An exploration party under the command of…
1817 CE
An exploration party under the command of James Kingston Tuckey had been sent to Africa in 1816 to establish whether the stretches of river at this time named the Niger River and the Congo River were one river or two.
The expedition had failed dismally: within a few months of reaching the river, many of the party were dead, including Tuckey and the expedition botanist Christen Smith (also known as Christian Smith and Chetian Smith).
The botanical assistant, David Lockhart, had survived, and had eventually returned a collection of around six hundred plant species to Joseph Banks, who turns the collection over to Brown to arrange it, and see what might be published based on it.
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The origin of the name "Australia" is closely associated with Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
"Australia", as a name for the country which we now know by that name, was suggested by Matthew Flinders, but first used in an official dispatch by Macquarie in 1817, in petitioning the British Admiralty to use the name instead of "New Holland".
Macquarie is regarded as having been ambivalent towards the Australian Aborigines.
He ordered punitive expeditions against the aborigines.
However, when dealing with friendly tribes, he developed a strategy of nominating a 'chief' to be responsible for each of the clans, identified by the wearing of a brass breast-plate engraved with his name and title.
This way of negotiation, although typically European, often does reflect the actual status of elders within tribes.
Despite opposition from the British government, Macquarie encourages the creation of the colony's first bank, the Bank of New South Wales, in 1817.
Johan August Arfvedson, a Swedish chemist, discovers a new element, lithium, in 1817 during an analysis of petalite ore, an ore now recognized to be LiAl(Si2O5)2, taken from the Swedish island of Utü.
The element's name is derived from Greek lithos (stony; apparently because it is discovered from a mineral source whereas the other two common group 1 elements, sodium and potassium, were discovered from plant sources).
He subsequently discovers lithium in the minerals spodumene and lepidolite.
The corrupt Serbian rebel leader Milos Obrenovic regards the exiled rebel leader Karadjordje as an enemy and has not permitted his return to Serbia.
Karadjordje, after living for a time in Russia, where he had been well received, has secretly returns to Serbia, hoping to organize an uprising against the Turks in alliance with Greek patriots.
Fearing the presence of such a dangerous rival, Milos has him murdered in his sleep on July 13 (July 25, New Style), 1817, at Radovanje.
To ingratiate himself with the sultan, he sends the slain man's head to Constantinople.
The assassination initiates a vendetta between the rival dynasties descending from the two leaders that will plunge Serbia into bloodshed for more than a century.
A five-year-old Jewish girl in Ferrara is forcibly taken from her family, with church approval, on the grounds that her Christian nurse had privately baptized her as an infant. The Jewish community here sends a delegation to Rome to plead for the girls' return, but no action is taken.
Ferrara's Jews, now fearful of their servants' actions, begin to require them, upon leaving service, to sign with an "X" a document stating that they had never baptized a child of the family. This innovation soon spreads to other ghettos in the Papal States.
Stendahl, whose real name is Marie-Henri Beyle, produces a second work in 1817, Histoire de la peinture en Italie (History of Italian Painting), the only book that he publishes under his own name
Like his earlier The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, it is also largely a plagiarization but nonetheless demonstrating an originality of mind.
He follows this the same year with the publication of Rome, Naples, and Florence, a travel book.
At seventeen, Stendahl had obtained a commission in Bonaparte’s army in Italy in 1800, courtesy of an influential Paris cousin.
In 1807 Stendhal had stayed near Stendal, where he fell in love with a woman named Wilhelmine, whom he called Minette, and for whose sake he remained in the city.
Stendhal added an additional "H" to make more clear the Germanic pronunciation.
Before settling on the pen name Stendhal, he had published under many pen names, including "Louis Alexandre Bombet" and "Anastasius Serpière".
From the publication of Rome, Naples, Florence (September 1817) onward, he has published his works under the pseudonym "M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie".
He has borrowed this nom de plume from the German city of Stendal, birthplace of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, an art historian and archaeologist famous at this time.
Georges Cuvier has founded the science of paleontology.
The belief that no species of animal had ever become extinct was still widely held when Cuvier presented his paper on living and fossil elephants in 1796.
