The Age of Wonder (41 page)

The legend of Mungo Park surviving somewhere beyond Timbuctoo-either the prisoner of some tribal king, or else ‘gone native’ (itself an idea that began to trouble nineteenth-century colonialists) and living as a great chieftain himself-became increasingly haunting. A biography of Park was published by ‘H.B.’ in 1835, but theories about his disappearance would continue into the twentieth century. In June 1827, the same year as Tennyson’s ‘Timbucto’ poem, Park’s eldest son Thomas, obsessed by tales of his father, set out to find him.

Thomas Park had studied science at Edinburgh University, and was now a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Taking a year’s leave of absence, he sailed to Accra on the Gold Coast, where he taught himself the Ashanti language, and made a preliminary sortie into the African interior. From a single surviving letter, sent from Accra to his mother in Scotland, and dated September 1827, it emerges that Thomas had set out on his quixotic mission without warning his family. His jaunty optimism strangely mirrors that of his father’s last letters to his wife: ‘My dearest Mother, I was in hopes I should have been back before you were aware of my absense. I went off-
now that the murder is out
-entirely from fear of hurting your feelings. I did not write to you lest you should not be satisfied. Depend upon it my dearest mother, I shall return safe. You know what a
curious
fellow I am, therefore don’t be afraid for me. Besides, it is my duty-my filial duty-to go,
and I shall yet raise the name of Park.
You ought rather to rejoice that I took it into my head…’

He went on to send love to his siblings, especially his sister, and to mention a possible plan to take his own boat down the Niger. But he gives no other details, no address or means by which he might be communicated with in Accra, and says nothing about companions, preparations or equipment. He signed off in the quiet, resolute Mungo Park style: ‘I shall be back in three years at the most-perhaps in one. God bless you, my dearest mother, and believe me to be, your most affectionate and dutiful son, Thomas Park.’
⁴⁰

Thomas embarked on a full-scale expedition in October 1827, marching 140 miles inland to Yansong. It was rumoured that he travelled not like ordinary white men, but in a native style adapted from his father’s first expedition. He had taken ‘no precaution with regard to the preservation of his health, but, adopting the habits of the people with whom he mingled, anointed his head and body with clay and oil, ate unreservedly the food of the natives and exposed himself with scarcely any clothing to the heat of the sun by day and the influence of the pernicious dews by night’.
⁴¹

Having reached Yansong, Thomas started to make enquiries about his father, but was almost immediately overcome by malarial fever. One account has him lying beneath a sacred tree (like Mungo), awaiting deliverance. Another has him climbing the tree to watch a native festival, drinking too much palm wine in the hot sun, and falling out of its branches. Whatever brought about his death, Thomas Park never returned, and his body was never found. A month later, in November 1827, a clean white shirt, pressed and labelled ‘T Park’, turned up in a basket of laundry delivered to the explorer Richard Lander at Sokoto, a hundred miles away on the western coast.

6

There are many abiding mysteries about both of Mungo Park’s expeditions. In the first, of 1794, there was his extraordinary physical courage combined with a patience amounting to almost suicidal passivity. He refused on principle to engage in personal confrontation, or stand on European ‘superiority’. His apparent acceptance of extreme moral and physical humiliation at the hands of native tribesman was exceptional. His reliance on poor villagers, fishermen and native women, rather than on tribal leaders and chieftains, perhaps reflected something of his Scottish upbringing. His dogged determination and adaptability were oddly combined with a strange ineptness and imprudence. His scientific fascination with local wildlife-bees, lions, hippos and birds-seemed instinctive and inexhaustible. His real motives for undertaking the first Niger expedition, beyond a desire for adventure, remain wonderfully enigmatic. His attitude to slavery is not clear. But his role as an essentially solitary traveller, a lonely wanderer among men and communities, came to seem intensely Romantic.

The second expedition of 1805 was entirely different in both manner and motivation from the first. Britain was now at war with France throughout the globe, and competitive exploration easily became colonial ambition. Mungo Park was ten years older, very conscious of family duties, and interested in financial reward. But equally, his intensely romantic attachment to his wife Allison did not prevent him from returning to the Niger, and the high likelihood of death. His agreement to lead an armed expedition, to accept a military commission and payment (and in effect a form of life insurance) from the Colonial Office, suggests a quite new kind of professionalism. So too does his acceptance of a commercial mission, to search for a ‘new trade route into the Sudan’, as well as his decision to learn Arabic before he set out. On his first trip he traded mostly in amber and cloth; on his second, in guns and gunpowder.

