I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  When Protagoras, speaking inclusively despite the standard translation, defined “man” as “the measure of all things,” he captured the ambiguity of our feelings and intellect in his implied contrast of diametrically opposite interpretations: the expansion of humanism versus the parochiality of limitation. Eternity and infinity lie too far from the unavoidable standard of our own bodies to secure our comprehension; but life’s continuity stands right at the outer border of ultimate fascination: just close enough for intelligibility by the measure of our bodily size and earthly time, but sufficiently far away to inspire maximal awe.

  Moreover, we can bring this largest knowable scale further into the circle of our comprehension by comparing the macrocosm of life’s tree to the microcosm of our family’s genealogy. Our affinity for evolution must originate from the same internal chords of emotion and fascination that drive so many people to trace their bloodlines with such diligence and detail. I do not pretend to know why the documentation of unbroken heredity through generations of forebears brings us so swiftly to tears, and to such a secure sense of rightness, definition, membership, and meaning. I simply accept the primal emotional power we feel when we manage to embed ourselves into something so much larger.

  Thus, we may grasp one major reason for evolution’s enduring popularity among scientific subjects: our minds must combine the subject’s sheer intellectual fascination with an even stronger emotional affinity rooted in a legitimate comparison between the sense of belonging gained from contemplating family genealogies, and the feeling of understanding achieved by locating our tiny little twig on the great tree of life. Evolution, in this sense, is “roots” writ large.

  To close this series of three hundred essays in Natural History, I therefore offer two microcosmal stories of continuity—two analogs or metaphors for this grandest evolutionary theme of absolutely unbroken continuity, the intellectual and emotional center of “this view of life.”2 My stories descend in range and importance from a tale about a leader in the founding generation of Darwinism to a story about my grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant who rose from poverty to solvency as a garment worker on the streets of New York City.

  Our military services now use the blandishments of commercial jingles to secure a “few good men” (and women), or to entice an unfulfilled soul to “be all that you can be in the army.” In a slight variation, another branch emphasizes external breadth over internal growth: join the navy and see the world.

  In days of yore, when reality trumped advertisement, this motto often did propel young men to growth and excitement. In particular, budding naturalists without means could attach themselves to scientific naval surveys by signing on as surgeons, or just as general gofers and bottle washers. Darwin himself had fledged on the Beagle, largely in South America, between 1831 and 1836, though he sailed (at least initially) as the captain’s gentleman companion rather than as the ship’s official naturalist. Thomas Henry Huxley, a man of similar passions but lesser means, decided to emulate his slightly older mentor (Darwin was born in 1809, Huxley in 1825) by signing up as assistant surgeon aboard HMS Rattlesnake for a similar circumnavigation, centered mostly on Australian waters, and lasting from 1846 to 1850.

  Huxley filled these scientific Wanderjahre with the usual minutiae of technical studies on jellyfishes and grand adventures with the aboriginal peoples of Australia and several Pacific islands. But he also trumped Darwin in one aspect of discovery with extremely happy and lifelong consequences: he met his future wife in Australia, a brewer’s daughter (a lucrative profession in this wild and distant outpost) named Henrietta Anne Heathorn, or Nettie to the young Hal. They met at a dance. He loved her silky hair, and she reveled in his dark eyes that “had an extraordinary way of flashing when they seemed to be burning—his manner was most fascinating” (as she wrote in her diary).

  Huxley wrote to his sister in February 1849, “I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition.” As Nettie’s only dubious trait, Hal mentioned her potential naïveté in leaving “her happiness in the hands of a man like myself, struggling upwards and certain of nothing.” Nettie waited five years after Hal left in 1850. Then she sailed to London, wed her dashing surgeon and vigorously budding scientist, and enjoyed, by Victorian standards, an especially happy and successful marriage with an unusually decent and extraordinarily talented man. (Six of their seven children lived into reasonably prosperous maturity, a rarity in those times, even among the elite.) Hal and Nettie, looking back in their old age (Hal died in 1895, Nettie in 1914), might well have epitomized their life together in the words of a later song: “We had a lot of kids, a lot of trouble and pain, but then, oh Lord, we’d do it again.”

  The young and intellectually restless Huxley, having mastered German, decided to learn Italian during his long hours of boredom at sea. (He read Dante’s Inferno in the original terza rima during a year’s jaunt, centered upon New Guinea.) Thus, as Huxley prepared to leave his fiancée in April 1849 (he would return for a spell in 1850, before the long five-year drought that preceded Nettie’s antipodal journey to their wedding), Nettie decided to give him a parting gift of remembrance and utility: a five-volume edition, in the original Italian of course, of Gerusalemme liberata by the great Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso. (This epic, largely describing the conquest of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099, might not be deemed politically correct today, but the power of Tasso’s verse and narrative remains undiminished.)

  Nettie presented her gift to Hal as a joint offering from herself, her half-sister Oriana, and Oriana’s husband, her brother-in-law William Fanning. She inscribed the first volume in a young person’s hand: “T. H. Huxley. A birthday and parting gift in remembrance of three dear friends. May 4th 1849.” And now we come to the point of this tale. For some reason that I cannot fathom but will not question, this set of books sold (to lucky me) for an affordable pittance at a recent auction. (Tasso isn’t big these days, and folks may have missed the catalog entry describing the provenance and context.)

