The Age of Wonder (38 page)

In 1817 Thomas Chalmers would publish his best-selling
Discourses on Astronomy.
He reflected on the atheistical implications of Herschel’s new cosmology, piously attempted to re-establish God’s role in the creation, but also raised intriguing questions about extraterrestrial life in the further planets of the solar system, and beyond. The book touched a public nerve, and sold 20,000 copies in its first year, although it was sceptically reviewed by William Hazlitt, one of his rare forays into the physical sciences. But the idea of a dramatically enlarged universe, which surely contained other civilisations apart from our own, was widely accepted among progressive thinkers of the next generation. William Whewell, the future Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, for exampled published an uplifting monograph,
On the Plurality of Worlds,
in 1850.
¹³³

Despite these apocalyptic conclusions, Herschel was beginning to be regarded as a kindly, silver-haired old sage. For all his remote speculations, there was said to be something disarmingly boyish about him. The poet Thomas Campbell was surprised to find him, with his son John, on holiday in Brighton in September 1813. John, incidentally, was ‘a prodigy in science and fond of poetry, but very unassuming’. Campbell was completely captured by the ‘great, simple, good old man’, as he called Herschel: ‘Now for the old astronomer himself: his simplicity, his kindness, his anecdotes, his readiness to explain-and make perfectly perspicuous too-his own sublime conceptions of the universe are indescribably charming. He is 76 [actually Herschel was then seventy-four], but fresh and stout, smiling at a joke…Anything you ask, he labours with a sort of boyish earnestness to explain…I asked him if he thought the system of Laplace to be quite certain, with regard to the total security of the planetary system, from the effects of gravity losing its present balance? He said, “No”.’

Campbell overlooked the startling bluntness of this reply, and its implication that the solar system could easily fly apart (or else implode). Instead he went on to record amiable chat about the newly discovered ‘asteroid’ belt between Mars and Jupiter. Herschel had actually named ‘asteroids’ himself in an earlier letter to Banks,
¹³⁴
and murmured, ‘remember there will be thousands more-
perhaps 30 thousand
-not yet discovered’. Herschel also mentioned applying Newton’s theories for measuring the speed of solar light to ‘inconceivably distant bodies’ in the stellar system, with unimaginable results. ‘Then speaking of himself, he said with a modesty of manner that quite overcame me, when taken with the greatness of the assertion: “I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must have taken millions of years to reach the earth.”’

Campbell recalled that he felt he had been ‘conversing with a supernatural intelligence’. Finally, Herschel completely perplexed the poet by remarking that many distant stars had probably ‘ceased to exist’ millions of years ago, and that looking up into the night sky we were seeing a stellar landscape that was not really there at all. The sky was full of ghosts. ‘The light did travel after the body was gone.’ After leaving Herschel, Campbell walked onto the shingle of Brighton beach, gazing out to sea, feeling ‘elevated and overcome’.
¹³⁵
He was reminded of Newton’s observation that he was just a child picking up shells on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay all before him.
¹³⁶

^♣
Adams never forgot this spirited meeting with Herschel. Years later, in 1825, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, his successor as President, complaining of the orthodox Christian beliefs of most British scientists, and advising Jefferson not to hire them to teach at the University of Virginia, where he was Chancellor. Adams contrasted these scientists’ attitudes with Herschel’s untrammelled vision: ‘They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball [planet earth], to be spit upon by the Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.’ This argument would presumably have been satisfactorily concluded the following year, when both Adams and Jefferson died and went to meet the Great Principle. See Michael J. Crowe,
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate
(1986).

^♣
In modern times the passage of Hale-Bopp (1997) inspired a mass suicide by the Heaven’s Gate cult, though that was in California. Even today, great uncertainty surrounds comets. Little more than 1,000 periodic comets have been identified, although several have been visited by space probes. Just as James Thomson suspected, they partly consist of frozen water, and have been described less romantically as ‘dirty snowballs’ of ice and rock. But current geophysical speculation that comets, as well as volcanoes, may have caused sudden catastrophic climate changes on planet earth in the past curiously brings back their role as portents of disaster. See the chapter ‘Geology’ in Natalie Angier’s exuberant study of current scientific thinking,
The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science
(2007).

^♣
Although there are many dissimilarities, not least that of age, it is interesting to compare Caroline’s situation with that described in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal on the day her beloved brother William married their friend Mary Hutchinson in October 1802 at Grasmere. ‘At a little after 8 o’clock I saw them go down the avenue to the Church. William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring-with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before-he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. When they were absent…I could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything.’ Unlike Caroline, Dorothy contented herself with deleting only a single sentence of her journal, the one about wearing William’s wedding ring (
Grasmere Journal,
October 1802). For a subtle and tender account see Frances Wilson,
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
(2008).

