Читать книгу Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work - Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell - Страница 13

Table of Contents

The Objects of the Voyage—The Route—The Naturalist and the Surgeon—Collecting and Dredging—Stay in Sydney—Adventures with the Natives—Comparison with Darwin's Voyage on the Beagle.

Her Majesty's ship the Rattlesnake, one of the old class of 28-gun ships, sailed from Plymouth for the Torres Straits and the Australian seas on December 12, 1846. Her commander was Captain Owen Stanley, a young but distinguished officer, the son of the Bishop of Norwich and a brother of Dean Stanley, who afterwards played so great a part in the social and religious history of England. She carried a complement of 180 officers and men, and was attended by the Bramble and the Castlereagh, two small vessels of light draught, whose purpose was to precede her in shallow waters. The young colonies of Australia were developing commerce with the mother country, and the business of the Rattlesnake was to survey the waters round about the Torres Straits, that the passage towards India on the homeward trip might be made safer. Incidentally the vessel was to land a treasure of £50,000 at the Cape of Good Hope, and another of £15,000 at the Mauritius. The Admiralty Commissioners left full powers to Captain Stanley to carry out the details of his mission according to his own judgment, but he was solemnly warned upon two points. Many very unfortunate casualties had occurred when sailors came in contact with the little-known savages of the southern seas, and the Admiralty instructed him as follows:

"In stretching off from the Barrier Reefs to the eastward, in order to explore the safety of the sea intervening between them and Louisiade and New Guinea, you will have occasion to approach these shores, in which case you must constantly be on your guard against the treacherous disposition of their inhabitants. All barter for refreshments must be conducted under the eye of an officer, and every pains be taken to avoid giving any just cause of offence to their prejudices, especially with respect to their women."

The second warning concerned grave international matters. European politics were in the unsettled condition which, after the illusive international courtesies of the Great Exhibition of 1851, ended in the Crimean War, and it was feared that in the event of hostilities breaking out, the zeal of the officers for their country might tempt them to transcend their peaceful occupation. The instructions with regard to this ran as follows:

"In the event of this country being involved in hostilities during your absence, you will take care never to be surprised; but you are to refrain from any act of aggression towards the vessels or settlements of any nation with which we may be at war, as expeditions employed on behalf of discovery and science have always been considered by all civilised communities as acting under a general safeguard."

The great scientific expeditions sent out in recent times by the governments of Britain, Germany, and the United States, were fitted with every convenience for the staff of naturalists, and the luxuries and comforts of civilisation attended them round the world. The late Professor Mosely, for instance, who was a naturalist on the English Challenger expedition, told the present writer of a pleasant way in which a peculiarity of the deep sea was made to pay toll to the comfort of those on board ship. The great ocean depths all over the world, under the burning skies of the tropics, or below the arctic ice-fields, are extremely cold, the water at the bottom always being only a few degrees above freezing point. When the dredge brought up a sample of the abysmal mud at a convenient time, it was used to ice the wine for the officers' mess. There was, however, no cooled champagne for Huxley.

"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes, "was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about the latest voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-arms—as we did on the south coast of New Guinea—and of making acquaintances with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But apart from experience of this kind, and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me personally the cruise was extremely valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessities; to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank with the sky for canopy, and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast; and more especially to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I myself along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be, and generally are, but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends the middies christened 'Buffons,' after the title conspicuous on a volume of the Suites à Buffon which stood on my shelf in the chart-room."

