The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Keats’s two Nile sonnets (1816) owe much of their décor to Park and Friedrich Hornemann. But Shelley’s epic about his wandering alter-ego, the poet in Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815), deeply reflects the spiritual loneliness of the desert traveller who pursues a perilous river, and knows he will probably never return. Shelley’s wilderness, while it includes ‘dark Aethiopia in her desert hills’, is geographically vague, though it moves more towards India and an imaginary East. But he catches something of Mungo Park’s enigmatic wanderlust, and transforms it into an unearthly Miltonic quest for the strange and magnificent limits of the known world:

  The Poet, wandering on, through Arabie

  And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,

  And o’er the aerial mountains which pour down

  Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,

  In joy and exultation held his way;

  Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within

  Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine

  Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,

  Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched

  His languid limbs … 42

  Later, his friend Thomas Love Peacock would remember Shelley stretching his languid limbs on the banks of the Thames, imagining vast and endless expeditions up the Niger, the Amazon, the Nile, though by now these trips would be taken aboard small steamships: ‘Mr Philpot would lie listening to the gurgling of the water around the prow, and would occasionally edify the company with speculations on the great changes that would be effected in the world by the steam navigation of rivers: sketching the course of a steamboat up and down some mighty stream which civilisation had either never visited, or long since deserted; the Missouri and the Columbia, the Oronoko and the Amazon, the Nile and the Niger, the Euphrates and the Tigris … under the over canopying forests of the new, or the long-silent ruins of the ancient world; through the shapeless mounds of Babylon, or the gigantic temples of Thebes.’43 Park’s Travels were widely used (by both sides) in the intense discussions surrounding the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Ten years later the radical surgeon William Lawrence would refer to Park’s observations on African racial types, and particularly the difference between ‘Negro and Moor’. John Martin’s epic painting Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1812), showing a bereft and solitary figure painfully pulling himself over desert rocks towards a distant river, may have been partly inspired by Mungo Park and the other explorers who never came back.44 Then there was the young explorer Joseph Ritchie, to whom Keats gave a copy of his newly published poem Endymion, with instructions to place it in his travel pack, read it on his journey, and then ‘throw it into the heart of the Sahara Desert’ as a gesture of high romance. Keats received a letter from Ritchie, dated from near Cairo in December 1818. ‘Endymion has arrived thus far on his way to the Desart, and when you are sitting over your Christmas fire will be jogging (in all probability) on a camel’s back o’er those African Sands immeasurable.’45 After this there was silence. Joseph Ritchie never returned.

  ♣ This final crazed descent of the river in HMS Joliba, as Park’s vessel was named, can be considered as the first enactment of a journey that was to be repeated many times in subsequent fiction and film. First perhaps in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, set in the Congo), and then in such films as Apocalypse Now (1979, adapted from Heart of Darkness, but set in North Vietnam) and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, set in South America). It is made more haunting and resonant precisely by the fact that Park’s own journal of these final weeks did not survive. Everything known is reported at second or third hand, and the truth can only — in the end — be imagined.

  ♣ Inspired by Cook and Banks, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) had returned from South America in 1804 with 60,000 botanical and zoological specimens, preserved in forty-five enormous packing cases. But unlike Banks, he proceeded to publish his findings in thirty volumes over the next two decades, and later summarised his view of the world in an all-embracing, visionary work, Cosmos (1845), which attempted to unite all the contemporary scientific disciplines, from astronomy to biology. He studied volcanoes and oceanic currents, invented isobars, mapped the changes in the earth’s magnetic field from pole to equator, and first proposed the science of climate change.

  6

  Davy on the Gas

  1

  During the late 1790s Joseph Banks started to get controversial reports of chemical experiments being carried out at a so-called ‘Pneumatic Institute’ in the Hotwells district of Bristol. They were being organised by Dr Thomas Beddoes, a one-time lecturer from Oxford, who had frequently applied to the Royal Society for subsidy. Despite recommendations from the Duchess of Devonshire and James Watt of the Lunar Society, Banks reluctantly turned down these requests, partly on the grounds that these experiments involved human patients breathing various kinds of gas, in ways which were too controversial to support. But he was also influenced by Dr Beddoes’s known radical sympathies.

