Since 1928, a portrait of the Jamaican poet Francis Williams, who lived between 1690 and 1770, has been kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A). For the Eurocentric vision of many, it was shocking that a black man appeared in a wig and frock coat, surrounded by books and scientific instruments like any other scholar of the 18th century, and the work came to be taken as a kind of mockery. In good part because the painting was cataloged upon its arrival at the museum as “a curious satirical portrait that records a failed experiment in the education of blacks.”
Although we knew in general terms the historical injustice that had been committed against Francis Williams, the historian Fara Dabhoiwala has carried out a meticulous investigation of the painting that has allowed him to identify the true date and the author, as well as reinterpret the role that the Jamaican wise man played in the history of science, obscured by the bad faith and racism of its detractors.
Using previously carried out ultra-high resolution scans of the painting, Dabhoiwala has identified a number of key elements such as the titles of the books on the shelves, the exact page of the Principle by Isaac Newton that Williams has open on the table (referring to the prediction of the orbit of comets) and a detail camouflaged behind the window unknown until now, a “small white ball” that, according to him, represents Halley’s comet in the exact moment of closest proximity to Earth when passing through Jamaica in 1759.
The new investigations reveal that the portrait was painted decades later than originally thought (in 1755 and not around 1735) and that the author of the painting was the artist William Williams, who visited Jamaica in 1760. According to the historian at Princeton University, all this new evidence points to the fact that Francis Williams himself was able to follow the return of the comet with precision thanks to his mastery of Newtonian laws since the portrait was commissioned by himself as an act of vindication of his achievements.
“The portrait is saying: ‘I, Francis Williams, free black knight and scholar, witnessed the most important event in the history of science in our lifetimes.’
Fara Dabhoiwala
— Historian and senior researcher at Princeton University
The findings, which will be published in the London Review of Books on November 13, were meticulously exposed this week by Dabhoiwala in a public lecture at the V&A in which each element of the story was revealed as in a detective film. “I think this painting is transmitting a very powerful message,” he said. “He is saying: ‘I, Francis Williams, free black knight and scholar, witnessed the most important event in the history of science in our lifetimes, the return of Halley’s Comet. And I calculated its trajectory, according to the rules of the third edition of the Principle by Isaac Newton.
Rejected by the Royal Society
Despite being born into slavery, his family was emancipated and Francis Williams traveled to London in his youth to study at Cambridge and rub shoulders with the most eminent natural philosophers of his time. His wit and intelligence led him to be proposed to enter the Royal Society in 1716, but a committee in which Isaac Newton himself and Edmond Halley were present rejected him “because of his complexion.”
“We can say categorically that they did not accept him because he was black, because in the committee discussion they talk about a black native of Jamaica and they did not say anything about color in any other discussion of other candidates,” Dabhoiwala explains to elDiario.es. “In addition, it was a scandal—candidates proposed to the committee by the assembly are never rejected—and six years later the rejection continued to be published, which was attributed to the color of their skin.”
We can say categorically that he was not accepted into the Royal Society because he was black.
Fara Dabhoiwala
— Princeton University Historian
Williams returned to Jamaica following the death of his father, a formerly enslaved African who bequeathed his son a large estate that included plantations and slaves. He was an academic, lawyer, art collector, poet, teacher and scientific pioneer, noted for a rhetorical ability that white Jamaicans tried to silence without success and opened a free school for black children, where he taught them to read, write, Latin and mathematics.
These acts made him a celebrity in his time, which exposed him to other attacks due to the color of his skin. In 1743, philosopher David Hume used him as an example to try to demonstrate that all “blacks” were “naturally inferior to whites.” “In Jamaica, he wrote, speaks of a black man as a man of talent and learning; but he is likely to be admired for very meager achievements, like a parrot who says a few words clearly.”
The worst stab at his figure was dealt by Edward Long, historian, plantation owner and defender of slavery, who in his History of Jamaica (1774) portrayed Williams, after his death, as a mediocre intellect and spread the legend that he had been part of an experiment to “discover whether, by proper cultivation and a regular course of enrollment in school and college, a black person could not be as capable of reading as a white person.” In the opinion of experts, envy of a brilliant figure who contradicted his racist postulates probably led Long to try to rewrite history and generate a malicious misunderstanding that spread for centuries.
