The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Trained as many of us are today in note-taking at school and university, as well as using digital folders on our laptops, it is easy to forget that Willughby and his colleagues would be treading unfamiliar paths in terms of organising their accumulated observations. Luckily, one or two of their predecessors had anticipated this potential problem and had published suggestions for classifying information. The Swiss physician Theodor Zwinger paved the way in 1577 with a book entitled Methodus Apodemica – literally, ‘methods of travel’, but specifically scholastic travel, exactly what Willughby and Ray were doing.11

  Zwinger’s approach was to construct tables that allowed travellers to place information in relevant categories, greatly facilitating the subsequent analyses of that material – an eminently sensible suggestion. Zwinger’s student Hugo de Bloot (aka Blotius), a librarian, scholar and natural historian, later developed a travellers’ checklist of what to record: geographic location, money, buildings, churches, rituals and so on. And even if Willughby and Ray didn’t take Bloot’s checklist with them, it may well have inspired them to construct their own.

  Finally, there was the issue of how one should conduct oneself while travelling. The answer, of course, was with decorum and critical acumen, as well as discretion when discussing religious and political matters. It is highly unlikely that all those undertaking the Grand Tour of the continent behaved in this way, but because Willughby and company’s tour was a fact-finding mission, appropriate etiquette undoubtedly helped to ensure their success.

  Crossing the English Channel entailed more than simply a change in language and religion. It also involved a massive ten-day change in calendar date, for France had been among the first countries to switch, in 1582, from the Julian (Solar) calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Proposed by Pope Gregory XIII, the change was motivated by the need to correct for the drift in dates caused by the fact that it took 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes, rather than exactly 365 days, for the earth to circle the sun. The switch in calendar, which facilitated the realignment of Easter with the vernal equinox (as it was meant to be), corrected for the accumulated drift through the ‘loss’ of ten days. It also resulted in potential confusion, some of which is alleviated by the terms ‘Old Style’ and ‘New Style’ when referring to the Julian and Gregorian calendars respectively. Further potential for misunderstanding was caused by different countries switching calendars at different dates, with Great Britain adopting the Gregorian calendar only in 1752. Willughby and his colleagues, however, stuck assiduously to their familiar Julian calendar throughout their travels.

  The day after arriving in Calais they set off for Dunkirk, beginning as they intended to carry on by soaking up all that was different. Perhaps surprisingly, their journey started with a visit to some English nuns: ‘They spake very civilly to us, and told us they were in number 44. They live very strictly, and never see the face of any man; the bars were of iron that we discours’d through.’ At another convent of English nuns the same day, Willughby and his three friends had ‘the freedom to see and discourse with the ladies; about five or six giving us the entertainment of their company through an iron grate’. Down at the quay they examined some fish, noting the ‘marner’ (whose identity remains a mystery), another ‘some call’d tench’, and a third, the ‘potshoest, i.e. Scorpoena bellonij [= Scorpion fish Scorpaena spp]’.12

  In the palace gardens at Brussels on 30 April were two captive eagles, an ostrich and two white Muscovy ducks. The ducks may have been noteworthy because the wild Muscovy duck, native to Mexico, Central and South America, has glossy dark-green plumage and was first brought to Europe in the sixteenth century. The domesticated, white-plumaged birds were sufficiently unusual to secure themselves a place in the Ornithology. In a later publication John Ray explained the name by saying that it is nothing to do with ‘Moscow’, but pertained to the bird’s musky odour – the function of which remains unknown.13

  They visited the university at Louvain, recording the way the students were taught and that they wore gowns and square caps, noting also that when the students enrolled at this university they had to ‘swear their belief of all the doctrines of the Romish church’. The city itself, they felt, ‘for trading and wealth is much decayed since the Low-Country [Eighty Years] wars’. Two days after leaving Louvain they were in Antwerp where Ray listed the many rare plants in the garden of the priest Franciscus van Steerbeck.14

