practices and beliefs in their company reports and journals, knowledge that was regarded as essential to the profitability of the Company, HBC traders became travellers across this spatial and temporal variety. In communicating data about the beliefs, practices and physiognomy of Indigenous peoples to European naturalists and philosophers, these men of trade made an important contribution to the Enlightenment's 'science of man' that mapped human variety across the globe. While Graham communicated knowledge that appeared to confirm European presuppositions about the 'savagery' of First Nations and Inuit people, his Edinburgh manuscripts leave traces of the confounding presence of those same Inuit and First Nation interlocutors, people who made artefacts, traded them, facilitated communication and made the mobility of knowledge possible. Studying them contributes to our understanding of the impact of colonisation in the intellectual history of Enlightenment science and understandings of human difference.

Edinburgh University's Natural-History Museum
Edinburgh University's natural history collection was one of the first public museums in Britain. It was created in 1697 when the professor of Medicine, Robert Sibbald, presented specimens that he and his former colleague Andrew Balfour had collected. A chair in Natural History was established in 1767 and its new professorship came with the responsibility for the Sibbald/Balfour Collection. The first person to have this position was Robert Ramsay. In 1779 he was succeeded by the Rev. Dr John Walker. Walker built his reputation as a naturalist through several natural-history expeditions to the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in the 1760s and 1770s. 17 He composed a number of naturalhistory reports but his major works were all published posthumously. Walker's influence during his lifetime lay primarily in his teaching and curating of natural history. Listed among the 709 students who passed through Walker's popular lectures between the years 1782 and 1803 were men who became natural-history travellers such as Mungo Park and William Somerville, or Samuel Latham Mitchell and Benjamin Smith Barton, who each forged careers as prominent intellectuals in the United States of America.
Walker's elevation at the University of Edinburgh marked the ascendency of a Linnaean approach within the teaching of natural history there. Walker's Linnaean legacy lay not just in the implementation of the taxonomic method for natural history, but in the consolidation of a methodology for conducting field work that was based on Linnaeus's travels to Sápmi (then referred to as Lapland) in 1732, and on the global fieldwork of his many students (including the participation of Daniel Solander and Anders Sparrman on the first two of James Cook's voyages into the Pacific). 18 Walker emphasised to his students that the profession of the natural historian was an active one, which depended less on the study of already acquired knowledge and more on the active gathering of new knowledge so that it may be studied. 19 Walker expressed a dislike for philosophical conjectures that were not verified by observation, emphasising the utility and necessity of travel. 20 Walker's insistence on the value of field observations echoed the message that Linnaeus had impressed upon his students at Uppsala University in his An oration concerning the necessity of travelling in one's own countrey. 21 Walker referred to Linnaeus's expedition and to those of his students, as well as quoting from Linnaeus's Oration in both his lectures at Edinburgh in addition to his natural-history reports. 22 Linnaeus's methodology for conducting field work was central to the intense interest devoted in European Enlightenment thought to explaining and cataloguing human variety. The various editions of Linnaeus's most celebrated work, the Systema Naturae, construed humans as part of a wider system of nature on the basis of their capacity for self-knowledge, that he captioned with the Latin tag Nosce te ipsum (know thy self), but classified them geographically into four continental varieties: Europeaus, Americanus, Asiaticus and Africanus. In the tenth edition, Linnaeus provided more information about the supposed differences between distinct human varieties using mixed criteria such as hair and eye colour, body type, along with judgements about temperament, traits, clothing and customs. 23 As Linnaeus construed it, complexion and temperament were qualities not of individuals alone, but whole varieties among the human species. In order to 'know' and understand differences between human varieties, Linnaeus formulated instructions on the study of societies. These included recording the diets, diseases, customs and characters of peoples the natural historian encountered. These were found in his Instructio Peregrinatoris which was designed for students travelling abroad. 24 Linnaeus encouraged his students and readers to search for markers of differenceas they would when classifying plantsby focusing on and identifying differences from related organisms.