^♣
Lalande had published a popular guide to astronomy for women,
Astronomie des Dames
(1795), in which he gave the history of women astronomers, beginning with the legendary Hypatia of Alexandria (also to be praised by Humphry Davy in his lectures) and continuing with Voltaire’s mistress Émilie du Châtelet, who translated Newton into French. Caroline Herschel is described as the ‘great comet hunter’, renowned throughout Europe for her ‘proficiency’. The book was subsequently translated into English with the anodyne title of
Astronomy for Ladies
(1815). See Claire Brock,
Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel’s Astronomical Ambition
(2007).

^♣
Something oddly similar happened in the Wordsworth household, when Dorothy Wordsworth became deeply attached to her brother’s first child, her nephew John Wordsworth, who was born in 1803, with Dorothy and Coleridge as his godparents. Dorothy nursed and played with John, who always remained Aunt Dorothy’s favourite, while Wordsworth doted on his beautiful daughter Dora (much to her discomfort in later adulthood). Dorothy even acted for several years as John’s devoted housekeeper, after he grew up and became a rather solemn young clergyman.

^♣
Coleridge seized on this idea in a late essay: ‘Kepler and Newton, by substituting the idea of the Infinite-for the idea of a finite and determined world assumed in the Ptolemaic Astronomy-superseded and drove out the notion of one central point or body of the Universe. Finding a centre in every point of matter and an absolute circumference nowhere, they explained at once the unity and the distinction that co-exist throughout the Creation by focal instead of central bodies. The attractive and restraining power of the sun or focal orb, in each particular system, supposing and resulting from an actual power, present in all and over all, throughout an indeterminable multitude of systems. And this, demonstrated as it has been by science, and verified by observation, we rightly name the true system of the heavens’-
Church and State
(1830). Hubble put this simply and beautifully: ‘Our stellar system is a swarm of stars isolated in space. It drifts through the universe as a swarm of bees drifts through the summer air’-Edwin Hubble,
The Realm of the Nebulae
(1936).

5
Mungo Park in Africa

1

In 1803 Joseph Banks wrote to a friend: ‘I am aware that Mr Park’s expedition is one of the most hazardous a man can undertake; but I cannot agree with those who think it is too hazardous to be attempted: it is by similar hazards of human life alone that we can hope to penetrate the obscurity of the internal face of Africa.’
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Throughout the late 1790s Banks had been increasingly tied down to his presidential chair in London. Physically he was marooned by his gout, and intellectually by the continuous administrative claims of the Royal Society. Yet despite this enforced immobility, and perhaps because of it, Banks’s huge imaginative interest in geographical exploration had continued to expand.

From Soho Square his gaze swept steadily round the globe like some vast, enquiring lighthouse beam. The fine, free anthropological adventures in the South Seas of earlier years were a thing of the past, of his lithe youth. But perhaps he could find others to undertake them. He followed the adventures of contemporary travellers with passionate interest. James Boswell gave a mutually flattering account of Banks reading his
Tour of the Hebrides
when it was first published in October 1785: ‘The President of the Royal Society clasped his hands together and remained for some time in an attitude of silent admiration.’
²

Banks determined to support and encourage travel and exploration, both for its scientific value and increasingly for the national interest. In 1779 he had first given evidence before a special committee of the House of Commons recommending ‘Botany Bay, on the Coast of New Holland’ as the place for colonial settlement and a penal colony. For the next twenty years he kept in close touch with the governors of New South Wales, arranged for a continuous supply of botanical specimens to be shipped back to Kew, and sponsored several expeditions to explore the continent further, such as Matthew Flinders’ heroic circumnavigation in 1802-03, and his travels in the mountain ranges of Victoria.

In June 1788 Banks had also become a founder member of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inland Districts of Africa, attending its first historic meeting at the St Alban’s tavern in The Strand.
³
Its Secretary was Bryan Edwards, a close friend of Banks’s, whose writing on the West Indies and indigenous folklore and witchcraft was later to inspire ballad poems by both Southey and Coleridge (notably Coleridge’s ‘The Three Graves’ in 1798). This pioneering body, which came to be known simply as the Africa Association (and much later, in 1831, was to be merged with the Royal Geographical Society), was soon sponsoring small but highly adventurous expeditions into Egypt and the horn of Africa. Its motives at this stage were scientific and commercial, with no missionary or colonial intentions. Its primary aim was discovery, not conquest. This would change once Banks was appointed to the Privy Council in 1797, and became ever more closely involved in prosecuting the war against Napoleon Bonaparte. From then all exploration took on a more political and frankly imperial significance. Yet Africa and Australia always fascinated Banks for their own sake.

