A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  Although much of what the Oslo team did was following in the footsteps of the 1967 discoveries there was an area of exposed rocks that the earlier trip had never explored. This outcrop lay to the south of the Valhallfonna glacier where it reached the sea in a massive cliff of pale blue ice. On the aerial photograph the dark rocks were quite obvious, outlined against the white ice sheet. To reach the exposure we had to cross in front of the ice face in our small, clinker-built dory. We felt like insignificant specks in comparison with the ice cliffs, from which small blocks regularly tumbled. We equally had to steer clear of ice floes, because the greater part of them was always treacherously concealed under water. Crazily eroded icy crags were scattered as if Henry Moore had had a sculpture retrospective floating at the top of the world. The new outcrop proved to be almost entirely developed in the black, deep-water limestone that included the olenid trilobites (Balnibarbi and Cloacaspis – ‘Fred’ – and many others) along with numerous graptolites. Nobody had ever collected there before, and the rocks were displayed in such a way that we could crawl over the surfaces of a series of sea floors that were 475 million years old. This was a fishing trip into ancient history, and we were the first ever fishermen. Even in the Arctic sleet it was enough to kindle a fire within a scientist’s breast. It was clear we should spend more time recording and collecting from this virgin territory, which came to be called Olenidsletta (it donated its name to part of the rock succession). A small breakaway camp was set up on the shore so that we did not have to make repeated trips by boat. David Bruton and I, together with our field assistants Koch and Gram, used it as a base to make forays over the new territory.

  One day I discovered a mistake in my PhD thesis. At the end of my submitted work I had put together a trilobite from apparently matching, but separate heads and tails that were ‘left over’ after every other species had been assigned. I reasoned that they must belong together to make a completely new kind of trilobite. On a particularly frigid day on Olenidsletta I found a whole trilobite that proved I was wrong. In front of me was a superb, complete extinct animal addressing me from the rock surface in the very place it had laid down and died. It would be the first trilobite I named in the scientific literature – Opipeuterella. It had the mystery tail, but a completely different kind of head, so I had clearly failed to make head or tail of it before! I cackled into the icy wind when I made that bad joke to myself. I struggled back to the tent through the squalls to report my good fortune. Indeed, this little trilobite was previously completely unknown. It helped me realise that there were several trilobites with inflated, goggle-eyes that were probably part of a planktonic community rather than dwelling on the sea floor. I would spend much time over the following years telling their story. In a small way it was a eureka moment – and neither of my examiners had cottoned on to my mistake. I also learned an important lesson: it was OK to get things wrong. No piece of work is perfect. I was lucky enough to rectify my own mistake this time, but if somebody else had found out my error science would still have advanced, albeit in a modest way. Science is a process which moves towards a greater and more embracing truth, shedding its own mistakes, and this process binds together an internationally famous particle physicist with a young palaeontologist struggling to keep his cigarettes dry while whacking rocks in a blizzard.[2]

  There were two skirmishes with death on the 1971 Spitsbergen expedition. I was lucky to survive both of them. The return to base camp from our outpost on Olenidsletta proved more hazardous than expected. My own recollections of the events are blurry, just a series of fleeting sensations. David Bruton was made of stronger stuff and, as on almost every day of his life, recorded what happened in his diary after the day’s adventures. His entry for 9 August follows verbatim:

  Two boats had planned to fetch us but one broke down and only one, skippered by Jensen, made it despite numerous ice floes in and around the beach. We soon found that we could not take both equipment and fossils so we left the latter to collect on a better day. We were Jensen, Nesland, Gram, Koch and Richard who sat in the stern while I sat high up on the cases with oars at the ready. The trim of the boat was pretty unstable and I said a silent prayer for a safe trip. The fog had come down again but we followed the shore and into the meltwater area in front of the glacier. The boat was going well in the following wind but each turn to avoid an ice floe, caused us to breach and the boat went precariously off balance.

  Koch used the walkie-talkie to base and told them we were underway when suddenly a high-pitched rev of the outboard made me look astern to see the entire motor kicking violently in Jensen’s hands. The transom board had come away completely from the gunwale leaving the motor to hang on the end of a short piece of safety rope tied to the stern ring. The motor stopped but not before I had both oars in the rowlocks trying to keep the boat from broaching to. It was almost impossible and I needed Koch’s help with the starboard oar. We were drifting dangerously to an iceberg which rocked ahead of us and lashed by waves on the port bow. The boat was drifting right onto it and if I only could backwater the port oar and turn like mad with the starboard. I did, again with Koch’s help and we shot by within touching distance of the blue ice front. Jensen, meanwhile, had succeeded in knocking the top plank of the transom into place again returning the nails into their well-worn holes. Would it hold? It did and soon the motor was going again and we shot past another ice floe which had loomed out of the fog dead ahead. Fortunately we were in smoother water and we could just see base camp. Even so, distances here are most misleading and it was an age before we were within what I judged to be swimming distance of the shore.

