Species Seekers Chosen 1 of 12 Books of Xmas: “Exceptionally Engaging”

Here’s today’s review from The Well-Read Naturalist:

Take even a brief look into the histories of those stalwart early naturalists who in the 1600s began fanning out across the globe in search of new forms of life and you will quickly come to understand that theirs were far from normal or average lives. Aside from the physical hardships and deprivations of travel (almost always by ship) in those days – bad food, cramped quarters, fetid water, scurvy and other diseases, drowning, pirates, shipwrecks, etc. – there were, should one survive the trip, myriad dangers peculiar to the destination itself still awaiting the intrepid explorer.

Then, if all went well and specimens were successfully collected without the exploring naturalist succumbing to disease, being killed by less-than-friendly local peoples, or simply getting lost and never heard from again, there was the problem of how to get everything back home. To a reasonable person, such an endeavor would be thought sheer madness; fortunately, as Richard Conniff so well explains in (although a strong argument could be made that most of them had at least a screw or two not completely tightened); some were simply enthusiastic amateurs posted as soldiers or in the employ of emerging global commercial enterprises such as the British East India Company or its Dutch counterpart who found themselves in far off and exotic locales where throwing a rock at random could likely result in it hitting some manner of creature not yet known in Europe.

Be they who and whatsoever they may have been, Conniff has collected their stories and in The Species Seekers recounts them, together with a goodly portion of the natural histories of their respective discoveries as well as the effects upon the societies of the nations in which collected specimens were studied, exhibited, and in many cases transformed into commercial objects, in a style that is exceptionally engaging, often somewhat playful (his frequent puns will have the attentive reader groaning with appreciation) and wholly intelligible to readers of most all levels of previous knowledge the history of natural history.

Title: The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth

Author: Richard Conniff (twitter, blog)

Publisher: W. W. Norton

Date of Publication: November 2010

ISBN (clothbound): 978-0-393-06854-2

The Species Seekers Chosen 1 of 12 Books of Christmas: “Exceptionally Engaging”

Here’s today’s review from The Well-Read Naturalist:

Take even a brief look into the histories of those stalwart early naturalists who in the 1600s began fanning out across the globe in search of new forms of life and you will quickly come to understand that theirs were far from normal or average lives. Aside from the physical hardships and deprivations of travel (almost always by ship) in those days – bad food, cramped quarters, fetid water, scurvy and other diseases, drowning, pirates, shipwrecks, etc. – there were, should one survive the trip, myriad dangers peculiar to the destination itself still awaiting the intrepid explorer.

Then, if all went well and specimens were successfully collected without the exploring naturalist succumbing to disease, being killed by less-than-friendly local peoples, or simply getting lost and never heard from again, there was the problem of how to get everything back home. To a reasonable person, such an endeavor would be thought sheer madness; fortunately, as Richard Conniff so well explains in The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth, madmen (and a few women as well) willing to undertake such journeys for the sake of science, fame, riches, sheer curiosity, or some combination of all of these were in no short supply during those early days of scientific exploration.

Not all of them were completely mad of course

A Coleopterist Goes to War

Napolean’s first aide-de-camp, Col. Pierre Francois Marie Auguste Dejean, was also a coleopterist.  What was his specialty?

1.  He made precision rifle sights.

2.  He collected beetles.

3.  He was a battlefield engineer, adept at reading the land by studying the foliage.

4.  He designed a new form of artillery.

And the answer is :

A Lively and Enthusiastic Tale of Adventure and Discovery

This is a lovely, well-informed review of The Species Seekers, from epinions, of all places.  The reviewer, identified only as “driftless,” is apparently a Wisconsin reader with a thing for cycling, insects, and old movies.  If only he wrote for, say, the New York Times Book Review:

It was a time of fanaticism and fervor.   In the 19th century, enthused by tales of adventure and derring-do across the world, young men would sail across the globe, risking death from accident, disease, drowning or cannibals, searching for new discoveries.  The goal was not new lands or territories – the continents had already been divvied up – but new forms of life.

