text:
“O Uommibatto”
How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat
By Angus Trumble
January 10, 2019

Angus Trumble on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company’s curious but longstanding fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat — that “most beautiful of God’s creatures” which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes.

In 1857, the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti — central figure of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and by then a national celebrity — was commissioned to decorate the vaulted ceiling, upper walls, and windows of the Oxford Union library. He mustered a large group of helpers, including his new Oxford undergraduate friends (and future leading artists) Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.
While the murals were being painted with scenes taken from Arthurian legend — rather badly, as it turned out, because they have since deteriorated beyond recognition — the glass panes of the windows were painted over to reduce the glare coming through onto the walls. These whitewashed surfaces were soon covered with sketches drawn or scratched into the paint, mostly depictions of one particular animal. The wombat.
These soon vanished because, of course, when the frescoes were finished the whitewash was removed. Edward Burne-Jones was supposed to have done the best ones, and he continued to produce them for many years. A rather overheated Egyptological example, shown whizzing past the pyramids, was much later chosen by Lady Burne-Jones as an illustration for the part of her memoir that dealt with the Oxford Union episode.
Recalling the hugely enjoyable experience of working in the Oxford Union, another artist — helper Val Prinsep — recalled: “Rossetti was the planet around which we revolved, we copied his way of speaking. All beautiful women were ‘stunners’ with us. Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures.”
How did Rossetti and his protégés come to be so obsessed with wombats?
Only one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood actually visited Australia — the sculptor Thomas Woolner who, after failing to earn a proper living with his art, emigrated there to seek his fortune on the goldfields. The Pre-Raphaelites and their friends met regularly to read aloud from the letter-journals that Woolner sent home. He had no luck at all and did not like the Australian landscape. He confided to his diary that he thought it topsy-turvy. The seasons were the wrong way around, as were the times of day. The birds, he claimed, did not sing, cherries grew with their stones on the outside of the fruit, the trees shed their bark, not their leaves, and so on. On one occasion he was shocked to encounter the fragrance of lilac because he had made his mind up that Australia was scentless, barren, “a land without fruit or vegetable”. Although wombats don’t get a specific mention in the surviving letters, it is quite possible he brought word of the exotic marsupial home with him when he moved back to England just a year later.
Of course, the Pre-Raphaelites were not the first English to become enamoured by the unusual creature.  Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact. The Aboriginal word wombat was first recorded near Port Jackson, and though variants such as wombach, womback, the wom-bat, and womat were noted, the present form of the name stuck very early, from at least 1797. Beautiful drawings survive from the 1802 voyages of the Investigator and Le Géographe. Ferdinand Bauer, who sailed with Matthew Flinders, and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who was in the rival French expedition of Nicolas Baudin, both drew the creature. These were engraved and carefully studied at home. Wombats were admired for their stumpy strength, their patience, their placid, not to say congenial manners, and also a kind of stoic determination. Occasionally they were thought clumsy, insensible, or even stupid, but these isolated observations are out of step with the majority of nineteenth-century opinion.
untitled text 2:48:     caption={ Engraving of wombats after a drawing by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, plate 58 in the Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes (1824) by Arthus Bertrand — Source.}
From about 1803, a steady trickle of live wombats reached Europe. We know there was a wombat among the birds and animals that were delivered to the menagerie of the Empress Joséphine Bonaparte at Malmaison, near Paris. Another early wombat owner was the English naturalist Everard Home, whose paper on the subject, “An Account of Some Peculiarities in the Anatomical Structure of the Wombat”, appeared in March 1809 in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts. Home’s wombat, a male, was in fact caught by George Bass, probably on King Island, where we know Bass and his companions shot several other specimens. Once provoked, this particular wombat put up a splendid struggle, tearing strips off Bass’ coat sleeves and making loud “whizzing” noises. Evidently he took ages to calm down. Bass kept him alive, looked after him well, and sent him to England. There, in London, he lived in what Home described as “a domesticated state for two years”. The following description is no less charming today than it must have been for English scientific readers nearly two centuries ago.
[The wombat] burrowed in the ground whenever it had an opportunity, and covered itself in the earth with surprising quickness. It was quiet during the day, but constantly in motion in the night: was very sensible to cold; ate all kinds of vegetables; but was particularly fond of new hay, which it ate stalk by stalk, taking it into its mouth like a beaver, by small bits at a time. It was not wanting in intelligence, and appeared attached to those to whom it was accustomed, and who were kind to it. When it saw them, it would put up its forepaws on the knee, and when taken up would sleep in the lap. It allowed children to pull and carry it about, and when it bit them did not appear to do it in anger or with violence.
Some misconceptions lingered for decades. In 1827 an engraver working for the museum in Newcastle had the wombat sitting up like a kangaroo, something that clearly escaped notice throughout the galley and page-proof stages of publication.
But the most important development in the establishment of the wombat’s English reputation was the appearance in 1855 of John Gould’s de luxe The Mammals of Australia. Gould was in Australia much earlier, in the 1830s, and it was certainly through Gould that the artist Edward Lear, who illustrated Gould’s Birds but unfortunately not the Mammals, made a wonderful sheet of whimsical drawings of the “Inditchenous Beestes of New Olland”, a rarity which is today in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. These are plausibly accurate caricatures of various species of kangaroo and wallaby, the platypus, the “possum up his gum tree”, and the Tasmanian Devil. There are also mad renderings of the bandicoot, echidna, and native cat, not to mention representative appearances in the margin of the cow, the dog, the sheep, and the horse. Splendidly rotund and occupying the largest amount of space towards the bottom centre of the sheet is the wombat, with “his i”.
Gould’s 1855 description of the wombat is almost as captivating as Everard Home’s fifty years earlier.
In its habits it is nocturnal, living in the deep stony burrows excavated by itself, during the day, and emerging on the approach of evening, but seldom trusting itself far from its stronghold, to which it immediately runs for safety on the appearance of an intruder. The natives state, however, that it sometimes indulges in a long ramble, and, if a river should cross its course, quietly walks into the water and traverses the bottom of the stream until it reaches the other side . . . In its disposition it is quiet and docile in the extreme, soon becoming familiar with and apparently attached to those that feed it; as an evidence of which, I may mention that the two specimens which are now and have been for a long period living in the Gardens of the Zoological Society in the Regent’s Park, not only admit the closest inspection, but may be handled and scratched by all who choose to make so intimate an acquaintance with them.
If not from Thomas Woolner, whose view of the Australian landscape was pretty bleak, Rossetti and his friends may well have derived their particular enthusiasm for wombats from Gould’s or some other appealing description. Or maybe they simply fell in love with the wombats at the Regent’s Park Zoo.
In the 1860s, Rossetti often took his friends to visit the wombats at the zoo, sometimes for hours on end. On one occasion Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown: “Dear Brown: Lizzie and I propose to meet Georgie and Ned [the Burne-Jones] at 2 pm tomorrow at the Zoological Gardens—place of meeting, the Wombat’s Lair.” In this period a number of new wombats arrived at the Regent’s Park Zoo: a rare, hairy-nosed wombat on July 24, 1862, and two common wombats despatched from the Melbourne Zoo on March 18, 1863. Rossetti also made regular visits with his brother, William Michael, to the Acclimatisation Society in London and its counterpart in Paris, to keep an eye on the hairy-nosed wombats residing in both places. This was no passing fancy.
