Books: Birds & Bigotry

THE STRANGE LIFE OF CHARLES WATERTON (231 pp.) — Richard Aldington —Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

Even when he was riding an alligator in the forests of British Guiana (see cut) or indulging his habit of “scratching the back of his head with the big toe of his right foot,” Naturalist Charles Waterton (1782-1865) could not forget or forgive the Reformation of the Church of England. The Watertons of Walton Hall were one of Britain’s most ancient Roman Catholic squirearchies, and ever since the day of “Harry the Eighth, our royal goat” (as Charles Waterton described the monarch), they had been first plundered, then scorned by their Protestant rulers. But the Watertons had never surrendered either their faith or their ancient seat, a mansion on a lake-island in Yorkshire, and had even fought off Oliver Cromwell with swivel guns and muskets. It was no wonder, then, that when Charles, 2yth Lord of Walton, grafted a mad passion for wild life onto the old family root of religious fervor, the resulting bloom resembled a Jesuit seminary disguised as a bird sanctuary.

Wild life and religion stand out as about the only two comprehensible characteristics of Charles Waterton. Investigating the rest of him is like entering a maze that turns out to have been planned as a staggering hoax. Many (including Novelist Norman Douglas and Poet Edith Sitwell) have been lured down the winding trails that appear to lead to the Watertonian heart of the matter—only to find that a conglomeration of blind alleys is, itself, the mysterious center of the weird and wonderful meanderer. Biographer Richard (The Duke) Aldington, in the most complete work on Waterton to date, explores the maze more thoroughly, but still finds no adequate explanation of the man who was unquestionably one of the 19th Century’s strangest freaks.

Hanoverian Rats. “The Squire,” as his acquaintances always called him, was educated at Britain’s famed Catholic public school, Stonyhurst College. Earlier teachers had found the boy’s passion for nature study so all-absorbing that they had tried to whip it out of him. “But,” said the Squire, the “bright colors in crockeryware are made permanent by the action of fire [and so] the warm application of the birch rod did but . . . render my ruling passion more distinct and clear.”

Stonyhurst’s sager Jesuits were more up to date in their psychology. They appointed Charles school ratcatcher—and so conquered his peculiar heart that he wore the Stonyhurst school uniform (“blue-tailed coat with gold buttons and a check waistcoat”) on all special occasions until his death at the age of 83. Unfortunately, ratcatching also served to nourish the largest bee that ever buzzed in Charles Waterton’s bonnet, i.e., his conviction that the common brown rat had been introduced to England by Protestant King George I. Thenceforth, the exterminating of the “Hanoverian rat” furnished the Squire with a pursuit that at first threatened to become his entire vocation.

Cantering Cayman. Luckily for the storytellers, England and her rats turned out to be too narrow a field for the energetic young Squire. In 1812 he began his series of extraordinary trips to South America, penetrating thousands of miles of unexplored jungle in his bare feet (shoes “would have retarded me in the chase of wild beasts”), and collecting, on a single trip, numerous “rare insects, 230 birds, two land tortoises, five armadillos, two large serpents, a sloth, an ant-bear and a cayman [alligator].”

It was not long, says Biographer Aldington, before the jungle presented only “one more toil for this Hercules of taxidermy” —the capture of a live cayman. This remarkable feat was polished off in Guiana and recounted later with a deadpan flamboyance that would have squeezed envy from every pore of radio’s late great spinner of tall tales, Frank Morgan. The Squire first caught the alligator with hook and rope, and then, as his helpers hauled the thrashing beast out of the river, Waterton advanced to meet it, armed with the “eight-foot mast from [my] canoe,” which he intended to ram down the reptile’s gullet. But to his delight he perceived that the cayman’s visage was furrowed with “fear and perturbation.”

Flinging away the mast, he recited, “I sprung up and jumped on his back, turning half-round as I vaulted, so that I gained my seat … in the right position. I immediately seized the forelegs, and by main force twisted them on his back; thus they served me for a bridle.” Followed a brisk canter back to camp, where “I cut his throat; and after breakfast . . . commenced . . . dissection.” “Should it be asked,” adds the Squire, “how I managed to keep my seat, I would answer, I hunted some years with Lord Darlington’s fox-hounds.”