Whether all this means that Mungo Park had consciously undertaken an ‘imperial’ mission in his second expedition remains ambiguous. At least up to the last boat journey from Sansanding, he was respectful of all native customs, modest in his behaviour, and humane and honourable in his treatment of anyone he met (including his own troops). The contrast with a soldier like John Martyn (who seems already to have been rehearsing his part for a Rudyard Kipling story) could not be more great.

The dauntless tone of Park’s journals, even in the final desperate weeks at Sansanding, may disguise his character as much as it reveals it. The impenetrable optimism of his last letters in November 1805, not only to Lord Camden, but also to Sir Joseph Banks and to his wife, remains enigmatic. So too do the contradictory reports of the circumstances of his death. The tragic obsession of his son Thomas to solve the mystery of his father’s disappearance suggests that something far more personal than imperial ambitions was always engaged. Thomas’s parting declaration-that he would ‘raise the name of Park’-has a curious resonance, and may be said to have been eventually fulfilled by the brass plate that was mounted by Victorian admirers on a monument overlooking the vast and shadowy delta of the river Niger, and dedicated ‘To Mungo Park, 1795, and Richard Lander, 1830, who traced the course of the Niger from near its source to the sea. Both died in Africa for Africa’.

Mungo Park’s career clearly fits into the wider pattern of great Romantic exploration during this period. His own patron Sir Joseph Banks had established the British tradition, and the few letters they exchanged show a special mutual understanding of the explorer’s mixture of endurance and delight. Other figures who actually made it home, like Bryan Edwards (from the West Indies), Charles Waterton (from South America) and William Parry (from the Arctic), would give it an increasingly literary dimension. At the very time that Park died (if he did die) in 1806, Alexander von Humboldt was just publishing the story of his South American wanderings in
A Personal Narrative.
^♣

Mungo Park’s story inspired a number of poets. Wordsworth included a passage about Park ‘alone and in the heart of Africa’ in an early version of
The Prelude.
He picked out another moment of crisis, when Park had collapsed in the desert, expecting to die from sunstroke, but later wakened to find

His horse in quiet standing at his side
His arm within the bridle, and the sun
Setting upon the desert.

Wordsworth subsequently withdrew this passage, probably because Robert Southey had used Park’s experiences at greater length in his adventure epic
Thalaba the Destroyer
(1801). Southey’s fictitious hero is compared to Mungo Park in a long historical prose Note to the poem: ‘Perhaps no traveller but Mr Park ever survived to relate similar sufferings.’ But this is a case where the historical fact is more powerful than the fiction based upon it. Park’s quiet, fresh, limpid prose has easily outlasted Southey’s gaudy, melodramatic poem.

Keats’s two Nile sonnets (1816) owe much of their décor to Park and Friedrich Hornemann. But Shelley’s epic about his wandering alter-ego, the poet in
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
(1815), deeply reflects the spiritual loneliness of the desert traveller who pursues a perilous river, and knows he will probably never return. Shelley’s wilderness, while it includes ‘dark Aethiopia in her desert hills’, is geographically vague, though it moves more towards India and an imaginary East. But he catches something of Mungo Park’s enigmatic wanderlust, and transforms it into an unearthly Miltonic quest for the strange and magnificent limits of the known world:

The Poet, wandering on, through Arabie
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
And o’er the aerial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within
Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs…
⁴²

Later, his friend Thomas Love Peacock would remember Shelley stretching his languid limbs on the banks of the Thames, imagining vast and endless expeditions up the Niger, the Amazon, the Nile, though by now these trips would be taken aboard small steamships: ‘Mr Philpot would lie listening to the gurgling of the water around the prow, and would occasionally edify the company with speculations on the great changes that would be effected in the world by the steam navigation of rivers: sketching the course of a steamboat up and down some mighty stream which civilisation had either never visited, or long since deserted; the Missouri and the Columbia, the Oronoko and the Amazon, the Nile and the Niger, the Euphrates and the Tigris…under the over canopying forests of the new, or the long-silent ruins of the ancient world; through the shapeless mounds of Babylon, or the gigantic temples of Thebes.’
⁴³

Park’s
Travels
were widely used (by both sides) in the intense discussions surrounding the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Ten years later the radical surgeon William Lawrence would refer to Park’s observations on African racial types, and particularly the difference between ‘Negro and Moor’. John Martin’s epic painting
Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion
(1812), showing a bereft and solitary figure painfully pulling himself over desert rocks towards a distant river, may have been partly inspired by Mungo Park and the other explorers who never came back.
⁴⁴

Then there was the young explorer Joseph Ritchie, to whom Keats gave a copy of his newly published poem
Endymion,
with instructions to place it in his travel pack, read it on his journey, and then ‘throw it into the heart of the Sahara Desert’ as a gesture of high romance. Keats received a letter from Ritchie, dated from near Cairo in December 1818. ‘Endymion has arrived thus far on his way to the Desart, and when you are sitting over your Christmas fire will be jogging (in all probability) on a camel’s back o’er those African Sands immeasurable.’
⁴⁵
After this there was silence. Joseph Ritchie never returned.

