by Tim Birkhead
ouzels or blackbirds – either ring ouzels or blackbirds
partridge – grey partridge (the red-legged partridge was introduced later)
pewits – black-headed gull
pheasants
pigeons – woodpigeon and other doves
plovers – probably golden plover
puffins – Manx shearwater
quail
redshanks
rils – unidentified
roe – unidentified
sand[er]lings
sea plover – grey plover
snipe
stint
swans – mute swans were eaten at feasts; may include whooper and Bewick’s
teal
throstles – song thrushes
thrushes – song thrushes
wheatear
wild duck – mallard and presumably other species
wild geese – presumably several species
woodcock
Note: The list of birds is from Edward Chamberlayne’s (1676) list of abundant English foods in Angliae Notitia or the Present State of England. Some identifications are from Swann (1913).
It was during their three days in Nuremberg that Willughby acquired another set of bird illustrations. We know this because Ray mentions it in the preface to the Ornithology: ‘At Nurenberg [sic] in Germany he [Willughby] bought a large volume of pictures of birds drawn in colour.’25 Curiously, neither Ray nor Skippon mention the acquisition of these pictures in their travel diaries. It is possible that Willughby went off on his own again to negotiate a price, but it is hard to imagine the other members of his party being unaware or indifferent to the paintings. Nor do we know from whom Willughby purchased the pictures, or who executed them. They still exist, at least in part, in the Middleton Collection, and judging from the diversity of styles and quality, several different artists were involved. Some of the illustrations like the cuckoo are superb, whereas others, such as the small passerines perched on branches decorated with unconvincing sprays of stunted leaves, are both unrealistic and unattractive.
This collection of images was transferred from Willughby’s descendants, the Middleton family, to Nottingham University Library in 1947. The pictures have been scrutinised by several historians and perhaps most intensively in the early 2000s by Nick Grindle, now at University College London. I have looked at these images too and they comprise a mixed and – to me at least – a visually rather disappointing collection. Grindle’s ability to find some order there is impressive. He suggests that up to nine different artists were involved, and notes that many of the 116 bird images are annotated, some by Willughby himself and always in Latin, as was his way, but also perhaps by their previous owners in Dutch, French or German. Of the fish, there are some eighty-two paintings or drawings by twenty-four different artists and another group of fourteen bearing the signatures of Willughby’s colleagues, including Philip Skippon, Nathaniel Bacon and Francis Jessop, but whether they executed them or merely lent them is unknown.
One tiny and easily overlooked clue as to how Willughby used his bird images is – as Grindle noted – that many of them have tiny pin holes in their corners. When this was first pointed out to me, it conjured up images of a historian with nothing else to go on desperately clutching at any clue that might help him or her interpret what they were seeing. As I became more familiar with the Middleton Collections, with the way historians work, and with Willughby himself, I found myself agreeing with Nick Grindle’s interpretation. His suggestion is that the holes tell us the illustrations were pinned onto backing sheets so that the bird images could be viewed together. Just think about it for a minute: it is so easy today for us to consult a field guide to see how a rook, crow or jackdaw compare. In Willughby’s day images were scarce, invariably monochrome and often poorly executed, making it difficult, to say the least, to see similarities and differences between species and perhaps identify natural groupings. Also, as Grindle suggests, the motivation for Willughby’s visual comparisons was the overarching desire to create a classification.
Journeying by coach from Nuremberg, Willughby and his colleagues travelled through beautiful pinewoods to arrive on the afternoon of 3 September 1663 in Altdorf, a tiny, walled town, whose houses they noted were ‘indifferently built’.26 The university at Altdorf conferred degrees of ‘doctors of law, physic and poetry, bachelors of divinity and matters of art’,27 but it was the university’s physic garden that they had come to see. This was created by Moritz Hoffmann, professor of medicine and botany and the author of an impressive illustrated catalogue of medicinal plants,28 who greeted his visitors with great charm. Knowing about his catalogue before they had set off from England, Willughby and Ray must have had the physic garden on their itinerary right from the start.