Edinburgh's curricula reflected a Europe-wide interest in natural history that encompassed the different taxonomic methods of both Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon. Walker's championing of Linnaeus should not blind us to his active amalgamation of the Linnaean tradition of instructed natural historical travel with a distinctly Scottish stadial history of the progress of humanity from 'savagery' to 'civilisation'. The stadial interpretation of the stage-like historical progress of humanity had been first developed by Adam Smith in his lectures on jurisprudence in 1761-1763, and then adapted by a range of other Scottish philosophers including Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, David Hume, and James Millar. Smith had argued that all human societies progressed through four consecutive stages of development from 'savagery' to 'civilisation': hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce. In each stage the customs, manners and morals a people exhibit were said to change in accordance with their means of subsistence (whether hunting or agriculture for example), leading also to the development of different institutions of government and law, as well as an array of intellectual and artistic accomplishments. 25 The model was to become so influential that natural historians adopted and adapted it. This combination of natural history and stadial theory became characteristic of Scottish Enlightenment thought and led (as I have argued elsewhere) to a distinctive layering of interpretive approaches and conceptual terminology among those educated at the University who subsequently undertook colonial travel. 26 This is reflected for instance in the readiness to adopt the stadial language of 'savagery' and 'civilisation' alongside a growing natural historical interest in human 'variation' and racial classification. Stadial assumptions were shared also by natural historians such as Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) who argued in his Arctic Zoology that although societies had in 'distant ages' started out from the same position, Europeans had been 'destined' to pursue an 'exploring life' and 'the subjection and civilization of distant peoples, nearly unreclamed (sic) from a state of nature'. 27 This facility for amalgamating natural history with stadial theory was also found in Walker's notes, in which he urged people to study the 'progress of human life from Infancy to manhood'. 28 At the heart of Walker's teaching his students to adapt and apply stadial history was an ambition for mobility. Walker taught his students that they must be prepared to travel in order to observe and collect specimens for classification. He took care to teach his students how to identify apparently mundane local and domestic objects as important specimens, as well as how best to preserve plants against saltwater damage during overseas expeditions. 29 In 1793 he composed specific instructions for collecting in India. 30 Walker's students benefited enormously from his role at the museum since he viewed the artefacts already stored there as important teaching aids. In one lecture he remarked: 'In Natural History … nothing tends so much to illustrate as a view of the bodies themselves. In this Science more knowledge may be obtained by the eye than can be conveyed by the ear'. 31 In common with other courses at Edinburgh, Walker's began with an historical narrative about the progressive accumulation of knowledge and refinement of technique. In his case, students were not only taught the value of collecting, but instructed on the improvement of techniques for doing so since Ancient times through to the founding of modern museums such as Anders Sparrman's in Sweden, and similar establishments like his own in Edinburgh. 32 The museum, he said, initially had a good reputation but much of its valuable collection had 'perished' and was in a state of disrepair by the time Walker became its keeper. 33 Walker valued his museum both as a tool for teaching students and the wider public, and for the prestige and status it brought to him personally and to the University. He consciously worked on extending the collection and under his management the museum became one of the largest in Europe. 34 In addition to contributing his own collection and purchasing further items, Walker utilised his large network of colleagues, overseas naturalists and students to acquire ever more artefacts. 35 Walker's instruction on how to collect and preserve artefacts was both part of what was expected of the universal scientific traveller and a utilitarian attempt to encourage students to bring back the right kinds of specimens in good condition for studying and exhibiting at the museum. The collection ranged from ethnographic artefacts from the Cook expeditions, items sent from HBC traders, through to local Scottish minerals and fossils. 36 A 1792 letter from a former student, William Balmain, the assistant surgeon in the new colony of New South Wales, listed several ethnographic objects forwarded for the museum including spears and a stone hatchet. 37 Another former student, Lord Daer, donated a vast collection including artefacts from Captain William Bligh's 1791-1793 voyage to Tahiti and the West Indies (musical instruments, arrowheads and fish-hooks), and 97 items collected by William Anderson (another former Edinburgh student) during James Cook's Resolution expedition (1772-1775). 38 Walker and his museum were part of an expansive, indeed global reach of knowledge. Walker not only sent out students schooled in Linnaean methods, primed to accrue knowledge of human diversity in the field, he received back from them (and from many others) a steady stream of donated artefacts and specimens that he curated and classified for further instruction. Yet this presentation of global knowledge and its extensive mobility, is all too seamless. The intellectual history of the circulation of knowledge of humanity must take account of the many fractures and frictions inherent in the colonial ambitions of Britain and other European powers. To explore these I will turn to the provision of artefacts and information from Andrew Graham.

