The Boatload of Knowledge: A Keelboat of Scientists Bound for Utopia

On the evening of Thursday, January 12, 1826, Robert Owen took his stand in the pulpit of the Harmonists’ former church in New Harmony, Indiana, and told the settlers of his new community that help was on its way. William Pelham, a Virginia-born settler who was living in the village and writing long letters to his son in Ohio, set down the gist that same week. Owen, he wrote, had left his party behind “proceeding in a boat which contained more learning than ever was before contained in a boat.” Owen did not mean Latin and Greek, Pelham added, but “real substantial knowledge,” and the boat held “some of the ablest instructors of youth that cd be found in the U. S. or perhaps in the world.”¹

The boat was a keelboat flying the name Philanthropist, and by the time Owen spoke it had spent four weeks frozen into the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania. It reached Mount Vernon, Indiana, on January 23. The nickname that grew out of Owen’s boast, the “Boatload of Knowledge,” has stuck to it for two centuries.² The story is a good one, but it survives in sources written at very different distances from the event, and they do not always agree.

A partnership of a reformer and a geologist

Owen was a Welsh-born cotton manufacturer who had made his mill village at New Lanark in Scotland a showcase for his ideas on schooling and character.³² He spent about half his fortune, $135,000 by Donald Pitzer’s account, on New Harmony and some 20,000 acres around it, buying the town from George Rapp’s Harmony Society, a German-American religious community that had moved back to Pennsylvania. Owen hoped to build a cooperative “community of equality” there as a model for a New Moral World.²

His partner was William Maclure, a Scottish-born merchant who had turned to geology and to school reform. Maclure’s geological map of the United States, presented to the American Philosophical Society in 1809, earned him the label “father of American geology,” and he served as president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia from 1817 until his death in 1840. He had visited Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s institute in Switzerland and had paid for Pestalozzian schools in Philadelphia, whose method rested on learning through direct experience rather than memorized texts.² Owen needed teachers and Maclure could supply them. When the two men set out from Pittsburgh in December 1825, they brought much of the Philadelphia academy’s talent with them, which, Pitzer notes, the academy never forgave.²

Who was aboard

The best-known passengers were scientists. Thomas Say, the academy’s librarian and a specialist in insects and shells, had been naturalist on Stephen Long’s expedition toward the Rocky Mountains. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, a French naturalist and artist who had sailed on the Napoleonic-era expedition to Australia, was the academy’s curator.²⁴ Alongside them came the teachers who mattered most to Maclure’s plans: Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot, a Pestalozzian teacher from Paris who had organized a school for him in Philadelphia, and William S. Phiquepal, who had headed his schools for boys in Paris and Philadelphia.²

Many of the forty or so passengers were young. Fretageot brought three pupils, the sisters Lucy, Frances and Sara Sistare. Phiquepal had ten boys from his Philadelphia school, among them Fretageot’s son Achilles and her nephews Peter and Victor Duclos. Lesueur had charge of Virginia DuPalais, her brother Victor, and Cecilia Noel. There was a physician, William Price, with his wife and three children; a carpenter, John Beal, with his family; a Swiss painter, Balthazar Obernesser; the English architect Stedman Whitwell, who had just shown President John Quincy Adams a large model of the ideal town Owen intended to build; and Owen’s eldest son, Robert Dale Owen, then twenty-four, who kept a journal of the trip.²

Pitzer reconstructed this list from three lists made by people on the voyage: Lesueur, Owen’s associate Donald Macdonald, and Robert Dale Owen.² He set aside a fourth, written decades later by Victor Colin Duclos, who had been a seven-year-old among Phiquepal’s boys. Pitzer calls it “quite inaccurate.”² Duclos’s memory, printed in 1916, includes figures such as the reformer John Speakman, who by Pitzer’s account had gone to New Harmony ahead of the boat. Duclos did preserve the local name, though: the boat, he wrote, carried the school’s most talented members “and was therefore styled the Boat load of knowledge.”⁵

Forty-seven days on the Ohio

Maclure and Owen had meant to travel by steamboat, but the river was too low. Robert Dale Owen, writing his memoirs nearly fifty years later, put it simply: “finding that steamboats had ceased to ply on the Ohio, we purchased a keel-boat” and fitted it up for a party “then amounting to some thirty or forty persons.”⁴ Pitzer describes a craft about 85 feet long and 14 feet wide, moved by six long oars and a steering sweep, divided into a crew section, a men’s cabin, a women’s cabin and a room for the children. Its flag read “Harmony” on one side and, in Lesueur’s French spelling, “Philantropist” on the other.²³

They pushed off from Pittsburgh at 2 p.m. on December 8, 1825. Within two days the boat had run aground on a riffle, and it took six men sent from the Harmonists’ new town of Economy, a few miles downstream, to free it. Owen soon left to settle the property deeds and went ahead overland.² From December 11 to January 9 the keelboat was frozen in at a spot called Safe Harbor, between Economy and Beaver. Two of Phiquepal’s boys fell through the ice and pulled themselves out; Dr. Price went in up to his neck; Phiquepal struck his head in a fall while out hunting with Lesueur and lay feverish for days.² The passengers agreed to do manual labor themselves and to eat two meals a day, dismissed eight of their eleven hired crew, and made Thomas Say captain. Fretageot read the French social theorist Charles Fourier aloud to the stranded company.²

