ABSTRACT
In 1622, Sir Francis Bacon published his Historia ventorum , in which he sought to answer a number of outstanding questions about the nature of the winds, which had exercised scholars from Aristotle onwards, including notably their origins and the causes of their potentially threatening ‘great and violent motion’. This chapter argues that, as well as an important intervention into early modern science, Bacon’s history of the winds also sprang from his political philosophy and his lifelong interests in trade, commerce and colonisation. While these elements have all received careful attention from Baconian scholars in recent years, their significance for the Historia ventorum has not been sufficiently noted. In this chapter, Vine therefore traces their connections with Bacon’s natural history to offer a new account of that work and thereby show how it (and his interest in the winds more generally) belonged to both his scientific and his political programmes. Bacon’s underlying aim in the work, the chapter argues, was the mastery of the winds – with how the winds might be controlled and put to human use and improvement, and with how the threat of natural disaster that they otherwise posed might therefore be averted. The subjects of the Historia ventorum were also, the chapter shows, intimately connected with Bacon’s commercial and colonial interests, or with what we might call his ‘mercantile imperialism’.
