Here’s an interesting example of how misunderstanding & not properly fact checking a text results in spreading misinformation that, again, makes it seem some people of the past were scared of bathing and filthy icky boys.
I had researched this before but today someone who seems to be obsessed with European hygiene and who just kept posting fake history after fake history on her rather large social media account brought it up again, so that was a good reason to write something more substantial about it.
In the 1770s Dutch-born John Gabriël Stedman signed up as a soldier to avoid debts and volunteered for an expedition to Suriname to suppress a slavery rebellion.
Much to every historian’s delight he kept a diary that was the basis for the book he published in 1796 with the catchy title; ‘Narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the wild coast of South America, from the year 1772, to 1777 : elucidating the history of that country, and describing its productions, viz. quadrupedes, birds, fishes, reptiles, trees, shrubs, fruits, & roots : with an account of the Indians of Guiana, & Negroes of Guinea’:
Stedman wrote in gruesome detail about some of the terrible things the natives and slaves endured and was horrified by their mistreatment and suffering.
Although his book was a bit romanticised and sanitised, his description of slavery and colonialism made his writings an important tool for the abolition movement.
Ironically Stedman himself was not against slavery, quite the opposite.
Anyway, his story and his writings are very interesting but today we’re going to look at just one tiny detail, mentioned here in the original tweet that made me write this article:
At first this looks like a well supported claim, the author forgets to mention the source, but it’s relatively easy to find, it’s the book ‘Plants and Empire’ by Londa Schiebinger’.
Not just any old article, not a random blog, but an actual history book but… I looked it up in my copy of the book and there’s no mention of a source or reference for the “distaste for bathing”…
So I had to go to the original source for the story, the book by Stedman mentioned above.
Luckily for us it’s available on the Internet Archive, you can find it by clicking here.
The book does indeed mention that Caramaca suggested that the author bathed daily and that he was discouraged from doing so… not because he had issues with bathing, but because of some sort of account relating to dangers…
So what exactly did Caramaca tell him about which dangers that made him not want to bathe daily?
It took a while to figure it out, in part because those annoying ancestors of us really enjoyed using a sort of letter f in stead of an s…
But I’m pretty sure he meant this account that shows that the second Caramaca mentioned bathing our author threw off his clothes and jumped into the river without any hesitation, only to be called back right away by Caramaca because of the dangers lurking in the deep:
No signs of anyone teaching anyone hygiene, no evidence of our Dutchman having a distaste for or being distressed by the idea of bathing (quite the opposite)… what actually discouraged him from jumping in the water was that it was full of scary beasts that would snap off limbs and drag him to the bottom!
Makes sense to me… I’ve had that fear of swimming in deep water ever since I saw ‘Jaws’!
Stedman added this illustration to explain to the people back in Europe who rarely meet animals more dangerous than a grumpy kitten what some of the local beasts in Suriname looked like:
The Pery fish mentioned in his texts probably is the Piranha.
Yeah, call me dirty, but if my local bathing spot is full of Piranhas and Alligators I’m not bathing.
So what are we left with:
A story about a man being discouraged to bathe daily… yes, that much is true.
But the reason why seems to have escaped a lot of people, including a few historians.
Of course if you want to feed your bias and want to further a certain agenda that makes certain people look inferior, disgusting and filthy, this all sounds like a wonderful little story to share online.
But the second you go back to the actual source and do some basic fact checking, which you should always do before sharing anything online, especially when you have tens of thousands of followers, the whole claim falls apart.
Fake History Hunter 