I was also making amends to Mary. I was at last asking her to forgive me my jealousy and disdain.
There was something else, though. This was also my chance for an adventure in an unadventurous life. I had never travelled alone, but was always with my sisters or brother or other relatives, or with friends. As secure as that had felt, it was a bind as well that sometimes threatened to smother me. I was rather proud now as I stood on the deck of the Unity—the same ship that had taken Colonel Birch’s ichthyosaurus to London—and watched Lyme and my sisters grow smaller until they disappeared and I was alone.
We sailed straight out to sea rather than hug the coast, for we had to clear the tricky isle of Portland. So I did not get to see up close the places I knew well—Golden Cap, Bridport, Chesil Beach, Weymouth. Once past Portland we remained out at sea until we had gone around the Isle of Wight, before finally coming closer to shore.
A sea voyage is very different from a coach trip to London, where Margaret, Louise and I were packed with several strangers into a stuffy, rattling, jolting box that stopped constantly to change horses. That was a communal event, uncomfortable in ways that as I grew older took days to recover from.
Being on board the Unity was much more solitary. I would sit on deck, tucked out of the way on a small keg, and watch the crew at work with their ropes and sails. I had no idea what they were doing, but their shouts to one another and their confident routines soothed my fears of being at sea. Moreover, the cares of daily life were taken out of my hands, and nothing was expected of me but to stay out of the men’s way. Not only did I not feel ill on board, even when it was rough; I was actually enjoying myself.
I had been anxious about being the only lady on the ship—the three other passengers were all men with business in London—but I was mostly ignored, though the Captain was kind enough, if taciturn, when I joined him to dine each night. No one seemed at all curious about me, though one of the passengers—a man from Honiton—was happy to talk about fossils when he heard of my interest. I did not tell him about the plesiosaurus, however, or of my intended visit to the Geological Society. He knew only about the obvious—ammonites, belemnites, crinoids, gryphaea—and had little of use to say, though he made sure to say every word of it. Luckily he could not bear the cold, and most often stayed belowdecks.
Until I boarded the Unity, I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening. As I sat I occasionally saw another vessel, but most of the time there was nothing but sky and moving water. I often looked to the horizon, lulled into a wordless calm by the rhythm of the sea and by ship life. It was oddly satisfying to study that far-off line, reminding me that I spent much of my life in Lyme with my eyes fixed to the ground in search of fossils. Such hunting can limit a person’s perspective. On board the Unity I had no choice but to see the greater world, and my place in it. Sometimes I imagined being on shore and looking out at the ship, and seeing on deck a small, mauve figure caught between the light grey sky and dark grey sea, watching the world pass before her, alone and sturdy. I did not expect it, but I had never been so happy.
The winds were light, but we made steady if slow progress. The first I saw of land was on the second day when the chalk cliffs to the east of Brighton came blinking into view. When we made a brief stop there to unload cloth from Lyme’s factory, I considered asking Captain Pearce if I might go ashore to see my sister Frances. However, rather to my surprise, I felt no real urge to do so, or to send her a note saying I was there, but was content to remain on board and watch the residents of Brighton on land walking back and forth along the promenade. Even if Frances herself had appeared, I am not sure I would have called out to her. I preferred not to disturb the delicious anonymity of standing on deck with no one looking for me.
On the third day we had passed Dover with its stark white cliffs, and were coming around the headland by Ramsgate when we saw a ship off our port side run aground on a sandbar. As we drew nearer I heard one of the crew name it as the Dispatch, the ship carrying Mary’s plesiosaurus.
I sought out the Captain. “Oh yes, that be the Dispatch,” he confirmed, “run aground on Goodwin Sands. They’ll have tried to turn too sharp.” He sounded disgusted and entirely without sympathy, even as he called for the men to cast anchor. Soon two sailors set out in a boat to cross over to the listing vessel, where they met with a few men who had by now appeared on deck. The sailors talked to them for just a few minutes before rowing back. I leaned forward and strained to hear what they shouted to the Captain. “Cargo was taken to shore yesterday!” one called. “They’re taking it overland to London.”
At this the crew jeered, for they had little respect for travel by land, I had learned during the trip. They saw it as slow, rough and muddy. Others—coachmen, for instance—might retort that the sea was slow, rough and wet.
Whoever was right, Mary’s plesiosaurus was now somewhere in a long, slow train of carts grinding through Kent towards London. Having left a week before me, the specimen would now probably arrive in London after me, too late for the Geological Society meeting.
We reached London in the early hours of the fourth day, docking at a wharf on Tooley Street. After the relative calm on board, all now became a chaos of unloading by torchlight, of shouts and whistles, of coaches and carts clattering away full of people and cargo. It was a shock to the senses after four days of Nature providing her own constant rhythms. The people and the noise and the lights reminded me too that I had come to London for a reason, not to enjoy anonymity and solitude whilst eyeing the wider horizon.