All of the early sponsored African expeditions ended in mystery. John Ledyard was sent out to explore westwards from Cairo in 1788, Major Daniel Houghton to cross the Sahara in 1791, and Friedrich Hornemann to explore southwards from Tripoli in 1799. Various reports and rumours drifted back to Banks and the Africa Association, but none of these early heroic travellers returned alive.
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The great prize was to reach the semi-legendary city of Timbuctoo, somewhere south of the Sahara. Here, it was said, lay a great West African metropolis, packed with treasures and glittering with towers and palaces roofed with gold. It was strategically situated astride the fabled river Niger, at the confluence of the Arabic and African trade routes. Beyond Timbuctoo, it was thought that the mysterious Niger might flow due eastwards, providing a trade route across the entire African continent, and eventually meeting up with the Nile in Egypt. But to the Europeans nothing was known for certain, though many speculative maps had been drawn by military cartographers, such as Major John Rennell’s ‘Sketch of the Northern Parts of Africa’, presented to the Association in 1790.

Banks remained optimistically on the lookout for young men of promise and daring. Perhaps he was searching for versions of his earlier self, the fearless young anthropologist and botanist in Tahiti. The fact that his marriage to Lady Banks had produced no children may well have given him a special, personal interest in the careers of these young protégés.

In 1792 he was introduced to a lanky, sandy-haired young doctor from Scotland. Mungo Park had been named by his mother after the Gaelic martyr St Mungo. He struck Banks as a tall, very largely silent, but strangely impressive young man with that promising shine of adventure in his eyes. He was twenty-one years old, unmarried, and announced that he was desperate to travel. Banks immediately sensed a likely candidate, with a suitable physique and a tough, unpretentious background.

He learned that Park had been born into a large, hard-working family at Foulsheils, near Selkirk, in 1771. He had had a happy but Spartan upbringing on a lowland farm, growing up in the valley of the Yarrow river. He was physically hardy and resilient, but also well-read and thoughtful. His background was not unlike Robert Burns’s, but his temperament was quite different. Sober, reserved, intensely private almost to the point of withdrawal, Park was a natural loner. But he also had stoic, unshakeable determination, probably influenced by his mother’s Calvinism. His faraway eyes had a blue, impassive glitter. If he was a dreamer, he was not afraid of nightmares. Not, at least, to begin with.

At fourteen Park went to live with his uncle, Thomas Anderson, a surgeon in Edinburgh. Here he learned medicine, and made the closest-perhaps the only-friend of his life, his cousin Alexander Anderson. He also admired Alexander’s pretty little sister Allison, but she was only eight. Park took his medical degree at Edinburgh University, but could not settle down to domestic doctoring. He wrote poetry, studied astronomy and botany, climbed Ben Nevis, and read travel writers. He was tall, bony, handsome, and deeply uncommunicative. ‘His friendship was not easily acquired, for he was ever of a shy, retired, though not suspicious temper,’ wrote a later biographer. ‘To strangers his calm reserved manner had something of the appearance of apathy and total want of feeling…Even his dearest friends…were sometimes ignorant of the designs that lay nearest to his heart, and formed the subjects of his secret meditations.’
⁵

In autumn 1792, at the age of twenty-one, he went to London to seek his fortune and find wider horizons. He had been given the introduction to Sir Joseph Banks through his brother-in-law, James Dickson, a botanist who worked at the British Museum gardens. After a breakfast interview at Soho Square, Banks arranged for Park to join a naval expedition to Sumatra in the East Indies, as Assistant Surgeon. He also gave him the run of his library, to prepare himself with reading and study. After his own experiences at Batavia twenty-two years before, Banks must have known that this voyage would be a demanding-perhaps fatal-trial of both the young man’s physical constitution and his morale.

On this first expedition to Sumatra, Park quickly discovered his love of travel and his extraordinary sense of self-sufficiency. When he returned eighteen months later in May 1794, tanned and fit, Banks recognised his remarkable qualities, and suggested to the Africa Association that they should send Park to explore the Niger. Speaking in his quiet, lowland accent, Park confessed to Banks that he had ‘a passionate desire’ to discover the unknown Africa, and ‘to become experimentally acquainted with the modes of life and character of the natives’. If he should ‘perish in the journey’, he was willing that his hopes and expectations should perish with him. He required no promise of ‘future reward’, and he had no missionary intent. This romantic attitude deeply appealed to Banks, as also to the accountants of the Africa Association.
⁶

In the event the Association supplied Park with basic kit for his expedition, and a salary of seven shillings and sixpence a day, or just over £11 a month. They also booked him a passage on a merchant ship bound for the Gold Coast (oddly, like Banks’s, it was named the
Endeavour
), and supplied a £200 letter of credit to buy supplies and trading goods at Pisania, the last white outpost on the river Gambia. Park’s kit was indeed very basic: it included two shotguns, two compasses, a sextant, a thermometer, a small medicine chest (the regular use of quinine as a prophylactic against malaria had not yet been adopted), a wide-brimmed hat and the indispensable British umbrella. There were also two vital objects of sartorial formality: a blue dress coat with brass buttons, and a malacca cane with a silver top.
⁷