  So Nettie Heathorn came to England, married her Hal, raised a large family, and lived out her long and fulfilling life well into the twentieth century. As she had been blessed with accomplished children, she also enjoyed, in later life, the promise of two even more brilliant grandchildren: the writer Aldous Huxley and the biologist Julian Huxley. In 1911, more than sixty years after she had presented the five volumes of Tasso to Hal, Nettie Heathorn, then Henrietta Anne Huxley, and now Granmoo to her grandson Julian, removed the books from such long residence on her shelf, and passed them on to a young man who would later carry the family’s intellectual torch with such distinction. She wrote below her original inscription, now in the clear but shaky hand of an old woman, the missing who and where of the original gift: “Holmwood. Sydney, N.S. Wales. Nettie Heathorn, Oriana Fanning, William Fanning.”

  Henrietta Heathorn’s inscriptions in a volume of poetry given first to her fiancé, Thomas Huxley, and sixty years later to her grandson Julian Huxley.

  Above her original words, penned sixty years before in youth’s flower, she then wrote, in a simple statement that needs no explication in its eloquent invocation of life’s persistence: “Julian Sorel Huxley from his grandmother Henrietta Anne Huxley née Heathorn ‘Granmoo.’ ” She then emphasized the sacred theme of continuity by closing her rededication with the same words she had written to Hal so many years before: “‘In remembrance’ 28 July 1911. Hodeslea, Eastbourne.”

  If this tale of three generations, watched over by a great woman as she follows life’s passages from dashing bride to doting grandmother, doesn’t epitomize the best of humanity, as symbolized by our continuity, then what greater love or beauty can sustain our lives in this vale of tears and fascination? Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many men rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.

  My maternal grandparent
s—Irene and Joseph Rosenberg, or Grammy and Papa Joe to me—loved to read in their adopted language of English. My grandfather even bought a set of Harvard Classics (the famous “five-foot shelf’ of Western wisdom) to facilitate his assimilation to American life. I inherited only two of Papa Joe’s books, and nothing of a material nature could be more precious to me. The first bears a stamp of sale: “Carroll’s book store. Old, rare and curious books. Fulton and Pearl Sts. Brooklyn, N.Y.” Perhaps my grandfather obtained this volume from a landsman, for I can discern, through erasures on three pages of the book, the common Hungarian name “Imre.” On the front page of this 1892 edition of J. M. Greenwood’s Studies in English Grammar, my grandfather wrote in ink, in an obviously European hand, “Prop. of Joseph A. Rosenberg, New York.” To the side, in pencil, he added the presumed date of his acquisition: “1901. Oct. 25th.” Just below, also in pencil, he appended the most eloquent of all conceivable words for this context—even though one might argue that he used the wrong tense, confusing the compound past of continuous action with an intended simple past to designate a definite and completed event (not bad for a barely fourteen-year-old boy just a month or two off the boat): “I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.”

  My grandfather’s inscriptions on the title page of the English grammar book that he bought soon after arriving in America as a thirteen-year-old immigrant.

  Of all that I shall miss in ending this series of essays, I shall feel most keenly the loss of fellowship and interaction with readers. Early in the series, I began—more as a rhetorical device to highlight a spirit of interaction than as a practical tactic for gaining information—to pose questions to readers when my research failed to resolve a textual byway. (As a longtime worshiper at the altar of detail, nothing niggles me more than a dangling little fact—partly, I confess, from a sense of order, but mostly because big oaks do grow from tiny acorns, and one can never know in advance which acorn will reach heaven.)

  As the series proceeded, I developed complete faith—not from hope, but from the solid pleasure of invariant success—that any posted question would elicit a host of interesting responses, including the desired factual resolution. How did the Italian word segue pass from a technical term in the rarefied world of classical music into common speech as a synonym for “transition” (resolved by personal testimony of several early radio men who informed me that in the 1920s they had transferred this term from their musical training to their new gigs as disc jockeys and producers of radio plays). Why did seventeenth-century engravers of scientific illustrations usually fail to draw snail shells in reverse on their plates (so that the final product, when printed on paper, would depict the snail’s actual direction of coiling), when they obviously understood the principle of inversion and always etched their verbal texts “backwards” to ensure printed readability? Who were Mary Roberts, Isabelle Duncan, and several other “invisible” women of Victorian science writing who didn’t even win a line in such standard sources as the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Dictionary of National Biography? (See essay 7 for a reader’s resolution to this little mystery.)

  Grammy and Papa Joe as I knew them in their later life, shown here in the early 1950s.

  Thus, when I cited my grandfather’s text en passant in an earlier essay, I may have wept for joy, but could not feign complete surprise, when I received the most wonderful of all letters from a reader:

  For years now I have been reading your books, and I think I should really thank you for the pleasure and intellectual stimulation I have received from you. But how to make even a small return for your essays? The answer came to me this week. I am a genealogist who specializes in passenger list work. Last Sunday I was rereading that touching essay that features your grandfather, Joseph A. Rosenberg who wrote “I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.” It occurred to me that you might like to see his name on the passenger list of the ship on which he came.