I stood on deck and looked out for my brother at the quayside, but he was not there. The letter I had posted at the same time as I left must have got stuck in the mud en route and lost its race with me. Though I had never been before, I had heard about London’s docks, how crowded and dirty and dangerous they were, especially for a lady on her own with no one expecting her. Perhaps it was because the darkness made everything more mysterious, but the men unloading the Unity, even the sailors I had got to know on board, now appeared much rougher and harder.
I hesitated to disembark. There was no one to turn to for help, though: the other passengers—even the cocksure man from Honiton—had hurried away in ungentleman-like haste. I could have panicked. Before the journey I might have. But something had shifted in me while I spent all that time on deck watching the horizon: I was responsible for myself. I was Elizabeth Philpot, and I collected fossil fish. Fish are not always beautiful, but they have pleasing shapes, they are practical, and they lead with their eyes. There is nothing shamful about them
I picked up my bag and stepped off the boat amidst a score of bustling men, many of whom whistled and shouted at me. Before anyone could do more than call out, I walked quickly to the Customs House, despite swaying with the shock of being on land again. “I would like a cab, please,” I said to a surprised clerk, interrupting him as he ticked items on a list. He had a moustache that fluttered like a moth over his mouth. “I shall wait here until you fetch me one,” I added, setting down my bag. I did not stick out my chin and sharpen my jaw, but gazed steadily at him with my Philpot eyes.
He found me a cab.
The Geological Society’s offices in Covent Garden were not far from my brother’s house, but to get there one had to pass through St Giles and Seven Dials, with its beggars and thieves, and I was not keen to do so on foot. Thus on the evening of the 20th February, 1824, I waited in a cab across from 20 Bedford Street, my nephew Johnny beside me. There was snow on the street, and we huddled under our cloaks against the cold.
My brother was horrified that I had come all the way to London on a ship because of Mary. When he was woken in the middle of the night to find me at the door, he looked so ill with surprise that I almost regretted I had come. Being quietly tucked away in Lyme, my sisters and I had rarely given him cause to worry, and I did not like to do so now.
John did everything he could to persuade me not to
go to the Geological Society, bar expressly forbidding me. It seemed he was only willing to indulge me in unusual behaviour just the once, when he had escorted me to Bullock’s to view Colonel Birch’s auction preview. Mercifully he had never found out I attended the auction itself. He would not help me with something so odd and risky again. “They will not let you in, for you are a lady, and their charter does not allow it,” he began, using first the legal argument. We were in his study, the door closed, as if John were trying to protect his family from me, his erratic sister. “Even if they let you in they would not listen to you, for you are not a member. Then,” he added, holding up a hand as I tried to interrupt, “you have no business discussing and defending Mary. It is not your place to.”
“She is my friend,” I replied, “and no one else will take her part if I don’t.”
John looked at me as if I were a small child trying to convince my nurse I could have another helping of pudding. “You have been very foolish, Elizabeth. You have come all this way, making yourself ill en route—”
“It is just a cold, nothing more.”
“—ill en route, and worrying us unnecessarily.” Now he was using guilt. “And to no purpose, for you will gain no audience.”
“I can at least try. It is truly foolish to come all this way and then not even try.”
“What exactly do you want from these men?”
“I want to remind them of Mary’s careful methods of finding and preserving fossils, and to convince them to agree to defend her publicly against Cuvier’s attack on her character.”
“They will never do that,” John said, running his finger along the spiral of his nautilus paperweight. “Though they may defend the plesiosaurus, they will not discuss Mary. She is only the hunter.”
“Only the hunter!” I stopped myself. John was a London solicitor, with a certain way of thinking. I was a stubborn Lyme spinster, with my own mind. We were not going to agree, nor either of us convince the other. And he was not my target anyway; I must save my words for more important men.
John would not agree to accompany me to the meeting, and so I did not ask, but turned to an alternative—my nephew. Johnny was now a tall, lanky youth who led with his feet, had a residual fondness for his aunt and an active fondness for mischief. He had never told his parents about discovering me sneaking out of the house to go to the auction at Bullock’s, and this shared secret bound us. It was this closeness I now relied on to help me.
I was lucky, for John and my sister-in-law were dining out on the Friday evening of the Geological Society meeting. I had not told him when the meeting was to take place, but allowed him to believe it was the following week. The afternoon of the supper I took to bed, saying my cold was worse. My sister-in-law pursed her lips in clear disapproval of my folly. She did not like unexpected visitors, or the sort of problems that, for all my quiet life at Lyme, I seemed to trail behind me. She hated fossils, and disorder, and unanswered questions. Whenever I brought up topics like the possible age of the earth, she twisted her hands in her lap and changed the subject as soon as it was polite to.
When she and my brother had gone out for the evening, I crept from my room and went to find Johnny and explain what I needed from him. He rose to the occasion admirably, coming up with an excuse for his departure to satisfy the servants, fetching a cab and hurrying me into it without anyone in the house discovering. It was absurd that I had to go to such lengths to take any sort of action out of the ordinary.
