Authors: Mary McGrigor
‘Forgive me,’ said a voice in a near-whisper, ‘if I do not rise. My illness precludes much movement. I am, as you see, an invalid.’
The American handed over his letter of introduction, at which the man on the sofa merely glanced, obviously finding it hard to read. Then, propping himself on his elbow, he asked his visitor to sit on the chair placed beside his couch. The two began talking, hesitantly at first, and then with greater ease. When mention was made of a mutual acquaintance, Sir James Clark, common ground was reached and the conversation flowed more freely.
The American made his visit short, sensing the huge amount of effort it took Wylie even to talk. Nonetheless on his departure, the old Scotsman begged Channing to come again. He did so, and during the course of subsequent visits the facts of an extraordinary life story were revealed.
Sir James openly admitted that he had been very unruly as a boy. Unlike many of the migrants who, seeking their fortune in the eighteenth century, had found their way to Russia, he had not been raised in poverty. His parents lived in comfortable circumstances, his father running a successful carrier’s business in Kincardine town, then an important port at the head of the Firth of Forth. On the profits made from the business, William Wylie was able to send William and James, the two eldest of his five sons, to the local school, which stood on the north side of Tulliallan Church.
James’s mind, however, as he struggled with the Latin grammar – in those days such an important part of the curriculum – was largely elsewhere. As soon as lessons were over and the black-gowned master had rung the bell, he was off, running like a hare for the harbour to see the latest ships to have sailed up the Firth of Forth.
‘A daft laddie, I was. Always wanting to go to sea.’
As he spoke the American could picture him, schoolbag dumped on the cobbles, sitting swinging his legs over the harbour wall. This to him was real life; here was a man’s world. Once he had the smattering of education he supposed was necessary for a career and had managed to gather together a few sovereigns, he would be off, on one of those ships lying at anchor, to find adventure far away from home.
The late 1770s were years of opportunity in Scotland. More than thirty years had passed since the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the country was becoming slowly more prosperous. Foreign commerce, in particular, was booming. Scottish ports, particularly on the east coast, had much trade with the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and even as far abroad as Russia. Ships sailed up the Forth to Kincardine, which at that time was even more important than Alloa as a port.
Masts crowded the harbour. Sloops and brigantines, elegant vessels built for fast sailing, towered over the mundane outlines of fishing boats with their cumbersome, mostly rust-coloured lug sails.
The harbour hummed with an excitement that must have set the blood rushing through the veins of a boy such as James. The smell of the sea, drifting in from the river, was enough to inspire visions of the wide ocean beyond the Firth, crowded with pirates and gigantic monsters. Or so said the sailors, black-bearded, brown-skinned as most of them were, who came rolling along the quays to ask in their strange, garbled languages of the whereabouts of local inns. James Wylie and his friends, always ready with information, would then try to divert and prolong the conversation by asking them for stories of where they had been.
In the harbour the clamour of shouting seamen and screaming gulls mingled with the yells and curses of the drivers and the clatter of iron-shod hooves and the grinding of wheels on cobbles as drays pulled by heavy horses, many of them owned by James’s father, carried cargoes unloaded from the holds of the ships. Such a scene inspired in James a sense of euphoria. He could not wait to go to sea! But his parents had other ideas. They had not paid his fees at the local school (two shillings and sixpence or thereabouts per term for each subject) for nothing. He and his elder brother William were ear-marked for professional careers. William was to become a schoolmaster, while James, it was decreed, would study medicine, then an increasingly respectable and indeed lucrative career in Scotland, as elsewhere.
Accordingly James was sent as an apprentice to the local practitioner, old Doctor Meldrum. Pedantic and short of temper, Meldrum proved a hard task-master who had little sympathy with a boy too inclined to voice his own opinions. James was set to mundane tasks, such as grinding herbs like rhubarb, then a panacea for many ills, in a mortar. He became increasingly bored. The doctor, a martinet for discipline, chastised him, whereupon James, furiously resentful at such treatment, decided to run away to sea.
Having gathered up a few essentials, he contrived to slip out of the work room at the back of the surgery where all the medicines were prepared. No one saw him go. With his pack on his back he tramped along the metalled road beside the river feeling he had foxed everyone.