  What David’s succinct account did not mention was that men overboard are supposed to last for only about four minutes in Arctic waters before shock takes control. As for me, I sat in the stern doing nothing much to help the situation; possibly, I did not even realise that our lives were in jeopardy. I hope I was not just incompetent. Åge Jensen, the able technician from the Oslo museum, kept his head clear to avert a disaster that could otherwise easily have proved fatal. Only when we got back safely to base camp did David shakily confess how worried he had been.

  My second escape from death did indeed involve immersion into a sea bobbing with ice floes. I was collecting from strata that dipped down into a choppy sea. Waves lapped up on to rocks that had been polished smooth by many years of marine scrubbing. Small ice floes jostled against one another further out to sea. I stepped down on to a sloping greenish surface – covered with tiny algae, I suppose – and my rubber boots had nothing to grip. I slithered uncontrollably into the deep icy waters beyond. This was it: four minutes. My trilobites flashed before my eyes. I recall with clarity the shock of the cold sea closing around me. I was wearing a good deal of woollen clothing and a heavy jacket; these would serve to drag me down. I gulped salt water in my confusion. It was my good fortune that David was working nearby. He quickly came to my rescue. Firmly braced so that he would not make the same mistake as I had, he reached out with his geological hammer. With one desperate lunge I managed to grab it, and somehow successfully scrabbled out of the sea, with David pulling on the handle end of the hammer. I was prodigiously chilled. The only thing to do was to run all the way back to camp to get changed into dry clothes. We were working a couple of kilometres away. So off I soggily set, relentlessly jogging through slushy ice and across melt streams and over stretches of loose cobbles. By the time I arrived at the communal tent the water in my wellington boots was lukewarm, through sheer bodily effort. Alone in the tent, the radio officer was making his usual unsuccessful attempts to contact Polar Star, while the radio whistled and crackled back at him like a lost alien. I am not sure he noticed my escape from death at all.

  David Bruton became a good friend, and not just because I owe him my life. You cannot hide much if you are sharing a small tent during a twenty-four-hour snowstorm. We differed then in several ways. He was seven years older than I was, and had left England by the time the 1960s were beginnin
g to offer a new version of society. Politically, I was far to the left at the time, and David was more on the right. Despite being the victim of rather typical Trotskyite manoeuvres while I was at King’s College, my disillusion with communism was complete only when I visited Czechoslovakia a year or two later. David had been in Prague when the Soviet tanks rolled up in 1968 and had tales of an exciting escape from that intransigent regime; the International Geological Congress was being held there at the time. My old professor Harry Whittington had been at the Congress with David and must have been reminded of his earlier escape from the Japanese armies during the war. Both knew the impact of the iron fist, and they would not forget its heavy blows. I listened to David’s account as we talked in our sleeping bags waiting for our feet to thaw. I guessed that politics were to be avoided if we were to live harmoniously, but I also had glimmerings of a greater tolerance of other people’s views and backgrounds. We got along just fine. When the fieldwork was complete, the fossils were stowed, and Polar Star took us laboriously back to Norway. The helicopter pilots entertained us yet again with ‘I beg your pardon’. For some reason it seemed more of an ordeal in this direction. When we reached Bodø on 7 September David gratefully left the ship as soon as he could, and continued his journey southwards by train. The collections found their way to the museum in Oslo much more slowly, where they were unpacked and registered. Most of them subsequently continued further to me in London for detailed preparation and proper study. I spent the next ten years of my life publishing the results and exploring their implications for science. Surely, this was the logical conclusion to that long journey from boy naturalist to scientific professional. What could go wrong?

  * * *

  When I arrived back in England I discovered that my wife had left me. While I was away in Svalbard she had moved back to the family home in Cambridge with Dominic, whose operations had been successfully completed. Back on familiar ground, she had developed a liaison with the husband of her old friend, an affair that had quickly developed into an overwhelming passion. By the time I arrived with my suitcases of dirty field kit I was almost irrelevant. I was the stranger who turned up on the doorstep, not welcome. As with the other traumatic events in my life, the details have been censored by some kindly overlord of my unconscious mind. All I have with me now is the feeling of being bereft. It was not supposed to be like this. This was not what the senior tutor had in mind for his research students. I was bewildered and hurt. I wanted to be with my son. It wasn’t my fault; or else it was all my fault. I felt that I had not escaped the Arctic seas after all: I was swirling around in a dark ocean trying to stay afloat, way out of my depth. I felt anger, I felt sorry for myself. I felt both simultaneously, the way that squalls and fog could coexist on Hinlopen Strait. I can no longer recall where I went during the crisis. I believe I avoided going home; I did not wish to hear my mother’s angry assertions that she had been right all along. I certainly imposed my misery upon my friends in Cambridge. I was a lost soul. All the small triumphs of discovery along Hinlopen Strait were eclipsed by heartache and confusion.

