by Stephen Moss
Before he reached his twentieth birthday Franklin had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, during which all but seven of the forty-seven men alongside him on deck were killed. Following this lucky escape, he went on his first voyage to the Arctic, an unsuccessful quest to reach the North Pole; he was then chosen to lead an expedition to try to discover the fabled North-West Passage. He was well aware that polar exploration had never been easy, but the trials and tribulations endured by Franklin and his men on this and later voyages almost beggar belief.
In August 1819, a reconnaissance party led by Franklin left their ship and headed off across the rapidly freezing tundra, where they underwent unimaginable hardships, eventually being forced to eat boiled leather and lichen to avoid starving to death. One member of the party, driven insane by hunger, even shot and killed a fellow crewman so he could eat his flesh.
Incredibly, Franklin, Richardson and a handful of others did somehow manage to survive their terrible ordeal. When they returned home the following autumn, they were given a heroes’ welcome. You might imagine that these horrendous experiences would have put them off polar exploration forever, but over the next three decades Franklin continued to go off to search for the North-West Passage, continually being thwarted by the seemingly impenetrable barrier of the sea ice.
It was during one of these voyages, on 6 June 1827, that the bird that would be named after him was found: a male Franklin’s gull, shot on the Saskatchewan River. In some ways it is surprising that this species had not been discovered earlier, for it is not a bird of the High Arctic like Sabine’s and Ross’s gulls. Franklin’s gulls breed on the vast open prairies of Canada south and eastwards to Montana and Minnesota, and spend the winter along the Pacific coasts of Central and South America, migrating through much of the United States along the way.
In May 1845, almost two decades after he found his eponymous gull, Franklin and his 133-man crew set sail on what would be their final expedition, again heading north and west to chart the possible route through to the Pacific Ocean. This time the sea ice was so impenetrable that the two vessels became stuck – not just for one winter, but for two long years in a row.
Eventually, the fateful decision was taken to abandon the stranded ships and trek across the ice, in the hope of reaching land and safety. But this brave attempt was doomed to failure from the very start: already weakened by a combination of starvation, scurvy and the bone-chilling cold, the entire crew perished. Later a stone cairn was discovered, which revealed that Franklin had actually died on 11 June 1847, not long before his men had left the boat.
Today, a dramatic painting of the last days of this doomed expedition hangs in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, in east London. Painted by William Thomas Smith, it bears the dramatic title ‘They forged the last link with their lives’. Taken from a letter from Sir John Richardson to the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, this sentence commemorates the fact that, despite their deaths, the expedition had proved enormously valuable in surveying new territory.
These early voyages in turn paved the way for later exploration of both the Arctic and Antarctic, in which ornithologists continued to play a crucial part. The best known of these were both on the fateful expeditions with Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson perished with Scott on his last, doomed expedition to reach the South Pole, but not before he had produced a series of accurate and beautiful sketches of Antarctic birds. Apsley Cherry-Garrard did survive, but had the grim and thankless task of searching for – and ultimately discovering – the bodies of Scott and his men, frozen in their hut just 11 miles from safety.
Cherry-Garrard’s legendary quest to collect the eggs of the emperor penguin was later documented in a book aptly titled The Worst Journey in the World, in which he famously wrote that ‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.’11
The other important ornithological legacy of Captain Scott’s ultimately disastrous expedition was the last, almost unbearably moving letter he wrote to his wife Kathleen. Knowing he was doomed to die, Scott sent her clear instructions on how to bring up their infant son, asking her to ‘Make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games.’ That young boy would grow up to be the best known naturalist, wildlife artist and conservationist of his, and arguably any other, era: Sir Peter Scott.
As for the legendary North-West Passage, the route through the ice was finally found during the first decade of the twentieth century by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen – later conqueror of the South Pole – using charts made by Franklin and his crew on their final, ill-fated voyage. So Sir John Franklin and his brave men did not, it seems, die entirely in vain.
Yet even though our knowledge of the Arctic and its wildlife continued to expand, the gull discovered by James Ross remained a genuine enigma. As recently as 1938, well over a century after Ross’s gull was first described, ornithologist Bernard Tucker could still write that ‘Very few … have seen this gull alive.’12
During the intervening years, other polar explorers had occasionally come across this elusive bird. Their excitement when they did so is evident from this evocative entry from Fridtjof Nansen’s diary for 3 August 1894:
Today my longing has at last been satisfied; I have shot Ross’s gull. This rare and mysterious inhabitant of the unknown north, which is only occasionally seen, and of which no one knows whence it came and whither it goeth, which belongs exclusively to the world to which the imagination aspires, is what I have always longed to discover.13
A decade later, one mystery was finally solved, when the breeding grounds of Ross’s gulls were finally discovered – completely by chance. The distinguished Russian ornithologist Sergei Aleksandrovich Buturlin was visiting Yakutia – a vast and remote region of north-eastern Siberia almost as big as India – when he found a colony of Ross’s gulls nesting on the tundra outside the village of Pokhodsk.
