Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  With the help of consular translators, Maillet taught himself Arabic so as to be able to read Arabic historical manuscripts and talk to Turkish and Arabic philosophers, historians, and naturalists. He befriended Christian savants, entering into elaborate correspondence with the Coptic and Greek patriarchs, the abbot of Sinai, and missionaries throughout the country, gaining access to specialized libraries, collections of rocks, archaeological finds, and mummies in remote monasteries and sending the carefully wrapped and crated objects back to his employer, Pontchartrain, in Paris. Although he was disliked by the traders in Egypt whom he represented, his fine manners and consular status endeared him to the pashas and their sages and curators, as well as to the commanding officers of the Turkish militia, some of whom also had libraries filled with rare books and manuscripts. Arabic, Latin, and Greek manuscripts took him back to the origins of Egypt, but when he reached the edge of those histories, he knew that the great expanse of time before man appeared on the earth could be read only in the rocks themselves. He taught himself to read them as if they were written in Arabic or Coptic.

  The Great Sphinx of Giza as Maillet would have seen it—up to its neck in sand.

  Description de l’Égypte (1809)

  By 1697 Maillet had gathered enough information about Egypt past and present to begin a book that would not be completed until 1735, when it was published in Paris as a series of letters called Description of Egypt (Description de l’Égypte). Describing the origins of Egypt had forced him to expand his idea of the age of the earth, for the ancient historical accounts he read recorded events that had happened in this landscape thousands of years earlier, chronicling a stretch of time much greater than that of any Western historical account he had encountered.

  Now that Maillet had reached that far back in time, there was no stopping his curiosity. He wanted to go further, beyond the formation of cities, beyond people, back into prehistory, back into deep time.

  So in the last few years of the seventeenth century, while he was still gathering material for his book on Egypt, Maillet began to write a more ambitious and speculative book about the earth, the sea, and time itself. This was dangerous work for a public servant, however well connected. If he was going to retain his position and his salary, he knew, he would have to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym.

  Perhaps it was by watching the way in which the Egyptians wrote their manuscripts from right to left that Maillet conceived of the idea of reversing the letters of his own name, much as Leonardo da Vinci had done with his mirror writing. Under the consul’s pen, “de Maillet” once reversed became “Telliamed,” and out of this strange reversal of his identity he shaped an alter ego, the mysterious Indian savant of his heretical book.* It gave him a fictional device, a seductive form of storytelling. It lent a frisson to his tale.

  In the opening pages of Telliamed, the French missionary-narrator explains to the reader that an Indian sage had recently appeared in Cairo and announced that he was ready to pass on his secret discovery. Over several days, during which the missionary had been struck almost mute by the Indian philosopher’s strange revelations, Telliamed had expounded a theory of the earth based on a hundred years of geological investigations, seabed mapping, diving, and fieldwork begun by his grandfather and continued by his family on a remote peninsula on the coast of India. The time had come, Telliamed had told the missionary, for the truth to be passed to the West. Then he had disappeared again, back into the Nile.

  Consul de Maillet was at once the wise Indian philosopher Telliamed and the awestruck, unnamed French missionary, as well as the ancient sage, the Aeiul, Telliamed’s grandfather. While it was of course Maillet who had gathered all the evidence and formulated his theory of the earth, in Telliamed it was the Indian philosopher who did the speaking. It was Telliamed, not the consul, who claimed that the earth was billions of years old, that it was shaped only by chance, and that all animals, including humans, had transmuted from primitive sea creatures. If the consul of Cairo had been asked, he would have said that it was Telliamed, not Maillet, who was the heretic.

  The elaborate conceits that shaped Maillet’s book, the fictionalized conversations, the anagrammed name, the mysterious Indian sage who issued from the Nile and disappeared back into it—all of this provided Maillet with a mask to protect his identity. But in using conversational form he was also imitating the shape of the great bestselling French science book of two decades earlier, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), a book written as a series of conversations about astronomy held through a series of moonlit, star-studded nights between a fictionalized astronomer and a marquise.