  However, by 1800 Banks had become greatly interested in one of Beddoes’s young assistants, a chemist from Cornwall, Humphry Davy. Although only twenty-one years old, Davy had already published several papers on chemistry, a book of Researches, and made numerous contributions to Nicholson’s Journal. He was said to have an outstandingly brilliant and original mind. He even wrote poetry. When Davy came to London in February 1801 to be interviewed for a possible new post at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, Banks summoned him to one of his breakfasts in Soho Square.1

  Sir Joseph met a very unusual young man. Davy was small, volatile, bright-eyed, and bursting with energy and talk. He had measured the cubic capacity of his own lungs, which was vast, especially since he was only five foot five tall, with a chest, which he had also measured, of a mere twenty-nine inches. He spoke English with a Cornish accent, and French with a Breton accent. Though he had never been abroad, he was completely up to date with the latest French chemistry, and was gratifyingly critical of Lavoisier’s work on oxygen and ‘caloric’ in the Traité Élémentaire de Chimie of 1789.

  Although Davy had attended a grammar school in Truro, and was briefly apprenticed to a physician in Penzance, he was very largely self-taught. He had never been to university, though he told Banks that he always intended to take a medical degree at Oxford. He never had the background in mathematics that shaped the scientific thinking of Newton and Cavendish. Like his contemporaries John Dalton (from Manchester), William Wordsworth (from Cumberland) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (from Somerset), he always retained strong regional roots.

  Banks would come to know a man who loved the high society of London, but was never at home in it, and was often mocked behind his back as a provincial. Davy’s patterns of thought, and methods of work, remained highly original and individualistic. He was impulsive, charming and arrogant. Though physically small, he had huge intellectual ambitions. He was a solitary man who was also an incorrigible flirt. He believed passionately in his own ‘genius’ — a word he used constantly – and in the future of English science. Banks sometimes concluded that Humphry Davy thought these two things were identical; and that very possibly he was right.

  Davy was born in Penzance, Cornwall, on 17 December 1778. Penzance was then a tiny seaside town, remote and isolated in the extreme southwest of rural England, dependent largely on fishing and the business of the local tin mines. Its population was below 3,000. Both fish and slabs of stamped tin were sold in the high street, known as Market Jew Street. There were several churches and Wesleyan chapels, many small dark taverns and a local school; but no theatre or learned institutions, except a small subscription library. (This would eventually become the famous Morrabic Library.) The front rooms of many of the houses were still floored with beaten earth or sand. On windy days the sound of the breaking sea and the rattle of rigging could be heard in every street.2

  Eighteenth-century Cornwall was still regarded as being as remote and barbaric as the Scottish Highlands: it was re
nowned for its fishermen, adventurers, smugglers and (most recently) mining engineers, and also for its rich, creamy, incomprehensible accent. The coach journey to London, which skirted Dartmoor and passed through Exeter and Bristol, covered nearly three hundred miles and took at least three days — and then only if the weather was good. Bad weather could easily cut Penzance off from the rest of the country. Sometimes connections were better by boat, eastwards up the Channel to Plymouth and Southampton; or southwards across the Channel, to northern France and Brittany.

