Conference Agenda

Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the Islands contains the earliest published musical transcriptions from Jamaica. The two pages of notation are embedded within a nearly 1000-page history devoted to botanical, zoological, and medical documentation of colonial Jamaica. Attributed to the elusive “Mr. Baptiste,” likely a Black musician trained in a French Caribbean colony, the transcriptions are subjects of recent studies analyzing their musical structure, authorship (Lingold 2023), ceremonial origins (Corbett 2025), and instrumentation (Gaddy 2022); Maria Ryan (2021) further analyzes how pieces like this were orally transmitted through systems of ear training and teaching.

While previous studies have largely viewed the musical examples in isolation, this paper situates them within Sloane’s natural-historical project and the epistemic frameworks of its readers. Patterns of wear, marginal annotations, acquisition records, and ownership histories reveal how European and Anglo-American readers – mostly trained as naturalists, physicians, and collectors – encountered, interpreted, and in some cases performed Baptiste’s transcriptions. Examining several extant copies at Harvard University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the John Carter Brown Library, I analyze physical evidence of use and trace histories of previous owners, whose careers and social lives were entrenched in colonial trade systems and extractive knowledge networks. For example, provenance research identifies one Gloucester, MA owner as a merchant, customs collector, and composer of Masonic music, demonstrating how the volume circulated within overlapping networks of Atlantic trade and musical culture.

These material traces illustrate how colonial readers understood Baptiste’s music within the same extractive colonial logics motivating Sloane’s indigenous plant collections and appropriation of Black medicinal knowledge (Iannini 2012). Sloane’s own medical case studies describe his invasive and coercive treatments performed on enslaved patients, embedding the musical transcriptions in a volume that both records and enacts colonial violence. Jamaican music was rendered legible through an imperial archive formed inside what Vincent Brown calls the “morbid environment” of colonial Jamaica – a social world structured by violence and plantation capitalism.

Though occupying only two pages of the volume, the transcriptions reveal how Black musical knowledge was classified, appropriated, and transformed into collectible property within European frameworks of science.