Earlier, in 1862, Rossetti had moved to Tudor House, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Spacious, with plenty of room for family and friends including George Meredith and the poet and semi-professional sadomasochist Algernon Charles Swinburne — who liked to slide naked down the banisters — the house had four-fifths of an acre of garden, with lime trees and a big mulberry. As soon as he arrived, Rossetti began to fill the garden with exotic birds and animals. There were owls, two or more armadillos, rabbits, dormice, and a racoon that hibernated in a chest of drawers. There were peacocks, parakeets, and kangaroos and wallabies, about which we know frustratingly little. There was a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, a Pomeranian puppy called Punch, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, a Japanese salamander, and two laughing jackasses. We know the neighbours were tolerant up to a point but Thomas Carlyle, for one, was driven mad by the noise. At length there was a small Brahmin bull that had to go when it chased Rossetti around the garden, and, in September 1869, a long-awaited wombat, the culmination of well over twelve years of enthusiasm for the exotic marsupial.
Shortly before this date there had been a number of animal deaths at Cheyne Walk, so Rossetti raised the animal-collecting stakes considerably. In November 1867, he was negotiating with his supplier of wild animals, Charles Jamrach. His object was to purchase a young African elephant, but he balked at the price of £400. Rossetti’s income for 1865 was £2000. Rossetti finally arranged to buy a wombat, again through Jamrach, when at length a suitable specimen became available. This wombat arrived when he was away in Scotland recovering from a kind of breakdown, largely precipitated by failing eyesight, insomnia, drugs, and, above all, his growing infatuation with Jane Morris, the wife of his old friend and protégé from the Oxford Union days.
A remarkable drawing of Jane Morris and the wombat in the British Museum illustrates the degree to which lover and pet merged in Rossetti’s mind as objects of sanctification. Each of them wears a halo. But Jane has the wombat on a leash, and it seems clear that Rossetti also used his pet wombat as a cruelly comical emblem for Jane’s long-suffering, cuckolded husband. Since university days William Morris was known to his friends as “Topsy”; the name Rossetti chose for his Wombat was “Top”.
Still shaky, Rossetti could not wait to get back to Chelsea from freezing Scotland. He wrote to Jane the following mock-heroic lines:
Oh! How the family affections combat Within this heart; and each hour flings a bomb at My burning soul; neither from owl nor from bat Can peace be gained, until I clasp my wombat!
Meanwhile, within days, Rossetti’s sister, Christina, had sent him breathless verses in Italian entitled “O Uommibatto”, in which she described the animal as “agil, giocondo” (nimble, cheerful), as well as “irsuto e tondo” (hairy and round). Writing from Scotland a few days later, Rossetti asked his brother William Michael also to thank Christina for the “shrine in the Italian taste, which she has reared for the wombat. I fear his habits tend inveterately to drain architecture . . . It appears the wombat follows people all over the house!” At last, Rossetti returned to London on September 20, and the next day wrote to William Michael his most famous and suggestive remark about the new addition to his menagerie: “The wombat is a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness.” Unfortunately, the poor wombat was also an invalid.
From the beginning, William Michael had sensed that something was wrong: “I went round to see the beast, which is the most lumpish and incapable of wombats, with an air of baby objectlessness — not much more than half-grown probably. He is much addicted to following one about the room, and nestling up against one, and nibbling one’s calves or trousers.” Top the wombat also got on well with the other animals, particularly the rabbits.
Soon, however, Top was ailing. William Michael wrote: “The wombat shows symptoms of some malady of the mange-kind, and he is attended by a dog doctor.” The next day: “Saw the wombat again at Chelsea. I much fear he shows already decided symptoms of loss of sight which effects so many wombats.” At length, on November 6, the wombat died. Rossetti had him stuffed and afterwards displayed in the front hall.
Rossetti’s famous self-portrait with Top, the deceased wombat, is satirical but was apparently prompted by genuine grief. The accompanying verses are bleak indeed:
I never reared a young wombat To glad me with his pin-hole eye, But when he most was sweet and fat And tailless, he was sure to die!
These verses are in fact Rossetti’s parody of the opening lines of “The Fire Worshippers”, a poem that appeared in a curious, but hugely popular novel by Thomas Moore called Lallah Rookh, published in 1817, which is all about the betrothal of the Emperor’s daughter to a foreign prince and the journey she undertook from Delhi to Kashmir to meet her future husband. On the way she meets a beautiful minstrel with whom she falls in love and, of course, it turns out in the end that he is none other than the prince in disguise. These lines are sung by Lallah Rookh:
I never nurs’d a dear gazelle To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die!
The substitution of the wombat for Lallah Rookh’s exotic gazelle is typical of Rossetti’s self-indulgent humour, and he clearly had no trouble adapting for himself the mood of a lovelorn oriental princess.
During its short life, the first of Rossetti’s two pet wombats secured a remarkable place in the mythology of his circle of friends. Rossetti gleefully reported to William Bell Scott on September 28, 1869, that the wombat had effectively interrupted a long and dreary monologue from John Ruskin by patiently burrowing between the eminent critic’s jacket and waistcoat. This must have been a marvellous thing to watch happen. Much later, James McNeill Whistler invented a silly story about how the wombat had perished after eating an entire box of cigars. Ford Madox Brown thought that Rossetti’s habit of bringing the wombat to dinner and letting it sleep in the large épergne or centrepiece on the dining room table inspired the dormouse in the tea-pot incident at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is in fact impossible because Lewis Carroll wrote that chapter in 1863, and the novel, with its famous illustrations by John Tenniel, was published two years later in 1865. There were also stories circulating about the wombat’s diet of ladies’ carelessly discarded straw hats, and so on.
Many years later, recalling the high jinks at Cheyne Walk, Max Beerbohm devised a series of ridiculous caricatures, with the garden menagerie as the setting. We do not know if this peculiar animal with enormous floppy ears was Beerbohm’s bizarre tribute to the wombat, but it seems possible.
In the short term, the Canadian woodchuck made up for Rossetti’s failure to preserve his two pet wombats. The woodchuck lasted much longer. For a long time it was mistaken for the wombat. On February 9, 1871, William Bell Scott observed the woodchuck nestling in Rossetti’s lap and made a charming pencil drawing on Cheyne Walk letterhead. He always assumed it was a wombat. I would say that it was, in fact, the woodchuck that slept peacefully in the épergne in the middle of the dining-room table, not the wombat.
Indeed it is the very idea of the wombat, not so much the creature himself, that consistently captured the imagination of visitors to Cheyne Walk, and stood out among the various Bohemian props with which Rossetti surrounded himself. The wombat craze of the 1850s and 1860s, while confined to a relatively small group of friends, represents a fascinating by-product of the British colonisation of Australia.
Australian birds and animals were very seldom noted in the London press. Palmer’s index to the Times newspaper lists only one reference each to a possum and an echidna in the whole extent of the nineteenth century, while kangaroos are likewise seldom mentioned — though the few mentions are so bizarre that they are worth repeating.
The first reference came in February 1834 and concerned an old woman who, living alone in a house on Castle Hill in South London, awoke one morning to find
a strange animal lying at her back, with one of its paws laid over her shoulder. Screaming with affright, she left her bed, and seizing a towel, she beat it with all her might, when, with one bound, it sprang to the furthest corner of the room, and at length took refuge in another bed which stood in the same apartment.
This rather nonchalant kangaroo turned out to have escaped from Mr Wombwell’s Wild Beast Show, which had lately occupied The Mound.
The second reference comes sixteen years later, in October 1850, and likewise concerns a kangaroo escapee, this time from a menagerie that belonged to a newly-elected member of Parliament, W. J. Evelyn of Wotton, near Dorking, in West Surrey. Raising the alarm, Evelyn called out the local hunt, replete with huntsmen, a pack of beagles, whippers-in, and so forth. The kangaroo sought refuge in a place called the Duke of Norfolk’s Copse but was flushed out and cornered at Abinger Rectory. The report is worth quoting:
Here the animal’s peculiar mode of progression was exhibited in a style which astonished the field — a singular succession of leaps carrying it over the ground at a rate perfectly startling. Those who were well mounted alone were enabled to go the pace, and they speedily found themselves at the top of Leith Hill, where the kangaroo took to the road, and for about a mile and a half they all dashed along, “the field” rapidly augmenting in numbers as they proceeded in their novel chase.
By contrast with these rare sightings of kangaroos, as a curiosity in Britain, the wombat, “the most beautiful of God’s creatures”, seems to have attracted far more attention than any other Australian animal and reached into the recesses of the imagination — at least among that group of artists who in the 1850s and 1860s clustered around Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 10, 2019