  Davy’s father Robert was a Cornish craftsman, who had trained in London as a wood carver and gilder. His grandfather was a builder. His uncle Sampson was a watch- and clock-maker with an original touch: he once made a grandmother clock with eyes that winked open and shut each time it ticked. His mother Grace came from an old mining family from nearby St Just. Though originally from Norfolk, the Davy clan had lived for generations in Penzance and its surrounding hamlets, and their modest tombs were crowded into one corner of Ludgvan churchyard, three miles to the east along the coast.♣

  Robert was a small, genial and unworldly figure, rather disapproved of by the other Davys. He had a reputation as a dreamer and a drinker, ‘thriftless and lax in his habits’.3 In 1782 he unexpectedly inherited a seventy-nine-acre estate of woodlands and marshes called Varfell. It lay immediately south of the village of Ludgvan, with dramatic views of St Michael’s Mount, the rocky island in the bay with its ancient abbey and fortress. Robert decided to build a house there, and to raise his family in the depth of the countryside. He continued his wood carving, invested in a small business, and took on local commissions. One of his carvings, a chimneypiece with two sportive griffins, was made for nearby Ludgvan Rectory. Another, illustrating Aesop’s fable of the fox and the stork, was sold in London and finished up in the Victoria and Albert Museum.4

  The wild Varfell estate (its very name full of Celtic echoes) gave Humphry Davy’s childhood an extraordinary freedom and independence. He never forgot it, and would always try to recreate it in adult life, especially in his final years. As a boy he was small for his age, but daring and mischievous. He was soon running wild through the Varfell woods and down to the adjacent Marazion marshes, with their golden bulrushes and plentiful wildfowl. He wandered through the gorse along the seashore opposite St Michael’s Mount, and up into the remote hills behind Penzance. His easy-going father gave him a fishing rod, and then a gun.

  He was also allowed to have a dog, Chloe, and eventually a pony called Derby. His taste for country sports, especially shooting and fishing, his intuitive feeling for nature, his love of running water and lyric poetry, were all formed here, and were never forgotten. On one of his birthdays he was allowed to plant an apple tree in the Varfell garden, possibly a local type called the Borlase Pippin, and in honour of Newton and the falling gravity-apple.

  Humphry’s mother, Grace, whose family came from St Just, was overwhelmingly important to him. She was one of three Millet sisters who had been adopted by a local Penzance surgeon, John Tonkin, on the sudden death of both of their parents from a fever in June 1757, when she was only seven. Tonkin (1719-1801) was one of the leading figures in the town, an old-fashioned philanthropist who was several times elected mayor.5 Grace remained happily in his household for nearly twenty years, and came to regard him as a father. She married Robert Davy comparatively late, at the age of twenty-six, in 1776. She was the strong, reliable personality who held the family together. Davy was deeply attached to his mother, wrote to her regularly all his life, and kept her informed of all his scientific hopes and triumphs. She in turn, though she never left Penzance, took huge pride in his achievements. Davy eventually had four younger siblings: three sisters (Kitty, Grace and Betsy) and a baby brother, John. The family always remained closely knit. John, twelve years his junior, hero-worshipped him, followed him into medicine, and later became his editor and biographer.

  John Tonkin, still acting as the family benefactor, in a way that perhaps suggests Robert’s ineffectiveness as a father, paid for young Davy to attend Penzance Grammar School when he was ten. It was agreed that the boy should lodge in Tonkin’s large house at the top of Market Jew Street, opposite the White Hart Inn, during term-time.6 Hoping he might become a physician, Tonkin also encouraged his interest in every form of natural history: fossils, wild birds and animals, botany, chemical experiments. Years later, engravings of their open-air expeditions, the young Davy skittering beside the aged Tonkin in his large black Quaker hat, became a favourite subject for Davy’s Victorian biographers.

  Davy was not remembered as an outstanding pupil. There is some suggestion that he had rebelled against his easy-going father, and that Grace had called in Tonkin to provide much-needed discipline. But he was articulate and adventurous, and became famed for ‘spouting’ stories and poems. His sister Kitty recalled his vivid story-telling, and his staging pantomimes on the back of the carts which were parked at the side of Market Jew Street, known as the Terrace. On summer evenings he would sometimes stand on the porch of the White Hart Inn and deliver ‘speeches’. Later he would secretly make fireworks, and let them off in the street. He was a particular favourite of his maternal grandmother, who had an endless fund of Cornish legends and ghost stories. Indeed, she told him, she had herself lived for many years in a haunted house in St Just.

