by Tim Birkhead
Willughby purchased a tiny parasitical novelty: a flea on a metal chain. Venetian craftsmen advertised their expertise by making and fitting a tiny chain to a flea – notwithstanding its short neck. One was ‘a gold chain the length of a finger, together with a bolt and key, [made] with such great skill, and with that accuracy, that they could easily be pulled by the flea as it moved forward. However, the flea, the chain, the bolt and the key together did not exceed the weight of a grain of corn.’ Willughby housed his flea in a little box, which he kept warm, allowing the beast to puncture the skin on his hand and feast on his blood each day. John Ray later described the process in the History of Insects: ‘When they begin to suck they raise themselves almost upright and thrust their snout that comes out of the middle of their forehead into the skin. The itching is not felt immediately, but a little later. When they have filled themselves with blood, they start to eject the bloody faeces through the anus; and they suck in this way for many hours if allowed and throw out their excrement. After the first itch no pain is ever felt.’ Willughby kept the flea for several months until it died of cold during the winter.7
They were taken to see glass-making by a merchant ‘who shewed us great civility’, spoke English, and carried them in his gondola to Murano, ‘which is some distance from the city, and consists of some islands built with many houses, most of which are inhabited by glass-men’. After observing the furnaces and glass-making process, Skippon was fascinated by the fact that ‘The Venetians use glass chamber pots, which are preserved from breaking by being put onto strong stalks.’8 As well as chamber pots, Murano was also where glass eyes were made, and I wonder whether it was here that Willughby obtained those that now stare eerily out of his seed-cabinet drawers.
On an island ‘beyond St Pietro di Castello’ (the island of Certosa) they visited a monastery and observed how each of the twenty-five monks had a ‘little house and garden by himself’ where they kept land-tortoises, ‘which lay about seven … eggs apiece in summer time in holes they scrape for them’. Skippon continues: ‘These eggs are thus buried in the earth, without any other warmth until next spring, when the young tortoises come forth.’ It sounds rather charming, until ‘They are counted pretty good meat, and are eaten by these monks.’ Once again, Skippon mistook land-tortoises for pond terrapins. Until recently both were widely eaten in certain parts of Italy. The Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi, for example, included recipes for land-tortoise pasticcio and fried tortoise with cucumber in his six-volume cookbook of 1570. An archaeological investigation of a late sixteenth-century monastery near Rome found both tortoises and terrapins on the menu.9
The Venetian winter was little better than an English one: ‘About the middle of October there was a great storm … and soon after the winter began, which was very sharp sometimes, and about the beginning of February the weather grew warm again.’ Venice continued to enthrall and surprise: ‘Some of the Venetian gentlemen are so poor, by reason of their debaucheries and ill husbandry, they go to strangers … and beg for charity … there were two that used to come to our lodgings in their gowns and caps, asking our relief with a great deal of humility.’ It all sounds suspiciously like some beggars today, for ‘some of them do live according to their quality, keeping house, a gondola or two, and yet go up and down begging’.10
The diversity of species available in Venice’s fish market was breathtaking. I won’t repeat Philip Skippon’s entire list of sixty species here,11 but simply quote from his and Willughby’s notes:
‘Mesoro’ Blennus ocellaris, butterfly fish, sold in Venice in October, and probably throughout the winter.12
‘Orada’ Sparus aurata, gilthead, sold in great abundance.13
‘Uranoscopus’ Uranoscopus scaber, stargazer. ‘Physicians say that its gall-bladder is good for cataracts’, but Willughby could see no reason why this fish’s gall-bladder would be more effective than that of any another fish.14
‘Licetti’ Stromateus fiatola, butterfish (not to be confused with the gunnel Pholis gunnellus, also called the butterfish, but which doesn’t occur in the Mediterranean). Willughby commented on its curved lateral line.15
‘Pesce Petro’ Zeus faber, John Dory, a species they had previously seen in 1662 in Penzance.16
‘Sorghe marina’ Gaidropsanus mediterraneus, Shore Rockling. Ray later saw a similar fish in Chester in 1671.17
‘Rubellio’ Pagellus erythrinus, Common Pandora. ‘We found the fish much tastier in the winter’.18
‘Scrofanello’ – Scorpaena sp., Scorpion fish.19 Willughby and Ray recognised two species: the small scorpion or Scorpaena and the large scorpion, probably the red scorpion fish Scorpaena scrofa, which, as they knew, was capable of inflicting a painful wound, and so-called ‘because it pierces and strikes and pours out poison in the manner of a land scorpion’. Later, in their History of Fishes, Willughby and Ray recount a story included by Rondelet in his fish book, of a boy who was ‘bitten’ after innocently placing a scorpion fish inside his shirt. Rondelet’s remedy was a mixture of mastic and the fish’s liver ‘applied to the area around the wound’. In fact, the venom comes not from a bite, but from spines covered with toxic mucous. Commenting on the fish’s flavour, Willughby says that the (small) Scorpaena is far inferior to the (red) scorpion, and indeed the latter is the key ingredient in bouillabaisse.