author: Angus Trumble


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The Myth of Blubber Town, an Arctic Metropolis

By Matthew H. Birkhold
July 10, 2019

Though the 17th-century whaling station of Smeerenburg was in reality, at its height, just a few dwellings and structures for processing blubber, over the decades and centuries a more extravagant picture took hold — that there once had stood, defying its far-flung Arctic location, a bustling urban centre complete with bakeries, churches, gambling dens, and brothels. Matthew H. Birkhold explores the legend.

Perched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg. Founded by Dutch whalers in 1619, Smeerenburg — literally “Blubber Town” — was once the busiest polar site for rendering oil from blubber. As new hunting grounds and technologies rendered land-based processing obsolete, the outpost became unnecessary. Faraway Smeerenburg was abandoned by 1663. Despite its brief existence, myths of a bustling Blubber Town lived on. Sailors recounted streets lined with churches, shops, and bakeries. Other tales described the clubs and brothels forlorn whalers could visit. Respected scientists and historians, including William Scoresby and Fridtjof Nansen, repeated the stories, claiming tens of thousands of people dwelled on the icy island. In reality, no more than fifteen ships carrying four hundred men visited the site.
Smeerenburg began with a happy accident. Searching for a Northeast Passage in 1596, famed navigator Willem Barentsz (1550–1597) stumbled upon the Svalbard islands. Here, along the rocky coasts, he found countless bowhead whales and saw an opportunity. The Dutchman planted a flag and claimed the lucrative waters for the United Provinces.
For the next century, the Dutch ruled the whale trade, supplying almost all of Europe with oil for lamps and whale bones for corsets and hoop-skirts. The peerless Dutch navy safeguarded sailing routes against English, German, and French interlopers as Dutch whalers asserted exclusive rights to the best hunting grounds in the Arctic. The resulting near monopoly allowed Dutch companies to keep prices artificially high and further gild their coffers. The legacy of this Golden Age dominance is recorded in our language: in addition to maritime words like “maelstrom”, “skipper”, and “cruise”, the terms “iceberg” and “walrus” also stem from Dutch exploits in the Arctic.
In 1614 an alliance of Dutch cities created the Noordsche Compagnie as a whaling cartel, which sent ships north each June. Following a three-week journey, the ships arrived to what they called Spitsbergen and remained until September or October, when the growing ice threatened to trap them. At the time, whales were hunted near the coasts and in fjords.
Harvesting the “gold of the seas” was arduous. Bowhead whales were the favored target of Dutch speculators because they are slow swimmers and possess vast quantities of blubber. They can grow up to 60 feet and weigh more than 100 tons. The whip of a tail could spell death. Once a whale was spotted, men hurried to small boats and rowed toward the beast. A successful throw would lodge a harpoon behind the whale’s eye, causing it to dangerously thrash and flee, dragging the craft through freezing waters. Once they exhausted the whale, the crew could repeatedly pierce it. A final lance to the organs would kill the animal, which would roll over, ready to tow back to the ship floating belly up.
Back on shore, men stood atop the giant carcass and flensed the blubber from the muscle, ending up hip-deep in blubber and blood. The process could take hours or days, depending on the size of the whale, the skill of the crew, and the weather. In the seventeenth century, the extracted blubber was cut into manageable pieces and boiled in enormous iron ovens to render oil. After cooling in wooden casks, the oil was funneled into barrels and loaded onto ships to be sold on the European market. Besides alleviating the potential fetor of rotting blubber aboard, producing oil on shore saved space in the hold and thus increased profits.
During their first expedition in the Arctic, ships from the Noordsche Compagnie set up camp on a narrow promontory off a small island near the northwest coast of Spitsbergen. They named it Amsterdam Island. The whalers returned to the same site each summer with canvas tents and makeshift ovens. In 1619, they arrived with timber, brick, and peat from home to create a permanent whaling station. The settlement came to be called Smeerenburg — a fitting name given the heaps of blubber (smeeren) carved up at the site. As more ships arrived each year, additional oil cookeries were built as well as storehouses and dwellings. The buildings were named for the cities that owned them: Delft, Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Middelburg, and Veere among others.
Word of a booming Blubber Town spread among whalers in the Arctic. There was no agreement on how large it had grown and when it was deserted. Most believed it was a bustling place. Written accounts corroborated the whalers’ yarns for a broader public. Jacob Segersz van der Brugge, for instance, published his journal shortly after returning home from whaling in 1634. He describes the lodgings — the Middelburg “tent” he occupied measured 21 by 16 feet — and catalogues his diet, including fresh meat from reindeer, foxes, and birds. Van der Brugge even claims to have repeatedly eaten salads. The German naturalist Friedrich Martens (1635–1699) visited in 1671 traveling aboard a ship christened Jonah in the Whale. His 1675 report of the journey, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise-Beschreibung, included the first scientific description of the flora and fauna of Svalbard and became an oft-cited reference work. In Martens’ eyes, Smeerenburg was a “village”.1 Chronicles escalated from there, particularly as their authors ceased visiting the settlement themselves.
By the eighteenth century, written accounts make clear that Smeerenburg was abandoned, but the myth of its former grandeur continued. Cornelis Gijsbertsz Zorgdrager penned what is considered the first classic account, influencing dozens of authors. Writing in 1720, Zorgdrager assures his reader that he is using reliable information from informants whose kin sailed to the whaling station when the Noordsche Compagnie was master of the trade. Zorgdrager upgrades the settlement from “village” to a “half small city” with busy streets.2 In addition to the tryworks that contained the ovens and working platforms, dwellings, warehouses, and workshops crowd the peninsula in his telling. Peddlers offer a variety of wares including tobacco and spirits in street-side stalls. According to Zorgdrager, Smeerenburg was a destination to make a “good purchase”.3 Best of all, Smeerenburg was home to multiple bakers. Each morning, when they pulled their bread hot from the oven, a horn was blown to alert the weary whalers. For this reason, Zorgdrager is tempted to compare Smeerenburg with Batavia, then the humming capital of the Dutch East Indies, but demurs based on the number of anchored ships reported.
Over time, the purported size of Smeerenburg grew larger as the myth propagated. English explorer William Scoresby, whom Herman Melville’s Ishmael quotes in Moby-Dick, introduces false numbers into the legend. In his popular 1820 Account of the Arctic Regions, Scoresby (1789–1857) asserts “the place had the appearance of a commercial or manufacturing town.”4 Leaning on the Batavia comparison mentioned by Zorgdrager and elaborated upon by other writers, Scoresby has no problem repeating the invention of shopkeepers, artisans, and bakers, ultimately calculating the population between 12,000 and 18,000 people. For comparison, at the time of the American Revolution, Boston had 15,000 residents. Building on Scoresby’s description, other authors add churches, fortresses, wood-paneled houses in bright colors, and even enlarge the size of buildings to 80 by 50 feet. By the end of the century, the rocky coast was thought to have been packed full and the harbor teeming with ships.
