Charles Waterton - Wanderings in South America

Plutarch, the most famous biographer of ancient times, is of opinion that the uses of telling the history of the men of past ages are to teach wisdom, and to show us by their example how best to spend life. His method is to relate the history of a Greek statesman or soldier, then the history of a Roman whose opportunities of fame resembled those of the Greek, and finally to compare the two. He points out how in the same straits the one hero had shown wisdom, the other imprudence; and that he who had on one occasion fallen short of greatness had on another displayed the highest degree of manly virtue or of genius. If Plutarch’s method of teaching should ever be followed by an English biographer, he will surely place side by side and compare two English naturalists, Gilbert White and Charles Waterton. White was a clergyman of the Church of England, educated at Oxford. Waterton was a Roman Catholic country gentleman, who received his education in a Jesuit college. White spent his life in the south of England, and never travelled. Waterton lived in the north of England, and spent more than ten years in the Forests of Guiana. With all these points of difference, the two naturalists were men of the same kind, and whose lives both teach the same lesson. They are examples to show that if a man will but look carefully round him in the country his every-day walk may supply him with an enjoyment costing nothing, but surpassed by none which wealth can procure; with food for reflection however long he may live; with problems of which it will be an endless pleasure to attempt the solution; with a spectacle of Infinite Wisdom which will fill his mind with awe and with a constantly increasing assurance of Infinite Goodness, which will do much to help him in all the trials of life. He who lives in the country and has the love of outdoor natural history in his heart, will never be lonely and never dull. Waterton himself thought that this love of natural history must be inborn and could not be acquired. If this be so, they ought indeed to be thankful who possess so happy a gift. Even if Waterton’s opinion be not absolutely true, it is at least certain that the taste for outdoor observation can only be acquired in the field, and that this acquisition is rarely made after the period of boyhood. How important, then, to excite the attention of children in the country to the sights around them. A few will remain apathetic, the tastes of some will lie in other directions, but the time will not be lost, for some will certainly take to natural history, and will have happiness from it throughout life. No study is more likely to confirm them in that content of which a favourite poet of Waterton’s truly says:—

Gilbert White and Charles Waterton are pre-eminent among English naturalists for their complete devotion to the study; both excelled as observers, and the writings of both combine the interest of exact outdoor observation with the charm of good literature. Waterton was born on June 3rd, 1782, at Walton Hall, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a place which had for several centuries been the seat of his family. His father, Thomas Waterton, was a squire, fond of fox-hunting, but with other tastes, well read in literature, and delighting in the observation of the ways of birds and beasts. His grandfather, whose grave is beneath the most northern of a row of old elm trees in the park, was imprisoned in York on account of his known attachment to the cause of the Young Pretender. As he meant to join the rebel forces, the imprisonment probably saved his own life and prevented the ruin of the family. In his grandson’s old age, when another white-haired Yorkshire squire was dining at Walton Hall, I remember that Waterton and he reminded one another that their grandfathers had planned to march together to Prince Charley, and that they themselves, so differently are the rights of kings regarded at different ages, when schoolboys together, had gone a-bird’s-nesting on a day, in 1793, set apart for mourning for the decapitation of Louis XVI. Waterton has himself told the history of his earlier ancestors in an autobiography which he wrote in 1837:—

“The poet tells us, that the good qualities of man and of cattle descend to their offspring. ‘ Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis .’ If this holds good, I ought to be pretty well off, as far as breeding goes; for, on the father’s side, I come in a direct line from Sir Thomas More, through my grandmother; whilst by the mother’s side I am akin to the Bedingfelds of Oxburgh, to the Charltons of Hazelside, and to the Swinburnes of Capheaton. My family has been at Walton Hall for some centuries. It emigrated into Yorkshire from Waterton, in the island of Axeholme in Lincolnshire, where it had been for a very long time. Indeed, I dare say I could trace it up to Father Adam, if my progenitors had only been as careful in preserving family records as the Arabs are in recording the pedigree of their horses; for I do most firmly believe that we are all descended from Adam and his wife Eve, notwithstanding what certain self-sufficient philosophers may have advanced to the contrary. Old Matt Prior had probably an opportunity of laying his hands on family papers of the same purport as those which I have not been able to find; for he positively informs us that Adam and Eve were his ancestors:—

Depend upon it, the man under Afric’s burning zone, and he from the frozen regions of the North, have both come from the same stem. Their difference in colour and in feature may be traced to this: viz., that the first has had too much, and the second too little, sun.

“In remote times, some of my ancestors were sufficiently notorious to have had their names handed down to posterity. They fought at Cressy, and at Agincourt, and at Marston Moor. Sir Robert Waterton was Governor of Pontefract Castle, and had charge of King Richard II. Sir Hugh Waterton was executor to his Sovereign’s will, and guardian to his daughters. Another ancestor was sent into France by the King, with orders to contract a royal marriage. He was allowed thirteen shillings a day for his trouble and travelling expenses. Another was Lord Chancellor of England, and preferred to lose his head rather than sacrifice his conscience.”

Waterton’s childhood was spent at Walton Hall, and in his old age he used sometimes to recall the songs of his nurses. “One of them,” he said, “is the only poem in which the owl is pitied. She sang it to the tune of ‘Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer,’ and the words are affecting:—

He was already proficient in bird’s-nesting when, in 1792, he was sent to a school kept by a Roman Catholic priest, the Reverend Arthur Storey, at Tudhoe, then a small village, five miles from Durham. Three years before his death he wrote an account of his schooldays, which is printed in the Life prefixed to Messrs. Warne’s edition of his “Natural History Essays.” The honourable character of the schoolmaster, and the simple, adventurous disposition of his pupil, are vividly depicted in this account. The following quotations from it show that preparatory schools were less luxurious in the last century than they commonly are at the present day:—