Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  Finally, out of this first generation of academicians to come of age in the latter half of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth, we have Joseph-Nicolas Delisle. When Delisle sent his semi-incompetent half-brother to Siberia with Gmelin and Müller, he wasn’t trying to avoid the rough life of exploring. While the Great Northern Expedition was exploring Siberia, he went on several expeditions of his own. In early 1740, Delisle made a trip to western Siberia to observe a transit of Mercury across the sun. After six weeks of travel, it was cloudy on the day of the transit and he was unable to make any observations. Like most members of the Russian Imperial Academy, he wasn’t one to waste a good trip. He made observations and collected data about many topics outside his field. On his return trip, he heard that a monastery in Tobolsk had some mammoth bones. The brothers showed him the bones and told him stories about some discoveries, including one by a famous bear-wrestling Cossack. After that, Delisle made a point of adding some bones to his personal collection. Soon after his arrival in Russia, officials began to suspect that he was copying geographical information and forwarding it to France. An official investigation was launched, and he was carefully watched. In time, the investigators decided there was no evidence of wrongdoing and reduced their surveillance. He remained in Russia for twenty-one years and retired with a full pension. Their suspicion that he was feeding information to France turned out to be true, but he was a better spy than they were spy catchers. When he returned to France in 1747, he brought with him more geographic information and the femur of a mammoth.

  It was September 1735 before Breyne gathered his mammoth data and sent it to Sloane in London. No doubt his impetus for doing so was learning of Messerschmidt’s death earlier that year. Breyne’s package included an English translation of his own paper from seven years earlier, the affidavit of discovery by Michael Wolochowicz, Messerschmidt’s drawings of the mammoth’s skull with detailed measurements, and a short letter summarizing his conclusions. Sloane presented Breyne’s materials to the Royal Society in early 1737 and had them published in the Transactions for that year. Breyne’s paper was brief and summed up what was already known. He made references to some of the Swedish prisoners’ accounts and stated that he was convinced that the bones were evidence of the Deluge. Wolochowicz’s affidavit was of historical, not scientific, interest. The true value in his package and Sloane’s publication of it was in the drawings and measurements. The society’s printers produced superb plates from them. These provided savants all over the continent and in the colonies with clear images to compare with their own discoveries. They served the same purpose for mammoths that Mullen’s drawings had served for elephants sixty years earlier. Appropriately, Breyne had used Mullen’s plates to make his identification.

  With that, the mystery was solved to most people’s satisfaction. The giant’s bones of Europe and the mammoth’s bones of Siberia were actually from the same animal, and that animal was an elephant, a beast known to the church fathers and the greatest writers of antiquity. And these bones had been brought to their disparate locations all around the world due to a cataclysmic event, whether it was the Deluge or another catastrophe. There was no reason to reach for fantastic explanations like sea monsters or carriage-sized moles. The men of the academies and societies had now seen, autopsied, and carefully described enough real elephants and compared their bones to those of mammoths to be confident that they were one and the same. Any differences could be explained as the normal range of variation to found in any species, such as dogs, hogs, or cattle. And then word began to come in from the Americas about more large bones that didn’t quite fit with this happy and neat solution.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE AMERICAN COUSIN

  In the fall of 1519, Hernán Cortés, six hundred soldiers, and fifteen horses arrived in the territory of the Tlaxcala, on the eastern edge of the central valley of Mexico. Tlaxcala was one of the last Nahua states to remain free of Aztec rule. For decades, they had been locked in the horrific Flower Wars with their larger neighbor. The purpose of these wars was not conquest or settling geopolitical conflicts but to provide prisoners to sacrifice to the gods to stave off famines caused by overpopulation. The first impulse of the Tlaxcala was to destroy this new alien army, and they had an opportunity to do just that, but divisions among their leaders led them to recall their army and make peace with the Spanish. They realized that the newcomers might be able to break the horrible stalemate of the Flower Wars in their favor. They invited Cortés into their city to rest and negotiated an alliance against the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. While the Spanish rested in Tlaxcala, preparing for a new campaign against the Aztecs, the Tlaxcala leaders made every effort to curry favor and impress these strangers. The Spanish were fed and entertained. The leading houses allowed their daughters to be baptized. At some point during the three weeks the Spanish stayed in Tlaxcala, a group of Spaniards began to question their hosts about their history. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier under Cortés’s command, who wrote a history of the campaign, recorded their answer.

  They said that their ancestors had told them, that in times past there had lived among them men and women of giant size with huge bones, and because they were very bad people of evil manners that they had fought with them and killed them, and those of them who remained died off. So that we could see how huge and tall these people had been they brought us a leg bone of one of them which was very thick and the height of a man of ordinary stature, and that was the bone from the hip to the knee. I measured myself against it and it was as tall as I am although I am of fair size.

