HANS SLOANE’S CURIOUS LIFE

Collecting The World is published by Allen Lane for £25.

Intro: Hans Sloane was a medical doctor to royalty and collector supreme who created Britain’s first public museums. But he couldn’t have cared less that his treasures were tainted by the blood of slaves.

‘Admission Free’ . . . When you next read those words at the entrance to one of our national museums, thank Hans Sloane (1660 – 1753), whose collection, built up over his lifetime, formed the core of the British Museum.

In those days of endemic British snobbery, when collections of antiquities and curiosities were normally viewed only by gentleman scholars by appointment in private houses, Sloane’s concept of creating a museum to all was ground-breaking.

In his Last Will of Testament he stipulated: ‘I do hereby declare that it is my desire and intention that my said musaeum (sic) … be visited and seen by all persons desirous of seeing and viewing the same.’

This led to the passing of the British Museum Act in 1753, which stated that Sloane’s collection was ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the publick (sic)’.

Some trustees were not happy with this arrangement, worrying that the dirty common people would wreck the furniture and gardens ‘and put the whole economy of the museum into disorder’.

Hans Sloane, Museum pioneer. Picture: National Portrait Gallery

THIS BOOK tells the story of Hans Sloane’s life. Having read it, I’m sure I will never look at my old Sloane Ranger Handbook again without thinking of the original Mr Sloane – or Sir Hans, as he became. A visit to Sloane Square, too, might take on a different perspective than one would otherwise have had.

Whether the blue-blooded Sloane Rangers would quite approve of him, given that he was a bit of an arriviste, is an open question.

Born the child of servants to aristocracy in Ulster, he came to London aged 19 and made it his business to climb the social ladder, achieving the first rung by learning medicine and becoming the personal physician to the Duke of Albemarie, whom he accompanied to Jamaica in 1687 to visit the Duke’s slave plantations.

When reading any book about the wealthy British in the 17th and 18th centuries, it’s never long before one’s nose is rubbed in the dark story of what helped make everyone so rich. Here, though, we get a first-hand glimpse into how the slavery system worked, and what life was like for slaves in Jamaica.

As soon as the Duke and Sloane disembarked, the Duke acquired 69 slaves, which was totally normal for a Thursday afternoon.

In the last quarter of the 17th century, the British transported 77,000 Africans to Jamaica; the crossings took three months and the mortality rate was 30 per cent.

What is striking is that Sloane, a Protestant who believed all nature was created by a benign God, had absolutely no interest in slaves as human beings.

Utterly dispassionately he describes the punishments meted out to them: ‘After they are whip’t (sic) till they are raw, some put on their skins pepper and salt to make them smart . . . they put iron rings of great weight on their ankles . . . these punishments are sometimes merited by the blacks, who are a very perverse generation of people’.

He did take an interest in slaves’ physiognomies, but this was purely commercial, gauging the degree to which different Africans made good slaves.

Sloane’s life as an obsessive collector of curiosities began in Jamaica. He started accumulating specimens of the plants and animals on the island with the help of slaves, who knew their way around and were useful for climbing trees.

Purely in passing, he gives glimpses of how the slaves lived, describing ‘the stench of a ship in from Guinea loaded with blacks to sell’.

He visited the slaves’ enclosures where they were allowed to grow a few crops to supplement the rotting carcasses they were fed by their owners. Some had managed to conceal a grain or two of rice in their hair before being hounded on to ships in Africa, and these were planted to sustain their families.

Sloane collected samples from these grounds that remain immaculately preserved in the Sloane Herbarium (now at the Natural History Museum). He also obtained an example of African music, taken down at his request by one of the ‘negroes’ – it’s the earliest sample of African music in the Americas. Proudly, Sloane noted: ‘I desired Mr Baptiste, the best Musician, to take the words they sung and set them to Musick (sic).’

For the modern reader, to look at the illustration of that snatch of music is to witness a fleeting glimpse of the deep yearnings of slaves for their homeland. For Sloane, it was an amazing souvenir.

The Duke died of drink and his corpse was embalmed and brought back to England – but not before Sloane had met Elizabeth Rose, the daughter of a wealthy planter, whom he would marry, bringing him a one-third share of the net profits from her father’s vast plantations.

Back in London, he built up his reputation as a great physician, living in fashionable Bloomsbury where his patients included Samuel Pepys, Robert Walpole, Queen Anne and two King Georges.

‘I’m almost wishing myself sick, that I might have a pretence to invite you for an hour or two,’ Pepys wrote to him – Sloane was clearly good company.

He became President of the Royal College of Physicians and aimed to bring medicine away from magic and quackery and into the new world of science.

He inoculated Queen Caroline’s children against small pox, but not before trying out the inoculation on prisoners in Newgate and then on charity children – just in case.

But it was a collector of objects from all over the world that Sloane became famous. He moved to Chelsea Manor and bought the house next door, which he filled with his burgeoning collection of natural specimens and man-made curiosities: he was at the helm of a new mania for treasure-hunting.

SOME people (including William Hogarth) mocked him for being a shallow collector of nonsense, ‘a mere trafficker of baubles’. But there was no stopping him.

Raking in money from Jamaica (on a single day in 1723 his books record proceeds from sugar shipments of more than £20,000 in today’s money), and with a genius for making contact with travellers to China, Japan and the South Seas, he could never resist a new offering, and seemed to collect everything.

His treasures ranged from ‘a long worm drawn piece meal from a Guinea negro’s legs and other muscular parts’ to drums, shoes, scientific instruments, thousands of medals, coins, birds’ eggs, fossils, sea urchins, human skeletons and an Egyptian mummy.

He collected other collectors’ collections in a way the author describes as ‘cannibalistic’. Visitors marvelled at ‘God’s power to create and Sloane’s power to collect.’

He was canny enough to choreograph his own legacy, appointing 63 trustees to ensure the creation of the ‘musaeum’ in which his collections would be preserved.

From the day of its opening in what was Montagu House, before the new Parthenon-like structure replaced it in the 1850s, the British Museum was a showroom for celebrating the global reach of British power.

This book succeeds in paying tribute to the man who was a living embodiment of that global reach, but it never shirks from exposing the dark side of his story: his unashamed acceptance of slavery as the engine of his wealth.

–     Collecting The World: The Life And Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo is published by Allen Lane for £25.