The Hudson's Bay Company and the Commercial Circulation of Knowledge
In 1787 the Scotsman called Andrew Graham donated a large collection of ethnographic artefacts and specimens to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Society had been established in 1783 by some of Scotland's leading intellectuals (Walker among them) and public figures to serve as a conduit for the communication of knowledge and the conferral of intellectual status. 39 By that stage, Graham had retired to Edinburgh following his 26-year long career in the Hudson's Bay Company. 40 Born in Edinburgh, Graham was just one of a large number of Scots who pursued colonial careers in the eighteenth century (on this topic see also Bruce Buchan's article in this issue). 41 Graham commenced his career in 1749 as a servant in an HBC trading vessel. From there he was appointed to a range of positions supervising trade in various trading posts on shore. In 1753 he became an 'assistant writer' under James Isham (1716-1761) at the trading fort, York Factory. When Isham took furlough in Britain in 1759, Graham was appointed acting 'chief writer'. From then until 1761 he was second-in-command at York. Following that he was promoted to master at Severn House where he worked until 1774. His last period, 1774-1775, was spent as master of Churchill. After returning to Scotland in 1775, Graham continued to work for the HBC as an agent, sending payments to company employees on Orkney from 1786 to 1791. 42 Founded in London in 1670, the purpose of HBC was to carry out business (as a chartered monopoly) in what was initially a relatively unknown and distant colonial location whose jurisdiction stretched over three million square miles. HBC employees had to study this new environment in order to plan commercial activities and calculate risks. They also had to communicate their activities to company directors in Britain who themselves had never set foot in the territory. 43 British ignorance about this northern territory was therefore a driving force behind the recording of knowledge within the HBC. 44 Graham's duties as 'writer' involved keeping journals, compiling inventories, and recording transactions. An employee's standing within the HBC was closely linked to the quality of their reporting. While some writers provided only brief entries, others provided lengthy and detailed accounts. 45 In addition to being places where employees picked up knowledge from one another, trading posts also offered reading and writing classes, and were the places from which instruments and instructions were issued. 46 James Cook's Endeavour voyage to the Pacific in 1767-1771 has been identified as the turning point after which the HBC began to more openly broker knowledge in the name of science rather than the narrow confines of profit. 47 The Company began to actively encourage an interest in natural history among its employees. Employees' observations began to venture beyond what was needed for commercial interests and reflected a growing desire to be part of a transnational scientific community. 48 Closer cooperation developed between the Company and England's Royal Society, with shared memberships and an increasing flow of specimens and artefacts. The Society even established a specific committee in the 1770s, under the naturalist Johan Reinhold Forster (who accompanied Cook on his second Pacific voyage), whose task was to decide how the many specimens coming from HBC should be studied. 49 Both Isham and Graham were part of this trans-Atlantic flow of specimens. Isham presented birds to the London-based ornithologist George Edwards, which the latter painted and gave Linnaean type specimen names. 50 Graham shared Isham's interest in birds and he collected several new species previously unknown to Europeans. 51 Among his collections from 1771 were 'eight boxes of stuffed and dried skins of quadrupeds, birds' that included the type specimens Great Gray Owl and Boreal Chickadee, stone and fossil collections, and the manuscript 'Descriptive and Historical Remarks on the several articles sent from Severn River in Hudson Bay'. 52 Graham's donated specimens were used, and acknowledged, by John Reinhold Forster in his 'Account of several Quadrupeds from Hudson's Bay' and 'An account of the birds sent from Hudson's Bay' which were both published in The Philosophical Transactions. 53 In addition to his provision of artefacts and specimens to Edinburgh's Royal Society Graham also collected seeds for Edinburgh's Botanical Garden and his meteorological observations were used by the University's Wernerian Society. 54 As one of the HBC's most esteemed writers, Graham's business inventories regularly incorporated information on nature and the local inhabitants. He took frequent temperature readings and drew maps, such as his 1774 chart of Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba and Winnipegosis and the Saskatchewan River system. 55 He also recorded customary practices among the First Nations people who lived in proximity to HBC trading posts. These people were of material interest to the Company and its investors because it was they who chiefly supplied or allowed its trappers access to pelts for the lucrative fur trade. Trade and exchange of information, goods, and artefacts were integral to the relationships between HBC traders and First Nations people. 56 Graham here followed in his predecessor's footsteps. Isham had compiled a Chipewyan lexicon that included names for flora and fauna, and he had also drawn sketches that illustrated Indigenous beaver-hunting techniques, as well as the usage of European guns. Graham's own writing suggested that he wished to position himself more explicitly as an intellectual authority in his own right by displaying a more taxonomic approach and including more references to published works. 57 Graham compiled his Observations on Hudson Bay 1767-1791 throughout his time in Canada, and continued to work on it after returning to Edinburgh. 58 His Observations contained long ethnographic sections on the Indigenous peoples of Canada with separate entries for peoples he described as 'Indians' and 'Esquimaux' respectively, yet he mostly referred to the Cree people with whom he had worked closely. It was the Cree that he referred to as the 'Home Guard Indians' at York and Severn. He also relied on second-hand Company informants such as William Tomison, whom he had sent on trading missions further inland, who provided ethnographic information about other First Nations peoples. 59 Graham's encounters with the Inuit seem to have been more tenuous, but were still significant. He personally encountered Inuit on voyages in the early 1750s and in 1770, and also knew four Inuit boys who were resident at Churchill in 1774 and 1775. 60 He supplemented these personal experiences of the Inuit with gleanings from Crantz's Account of the Greenlanders. 61 Though Graham had not been university educated, and did not have access to a well-stocked library, it is likely that he acquired his own collection of books, among which was Thomas Pennant's British Zoology, obtained during his furlough in Britain in 1769-1770. 62 Self-taught as he was, Graham and his HBC colleagues were in high demand due to the knowledge they gained in situ, and especially for their access to specimens and artefacts. 63 It is precisely for these reasons that Graham came to the notice of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and John Walker.

