Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“That little ivory knife,” Jane said, “and the four colors of sealing wax, and the pounce box and the silver pencil!”

With a pang Alexandra thought of Jane’s bare bedroom in Browning’s house, and the gate-legged table that served as her desk. Harriet, who also had no desk of her own, brought up a few more cherished scenes. And Emily added, “Men make fun of it, I know you all do. You like tales of adventure, in which the hero truly explores that wide world. But the novel is about tyranny, really; the tyranny of family and circumstances, and how one survives when running away isn’t an option. Which it never is for women like us.”

Browning raised his eyebrows and turned the conversation toward more serious books. Coffee and the puddings and pies arrived, and by the time Alexandra could pay attention again Browning and Linnaeus were discussing the relative merits of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mrs. Hentz’s rebuttal of it in The Planter’s Northern Bride. Then Emily was telling Linnaeus and Lucy about her work with runaway slaves who’d made their way to the city. Perhaps she’d drunk too much of the Wellses’ lovely claret.

Linnaeus said, “That’s all very admirable. But can you answer the argument Mrs. Stowe has St. Clare make to Miss Ophelia? Are we in the North willing to elevate and educate the floods of freed slaves that must arrive here on emancipation? I think we won’t; we can’t. They’re so essentially different from us.”

Humboldt leaned into the conversation. “Are they not,” he said, “even a separate species from us? In the same way that Catlin thinks the Indian tribes he painted out west are indigenous, and extremely ancient — their languages resemble no other group, they must have been created there. And Agassiz and others have argued…”

“Agassiz’s idea of centers of creation is simple sacrilege,” Browning said sharply. “This position that species are created in their proper places and don’t migrate far, this thing he calls ‘polygenism’: to argue that human races are different species, descended from different Adams who were created separately in different zoological regions — this is to argue that scripture is allegorical rather than literal. And I don’t accept that. We all descend from Adam and Eve, a singular creation. Human races have degenerated differently from that original pair.”

Erasmus, Alexandra saw, was flicking his thumbnail against his front teeth. Lavinia looked up when Emily began to contradict Browning.

“Never mind that,” Emily said. “It’s not the theology that’s important — Agassiz’s polygenism is harmful because of the ammunition it provides to the proponents of slavery. And anyway he’s a horrid man. He didn’t come here just to give those lectures; he wanted to see Dr. Morton’s collection of skulls and gather more data for his theories. I was working among the Negro servants at the hotel he stayed at, trying to convince them to provide shelter for escaped slaves passing through, and I saw him there, in the hall. One of the maids was trying to give him a message from someone who’d come by looking for him. She spoke perfectly clearly but he stood there like a big ox, pretending he didn’t understand her and asking her again and again to repeat the same phrases. The look on his face — he was frightened of her. Revolted by her. How can you trust the science of a man like that?”

Erasmus flicked his thumbnail again and then spoke for the first time since he’d finished carving the ham. “Is that true?” he said. “About Agassiz?”

“As far as I know,” Emily said. “He makes no secret of his attitude toward other races. No more than did Dr. Morton.”

Erasmus shook his head. “Morton did good work at the Academy,” he said. “But that necropolis he kept in his office — for all the time I was acquainted with him, I managed to avoid seeing the cabinet. None of us ever saw it.” Linnaeus and Humboldt agreed.

“Such an awful obsession,” Erasmus continued. “Hundreds of Indian crania, hundreds more from the Egyptian tombs and men all over the world robbing graves to send skulls back to him— but I don’t remember any connection to Agassiz, I just remember the lectures Agassiz gave. And all the dinners feting him.” He was silent for a moment. “Can’t we talk about pleasanter things?” He pushed his chair away from the table and rolled in the direction of the parlor.

ERASMUS DIDN’T SAY he hadn’t met Agassiz because he wasn’t invited to the dinners. In the aftermath of the Exploring Expedition his reputation as a naturalist had been so slight that, despite his father’s connections, no one had thought to include him. Yet what did this matter now? Most of his attention was taken up by fittings for his new shoes with the little pads that replaced his lost toes and cushioned his stumps. Late one night, when he was sure he wouldn’t be interrupted, he opened his tin box and then the fossil cabinet with the hidden compartment. His nostrils filled with the smell of leather as he lined the footwear along his bed: one tiny antique woman’s boot, one new man’s shoe, one piece of boot sole. The fragment he’d brought home from Boothia was distinctly larger than the corresponding portion of his new shoes; his shoes now matched his mother’s.

He practiced moving on his dwarfed feet, aided by a pair of walking sticks. For a while this occupied him entirely. Later, as he grew more confident but still was trapped inside by the freak snowfalls and bitter cold, the Christmas conversation began to nag at him. He read Agassiz’s essay in Types of Mankind and studied the chart linking the world’s zoological provinces and their human inhabitants. The arctic column showed a polar bear, a walrus, a Greenland seal, a reindeer, a right whale, an eider duck. Then the face and skull of what Agassiz termed a Hyperborean. The features, which looked like no person Erasmus had ever seen, might have been imagined from Pliny’s description. The races of man, Agassiz had written, differed from each other more than monkeys considered separate species within the same genus.

Browsing through the long passages of biblical exegesis and the essays on geology and paleontology, Erasmus saw that the point was an attack on the unity of races, an attempt to prove their separate creation. A messy compendium, the drawings distorted — whether willfully or unconsciously — to make a point. The Esquimaux looked like misshapen gnomes and the Negroes like chimpanzees; how could anyone who’d traveled the world take this seriously? Yet he knew there were clergymen shouting that the book cast contempt on the word of God. He was no judge of theology, but he thought it was bad science to deny that humans were part of nature and all one species. He had the feet of a pygmy now, but he was still himself.

He longed, as always, for Dr. Boerhaave, with whom he might have had a proper discussion. What is life, where did it come from? Species may be placed in groups related to one another in structure — but where did that relationship originate? He and Dr. Boerhaave would have laughed as they argued. He was grateful for that memory — and grateful, too, that the horrid stretch during which he’d been able to hear his friend’s voice but couldn’t see his face had passed.

Bit by bit his friend had returned to him. As he lay sleepless he’d seen first Dr. Boerhaave’s leafy brown hair, striped with white, perfectly straight and flopping in the wind. His long chunky nose with that charming square tip appeared next; then his narrow eyes, slightly too close together; his wide, thin-lipped, mobile mouth; and the long-fingered hands which, gesturing so fluidly, had seemed like outposts of his mind. The world has a pattern, he’d said. Our minds are made to perceive that pattern laid down by the Lord. With those words humming in his ears, Erasmus searched the shelves for his father’s old copy of Morion’s Crania Americana.