  I think I always knew that I might be able to find the manifest of Papa Joe’s arrival at Ellis Island. I even half intended to make the effort “some day.” But, in honest moments of obeisance to the Socratic dictum “know thyself,” I’m pretty sure that, absent this greatest of all gifts from a reader, I never would have found the time or made the move. (Moreover, I certainly hadn’t cited Papa Joe’s inscription in a lazy and intentional “fishing expedition” for concrete information. I therefore received the letter of resolution with pure exhilaration—as a precious item beyond price, freely given in fellowship, and so gratefully received without any conscious anticipation on my part.)

  My grandfather traveled with his mother and two younger sisters on the SS Kensington, an American Line ship, launched in 1894 and scrapped in 1910, that could carry sixty passengers first class, and one thousand more in steerage—a good indication of the economics of travel and transport in those days of easy immigration for European workers, then so badly needed for the factories and sweatshops of a booming American economy based on manual labor. The Kensington had sailed from Antwerp on August 31, 1901, and arrived in New York, as Papa Joe accurately recorded, on September 11. My page of the “list or manifest of alien immigrants” includes thirty names, Jewish or Catholic by inference, and hailing from Hungary, Russia, Rumania, and Croatia. Papa Joe’s mother, Leni, listed as illiterate and thirty-five years of age, appears on line 22 with her three children just below: my grandfather, recorded as Josef and literate at age fourteen, and my dear aunts Regina and Gus, cited as Regine and Gisella (I never knew her real name) at five years and nine months old, respectively. Leni carried $6.50 to start her new life.

  I had not previously known that my great-grandfather Farkas Rosenberg (accented on the first syllable, pronounced farkash, and meaning “wolf” in Hungarian) had preceded the rest of his family, and now appeared on the manifest as their sponsor, “Wolf Rosenberg of 644 East 6th Street.” I do not remember Farkas, who died during my third year of life—but I greatly value the touching tidbit of information that, for whatever reason in his initial flurry of assimilation, Farkas had learned, and begun to use, the English translation of a name that strikes many Americans as curious, or even amusing, in sound—for he later reverted to Farkas, and no one in my family knew him by any other name.

  My kind and diligent reader then bestowed an additional gift upon me by locating Farkas’s manifest as well. He had arrived, along with eight hundred passengers in steerage, aboard the sister ship SS Southwark on June 13, 1900, listed as Farkas Rosenberg, illiterate at age thirty-four (although I am fairly sure that he could at least read and probably write Hebrew) and sponsored by a cousin named Jos. Weiss (but unknown to my family, and perhaps an enabling fiction). Farkas, a carpenter by trade, arrived alone with one dollar in his pocket.

  Papa Joe’s later story mirrors the tale of several million poor immigrants to a great land that did not welcome them with open arms (despite Lady Liberty’s famous words), but also did not foreclose the possibility of success if they could prevail by their own wits and unrelenting hard work. And who could, or should, have asked for more in those times? Papa Joe received no further schooling in America, save what experience provided and internal drive secured. As a young man, he went west for a time, working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and on a ranch somewhere in the Midwest (not, as I later found out, as the cowboy of my dreams, but as an accountant in the front office). His mother, Leni, died young (my mother, Eleanor, bears her name in remembrance), as my second book of his legacy testifies. Papa Joe ended up, along with so many Jewish immigrants, in the garment district of New York City, where, after severing his middle finger in an accident as a cloth cutter, he eventually figured out how to parlay his remarkable, albeit entirely untrained, artistic talents into a better job that provided eventual access to middle-class life (and afforded much titillation to his grandchildren)—as a designer of brassieres and corsets.

  Partial page of the passenger manifest for my grandfather’s arrival in America on September 11, 1901. He is listed (as Josef Rosenberg) along with
his mother, Leni, and his two younger sisters (my aunts Gus and Regina).

  He met Irene, also a garment worker, when he lived as a boarder at the home of Irene’s aunt—for she had emigrated alone, at age fourteen in 1910, after a falling-out with her father, and under her aunt’s sponsorship. What else can one say for the objective record (and what richness and depth could one not expose, at least in principle, and for all people, at the subjective level of human life, passion, and pure perseverance)? Grammy and Papa Joe married young, and their only early portrait together radiates both hope and uncertainty. They raised three sons and a daughter; my mother alone survives. Two of their children finished college.

  Somehow I always knew, although no one ever pressured me directly, that the third generation, with me as the first member thereof, would fulfill the deferred dream of a century by obtaining an advanced education and entering professional life. (My grandmother spoke Hungarian, Yiddish, German, and English, but could only write her adopted language phonetically. I will never forget her embarrassment when I inadvertently read a shopping list that she had written, and realized that she could not spell. I also remember her joy when, invoking her infallible memory and recalling some old information acquired in her study for citizenship, she won ten dollars on a Yiddish radio quiz for correctly identifying William Howard Taft as our fattest president.)

  Papa Joe’s prayer book recording the death of his mother in 1911.