Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  While George drew and painted drummers across any piece of blank paper he could find, Darwin made his turns around the Sand Walk and, during his allotted three hours of work, plunged further and further into the proofs of the second barnacle volume, which had sat on his desk since August. He had just made it past the two-hundredth page.4 He had decided that, in order to keep life simple, he would not begin work dissecting and writing up the sessile barnacles until all the stalked barnacles were safely in print; there would be no confusing overlaps between books this time. But he had discovered too late and to his enormous frustration that a barnacle that he had named Xenobalanus siphonicella in the volume had already been named Xenobalanus globicipitis by Japetus Steenstrup, the Danish zoologist, in a previously published paper.5 It was too late to change the proofs, but he would have to add Corrigenda; the second volume was no longer quite perfect. Furthermore, this would mean that he would have to wait for Steenstrup to send him the publication details of the paper – knowing Steenstrup, this might take months.6

  Each reading of the barnacle proofs made him less and less certain of his conclusions – what would people make of the Ibla and Scalpellum males and his conclusions about them? Would these Münchausen stories be believed? Or would the storyteller be laughed at, publicly ridiculed? Every page was the result of rigorous struggle with words and sleepless nights trying to determine how these creatures fitted into recognizable genera; blood and sweat in every phrase. But how many people would actually read them? What mark would they make on the world? The Ray Society would send out the volumes to its members, and it would send him a further twenty complimentary copies to distribute himself, but he would have to seek out reviewers for himself, using all his arts of persuasion. He would have to publicize his barnacles for himself.7

  Hooker was now going through his own classification nightmares in the gardens of Kew. After all the glamour of Paris and the jurors’ reports of the Great Exhibition he was now trying to analyse his own Indian botanical hoard, his roomfuls of carefully labelled boxes of dried leaves and flowers, now housed in Kew’s Temple of the Sun and in a shed behind the Orangery. He was not alone: he had a partner in his labours, the fellow botanist, traveller and collector, Thomas Thomson. Their joint collections amounted to 150,000 specimens and six or seven thousand species. Hooker’s first problem, just as Darwin’s had been, was to find a way of making sense of the confusion of names that had been applied to the plant species he had collected by the various botanists and amateur plant collectors who had published papers – synonym after synonym, some correctly applied, some incorrect, like patchwork. He and Thomson both, like Darwin, deplored ‘the prevailing tendency to exaggerate the number of species and to separate accidental forms by trifling characters’.8 The classification of these plants, like the classification of barnacles, was in chaos as a result of collectors splitting and resplitting groups and species. He and Thomson had to forge some degree of order in their naming strategies before they could even begin to work out patterns of geographical distribution and diversification. They set out to reduce the numbers of species. What was needed was a degree of inclusivity – clear boundaries between species listed as large groups by patterns of affinity.9

  24 The Outside of a Stalked Barnacle

  The reality was much messier altogether. Hooker was now facing many of the impossible questions and impassable obstacles that Darwin had himself faced as he began the barnacle work, trying to define minute variations between one group and another. Where did one group begin and another end? Where were the boundaries? What were the critical parts of an Ibla or an orchid that made it essentially an Ibla or an orchid? And which plant or animal part served as the absolute measure of difference? The particular problem that faced Hooker in November 1851 was the New Zealand flowering plants, which showed, like Darwin’s barnacles, a terrifying degree of variation. He wrote to tell Darwin of his problems, knowing that these questions pressed on his friend’s species theories: ‘There are 4 or 5 genera of flowering plants in N.Z. so large (for an Island where all the genera are small) & so disgustingly protean, that I am again reconsidering old Bory de Vincents dictum as to the variability of Insula species … Coprosma, is almost peculiar to N.Zeald & for the life of me I do not know how to draw the line between there being only one species, or 28!’10

  How to draw the line indeed? And to which side of the critical line would Hooker’s frustrating classification forays take him when he came to publish? He had written from the Himalayas that, try as he might, he could not see sufficient evidence of Darwin’s species theory in the flowering plants of India; but gratifyingly, Darwin noted, he was at least prepared to look at his botanical specimens through the lens of the species theory. He had an open mind, and he had been impatient with Darwin, wanting him to return to the species theory, to finish it, send it out into the world. He was bored with the barnacles. He knew what explosive material Darwin had tucked away in his drawers and he wanted his friend to attend to it, gather the evidence, make the case, so that other people could use it.

  With Hooker, the secret sharer, back in England and writing lines like these, Darwin felt the pressure of the formed but not yet ripe theory more heavily than before – felt its weight upon him. He did not write about it to Hooker, yet it lay between them like a spectre of expectation, and he felt compelled to allude to it in each letter he wrote to Hooker on his return – a gesture, a glance, a promise that it had not been forgotten. Yet he had to finish the barnacles, and the enormous and ‘disgustingly protean’ community of sessile barnacles still lay before him, unmapped and unplaced, filling him with dread.11

  It was late in 1851. The two volumes of stalked barnacle classification had already taken him five years and perhaps broken his health. How much more time would the sessiles take – the most difficult task of all? He had written out a plan of work that made him feel better, a scheme that should take only a few months. He had made a list of all the sessile barnacle groups, saving the trickiest to the end: the group of truly aberrant burrowing barnacles would be his pièce de résistance, his swansong, before he passed on to the tiny group of fossil sessile barnacles and had done with barnacles for ever. Mr Arthrobalanus and his fellow deviants lay at the end of that plan of work – still waiting in the wings. When he reached him, the labours of this latter-day Hercules would be almost at an end.

