Gerard Boate, a medical graduate of Leyden University, Holland, settled in London in 1630 where he was appointed Royal Physician to King Charles I. He subscribed to the fund established for the reduction of the Irish in Ireland, opened to the Dutch by a special Act of Parliament in 1642. He invested £180 in expectation of a reward of 847 acres in Co. Tipperary.27 That was about the time that Boate the physician became Boate the promoter of Ireland, working entirely from England: he ‘begun to write that work at the beginning of the year of our Lord 1645 and made an end of it long before the end of the same year: wheras he went not to Ireland untill the latter end of the year 1649’ as explained by his brother Arnold in the section in Irelands Naturall History entitled ‘To the Reader’. In 1647 Boate was appointed physician to the Army of Ireland but was unable for unknown reasons to take up his position until 1649.28 He died a few months after arriving in Dublin and his widow was left to claim the grant to the lands in Tipperary. Gerard’s manuscript was published by Samuel Hartlib in 1652.
Most of the knowledge in the book came from Arnold Boate, who had spent eight years in Ireland as Physician-General to the Army in Leinster, during which time he had gathered a large amount of information about the country. Much of it was probably obtained from surveyors, judging by the amount of topographic material in the book, especially concerning the coastline. Arnold ‘made very many journeys into the countrie and by meanes therof saw a great part of it, especially the provinces of Leinster and Ulster’. Before Gerard started writing the book Arnold went to London to spend six months with him ‘reasoning about Ireland … chiefly about the Natural History of the same’. Gerard set down what he heard and then conferred afterwards with various gentlemen including the Irish scientists William and Richard Parsons, who were exiles in London because of civil unrest in the colony. It is thought that the Parsons contributed a lot of the information, especially on geology and minerals.
The approach adopted by Boate in his book was one of scientific pragmatism, following the Baconian New Philosophy of utilitarianism which advocated taking advantage of the accumulated experience of artisans, gardeners, husbandmen, etc., to compile exhaustive ‘Histories of Trade and Nature’. Because of this new method, Irelands Naturall History was a major triumph over the antiquarian, anecdotal and chorographical tradition embodied in previous descriptive texts. The chorographical approach was not much more than a bare listing of natural history features whereas the artisans and others drew upon many years of practical management of the environment and were wont to make enlightening comments. Most of their statements were based on observation and in many cases verifiable facts – sometimes through scientific experimentation. The book went a long way to remedying many of the ‘chief defects for which the Truths of Naturall Philosophie and the products thereof….are so imperfectly known’.29 Regrettably, Gerald Boate’s plan to write a threefold sequel dealing with plants, other living creatures, and ‘old Fashions, Lawes and customs’ never came about because of his premature death.
Irelands Naturall History is divided into 25 chapters and written in a direct, unconvoluted style. After describing the situation and shape of Ireland, Boate turns to the provinces, the counties of the English Pale (an area around Dublin bounded by a palisade, to keep out the ‘barbarous’ Irish) and the principal cities and towns of Ireland. Almost one third of the book is devoted to a very detailed descriptive analysis of the coastline – its headlands, bays, sandbanks, harbours and anchorages. In this part Boate reveals himself as one of the earliest geomorphologists, with an interest in the coastal erosion produced by wave action. He was also clearly following Bacon’s advocacy that information should be gathered about the ebb and flow of the sea, currents, salinity, subterranean features, etc. Minerals and mining receive much attention, while the property of Lough Neagh’s waters to turn wood into stone was personally investigated by Arnold Boate (see here).
It was the bogs that fascinated Gerard, especially their potential for agricultural development. He thought they were of recent origin, only requiring drainage to make them available to agriculture – for pasture or good tillage land. He provided the first classification of bogs which were arranged as ‘grassy, watry, muddy and hassocky’. He thought that very few of the wet bogs were a ‘natural property or of a primitive constitution’ but arose through superfluous moisture gathering over time, arising from springs that had no easy run off for their water. The result was ‘rottenness and springiness, which nevertheless is not a little increased through the rain water coming to that of the Springs’.
The lack of woodland over the greater part of Ireland was noted by Boate who quotes that the area between Dublin, Drogheda, Dundalk, Newry, and as far as Dromore was bereft of woodlands ‘worth speaking of’ and without a single tree in most parts. Some great woods still persisted in Kerry and Tipperary, despite the depredations of the Earl of Cork, a well-known enemy of anything leafy and tall. The country had been well stocked with woods at the time of the Norman invasions:
‘In ancient times, and as long as the land was in the full possession of the Irish themselves, all Ireland was very full of woods on every side, as evidently appeareth by the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis…. But the English having settled themselves in the land, did by degrees greatly diminish the woods in all places where they were masters, partly to deprive the thieves and rogues, who used to lurk in the woods in great numbers, of their refuge and starting-holes, and partly to gain the greater scope of profitable lands. For the trees being cut down, the roots stubbed up, and the land used and tilled according to exigency, the woods in most places of Ireland may be reduced not only to very good pastures, but also to excellent arable and meadow.’
Boate went on to say that most of the woodland remaining after the initial English onslaught was destroyed for the manufacture of charcoal used in the smelting of iron, an industry started by the New English who had been in Ireland since the Elizabethan wars. Another aspect that Boate commented on was the nature of the soil in Ireland. He noticed that the surface deposits were varied – as the last Ice Age would have ordained them to be – but he did not speculate as to their origin: ‘The fertile soil is in some places a blackish earth, in others clay, and in many parts mixt of both together; as likewise there be sundry places, where the ground is mixt of earth and sand, sand and clay, gravel and clay, or earth; but the chalk ground and the red earth, which both are very plentiful and common in many parts of England, are no where to be found in Ireland.’
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Ireland for Boate was its suitability for agriculture. Emphasising the potential to make profits as a planter, he expounded various possibilities for the improvement of the land by drainage, the laying down of special manures, and the reclamation of bogs. He went to great technical length to make the prospect of tillage in Ireland an attractive one: ‘the best and richest soils, if but half a foot deep, and if lying upon a stiff clay or hard stone, is not so fertile, as a leaner soil of greater depth, and lying upon sand and gravel, through which the superfluous moisture may descend, and not standing still, as upon the clay and stone, make cold the roots of grass, or corn, and so hurt the whole.’
Other early endeavours
In 1633, 12 years before Boate was busy writing his book from his London quarters, a real field naturalist, Richard Heaton (c. 1604–c. 1666), born in England, first arrived in Dublin to become rector of Kilrush, Co. Clare, and later Birr, Co. Offaly, before returning to England after the outbreak of the Confederate War in 1641. He came back to Birr in 1660 and was appointed Dean of Clonfert later that year. It was only during his first sojourn that he botanised, exploring the landscape, discovering new plant records and passing them on to other botanists such as William How who published them in Phytologia Britannica (1650).30 Heaton, credited by the botanical scholar Charles Nelson to be the first person to have carried out a systematic study of the Irish flora, probably prepared a manuscript sometime before 1641. What became of it is unknown but it was certainly used by Caleb Threlkeld (1676–1728) in the formation of his own comprehensive study Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarum, published