by Petamber Persaud
After exploring a part of Guyana’s heartland via Stan Brock (‘Jungle Cowboy’) and Gerald Durrell (‘Three Singles to Adventure’) a few other books and their authors vied for a mention in my column. I was unable to get my hands on ‘Ninety-two Day’ by Evelyn Waugh (an account of his travels in Guyana and Brazil) and I had already written about ‘Zoo Quest to Guiana’ by David Attenborough (his three months spent in Guyana filming and collecting animals), so I focused on Charles Waterton of Walton Hall, Guyana and of Walton Hall, England, who wrote ‘Wanderings in South America’.
I focused on Waterton mainly of two quotations; one on the man and the other about his book. Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist and conservationist, said that ‘Wanderings in South America’ is ‘the beginning of literature wherein field naturalists who were also men of letters, have described for us the magic and interest, the terror and the beauty of the far-off wilds, where nature gives peace to bold souls and inspires terror in the mind’. Gerald Durrell writing the foreword to Julia Blackburn’s book ‘Charles Waterton, 1782-1865, Traveller and Conservationist’, said Waterton ‘was a man who did no harm to the world he lived in but enhanced it by his presence and his care of it. Would that we could all have similar epitaph’.
After surviving numerous life-threatening encounters during his wanderings in British Guiana and other parts of the world, Charles Waterton died in his own backyard, stumbling on the flora (a briar-root) he nurtured to serve as sanctuary for the fauna he revived and sustained in his park, the world’s first wildfowl and nature reserve, at Walton Hall, Yorkshire, England.
Waterton was interned on his birth anniversary, June 3, some 83 years after he was born; his coffin on its floating briar was towed on the lake surrounding Walton Hall accompanied by boats draped in black cloth. He left detailed instruction for an elaborate funeral. Yet he disapproved of mourning and wearing of black. He died at twenty-seven minutes past two on the morning of May twenty-seventh, 1865.
His life was replete with curious incidents; some commentators went as far as labelling Waterton ‘a curiosity’ having done a few things different to the norm like sporting a crew-cut instead of a full head of hair and healing himself by bloodletting. But he was catholic in nature and Catholic by religion, praying daily in the wee hours of the morning, sleeping on bare floor with a block of wood for pillow.
He was well-read, saturating his mind with classical literature like Horace, Virgil, Ovid, but his bible was Cervantes’ Don Quixote which he read almost every day of his life, sometimes, reading by the light of a multitude of fireflies in the jungle of British Guiana. His life and work fitted aptly to a line from Don Quixote: ‘He is mad in patches, full of lucid intervals’.
He invented the bird nesting box and created the world’s first wildfowl and nature reserve accommodating 17, 000 visitor in a year.
He was credited with taking the anaesthetic agent curare to Europe and taking “taxidermy from a sorry handicraft to an art” – his creations were ‘perfect and extraordinary lifelike’, taking back to England after his third trip to Guiana ‘two hundred and thirty birds, two land tortoises, five armadillos, two large serpents, a sloth and ant-bear, and a cayman’. He was an early opponent to pollution, successfully fighting for the removal of the soap factories around his estate that emitted poisonous chemicals which damaged the trees and waterways.
Charles Waterton was the Squire of Walton Hall, Yorkshire, and manager to Walton Hall, Essequibo, British Guiana. He first came to British Guiana in 1804 to manage his uncle’s estates, Friendship and La Jealousy, on the West Coast of Demerara, at a time when yellow fever was wrecking havoc with the population, coffins were a constant flow out of the city of Georgetown. Between 1812 and 1824, he made four forays into the jungle of Guiana; the best days of his life ‘where a man would lose his senses, and forget the world’ and enjoy the silence and solitude of the forest.
There are many reasons for his expedition into the jungles of Guiana. One, he was a changed man, a more humane man, after dealing with the slaves on the plantations. So much so that he said one had to have had a heart of stone to defend slavery. He taught the most important science of the day, taxidermy, to John Edmonstone, a freed African who went to England and in turn imparted the art to Charles Darwin. And the other reason for exploring the virgin forest of Guiana was bound up in the fact that an acquaintance, Sir Joseph Banks, encouraged Waterton to bring back samples of curare in order to experiment with the substance as a curative agent for certain aliments.
Waterton was born at Walton Hall, West Yorkshire, England, on June 3, 1782. At an early age he was attracted to nature, this interest was encouraged at Stonyhurst College.
His first foreign trip, to Malaga, like many subsequent voyages was not smooth sailing; he escaped the black plague slightly wounded.
His ailment triggered his sojourn to warmer climes in British Guiana. His adventures were captured in an immensely popular book, ‘Wanderings in South America’, published 1826. It was translated into French, Dutch and Spanish and endorsed by Dickens, Darwin and Roosevelt. It would be useful to know that ‘Wanderings in South America’ was not meant to be a text-book but as Waterton declared that he only ‘penned down a few words’ to encourage naturalists to explore.
After his wanderings, he settled at Walton Hall, England, and married Anne Edmonstone at whose christening he was present on the Mibiri Creek, Demerara River, British Guiana. The union produced one son, Edmund, who was opposite in nature to his father and at whose feet lay the blame for lost of a great deal of information on Charles Waterton.
WHAT’S HAPPENING:
New Arrivals: Monsoon on the Fingers of God (poetry) by Sasenarine Persaud; Red Hibiscus (novel) by Scott Ting-A-Kee; Aftermath of Empire: The Novels of Roy A. K. Heath (literary criticism) by Ameena Gafoor.
Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com (Times Sunday Magazine)