The most colorful accounts come from the twentieth century. Surprisingly, the otherwise meticulous Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen, famous for crossing Greenland, perpetuated and inflated the myth. In A Voyage to Spitsbergen (1920), Nansen claims:
Here was an whole town with booths and streets . . . . Some ten thousand people in the summer with the clamor of pack-stalls, and oil cookeries, and gambling halls, of smithies, and workshops, of peddlers, and dance halls. Along this flat beach, a mass of boats with seafarers just coming from the exciting whale-hunt, and of women in various colors who were on the man-hunt.5 Nansen likely read the earlier texts by Zorgdrager and Scoresby; though, it is unclear whether he had a source for the addition of lusty women and dance halls. Regardless, relying on Nansen as a respected researcher, others soon ran with the idea. Helge Ingstad, who with his wife Anne Stine discovered the remains of a Viking settlement in Canada, repeats the extravagant tale of Smeerenburg in his 1948 book The Land with the Cold Coasts. Ingstad discusses the shops, dwellings, and church and further adds a “house for loose women”.6 As late as 1984, the Norwegian Svalbard Society released a history of the archipelago that cited the bakeries of Smeerenburg and estimated its population reached up to 18,000 men.
In reality, Smeerenburg was never more than a desolate outpost. Thanks to the enduring myth, considerable archaeological work was conducted on Amsterdamøya between 1979 and 1981. Some estimate the maximum number of men to have been two hundred at any given time — and there is no evidence of women on the site. There may have been a total of nineteen buildings, including warehouses and workshops, where craftsmen, blubber cutters, and blubber cooks worked. At most there were eight oil cookeries. There was no church or gambling den. The focus was unambiguously on work and capitalizing on the short hunting season. The conditions were grueling. Men likely worked long hours, taking advantage of the endless Arctic summer days, often working through the night in rotation. Zooarchaeological analysis suggests the Dutch were primarily dependent on barreled beef in the seventeenth century. Transported from the Netherlands, the meat would have been cut into 25-centimeter portions, salted, and packed in casks. Jacob Segersz van der Brugge’s fox meat was the exception. And his much-rhapsodized “salad” was likely fistfuls of cochlearia officinalis. Better known as scurvygrass, the leafy plant did indeed ward off the disease, but had an impossibly bitter taste. Eventually, shelters were built by the ovens to protect workers from inclement weather. But death was not uncommon. 101 graves have been identified on the island.
By the 1660s, Smeerenburg was a ghost town. The Noordsche Compagnie dissolved in 1642 after Dutch free traders created too much competition for the cartel. Further precipitating the decline of Blubber Town, whales all but vanished from the coasts of Svalbard. The animals began avoiding the waters either due to shifting currents or learned wariness of the area. With whales further out at sea, it became unnecessarily difficult to drag them to shore — particularly to an island isolated in the upper reaches of the Arctic. Consequently, the Dutch abandoned shore whaling for pelagic whaling, flensing slain whales alongside ships and returning to port in the Netherlands with unprocessed blubber. Vaguely aware of this history, some chroniclers warned against tales of a bustling Blubber Town. Already in his 1874 study of the Noordsche Comagnie, Samuel Muller names them “fairytales”.7
Nevertheless, the myth persisted and grew over time. One explanation, of course, is simply bad history. Authors stopped visiting the settlement themselves and depended solely on first- and second-hand reports. Eventually, these sources disappeared. Writers had to rely on previous written accounts of Smeerenburg and a combination of misreadings and embellishments twisted into an elaborate yarn. A long series of even small exaggerations eventually produced imaginary dance halls and brothels.
Alternatively, it is possible that authors like Scoresby and Nansen strategically deployed the far-fetched stories to attract readers interested in the fantastic. This feels unlikely though. Whaling itself was exciting business, full of enthralling adventures (as Moby-Dick makes clear) — there would be no need to invent a town to capture the imagination of common readers. In any case, evidence indicates the earliest published sources relied on sailors’ tales; the myth was not simply the invention of profit-seeking scribes.
A more generous interpretation, perhaps, is that historians projected their current situation onto the past. After the disbandment of the Noordsche Compagnie in 1642, the number of Dutch whaling ships rapidly increased from some 35 to 70 in 1654 and 148 ships by 1670. Unregulated free whaling burst open the industry and the Dutch continued to outpace competitors until the second half of the eighteenth century. The whale trade itself did not slow down until the twentieth century. By 1840 there were more than seven hundred whaling ships throughout the world. It is possible that authors like Scoresby failed to appreciate how much the industry had grown after Smeerenburg’s abandonment, concluding the settlement must have been crowded when land-based processing was practiced in the seventeenth century. Others may have wrongly assumed all Dutch colonial ports were similar. Coincidentally, the Dutch East India Company razed Jayakarta and founded Batavia in 1619, the same year permanent dwellings were built on Amsterdamøya. Authors like Zorgdrager and Scoresby, who compared the whaling station with the still-flourishing Batavia, might also have sought to glorify the Dutch Republic’s reach and riches by inflating the size and splendor of Smeerenburg.
The sailors who spread stories about Blubber Town likely had a different objective. Throughout the years, whaling remained both tedious and dangerous. The shift to open-sea whaling meant most men did not step foot on land for months. Quarters aboard a typical ship were damp, crowded, and typically under five feet high. In such conditions, dreams of warm beds and quaint cottages would naturally fill even the most sober heads. Daily servings of barreled beef might conjure illusions of freshly baked bread. And the monotony of working with the same crew could inspire longings for gambling dens and dance halls to meet new people. The fantasy of a Blubber Town brothel requires no explanation. Especially for men tricked or coerced onto ships, as was not uncommonly the case, such an imaginary town enabled hopes of a getaway, particularly in the Arctic, where there was no place to flee. Stories about Smeerenburg might have been a foil that allowed later whalers to feel justified bemoaning their comparably harder lot. But ultimately, like many myths, Blubber Town was meant to entertain, to provide an escape for readers at sea and at home alike.
Surrounded by steep mountains, glacier walls, and deep fjords, Smeerenburg is now a popular stop for Arctic cruises. In 1973 its ruins became part of Norway’s Nordvest-Spitsbergen national park. Visitors are warned against walruses and then invited to wonder at the brick foundations of the tryworks. They can gape at the so-called “blubber cement” that still outlines the place where enormous cooking vessels once stood. The result of mixed whale oil, sand, and gravel, the asphalt-like substance is the most tangible remnant of Blubber Town. Otherwise, the busy streets, warm bread, and welcoming women populating Smeerenburg must continue to exist in our collective imagination.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Matthew H. Birkhold