Huxley was only the surgeon on board the Rattlesnake, and his pursuit of natural history was his own affair. There was a special naturalist appointed to the expedition, no doubt chosen because four years earlier, as assistant to Professor Jukes, he had been attached as naturalist to the expedition of the Fly in the same waters. His name was John MacGillivray, and he was the son of an exceedingly able naturalist whose reputation has been overshadowed by the greater names of the middle century. William MacGillivray, the father, sometime professor at the University of Aberdeen, was one of those driven by an almost instinctive desire to the study of nature. In his youth, when he was a poor lad, desiring to see as much as possible of his native land, and above all to visit the great museums and libraries of the south, he walked from Aberdeen to London with no luggage but a copy of Smith's Flora Britannica. He was an ardent botanist, a collector of insects and molluscs, and one of the pioneers in the anatomy of birds. There are many curious allusions in his writings which seem to shew that he too was beginning to doubt the fixity of species, and to guess at the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest which the great Darwin was the first to make a part of the knowledge of the world. It must be confessed that his son John, the companion of Huxley, had little of his father's ability. He was three years older than Huxley, and broke off his medical course at the University of Edinburgh to sail in the Fly. After the return of the Rattlesnake, he was appointed in 1852 as naturalist to H.M.S. Herald, then starting under Captain Denham for surveying work round the shores of South America. He left that ship at Sydney, and after many years' wandering about the southern seas, accounts of which he communicated from time to time to Sydney newspapers, he died in 1867. He was a zealous collector of plants and animals, but apparently cared little for the study of his captures, either in life, in relation to their surroundings, like Darwin, or for the structure of their bodies, like Huxley. The somewhat unpleasing nature of his regard for animals appears in the following story which he himself tells:

"While at dinner off Darnley Island near the Torres Straits, news was brought that Dzum was under the stern in a canoe, shouting out loudly for Dzoka (MacGillivray's native name), and, on going up I found that he had brought off the barit, which after a deal of trouble I struck a bargain for and obtained. It was a very fine specimen of Cuscus Maculatus, quite tame and kept in a large cage of split bamboo. Dzum seemed very unwilling to part with the animal, and repeatedly enjoined me to take great care of it and feed it well, which to please him I promised to do, although I valued it merely for its skin, and was resolved to kill it for that purpose at my first convenience."

On the other hand, MacGillivray paid great attention to native languages, and collected vocabularies of some value. To him was entrusted the task of writing an account of the voyage, and it is from his rather dull pages, brightened by illustrations from Huxley's sketches, that the incidents of the voyage are taken. The references to Huxley in the narrative are slight, and seem to shew that no great intimacy existed between the two young men, the one a naturalist by profession, the other as yet a surgeon, but more devoted to natural history than the naturalist. Such references as occur relate to Huxley's constant occupations on shore, sketching natives and their dwellings, and his apparatus on board for trawling, dredging, and dissecting.

The voyage out was uneventful. The ship touched at Madeira and at Rio de Janeiro, and then crossed the South Atlantic to Simon's Town at the Cape of Good Hope, where the first quantity of treasure was to be landed. There they found the colony distressed by the long continuance of the Kaffir war. Prices for everything were extortionate, and the colonists had no mind for any affairs than their own, so after a short stay the voyagers were glad to set out for the Mauritius. That island, although in the possession of Britain, still retained a strong impress of its French occupation, and the travellers were interested by the mixture of population inhabiting it.[B]

"Passing through the closely packed lines of shipping, and landing as a stranger at Port Louis, perhaps the first thing to engage attention is the strange mixture of nations—representatives, he might at first be inclined to imagine, of half the countries of the earth. He stares at a coolie from Madras with a breech-cloth and a soldier's jacket, or a stately bearded Moor striking a bargain with a Parsee merchant. A Chinaman with two bundles slung on a bamboo hurries past, jostling a group of young Creole exquisites smoking their cheroots at a corner, and talking of last night's Norma, or the programme of the evening's performance at the Hippodrome in the Champ de Mars. His eye next catches a couple of sailors reeling out of a grogshop, to the amusement of a group of laughing negresses, in white muslin dresses of the latest Parisian fashion, contrasting strongly with a modestly attired Cingalese woman, and an Indian ayah with her young charge. Amidst all this, the French language prevails; and everything more or less pertains of the French character, and an Englishman can scarcely believe that he is in one of the colonies of his own country."