Breeding colonies have since been discovered elsewhere in the Arctic, including north-east Greenland and the far north of Canada, not far from where Ross made his original find. The gulls probably spend the autumn and winter months somewhere in the North Atlantic, although even with the advances in tracking technology we have at our disposal today, we still do not know exactly where.14
4: Scotland’s Forgotten Genius
William MacGillivray is Scotland’s forgotten genius in the field of natural history. There is no question of his pre-eminence as a naturalist, of his originality of mind, of his skill as a writer and above all his talents as an ornithologist.15
This tribute from William MacGillivray’s biographer Robert Ralph identifies one aspect of the character of this pioneering nineteenth-century ornithologist. We have already seen aspects of his other, darker side, in the way he took the credit for the naming of Ross’s gull, over the prior (but unpublished) claim of his colleague John Richardson, and in his ability to both offend and to find offence with others. But we have also witnessed his generosity of spirit, as shown in naming Montagu’s harrier after his illustrious predecessor.
If MacGillivray is remembered nowadays at all, it is for what should have been the most influential and important ornithological work of the nineteenth century. The fact that he is largely forgotten, except by those few people who have actually read his writings, is partly due to his stubborn character and partly, as so often with the vagaries of fame, simply down to bad luck.
MacGillivray’s A History of British Birds is rarely referred to nowadays, and read even less frequently: the five stout, leather-bound volumes sit forgotten on library shelves, or linger unsold in the catalogues of antiquarian booksellers, gathering literal and metaphorical dust. After all, why would anyone bother to read a work now almost two centuries old, when so much has been discovered and written about our avifauna since it was published?
I first came across a set of MacGillivray’s masterwork in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge in the early 1980s, w
hen I was writing my dissertation on the bird poems of John Clare. It was priced at a prohibitive £200, way beyond my student pocket, but thanks to the generosity of the bookseller I was able to make detailed notes on the books’ contents without actually having to make a purchase.
Almost forty years later, I have finally acquired a set of my own, and have been entranced by the contents. The blend of forensic detail, together with extensive descriptions of each species’ habits and behaviour, all wrapped up in that unmistakable musty smell of antiquarian books, take me straight back to this exciting era when so many discoveries about Britain’s birds were being made. It also makes me appreciate the efforts of men such as MacGillivray and his English contemporary William Yarrell, who did so much to extend and consolidate our knowledge of Britain’s birdlife.xvi
Like his predecessor George Montagu, MacGillivray was an obsessive completist, as the books’ full title bears witness:
A History of British Birds, Indigenous and Migratory:
Including
Their Organization, Habits and Relations;
Remarks on Classification and Nomenclature;
An Account of the Principal Organs of Birds, and
Observations Relative to Practical Ornithology.
Never let it be said of Victorian writers that they didn’t provide enough information for their readers! So how was MacGillivray’s work received? It is fair to say that reactions were somewhat mixed, as this comment, written eighty years after publication, reveals:
To MacGillivray has always belonged the enviable reputation of writing one of the most original histories of British birds we possess. The consensus of opinion accords his History the merit of being original and accurate … but at the same time his peculiar methods of classification and nomenclature (most undoubtedly original) naturally aroused criticism and even condemnation.16
Talk about damning with faint praise – rarely can the word ‘original’ have been used so pejoratively. Yet the co-author of that verdict, William Mullens, was not unsympathetic to MacGillivray’s work, considering it superior to that of any of his contemporaries. Mullens was also scathing about the critics who condemned MacGillivray for his eccentric ordering of families and obsession with detailed accounts of each species’ anatomy, accusing them of having ‘broken the heart of the greatest ornithologist this country has ever possessed’, and almost preventing the completion of what he called ‘one of the greatest books on British birds’.
It wasn’t just MacGillivray’s taxonomy that baffled his readers, but also the names he used for so many familiar species. A glance at the entries in the first volume, published in 1837, yields a truly baffling assortment, each invented by MacGillivray to impose some sense of order and logic on avian nomenclature. Fortunately for the modern reader, MacGillivray often added the more widely accepted name (usually the one we still use today) as an alternative:
The Mountain Finch, or Brambling
The Black-throated Grosbeak, or Hawfinch
The Red-fronted Thistlefinch, or Goldfinch
The Mountain Linnet, or Twite
In the second volume, published two years later in 1839, the names were even more eccentric. The thrushes appeared as black, ringed, chestnut-backed, red-sided and variegated – for blackbird, ring ouzel, fieldfare, redwing and the eponymous White’s thrush respectively.
‘Shore pipit’ (for rock pipit) aside, the pipits and larks retained their more conventional names, but when it came to the pipits’ cousins, the wagtails, MacGillivray went off-piste once again. Pied wagtail was the only instantly recognisable name, as the grey wagtail became ‘grey-and-yellow’, and the white wagtail (the continental race of pied) became ‘grey-and-white’. For the yellow wagtail, and its continental relative the blue-headed wagtail, he invented an entirely new name – ‘quaketail’ – with the respective epithets ‘green-headed’ and ‘blue-headed’.