Graham's Construction of 'Savagery'
Graham's donation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1787 contained 28 birds, 12 items relating to First Nations peoples with a further 12 Inuit articles, 10 'miscellaneous natural productions', and 11 objects from Cook's third and last Pacific expedition. The ethnographic artefacts, which he referred to as 'curiosities', included an 'Esquimaux bow and arrow', 'Indian Garters', 'Seal Skin Frock' and 'Human hair from Otheite Isles', and 'rope' from New Zealand. Graham had also encouraged Captain Robert Liddell, to donate a 'Stuffed polar bear' to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 64 Graham made note of these donations in his Observation manuscript, suggesting that he wanted his benefaction to be acknowledged and that he was proud of them.
In addition to these items, the Walker archives at the University of Edinburgh holds a manuscript in Graham's handwriting that relates to the artefacts, which Walker noted in this way: 'The following curiosities presented to the Edinburgh Royal Society with a True Account of them by Andrew Graham, late factor to the Honble. Hudson's Bay Company. January AD 1787'. This hand-written note is of considerable interest both as a record of his collecting and for its differences from his Observations on Hudson Bay 1767-1791. I will henceforth differentiate Graham's Observations from his hand-written note by referring to it as his Manuscript. 65 Graham's Manuscript lists the objects he donated and also contains 64 folios that provide detailed descriptions of the items. These notes included extensive descriptions of the customs, manners and physiognomy of the inhabitants of Rupert's Land and the Inuit. Crucially, Graham presented the Inuit, or 'Esquimaux' as he called them, as a distinct variety from the First Nations people of Rupert's Land that he referred to as 'Indians'. Graham's description of the physiognomy of the Inuit conformed with the increasing emphasis in the late eighteenth century on the physical traces of supposed racial variety recorded in measurements of stature, hair colour, and shape of the body parts, including the face, which was depicted as 'broad and flat occasioned by the prominence of the cheekbones and the rotundity & largeness of the cheeks'. 66 As part of his Inuit typology, Graham also discussed their temperament and habits. He attributed several positive characteristics to the Inuit such as having great affection for their children, being kind to each other as well as 'civil' and hospitable towards Europeans. 67 His narrative then took a rather sudden and sharply negative turn in referring to the alleged cruelty manifested by the 'sly' and 'treacherous' personalities of the Inuit. 68 An example is then provided of Inuit trying to seize a company vessel. 69 Following this passage, he referred to another incident supposedly demonstrating the Inuit's dangerous nature that took place in 1755 at Richmond Fort on the Eastern Coast of the Bay. Here, Company men had built a temporary house away from the Fort, leaving behind a teenage boy (whom Graham does not name), while they hunted for white whales in the summer. Graham alleged that the Inuit, whom he now referred to as 'the Savages', murdered and 'devoured' the boy. 70 There was no explanation given for this act of murder, nor for the alleged cannibalism. On the contrary, Graham's description of the Inuit as 'Savages' now served as verification of a supposed disposition to cruelty whenever 'they have an advantage'. 71 The reference to the Inuit as savages in Graham's Manuscript is especially interesting when it is compared to his Observations. 72 This latter text differs from the former by including information about HBC retaliation. Company employers, he explained, avenged the boy's abduction by putting three Inuit men who had visited them at the Fort in chains. They let one go in order to warn other Inuit and shot and killed the other two whom Graham claimed had resisted their captivity. 73 Graham did not record in his Observations, however, the act by postmaster Richard Potts who cut off an ear from each man, preserved them in spirits, and then asked his employers to distribute them to First Nation Chiefs. His reasons for doing so are unclear, though it is likely he wanted to encourage the chiefs to attack the Inuit with whom they were often in conflict. 74 Reciprocal and systematic acts of violence and provocation reflect the fact that the cold Hudson Bay region was a hotly contested landscape. It contained multiple boundaries and contact zones: between First Nations and Inuit groups, between different First Nations, between European traders and different Indigenous groups or nations, and between different Europeans (French and British). Graham and other company men negotiated existing borders and also, as the episode above illustrates, attempted to shape and construct new ones. Although conflicts between First Nation (particularly Cree) and Inuit groups pre-dated the arrival of the HBC, the presence of European traders changed the power balance in the area in favour of the Cree who also obtained access to ammunition. 75 With HBC activities came new environmental risks for First Nations who now split their time hunting for fur and for food. A consequence of this was starvation, which the Cree at times blamed on Inuit sorcery, leading to further hostility between them. 76 Amid this fraught context, catalysed by the presence of the HBC, Graham sought to present himself as a voice of neutral authority to his employers by explaining the plight of First Nations people as a result of their indolence. 77 This highlights a key point of difference between Graham's Manuscript and his Observations. Unlike the much more comprehensive and nuanced Observations, his shorter Manuscript centred on the donated artefacts, and thus elided the colonial violence and multiple points of friction inherent in the knowledge he brokered and made mobile.