From Mauritius they proceeded to the English-looking colony of Tasmania, and after a few days set out for Sydney, arriving there on July 16th. The surveying officers had tedious work to do there, and Huxley stayed in Sydney for three months. Then, and in the course of three other prolonged stays in that town during the expedition, Huxley entered into the society of the town and became a general favourite. He is still remembered there, and the accompanying illustration[C] is a copy of an original sketch of himself, now in the possession of an Australian lady. He drew it on the fly-leaf of a volume of Lytton's poems and presented it on her birthday to the little daughter of a friend. At Sydney, too, he met and gained the love of the lady, then Miss Henrietta A. Heathorn, who afterwards became his wife.

On October 11th the Rattlesnake sailed northwards to begin the real work of the expedition. The great island of New Guinea, lying to the north of Australia, is separated from it only by the comparatively narrow Torres Straits. Through these lies the natural route for the commerce between Australia and the Northern Hemisphere. The eastward prolongation of New Guinea, and the coast of Queensland, enclose between them a great tropical sea which gradually converges to the Straits. The waters are very tempestuous, and the navigation is made more dangerous by the thousands of coral islands and coral reefs that stud the ocean. Following the shoreline of Queensland, at a distance of from ten to one hundred and fifty miles, and stretching for twelve hundred and fifty miles, is the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, one of the wonders of the world. The shelving floor of the ocean rises nearly to the surface along this line, and vast colonies of coral building creatures have formed their reefs up to the water's edge along the ridge. The turbulent waves scouring over this living mass have carved and moulded it into millions of fantastic islands, sometimes heaping detached masses of dead debris high above the surface of the water. At low tide the most wonderful fields of the animal flowers of the sea are exposed. Some of them form branching systems of hard skeletons like stony trees, the soft, brightly coloured animals dotted over the stems like buds. Others form solid masses; others, again, rounded skull like boulders, or elevations like toadstools. The colours of the skeletons and the animals are vivid scarlets and purples and greens. Sea anemones, shell-fish, and starfish of the most vivid hues are as abundant as the corals. Brilliant fish dart through the blossoms of the marine gardens, and sea birds scream and wheel in the air. The whole region is a paradise for the naturalist. Along the seaward side of the reef the great ocean surges and thunders perpetually. Between it and the shore the quiet channel glows under the tropical skies. It was amid such scenes as these that the Rattlesnake moved for nearly four years in the slow work of taking soundings, fixing the exact position of channels through the outer reef by slow triangular measurements, and generally preparing for the safety of the commerce of all nations. The ship went first up to Port Curtis in Brisbane; then fetched back to Sydney. Its next trip was south to the strait between Tasmania and Australia, then back to Sydney; then again along the Barrier Reef right up to the Torres Straits. After work there, it returned again to Sydney, and then set out for the Louisiade Archipelago, which stretches through the coral sea south-eastward from New Guinea; then again to the Australian shores of the Torres Straits, and finally arrived in Sydney in March, 1850, where the Captain suddenly died, and the ship was ordered to return to England.

Throughout the voyage MacGillivray and Huxley busied themselves with collecting animals on sea and on shore. MacGillivray seems to have taken for his share of the spoil chiefly such animals as provided shells or skins or skeletons suitable for handing over to museums. Huxley occupied himself incessantly with dissecting tools and with the microscope, with results to be described in a later chapter. The better equipped expeditions of modern times were provided with elaborate appliances for bringing up samples of living creatures from all depths of the floor of the ocean, and with complicated towing nets for securing the floating creatures of the surface of the seas. The Rattlesnake naturalists had to content themselves with simple apparatus devised by themselves. At an early period of the voyage attempts were made to take deep soundings, but no bottom was reached at a depth of two thousand four hundred fathoms, and their later work was confined to surface animals or to inshore dredging in shallow waters. They began near Rio.