Dabhoiwala’s new research makes it clear that Williams possessed scientific abilities shared by barely a dozen of his contemporaries and that he was one of the few people in America to accurately measure the trajectory of Halley’s Comet, a key issue for gravity predictions. which Newton himself found extremely complicated, the historian emphasizes. “It is terrible that this image that Williams wanted to project of himself, showing an incredible discovery, has been misinterpreted for so long as the parody of a black man pretending to be an academic,” he summarizes.
The despised knowledge
In addition to demonstrating that Williams was a participant in one of the most relevant moments in the history of science, there is another truth that was blurred but now shines in Dabhoiwala’s findings like the comet behind the portrait window; the fact that scientific contributions made by people from other places and cultures were systematically assimilated and silenced by the mainstream.
“The way we think about science for the last 300 years has been poisoned by the idea that everything revolves around white European men pushing the boundaries and others following them, and that is not true,” says the historian. “And the case of Francis Williams proves this very well. “He is not the only one, but he is a great example.”
Vincent Carreta, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and one of the greatest scholars of the figure of Francis Williams, acknowledges that the new findings highlight details that he and others had overlooked. “And they reveal that Williams posed a challenge to contemporary racist ideology as a poet and as a scientist,” he explains. In his view, what motivated Edward Long and other defenders of slavery to deny the achievements of Francis Williams seems obvious. “If a single person of African descent were capable of producing literature, the argument of African inferiority would be questioned,” he points out.
Findings reveal that Williams posed a challenge to contemporary racist ideology as both a poet and a scientist.
Vincent Carreta
— Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland and Francis Williams Expert
“These discoveries have deepened our understanding of Francis Williams’ commitment to the science of the Enlightenment,” he adds. Miles Ogbornan expert in human geography at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). “We are forced to recognize that, as an 18th-century black natural philosopher, Francis Williams was both a scientist and the subject of scientific debate about racial differences. Their white counterparts did not have to bear that burden.”
An overwhelming debt
For Jenny Bulstrode, an expert in the history of science at University College London (UCL), the case of Francis Williams is an important reminder of the enormous intellectual debt of modern science to the skills and knowledge of people of African descent. even under extreme oppression.
“We begin to glimpse the overwhelming debt that all science owes to oppressed peoples throughout history,” he says. In his opinion, Fara Dabhoiwala’s findings not only reveal the prejudice of the dominant scientific communities in the 18th century, but also highlight how these prejudices have persisted for centuries until the present day (Dabhoiwala himself recalls that the Royal Society did not incorporate no black members until 2023).
“We begin to glimpse the overwhelming debt that all science owes to oppressed peoples throughout history.”
Jenny Bulstrode
— Expert in the history of science at University College London (UCL)
Bulstrode lists discoveries in mineralogy, botany, medicine and pharmacology and innovations in the science of crops that were contributions of Afro-descendants that were taken over by white professionals and institutions in northern Europe and North America. The most significant is, for her, the so-called “Cut process”, a revolutionary innovation that allowed wrought iron to be mass produced and helped launch Britain as an economic superpower. “An innovation that was stolen from black Jamaicans during slavery,” says the expert.
“Although they were later erased from history, African slaves and their descendants continued to contribute to the development of modern science,” warns historian James Poskett in his book Horizons (Criticism, 2022), in which he already mentioned the portrait of Francis Williams as an example of “the traditional narrative of the history of science, in which the descendants of Africans are often wrongly excluded.”
“It is true that in many cases it has been omitted from the official story and many protagonists who would deserve greater recognition have been left out of the photo; women, indigenous people, mestizos, criollos and the invisible technicians,” adds Juan Pimentel, researcher at the Institute of History (CCHS, CSIC). In the Latin American sphere, Pimentel comes to mind two examples of Creole scholars who were belittled by those who fabricated the grand narrative of modern science. One is Antonio de León y Gama, the astronomer born in Mexico City who discovered the Stone of the Sun, and the other Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, protagonist of a controversy that pitted him against the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino, who despised his views on the great comet of 1680.
“They think in some parts of Europe,” he wrote to complain about this discrimination, “that not only the Indians, the original inhabitants of these countries, but also those of us who were parents of Spanish colonial scientific knowledge and who happened to be born in them […] “We do not know how to read and, consequently, we are incapable of making a judgment about what consists of letters.”
Today, three and a half centuries later, and thanks to contributions like those of Dabhoiwala, that complaint about the contempt for contributions from non-white, non-European spheres is beginning to come into focus and an old injustice in the history books is being corrected.
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