At Cramond, further down the Forth, he managed to find the captain of a sloop lying at anchor, who agreed to take him on as an extra hand. A delighted James hurried to get on board. He had escaped!
But he had failed to reckon on his formidable mother. This resourceful and intractable lady, born Janet Meiklejohn, was every bit as wilful as her son. Guessing his intentions, she contrived to follow in his tracks and, after locating the sloop in the harbour at Cramond, she found a boatman to take her out and who agreed to lie on his oars while she went aboard. The captain must have gasped in amazement as this woman of commanding presence, towering over him in rage, seized his newly recruited deck hand by the collar and dragged him into the waiting skiff to be rowed quickly back to the shore.
The redoubtable Janet Wylie, her son still in her firm grasp, then set forth for home. Tramping side by side, James by now cowed into silence, they headed upriver for Kincardine, a distance of some twenty miles. Their feet ached, they were tired and hungry, and now, to make matters worse, heavy clouds darkened the sky in ominous sign of a storm. Soon the wind rose. Janet pulled her shawl around her head and, stumbling on in the near darkness, took a stronger grip of James’s hand. Thus they struggled through ever more torrential rain, until, utterly exhausted, they knew they must find shelter or die. Suddenly, through the blackness, came a gleam of light among some trees. It proved to come from a cottage where they were able to shelter for the night
Next morning, as the sky cleared after the storm, a passer-by called in with local news. The gale had caused havoc. Trees had fallen, buildings had lost their roofs, but most tragic of all were the losses at sea. Even in the supposedly sheltered waters of Cramond harbour a sloop had gone down. Only her mast stuck forlornly out of the water marking the grave of all who had been aboard.
Shaken by his close brush with death, the hitherto rebellious pupil went on to complete his apprenticeship with the taciturn Doctor Meldrum, primarily because this was the only way by which he could gain entry to Edinburgh University.
2
Enrolling at the prestigious university in 1786, the young Wylie was fortunate in having among his teachers some of the greatest intellects of the day. Among them were Daniel Rutherford, an uncle of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who was later to become famous as the discoverer of nitrogen gas, and Alexander Monro ‘Secundus’, a member of the Academies of Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Moscow, who was the second of three generations of world-famous professors of anatomy. Joseph Black, who held the Chair of Chemistry, was one of the most distinguished chemists that Scotland has ever known and William Cullen, the Professor of the Practice of Medicine and Surgery, continued the method of clinical teaching introduced by Doctor John Rutherford (brother of Daniel) who, having studied under the famous Boerhaave at Leyden, had introduced this system to Edinburgh University shortly after the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
Outstanding among other greatly eminent men at Edinburgh were James Hamilton, the first Professor of Midwifery in Scotland, and John Thomson, lecturer on Pathology, another who ranked first in his field. Best known of all, perhaps, was Professor James Gregory, inventor of Gregory’s mixture (a laxative compounded mainly of rhubarb) and already a household name.
Wylie matriculated in anatomy and surgery in 1786, in medical theory and practice in 1787, and in anatomy and surgery in 1788. He gained his practical knowledge in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, one of the most advanced hospitals of the day. The matriculation records in Edinburgh University Library attest to Wylie’s achievements over the space of three years, the usual time taken to qualify as a practitioner at that time.
The surgical skills he gained in Edinburgh were to stand him in good stead, and the fact that he left the university without graduating was not unusual at the time. Adventure was all that mattered to him. Moreover money could be made abroad. It was certainly hard to find at home. If legend can be believed Wylie, at one time, together with some of his equally penniless friends, was funding his exploits in the taverns of Edinburgh by selling stolen sheep. Somehow this enterprise was brought to the attention of the authorities, and Wylie soon discovered that officers of the law were on his trail. Some years before a man named Robert Livingston had been ‘banished from the Shire of Clackmannan’ for the same offence and had been warned that if he were caught again he would be subject to the death penalty.