I can see what MacGillivray was trying to do. A tidy-minded man, borderline obsessive-compulsive by nature, he was simply attempting to add some kind of rationality to bird names, where little or none had existed before. For instance, later in the same volume blackcap appeared as ‘black-capped warbler’, and whitethroat ‘white-throated warbler’ – both names are perfectly logical, yet nevertheless utterly inelegant.
MacGillivray created more evocative names for other members of the warbler family. He coined ‘grasshopper chirper’ for grasshopper warbler, and ‘sedge and marsh reedlings’ for sedge and reed warblers (the much rarer marsh warbler was yet to be discovered in Britain). But my favourite is ‘Provence furzeling’ – undeniably a more accurate name than the Dartford warbler, and redolent of the names still used for the species in Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages, although not, oddly, in French.xvii
For the leaf warblers, he preferred ‘yellow, willow and short-winged woodwrens’ (wood and willow warblers and chiffchaff), while other new and rather bizarre names included ‘long-tailed muffin’ (long-tailed tit), ‘hedge chanter’ (dunnock), ‘blue-throated redstart’ (bluethroat) and ‘white-rumped stonechat’ (wheatear).xviii
It’s easy to mock MacGillivray, especially as not a single one of the names he invented has stood the test of time; we might perhaps look on him more kindly if, as with so many of the new names coined by Thomas Pennant in the previous century, they had been adopted into general use. For who is to say that Pennant’s ‘tawny owl’ is better than MacGillivray’s ‘tawny hooting-owl’, or that the former’s ‘oystercatcher’ is superior to the latter’s ‘pied oystercatcher’.
Sadly, for William MacGillivray, his plans to add rigour and logic foundered in the face of general usage and the mocking ridicule of his peers. In the meantime, Yarrell’s shorter and more accessible work, also entitled A History of British Birds (but lacking the long and convoluted subtitle), had become a popular bestseller. One of the main reasons for its wide appeal amongst the reading public was the inclusion of attractive woodcuts to illustrate each species.
Ironically, MacGillivray had also planned to have his work illustrated, and had painted many excellent plates himself, which had been praised by no less an authority than John James Audubon as equal to anything that great American artist had achieved himself. But stricken by poverty, as he was throughout his life, MacGillivray simply could not afford the cost of including these in the finished work.
Yarrell’s chosen method of publication may also have helped promote his writing. Like many novelists of the period, including Dickens and Trollope, he issued his work not in one thick, heavy and expensive volume at a time, but periodically, in thirty-six affordable monthly parts.xix Yarrell also managed to complete his History by 1843, whereas his rival took almost a decade longer to do so. This gave Yarrell a crucial head start in the market, from which MacGillivray never recovered.
MacGillivray’s heartfelt opening words to the Preface of Volume IV, written in March 1852 from the Devon resort of Torquay, sought to excuse the long delay since the previous volume:
As the wounded bird seeks some quiet retreat, where, freed from the persecution of the pitiless fowler, it may pass the time of its anguish in forgetfulness of the outer world; so have I, assailed by disease, betaken myself to a sheltered nook, where, unannoyed by the piercing blasts of the North Sea, I had led to hope that my life might be protracted beyond the most dangerous season of the year…
This acid blend of bitterness and self-pity, lightened by a soupçon of black humour, is emblematic of MacGillivray’s complex character. He was always an outsider, impatient and intolerant of others, and just as rigorous, it seems, at judging himself.
Yet the seaside cure seems to have worked – at least temporarily – for soon afterwards he returned north to his home in Aberdeen, where he was Professor of Natural History at the university. Here, on 31 July, he wrote the Preface to the fifth and final volume of his epic work. He once again outlined the case for the History’s importance, and added a telling comment on the poor reviews he expected to receive:
He who possesses the greatest contempt for public opinion is always the most anxious for general applause. I should, no doubt, be very well pleased to be commended; but I do not now anticipate great distress from the most virulent censure.
Ironically, MacGillivray never read any reviews of this final volume, whether praiseworthy or critical. For on 8 September 1852, barely a month after his final bitter sideswipe at the critics, he died, at the age of fifty-six. He was buried in Edinburgh’s New Calton Cemetery, next to his late wife and two of his children, who had died in infancy. For half a century his grave remained unmarked, until some of his relatives and former students raised the funds for a huge and impressive granite monument that still stands today.
Ironically, after his death his fame grew, with the circulation of his posthumously published book The Natural History of Dee Side and Braemar, privately produced with funding from none other than Queen Victoria. Towards the end of the Queen’s long reign, the pioneering ornithologist Professor Alfred Newton bestowed upon MacGillivray the grand epitaph that ‘after Willughby, MacGillivray was the greatest and most original ornithological genius … that this island has produced’.17
William MacGillivray may have lived a troubled life, and died in sad and difficult circumstances. But like the equally irascible George Montagu, he left us a masterwork that – if the critics had not become so hung up on his fanaticism for detail and eccentric names – might have changed the way we look at Britain’s birds forever. Instead, it was Yarrell’s History, written in a less rigorous but undoubtedly more popular style, with more acceptable English names, that went on to influence birdwatchers and ornithologists for almost a century afterwards.xx