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Greenland Unicorns and the Magical Alicorn

By Natalie Lawrence
September 19, 2019

When the existence of unicorns, and the curative powers of the horns ascribed to them, began to be questioned, one Danish physician pushed back through curious means — by reframing the unicorn as an aquatic creature of the northern seas. Natalie Lawrence on a fascinating convergence of established folklore, nascent science, and pharmaceutical economy.

Unicorns seem to be everywhere these days. It’s virtually impossible to walk down a high street or go into a gift shop without coming face to face with one of these rainbow-spangled creatures in some form or other. They have become a fashionable cultural icon of fantasy, escapism, and (somewhat paradoxically) individuality — a fact exploited to the full by manufacturers and marketing experts. All the same, most people today are well aware unicorns don’t exist.
In the seventeenth century, the existence of the unicorn was a serious matter of contention. What was at stake was far more than the fantasy worlds of tweenage girls: this fantastical beast was the basis for a whole body of scholarly literature and a lucrative international market in pharmaceuticals (both recreational and medicinal). As Professor Bernd Roling shows in his 2014 essay “Der wal als schauobjekt”, one family in particular were responsible for the demise of the unicorn’s long-standing market value in Europe.1 Caspar Bartholin, his brother-in-law Ole Worm, and his son Thomas Bartholin were a trio of Scandinavian scholars and physicians who scrutinized the unicorn and its purported medicinal powers. Their work culminated in the publication of Thomas Bartholin’s De Unicornu Observationes Novae (New observations about the unicorn) in 1645 (second edition in 1678). Quite counter to Thomas’ intentions, this book precipitated the shunting of the unicorn from credible reality into myth.
De Unicornu Observationes Novae dealt with “unicorns” in the broadest sense, examining all animals with a single horn. Thomas cast his net wide because he was attempting to undertake a very important task: to prove that simply having a single horn didn’t qualify something as a unicorn. He wanted to show that “real” unicorns did exist and that their horns were a key ingredient for many potent medicines. In doing so, though, he had to replace the traditional European image of unicorns as terrestrial antelopes or horses that inhabited exotic Eastern wilds by demonstrating that unicorns were actually aquatic creatures from the North.
Why did Thomas Bartholin feel the need to make this point? Let’s first take a look at why unicorns were so important in early modern Europe. By the seventeenth century, they had a long history already: medieval scholars had assembled descriptions of “unicorns” by classical authors such as Ctesias, Aelian, Aristotle, and Pliny into a body of unicorn lore. These descriptions were of many and varied animals, from inelegant rhino-like beasts with a temper and a penchant for bullying elephants to strangely colourful antelope or fierce chimaeras. The Greek physician Ctesias, for example, recorded exotic travellers’ tales in his book Indica (ca. 810–893 AD), which contains perhaps the earliest surviving account of unicorns:
There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.2
The horn, Ctesias added, was said to be white, red, and black, and offered protection against poison. Most other classical authors were probably also referring to animals they had seen or heard about from travellers (though some might have been rather more creative with their material). What unified accounts of these varied “unicorns” was the idea that they were beasts of great power with a single horn on their heads.
The image of the unicorn was transfigured throughout the Middle Ages — by the sixth-century scholar Isidore of Seville, among others — into a wild, one-horned horse that could be killed by hunters only if it was first lured in and tamed by a virgin. Stories of this kind were recorded in bestiaries and collections of lore such as the Physiologus, which was added to, translated, and reproduced over many centuries. Some versions of the Physiologus included tales of unicorns dipping their horns into water that had been poisoned by serpents, in order to purify it.
This fabulous horse, his magical abilities, and his maiden temptress were enshrined in the sequence of seven unicorn tapestries thought to have been made at the turn of the sixteenth century (now on permanent display at the Met Cloisters in New York). By the early modern era, the unicorn had become a Christian symbol. The image of the beast slain by hunters was associated with Christ’s sacrifice and his noble submission to a virgin had come to represent the Virgin Mary’s chaste power.
Such exotic and sacred associations helped gain unicorn horn or “alicorn” a reputation as a panacea in Europe. Nobles had long had tableware supposedly made of alicorn to avoid being bumped off by poison in their food and drink. Powder made from the horn was similarly believed to cure a case of poisoning. Alicorn was also considered a powerful aphrodisiac and an effective treatment for all sorts of ailments, from fever to the aches of old age.
In the decades before Thomas Bartholin published De Unicornu Observationes Novae, there was still a roaring trade in powdered “unicorn horn” bolstered by classical texts and biblical imagery, as well as by more recent scholarly works singing the praises and potencies of the horn. Apothecaries in some areas displayed unicorn images or actual specimens of horns to signal that they had access to these costly and potent substances. The spiralling tusks of narwhals, identified by dealers, collectors, and scholars as alicorns, were prized possessions in many cabinets of wonder around early modern Europe.
The powdered horn, sold at a premium by apothecaries, was usually made from narwhal tusk, traded to Europe through Scandinavia, which profited greatly from the trade. The horn could also have other sources, including elephant or walrus tusk. Some experts could tell ivories apart: one apothecary argued that narwhal “Horn . . . may be distinguished from [elephant] Ivory by the threads or fibres which are more subtle” and in being “more solid and more heavy”.3  Chopped up into chunks, or ground down completely, however, few people except the hunters and dealers knew where the horns really came from. This confusion was occasionally lamented by writers and apothecaries. The well-travelled French doctor Pierre Martin de La Martinière (1634–1690), for example, commented upon the difficulty of knowing “the right Unicorn . . . there being several Animals the Greeks call Monoceros, and the Latines Uni-Cornis”, ranging from myriad terrestrial quadrupeds and “serpents”, to “fish” such as the “sea elephant”.4
People weren’t entirely lacking in scepticism, though. Many had their suspicions regarding  the reality of the unicorn and the power of the horn. The French physician Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1585) contained a “Discourse on the Unicorn” discussing his doubts. Europeans’ explorations in the Arctic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revealed that the narwhal, a strange spear-headed fish which was previously unknown in European scholarship, was the source of some of these “unicorn” horns. After the first formal European description of the narwhal was produced by William Baffin in the late sixteenth century, the medicinal value of alicorn started to be called into question. Many kinds of horn-like products were thought to contain magical properties — some texts claimed that walrus tusk was even more powerful than alicorn. Such comparisons further threatened the elevated status of alicorn as questions about its origins tarnished its allure. Scholars in Southern Europe began to question whether “unicorn horn” was really all it had been cracked up to be.
Enter the Bartholins. Beginning in 1613, Thomas’ father, Caspar Bartholin the Elder, was the professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Before taking this post, he had travelled extensively through the Netherlands, England, France, and Germany — which was relatively unusual at that time. On his travels, he visited some of Europe’s most illustrious Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders. Examining the unicorn horns present in these collections, he concluded they could not be antelope- or horse-derived appendages. They must be marine. Coming from Denmark, Caspar was far too familiar with the narwhal not to have noticed the similarity between their horns and alicorns, but he avoided making a direct link between them.
It wasn’t until 1636 that Caspar’s brother-in-law, the prolific antiquary and collector Ole Worm, affirmed that narwhals were indeed the source of alicorn. By systematically comparing the skeletons of narwhals with the twisted ivory horns sold as unicorn horns in Europe, he proved they were one and the same: alicorns could only be the bizarre, single emergent teeth of the marine animals. Ole’s conclusion created all sorts of problems. What had the classical authors been describing? Did terrestrial unicorns exist? Was alicorn actually medically potent?
Thomas Bartholin, who was a physician by training, stepped in to resolve the quandaries left by his father and uncle’s investigations. He also managed to execute some clever marketing and public relations for Denmark’s fishing industry. His work bridged the traditional scholarly penchant for prioritising the authority of ancient texts with the growing trend of using experiment and direct observation. He synthesised Caspar and Ole’s conclusions in De Unicornu Observationes Novae, reaffirming that alicorns were the tusks of narwhals while continuing to insist on their medicinal potency. In a sense it was a rebranding exercise: the humble narwhal, its magical properties affirmed, now reimagined as the “Greenland Unicorn”.
Written in Latin, Bartholin’s book laboriously analysed all of the known horned creatures, from rhinos to rhinoceros beetles, hornbills to horned vipers. Bartholin even touched on a few man-made horn objects, such as the “Horn of Gallehus”, a piece of fifth-century craftsmanship made of pure gold, found in Denmark in 1639. (All of these creatures and objects were elaborately illustrated, with full fold-out images in the later 1678 edition produced by Thomas’ son, who was, like his grandfather, called Caspar.)
Given that the usual classical authorities were focused on the land-based versions of the mythical beast, Bartholin called upon some very different ancient sources to give his work gravitas. He used Old Norse texts such as the Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror) — a text written in 1250 for the education of a young Norwegian prince — to demonstrate that the Norsemen were well aware of the nature of these horns and had known of their great power as they traded in them. Invoking the wisdom of such an old text was a powerful argument in a world where tradition and ancient knowledge were put on a pedestal.
In addition to scouring the written record, Thomas also conducted a series of experiments in the hope of confirming the efficacy of narwhal/unicorn horn for curing ailments. Roling mentions that Thomas “even thought he was able to halt a fever epidemic in Copenhagen with unicorn rubs”.5  Using such hard observational evidence to prove that alicorn really was a powerful medicine, he quelled the growing arguments to the contrary. Finally, Thomas was willing to concede that the terrestrial unicorns mentioned in ancient texts must have real-life counterparts in exotic locales; but the medicinal, potent, and valuable alicorn? Well, that could only be procured from the Arctic marine mammals. And only from Iceland.
Thomas Bartholin’s reimagining of the narwhal as the “sea unicorn” was an important marketing gimmick. It protected the value of a medicine that the Bartholins, as physicians, could continue to administer at great cost to their patients. At the same time, it protected the valuable Scandinavian trade in narwhal horns, which was important to the Danish economy. The 1678 publication of an elaborately illustrated edition of De Unicornu by Thomas’ son, Caspar, helped to maintain the sea unicorn’s image in the public eye, and for decades after, Thomas’ ideas continued to have a place in scholarly discussions of alicorn.
This shift from terrestrial horse to sea beast is one of the many changes the meaning of “unicorn” has undergone over time. For a short while in the seventeenth century, the “Greenland Unicorn” — a strange northern sea creature that few Europeans had seen — displaced their obscure hoofed cousins in Asia as the source of the wonderful, spiralling tusks valued by collectors and physicians. Thomas Bartholin’s sleight of hand maintained popular faith in the potency of alicorn until the early eighteenth century, when pharmacists became disenchanted. More reliable experiments proved the powder was not all that useful for curing disease or protecting against poison. In his Systema Naturae (1735), the most prominent taxonomist in history, Carl Linnaeus, would reject the “Greenland Unicorn” once and for all (though the narwhal’s scientific name remains Unicornu groenlandicus). Still, there was a time when unicorns existed both in the sea and on the land, before the medicinal magic of their horns was dispelled and they retreated to the world of pure fable.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 19, 2019

author: Natalie Lawrence


text:
Picturing a Voice
Margaret Watts Hughes and the Eidophone
By Rob Mullender-Ross
November 27, 2019

Of the various forms the nascent art of sound recording took in the late nineteenth century perhaps none was so aesthetically alluring as that invented by Margaret Watts Hughes. Rob Mullender-Ross explores the significance of the Welsh singer’s ingenious set of images, which until recently were thought to be lost.