"None of the ship's boats could be spared, so I [MacGillivray] hired one pulled by four negro slaves who, although strong, active fellows, had great objections to straining their backs at the oar, when the dredge was down. No sieve having been supplied, we were obliged to sift the contents of the dredge through our hands—a tedious and superficial mode of examination. Two days after, Mr. Huxley and I set to work in Botafogo Bay, provided with a wire-gauze meat-cover and a curious machine for cleaning rice; these answered capitally as substitutes for sieves, and enabled us, by a thorough examination of the contents of the dredge, to detect some forty-five species of Mollusca and Radiata, some of which were new to science."

By "new to science" MacGillivray meant no more than that the particular genera and species had not been captured before. Huxley, by his anatomical work, showed many of the most familiar creatures in a light "new to science," by revealing their true structure and relationships.

"Among the acquisitions," MacGillivray goes on, "I may mention a new species of Amphioxus, a genus of small fishes exhibiting more anomalies than any other known to Ichthyologists, and the lowest organisation found in the class. It somewhat resembles the sand-eels of Britain in habits, like them moving with extraordinary rapidity through the sand. By dint of bribery and ridicule we had at length managed to get our boatmen to work tolerably well, and when we were alike well-roasted by the sun and repeatedly drenched, besides being tired out and hungry, they had become quite submissive, and exchanged their grumbling for merriment."

The towing net repeatedly produced a rich harvest. It was constructed by themselves, and consisted of a bag of the bunting used for flags, two feet deep, the mouth being sewn round a wooden hoop fourteen inches in diameter; three pieces of cord, a foot and a half long, were secured to the hoop at equal intervals and had their ends tied together. This net was towed behind the ship by a stout cord. The water passed through the meshes of the cloth and left behind in the pocket any small floating animals.

Excursions ashore to the little savage islands or to the mainland were a source of constant interest, and it cannot be doubted that the acquaintance Huxley thus gained with many of the very low savages of Australia and New Guinea prepared his mind for the revolutionary doctrine of descent which he embraced a few years later. At the present time, there are probably very few parts of earth where there are yet to be found savages unaltered by civilisation. Some of the low races with which Huxley came in contact are now extinct. All the survivors have come in contact with white races, and their habits and customs have been altered. Before long the total extinction of these lower races is to be expected, and there will then be left an enormous gap between the lower animals and the dominant, aggressive, yellow and white races which are spreading over the earth and making the lower races perish before them, as the smaller but more cunning European rat has exterminated the native brown rat of Australia. In their various excursions upon the Australian mainland they had no trouble of any kind with the natives. These were at first suspicious of the doings of the white men, and their total ignorance of the use of firearms tempted them to rashness; but a few friendly gifts, and the exercise of tact in negotiating exchanges with them, made all the encounters pass off pleasantly. On the other hand, in the Louisiade Archipelago where the savages were of a higher type, difficulties constantly occurred. On one occasion, in a bay on the south side of Joannet Island the party was attacked.