  Sulivan came for dinner in December 1851. Lieutenant Sulivan of the Beagle, big-hearted, impatient with himself and with everyone around him, wanting to get on, wanting to get out, pacing the deck, was now Admiral Sulivan. Sulivan the hunter, the restless, the friend with whom Darwin had stirred plum pudding in an empty rectory on an abandoned island one Christmas Day, now in his forties, too, and with half a dozen children, brought his restlessness, his sleeplessness and his hunger to the quiet of Down in December. Over dinner he stirred them all up with his stories of the Sullivan family’s adventures and his predictions of impending invasion. George was besotted.

  Disembarked from the Beagle, Sulivan, like Darwin, had married and then taken his bride, a steely and adventurous admiral’s daughter, to sea again, as part of his commission to survey and map the inhospitable Falkland Islands. So while Charles and Emma had sown their orchards and borders at Down, Captain and Mrs Sulivan had sailed the coasts of the Falkland Islands. Without chloroform, Mrs Sulivan had given birth to babies on ship and on land. Falkland, their eldest boy, had been, they claimed, the first European to be born on the Islands. Then, while Sulivan petitioned unsuccessfully for a command back in Plymouth, his health suffering, they had decided to try their luck back out in the Falklands, not this time as surveyors, but as breeders of horses and sheep. Sulivan told the assembled guests how, granted three years’ leave of absence, he had returned from the Admiralty on a Monday morning to say to his wife, ‘Will you be ready to leave by Thursday?’ to which she had replied, ‘No, but I will be by Monday next.’

  The family had sailed for the Islands with a recently hired governe
ss, five children under the age of eleven, a maidservant, a manservant and his wife, six thoroughbred horses for breeding, sheep and a piano. By the time they arrived there were several men at the docks, waiting to propose to the maidservant, for there were virtually no unmarried women on the island. The maid was married within weeks, Mrs Sulivan told the Darwins, leaving her to manage her new house and five children almost entirely unaided.

  Sulivan had brought Darwin a present: not snuff or port for the cellar, but a crustacean taken from the stomach of a dolphin, drowned in the Falklands kelp. He knew how to please his old shipmate. It was, Darwin told him as he examined its curled horns and carapace, a very rare specimen indeed, so rare it must be seen by the eyes of James Dana in New Haven, Connecticut, who was completing his two-volume life’s work on crustacea. So he slipped it, carefully nested in a wooden pill box, inside the parcel containing two complimentary copies of his barnacle volumes he was sending Dana. Dana never received the tiny, carefully wrapped wooden box. Officials at the New York Customs House opened Darwin’s parcel and lost the box with its well-travelled and rare inhabitant somewhere amongst the piles of letters, parcels, brown paper and string.12

  Darwin found Sulivan’s emigration tales alarming. This was hardly the kind of grand future he had fantasized about for William and George; but then Sulivan, in choosing the Falkland Islands, had hardly chosen the land of milk and honey. Even the journey home had been terrifying. Sailing for England – not with five children but with six, for Mrs Sulivan had given birth to another baby during their last months in the Falklands – the ship on which the family sailed had been too heavily laden. Two members of the crew had stoked up a mutiny within weeks of embarking on the ninety-day voyage. However, when the mutinous crew had gone below to make their deliberations, quick-thinking Sulivan, the Captain and the mate had nailed down the hatches, lowered the sails and sailed the ship themselves for the few days it took to starve the crew into submission. Mrs Sulivan, who had nursed her children through sieges in Montevideo and the wild climatic changes of the Falklands, was uncomplaining. Perhaps, then, Charles and Emma were better off here on this quiet ship on the Downs, safe from pirates, mutineers and war.

  Sulivan brought anxieties and sleepless nights, too, to the quiet world of Down. He was a man of war. Son of a naval commander, nephew of three naval officers, his return to England from the Falklands had been prompted not a little by the smell of war. After the women had retired from table that night in December, he reminded the country gentlemen assembled around Darwin’s table that Napoleon was dangerous. The coup d’état the French leader had just pulled off in Paris was likely to be only the beginning. He was ambitious; he had plans; he wanted an empire – called himself an emperor. Moreover, the French were clever, unscrupulous and deadly enemies. If you were Napoleon, he challenged his guests, flushed by wine, where would you enter England if you were determined upon conquest? Where would be the easiest point of entry? The Kent coast, he told them triumphantly, drawing maps and diagrams with his fingers on the tablecloth, was the easiest place from which to march on London; and sleepy villages like Down lay right in the Frenchman’s path. Imagine a French battalion surrounding your house at night, he challenged them, pushing the salt cellars with sinister precision further toward the fruit bowl piled high with winter pears. How would their servants fare? Would they fight? When was the last time they handled guns? What kind of men did they have about them? How safe would their womenfolk be?