  Conversations was the first popular science book written in the vernacular; in it, Fontenelle, a poet and a playwright inspired by the new sciences and particularly by the work of René Descartes, had found a way of turning new Cartesian scientific ideas into an act of sustained persuasion that was also daring, entertaining, and seductive. Surveying the night sky, for instance, the astronomer and the marquise considered the possibility of travelers from the moon. “What if they were clever enough to navigate the surface of our atmosphere and, from a curiosity to examine us, should be tempted to draw us up like fishes; would that please you?” asks the philosopher. “Why not?” the marquise replies, laughing. “I would voluntarily put myself in their nets, just for the pleasure of seeing the fishers.”

  The ideas that Fontenelle’s elegant and heretical book explored—ideas about alternative worlds, unimaginable races, great tracts of time, stars that waxed and waned through thousands of years—dominated the talk of the Paris salons for more than a century and enlarged ideas and imaginations: “Were the sky only a blue arch to which the stars are fixed, the universe would seem narrow and confined; there would not be room to breathe … [but now],” the marquise enthuses, “I seem more at liberty; to live in a freer air; and nature appears with astonishingly increased magnificence.”

  More deeply unchristian and speculative than Conversations, Telliamed made no attempt to apologize for its heretical claims; Maillet did not try to square his theory with the Bible or find a way of bringing God into the picture. He largely bypassed both. There was no God in Telliamed’s system of the earth. There was no maker. There were no supernatural explanations or interventions. Instead, Telliamed claimed, everything on the earth, all the landscapes, all the trees, flowers, animals, and people that live on it, have been made through the operations of le hasard, chance. The earth was not thousands of years old as the Church claimed, but billions of years old. The sea was slowly shrinking; falling sea levels shaped—and continued to shape—the landscape. Most shocking of all, the Indian philosopher insisted in its pages that all life on earth had evolved from primitive sea creatures and that men had evolved from sea versions of themselves. Those remnants of an earlier sea race of humans were still alive in the world, he declared, living as exiles, hiding their sea tails.

  The thirty-six-year-old Maillet had arrived in Egypt in 1692 with a set of questions shaped by his time in France, and particularly in Marseilles. Many of these questions, which pressed not only upon Maillet but upon a generation of European intellectuals, were stimulated by his reading of Fontenelle’s Conversations six years earlier. The questions at the core of Fontenelle’s book—where does time begin, how did the stars come into being, where does matter begin and end, how many living worlds are out there?—were expanded in the conversations Maillet had in the salons of Marseilles and in the circle of his patron Pontchartrain in Paris. Fontenelle’s book and Claude Gadrois’ treatise Conversation on the Influence of the Stars (Discours sur les influences des astres) (1675) introduced Maillet to René Descartes’ cosmology for the first time—the theory that stars had been born from a vortex and continued to mutate through dark and luminous phases, shrinking and cooling, heating and swelling by turns. Maillet took a copy of Conversations with him to Cairo and searched out Fontenelle’s other scientific papers; in one of the
se he read of Bernard Palissy’s Admirable Discourses and gave an approving description of “the simple potter” in his account of fossil formation in the Second Conversation of Telliamed, chronicling the “striking proofs” Palissy had collected in his Paris cabinet and lectures. Palissy’s arguments had convinced Maillet not only that the waters of the earth were infused with generative elements, as the potter argued, but that both sea and air were filled with minute seeds and that new species were being produced constantly at all the transmigration points.

  After leaving Egypt in 1708 and settling in Leghorn, Maillet continued to add to his great work, collecting geological facts from savants, traders, sailors, and ships’ captains; he visited more cabinets of curiosities, continued to scour the natural history pages of the European journals, and traveled the length and breadth of Europe measuring riverbeds, searching out shells at the tops of mountains and at ancient ruined ports, looking for further evidence of a fallen and falling sea and for reports of sea people. In Leghorn he discussed his ideas with his great friend the Constable Marie Mancini Colonna, an elderly divorcee who had been the first love of the king of France, who now lived an itinerant life dependent on patrons, exiled from several countries for her affairs and scandals and constantly under surveillance. It was Marie Mancini Colonna who provided Maillet with the stories of sexual and moral improprieties that he was required to send back to Pontchartrain for the king’s ministers to use in their diplomatic and political negotiations.