There was an intellectual zeal at the time that caused these men to weather incredible hardships in the quest to be the first white man to describe a new tree, quadruped or butterfly.   Some would go on to fame and fortune, others would die of malaria or cholera, but all too often, after spending several years collecting thousands of specimens, taking copious notes, gathering loads of data, they would sail for home, often getting within sight of the European coast, only to founder on the rocks and sink, losing all of the fruits of their labor.   If they made it home alive, they would often make plans to return to the tropics and try again.  In The Species Seekers, writer Richard Conniff tells the stories of these intrepid investigators.

During the Age of Discovery, voyagers brought back hoards of exotic and unusual plants and animals.  The scientists of the time had no reliable method to categorize these finds, even arguing over whether a given animal was a bird, fish or mammal at times.  Conniff describes how order was brought to this chaos by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish physician who conceived the taxonomic system used to this day, including the binomial nomenclature that names the human species, Homo sapiens.   This remarkably effective system inspired countless aspiring young scientists to travel the world seeking to name every new creature they encountered.

Over almost 400 pages, Conniff tells the story of famous collectors like Darwin and Audubon, but he spends most of the book relating stories of naturalists of whom I’ve never heard.   His descriptions of the various heroes, villains, buffoons and charlatans make for entertaining reading.  He also delves deeply into the politics and class warfare that permeated these efforts; the battles waged over the significance of the discovery of the gorilla are particularly interesting.  His writing style is lively and enthusiastic and he clearly enjoys telling these tales.

The book moves along quickly, but it’s not until the last couple chapters that Conniff’s true inspiration is apparent.   It’s not so much a surprise ending, but he concisely clarifies how important these discoveries turn out to be.  The entire taxonomic edifice constructed by Linnaeus, Darwin and many others provides the structure that leads directly to triumph over infectious horrors like malaria, yellow fever and almost every other tropical scourge to have plagued humankind over millennia.   These medical victories would never have occurred had it not been for the mad efforts of hundreds of indefatigable naturalists, many of whom gave their lives in the effort.   Conniff even includes an inspiring Necrology section at the end of the book where he lists a brief bio of several dozen scientists who died on the job, often quite horribly.

Much more than a book about butterfly collectors and bird watchers, The Species Seekers tells the birth story of modern biology and much of modern medicine.     Conniff’s focus on the unusual individuals that made this possible is a fitting tribute to these daring, but mostly unrecognized, men and women.   The world would be a much different place without them.

An Everlasting Itch

I came across a great epigraph today, from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, by way of the late, lamented diplomat Richard Holbrooke, and the Wall Street Journal.

Wish I had had it while writing The Species Seekers because it perfectly captures the spirit of so many of the explorers in that book, going out to discover obscure insects, fishes, reptiles and other creatures:

“With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

Disco Sea Snail (in the Land Down Under)

The light show from Hinea brasiliana. Credit: D. D. Deheyn

 

They light up inside when touched.

And the light pulsates every hundred milliseconds.

Don’t you know the feeling?

Feel the city breakin’ and ev’rybody shakin’

and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.

Ah, ha, ha, ha, Stayin’ Alive.

Or, wait, am I anthropomorphizing?  Here’s a more sober report from the splendid wallflowers at Livescience:

Tracing the mysterious green flashes of light produced by a sea snail has revealed a creature built to shine from the inside – and with a shell that may be designed for communication as well as protection.

Typically found in tight clusters or groups at rocky shorelines, the clusterwink snail, or Hinea brasiliana, was known to produce light. But scientists like Dimitri Deheyn assumed the sea snails did their light thing just like their pals on the land. Terrestrial snails produce a glowing light from their foot when it’s sticking outside the shell.

Nerida Wilson of the Australian Museum in Sydney was working with the Hinea snail when she noticed these bright flashes and not the usual snail glow, so she contacted her colleague Deheyn, of the University of California-San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and sent him some snails. [Sea Creature Releases Glowing Decoy 'Bombs']

The first difference he noticed upon receiving them was that, instead of glowing continuously, they produced light flashes that occurred only when touched.