Hoffmann showed them two books of dried plants containing some 3,000 specimens: the first comprised specimens primarily from the Padua physic garden; the second were plants from the Altdorf garden. Willughby and his colleagues were also treated to several curiosities including the bones found in the human ear; ‘a little wooden head curiously imitating all the futures [features] and other parts of a human head’; an eye of box (wood) and ‘another of ivory, with the optic nerve, tunicae, humours &c’. They also marvelled at an early modern wheelchair designed by a lame person from Altdorf, enabling him to get to church ‘without any help’. Philip Skippon was so impressed that he included a diagram of the wheelchair in his journal.29
Trained in Padua, Hoffmann was one of several physicians just starting to become interested in minerals and fossils, and he proudly showed his visitors his collection. These included ‘pectinites’ – scallop-like fossils, glossoptera, sea balls from Naples and ammonites. Glossoptera were so-called because of their tongue-like shape (glosso = Greek for ‘tongue’) and were once thought to be the petrified tongues of dragons or snakes. Their true identity – fossilised sharks’ teeth – was revealed by the Italian philologist and antiquarian Fabio Colonna in 1610. Sea balls are mineral concretions rather than true fossils, which weather out of marine cliffs and whose spherical appearance encouraged their collection as curios.
As anyone with even the slightest interest in geology knows, ammonites are the commonest fossils, and in Willughby’s day they were referred to as serpent stones or snake stones. The name arises, obviously, from their coiled, snake-like form, but also because these fossils are particularly abundant near Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, where in the seventh century St Hilda, Whitby’s abbess, banished a plague of snakes by turning them to stone. That these particular snakes lacked a head was thanks to a beheading curse by Hilda’s contemporary, the hermit of Lindisfarne, St Cuthbert, who, incidentally, had a tame eider duck that followed him everywhere.30 So strong is the link between St Hilda and ammonites that one genus now bears the name Hildoceras and three ammonites adorn Whitby’s coat of arms. The snake myth was reinforced and given credence in Victorian times by local artisans carving serpent heads onto the fossils.
Ammonites are the petrified remains of the shell of extinct cephalopods – close relatives of the octopus and cuttlefish. They were common in the seas 200 to 400 million years ago and became extinct about 65 million years ago. Their shell comprises a series of gas-filled chambers by which the animal could regulate its position in the water column, and its soft body – complete with tentacles and a beak – occupied the final outermost chamber. The structure of the animal itself is unknown because it never fossilised, but the shell’s similarity to that of certain extant cephalopods allows palaeontologists to confidently infer what it was like.
No such confidence existed in Willughby’s day. Fossils were a mystery and – as exemplified by serpent stones – they are often imbued with convoluted tales regarding their origin.
The day after visiting Hoffmann the group travelled on to Neumarkt, where as Skippon tells us, ‘two miles [3 km] further we lodged this night in the straw at a poor village [whose name he had forgotten] where we found Cornua Ammonis [am
monites]’.31 In his account, Ray says that in some fields they ‘gather’d up [a] good store’ of fossils for themselves. Some of those ammonites may well be the ones that still lie in the uppermost drawer of Willughby’s cabinet.
In the mid-1600s fossils were a problem. What were they exactly? Sharks’ teeth did indeed seem to be what Fabio Colonna said they were, as was obvious from a comparison with the teeth of living (or rather, recently dead) sharks. On encountering fossil stems of giant horsetails (Equisetum) in Italy the following year, John Ray immediately recognised their similarity to living horsetails, allowing him and Willughby to conclude that ‘the parts not only of trees but also herbs themselves may sometimes petrifie’.32 Ammonite fossils were an issue, however, because – like dinosaur fossils discovered later – they didn’t obviously resemble any living organism. And if God had created all known organisms, what were these unknown things? Even more puzzling was the location of marine fossils, like cockles and scallops, far from the sea and at the tops of mountains.