"In the grey of the morning the look-outs reported the approach of three canoes with about ten men in each. On two or three persons shewing themselves in the bow of the pinnace, in front of the rain awning, the natives ceased paddling, as if baulked in their design of surprising the large boat; but, after a short consultation, they came alongside in their usual noisy manner. After a stay of about five minutes only they pushed off to the galley, and some more sham bartering was attempted, but they had nothing to give in exchange for the wares they so much coveted. In a short time the rudeness and overbearing insolence of the natives had risen to a pitch which left no doubt of their hostile intentions. The anchor was got up, when some of the blacks seized the painter, and others, in trying to capsize the boat, brought the gunwale down to the water's edge, at the same time grappling with the men to pull them out, and dragging the galley inshore towards the shoal-water. The bowman, with the anchor in his hand, was struck on the head with a stone-headed axe. The blow was repeated, but fortunately took effect only on the wash-streak. Another of the crew was struck at with a similar weapon, but warded off the blow, although held fast by one arm, when, just as the savage was making another stroke, Lieutenant Dayman, who up till now had exercised the utmost forbearance, fired at him with a musket. The man did not drop, although wounded in the thigh. But even this, unquestionably their first experience of firearms, did not intimidate the natives, one of whom, standing on a block of coral, threw a spear which passed across the breast of one of the boat's crew and lodged in the bend of one arm, opening a vein. They raised a loud shout when the spear was seen to take effect, and threw several others which missed. Lieutenant Simpson, who had been watching what was going on, then fired from the pinnace with buckshot and struck them, when, finding that the large boat, though at anchor, could assist the smaller one, the canoes were paddled inshore in great haste and confusion. Some more musket shots were fired, and the galley went in chase endeavouring to turn the canoes, so as to bring them under fire of the pinnace's twelve-pounder howitzer, which was speedily mounted and fired. The shot either struck one of the canoes or went within a few inches of the mark, on which the natives instantly jumped overboard into the shallow water, making for the mangroves, which they succeeded in reaching, dragging their canoes with them. Two rounds of grape-shot crashing through the branches dispersed the party, but afterwards they moved two of the canoes out of sight. The remaining one was brought out after breakfast by the galley under cover of the pinnace, and was towed off to some distance. The paddles having been taken out and the spears broken and left in her, she was let go to drift down toward a village whence the attacking party were supposed to have come. Some blood in this canoe, although not the one most aimed at, showed that the firing had not been ineffective. This act of deliberate treachery was perpetrated by persons who had always been well treated by us, for several of the natives present were recognised as having been alongside the ship in Coral Haven. This, their first act of positive hostility, affords, I think, conclusive evidence of the savage disposition of the natives of this part of the Louisiade Archipelago when incited by the hope of plunder, and shews that no confidence should ever be reposed in them, unless, perhaps in the presence of a numerically superior force, or in the close vicinity of a ship. At the same time, the boldness of these savages in attacking, with thirty men in three canoes, two boats known to contain at least twenty persons—even in the hopes of taking them by surprise—and in not being at once driven off upon feeling the novel and deadly effects of firearms, shews no little amount of bravery."

On their last visit to Cape York, in the extreme north of Australia, the party had the remarkable experience of rescuing a white woman from captivity among the natives.

"In the afternoon some of our people on shore were surprised to see a young white woman come up to claim their protection from a party of natives from whom she had recently made her escape, and who she thought would otherwise bring her back. Of course she received every attention, and was taken on board the ship by the first boat, when she told her story which is briefly as follows: Her name is Barbara Thomson. She was born at Aberdeen in Scotland, and, along with her parents, emigrated to New South Wales. About four years and a half ago she left Moreton Bay with her husband in a small cutter, called the America, of which he was the owner, for the purpose of picking up some of the oil from the wreck of a whaler, lost on the Bampton shoal, to which place one of her late crew undertook to guide them; their ultimate intention was to go on to Port Essington. The man who acted as pilot was unable to find the wreck, and after much quarreling on board in consequence, and the loss of two men by drowning and of another who was left on a small uninhabited island, they made their way up to the Torres Straits, where, during a gale of wind their vessel struck upon a reef on the eastern Prince of Wales Island. The two remaining men were lost in attempting to swim on shore through the surf, but the woman was afterwards rescued by a party of natives on a turtling excursion, who, when the gale subsided, swam on board and supported her on shore between two of their number. One of these blacks, Boroto by name, took possession of the woman as his share of the plunder; she was compelled to live with him, but was well treated by all the men, although many of the women, jealous of the attention shewn her, for a long time evinced anything but kindness. A curious circumstance secured for her the protection of one of the principal men of the tribe. This person, acting upon the belief, universal throughout Australia and the islands of the Torres Strait, so far as hitherto known, that white people are the ghosts of the aborigines, fancied that in the stranger he recognised a long-lost daughter, and at once admitted her into the relationship which he thought had formerly subsisted between them. She was immediately acknowledged by the whole tribe as one of themselves, thus securing an extensive connection in relatives of all denominations. The headquarters of the tribe being on an island which all vessels passing through the Torres Strait from the eastward must approach within two or three miles, she had the mortification of seeing from twenty to thirty or more ships go through every summer without anchoring in the neighbourhood, so as to afford the slightest opportunity of making her escape. Last year she heard of our two vessels being at Cape York, only twenty miles distant from some of the tribe who had communicated with us and had been well treated, but they would not take her over and watched her even more narrowly than before. On our second and present visit, however, which the Cape York people immediately announced by smoke signals to their friends, she was successful in persuading some of her more immediate friends to bring her across to the mainland within a short distance of where the vessels lay. The blacks were credulous enough to believe that as she had been so long with them and had been so well treated, she did not intend to leave them—only 'she felt a strong desire to see the white people once more and shake hands with them': adding that she would be certain to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco, and other much-prized articles."