Niagara for Sprains. Needless to say, the Squire did not always emerge unscathed from such exploits. Nor did he always want to. Nests of chiggers were encouraged to burrow into his body, then coolly dug out with a penknife and tenderly examined. Although vampire bats flatly refused to “tap” the toe he calmly dangled night after night outside his hammock, he once ripped open one of his bare feet while chasing a woodpecker, and cured the wound by applying Watertonian “hot . . . poultices of boiled cow’s dung.” On a visit to the U.S., having sprained a foot springing out of the Buffalo stagecoach, the Squire recalled that the proper treatment was to hold the injured member under a pump. And under the nearest pump it went—nearby Niagara Falls.

But his travels did more than bring out Squire Waterton’s maddest feats of whimsy. He invented and perfected his own method of taxidermy. By marinating his specimens in corrosive sublimate he reduced them to a condition at once so seasoned and so rubbery that he was able not only to preserve them perfectly but also to manipulate their skins and limbs into whatever postures he desired. Unfortunately, both his method and his madness were years ahead of their time. On his triumphant return to England, a horrified customs officer detained Waterton’s shipload of un-British, lifelike trophies until he could get instructions from London. The Treasury finally let him bring them in, subject to a 20% import duty.

“Dear Me.” Waterton never forgave Britain’s “Hanoverian” Treasury for this ignorant act—which, of course, he interpreted as a calculated attempt to insult and enfeeble the Roman Catholic Church. Back at Walton Hall he set grimly to work, applying his taxidermal brilliance to a hideous revenge. Monkeys, bats and reptiles of every description were reduced to a rubbery state and manipulated into horrifying caricatures of famous contemporary Protestants. To a Red Howler monkey fell the privilege of being shaped into a rough likeness of Mr. J. R. Lushington, an official of the guilty Treasury, and then being reproduced as the frontispiece to Waterton’s fascinating Wanderings in South America. Yet even this barefaced insult was sadly misunderstood. Naturalists took one look at the grimacing, bewhiskered frontispiece and decided that the whole book was beneath contempt. And a Yorkshire baronet, mistaking the Howler for the author, was heard to murmur: “Dear me, what a very extraordinary-looking man Mr. Waterton must be.”

Baffled by his real and imaginary enemies, the Squire turned to devoting his life almost exclusively to “birds and bigotry.” Around the great park of Walton, at a cost of nearly £10,000, he built a wall three miles long and thus created the first bird sanctuary. Within its protective bounds he went grimly to work hunting down Walton’s “Hanoverian rats” with the aid of arsenic, booby traps, owls and a Demerara tiger cat. Occasionally he paused, like a true Waterton, to fire poetic musket shots at the two-legged Hanoverians outside the wall:

<i>I pray for those who now have got
A creed infected with the rot,
And wickedly have set at nought
That which our ancestors had taught…

I pray for those who, having slain
Our flocks that grazed the peaceful plain,
Did force their pastoral defenders
Into Jack Ketch’s hemp suspenders.
</i>

A trip to Rome (during which Waterton, attired in the uniform of the “Demerara militia,” had an audience with the Pope) produced what is perhaps the finest gem of Watertonian verse. In this work the ghost of Queen Elizabeth hovers over the Church of England, screaming:

<i>Whilst you Bishops here are boasting
Of the reformation-tricks,
My poor soul is damned and roasting
On the other side of Styx. </i>

Ornithological contemporaries of Charles Waterton may be forgiven for having failed to give their half-crazed colleague the respect he now receives. Not only did Waterton invent the bird sanctuary and bring taxidermy to the status of a fine art; he also proved himself one of zoology’s first field researchers, “the pioneer among traveling English naturalists, preceding Darwin, Wallace, Huxley . . .” He himself, of course, gave pride of place to quite another achievement of his busy life. “When I am gone to dust,” he wrote, “if my ghost should hover o’er the mansion, it will rejoice to hear the remark, that Charles Waterton . . . effectually cleared the premises at Walton Hall of every Hanoverian rat, young and old.”