‘My instructions were very plain and concise,’ Park later wrote in his characteristic style. ‘I was directed on my arrival in Africa to pass on to the river Niger, either by the way of Bambouka, or by such other route as should be found most convenient. That I should ascertain the course, and, if possible, the rise and termination of that river. That I should use my utmost exertions to visit the principal towns or cities in its neighbourhood, particularly Timbuctoo and Houssa; and that I should be afterwards at liberty to return to Europe, either by the way of the Gambia or by such other route as…should appear to me advisable.’
⁸

2

Mungo Park’s ship took a little more than four weeks to reach the Gold Coast, and by 5 July 1794 he was installed in Pisania, a tiny, remote outpost a hundred miles up the river Gambia. It was occupied by only three other white men, each living in a small compound: a doctor, and two white traders whose main business was gold, ivory and slaves. Park kept his views on slavery to himself, took lodgings with Dr Laidley, and was made welcome. As the rainy season set in, he learned the local language, Mandingo, read and botanised, practised navigation by the stars with his sextant, and (after spending too long observing an eclipse of the moon) endured a month-long bout of malarial fever, which ‘seasoned’ him, in the local terminology, and probably saved his life later on.
⁹

Dr Laidley nursed him with great kindness and care, and inspired the first of many vivid evocations of the African experience in Park’s
Travels:
‘His company and conversation beguiled the tedious hours during that gloomy season, when the rain falls in torrents; when suffocating heats oppress by day, and when the night is spent by the terrified traveller in listening to the croaking of frogs (of which the numbers are beyond imagination), the shrill cry of the jackal, and the deep howling of the hyena: a dismal concert interrupted only by the roar of such tremendous thunder as no person can form a conception of, but those who have heard it.’
¹⁰

Park laid in a modest £16-worth of trading items-amber, tobacco, beads and Indian silks. These items were carefully chosen, not for profit, but to pay his way in diplomatic gifts and formal permissions to cross tribal territories. He bought a horse and two mules, and hired two servants to accompany him. The first was Johnson, an African guide and interpreter, a calm, stately man who had seen many things: he had been a slave in Jamaica, and then a freed man in service in England, where he married and then returned to Africa. Characteristically, Park paid half Johnson’s salary to his wife. The second was Demba, a young African slave boy, ‘sprightly’, charming and quick-witted, to whom Park promised to purchase his freedom on their safe return.
¹¹
These preparations, and Park’s slow recovery from the fever, took five months.

Anxious for Park’s safety, Dr Laidley tried to persuade them to leave in the company of a slave caravan, but Park refused, a rejection that was later seen as symbolic. The little expedition left Pisania for the interior on 2 December 1795. ‘I believe they secretly thought they should never see me afterwards,’ wrote Park.
¹²
Shortly after, a cheerful letter arrived from Joseph Banks, wondering if Park had returned from Timbuctoo already: ‘By the time you receive this you will no doubt have returned from a perilous Journey if you have accomplished the business of seeing Tambookta you will deserve from the Association every thing they can do for you as I have no doubt you will be able to give a good Account of what you have seen.’
¹³

In the event, the journey took two years to accomplish. Speculative maps had been drawn of this region, based on the stories of slave traders, but it was virtually unknown territory to any European. It was not even clear where the fabled river Niger rose, or in which direction it flowed. Park had to depend on luck, endurance, local hospitality and his sextant. But he had a Romantic belief in his own destiny, and a strange inner tranquillity, which could accept even the most disastrous turn of events with equanimity.

Park first followed the course of the river Gambia eastwards. He made good progress, but had most of his gifts and valuables claimed or forcibly removed by tribal chiefs in the first few weeks. On 18 February 1796 he reached the point where Major Houghton had written his last note. Here he turned northwards into the region of Ludmar, controlled by a powerful Moorish chieftain, Ali, whose protection Park intended to claim.

But in Ludmar the hoped-for Moorish hospitality imperceptibly changed into captivity, and polite interrogation degenerated into deliberate humiliation. Park had all his remaining goods seized, his interpreter Johnson taken away, and his boy servant Demba abducted. By 12 March he was effectively a solitary prisoner at Ali’s camp.
¹⁴
He was confined to a hut, and subjected to an intrusive physical examination by Ali’s wife Fatima and her entourage of Moorish women. ‘A party of them came into my hut, and gave me plainly to understand that the object of their visit was to ascertain by actual inspection, whether the rite of circumcision extended to the Nazarenes [Christians], as well as the followers of Mahomet…I thought it best to treat the business jocularly.’
¹⁵