Andrea Barrett: Voyage of the Narwhal

Across the garden loomed the house he hadn’t slept in for more than a decade. Everything showed his father’s hand, from the carved ferns on the moldings to his own name. He was Erasmus Darwin for the British naturalist, grandfather to the young man who’d set off on the Beagle; his brothers were named after Copernicus, Linnaeus, and Alexander von Humboldt. Four boys gaping up at their father like nestlings waiting for worms. An engraver and printer by trade, Frank Wells’s passion had been natural history and his truest friends the Peales and the Bartrams, Thomas Nuttall and Thomas Say, Audubon of the beautiful birds and poor peculiar Rafinesque, who’d died in a garret downtown.

On summer evenings, down by the creek, Mr. Wells had read Pliny’s Natural History to his sons. Pliny the Elder had died of his scientific curiosity, he’d said; the fumes of Vesuvius had choked him when he’d lingered to watch the smoke and lava. But before that he’d compiled a remarkable collection of what he’d believed to be facts. Some true, some false — but even the false still useful for the beauty with which they were expressed, and for what they said about the ways men conceived of each other, and of the world. Sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting on a tuft of grass, Erasmus’s father had passed down Pliny’s descriptions of extraordinary peoples living beyond the edge of the known. A race of nomads with legs life snakes; a race of forest dwellers running swiftly on feet pointed backward; a single-legged race who move by hopping and then rest by lying on their backs and raising their singular feet above their heads, life small umbrellas. Stories, not science — but useful as a way of thinking about the great variety and mutability of human nature. How easily, he’d said, might we not exist at all. How easily might we be transformed into something wholly different.

In those old stories, he’d said, were lessons about gossip and the imagination and the perils of not observing the world directly. Yet although he was a great collector of explorers’ tales he’d traveled very little himself; Erasmus had never known what his father would most like to have seen. As a counterpoint to Pliny he’d offered his sons the living, breathing science of his friends. They’d helped design the Repository and delighted Erasmus and his brothers with accounts of their travels. When Lavinia was born, they’d named her after her dying mother and tried to distract their friend from his grief with bones and feathers.

Now Erasmus followed the tracks of those men across the polished floor. He stopped at a wooden case holding trays of fossil teeth. Beneath the third tray was a false bottom, which only he knew about; in the secret space below the molars was a woman’s black calf walking boot. His mother’s; once he’d had a pair. Before the servants took her clothes away, to be given piece by piece to the poor, he’d stolen the boots she’d worn most often. For years he’d hidden them in his room, sometimes running his hands up the buttons as another boy might have fingered a rosary. Later, about to leave on his ill-fated first trip, he’d given Lavinia the left boot after swearing her to secrecy. This other he’d buried. Had it always been so small? The sole was hardly longer than his hand, the leather was cracking, the buttons loose. Where Lavinia’s was he had no idea.

Four years ago, when his father died, he’d received the house, the Repository, a small income, and the care of Lavinia until she married. Which meant, he thought, that he’d inherited all the responsibility and none of the freedom or even the solid work. Was it his fault he hadn’t known what to do? The family firm had gone to his middle brothers, who’d settled side by side downtown, within walking distance of their work: two moons, circling a planet that didn’t interest him. Meanwhile Copernicus had headed west as soon as he received his share of the estate. Out there, among the Indians, he painted buffalo hunts and vast landscapes while Erasmus and Lavinia, left behind, leaned against each other in his absence.

Copernicus sent paintings back, some of which had already been shown at the Academy of Fine Arts. And sometimes— when he remembered, when he could be bothered — he sent packets of seeds, shaken from random plants that had caught his eye. His afterthoughts, which had become Erasmus’s chief occupation. Erasmus had examined, classified, labeled, cataloged, added them to his lists. He filed them in tall wooden towers of tiny drawers, alongside the seeds his father’s friends had brought back from China and the Yucatan and the Malay Archipelago, and those he’d salvaged — stolen, really — from the collections of the Exploring Expedition. When his eyes grew strained and his skin felt moldy, he retreated out back, between the house and the river and behind the Repository, planting samples in oblong plots and noting every characteristic of the seedlings.

But all that was over now. He put the boot away and returned to bed. In Africa, his father had said, are a tribe of people who have no heads, but have mouths and eyes attached to their chests. Sleep eluded him yet again and his lists bobbed behind his lids. In Germantown and along the Wissahickon, people sent him socks and marmalade and then dreamed of this expedition. Vicarious travelers, sleeping while he could not and conjuring up a generic exotic land. Lavinia had friends like this, for whom Darwin’s Tierra del Fuego and Cook’s Tahiti had merged with Parry’s Igloolik and d’Urville’s Antarctica until a place arose in which ice cliffs coexisted with acres of pampas, through which Tongan savages chased ostriches chasing camels. Those people sent six candies encased in brown paper but couldn’t keep north and south straight in their minds, placing penguins and Esquimaux in the same confused ice and pleating a continent into a frozen sea.

None of them grasped the drudgery of such a voyage. Not just the planning and buying and stowing but the months sitting idly on the decks of a ship, the long stretches when nothing happened except that one’s ties to home were imperceptibly dissolved and one became a stranger to one’s life. No one knew how frightened he was, or the mental lists he made of all he dreaded. Ridiculous things, ignoble things. His bunk would be too short or too narrow or damp or drafty; his comrades would snore or twitch or moan; he’d be overcome by longing for women; he’d never sleep. Sleepless, he would grow short-tempered; short-tempered, he’d say something wrong to Zeke and make an enemy. The coarse food would upset his stomach and dyspepsia would upset his brain; what if he forgot how to think? His hands would be cold, they were always cold; he’d slice a specimen or stab himself. His joints would ache, his back would hurt, they’d run out of coffee, on which he relied; a storm would snap the masts in half, a whale would ram the ship. They’d get lost, they’d find nothing, they’d fail.

Giving up on sleep, he lit a candle and reached for his journal. On his earlier voyage this had been his constant, sometimes sole, companion, but tonight it let him down. Pen, inkpot, words on white paper; an inkstain on his thumb. He couldn’t convey clearly the scene at the wharf. He gazed at his first messy attempt and then added:

Why is it so difficult simply to capture what was there? That old problem of trying to show things both sequentially, and simultaneously. If I drew that scene I’d show everything happening all at once, everyone present and every place visible, from the bottom of the river to the clouds. But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everything’s shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I could show it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appearand not just my version of it. As if I weren’t there. The river as the fish saw it, the ship as it looked to the men, Zeke as he looked to young Ned Kynd, the Toxics as they appeared to Captain Tyler: all those things, at once. So someone else might experience those hours for himself.