  His field researches were often aided by luck. In 1714, for instance, the engineers digging a ditch from the new infirmary of Leghorn to the old infirmary hit a layer of mud under several rock strata. Here they found a hollow log about twenty feet long embedded two or three feet in mud flecked with seashells, pinecones, animal horns, bones, and teeth. They sent for Maillet—he was well known to the miners, engineers, and road makers in the area—who confirmed that it was a pump from a wrecked ship that had once sailed on seas long retreated. With new evidence like this surfacing all the time, Maillet could not bring his book to a conclusion. There were always more facts to find, more libraries, more books, more reports and stories. His chests now contained hundreds and hundreds of pages.

  Like Jahiz’s Book of Living Beings, Telliamed was a melting pot, a synthesis of ideas, “facts,” reports, and stories collected from across the world and from different traditions and cultures over many centuries, all of them convinced in different ways of the earth’s formation through a retreating sea. Like the land of Egypt itself, crafted and carved by the Nile, Telliamed constantly changed its shape as new materials were brought into it. Though Maillet’s questions and his search for origins may have been engendered in Marseilles and Paris, they were sharpened and remade by the Arabic and Persian authors he read, such as Ahmed al-Makrisi, a fifth-century Cairo geographer and historian who wrote An Historical and Topographical Description of Egypt and A History of the Ayoubite Sultans and Memluks; Maillet brought Arabic historians and geographers onto the stage of his book alongside Herodotus, Seneca, and Pliny as fellow heretics, and he allowed them to speak for themselves. Most important of these was Omar Khayyám, whom Maillet referred to as Omar el Aalem, who “taught philosophy at Samarkand about 800 years ago.” In Telliamed, Maillet devoted more than two pages to Khayyám’s ideas about the diminution of the sea, stressing the intellectual risks Khayyám took and his collision with the authorities that resulted in his exile from Samarkand for heresy. As consul, Maillet had access to Khayyám’s geographical and geological work, pages that have been lost to the West. Maillet was acutely conscious that with Telliamed he, too, was on extremely dangerous ground.

  In 1717, Maillet returned from Leghorn, where he had been first consul and then inspector of French establishments in the Levant and on the Barbary Coast,* to Marseilles. The French port city, which received goods from the East, silk from Spain, rice and wheat from the Levant, Yemen mocha from the Barbary Coast, Arabic coffee from Egypt, and new American coffee beans from Martinique, was another crossing point, teeming with foreign traders and sailors. French ships set sail with flour, wine, eau-de-vie, marble mantels, chalk brick, soap, shoes, and French textiles. Maillet set up house in the rue de Rome near the old port where he could keep an eye on trading activities from his upper windows.

  However, as inspector, it was difficult for him to focus on his book; he spent most of the following two years sailing between Algiers, Alexandria, Syria, and Cyprus, sometimes arriving incognito in an unmarked boat in order to undertake investigations or to broker treaties or inspect accounts. On his retirement in 1719, Maillet returned to his Marseilles house on a modest royal annuity, working on his manuscripts, ordering his library, and continuing to write reports. The new secretary of state for the navy, the third of the Phélypeaux dynasty, Jean Phélypeaux, no longer required him to provide reports of sexual scandal, but now wanted instead to mine the depth of his mercantile knowledge. After forty years, Maillet was still the eyes and ears of the French king.

  When plague forced him to leave Marseilles in 1720, Maillet headed for Paris, determined to find a publisher. He now had working drafts of four books but had lost control of all of them: his book on Egypt, a short treatise on Ethiopia, a longer set of memoirs on Ethiopia, and Telliamed. The manuscripts had all become unwieldy. The Egypt book badly needed a structure; the arguments of Telliamed had been lost under all the evidence. He was now in his sixties, and time was running out.