However, it was also a relief to have company. Now we sat in the cab on Bedford Street across from the Geological Society house, Johnny having gone in to check and found that the members were still dining in rooms on the first floor. Through the front windows we could see lights there and the occasional head bobbing about. The formal meeting would begin in half an hour or so.
“What shall we do, Aunt Elizabeth?” he demanded. “Storm the citadel?”
“No, we wait. They will all stand so that the meal can be cleared away. At that moment I will go in and seek out Mr Buckland. He is about to become President of the Society, and I am sure he will listen to me.”
Johnny sat back and propped his feet up on the seat across from him. If I had been his mother I would have told him to put his feet down, but the pleasure of being an aunt is that you can enjoy your nephew’s company without having to concern yourself with his behaviour. “Aunt Elizabeth, you haven’t said why this plesiosaur is so important,” he began. “That is, I understand that you want to defend Miss Anning. But why is everyone so excited about the creature itself?”
I straightened my gloves and rearranged my cloak around me. “Do you remember when you were a small boy and we took you to the Egyptian Hall to see all the animals?”
“Yes, I recall the elephant and the hippo.”
“Do you remember the stone crocodile you found, and I was so upset by? The one that is now in the British Museum and they call an ichthyosaurus?”
“I’ve seen it at the British Museum, of course, and you’ve told me about it,” Johnny answered. “But I confess I remember the elephant better. Why?”
“Well, when Mary discovered that ichthyosaurus, she did not know it at the time, but she was contributing to a new way of thinking about the world. Here was a creature that had never been seen before, that did not seem to exist any longer, but was extinct—the species had died out. Such a phenomenon made people think that perhaps the world is changing, however slowly, rather than being a constant, as had been previously thought.
“At the same time, geologists were studying the different layers of rock, and thinking about how the world was formed, and wondering about its age. For some time now men have wondered if the world isn’t older than the 6000 years calculated by Bishop Ussher. A learned Scotsman called James Hutton even suggested that the world is so old it has ‘neither a beginning nor an end,’ and that it is impossible for us to measure it.” I paused. “Perhaps it would be best if you didn’t mention any of what I’m saying to your mother. She doesn’t like to hear me talk of such things.”
“I won’t. Carry on.”
“Hutton thought the world is being sculpted by volcanic action. Others have suggested it has been formed by water. Lately some geologists have taken elements of both and said a series of catastrophes has shaped the world, with Noah’s Flood being the latest.”
“What does this have to do with the plesiosaurus?”
“It is concrete evidence that the ichthyosaurus was not a unique instance of extinction, but that there are others—maybe many extinct creatures. That in turn supports the argument that the earth is in flux.” I looked at my nephew. Johnny was frowning at the light snowflakes swirling about outside. Perhaps he was more like his mother than I realised. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to upset you with such talk.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s fascinating. I was just wondering why none of my tutors discuss this in lessons.”
“It is too frightening for many, for it challenges our belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful God, and raises questions about His intentions.”
“What do you believe, Aunt Elizabeth?”
“I believe…” Few had ever asked me what I believed. It was refreshing. “I am comfortable with reading the Bible figuratively rather than literally. For instance, I think the six days in Genesis are not literal days, but different periods of creation, so that it took many thousands—or hundreds of thousands of years—to create. It does not demean God; it simply gives Him more time to build this extraordinary world.”
“And the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus?”
“They are creatures from long, long ago. They remind us that the world is changing. Of course it is. I can see it change when there are landslips at Lyme that alter the shoreline. It changes when there are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and floods. And why shouldn’t it?”
Johnny nodded. It was a relief to say such things to a sympathetic ear and not be judged either ignorant or blasphemous. Perhaps he could b
e so open-minded because he was young.
“Look.” He pointed at the windows of the Geological Society house. Figures were blocking the light as the men got up from their tables. It was time for me to lead with my eyes. I took a deep breath and opened the cab door. Johnny leaped out and helped me down, excited to be acting at last. He strode to the door and knocked boldly. The same man answered as had the first time, but Johnny treated him as if he had never spoken to him before. “Miss Philpot here to see Professor Buckland,” he announced. Perhaps he thought such confidence would open all doors.
The doorman, however, was not taken in by youthful assuredness. “Women are not allowed in the Society,” he replied, not even glancing at me. It was as if I did not exist.
He began to shut the door, but Johnny stuck his foot on the jamb so that it wouldn’t close. “Well, then, John Philpot Esquire here to see Professor Buckland.”
The doorman looked him up and down. “What business?”
“It’s to do with the plesiosaurus.”
The doorman frowned. The word meant nothing to him, but it sounded complicated and possibly important. “I’ll take up a message.”
“I can only speak to Professor Buckland,” Johnny replied in a haughty tone, enjoying every moment.
The doorman appeared unmoved. I had to step forward, forcing him at last to look at me and acknowledge my presence. “As it is to do with the very subject of the meeting that is about to start, it would be wise of you to inform Professor Buckland that we are waiting to speak to him.” I looked him straight in the eye, with all of the steadiness and resolve I had discovered in myself on board the Unity.
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