‘The correct name for the breadfruit’: on interdisciplinarity and the artist Sydney Parkinson's contested contributions to the botanical sciences

Abstract

Breadfruit is a tropical fruit-bearing tree native to Oceania and a staple food in the diets of many Pacific Islander communities. During the so-called Age of Discovery, several European voyages returned from the Pacific with descriptions of the region's flora, including breadfruit. Since that time, scientists have sometimes struggled to agree upon an adequate acknowledgement of those early descriptions in modern botany and taxonomy. This paper considers one such struggle: the centuries-long disagreement among botanists regarding the value of the botanical descriptions and illustrations of breadfruit, as well as the proposed scientific name for the species attributed to Sydney Parkinson, a young artist who sailed with Cook aboard HMS Endeavour during the late eighteenth century. While Parkinson's descriptions were thorough, it is suggested here that his contributions were neglected by later scientists, due mainly to his status as an artist and to an approach that today we would call interdisciplinary. This outcome can be viewed as indicative of the tension between the arts and the sciences that remains to this day and, I suggest, continues to hamper our understanding of the natural world.