  What the country needed, Sullivan intoned, was a volunteer corps for the south-eastern counties, Martello towers in all the coastal villages, good road connections. Every hunting district should form troops of well-mounted young men armed with swords and light rifles. The men around Darwin’s table that evening urged Sulivan to write letters to the Naval and Military Gazette; some of the Gazette’s readers might have government influence, they reasoned. Darwin wondered about the state of his own guns and how men like Parslow might react to an invasion. There were certainly plenty of young men in the village who would fight, but would they be ready?

  Darwin worried his way through Christmas and into spring. ‘My nights are always bad,’ he wrote to his cousin Fox in March, and at night his worries magnified to monstrous proportions; his thoughts twisted and turned through worries about money, the future of his children, inherited weaknesses resurfacing in his children (he and Emma had started to keep a diary of five-year-old Lizzie’s strange twitches and pronunciation habits, worrying that she might have an inherited defect) and the French invading Down. ‘My three Bugbears are Californian & Australian Gold, beggaring me by making my money on mortgage nothing – The French coming by the Westerham and Sevenoaks roads, & therefore enclosing Down – and thirdly Professions for my Boys.’13 He continued: ‘I congratulate & condole you on your tenth child; but please to observe when I have a 10th, send only condolences to me. We now have seven children, all well Thank God, as well as their mother; of these 7, five are Boys; & my Father used to say that it was certain, that a Boy gave as much trouble as three girls, so that bona fide we have 17 children …’

  He had capitulated on William’s education, agreeing to send him to Rugby rather than the experimental schools they had considered at first; but his mind was not at rest about it. How would Rugby shape him? The Lubbock boy, John, now eighteen and still riding over from High Elms to Down House on his pony to work alongside Darwin at the microscope, had turned out well enough after his Eton education. He was clever and curious and he could write well and precisely. Being taught to write – well – that was perhaps the most important training of all, the kind of training his tutor, the Revd Henslow, had insisted on at Cambridge. He had even tried to persuade Henslow to write a little training book for children: ‘I often reflect over your inimitably (as it appears to me) good plan of teaching correct, concise language & accurate observation, namely by making your pupils describe leaves &c…. a most useful volume might be published … What a habit it would give to youths of thinking of the meaning of words & what powers of expressing themselves! Compare such habits with that of making wretched Latin verses…’14 Correct and concise language still eluded Darwin in his daily struggles to put barnacles into words.

  His health kept him living as a hermit, he told his cousin Fox, and if this had not been so, he would indeed have been off to Yorkshire to see and attempt to describe the effects of the bursting in February 1852 of the Holmfirth Reservoir, a rare opportunity to witness the effects of violent deluge acting upon a landscape. The mill owners, in an attempt to control the erratic water supplies of the region, had built the reservoir, a dam of some 340 feet in length and ninety-eight feet high with a mass of earth on either side, above a valley of mills, villages and shops with a large population of mill workers and shopkeepers. Having successfully controlled the water flow and supply to the factories, the mill owners, engineers and commissioners had subsequently neglected the maintenance of the dam and the whole structure had quickly become rotten and defective. Heavy winter rain had choked the valves of the overflow and on the afternoon of 5 February the embankment had burst and floodwaters swept through the hamlet of Holm like a tidal wave, carrying everything before it: churches, shops, barns, and cottages. Hundreds of inhabitants had drowned, often whole families together.

  Darwin, so long a student of the effects of natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes and tidal waves, wanted to see the shape of the flooded valley, in the aftermath of this catastrophe, with his own eyes. The papers described the effects, but journalists were inevitably more interested in the tragic human consequences than the geological ones:

  When morning broke, the spectacle presented by the once busy valley was fearful in the extreme. The shattered fragments of walls retained the ruins of other buildings or their own. – Mill wheels, timber, roofs of houses, fractured carts, pieces of cloth, and household furniture were intermingled with huge rocks, or half buried in stones and mud. The boilers of steam-engines loomed large in the bed of
the stream or stranded in the gardens – while here and there a drowned corpse was to be seen lifeless on the water-left shingle, or buried in ruins; to the horror of this spectacle was added the presence of numerous skulls and other human bones which the torrent had washed out from the graveyards.15

  On 26 March 1851, almost a year to the day after he had taken Annie to Malvern, Darwin began reading a book by a promising young naturalist who had been making a name for himself in microscopical studies and marine invertebrates, Philip Gosse’s A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica. Gosse, like Huxley, was one of the new voices in zoology: he had already published a number of articles in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History; but although his prose style was lively and elegant like Huxley’s, and his observations acute, he was publishing his books at this time principally for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and, as a zealous Christian, his writing tended to be descriptive and worshipful rather than theoretical or speculative. He had returned from his travels to Canada and Jamaica like Darwin and Huxley, with copious zoological and botanical notes, and now he was seeking to invest this knowledge in publications that might secure him an income.