Recorded sound began as much a visual and textual concern as an auditory one. From its inception the phenomenon necessarily relied upon the act — via the medium of a vibrating surface — of converting sound waves into physical motion, and a subsequent act of inscription. Probably the earliest practical example of such a recording apparatus was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph. Patented in 1857, it consisted of a mechanism of vibrating diaphragm, lever, and a hog’s bristle which scratched sound into soot-coated paper or glass. Scott de Martinville conceived the marks produced as a form of “auto-stenography”, where the inflections and intonations of an individual’s speech might be read by anyone with the required patience to learn this new form of “script”. This new-found visibility of sound fuelled much debate between artists, musicians, scientists, and even lawyers about what precisely these scratches and squiggles constituted. Were they a kind of writing, an expository method of display and measurement, or a mutable and plastic material — a site of aesthetic transformation and potential production? Audio-visual correspondences as aesthetic concerns — often suffused with occult or spiritualist sensibilities — grew to become well established in the more esoteric visual and musical practices of the late nineteenth century.
Even Alexander Graham Bell felt the seductive promise of a commingling of the auditory and the visual when, on having successfully demonstrated a new communication device he called the Photophone, he exclaimed to his father:
I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!. . . I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of the cloud across the sun’s disk!1
Bell had heard a signal (light) that had never previously existed within the auditory realm; already the provenance of sound was undermined. This ingenious device consisted of a mouthpiece attached to a chamber capped with a thin mirror. When spoken into, the mirror would vibrate, thereby modulating a beam of sunlight — effectively encoding it with the sound. This vibrating light beam was then picked up and turned back into sound by a mirrored parabolic receiver some distance away. As Steven Connor (after Friedrich Kittler) has noted, the communications landscape of the late nineteenth century was characterised by “a kind of conversion mania, as inventors and engineers sought more and more ways in which different kinds of energy and sensory form could be translated into each other.”2
The Welsh popular singer and philanthropist Margaret (Megan) Watts Hughes entered this discourse with a device almost identical in most respects to the transmitter of Bell’s Photophone — one which similarly combined the auditory with optical phenomena. Her “Eidophone”, which she had conceived of and produced in order to measure the power of her voice, consisted of a mouthpiece leading to a receiving chamber, over which was stretched a rubber membrane, or diaphragm. Her experiments with this device involved sprinkling a variety of powders onto its surface, then singing into it to see how far these powders would leap. This activity would soon take an unexpected turn:
I had been working on this path until May, 1885, when on one occasion as I sang I noticed that the seeds which I had placed on the India rubber membrane, on becoming quiescent, instead of scattering promiscuously in all directions and falling over the edge of the receiver onto the table, as was customary when a rather loud note was sung, resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.3
Illustrations of these phenomena — which she termed Voice Figures — can be found in her first publication, an article in the Century from 1891. Arranged in order of increasing complexity, the figures display a clear hierarchy of forms, from the simple “primitive” and geometrical, to more complex figures that look more like floral shapes. Here, we can detect the beginnings of Watts Hughes’ passion for the project; what began as a technique for measuring an aspect of vocal prowess becomes an exploration of visual forms created through the resonant interaction of voice, instrument, and materials.
From Watts Hughes’ writing, we know that she went on to experiment with placing various consistencies of pastes and liquids on the instrument as a way of introducing binding mediums to “fix” the figures she made, resulting in a series of figures that both resembled and were named after flowers. These images were produced by placing the Eidophone’s diaphragm face up: the figure would then be sung into existence, and the glass plate then placed on top to capture it. An 1890 article in the Pall Mall Gazette contains both an interview with Watts Hughes and a valuable description of this part of her practice. For example, when a “daisy” is to be created,
the substance placed on the disc [i.e., the diaphragm] creeps together at the centre of the membrane at the command of the first note, which is obeyed as unhesitatingly as the bugle horn in a soldiers’ camp. Another note follows of a different calibre, and out from the centre all around shoot small petals shaped exactly like those of the daisy. But perhaps the note has not been quite so full as it should have been, and the petals not as symmetrical as they ought to be. Then comes one of the most marvellous parts of the process, for once more the voice commands, and immediately they rush back and amalgamate once again at the centre, to reappear at the next note, smoothly and shapely.4
While Watts Hughes’ own writing about the process tends to be from a traditional musical perspective (depicting the “dry”, static voice figures derived through different pitches above a musical stave, for example), in the above account we get a distinct sense of the power and textures of her voice, and of the timbres she may have employed — although the reference to the bugle may also have been a nod to the Eidophone’s unusual appearance. Her vocal training is further detectable in a group of works she called Impression Figures, which are by far the most visually and symbolically rich of the figures she produced. These were made by first coating a glass plate and the diaphragm of a “hand Eidophone” with pigment, then passing the diaphragm of the Eidophone over the plate’s surface while singing a note into its mouthpiece:
The plate and disc [i.e. diaphragm] being both coated as before, the plate is laid upon the table, the wet colour side uppermost. The disc is now reversed, set vibrating, and, while vibrating is moved along the surface of the wet plate. As it glides over the moist surface, while a steady note is sustained, it leaves behind it a register of every vibration, recorded with the strictest accuracy.5
These figures fall into roughly two categories. The first might be described as “acoustically motivated”, since as a group they depict discrete pitches (often annotated with musical notes), are all fairly small, and are a uniform blue in colour. These blue figures appear to show a single gesture of instrument and voice, with striations sweeping across the surface of the plate, before terminating in a denser area of pigment where the passage of the Eidophone slows, and then is lifted from the surface at the end of its journey. Several contain two or even three figures of different pitches for comparative purposes, the overall impression being that these plates represent a period of scientifically inspired research.
The largest of the Impression Figures, however, are the most startling images, and are clearly directed toward a completely different purpose. Rather than recording only pitches (although many of these images do contain elements of pitch-derived patterns), these images consist of complex reticulations and textures which are smeared and manipulated across the plate in a simulation of plant-like shapes.
Close examination of these larger plates reveals a variety of elements in abundance. Spatters and unexpected ruptures burst from the edge of the vibrating diaphragm, some of which emerge seamlessly and carry the same frequency of pattern before terminating in a darker patch of higher pigment density; a profusion of serpentine emissions emerging from the central figure body — visually (although perhaps not mathematically) prescient of fractal graphical production. Watts Hughes discusses having made different sizes of Eidophone, and that “by varying the sizes of the discs, it is possible to find one to suit the lung capacity of every voice . . . ranging from one inch to thirty-seven inches in circumference”,6 making the smallest diaphragm around 8 mm in diameter. However, the size of these smaller details (as little as 2 mm across in places) marks them as perhaps originating not from a gesture of the hand and voice with a specific Eidphone. Rather, it suggests an effect structural to the physics at play, whereby free-flowing drops or liquids adopt the vibrating frequency of the diaphragm as it sweeps across the pigment.
Alternatively, a bulge in the diaphragm on the smallest of the Eidophones may have been effected by means of air pressure, meaning that each of these details represents a manual/vocal gesture. This presents the intriguing possibility that these plates might constitute an aggregated and spatially arranged chorus of voices. Elsewhere in these images, Moiré-like patterns are sung into the pigment (these she named “cross-vibration figures“”), suggestive of the presence of overtones in her voice.
In a letter to the editor of the Spectator in 1889, the novelist Emilie Barrington writes enthusiastically of a visit she paid to Watts Hughes at the orphanage she ran in Islington, in North London. As an “ear-witness” account of the production of Impression Figures, it is as valuable as the Pall Mall article discussed above — but just as fascinating is the breathless description of the way that these works are displayed:
Instead of blinds or curtains drawn across the lower panes of the windows, there are wonderful designs in colour; strange, beautiful things — suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.7
Barrington’s response is to something she describes as possessing a “touch of fairy land”, and that the Impression Figures
are more like, perhaps, what a dream might make out of the impressions left by Nature, perfectly drawn designs of shell-like forms, photographically precise renderings of shapes of which the exact originals were never seen by human eye on sea or land; such things as “Alice in Wonderland” might have come upon, had she tumbled down to the bottom of the sea.8
The positioning of these works in the windows of an orphanage could suggest that their purpose was more than simply decorative. Perhaps in direct reference to the windows of the Congregationalist Bethania chapel at Dowlais which Watts Hughes considered her second home, and perhaps in consonance with what Verity Hunt describes as the era’s privileging of “magical wonder” and enchantment in educational pursuits through optics and domestic display, these works were employed to perform the function of “illumination” in more than one sense of the word.9 Being aesthetically atypical (or perhaps unique) for the time, and born of the voice rather than hand, these figures strongly suggest that we read them as working within a spiritual/symbolic domain — even bordering on the divinatory when considered with their creator’s beliefs in mind. After all, Watts Hughes desired that her experiments might aid “by some slight degree, the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe that, we are told in Holy Writ, took its shape in the voice of God.”10 Nature, and by implication God’s voice, had found its way into the acoustic sphere by way of the visual.
Early attempts at capturing “natural” sound could be crudely summarised as a history of speaking loudly and steadily into apertures and tubes, with perhaps the odd song to lighten the mood. However, these acts of capture were rarely understood as creative in and of themselves. The aesthetic “object” was almost always understood to be the qualities of the performed voice or instrument, as distinct from the transformative act of recording. Discussions of such media usually revolve around the concept of “fidelity”, of “original” compared to “copy”, but in the work of Watts Hughes we see a different kind of sound recording at play. Her capture of sound into shape never sees the final conversion back into sound that characterises more common modes of recording. There is no final playback, no “loss of fidelity” or “loss of being between original and copy”, as Jonathan Sterne writes of early sound media.11 There is, rather (due to the one-way migration of medium), a creation of something in its own right, a transformation rooted in a profound belief in the generative, incantatory power of the voice as an ineluctably spiritual phenomenon. Given their beauty and their richness of form and intention, it could be said that Margaret Watts Hughes’ extraordinary works are, despite being silent, possessed of a surfeit of being. Her Voice Figures may not sit comfortably within any of the disciplines of her day, but they nonetheless gesture toward, amongst many other things, practices that only evolved much later in sound and arts, which understand the recording process to be a transformational creative act in and of itself, rather than merely an act of “sound capture”. As such they deserve to be much more widely known.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 27, 2019

author: Rob Mullender-Ross


text:
Flower Power
Hamilton’s Doctor and the Healing Power of Nature
By Rebecca Rego Barry
January 24, 2019

Rebecca Rego Barry on David Hosack, the doctor who attended Alexander Hamilton to his duel (and death), and creator of one of the first botanical gardens in the United States, home to thousands of species which he used for his pioneering medical research.