3
Thus with the threat of the gallows looming, Wylie, his pockets stuffed with money from the sale of the stolen animals, persuaded a farmer, who may have been one of his gang, to drive him to the docks of Leith, then the main embarkation point for Europe, hidden in his cart beneath a load of hay.
Wylie sailed for Russia by way of Gothenburg in Sweden. He then travelled on to Riga, a shipping centre in western Russia, now the largest city in the Baltic States. There he found that because he had failed to graduate in Edinburgh, he had to take an examination at the city’s medical college in order to be eligible to practise as a surgeon. Having passed, he set off for St Petersburg, where, at the Medical Collegium, then the highest medical institution in Russia, he passed yet another examination, which allowed foreigners to practise there. Then, on 9 December 1790, he was assigned to the Yelets [Eletsky] Infantry Regiment as a surgeon.
4
Wylie came to Russia at a time when the country was ruled by one of the most extraordinary and dynamic women who have ever lived: Catherine the Great.
Born in the Baltic city of Stettin, Pomerania, in 1729, the daughter of Prince Christian Augustus of Anhalt-Zerbst, and his wife Joanna, Princess of Holstein-Gottorp, Sophie Augusta Frederica, as she was christened, was remarkably ugly as a child. By the age of thirteen, however, she was beginning to show signs of the beauty and sensuality which would hold so many men enthralled. Her portrait, painted by the French artist Antoine Pesne, was sent to the Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, and Tsarina of Russia since the death from smallpox of her elder sister’s son. Unmarried herself, she was impressed by the likeness of the young Sophie, whom she thought a suitable bride for the unattractive and sickly Prince Peter Ulrich of Holstein, her nephew and heir. The marriage took place in 1745 when Peter was seventeen and Catherine, as Sophie’s name was changed to, was sixteen.
Catherine was not in love with her husband but she wanted to be a queen. She soon began to take lovers, and afraid that Peter wanted to get rid of her, she agreed to participate in a plot, orchestrated by three brothers named Orlov, to have him put under house arrest. On the morning of 28 June 1762, she set off by coach from Peterhof to St Petersburg. Reaching the Winter Palace, she came out on the balcony with her young son Paul beside her, while crowds cheered ecstatically below.
Shortly afterwards she issued a manifesto to justify her reasons for subjecting her husband’s power.
Firstly she claimed that Orthodoxy was being threatened by foreign creeds; secondly, that Peter had betrayed his country by making peace with Frederick the Great of Prussia, and thirdly that the country’s government had been mismanaged to the point where it was no longer effective.
That evening, wearing the uniform of the Preobrazhenski Guards, and with her long flowing chestnut hair held in place by a sable-lined hat crowned with oak leaves, she mounted her white stallion, Brilliant, to ride back to Peterhof at the head of a troop of soldiers. On reaching the palace, she ordered that her husband Peter be arrested and placed under guard at Ropsha, a nearby estate. Six days later he was killed by Alexei Orlov.
Catherine, denying all involvement in his death, declared he had died of colic. It is possible that he was poisoned, but the fact that she had his head and throat covered as he lay in state prior to his burial, suggests that he might have been strangled.
Once in power the young empress, then a woman of thirty-four, proved herself an adept, though absolute, ruler. Catherine herself founded both schools and hospitals in the major cities of her realm. In doing so she was following the lead of her late husband’s grandfather, who, aware of the ignorance of the Russian physicians of his day, had first brought Scottish doctors to Russia, both to educate his own practitioners and to manage the hospitals that he built.
A century had passed since Peter the Great, tsar of Russia 1682–1725, had made his epic journey to the west, returning convinced that the country’s future lay in conforming economically and culturally to the models of Western Europe. The first Russian ruler to leave his own country for more than 600 years, he had gone with the main purpose of learning how to build and crew ships with the object of establishing a navy in the Black Sea. Working himself as a shipwright in Amsterdam, he had helped to build a frigate which remained in service in the Dutch East India Company for many years. Crossing the North Sea to England, he had then learned more about ship-building at Deptford and increased his knowledge of arming warships at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Most notably he had induced several hundred skilled craftsmen to return with him to Russia, including Professor Ferghasen of Aberdeen University, founder of the school of navigation in Moscow.