Graham amplified his voice of scientific authority in the Manuscript by focusing on his field observations, and those of other HBC naturalists such as Samuel Hearne (1745-1792). The Manuscript does not refer to information from other published sources. It presents Graham as the key source of intellectual authority. By doing so, Graham transformed the assertion of First Nations and Inuit people as 'savages' into a scientific and taxonomic verity even as he obscured the colonial violence inscribed on the donated artefacts. Among those artefacts was a copper bracelet from the Chipewyan leader and trader Matonabbee (c. 1737-1782), who had supposedly taken it from a group of Inuit killed during the Bloody Fall's Massacre on 17th of July 1771. 78 The inclusion of this one item in Graham's collection encapsulates the process whereby the colonial implication in violence was recast by the voice of scientific authority, effectively sanitising it as an example of 'savagery' it was the natural historian's task merely to catalogue.
The massacre of Inuit at Kugluk was a violent incident that occurred during the overland expeditions undertaken by Samuel Hearne at the behest of the HBC. It was Hearne who named the location of the incident, Bloody Falls, in his much publicised account of what took place there. Hearne's expedition was intended to follow up First Nations' information about distant deposits of copper. Having made two unsuccessful journeys in 1769-1770, Hearne was guided on this third in 1770-1772 by Matonabbee, and a group of Dene people. Matonabbee was a powerful intermediary between the Hudson's Bay Company and First Nations in the fur trade. His mother had married a Company hunter and he was brought up at Churchill, speaking English and Cree. In the 1750s he had been an intermediary and peacekeeper between Cree and Anthapascan Indians. 79 The HBC's colonial endeavours were built on trade, labour, and resources, for each of which they were highly dependent on Indigenous intermediaries and guides. Matonabbee was vital to the success of Hearne's expedition because he was able to read the landscape. Though well known to him, to Europeans this was 'unexplored' territory whose economic potential remained largely hidden. 80 Accounts of Hearne's expedition had reached Britain by the 1780s, prior to his own publication in 1795. London-based naturalists such as Thomas Pennant read manuscript copies of Hearne's journal, and the two of them met when Hearne was in London 1782-1783. 81 We know that Pennant also read Graham's second hand narration of the massacre. Once again, Graham's Manuscript remained silent on the colonial implication in the violence on Hearne's expedition, and construed it merely as a feature of the cruelty of 'Indians' that it was his job to accurately describe. This is Graham's brief account of the massacre, which occurs early on in his manuscript: , so as to enable them to be on an equal footing with their mortal enemies, and as they are a more lively people than the slow phlegmatic Indian, thro time they may be an Over match for their destroyers. 82 Drawing on Hearne's (as yet unpublished) and Graham's accounts, Pennant later described the massacre in his Arctic Zoology in 1784-1785. Here he included a dramatic scene of a young woman trying to escape the massacre by embracing Hearne's feet till she was 'persuaded by a barbarian' to release her grip before killing her. Pennant's sensationalised fragment of the massacre story whetted the appetite of a curious European audience, which Hearne later supplied with his own posthumous publication in 1795. 83 Here again we can see the means whereby colonial violence could be rendered into a taxonomic criterion in the natural history of 'savagery'.
Graham worked closely with Hearne and it was he who first transcribed the massacre story. Graham also knew Matonabbee, who led Hearne's expedition safely back to Churchill. At no point in his Manuscript did Graham refer to his continuing collaboration with Matonabbee. Graham simply presented the massacre as a taxonomic feature of the presumed 'savagery' of 'Indians'. He described them as taking 'glory' in their killing of their 'mortal enemies', the Inuit. The Company's implication in the violence, causing escalating pressures on First Nations communities due to the fur trade and its impact on land use, is erased from the Manuscript. Nor did Graham provide evidence here of the amicable trade and exchange of gifts between Inuit and First Nations that also took place. 84 Hostility between First Nations and Inuit was instead presented as a feature of people who were construed as 'savages'. Written for a University audience, steeped in Linnaean natural history, Graham's Manuscript described Inuit and First Nations peoples as distinct types, 'Esquimaux' and 'Indian', each with different characteristics. Such an account was of service to a Linnaean system of taxonomy by highlighting essentialised types whose characteristics and temperaments could be compared and contrasted with each other.
