Harvard’s Thayer Expedition to Brazil: Jars of Fish and Coffee

Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and his wife, Elizabeth, went on a research expedition to Brazil in 1865, sponsored by Nathaniel Thayer. While Agassiz primarily planned to study fish, he also commissioned hundreds of objectifying portraits of African and Indigenous Brazilians to support his ideas about racial types. These photographs were taken by Walter Hunnewell and are held at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology today. Both activities—collecting specimens and photographing people—were part of Agassiz’s mission to measure differences between animal species and human races.

A fish specimen, described as follows — *Priacanthus arenatus: Specimen Collected by Louis Agassiz. MCZ Ichthyology #9772. Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.*

This is a specimen of Priacanthus arenatus collected by Agassiz in Brazil in 1865. Though imaged here against a black backdrop, it is stored in preserving fluid in a glass jar—what is called a “wet” specimen.

A drawing of a fish, in vivid red color — *Watercolor Drawing by Jacques Burkhardt, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 8 June 1865. Image Courtesy of the Ernst Mayr Library, Special Collections.*

To show how this and other fish looked in life, Agassiz hired the artist Jacques Burkhardt to join his expedition. Burkhardt made nearly 2,000 paintings, which were crucial for scientific study. As in this case, the paintings often featured annotations to identify the painting’s subject and record the date and place it was painted. The paintings captured visual details that the preserved specimens could not. To fully understand and document a species, a single representation was not enough. Compare the specimen to the painting: what differences do you see?

An empty specimen jar — *Collecting Jar Belonging To Agassiz Expedition, c. 1864-1866. CHSI #1997-1-1570*

This clear glass jar was used to collect specimens on Agassiz’s expedition. Although it seems simple, jars like this were also scientific instruments. They were used to hold, transport, and display parts of nature, turning them into measurable items for study.

Specimen jar with coffee beans inside — *Collecting Jar of Coffee Beans, 1865. CHSI #1997-1-1905.*

The glass jars did not only contain animal specimens. In the memoir A Journey in Brazil (1868), Elizabeth Agassiz described their visit to fazendas or coffee plantations, where no doubt these beans were collected. Slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888, and the coffee beans preserved in this jar as scientific specimens would have been grown and harvested by enslaved people. Coffee accounted for about half of Brazil’s exports in the 1860s, and studies to improve the crop and tackle pests formed the discipline of economic botany.