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This final crazed descent of the river in HMS
Joliba,
as Park’s vessel was named, can be considered as the first enactment of a journey that was to be repeated many times in subsequent fiction and film. First perhaps in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
(1899, set in the Congo), and then in such films as
Apocalypse Now
(1979, adapted from
Heart of Darkness,
but set in North Vietnam) and
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(1972, set in South America). It is made more haunting and resonant precisely by the fact that Park’s own journal of these final weeks did not survive. Everything known is reported at second or third hand, and the truth can only-in the end-be imagined.

^♣
Inspired by Cook and Banks, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) had returned from South America in 1804 with 60,000 botanical and zoological specimens, preserved in forty-five enormous packing cases. But unlike Banks, he proceeded to publish his findings in thirty volumes over the next two decades, and later summarised his view of the world in an all-embracing, visionary work,
Cosmos
(1845), which attempted to unite all the contemporary scientific disciplines, from astronomy to biology. He studied volcanoes and oceanic currents, invented isobars, mapped the changes in the earth’s magnetic field from pole to equator, and first proposed the science of climate change.

6
Davy on the Gas

1

During the late 1790s Joseph Banks started to get controversial reports of chemical experiments being carried out at a so-called ‘Pneumatic Institute’ in the Hotwells district of Bristol. They were being organised by Dr Thomas Beddoes, a one-time lecturer from Oxford, who had frequently applied to the Royal Society for subsidy. Despite recommendations from the Duchess of Devonshire and James Watt of the Lunar Society, Banks reluctantly turned down these requests, partly on the grounds that these experiments involved human patients breathing various kinds of gas, in ways which were too controversial to support. But he was also influenced by Dr Beddoes’s known radical sympathies.

However, by 1800 Banks had become greatly interested in one of Beddoes’s young assistants, a chemist from Cornwall, Humphry Davy. Although only twenty-one years old, Davy had already published several papers on chemistry, a book of
Researches,
and made numerous contributions to
Nicholson’s Journal.
He was said to have an outstandingly brilliant and original mind. He even wrote poetry. When Davy came to London in February 1801 to be interviewed for a possible new post at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, Banks summoned him to one of his breakfasts in Soho Square.
¹

Sir Joseph met a very unusual young man. Davy was small, volatile, bright-eyed, and bursting with energy and talk. He had measured the cubic capacity of his own lungs, which was vast, especially since he was only five foot five tall, with a chest, which he had also measured, of a mere twenty-nine inches. He spoke English with a Cornish accent, and French with a Breton accent. Though he had never been abroad, he was completely up to date with the latest French chemistry, and was gratifyingly critical of Lavoisier’s work on oxygen and ‘caloric’ in the
Traité Élémentaire de Chimie
of 1789.

Although Davy had attended a grammar school in Truro, and was briefly apprenticed to a physician in Penzance, he was very largely selftaught. He had never been to university, though he told Banks that he always intended to take a medical degree at Oxford. He never had the background in mathematics that shaped the scientific thinking of Newton and Cavendish. Like his contemporaries John Dalton (from Manchester), William Wordsworth (from Cumberland) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (from Somerset), he always retained strong regional roots.

Banks would come to know a man who loved the high society of London, but was never at home in it, and was often mocked behind his back as a provincial. Davy’s patterns of thought, and methods of work, remained highly original and individualistic. He was impulsive, charming and arrogant. Though physically small, he had huge intellectual ambitions. He was a solitary man who was also an incorrigible flirt. He believed passionately in his own ‘genius’-a word he used constantly-and in the future of English science. Banks sometimes concluded that Humphry Davy thought these two things were identical; and that very possibly he was right.