  We tried getting the family back together, this time in a small apartment in Tufnell Park in North London. It was not going to work. I had lost my confidence, and my wife had moved on. The romantic days of my third undergraduate year seemed like an illusion, a trick of memory. The pretence that everything was back to normal soon fell to pieces. I packed up all my belongings into two suitcases, and became an itinerant, visiting on the weekends, a typical young, separated father who chased a small, laughing boy around the ponds on Hampstead Heath. I possessed almost nothing: a terrible old Austin Mini Countryman with a leaking petrol tank was my most valuable item. My wounds were invisible, but loss of trust is one scar that never heals completely. My senior sister-in-law kindly let me live in her unoccupied flat in Percy Street, in a raffish part of central London north of Soho known as Fitzrovia. One side of the street was a rickety old Georgian terrace, and the flat was above an Italian restaurant and an out-of-hours drinking club run by a Mr and Mrs Con, who despite their name and occupation were eminently respectable. I could climb out through a skylight to hang out my smalls to dry between the chimney pots. This was my brief bohemian phase. I also discovered an inner-city ecosystem. The flat harboured cockroaches that lurked behind the sink and came out in some numbers at night. My mattress was on the floor, and I kept a shoe handy to whack the roaches if their scuttling woke me up. Once I awakened to find a mouse gorging on a fat squashed insect. This was a kind of balance between pests; for some reason I found it consoling. I suppose the message was: ‘life carries on’. Some years later, after a relatively uncomplicated divorce, Bridget married yet another of my Cambridge friends and contemporaries, and Dominic went to live in France with his new family. Only then did the memory of my traumatic return from Svalbard begin to recede. A small but insistent voice told me that I had escaped from something that would have made me miserable.

  My scientific work was set back. The Keeper of Palaeontology at the British Museum (Natural History) was compassionate enough, although my permanent appointment was put on hold, I assume to allow me time to prove my resilience. The new collections arrived from Oslo. Preparing trilobites from their rocky hiding place proved to be a kind of occupational therapy. I could not let my mind wander on to my wounds and worries because total concentration was obligatory – one slip and a valuable specimen was gone. A whole world was bound within the compass of a binocular microscope. I buckled down to months of work with ‘vibrotool’ and needles. I remembered Harry Whittington’s advice: I had to get my new information about the olenid trilobites (‘Fred’ and allies) published before I could put out my theories about ancient continental boundaries. On the basis of the new collections, there were several species I had not known about when I completed my PhD thesis, and all of these needed work. Somehow, I wrote up the results of our new 1971 fieldwork, jointly with David Bruton, and published it in a mainstream journal of the Geological Society of America. My scientific publication list was growing, despite what had happened in my private life. There are many varieties of desperation, but only one kind of hope, and that is rooted in the future – in striving – in making a meal from a cockroach. Persistence would prove the stalwart virtue, more durable than idealism, and stronger than earthly passion: the imperative to carry on carrying on.

  I began to expand my contacts. I soon discovered that one of the great things about science is that national borders mean little in a common endeavour. An advantage of being a specialist is that there are a relatively small number of colleagues around the world, and they soon become friends. Once my publications began to appear I sent reprints to people I had never met (‘with compliments of the author’ scribbled on the top) and received theirs in return. A pile of my reprints always arrived by post after any article was published, and these papers became the intellectual currency of my science. I started to build a library, in file boxes, alphabetically arranged by author. It signalled my entry into a community of like souls. Scientists working for the United States Geological Survey or at the American Museum of Natural History sent me copies of their works. We soon were on first-name terms. Famous Swedish specialists were generous with their celebrated contributions. Politics did not stop the flow of information. I received papers from Marina Chugaeva from the former Soviet Union. Doubtless, when I reciprocated, some KGB functionary in Moscow would have spent too much time trying to find secret messages concealed in trilobite language. Even China would emerge within a few years from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, when it became obvious that some of the richest fossil faunas anywhere were to be discovered in the Far East. In a decade I would mentor a Chinese academic in London for two years. John Shergold and the great A. A. Opik became correspondents from Australia, where I would one day go to pursue my research. All my letters were typed on a machine that had already seen much service; staff were supposed to file a carbon copy of everything. When personal computers arrived I kep
t the old typewriter as a memento of more leisurely times. Letters could then be left for a week to mature; the peremptory responses demanded in the electronic era would have seemed fantastical.

  Not everything was welcome: a proportion of published research proved to be inferior. A package from Monsieur Pillet in France was viewed with apprehension if it included smudgy photographs of poor specimens. Pillet published in obscure regional French journals, and there were doubts whether his papers had been through stringent peer review. Professor Techii Kobayashi was different. He was a senior Japanese professor and nobody dared challenge what he said in print. His illustrations were rarely adequate, and he coined new names with abandon. I was learning to pick my way through the minefields of scholarly reputation. London was, and remains, a hub for international travel, and some of my overseas colleagues would call in at the museum on their way to conferences or fieldwork, or to consult the collections. Then I could put a face and a handshake to the reprints. I began to feel that this world was where I belonged, but it was not the world of the Natural History Museum alone. I had joined a community of enthusiasts from almost every continent.