Robert Dale Owen remembered the month as a happy apprenticeship. In his 1874 memoir he wrote that the ice, “closing in upon us, arrested our voyage for a full month,” and recalled learning the names of forest trees and how to shoot from an old hunter named Rice.⁴ On January 8, passengers and crew cut a channel through the ice to open water, and the boat drifted on. It took on a judge’s son at Steubenville, picked up Maclure and Fretageot at Wheeling (they had gone ahead by land), and reached Cincinnati, where some of the party toured a natural history museum and heard John Cleves Symmes lecture on his theory that the earth was hollow. At Louisville they met Joseph Neef, the Pestalozzian teacher Maclure had first brought to America, who agreed to join them. The boat tied up at Mount Vernon at 9 a.m. on Monday, January 23, forty-seven days out of Pittsburgh. Most passengers went the last miles to New Harmony by wagon; a few stayed aboard as it went on down the Ohio and up the Wabash.²

Lesueur sketched all the way. Pitzer counts 127 drawings from the trip, among them the frozen keelboat at Safe Harbor and the boat at Mount Vernon on January 24 under the title “Debacle a Mount Vernon.” They are kept with more than 1,200 of his American sketches in the natural history museum at Le Havre.²

Where the record disagrees

The sources fall into three layers: documents written at the time (Pelham’s letters, Robert Dale Owen’s journal), memories written much later (Owen’s 1874 memoir, Duclos’s recollections), and historians’ syntheses. They disagree on several points.

The clearest case is the geologist Gerard Troost, the Philadelphia academy’s first president. Duclos’s list puts him on the boat, and so does a 1927 essay by David Starr Jordan and Amos Butler.⁵⁶ Pitzer says Troost reached New Harmony in the fall of 1825, ahead of the boat, and Nils Johansen states that he came overland about a month before it.²⁷ Robert Dale Owen’s memoir names Troost among those who joined the party in the weeks after it landed in New York.⁴ Pelham, in a letter dated January 27, 1826, written after the boat had arrived, named him in a list of “persons who have lately arrived” alongside Maclure, Say and Lesueur, which does not settle the question either way.¹ The weight of the scholarly accounts puts him in New Harmony before the boat, and he is best not counted among its passengers.

Memory also improved some stories. In his memoir Robert Dale Owen recalled winning a wild turkey at a backwoods shooting match.⁴ Pitzer, reading the journal Owen kept at the time, says that Rice won the turkey and a pair of braces and Owen came away with a handkerchief.² The memoir is also unsure whether Maclure had been with them at all, though Pitzer’s sources place Maclure aboard for much of the trip.⁴² Even the date is uncertain in late accounts: Duclos remembered leaving in “the fall of the year 1825.”⁵ None of this changes the outline of the voyage, but it shows why historians of New Harmony lean on the journal and the letters over the reminiscences.

What the passengers built

Once in Indiana, the boat’s teachers became the core of New Harmony’s schools. Maclure took charge of education, and in a prospectus published early in 1826 he set out their guiding rule: “never to attempt to teach children what they can not comprehend,” moving “from the known to the unknown.”⁸ Pitzer describes an infant school run on the New Lanark model by Fretageot and Eloisa Neef, a higher school under Joseph Neef, and a School of Industry, begun in 1826, in which pupils spent part of each day learning a trade. Phiquepal taught printing, and John Beal taught carpentry.²

Printing gave the scientists an outlet. The New Harmony press issued the first parts of Lesueur’s American Ichthyology in 1827 and, from 1830, Thomas Say’s American Conchology, a study of North American shells published in parts until 1838, four years after Say’s death.²³ Its illustrations are credited largely to Lucy Sistare, the boat’s pupil, who married Say on January 4, 1827; the Indiana State Library notes that many were hand-colored by her or by two of her students, while Pitzer, more cautiously, says she helped color them.³⁹² After Say died in 1834 she left New Harmony, and she later became the first woman elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.⁹³

The community itself did not last. Communal living at New Harmony was abandoned in 1827, Maclure withdrew to Mexico in 1828 for his health, and Fretageot, who carried out his instructions in New Harmony for years, died in Mexico in 1833.² Lesueur returned to France in 1837.² Writing in 1927, when the Indiana Academy of Science marked the centennial of western science at New Harmony, Jordan and Butler summed up the venture: “Its failure was in its economics; its successes in the study of nature.”⁶ Johansen notes that some critics have called the experiment top-heavy, with too much weight on intellect and too few farmers and laborers.⁷

Weighing the legacy

Pitzer, a historian of New Harmony, makes a strong case for what came after: Maclure’s bequest to workingmen’s libraries, which funded 160 of them in Indiana and Illinois, and the later careers of people the boat brought or drew to New Harmony, including Robert Dale Owen’s work for free public schools in Indiana’s 1851 constitution and for the founding of the Smithsonian Institution.² Some of his claims, such as that New Harmony students were perhaps the first in America to study with active research scholars, are judgments rather than settled findings, and he offers them as such.

What can be said firmly is narrower. In one winter, a geologist’s money and a reformer’s ambition moved a group of naturalists, artists and teachers, many of them women and children, from Philadelphia to a frontier village on the Wabash, and their books, drawings and schools outlasted the utopia they came to serve. Owen’s phrase about a boat full of learning was a recruiter’s boast. Historians who have weighed it, Pitzer reports, have generally agreed that for once he did not exaggerate.²

Footnotes

1. Pelham, letter begun January 8, 1826 (p. 405), and letter dated January 27, 1826 (p. 407), in Lindley 1916. ↩ ↩²

2. Pitzer 1989, pp. 128-141. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶

3. Wills, JSTOR Daily 2023. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. R. D. Owen, Threading My Way (1874), pp. 236-238. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

5. Duclos, recollections, in Lindley 1916, pp. 536-537. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Jordan and Butler 1928, pp. 59-61. ↩ ↩²

7. Johansen 1997, pp. 262-263. ↩ ↩²

8. Lockwood 1905, pp. 235-236. ↩

9. Lewis, Indiana State Library blog. ↩ ↩²