  A clandestine book trade had burgeoned in Paris in the first decade of the eighteenth century. A community of loosely networked savants and translators were busy identifying, translating, and reissuing controversial, materialist, and radical books that challenged religious, intellectual, and political orthodoxies. These books, which would often include new prefaces and commentary, were sometimes published in Paris but more often appeared in Amsterdam or The Hague, where the trade in clandestine books was less closely policed. The French authorities had established the first inspectorate of the book trade in order to control the growth of this seditious material; there were forty-one royal censors checking books in the early 1730s, and punishments included book burnings and imprisonment.

  In Paris, Maillet hoped to find an intellectual patron who would have the courage to collaborate on Telliamed as well as to edit and restructure his Egypt book. First he approached his friend the Abbé Granet, a humanist, who was busy editing the many works of the great French dramatist Corneille. Granet turned the Egypt manuscript down. Next he approached the geographer and mapmaker Jean Baptiste Liebaux, who promised he would begin work on it when he could and took the manuscript away to read. Meanwhile, a Parisian publisher agreed to publish Maillet’s treatise on Ethiopia as one of several additions to a reprint of a translation of the account of the voyages of a Jesuit Portuguese priest written in the previous century. Things were looking up.

  But what was he to do with his most dangerous book? The manuscript of Telliamed had been circulating in Paris and Marseilles for several years, but though it was a controversial book about the history of the earth, it did not yet include Maillet’s radical theories about species change and human origins. In 1726, relieved that his treatise on Ethiopia was now in press and the Egypt book in the hands of a prestigious editor, Maillet sent a copy of the manuscript of Telliamed to the sixty-nine-year-old Fontenelle, who was now perpetual secretary of the Academy of Science, asking for his help in editing it. He knew he was not the first to have developed a theory on the origin of the earth, he explained, but he believed he was the first to have discovered the way it had changed and been able to prove it to be true beyond doubt. He asked for Fontenelle’s advice: although he had gathered a great deal of proof to support his theories about the origins of species, he considered them to be still too controversial for publication.

  Fontenelle urged him to expand the book. He reminded him that the eminent German natural philosopher Gottfried Leibniz had speculated on extinct species in an essay on fossils that had been reporte
d by the Academy in 1706. He assured him that Descartes’ ideas were no longer so controversial in Paris and that the question of the origin of species was the most burning philosophical problem of the day. It was on everyone’s lips. If Maillet had evidence and proof relating to the origins of species, he must disclose it.

  So in Marseilles in 1722, in the aftermath of the great plague, Maillet began to sort through the materials he had gathered for the most controversial conversation of all: Conversation 3, “On the Origin of Species.” He was still revising it fourteen years later in 1736, redrafting, rephrasing, putting the conversation in and taking it back out. He wrote to the Marquis de Caumont in 1737 in the last year of his life: “Telliamed has all the trouble in the world out of this conversation about which he is not happy.” In the narrative, even the usually unperturbed Indian philosopher hesitates before he discloses these most dangerous of ideas to the French missionary. He also ensures that his boat is in the harbor, sails up, ready for him to effect a quick disappearance.

  Maillet was quite secure in his conclusions now; he had gathered a mountain of evidence, scores of multiply witnessed sightings of sea people from across the world, from different centuries, and from many different sources and authorities. He could only hope that the weight of evidence would be enough to persuade some of his readers. But the words on the page trembled under his ventriloquist’s pen.

  Telliamed’s species theory was startling, extraordinary, and bizarre: billions of years ago, he claimed, a great sea had covered the earth. All life came into being in that ocean, evolving from tiny, invisible seeds; some species, including a form of sea people, had transmigrated from the sea to the land. Beaks and claws and necks and limbs slowly changed their shapes as species adapted to new environments. Some intermediate forms of sea-human species still swam in the sea, he claimed; some walked on land. Many hundreds of these sea people—with webbed feet, scales, or tails—had been sighted and reported by people in positions of authority. He had even seen them with his own eyes.