Davy was born in Penzance, Cornwall, on 17 December 1778. Penzance was then a tiny seaside town, remote and isolated in the extreme southwest of rural England, dependent largely on fishing and the business of the local tin mines. Its population was below 3,000. Both fish and slabs of stamped tin were sold in the high street, known as Market Jew Street. There were several churches and Wesleyan chapels, many small dark taverns and a local school; but no theatre or learned institutions, except a small subscription library. (This would eventually become the famous Morrabic Library). The front rooms of many of the houses were still floored with beaten earth or sand. On windy days the sound of the breaking sea and the rattle of rigging could be heard in every street.
²

Eighteenth-century Cornwall was still regarded as being as remote and barbaric as the Scottish Highlands: it was renowned for its fishermen, adventurers, smugglers and (most recently) mining engineers, and also for its rich, creamy, incomprehensible accent. The coach journey to London, which skirted Dartmoor and passed through Exeter and Bristol, covered nearly three hundred miles and took at least three days-and then only if the weather was good. Bad weather could easily cut Penzance off from the rest of the country. Sometimes connections were better by boat, eastwards up the Channel to Plymouth and Southampton; or southwards across the Channel, to northern France and Brittany.

Davy’s father Robert was a Cornish craftsman, who had trained in London as a wood carver and gilder. His grandfather was a builder. His uncle Sampson was a watch-and clock-maker with an original touch: he once made a grandmother clock with eyes that winked open and shut each time it ticked. His mother Grace came from an old mining family from nearby St Just. Though originally from Norfolk, the Davy clan had lived for generations in Penzance and its surrounding hamlets, and their modest tombs were crowded into one corner of Ludgvan churchyard, three miles to the east along the coast.
^♣

Robert was a small, genial and unworldly figure, rather disapproved of by the other Davys. He had a reputation as a dreamer and a drinker, ‘thriftless and lax in his habits’.
³
In 1782 he unexpectedly inherited a seventy-nine-acre estate of woodlands and marshes called Varfell. It lay immediately south of the village of Ludgvan, with dramatic views of St Michael’s Mount, the rocky island in the bay with its ancient abbey and fortress. Robert decided to build a house there, and to raise his family in the depth of the countryside. He continued his wood carving, invested in a small business, and took on local commissions. One of his carvings, a chimneypiece with two sportive griffins, was made for nearby Ludgvan Rectory. Another, illustrating Aesop’s fable of the fox and the stork, was sold in London and finished up in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
⁴

The wild Varfell estate (its very name full of Celtic echoes) gave Humphry Davy’s childhood an extraordinary freedom and independence. He never forgot it, and would always try to recreate it in adult life, especially in his final years. As a boy he was small for his age, but daring and mischievous. He was soon running wild through the Varfell woods and down to the adjacent Marazion marshes, with their golden bulrushes and plentiful wildfowl. He wandered through the gorse along the seashore opposite St Michael’s Mount, and up into the remote hills behind Penzance. His easy-going father gave him a fishing rod, and then a gun.

He was also allowed to have a dog, Chloe, and eventually a pony called Derby. His taste for country sports, especially shooting and fishing, his intuitive feeling for nature, his love of running water and lyric poetry, were all formed here, and were never forgotten. On one of his birthdays he was allowed to plant an apple tree in the Varfell garden, possibly a local type called the Borlase Pippin, and in honour of Newton and the falling gravity-apple.

Humphry’s mother, Grace, whose family came from St Just, was overwhelmingly important to him. She was one of three Millet sisters who had been adopted by a local Penzance surgeon, John Tonkin, on the sudden death of both of their parents from a fever in June 1757, when she was only seven. Tonkin (1719-1801) was one of the leading figures in the town, an old-fashioned philanthropist who was several times elected mayor.
⁵
Grace remained happily in his household for nearly twenty years, and came to regard him as a father. She married Robert Davy comparatively late, at the age of twenty-six, in 1776. She was the strong, reliable personality who held the family together. Davy was deeply attached to his mother, wrote to her regularly all his life, and kept her informed of all his scientific hopes and triumphs. She in turn, though she never left Penzance, took huge pride in his achievements. Davy eventually had four younger siblings: three sisters (Kitty, Grace and Betsy) and a baby brother, John. The family always remained closely knit. John, twelve years his junior, hero-worshipped him, followed him into medicine, and later became his editor and biographer.

John Tonkin, still acting as the family benefactor, in a way that perhaps suggests Robert’s ineffectiveness as a father, paid for young Davy to attend Penzance Grammar School when he was ten. It was agreed that the boy should lodge in Tonkin’s large house at the top of Market Jew Street, opposite the White Hart Inn, during term-time.
⁶
Hoping he might become a physician, Tonkin also encouraged his interest in every form of natural history: fossils, wild birds and animals, botany, chemical experiments. Years later, engravings of their open-air expeditions, the young Davy skittering beside the aged Tonkin in his large black Quaker hat, became a favourite subject for Davy’s Victorian biographers.