  There were many stalls ‘well stored with fish of several sorts’ at Machlin (Machelen): ‘we saw the Vinder-fish or Vintz [again, unknown], Cods, piscis Mai, i.e. Alosa sive clupea [allis shad], Barbles, Holybutt [halibut: holy because it was eaten on religious holidays, butt = flatfish], Hootes, i.e. Oxyrhyncus [sturgeon?], and Eless [= eels?]’. In a druggist’s shop, they examined a preserved armadillo, a dried sturgeon and a ‘little square fish having a round mouth, two horns before on the head, and as many on the tail’ (possibly a long-horned cowfish Lactoria cornuta, from the Indo-Pacific – and undoubtedly a dried specimen). In the same shop were preserved crocodiles and alligators and two ‘horns’, one of which was over eight feet long. These were the tusks (an upper canine tooth) of the narwhal, widely believed at that time to be the horn of the unicorn, and because of its alleged magical powers a must-have item for any cabinet of curiosities. Although Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala, published an image of a fish-like creature with a single long horn in the mid-1500s, it was only in 1636 that the Danish physician, Ole Worm, famous for his own Wunderkammern (wonder room or cabinet of curiosities), discovered the true identity of the unicorn’s horn, which he did by obtaining one still attached to a skull of what was obviously a whale. Ray knew this too, writing that it was ‘the horn of a fish of the cetacean kind … not the horn of a quadruped, as is vulgarly but erroneously thought’.15

  In a different druggist’s shop they witnessed another Arctic curiosity: a ‘Greenland man in a boat’.16 This was a copy, as Skippon knew, of ‘that which hangs up at Hull in England’. This particular curiosity had its origins off the coast of Greenland in 1613, when the crew of an English vessel, the Heartsease, rescued an Inuit found exhausted at sea in his kayak. They brought him aboard and tried to revive him, but he died three days later. On their return, an effigy of the man seated in his kayak, and in his original clothes, was displayed by Trinity House in Hull.17

  Drawing of the Inuit man in his kayak rescued by the Heartsease in 1613.

  On 15 May 1663 the party took a boat to Middelburg and were searched, ‘as were all vessels going to and from Antwerp’, for security reasons.18 There in the town hall they saw two black eagles ‘shut up in a cage’, which the town’s charter apparently obliged it to keep.19 Ray later described these as ‘double the bigness of a raven, but lesser than the pyarg [white-tailed sea-eagle]’; and said ‘of the place of this bird, its food and manner living, building its nest, eggs and conditions, etc., we have nothing certain’.20 Given that they did not know what species it was, it is hardly surprising they knew nothing about its biology. Their ‘identification’, it seems, was based on Aldrovandi, who mentions ‘black eagles’ in his books; but, in all probability, the Middelburg eagles were golden eagles.

  Also in that town they visited the house of someone named ‘Cliver’ (presumably Kluijver), who showed them some of his rarities, including ‘sea-horses teeth’ (in all likelihood the tusks of a walrus, once known as the seahorse), a whale’s penis (dried, I presume), more ‘unicorn’ horns, a sea wolf (possibly a dried specimen of the northern wolf fish Anarhichas denticulatus), a sea porcupine (possibly the tropical porcupine fish Diodon holocanthus, or the spiny puffer fish, both of which when dried make spectacular museum pieces), an ostrich egg with faces carved on it, twelve dodecahedrons of ivory one within another, a circumcision knife made of a blueish stone, and ‘dragon’s teeth, i.e. the petrified teeth of a shark’.21

  From Middelburg they travelled on to Bergen op Zoom from where on 21 May they hired a ‘waggon [sic] drawn by three horses abreast, which carried
us … to a village called Sundert’. It was here that they shot a red-backed shrike. Much later when writing the Ornithology, Willughby and Ray refer to this as Lanius tertius, ‘called in Yorkshire the flusher’.22 Shrikes would have been easy to shoot because of their habit of sitting out in the open on the top of a bush, and they killed another ‘between Heidelberg and Strasburgh, about a village called Linkenom’. This one was ‘the greater butcher bird’ or great grey shrike, of which they comment: ‘We are told, that it is found in the mountainous parts of North England, as for instance in the Peak District of Derbyshire’ – which is true, but only as a winter visitor.23 Two other types of shrike are named and described in the Ornithology, but both are woodchat shrikes, the first an immature bird with ‘the breast elegantly variegated with the like black semicircles, almost after the manner of the wryneck’; the other is clearly an adult bird ‘whose head was a lovely red’. We also learn from their account that Ray later saw and described another woodchat shrike in Florence – almost certainly from the bird market – and ‘Mr Willughby also described another killed near the Rhene [Rhine] in Germany.’24

  From these descriptions we get a clear sense of Willughby’s eye for detail. Of the great grey shrike, he says ‘the nostrils are round, above which grow stiff black hairs or bristles’. We now refer to these as rictal bristles – modified feathers – whose bases contain numerous sensory nerve endings. Of the red-backed shrike, Willughby commented on the notch on the upper mandible of the bill; a feature found in few other birds.