Not only that, but

A Very Colorful Nondescript

Collector Charles Waterton was adept at taxidermy, but notorious for his quirky mountings.  His masterpiece was the “Nondescript.”  What was it?

1.  A lion concealed for ambush.

2.  A human being of bland countenance.

3.  The head of a monkey.

4.  A polar bear.

And the answer is:

Raffles of the Eastern Isles

Stamford Raffles, the British naturalist and empire builder of the Far East, was a particularly poignant example of how families became caught up, and often sacrificed, to the greater cause of collection and conquest.

The child of a slave trader, he went to work at 14, as a clerk for the British East India Company.  Ten years later, the company sent him to Penang, and he started his long career in Southeast Asia.   In 1811, he orchestrated an invasion of Java by a British expedition of 11,000 men.  He then served as lieutenant-governor there, and among other progressive measures, ended the slave trade and established rules of self-government.  But his first wife died on Java, of tropical disease.

Back in England a few years later, Raffles remarried and brought his new wife, Sophia Hull, with him to the Far East, where he became governor general of Bencoolen in Sumatra.  The two of them would have five children together while Raffles governed Sumatra, founded the city of Singapore, and somehow also managed to make significant contributions to the study of natural history.  He discovered several dozen new species, including the sun bear (Ursus malayanus), the crab-eating macaque (Macaca fascicularis), the great-billed heron (Ardea sumatrana) and the milky stork (Mycteria cinerea), as well as the world’s largest flower, a genus of plants that parasitize palm trees, now named Rafflesia in his honor.

The transformation of Singapore into a thriving British colony filled him with unabashed mercantile delight: “Here all is life and activity; and it would be difficult to name a place on the face of the globe with brighter prospects or more pleasant satisfaction.”

His private life, on the other hand, had taken a much darker turn.   Within a period of just six devastating months, his first three children died, of dysentery and other afflictions.  A new child arrived in 1823, but soon also died. He and his wife had only a young daughter left, and in Raffles’ letters it became an urgent question whether they could find a ship to get them home “in time to save our lives.”

Raffles packed up all his notes, maps, books, paintings, musical instruments, and other mementoes, as well as boxes filled with thousands of specimens of different species.  He neglected to get insurance, and shipped all their property, valued at £25,000, a sizable fortune then, at their own risk.

Two days out to sea, a fire broke out beneath their cabin.  Everyone aboard was able to get off into lifeboats, but “less than ten minutes afterwards she was one grand mass of fire,” Raffles wrote, and with the ship went much of what was left of his own shattered life.

Raffles, Sophia, and their surviving daughter would eventually get back to London, where he would become the driving force behind the creation of the London Zoo and then die, one day short of his 45^th birthday.  Along with the new species he had brought to the attention of science, Singapore would be his real legacy.  Soon after the deaths of his children, he had referred to it as “this, my almost only child.”  It was as if, however reluctantly, he had swapped his flesh-and-blood for the glories of empire–a bargain many men implicitly accepted then when they voyaged out into the world as naturalists and colonizers—their lives, marriages, children, even perhaps their souls, for the glory of a new city or a new species.

Ironically, because of his anti-slavery stance, he was refused burial inside his local parish church (St. Mary’s, Hendon) by the vicar, whose family had made its money in the slave trade. The actual whereabouts of his body remained unknown until it was found in a churchyard vault, in 1914.  His tomb was incorporated into the body of the church when it was enlarged a few years later.

An Arctic Explorer and his Rather Large Find

In 1773, Capt. Constantine John Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave took two ships on a voyage towards the North Pole.  What was the mission’s outcome?

1.  He found the Northwest Passage.

2.  He saw a polar bear.

3.  He was a spy and brought back early evidence of revolutionary sentiments in the American colonies.

4.  He had to be rescued from the ice.

And the answer is

Green Penises and Oblivious Biologists

Because they tended to ignore sexual selection as a factor in the evolution of species, generations of male scientists failed to notice what hard-to-miss phenomenon?

1.  Displays by the bird of paradise.

2.  Musth in elephants.

3.  Changing colors in cuttlefish.

4.  The love song of the crested bandicoot.