  The Spanish helped themselves to the bone and sent it to King Charles I on the first treasure ship out of Veracruz. The bones of both Columbian mammoths and American mastodons have been excavated in that part of Mexico, but a bone as long as the one Díaz described probably came from an earlier mastodon species such as Rynochotherium tlascalae, which has been found in that region and better fits the dimensions that Díaz mentions. In researching her book Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Adrienne Mayor went searching for this femur. Although officials at the national museums in Spain couldn’t identify that specific bone, they didn’t exactly rule out its being there. The records for those years are just too sparse to be sure. It very well might be that the Tlaxcala femur is sitting, unlabeled, in a warehouse somewhere in Madrid.

  Díaz wasn’t the only Spaniard to report on the presence of large bones and legends of ancient giants. Cortés himself had a collection of giant bones at his estate all collected in the New World. Later travelers José de Acosta, Antonio Herrera y Tordesillas, and Joseph Torrubia were also shown giant teeth and bones by the Tlaxcala and recorded the legends of giants that the native Mexicans believed. Nor was the valley of Mexico the only place where such bones were reported by the Spanish conquerors. In South America, during the chaos following the destruction of the Inca empire, two different writers, Pedro Cieza de León, a soldier, and Agustín de Zárate, a clerk, described bones on the on the Santa Elena Peninsula near the site of modern Quito, Ecuador. The legends of the Manta natives who lived there were different than those of the Tlaxcala. In their mythology, the bones were of insatiable giants who invaded the country, murdered the people, and ate all the food. The people were defeated in every attempt to fight the giants. Finally, the gods heard their prayers and destroyed the giants with lightning.

  Neither Cieza nor Zárate was able to go to the peninsula to see the bones. Cieza heard enough from Spaniards who had seen giants’ bones in other parts of the Americas to accept that the story must be true, though he though they were probably exaggerated. Zárate wrote that the story seemed too fantastic to believe until he heard of another Spaniard who had made the trip to the peninsula specifically to see these bones. This man, Captain Juan de Olmos, the lieutenant governor of Puerto Viejo, was able to find and subsequently excavate these bones in 1543. What Olmos did was quite advanced for his time. He could easily have ordered the natives to br
ing him a few bones. Instead, he went to the place where the bones had been reported and examined them in situ before beginning careful extraction. He recovered the complete bones of this being and tried to reconstruct what it might have been based on the knowledge and worldview that he had. The bones that Olmos examined were most likely those of Cuvieronius hyodon, a type of gomophthere (relatives of the mastodon) commonly found in the area. The only specific detail he describes are the teeth, which don’t match any other animal since discovered in the region.

  Even though the Tlaxcala and Manta came to the same conclusions as sixteenth-century Europeans when presented with proboscidean skeletons—that is, that they were the bones of giants—they were, in many ways, far ahead of the Europeans in the practice of paleontology. The Native Americans never questioned the organic nature of the bones. This was true of petrified bones, such as dinosaur fossils, as well as nonpetrified bones, such as mammoths and mastodons. They had no equivalent theory to the European vis plasica holding back their understanding. Native Americans had a second conceptual advantage over Europeans. They had no trouble with the idea of extinction in their worldview, unencumbered by the Christian version of divine creation and the divine chain of being. Whether the giants were killed by Tlaxcala warriors or smited by the gods, they were a race of beings now gone from the earth. As we’ve seen, it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that vis plastica was fully defeated. And discomfort with the idea of extinction among Europeans would persist well until the beginning of the following century.

  The books containing the Spanish descriptions of giant’s bones in the New World were not obscure. In particular, Father Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies was broadly known. In the thirty-five years after its first appearance in Latin in 1590, it went through over a dozen editions and was translated into Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and German. Herrera y Tordesillas’s history, known as the Décadas, which repeated Zárate’s story, was translated into the same languages. Other authors writing about giants repeated the Spanish stories. And at least one writer made the connection between giants and elephants. That person was our friend Nicolaas Witsen, who, in his two books on shipbuilding, mentions “Elephant Teeth that can be got in Mexico from the deep abyss of the earth.”

  The first published account of giant bones in Anglo-America appeared in the Boston News-Letter on July 30, 1705. The bone was a giant tooth dug out of a hillside by a farmer near Claverack, in the Hudson valley, twenty miles south of Albany. The article described it as “a great prodigious Tooth . . . supposed by the shape of it to be one of the far great Teeth of a man; it weighs four pound and three quarters, the top of it is as sound and white as a Tooth can be, but the root is much decayed, yet one of the fangs of it hold half a pint of Liquor.” Peter Van Bruggen bought the tooth for half that much liquor and presented it Lord Cornbury, the governor of New York. Cornbury, in turn, packed up the tooth and sent it to the Royal Society with the request that they give it to Gresham College after they were done examining it. Cornbury was not a popular man in the colony. A few years later he would be indicted for embezzlement, graft, and general obnoxiousness, including walking the streets of New York in a dress, an act which was believed to be mocking Queen Anne. From our perspective, he did have one redeeming characteristic: curiosity. After receiving the tooth—and possibly emptying it of any remaining liquor—he ordered the Recorder of the Assembly, Johannis Abeel, to investigate the place where the tooth was found, and later he traveled there to look at it himself. Abeel reported finding a skeleton thirty feet long, but said that the bones had crumbled when they tried to remove them from the ground. The Boston News-Letter also mentions bones that could not be recovered, including “a Thigh-bone [that] was 17 Foot long.”

