Flesh, "Discovery," and Loss in Colonial Sumatra: The Case of the Corpse Flower in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Botany.

In May 1818, Joseph Arnold—a surgeon and naturalist working under British statesman Thomas Stamford Raffles—came across what he called the "vegetable of the prodigy world," a flower so unbelievable in its size, putrid odor, and fleshiness that it would challenge the limits of floral life for colonial naturalists thereafter. Tracing the material history of the so-called corpse flower, Rafflesia arnoldii , over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its place—or lack thereof—in colonial collections, this article explores how natural historical knowledge develops when specimens cannot be fully collected, described, or possessed outside of the field. Facing a lack of physical evidence and the utter inability to preserve, pack, and ship the massive, stinking, and ephemeral corpse flower to Britain and Europe from its Sumatran home, naturalists like Arnold struggled with disbelief and self-doubt while moving through colonial networks of exploration, competition, and death in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. Loss, this article argues, held significant weight in colonial collecting, challenging notions of material abundance in herbaria and natural history museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]