Adaptations and Relocations: Travelers' Changing Bodies in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

For seventeenth-century Europeans, location played a determining role in creating bodily difference.  Atlantic travelers linked variations in climate not only to skin color, but also to disease, the type and quality of foodstuffs, air currents, and water availability, all of which directly impacted the body.  As Europeans traveled around the Atlantic basin, they confronted stark differences in climate, and believed their bodies went through a process of seasoning, or adjustment, to conform to that climatic change.  But what about those people who moved to more than one location around the Atlantic rim, or even beyond?  Some settled in the West Indies only to move onto the American continent or back to Europe; others did not stay long enough in one place to settle at all.  But as these travelers struggled to adapt to the different diets, air quality, weather patterns, and animal and plant life in each place they encountered, both their bodies and their conceptions of climatic determinism underwent vast changes.  Some travelers and settlers became ill or died as they moved to a new place, but many survived.  For travelers who remained in the colonies for any length of time, their stay was one of experimentation and adaptation, based largely on their own observations in a strange and new place.  The experimental nature of many of their experiences, and their bodies’ ultimate ability to adapt, forced Europeans both in the colonies and in Europe itself to re-think conceptions of the body as tied to a particular place, and to re-evaluate climatic determinism in a broader sense.