Authorities such as Buffon had claimed that fossils found in Europe of animals such as the woolly rhinoceros and mammoth were remains of animals still living in the tropics (i.e., rhinoceroses and elephants), which had shifted out of Europe and Asia as the earth became cooler.
Cuvier's early work had demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case.
None of Cuvier's many works attain a higher reputation than his Le Règne Animal, the first edition of which appears in four octavo volumes in 1817.
Pierre Joseph Pelletier, a French chemist and pharmacist who in 1817 becomes the first to isolate chlorophyll, continues to research natural products such as alkaloids and gum resins.
He discovers emetine in the same year.
Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, a professor at the École de Pharmacie (School of Pharmacy) in Paris, collaborates with Pelletier in a Parisian laboratory located behind an apothecary.
He is a pioneer in the use of mild solvents to isolate a number of active ingredients from plants, making a study of alkaloids from vegetables.
Friedrich Stromeyer, a German chemist investigating a sample of zinc carbonate, cadmia (now called calamine) that is yellow instead of the usual white, finds and describes a new metal in 1817.
In the same year, Karl Samuel Leberecht Hermann and J. C. H. Roloff find the same new metal in a specimen of zinc oxide, used at this time in medicine.
These researchers are examining both zinc compounds because their purity as pharmaceuticals is suspect.
The yellow color is due to the new element, which receives the name cadmium after the ore in which it is found.
A historical debate still remains as to who actually discovered the pure form of the element first.
Morphine, the first active alkaloid extracted from the opium poppy plant, discovered by Friedrich Sertürner in December 1804 in Paderborn, Germany, is first marketed to the general public by Sertürner and Company in 1817 as an analgesic and as a treatment for opium and alcohol addiction.
The idea of a canal to tie the East Coast to the new western settlements had been discussed as early as 1724: New York provincial official Cadwallader Colden made a passing reference (in a report on fur trading) to improving the natural waterways of western New York.
Gouverneur Morris and Elkanah Watson were early proponents of a canal along the Mohawk River.
Their efforts led to the creation of the "Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies" in 1792, which had taken the first steps to improve navigation on the Mohawk and construct a canal between the Mohawk and Lake Ontario,[ but it was soon discovered that private financing was insufficient.
Christopher Colles (who was familiar with the Bridgewater Canal) had surveyed the Mohawk Valley, and made a presentation to the New York state legislature in 1784, proposing a shorter canal from Lake Ontario.
The proposal had drawn attention and some action but has never been implemented.
Jesse Hawley had envisioned encouraging the growing of large quantities of grain on the western New York plains (then largely unsettled) for sale on the Eastern seaboard.
However, he went bankrupt trying to ship grain to the coast.
While in Canandaigua debtors' prison, Hawley had begun pressing for the construction of a canal along the ninetey-mile (one hundred and forty)-long Mohawk River valley with support from Joseph Ellicott, the agent for the Holland Land Company in Batavia).
Ellicott realized that a canal would add value to the land he was selling in the western part of the state. He later became the first canal commissioner.
Engineering requirements
The Mohawk River (a tributary of the Hudson) rises near Lake Ontario and runs in a glacial meltwater channel just north of the Catskill range of the Appalachian Mountains, separating them from the geologically distinct Adirondacks to the north.
The Mohawk and Hudson valleys form the only cut across the Appalachians north of Alabama, allowing an almost complete water route from New York City in the south to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in the west.
Along its course and from these lakes, other Great Lakes, and to a lesser degree, related rivers, a large part of the continent's interior (and many settlements) would be made well connected to the Eastern seaboard.
The problem is that the land rises about six hundred feet (one hundred and eighty meters) from the Hudson to Lake Erie.
Locks at this time can handle up to twelve feet (three point seven meters) of lift, so even with the heftiest cuttings and viaducts, fifty locks would be required along the three hundred and sixty-mile (five hundred and eight kilometers) canal.
Such a canal would be expensive to build even with modern technology; in 1800, the expense was barely imaginable.
President Thomas Jefferson called it "a little short of madness" and rejected it; however, Hawley has interested New York Governor DeWitt Clinton in the project.
There is much opposition, and the project is ridiculed as "Clinton's folly" and "Clinton's ditch."
In 1817, though, Clinton receives approval from the legislature for seven million dollars for construction