Examples of fossils (l–r): three different ammonites and a scallop-like bivalve, all from Aldrovandi (1648)
In Bologna, Willughby and Ray visited Aldrovandi’s museum and examined his collection of fossils. They were already familiar with his comprehensive and thoughtful views on marine animal remains described in his De Reliquis Animalibus, and in his posthumously published Musaeum Metallicum.33 Both books contained plenty of images and ideas, including the notion that fossils, like crystals and other minerals, had ‘grown’ – a view that both Willughby and Ray could relate to as a result of their experiments with chemical gardens, in which lifelike but inanimate structures grew in front of their eyes.34 Given their reliance on the great Italian naturalist’s work, it is perhaps not unexpected that some of Willughby’s fossils are labelled with reference to Aldrovandi’s books.
Exactly at the time when Willughby and his friends were travelling across the continent, the question of what fossils were was being actively discussed at the Royal Society in London. Robert Hooke – extraordinarily brilliant, physically deformed and not universally popular – examined fragments of petrified wood using his newly acquired microscope in 1663, confirming that the specimen’s fine structure was exactly like that of extant trees. He concluded that fossils were the organic remains of long dead and – in some cases – extinct organisms. As though this wasn’t clever enough, he also came up with the earth-shattering idea that marine fossils found on the tops of mountains had got there as a result of earthquakes. Hooke’s ideas challenged conventional beliefs about the age of the earth and the biblical narrative, and the ensuing debate rumbled on for years.
Interestingly, Hooke’s wonderful insights had been anticipated in part at least by Xenophanes in the sixth century bc, suggesting that the impressions of leaves and all manner of sea creatures embedded in rock were the result of everything being covered in mud long ago, after which the impressions dried out.35
When he reached home in 1666, Ray became aware of the Royal Society’s fossil debate, and anxious to demonstrate how up to date he was with scientific developments, he decided to include a fourteen-page digression on fossils in his account of the continental journey, listing where they could be found and their probable origin. This was based partly on his own experience and partly on what he calls other ‘good writers’.
Ray accepted the biological origin of fossils because to do otherwise would ‘put a weapon into the atheists hands’. If fossils were sports of nature created ‘without reason or function … then living animals could also be produced without counsel or design’, forcing Ray to accept that fossils were once living creatures. But he wasn’t happy. The problem was that some fossils – like ammonites – looked like nothing on earth and therefore, if they were once living organisms, they must be extinct. Ray’s religious beliefs simply would not allow him to accept that God might have created certain animals or plants only to allow them to be subsequently lost.36
Willughby’s company entered Vienna on 15 September 1663, and visiting St Stephen’s Cathedral, looked in awe at the panorama of the city that was their reward for climbing the 414 stone steps to the top of the spire. In the narrow streets – busier, they said, than anywhere they had been other than London – there were Hungarian soldiers, proud, confident and curiously exotic. Dressed in boots and fur caps adorned with two or three long feathers and armed with a poleaxe and long, broad-bladed scimitars, they were an imposing sight. Most ‘are habited all in blue … some of the better sort wear black. Many have their heads are shaven, except one lock, which they let grow on the top of their heads. We saw some of their gentlemen on horseback, with leopards skins wrapt about them …’37 These were the victors of a pitched battle between an Austrian-Habsburg army and the Ottomans – the Battle of Saint Gotthard and part of the Fourth Austro-Turkish War of 1663–4 – that had occurred just six weeks earlier on the Raba river some eight kilometres south of Vienna.38
Visiting the markets, Willughby and his friends were fascinated to discover that they could buy land tortoises for about six pence apiece, ‘which are good meat when their heads and feet are cut off; they are found in these parts in muddy ditches’.39 To me these sound more like European pond terrapins, which are common around Vienna, whereas land tortoises occur only further south.