  ‘About six in the afternoon we took our seats in the passage-boat, somewhat like our pleasure-barges on the Thames … and by one horse were drawn in two hours time to Delft.’25 This gentle, undemanding form of travel must have provided a welcome change from their horses and an opportunity for the four men to chat, make notes and discuss what they’d seen so far, and what they hoped to see at their next stop.

  The cabinet of curiosities owned by the Delft apothecary Jean van der Mere (Jan van der Meer) was packed with intriguing zoological specimens, including a civet cat, a moose with enormous palmate antlers, the skin of a rattlesnake and an elephant’s tail that Ray considered ‘a very small thing considering the bigness of the animal’.26 Also in Delft they found a ‘chirurgeon’s’ (surgeon’s) anatomy theatre stuffed with exciting specimens: the mummified leg of a man, ‘a flying cat or squirrel with membranous wings and tail’, the head of an elephant, the skull of a babirusa, Babyrousa babyrousa (an Indonesian wild pig whose extraordinarily long tusks curl upwards from the lower jaw, through the upper lip and towards the eyes), and a starfish with five radii on a convex shell that Skippon’s sketch allows us to see is the ‘test’ or skeleton of a sand dollar (an echinoderm). In Ray’s notes on their visit (and comparing his with Skippon’s it seems they shared but didn’t completely duplicate information), he mentions a ‘Soland-goose out of Groenland’, which may be a northern gannet; several sorts of hummingbird; the dried head of a hornbill (said to be ‘worth twelve florins in Amsterdam’); a feather garment from the Straits of Magellan; the egg of a cassowary; and the eggs of an Indian goose – whatever that refers to.27 This final example makes the point that as exhilarating as it was for Willughby and his colleagues to see and handle such unusual objects, with little or no information or context – and indeed, a high risk of misinformation – it must have been frustratingly difficult to know what to make of them. In addition, unless they made notes as they went around these collections or were given a catalogue or list, it must have taxed their memory each evening to record everything they had seen during the day.

  From Delft they travelled once again by horse-drawn boat to The Hague, arriving at Leiden three hours later. At the university there they were interested in what the students were reading and no doubt drew comparisons with Cambridge.28 Leiden’s physic garden comprised ‘a square of less than an acre of ground, but well stored with plants, of which there have been at sundry times several catalogues printed’.29 In the anatomical theatre they found ‘preserved many skeletons of men and beasts, skins of beasts, parts of exotic animals, and other rarities’. They saw horned beetles from the East Indies, petrified mushrooms (=?), the skin of a ‘Tartarian [Tartar] prince who ravished his sister’, an anteater ‘bigger than an otter, having a very long snout, long crooked claws, coarse bristly hair and a long brush tail’. This was obviously the giant anteater Myrmecophaga tridactyla from Central and South America. Even today the size and shape of this extraordinary animal seems improbable, so Willughby and his companions must have been amazed by it.30

  Willughby’s continental travels with John Ray, Philip Skippon and Nathaniel Bacon: the Netherlands, 1663.