The contrast between Graham's Manuscript and his earlier Observations is significant. In his Observations there were more nuanced differences described among 'Indians', each nation of whom had separate entries. This level of identification was absent from the Manuscript by the imposition of a taxonomic binary between 'Esquimaux' and 'Indians' as distinct types. Particularly noticeable in its absence from his Manuscript were Graham's comments in the Observations on the shared humanity between Europeans and 'Indians'. His Observations had in fact explained supposed 'savagery' as resulting from a 'lack of instruction'. 85 He insisted that humanity could be found even amongst the 'rudest savages', demonstrated in their affection for children, and in the 'courteous, benevolent, humane, and kind' conduct they exhibited. 86 It is important to acknowledge that Graham here judged Indigenous humanity with a British yardstick, writing for instance that while 'Indians' also experienced love and friendships they expressed these sentiments differently from Europeans, and could thus appear to an 'Englishman' as 'morose, insensible, and much on the reserve'. 87 In his later Manuscript however, Matonabbee and other First Nations individuals are transformed into exemplars of an 'Indian' cruelty. As Emilie Cameron has shown, the insistence on cruelty in the narrative of the Coppermine massacre, was to become a chief source on the supposed savagery of the 'Indian' throughout the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. 88 It was on the basis of this incident that The Critical Review could declare in 1797 that this story was an antidote to unwarranted 'praises of savage life'. 89 The Scottish geographer, Alexander Dalrymple, also wrote that anyone who had consulted Hearne's journal 'must feel a strong desire, of correcting the brutality of the Indians, truly called savage, by Introducing amongst them the Comforts and Humanity of civilized Life'. 90 Graham and Hearne were thus portrayed as reliable observers able to render the cruelties of savagery into the neutral categories of natural historical description. Theirs was testimony vital to implicitly colonial orderings of knowledge, in which First Nation peoples represented savage and uncontrolled violence excising the violence inherent in the colonial occupation of land by the HBC. 91 Hearne actively distanced himself from any responsibility and presented himself as a horrified but innocent observer of the violence. 92 He became as a result an early embodiment of the 'romantic adventure-scientist' of northern exploration largely thanks to his translation of horrifying violence into scientific classification. For the Inuit themselves, as Cameron's research demonstrates, the violence of the massacre has not been so sanitised. When 'Inuit and Dene gather in each other's communities to work toward better futures for themselves, their young people and the land' they do not speak of it. 'There are better stories to tell, for better purposes'. 93

Prestige and Authority in the Circulation of Colonial Knowledge
'Better stories' could well be used as an epigraph for Graham's deliberate silences, and for the way that he too was over-written by members of Britain's scientific and social elites. Despite donating his artefacts and providing the testimony of his Manuscript and Observations, Graham was never elected to be a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Graham's authority was cited in the natural histories of more renowned figures, Thomas Pennant, Thomas Hutchins (c. 1742-1790), and Edward Umfreville (c. 1755c. 1789), but his own Observations remained unpublished. Glover and Williams have argued that Thomas Hutchins (the Company surgeon at York Fort and Chief Factor at Albany) largely plagiarised passages from Graham's Observations. 94 More recent scholarship has emphasised the collaborative nature of colonial knowledge production within the HBC. In addition to his own Observations and experiments, Graham had helped himself to Isham's earlier Observations. Both he and Hutchins carried out astronomical and meteorological observations and made use of each other's written work in producing their respective Observations. 95 Once back in Britain it was clear that these HBC naturalists did not have the same social standing, and that their work carried different levels of epistemological clout. In his acknowledgements in the second edition of Arctic Zoology, Pennant described Hutchins as 'a gentleman' and a learned surgeon who was 'greatly distinguished' for his philosophical enquiries. By contrast, Graham was simply mentioned as providing Pennant with 'numbers of observations' and specimens donated to the Royal Society. 96 A clear social hierarchy existed within natural history despite the increasing number of people participating in collecting and the circulation of knowledge. Even the observations made in the field still had to be validated and published by scientists such as Pennant who were part of the social elite for this information to be regarded as knowledge. 97 Below Graham in that hierarchy were other employees such as servants and traders at Hudson Bay as well as his Indigenous informants. Graham delegated collecting to Indigenous people and recorded their information about objects. In his Manuscript, Graham referred to 'Northern Indians' bringing 'many specimens yearly … to Churchill: I have sent home many pieces of different forms to Gentlemen in London'. 98 First Nations peoples were aware that Graham collected and they brought him items from inland areas. 99 Cree names were still present in Graham's Manuscript, and he likewise appreciated First Nations technology and workmanship, praising for example the construction of canoes and snowshoes. 100 Graham perceived himself as an interlocutor who evaluated and authorised 'native' knowledge, noting that he took 'the greatest precaution to avoid' errors 'by ascertaining our observations from the general voice of the natives'. 101 Graham's communication of Indigenous knowledge also incorporated misunderstandings and mistranslations of Cree knowledge as can be seen in the mistakes he made when naming birds. 102 Science, as Londa Schiebinger has stressed, is not necessarily a 'cumulative enterprise', instead it is 'as much about the loss of traditions as it is about the creation of new ones'. 103 In addition to a Scottish wife whom he had married while on furlough, Graham also had a Cree partner and at least two children conceived while he was in Canada. 