In October 1667, Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society of London, wrote to John Winthrop Jr, the Governor of Connecticut, reminding him of his responsibility to help the Society ‘lay open … an Empire of Learning’ as Edmond Halley put it in the preface to the Philosophical Transactions in 1686.In the forty years following the Restoration, Winthrop was one of many correspondents of the Royal Society, sometimes Fellows themselves, who would send back ‘rarities’, ‘curiosities’ and detailed knowledge from the colonial periphery to London. This transfer of knowledge was tangible and haphazard; letters and wooden boxes were shipped across the Atlantic. The former recorded natural histories of places throughout the Americas and observations of weather patterns, while the wooden boxes contained berries, soil samples, rocks and occasionally even animal specimens.

This chapter explores the colonial dimension of the Royal Society's extensive correspondence with men throughout the New World. The colonial context is particularly illuminating: the Society conceived of correspondence with the New World as a vital part of its project to restore man'sepistemic dominion over nature.

The Royal Society engaged in two practices of knowledge collection and organization. The first was the attempt to create an encyclopedic natural history; a practice which relied heavily upon information sent from England's Atlantic and Caribbean possessions.