Although the external adventures of the Rattlesnake party were less varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great university of nature, and when he had finished it he was no longer a mere student, capricious and unsettled in his mental tastes and inclinations, but had set his face steadily towards his future life-work. It is interesting to compare the importance in Huxley's life of the Rattlesnake voyage with the importance in Darwin's life of the voyage on the Beagle undertaken some fifteen years earlier. Huxley, when he started, was a young surgeon with a taste of a vague kind for dissecting and for drawing the peculiarities of structure of different animals revealed by the knife and the microscope. Day after day, month after month, year after year, in the abundant leisure his slight professional duties left him, he dissected and drew, dissected and drew, animal after animal, as he got them from the dredge or tow-net, or from the surface of the coral reefs. He was not in any sense of the word a collecting naturalist. The identification and naming of species interested him little. What he cared for was, he tells us, "the architectural and engineering part of the business: the working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of divers living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve different ends." And so, on the Rattlesnake, and in his work in continuation of the Rattlesnake investigations—which occupied most of his time for a few years after his return to London—there was gradually growing up in his mind a dim conception of the animal kingdom as a group of creatures, not built on half a dozen or more separate plans or types, each unconnected with the other, but as a varied set of modifications of a single type.

When Darwin set out on the Beagle, unlike Huxley, he was an enthusiastic collecting naturalist. He had wandered from county to county in England adding new specimens to his collections of butterflies and beetles. As the Beagle went round the world visiting remote islands, far from land in the centre of the waters, archipelagoes of islands crowding together, islands hugging the shore of continents, and the great continents of the old and new worlds, he continued to collect and to classify. Gradually the resemblances and differences between the creatures inhabiting different parts of the earth began to strike him as exhibiting an orderly plan. He saw that under apparently the same conditions of food and temperature and moisture, in different parts of the world the genera and species were different, and that they were most alike in regions between which there was the most recent chance of migrations having taken place. In the quietness of England, while Huxley was on the Rattlesnake, Darwin was slowly working towards the explanation of all he had seen: towards the conception that animals and plants had spread slowly from common centres, becoming more and more different from each other as they spread. He realised on his voyage that species had come into existence by descent with modification, and before long he was to publish to the world in the Origin of Species a vast and convincing bulk of evidence as to the actual fact of a common descent for all the different existing organisms, and, in his theory of natural selection, a reasonable explanation of how the fact of evolution had come about. Darwin's greatest ally in bringing the new idea before the world was Huxley, and Huxley was teaching himself the absolute unity of the living world. The two men were dissimilar in tastes and temperament, and they were at work on quite different sides of nature. When the time came, Huxley, with his commanding knowledge of the structure of animals, was ready to support Darwin and to illustrate and amplify his arguments by a thousand anatomical proofs. It is a curious and dramatic coincidence to realise that both men learned their very different lessons under very similar circumstances in the tropical seas of the Southern Hemisphere.