104 These do not feature in his Manuscript, nor did he narrate to his Edinburgh audience that it was common practice in the HBC to partner with First Nations women and to raise families with them. Many Company men had an Indigenous wife and childrena powerful reminder of the entangled economic, social and personal relationships that existed in Hudson Bay. The fur trade was built on both violence and kin relations. 105 Affectionate relationships no doubt existed, but these relationships were also necessitated by strategic considerations. Among Europeans there was a strong notion that 'Indians' preferred to trade with kin. Women were also needed for the fur trade by preparing skins and making clothes. While records reveal this pattern of reliance on Indigenous knowledge and collaboration in natural history collecting, it is impossible as Binnema argues, to research 'the true scale of the transfer of knowledge and material'. 106 It is also just as likely that First Nations women and their communities made their own strategic calculations about the value of these relationships for access to food and favourable trade.
Graham mentioned in his Observations that sexual relations were prohibited between Company men and First Nations women, though they were at the same time 'winked at', and that Company factors often kept 'a bed-fellow within the Fort at all times'. 107 Although some governors were against sexual relations, and the committee in London officially frowned upon relations, exceptions were often made and relations continued. 108 Despite these admissions, and his making no mention of his own family circumstances, an early version of his Observations makes a tantalising reference to Company men trying to bring their children to Britain: Several children, of both sexes hath been carried home to England, although against the Company's orders. The Captains of their ships were severely reprimanded, and threatened to be dismissed their service. The reason is this; several factor's children has been thrown back upon the Company in London, their fathers dying, and leaving them quite destitute of money or friends. 109 His writing reveals a racialized thinking since the children from these relations were portrayed as superior to what he referred to as 'true born natives', describing the former as 'far more sprightly and active … their complexion fairer; light hair and most of them fine blue eyes'. 110 Graham did record that British men often embraced their children as part of their lineage, yet the reality was that these children and their mothers typically had to return to their Indigenous relatives when Company men returned to Britain. Some men did, though, attempt to bring the children with them to Britain for education, a circumstance more common for boys since girls often had arranged marriages within furtrade networks. 111 In August 1772 Graham wrote a letter to the HBC's Committee about inland posts, at the end of which he asked to bring back his daughter, appealing to the board members' paternal, Christian and human feelings: Having so fully mentioned your Honours' affairs, permit me to say something about my private concerns. I have been many years in your service and always endeavouring to do my duty; let me therefore beg a favour of you, a favour the greatest you can confer on me, and I trust not prejudicial to yourselves. It is to permit my daughter to go to England in your ships. I will with pleasure give my security for her maintenance; I have settled one thousand pounds upon her, and if you choose it shall be lodged in your hands. You are many, if not all of you, fathers; let then what would be the feelings of your own paternal hearts on such an occasion plead in my behalf, and let not humanity and Christianity be forgot. Let me then have cause to bless your goodness. 112 This was information that Graham did not want to circulate. He later erased this section of his letter from the version that he copied into his Observations of 1791. Graham's initial request was turned down due to his daughter's 'tender age'. 113 When he left Canada in 1775 on the Prince Rupert IV Graham did travel with his daughter, leaving his First Nation wife and two-year-old son, Joseph, behind. Graham's journals do not mention his then six-year-old daughter, nor what plans he had for her in Britain. Joseph, may have travelled to Britain a few years later in 1780 but what became of the two children thereafter is not known; neither were mentioned in his will. 114 Graham's personal relationships remind us that the circulation of knowledge reveals the imprint of relations of power that served to buttress his standing and authority in the colonial context of Hudson Bay, even while it excised his presence from the polite society of gentleman scientists in Edinburgh and Britain. Yet the presence of colonisation in Graham's life story, and the knowledge he brokered, remained a constant throughout his career. Once back in Edinburgh, long after his return from Canada, Graham traded knowledge and artefacts he had gained from intimate involvement in colonisation, but he also reflected on the resistance shown by First Nations people to the designs made by colonists on their lives, livelihoods, and their very bodies. His Manuscript contains a revealing story arising from being 'ordered' by the Board of Directors in a letter of 1773 to send two Inuit boys to London. Graham related that having found three suitable children he promised to return them to Churchill the following year. This was to no avail. The boys refused to follow him: I could by no Gifts or promises make them comply: Nay! So terrified were they that they three in numbers, insisted on returning to their friends, and when on Board the Sloop I was informed sang & danced with great glee. 115 Graham's usage of the adjective 'glee' in relation to the boys' actions may be read as indignant, and his disapproval at the boys' defiant laughter still echoes from the page. Graham excused his 'failure' to bring the boys to England by emphasising the Inuit people's strong attachment to their land and friends. 116 Had he succeeded in sending the boys, they would no doubt have caused great excitement as ethnographic exhibitions were growing in popularity in tandem with an emerging focus on anatomy and the study of 'savage bodies'. Banks and his friend and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander, had only a year earlier made several visits to an exhibition of Inuit in London in order to examine their bodies. 117 What remains of this brief episode, still palpably to be heard, is not Graham's disappointment but the laughter and glee of three Inuit boys dancing defiantly among their friends.

