“Humble Auxiliaries to Nature”

This chapter seeks to position Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's work, especially his later work, the fictional travelogue, Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York, into a transatlantic discourse of science. Crevecoeur was born in France, he was educated in England, and in early adulthood he became a cartographer in the French colonial army, working under Montcalm and witnessing the infamous massacre at Fort William Henry. The chapter argues that Crevecoeur complicates the dominant binary structure of natural knowledge production in the late eighteenth century. Instead, he evokes a networked approach to epistemological control, prioritising the expertise of the go-between, thereby challenging the emergence of discrete nationalisms. Crevecoeur distinguishes himself from his contemporaries because he challenges preconceived notions about the relationship between the centre and the periphery, and about the identities of credible go-betweens.