IIn 1797, fifteen-year-old Philip Hamilton was burning up with an ordinary, unidentified childhood disease of the time, such as typhus or scarlatina, and appeared to be mere hours from death. The attending family physician, David Hosack, who mostly rejected customary treatments like bloodletting and doses of mercury, took a risk and immersed the boy in a steaming bath with Peruvian bark stripped from the cinchona tree dissolved in it. Peruvian bark was a remedy widely used for malaria, although doctors of the time were unsure why or how it worked (it was the quinine). Hosack then added alcohol to the bathwater and employed smelling salts before swaddling the boy in blankets and putting him back in bed. He repeated this again and again until the fever broke. Philip’s recovery surprised even Hosack, and the boy’s father, Alexander Hamilton, was ever grateful.
Just seven years later Hosack would treat the elder Hamilton, with less success. Hamilton had asked Hosack to accompany him to Weehawken, New Jersey, where, as we can all now recount — or perhaps even sing — Hamilton was fatally shot by Aaron Burr. In the megahit Broadway show Hamilton, Hosack goes unnamed. He is referred to as a “doctor that [Hamilton] knew”, and a song about the rules of dueling includes a lyric about the attending doctor who “turned around so he could have deniability”.1
For a country in the grip of Hamilton-mania, perhaps it is this connection to the fêted founding father that has rekindled interest in Hosack, a politically neutral but socially well-connected professor and physician who lived mainly in New York City from 1769–1835. That, and a 2018 biography called American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Norton) by Victoria Johnson, the first biography of him since 1964. Hosack (pronounced Hozz-ick) is not a household name, and, until now, has been “largely forgotten”,2 according to the scholar Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe. This opportunity to take a fresh look at such a noteworthy figure reveals much about early American medicine, particularly Hosack’s mission to “unlock the saving power of nature”, as Johnson puts it, through the scientific study of botany and the cultivation and use of plant-based medicines.3
Hosack grew up in British-occupied New York. His father was a Scottish immigrant, and his mother a New Yorker with English and French ancestry. As a child he was sent away to school in New Jersey, and from there enrolled at Kings College (now Columbia University) in Manhattan. In 1788, he apprenticed himself to Dr Richard Bayley, at just the right historical moment to witness the Doctors’ Riot, a public revolt against Bayley and his staff who were accused of exhuming, stealing, and dissecting cadavers. Hosack, a proponent of anatomical dissection, was physically attacked in the scuffle, and at least a few died.
From there, Hosack made his way to Philadelphia where he earned a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania under the famous Benjamin Rush, with whom he would remain lifelong friends, even when they disagreed on curatives. (By many accounts, Rush was “addicted to the virtues of bloodletting”.4) Although Hosack was newly married with an infant son, he decided his next step was a two-year solo trip to Edinburgh and London, where he could continue his medical training.
Why did he need further training, and why in Britain so soon after the Revolutionary War? As John C. Greene writes in the Journal of American History: “[P]roud though the Americans were to be independent of Europe for medical instruction, they realized that a medical degree from Philadelphia, Boston, or New York was not the equivalent of training at Edinburgh, London, or Paris.”5 If Hosack wanted to compete with the likes of Rush, Samuel Bard, or John Warren, the leading figures of American medicine, he had to study abroad, as they had.
What he found there startled and inspired him. In Edinburgh, he was “mortified by [his] ignorance of botany with which other guests were conversant.”6 He contemplated the fact that though many of the known medicines were derived from roots, leaves, and petals — e.g., infusions from the leaves of menyanthes to soothe herpes sores, or a cough syrup made from arborvitae tree resin — his medical training thus far had not prepared him in the area we might now call botanical pharmacology. In medicine, as in science as a whole, America was still in the process of catching up with its European counterparts, still relying on them “for inspiration and ideas, for models of scientific achievement  . . . for books and instruments, and for museums and herbaria.”7 Hosack pondered the contribution America could make in terms of undiscovered species and yet-to-be-discovered medications.
In London, Hosack met William Curtis and spent much of 1793 botanizing under his tutelage at the Brompton Botanic Garden. Curtis, a former apothecary, author of Flora Londinensis, and founding editor of the Botanical Magazine (which is still in circulation), tended the 3.5-acre garden in the manner of a medicinal garden attached to a medieval monastery. He was particularly interested in how plants of the same order had overlapping medicinal properties and in identifying new species with greater therapeutic value. According to biographer Victoria Johnson, Hosack’s time with Curtis prompted him to question whether “plants or lancets” were the better approach to illness.8
But Hosack’s proverbial walk in the park finally came to an end, and he returned to New York — on a ship plagued by typhus — in 1794 to set up his practice. His wife awaited him, but their son had died during his absence. Nevertheless, as a newly minted fellow of the Linnean Society, he immediately began advocating for botanical education. As Johnson writes, he realized “what the nation needed  . . . was a new kind of garden — a botany classroom, chemical laboratory, apothecary shop, plant nursery, horticulture school, and lovely landscape all rolled into one.”9 His first salvo was a request for citizen scientists to compile New York state’s first hortus siccus, or dry garden (herbarium), and begin the process of cataloguing native plants for research and experimentation. This idea didn’t get far, and Hosack was understandably too busy to follow up. Within a year, he became professor of botany at Columbia, performed the first hydrocele operation in the United States, and ministered to the sick and dying during the 1795 yellow fever outbreak in New York City.
Like Philadelphia in 1793 and 1794, New York in the summertime was prone to the deadly epidemic, of which very little was understood by contemporary physicians. As bodies piled up, doctors scrambled to ascertain best practices. Benjamin Rush, who had tended to victims in Philadelphia, encouraged venesection and doses of mercury. Hosack, on the other hand, having tried Rush’s remedies, preferred the gentler treatments that he had earlier used on Philip Hamilton and on Nathaniel Pendleton’s one-week-old infant. He washed sufferers with vinegar, wrapped them tightly, and had them drink tamarind water (from the tamarind tree) and diluted Virginia snakeroot to induce sweating. Hosack’s biographers agree that it wasn’t so much what Hosack did that saved his patients, as what he did not do — further weaken them with purging or bleeding. As Hosack himself wrote,
I have generally pursued the sudorific treatment during every visitation of yellow fever since 1794. With due respect for the opinions and views of other practitioners, I am no less convinced of the injurious consequences to be apprehended from the indiscriminate use of the lancet and mercury in this epidemic form of fever.10

Hosack’s pregnant wife survived the scourge only to die in childbirth in early 1796 (prompting him to found the city’s Lying-In Hospital for expectant mothers). In yet another busy year, Hosack was nominated to teach materia medica (early pharmacology), as well as botany, at Columbia. He was also invited to join the practice of the renowned Dr Samuel Bard, who, it seems, also preferred less invasive medicine; when Hosack and Bard both contracted yellow fever in 1798, they healed themselves with infusions of boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), followed by teas made from catmint, sage, and snakeroot.
Whether it was the deaths of his own children — a third child died of scarlet fever in 1801 — or his success at saving the lives of others, or the encouragement of Bard, at the turn of the new century, Hosack refused to waste more time without a garden that could produce the botanicals he believed the nation needed. He sought help from Columbia, to no avail, and then lobbied state officials, saying, “We spend large sums upon appropriations for teaching chemistry and medical philosophy — shall we be insensitive to the means of preserving health and curing diseases?”11 Finally, in 1801, he took matters into his own hands.
On September 1 of that year, Hosack purchased a 20-acre plot in what one biographer described as a “suburb, three and half miles from the populous center of New York City.”12 To describe it now, two words would suffice: Rockefeller Center. At the time, it was almost rural in appearance, with rock outcroppings, wild violets, and sweeping views of both rivers. He named it the Elgin Botanical Garden and immediately set to work plowing fields, harvesting indigenous flora, and collecting specimens from around the world. He hired laborers and gardeners and pushed forward with his plan to create the first botanic garden in the United States. The phrase “botanic garden” may, for twenty-first-century readers, call to mind a primrose path. Not so, writes Victoria Johnson: “[T]he Elgin Botanic Garden had less in common with a beautiful city park than with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and CRISPR gene-editing laboratories.”13
Indeed, by 1806 when Hosack issued his first Catalogue of Plants Contained in the Botanic Garden at Elgin, he had amassed 1,400 exotic species and 250 natives, and he used those collections “to conduct and supervise some of the earliest systematic research in the United States on the chemical properties of medicinal plants”, according to Johnson.14 He was experimenting with known remedies, e.g., mashed fig poultices to relieve infected flesh and sweet bay laurel tree oil to stimulate circulation, and researching the possibility for new ones with plants that grew in abundance nearby, like unicorn root and skullcap for bowel trouble and elderberries to make cough syrup. One of the garden’s least publicized advantages was the creation of a local supply of plants for medical use, which would become important after the passage of the Embargo Act that lead to the War of 1812.
Hosack’s 1811 catalogue, titled Hortus Elginensis, included 2,000 species, and it records the garden at its high point. After many negotiations, the New York state legislature had finally voted to buy Elgin in 1810, handing its management over to the College of Physicians & Surgeons, a medical school that Hosack had been affiliated with, off and on. (Elgin was later regifted to Columbia.) At first, the handover was a relief to Hosack, who had been shouldering the financial burden for a decade, but within a few years, it became clear that the lack of institutional caretaking, coupled with the need for major geographic re-mapping as the city expanded, would be the death of Elgin. The seeds that Thomas Jefferson contributed in 1816 were too little, too late.
The zeal that Hosack showed for Elgin exasperated less forward-thinking colleagues, too. To them, a garden seemed “frivolous  . . . severed from the bloody mess of clinical practice”, writes Johnson.15 Which is an arguable point, even if one considers the amount of botanical research conducted, or the fact that Hosack cultivated the garden while maintaining his position as one of the city’s top doctors — whose ligation of a femoral artery was the first documented in the United States. But it seems Hosack was considered “a little queer”, at least according to Scientific Monthly in 1929.16 A maverick, in today’s parlance, or, simply ahead of his time. Hosack spent his later years with his third wife and their combined large family creating a new Elgin of sorts at his 500-acre estate in Hyde Park, New York. He retired from medicine in 1834 and died a year later. His legacy in botany was borne out in his grandchildren’s generation, when botanic gardens bloomed all over the United States. As his biographer concludes, “He had done more than any other citizen of the United States to call into being a generation of professional botanists where there had been almost no one.”17
Today’s pharmacology and pharmaceuticals may be a world away from sneezewort yarrow powders and horehound syrups, but Hosack’s advice to get back to nature still resonates.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 24, 2019

author: Rebecca Rego Barr


text:
Music of the Squares
David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics
By Carmel Raz
May 16, 2019

Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist’s original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” So wrote the Victorian art critic Walter Pater in 1888. Earlier in the century, Scottish artist David Ramsay Hay composed a series of fifteen books published between 1828 and 1856 that attempted to develop a theory of visual beauty from the basic elements of music theory. Anticipating Pater but also fin-de-siècle attempts to unite the arts via spiritual or synesthetic affinities, Hay’s writings mapped colors, shapes, and angles onto familiar musical constructs such as pitches, scales, and chords. While these ideas might appear highly eccentric today, an understanding of them offers a glimpse of the remarkable importance of music to the Victorian Zeitgeist.
In spite of the unabashedly speculative nature of his theories, Hay’s claim to have understood the psychology of beauty profoundly shaped mid-nineteenth-century notions of aesthetics, an influence amplified through his professional activities as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and as the official interior designer to Queen Victoria. His books were reissued in multiple editions and translated into both German and French, and they gained traction with leading scientists of the time, including Adolf Zeising, John Addington Symonds, and Thomas Laycock. And yet, his ideas remained complex and idiosyncratic.
Hay’s approach to visual aesthetics was equally applicable to architecture, color theory, the ornamental arts, and the human face and figure. It can be understood as a psychological account of beauty, as opposed to other contemporary theories that anchored beauty in notions of the picturesque, the mimetic, or the sublime. Though analogies between music and the fine arts certainly do not originate with Hay, his application of music theory to an extensive array of visual experiences including color, shapes, figures, and architecture broke new ground. Rather than locating musical properties in the objects themselves, as earlier thinkers ranging from Plato to Newton had done, Hay worked in the post-Kantian tradition, regarding these features as immanent to our own minds, where they create our experience of beauty by determining the very structure of our perceptions.
Hay defined his project as the development of a science of aesthetics based upon what he called the “great harmonic law of nature which pervades and governs the universe”.1 He wrote that
there appears to be implanted in the human mind a governing principle of harmony of a mathematical nature, responsive to impressions made upon the organs of sense by certain combinations, motions, and affinities in the elements of matter.2
The fact that we derive pleasure from hearing certain concordant intervals, that derive from what is known as the overtone series, for Hay demonstrates that nature and humanity are governed by the same principles.3 He takes this further: the physiological affinity between seeing and hearing means that these laws extend not only into music but into the visual world too.4 After all, he observes, “the eye and the ear are various in their modes of receiving impressions; yet the sensorium is but one, and the mind by which these impressions are perceived and appreciated is also characterised by unity.”5 Since both sight and hearing are processed by the mind, they should be governed by similar principles.
Throughout his writings, Hay consistently links the claim that a single fundamental law of nature determines aesthetic perception to the work of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. “From the teachings of this great philosopher and his disciples,” Hay writes,
the harmonic law of nature, in which the fundamental principles of beauty are embodied, became so generally understood and universally applied in practice throughout all Greece, that the fragments of their works are still held to be examples of the highest artistic excellence ever attained by mankind.6
Hay ascribes the superiority of ancient Greek artists to their reliance on the Pythagorean system of harmonic numbers, regardless of whether they were designing a building or a vase. And since, Hay argues, the Greeks’ artistic brilliance was the fruit of a psychological phenomenon,7 it should be possible to combine Pythagorean tenets with an empirical investigation of beauty. Or so he fervently believed.
Hay’s work contains relatively naïve comparisons of various musical concepts (such as scale degrees, chord inversion, and melody) to diverse visual forms (such as geometrical shapes, angles, and color combinations). For example, in The Natural Principles and Analogy of the Harmony of Form (1842), he constructs an analogy between the circle, triangle, and square, and the tonic, mediant, and dominant (the first, third and fifth notes of the scale, which, when played together with the upper octave of the first note, form the most basic kind of chord, the so-called triad). The three geometrical shapes, Hay argues, analogously comprise the fundamental triad of visual beauty. This is all depicted graphically in Hay’s diagram, which incorporates three smaller figures.
In the first of these, at the top of the diagram, the musical triad (with its lowest note, the tonic, C, replicating an octave higher) is matched to a compound figure comprising a number of shapes: a large circle (representing the tonic, the low C), a much smaller triangle centered within that circle (representing the chord’s next note up, the mediant, E), a still smaller square (the dominant, G), and finally, within that square, a second, much smaller circle, representing the upper-octave replication of the tonic, C. Here, the relative sizes of the shapes are determined by the relative pitch heights of the notes they represent: lower notes get larger shapes. The next two figures within the diagram show the two “inversions” of the musical triad: here, the mediant (E) and then the dominant (G) become the lowest sounding note (instead of the tonic note). The geometrical shapes that represent those notes (first a triangle for E, then a square for G) then undergo an analogous “inversion” in space, as their relative positions and sizes change to reflect the changes in the relative pitch heights of the notes.

This use of basic shapes allowed Hay to analyze complex architectural structures in a new way — by breaking them down into their simplest constituent parts. When these basic elements are superimposed onto each other, they form a harmony, and when they are arranged in a series, they form a melody. The resulting harmonies or melodies can then be evaluated according to the simplicity and regularity of their proportions: the more beautiful an object, the more harmonious it will be. To this end Hay identifies the “most perfectly harmonious production in architecture that exists”: the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis.8 The animation below shows Hay’s diagram of the “melody” of the portico of the Parthenon, sat on the hill, which Hay transcribes as the first, third, and fifth note of a scale.

Hay’s more mature work applied music theory to angles rather than shapes, contours, or colors. In The Science of Beauty, as Developed in Nature and Applied in Art (1856), he begins with a discussion of Pythagorean numerology, which he uses to generate a series of four scales. The proportional relationships involved in these scales map onto the “just intonation” scales, from which Hay derives a categorization of various kinds of angles. These relationships, he claims, are the “simple elements of the science of that harmony which pervades the universe, and by which the various kinds of beauty aesthetically impressed upon the senses of hearing and seeing are governed.”9 That is to say, Hay attributes the subjective sensation of aesthetic beauty to the effect of certain simple proportions on the senses of hearing and seeing. He then aligns this with a broader notion of cosmic harmony.
This vast systemization reaches new heights when Hay revisits the Parthenon and offers a fresh analysis. Given that all of the angles of this edifice can be described as divisions of a 90° angle (using the simple factors of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9 that correspond to 45°, 30°, 18°, 12.85°, and 10°), he maintains that the specific proportions of their angles can be compared to the proportions of the musical scale: the elementary triad of tonic (first in the scale), dominant (fifth) and mediant (third) angles, alongside the subtonic (seventh) and supertonic (second) angles. That is to say, the edifice (as a visual form) and the scale (as a musical construct) are understood as analogous assemblages of harmonious proportions.

Hay then seeks to prove his theorem through the analysis of Greek vases, column ornaments, color arrangements, and idealized faces and figures.
His central conclusion is that nine of the angles governing the portico of the Parthenon also define the angles of the ideal female figure. Tallying measurements of ancient Greek sculptures with the empirical dimensions of six female models employed by the Scottish Academy of the Arts, Hay contends that his results confirm Vitruvius’s assertions that ancient Greek architecture was modeled on the proportions of the human body. Here the “male gaze” extends from women’s bodies to ancient buildings; both are judged by the very same criteria.
Hay’s attempt to articulate abstract properties of visual aesthetics by using the language of music is not always convincing. Even once his claims are grasped — a tall order even for those initiated into the ways and whiles of music theory — they often appear both bizarre and speculative. All the same there is something highly appealing in his ideas, something alluring in using music theory to open up new ways of approaching visual forms. The metaphor often attributed to Schelling, that architecture is music frozen in time, can be refracted against Hay’s project: to gaze upon beauty — whether in the form of a building, a vase, a color combination, or the human physique — was, for Hay, to experience the geometrically ordered music of the spheres.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Carmel Raz