  In Leiden they took the opportunity to attend some lectures at the university, including one in which the insect that ‘makes the Indian cochinele’ was described – the highly prized carmine dye cochineal, extracted from a Mexican scale insect. Beneath the anatomy theatre they saw the ‘great skeleton of a fish we guess’d to be a whale’, presciently noting that the shoulder blades were like those of a quadruped. Willughby and Ray knew that whales weren’t fish, but there was a widespread perception that they were.31

  A visit to Leiden’s public library accompanied by a Mr Newcomen, minister of the English congregation, allowed them to examine the original papers of the famous historian Joseph Scaliger. It may have been Scaliger’s interest in philology – the study of literary texts – that attracted Willughby and his party. It was then on to visit Dr Van Horne, professor of anatomy, who entertained them with ‘great kindness and civility’ and showed them many anatomical specimens, of which the most notable were the skulls of human embryos ‘wherein were clearly discern’d the disjunction of bones which are afterwards not to be observed, the intermediate cartilages hardening to bone’. He also showed them the three tiny bones of the ear: the hammer, stirrup and anvil, and the ‘bones found in the glandula pinealis of men, which were very small’. But Van Horne was mistaken; the pineal gland (located near the centre of the brain) contains no bones. The pineal is an endocrine gland shaped like a pine cone – hence its name – that in the mid-1600s was thought to have a special significance, withDescartes referring to it as the ‘seat of the soul’ – the vital link between mind and body.32 The gland rests upon the butterfly-shaped sphenoid bone in the centre of the cranium, and it may have been this that Van Horne showed them.

  On 5 June, before leaving Leiden, the party ‘made a bye-journey to Sevenhuis [known today as Zevenhuizen], a village about four leagues [roughly five kilometres] distant, to see a remarkable grove, where, in time of year, several sorts of wild-fowl build and breed’. Travelling by boat they reached ‘a most pleasant wood’ occupied by a mixed colony of cormorants (which Ray refers to as shags), spoonbills, ‘Quacks’ and ‘Regers’ or herons. This must have been a remarkable experience. On their journeys through Britain, they had seen seabird colonies – albeit at a distance – but here they were in the heart of the colony. Under the nesting trees they were in danger of being splattered by the bird excrement showering down through the vegetation. Then there was the incessant and unavoidable screeching, belching and vomiting of the adult and immature birds above, and finally, the smell. To my mind and nose, the odour of heron colonies is curiously reminiscent of baked bread generously mixed with decaying fish and decomposing chicks that have fallen from their nest to die on the woodland floor.

  Sevenhuis bird reserve in the Netherlands with its abundance of herons, spoonbills and cormorants – an undated drawing by Simon Klamputs, but probably 1700s.

  They were astounded by the sight of cormorants nesting in trees and Ray considered them the only ‘whole-footed birds’ (birds with webbed feet) that are ‘wont to sit in trees, much less build its nest upon them’. Their visit coincided with the annual harvest of birds, presumably mainly for human consumption, although according to another visitor, Gottfried Hegenitius, thirty years earlier, two boatloads of live birds were sent to England each year. The method of harves
ting, as related in the Ornithology, was that once the young herons, spoonbills and cormorants were deemed fat enough, ‘those that farm the grove use an iron hook on a long pole to shake them out of the nest onto the ground’. Willughby was thus able to dissect a young cormorant, commenting on the blackish worms – parasites – that he found in its stomach. Ray must also have dissected a cormorant, probably elsewhere, for in the Ornithology he says that he too found worms similar to earthworms in it, along with an entire cod.33

  It was at Sevenhuis that they also obtained a well-grown spoonbill chick, noting that it weighed 45½ ounces and measured thirty-four inches from the tip of its beak to the end of its toes; ‘The colour of the body was snow-white like Swans.’ This must have been the only spoonbill they ever got to see in the hand, for in the Ornithology their description is based on this same immature individual shaken from its nest. In Willughby’s meticulous manner there is then an account of the bird’s external and internal features. Externally, of course, its most notable feature was the unusually shaped bill – whose spatulate tip we now know is full of sensory nerve endings allowing the spoonbill to distinguish edible from inedible items as it sifts its beak from side to side through the water.34 Internally, they noted that ‘We did not observe in our bird those reflections [twists and turns] of the wind-pipe, which Aldrovandi mentions, describes and figures.’

  Aldrovandi’s drawing of a dissected spoonbill showing the convoluted windpipe or trachea.

  Continuing, Willughby and Ray recorded: ‘It has a large gall: the guts had many revolutions. Above the stomach the gullet was dilated into a bag.’ Finally, they comment on the spoonbill’s eggs, which are ‘of the bigness of hens eggs, white and powdered with a few sanguine or pale red spots’.35