Ray wondered whether the fish called Gattoruggine in Venice is the same as Gesner’s Gotorosola fish.20 He thought that the variant names arose because foreigners were unable to follow the fishermen’s pronunciation and suggested that Italians should be consulted on this matter – clear evidence that they weren’t always confident about their comprehension of Italian.
In some ways Venice must have been an embarrassment of aquatic riches, and I wonder whether they actually had time to describe and anatomise all sixty fish species? Certainly on any single day the number of specimens they could process was limited, especially if the weather was warm. It appears they had help from one or more servants with the dissections at least. Among Willughby’s notes is an account written by Philip Skippon of a dissection of a male stingray accompanied by sketches drawn by one Mr Okely; the dissection ended when Mr Skippon’s ‘workman’ became too tired.
Mr Okely’s drawings of the stingray Willughby and Ray saw dissected in Venice.
This particular servant may have been a relative of Margaret Oakley, John Ray’s future wife, from the Willughby household at Middleton. Although we might turn our noses up at the idea of Willughby not dirtying his hands by dissecting, their servants’ role was not really that different from the part played by university technicians or research assistants today. What’s more, having someone literally getting their hands dirty, bloody and smelly, while someone else took measurements and notes, seems eminently sensible.
Willughby’s strategy with the fish they encountered was almost identical to that adopted with birds: a careful description of the external morphology, with particular attention to the colour, the number and position of the fins, the numbers of rays in the fins and so on. Willughby measured the specimens’ dimensions, and examined their mouth and teeth; when all that was done, a servant, it seems, opened the fish up so they could see the internal organs: the gut, gonads and liver. Notwithstanding the stingray sketch, we don’t know whether they routinely made drawings of the specimens they observed. We take it for granted that on encountering an unknown fish species today – as I did with a curious boxfish on a remote Sri Lankan beach – we save a thousand words by simply taking a few pictures on our iPhone, capturing the way a fish looks and providing the perfect reference from which to make an identification.
Without modern technology, and with insufficient time or talent to create their own high-quality images, Willughby did the next best thing and bought collections of watercolours depicting Venetian fish. This at least gave them something tangible to work from and a wonderful aide-memoire. Those images now lie in the Middleton Collection, many with Willughby’s notes scrawled upo
n them, and several of them very obviously formed the basis of the illustrations in the History of Fishes, published after Willughby’s death. These images, created by a variety of different artists, include pipefish, seahorses, a writhing conger eel, a bearded rockling, a John Dory, top-knot blenny, garpike, red gurnard and dolphin fish. The paintings are remarkable for their accuracy and beauty – indeed, the next best thing to a colour photograph – but then Italy was the centre of the artistic world at that time, and, no doubt, foreign tourists and travellers created a ready market for such souvenirs.
Looking through this remarkable collection of illustrations, I began to appreciate the magnitude of the task Willughby and Ray had set themselves. I have spent forty years studying birds and I take for granted the fact that I can recognise most species and tell you what family they belong to. The fish are something else, and my experience reminded me of that trick used by those who train people to teach English as a foreign language: they get someone to talk to the class in Norwegian. ‘OK?’ they say. ‘See what it’s like?’ The sheer diversity of fish body forms, sizes, appendages and colours, as well as their internal structures, meant that classifying fish – or any other animal group – was far from straightforward. Except for the fact that birds are more visible on a day-to-day basis, I don’t suppose Willughby and Ray found them any easier.