  Curiously enough, Davy would later relate his love of science to this fascination with story-telling. What he always wanted to do was to hold an audience spellbound with wonders: ‘to gratify the passions of my youthful auditors’, as he put it. ‘After reading a few books, I was seized with the desire to narrate … I gradually began to invent, and form stories of my own. Perhaps this passion has produced all my originality. I never loved to imitate, but always to invent: this has been the case in all the sciences I have studied.’ Then he added: ‘Hence many of my errors.’7

  His holidays were spent at Varfell, rambling, fishing, cliff-climbing and shooting wildfowl all round Mount’s Bay. He was small, quick, witty, impetuous, with something mercurial and secretive about him.

  In 1793, when he was fourteen, Davy was sent away to Truro Grammar School, also paid for by John Tonkin (then in his seventies). This was perhaps another attempt to discipline him, but also to give a potentially bright boy a better education. He was taught Latin and some Greek, but no science.

  Everything changed in December 1794, with the sudden death of his father Robert, aged only forty-eight. It was caused by ‘an apoplexy’, or a stroke, as Davy would never forget. It was the same year in which the greatest chemist of his generation, Antoine Lavoisier, was guillotined in Paris. Robert left the family in debt to the tune of £1,300, a considerable sum, and the Varfell estate had to be sold. Grace Davy moved the family back to Penzance, started a millinery business with a young refugee Frenchwoman from the Vendée, and took in lodgers. Humphry had to give up his horse, Derby, and shortly after was withdrawn from Truro Grammar School.

  Robert was buried in Ludgvan churchyard, and this became a place of secret pilgrimage for Davy. He would walk up the little lane out of Penzance, through Gulval village (where he once stopped to paint the view of St Michael’s Mount), past the low stone farmhouse of Varfell, and climb through the trees to the flint church on its small but commanding eminence. Here he would sit with his back to the tombstones, and look out southwards, beyond the roof of Dr Borlase’s rectory, far across the fields to the cold blue Cornish sea.

  One of Davy’s most striking and mysterious poems is set here, in Ludgvan churchyard. It clearly records one such grieving moment, although it may have been written much later, even possibly towards the end of his life. Though grieving, it admits not the least word of Christian comfort. It suggests a purely material philosophy, in which the atoms of his dead ancestors ‘dance in the light of suns’, but no spirit or soul survives. ‘Their spirit gave me no germ/of kindling energy,’ as one fragment says. In fact the unfinished poem feels oddly pagan, ‘primitive’, with a harsh physical
ity often associated in later Cornish art with the worship of stone, flint and sunlight.

  It is also rare among Davy’s poems in that it does not rhyme. It is formed from a plain list of terse factual statements: a list of precise observations, such as one might find in a shorthand account of an experiment in a laboratory notebook.

  My eye is wet with tears

  For I see the white stones

  That are covered with names

  The stones of my forefathers’ graves.

  No grass grows upon them

  For deep in the earth

  In darkness and silence the organs of life

  To their primitive atoms return.

  Through ages the air

  Has been moist with their blood

  The ages the seeds of the thistle has fed

  On what was once motion and form …

  Thoughts roll not beneath the dust

  No feeling is in the cold grave

  They have leaped to other worlds

  They are far above the skies.

  They kindle in the stars

  They dance in the light of suns

  Or they live in the comet’s white haze.8

  John Tonkin clearly felt that Davy was drifting. It was time for him to make his way in the world. On 10 February 1795, just turned sixteen, he was indentured for seven years to John Bingham Borlase, the leading surgeon-apothecary in Penzance, an old friend of Tonkin’s. Borlase (1752-1813) had his shop at the top of Market Jew Street, next to the White Hart Inn, and was also several times mayor of Penzance. His father had been rector of Ludgvan, a distinguished Cornish antiquary, botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society. One of his many scientific friends was Dr William Oliver, inventor of the Bath Oliver biscuit.♣