Davy was not remembered as an outstanding pupil. There is some suggestion that he had rebelled against his easy-going father, and that Grace had called in Tonkin to provide much-needed discipline. But he was articulate and adventurous, and became famed for ‘spouting’ stories and poems. His sister Kitty recalled his vivid story-telling, and his staging pantomimes on the back of the carts which were parked at the side of Market Jew Street, known as the Terrace. On summer evenings he would sometimes stand on the porch of the White Hart Inn and deliver ‘speeches’. Later he would secretly make fireworks, and let them off in the street. He was a particular favourite of his maternal grandmother, who had an endless fund of Cornish legends and ghost stories. Indeed, she told him, she had herself lived for many years in a haunted house in St Just.

Curiously enough, Davy would later relate his love of science to this fascination with story-telling. What he always wanted to do was to hold an audience spellbound with wonders: ‘to gratify the passions of my youthful auditors’, as he put it. ‘After reading a few books, I was seized with the desire to
narrate
…I gradually began to invent, and form stories of my own. Perhaps this passion has produced all my originality. I never loved to imitate, but always to invent: this has been the case in all the sciences I have studied.’ Then he added: ‘
Hence many of my errors.
’
⁷

His holidays were spent at Varfell, rambling, fishing, cliff-climbing and shooting wildfowl all round Mount’s Bay. He was small, quick, witty, impetuous, with something mercurial and secretive about him.

In 1793, when he was fourteen, Davy was sent away to Truro Grammar School, also paid for by John Tonkin (then in his seventies). This was perhaps another attempt to discipline him, but also to give a potentially bright boy a better education. He was taught Latin and some Greek, but no science.

Everything changed in December 1794, with the sudden death of his father Robert, aged only forty-eight. It was caused by ‘an apoplexy’, or a stroke, as Davy would never forget. It was the same year in which the greatest chemist of his generation, Antoine Lavoisier, was guillotined in Paris. Robert left the family in debt to the tune of £1,300, a considerable sum, and the Varfell estate had to be sold. Grace Davy moved the family back to Penzance, started a millinery business with a young refugee Frenchwoman from the Vendée, and took in lodgers. Humphry had to give up his horse, Derby, and shortly after was withdrawn from Truro Grammar School.

Robert was buried in Ludgvan churchyard, and this became a place of secret pilgrimage for Davy. He would walk up the little lane out of Penzance, through Gulval village (where he once stopped to paint the view of St Michael’s Mount), past the low stone farmhouse of Varfell, and climb through the trees to the flint church on its small but commanding eminence. Here he would sit with his back to the tombstones, and look out southwards, beyond the roof of Dr Borlase’s rectory, far across the fields to the cold blue Cornish sea.

One of Davy’s most striking and mysterious poems is set here, in Ludgvan churchyard. It clearly records one such grieving moment, although it may have been written much later, even possibly towards the end of his life. Though grieving, it admits not the least word of Christian comfort. It suggests a purely material philosophy, in which the atoms of his dead ancestors ‘dance in the light of suns’, but no spirit or soul survives. ‘Their spirit gave me no germ/of kindling energy,’ as one fragment says. In fact the unfinished poem feels oddly pagan, ‘primitive’, with a harsh physicality often associated in later Cornish art with the worship of stone, flint and sunlight.

It is also rare among Davy’s poems in that it does not rhyme. It is formed from a plain list of terse factual statements: a list of precise observations, such as one might find in a shorthand account of an experiment in a laboratory notebook.

My eye is wet with tears
For I see the white stones
That are covered with names
The stones of my forefathers’ graves.

No grass grows upon them
For deep in the earth
In darkness and silence the organs of life
To their primitive atoms return.

Through ages the air
Has been moist with their blood
The ages the seeds of the thistle has fed
On what was once motion and form…

Thoughts roll not beneath the dust
No feeling is in the cold grave
They have leaped to other worlds
They are far above the skies.

They kindle in the stars
They dance in the light of suns
Or they live in the comet’s white haze.
⁸

John Tonkin clearly felt that Davy was drifting. It was time for him to make his way in the world. On 10 February 1795, just turned sixteen, he was indentured for seven years to John Bingham Borlase, the leading surgeon-apothecary in Penzance, an old friend of Tonkin’s. Borlase (1752-1813) had his shop at the top of Market Jew Street, next to the White Hart Inn, and was also several times mayor of Penzance. His father had been rector of Ludgvan, a distinguished Cornish antiquary, botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society. One of his many scientific friends was Dr William Oliver, inventor of the Bath Oliver biscuit.
^♣