Willughby’s continental travels with John Ray, Philip Skippon and Nathaniel Bacon: Italy 1663–4.
It is so frustrating that Francis Willughby’s notes no longer exist, for Venice was clearly a wonderful source of specimens and ornithological opportunities. The Venice lagoon was – and still is – excellent for birds. In December, for example, some eight kilometres from Burano, they saw ‘a multitude of coots and sea-cobs’, that is, gulls. They visited a private reed-fringed lake, a vallè, with a small island on which lived a keeper who refused them access, ‘tho’ we requested it very earnestly’, for catching fish and fowl. The fish attracted huge numbers of predatory (piscivorous) birds and ‘Once or twice a month the owner gives leave to many people, who come in gondola’s [sic] and shoot what they can.’ The vallè, owned by a Venetian nobleman, apparently ‘yielded a considerable profit’.21
Many of these birds ended up in the Venetian markets, and luckily, Skippon was sufficiently impressed that he left a detailed account, listing twenty-eight species, albeit using only their Latin names: Arcuata sive Numenius Avis; Gallo di Montagna; Sardina vel Tardina; Alaudae species, and so on. When my colleague Mark Greengrass worked out what most of these are, the list reveals a rather remarkable range of species: Eurasian curlew, capercaillie, black-eared wheatear, reed bunting, common greenshank, brambling, common sandpiper, red-legged partridge, golden plover, smew, spotted redshank, great white egret, merlin, goshawk, avocet, little egret, bar-tailed godwit, red-breasted merganser, red-throated diver, common crane, rock ptarmigan and the ‘capo posso’ – the lesser red-headed duck, which is probably the ferruginous duck. There aren’t twenty-eight species here, because Skippon, tellingly, counted males and females of a few – including the smew and the brambling – as separate species.
It is curious, perhaps, that no such list of birds appears in John Ray’s travel journal, but a likely explanation for this exists in the Ornithology. That volume contains numerous references to birds seen, described and dissected at Venice, including several that are not on Skippon’s list. This suggests to me that Willughby kept the bird notes in Venice and later, with access to these, Ray incorporated the relevant information into the text of the Ornithology. Their account of Venetian birds is enhanced by the occasional intriguing observation. For example, in ‘the palace of a certain nobleman of the city standing upon the Grand Channel’ they get their first, breathtaking glimpse of a gigantic griffon vulture; and bramblings were available in ‘great numbers’ in poulterers’ shops in winter, suggesting that 1663–4 was one in which bramblings made one of their very infrequent mass appearances in this part of Italy. The local bird-catchers called the bird Pepola or Fringuello montanino, the mountain finch, and these birds were almost certainly caught in the hills not far away. It is also possible that the brambling were taken on the northern side of the Alps where their winter roosts sometimes contain several million birds, attracting all sorts of capture methods – including the use of blow-pipes loaded with clay pellets.22 Other birds purchased and examined in Venice include whimbrel, water rail, a great skua (dissected by Willughby), tufted duck, goldeneye (that Ray says were common), and perhaps most spectacular of all, a white-tailed eagle that Willughby bought from a fowler.
Obviously, many of these – the waders, herons, ducks and divers – are species that could have been hunted or trapped in the Venice lagoon. But there are others that must have come from elsewhere – the rock ptarmigan, for example, can only have been acquired in the Alps or Dolomites, and the goshawk and capercaillie are both forest birds. Skippon doesn’t tell us on what date he saw these birds, but the black-eared wheatear is a summer visitor to northeast Italy so must have been trapped on migration, while the brambling is, as we have seen, an irregular winter visitor from northern Europe. It is obvious from the Ornithology that Skippon’s list is far from comprehensive and that he simply catalogued species he and his companions were unfamiliar with at home.