In a house in the Viennese suburbs they came across a picture of a Hausen fish – that is, a sturgeon – ‘of a great bigness’ that had been taken from the Danube ‘frequently bought hither in Lent’, adding that ‘Of the spermatic vessels ’tis said the ichthyocolla is made.’ Ichthyocolla refers to isinglass, the same substance Willughby and Ray used when growing their ‘chymical’ gardens in Cambridge. Skippon isn’t quite correct in saying that the isinglass is made from the Sturgeon’s ‘spermatic ducts’; it is from the swim bladder. The sturgeon was the most popular fish for this purpose, probably because of its size, but the swim bladders of many different fish also yield the collagen-based substance from which isinglass can be prepared.40
Significantly, Vienna provided an unusual opportunity to add to their word lists, first tested on their Welsh trip the previous year. Now, however, Willughby’s approach was to ask his informants for the Lord’s Prayer, and his prompt list comprised Latin rather than English words: ‘We busied ourselves with several persons in procuring Bohemian [Czech], Hungarian, Polonian [Polish] and Turkish words.’41 Skippon transcribed the Turkish words on a prompt list of his own making, and made notes on both phonetics and spelling. Willughby and some unknown persons – judging from the writing – took care of the rest, adding them to a prompt-list scroll on which had already been listed samples of Low Dutch (Dutch) and High Dutch (German). This was a joint project between himself and Philip Skippon, who continued to collect information, including Romansh and Maltese words when he and Ray later separated from Willughby and Bacon in Italy.
After nine days, Willughby’s party left Vienna on 24 September 1663, and headed south across the Alps to Venice and to a new world.
6
Italian Sophistication and Spanish Desolation
The journey from Vienna to Venice was tough. The weather was poor, the mountain tracks were steep, and throughout the entire sixteen-day journey Willughby and his friends had little to eat other than bread and ‘what was made of sorghum’. Even so, they managed to enjoy the discovery of some new Alpine plants and birds including nutcrackers and ‘mountain finches’ (bramblings). They were shocked, however, by tiny communities in the mountain valleys near Leoben in which the men and women had ‘great bronchoceles … some of which were single, others double and treble’ under their chins. Also known as ‘Bavarian Pokes’ these were goitres caused by enlarged thyroid glands. Worse, many of these people seemed to be ‘ideots and scarce sound of mind’.1
Since Roman times it has been known to some at least that the people of remote Alpine valleys, once referred to as cretins, often suffered from goitres, mental deficiency and stunted growth. The cause of this condition,
known now as congenital hypothyroidism, was originally attributed to stale mountain air. The true cause, however, discovered in 1851, was a lack of dietary iodine, an accident of geography and geology, exacerbated in this case by inbreeding.23
Descending from the mountains onto the sun-drenched, plant-rich plain near Friuli their spirits soared, with Ray noting that ‘This part of Italy hath been deservedly celebrated for its fertility, and may justly, in my opinion, be styled the garden of Europe.’
It was about to get better. Venice – where they arrived on 6 October 1663 – proved to be an educational utopia. Rich in wonders, both natural and artificial, crammed with culture, both polite and impolite, Venice perched precariously on the watery cusp between the exotic east and the conservative west. Then as now, Venice felt like a fairy-tale city, with its winding waterways, endlessly confusing narrow streets, luminescent light and wonderful architecture. Little wonder that Willughby and friends spent three months here. They loved it: ‘We never enjoyed our health better, nor had better stomachs to our meat in any place beyond the seas than we had here.’
Venice was also a biologist’s paradise: the fish market was – and still is – better than the best zoology practical class, with over sixty species of fish and more than twenty marine invertebrates, many of which they were seeing for the first time. The market also (then, but not now) offered an extraordinary variety of dead birds for sale.
After their exhausting journeys, it must have seemed as though they were on holiday. There was so much to see and do, including the welcome distraction of theatrical performances. On one occasion, they went to a comedy ‘where at the door we paid 16 soldi, when others paid but six’. Skippon describes the scene: ‘Round about were four or five rows of boxes … where Venetian gentlemen and others sat … The gentlemen, and some with their wives or whores, came masked and disguised … Before the play began the gentlemen … were impatient and called out often Fuora, Fuora [Out Out!],4 and they made a great noise when they stamp’d and whistl’d.’ It is beginning to sound rather rowdy: ‘Those that sat in the boxes did frequently spit upon the company in the pit, so that all appeared very rude.’ Worse was to come: ‘We observed but three acts in the play, which was very immodest and obscene, nothing would please the company, who were ready to hiss, and they [their?] disgust [at] anything that was not filthy.’5 Little wonder that some English authors expressed grave reservations about continental travel for their young men, who they imagined ‘losing their virtue, faith and obedience through exposure to foreign vice’.6