  The following summer, more teeth and bones were found on the Hudson. These were brought to the attention of Cotton Mather, of Salem witch trial fame, and, through him, to the Royal Society. In a letter to Mather, Massachusetts governor Joseph Dudley described the circumstances of the discovery. “[T]wo honest dutchmen” brought him some teeth and bone fragments. These, they said, were found near Claverack in a pocket of earth seventy feet long, of a different “colour and substance” than the surrounding soil. This discolored earth, they assumed, was the remains of the body of the creature that had previously owned the bones and teeth. One tooth was almost perfect. Dudley said it was of the same configuration as Cornbury’s tooth and that he and all the doctors of the town agreed that it exactly matched a human molar. It had to be from a human giant “for whom the flood only could prepare a funeral; and without doubt he waded as long as he could to keep his head above the clouds, but must at length be confounded with all other creatures, and the new sediment after the flood gave him the depth we now find.” Dudley added that it was impossible that the tooth could have come from a whale or elephant. Claverack was too far from the sea for whales, and the tooth was the wrong shape for an elephant. The poet William Taylor heard of the same discovery and wrote that Indians from all around came to say “I told you so” to the rude Europeans who had discounted their ancestor’s tales of giants.

  Dudley’s letter came a perfect time for Mather. For years, his political and social influence had been declining. Under Queen Anne, High Anglicanism was on the rise and Puritanism in decline. Mather’s difficult personality also drove any remaining supporters away from him. His wife had died four years earlier, and he was in ill health. He was increasingly worried that he might not live to complete what he saw as his most important work, Biblia Americana, a gloss on different verses of the Bible in the light of modern scientific thought. He saw the giant bones and teeth of Claverack as the proof he needed for Genesis 6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” The gloss on this verse is one that he would be particularly proud of. In November 1712, Mather sent thirteen letters to the Royal Society over a twelve-day period. The mail being what it was, these letters almost certainly traveled together on the same ship. The letters appear to have been written over several years, despite being mailed within two weeks. One can only speculate as to why he didn’t package them into a single bundle.

  For Mather, and for us, the most important letter is the first. This letter is addressed to John Woodward, a member of the society who, in the 1690s, had written a rebuttal to Burnet’s theory of the flood titled Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth. Woodward’s countertheory challenged Burnet’s idea of a pristine smooth earth before the Deluge, pointing out that mountains are mentioned in Genesis before the Flood, and took issue with the implication of great age for the earth in Steno’s explanation of stratification. In his theory, the violence of the flood destroyed the old mountains, the sediment-filled waters next laid down all the visible geological strata, and the receding waters carved valleys into the still-soft sediment, creating the mountains of historical times. Woodward rejected the idea of vis plasica and embraced the organic nature of fossils. Within the violent, muddy waters of the Deluge, bones and shells survived and were eventually deposited in layers according to their various specific gravities. This is essentially the flood geology theory embraced by American Creationists today. Although the theory already had its critics, Mather felt that Woodward’s theory best explained the strata visible in the earth and the placement of fossils in those strata. He believed his gloss of the giants fit in well with Woodward’s theory and hoped to gain the patronage of his better-known peer. In this letter, he rather disingenuously presents his Biblia Americana as the work of a brilliant young colleague to whom he wishes to draw the attention of the learned men of Europe. After praising this anonymous author, he adds his gloss of Genesis 6:4 as a proof of his genius. After citing the usual ancient and medieval sources on giants, Mather describes the Claverack teeth. For Cornbury’s tooth, he quotes, with credit, the newspaper account of the discovery. For the second tooth, he plagiarizes Dudley’s letter, including the conclusion that the bones were found too far from the sea to have been from a whal
e and were of the wrong shape to have been from an elephant. In a long marginal note, he points out that such teeth and bones have been found by “Americans in the Southern Regions” and credits Zárate, Acosta, and Cieza as his sources. He finishes with a bit of patriotic pride: “But at last we dig them up in [our] Northern Regions too.” He, too, describes the Indians coming to look at the bones and cite them as proof of their legends, but his reason for mentioning them is nothing more than a hook to launch into a short rant on how disgusting he finds the language of the “Salvages.”

  The Royal Society was not especially impressed with Mather’s letters. Two years after receiving them, Edmund Halley, Sloane’s replacement as secretary, published a short summary of them, giving each one a single paragraph, in some cases only a single sentence. As to the teeth, Halley repeats the physical descriptions of them, ending with the comment, “It were to be wish’d the Writer had given an Exact Figure of the Teeth and Bones.” From the descriptions given, the teeth found at Claverack and in other parts of the Hudson valley came from mastodons. Like the Deinothere teeth that were mistaken for Theutobochus, mastodons’ teeth have a hard enamel surface and cusped shape that closer resembles a human molar than an elephant’s grinder. The Hudson valley is a very rich area for mastodon bones, and the most important find of the century would be made at Newburg, sixty miles downriver from Calverack. That would happen at the end of the century, long after Mather had died. For the time being, the Hudson valley teeth remained a local curiosity and nothing more.