The Italians were, and many still are, inordinately fond of eating birds, especially small birds, and the annual north–south migration of millions of birds between Africa and northern Europe provided a rich harvest. Since at least the 1400s, bird-catchers in northern Italy have created large structures referred to as roccoli at strategic locations in mountain passes for trapping birds. Roccoli usually consist of one or more huge circular hedges up to eight metres high and several tens of metres across. The bird-catchers position their nets inside the hedge, and then use caged decoy birds to pull in the migrants. For some unknown reason, migrating birds find the calls of their own species irresistible and are drawn irrevocably from the sky towards their death. At the centre of the roccolo is a wooden or stone tower in which the bird-catcher sits and waits. When sufficient birds have accumulated on the branches of the hedge within the roccolo, he hurls from his hiding place a ‘bird-racket’ (a stick with a flat wicker end) that birds mistake for a hawk, causing them to dive for cover – and into the nets. The hundreds or thousands of roccoli scattered across the Italian countryside meant bird-catching – mainly for thrushes and finches – was once practised on an almost unimaginable scale.23
Many roccoli still exist near Bergamo, maintained either for historical interest or for legitimate bird-catching and ringing (banding), but also – as was apparent when I visited the region – for illegal bird-catching.
It doesn’t seem that Willughby and his colleagues knew about roccoli, and were happy simply to have access to the spoils. Certainly, many of the vast numbers of dead birds they saw in Italian markets, and especially in Rome and Florence later on, provided an almost unique opportunity to describe and dissect species they hadn’t previously encountered. It also allowed them to examine multiple specimens of the same species and see the extent of individual variation in plumage and other features. Together with the fish, they had their work cut out to dissect and describe everything they encountered.
In the spring of 1664 John Ray and Philip Skippon left Francis Willughby and Nathaniel Bacon to travel separately. Willughby and Bacon spent May, June and July 1664 in Rome. Ray and Skippon visited that city later, between 1 September 1664 and 24 January 1665. The bird markets of Rome proved irresistible to both parties, although we have only Ray and Skippon’s accounts. Ray was clearly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of dead birds and the diversity of species on sale: ‘partridges of two kinds, the common and red-legged, wood-cocks, snipe, wigeon, teal, bastard plover [lapwing], curlews, quails. Of small birds the greatest plenty I have anywhere seen: as thrushes in winter time an incredible number, black-birds store [many], larks infinite.’ And tellingly: ‘One would think that in a short time they should destroy al
l the birds of these kinds in the country.’24
Ray also comments on what people were prepared to eat: ‘I have seen lying frequently in poulterer’s shops, and therefore I presume people eat them, such birds as in England no man touches, viz. kites, buzzards, spar-hawks, kestrels, jays, magpies and wood-peckers’, adding that ‘Nothing more commonly sold and eaten here, and in all Italy, than coots and stares [starlings].’ Later in the Ornithology, Ray wrote: ‘Stares are not eaten in England by reason of the bitterness of their flesh; the Italians and other outlandish [foreign] people are not so squeamish.’25
There is a painting of birds from the 1600s once thought to be the work of the Italian artist Caravaggio, who was active – and dangerous (he murdered someone) – in Rome at that time.26 The image is a still life of some forty species of exquisitely painted birds laid out as though on a market stall. They include some of those that Willughby and Ray saw in Rome, but there are others too, such as wryneck, kingfisher, golden oriole, barn owl, green woodpecker and smew – all of whose palatability an Englishman might question. Others though are well known to be good eating, including partridges, pigeons, ducks and woodcock. One potentially puzzling feature of the painting is a metal dish on which lie eleven plucked birds, each one – slightly embarrassingly it seems to me – with a single black and white feather protruding from its bottom, where its tail used to be. Naked but not quite, these are northern wheatears caught on migration, beneath whose pale skin lies a layer of fat that, had they survived, would have fuelled their migratory marathon. Instead, that fat rendered them a gustatory treat. Old habits die hard, as one of my Italian colleagues told me how as recently as the 1960s, his mother roasted small birds on a spit, allowing the hot fat to drip onto slices of bread that he and his family ate with gusto. It is clear also that the practice of eating small birds in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean continues to this day.