Conclusion
Andrew Graham's collection and his texts illustrate the limitations and opportunities, frictions and flows in the circulation of natural historical knowledge in the late eighteenth century. More to the point it shows us how the participation of different actors within those knowledge circuits was highlighted or obscured. Graham's career also illuminates the inextricable entanglements of Enlightenment knowledge with colonial violence. Though he was not university educated and was not accepted within the society of Britain's intellectual elites, Graham nonetheless positioned himself as a purveyor of truth, the author of 'a true account' as he put it in his Manuscript's title. 118 By exploring the tensions between his Manuscript and Observations, Graham's role in selecting, constructing, modifying, and at times erasing local knowledge convey traces of messy colonial realities behind that authoritative self-positioning. The Indigenous peoples who featured in his writings were concurrently natural-history specimens, trading partners, friends, and included also Graham's lover, spouse, and mother to his children. Sometimes First Nations people willingly contributed specimens and knowledge, but at other times, like the 'gleeful' Inuit boys, they refused to participate in colonial circuits of knowledge.
Alan Bewell has aptly referred to Indigenous knowledge and colonial histories as 'ghosts' that haunt metropolitan museums. 119 The Indigenous people who produced and provided many of the artefacts on display in these museums were themselves transformed into foreign or 'savage' specimens to be studied and classified. Eventually Walker, too, would take his place among the ghosts of natural history. In the last few years of his life, he struggled with increasingly bad eyesight and was almost blind towards the end of his life. A former student, Robert Jameson, took over his lectures and the running of the museum, and succeeded him as Professor of natural history. 120 When Walker died in 1803 the museum's collection had shrunk dramatically. Walker's trustees carried away many objects, while the remaining collection had fallen into decay. One of the artefacts that decayed was the Polar Bear that Graham had forwarded. There are, however, still HBC artefacts in the National Museum of Scotland such as a Cree/Metis Coat, which are assumed to have been part of Graham's collection. 121 Jameson was the keeper of the museum for 50 years and during his tenure the number of specimens increased spectacularly to 74,000 items. As part of his effort to extend his collection Jameson drew up in 1817 a list, Set of Instructions for Collectors, to inform people abroad what to he wanted them to collect. He thereby actively encouraged a larger and more diverse group of collectors to harvest colonial artefacts and specimens for the museum. 122 The instructions included information on how to preserve natural specimens, such as birds, insects and crabs, and had a strong ethnographic dimension that situated the stadial approach of studying different stages of human history. He requested that collectors obtain clothing, agricultural objects, instruments, and other items, from 'different nations and tribes' in order to show 'the past and present condition of the human species'. From having used the terms 'nations' and 'tribes', Jameson's terminology slid towards 'race' in his instruction about the collection of skeletons and in particular skulls: 'Of man, the skull is the most interesting part, as it varies in the different races of the human species, and is also frequently singularly altered by the practices of savage tribes'. Jameson's instructions belonged to a continuing Linnaean tradition of natural history whereby humanity was included in natural-history writing and collecting. Jameson's instructions also reveals the increasing anatomical focus in natural history. Naturalists were now expected to carry out anatomical collecting that illuminated the different 'races' of humanity. Thinking on humanity was, at the end of the century and into the early nineteenth century, becoming in general markedly more biological and 'solidified', to quote Bronwen Douglas, in 'the bones, nerves, flesh, and skin of the measurable, dissectible anatomical body'. 123 The story of Graham's career and his connection with Walker and Edinburgh's and Britain's scientific elites played no small part in consolidating that movement, illustrating at the same time how Enlightenment knowledge of humanity was shaped by the multiple mobilities of colonisation.