Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

"Among the acquisitions," MacGillivray goes on, "I may mention a new species of Amphioxus, a genus of small fishes exhibiting more anomalies than any other known to Ichthyologists, and the lowest organisation found in the class. It somewhat resembles the sand-eels of Britain in habits, like them moving with extraordinary rapidity through the sand. By dint of bribery and ridicule we had at length managed to get our boatmen to work tolerably well, and when we were alike well-roasted by the sun and repeatedly drenched, besides being tired out and hungry, they had become quite submissive, and exchanged their grumbling for merriment."

The towing net repeatedly produced a rich harvest. It was constructed by themselves, and consisted of a bag of the bunting used for flags, two feet deep, the mouth being sewn round a wooden hoop fourteen inches in diameter; three pieces of cord, a foot and a half long, were secured to the hoop at equal intervals and had their ends tied together. This net was towed behind the ship by a stout cord. The water passed through the meshes of the cloth and left behind in the pocket any small floating animals.

Excursions ashore to the little savage islands or to the mainland were a source of constant interest, and it cannot be doubted that the acquaintance Huxley thus gained with many of the very low savages of Australia and New Guinea prepared his mind for the revolutionary doctrine of descent which he embraced a few years later. At the present time, there are probably very few parts of earth where there are yet to be found savages unaltered by civilisation. Some of the low races with which Huxley came in contact are now extinct. All the survivors have come in contact with white races, and their habits and customs have been altered. Before long the total extinction of these lower races is to be expected, and there will then be left an enormous gap between the lower animals and the dominant, aggressive, yellow and white races which are spreading over the earth and making the lower races perish before them, as the smaller but more cunning European rat has exterminated the native brown rat of Australia. In their various excursions upon the Australian mainland they had no trouble of any kind with the natives. These were at first suspicious of the doings of the white men, and their total ignorance of the use of firearms tempted them to rashness; but a few friendly gifts, and the exercise of tact in negotiating exchanges with them, made all the encounters pass off pleasantly. On the other hand, in the Louisiade Archipelago where the savages were of a higher type, difficulties constantly occurred. On one occasion, in a bay on the south side of Joannet Island the party was attacked.

"In the grey of the morning the look-outs reported the approach of three canoes with about ten men in each. On two or three persons shewing themselves in the bow of the pinnace, in front of the rain awning, the natives ceased paddling, as if baulked in their design of surprising the large boat; but, after a short consultation, they came alongside in their usual noisy manner. After a stay of about five minutes only they pushed off to the galley, and some more sham bartering was attempted, but they had nothing to give in exchange for the wares they so much coveted. In a short time the rudeness and overbearing insolence of the natives had risen to a pitch which left no doubt of their hostile intentions. The anchor was got up, when some of the blacks seized the painter, and others, in trying to capsize the boat, brought the gunwale down to the water's edge, at the same time grappling with the men to pull them out, and dragging the galley inshore towards the shoal-water. The bowman, with the anchor in his hand, was struck on the head with a stone-headed axe. The blow was repeated, but fortunately took effect only on the wash-streak. Another of the crew was struck at with a similar weapon, but warded off the blow, although held fast by one arm, when, just as the savage was making another stroke, Lieutenant Dayman, who up till now had exercised the utmost forbearance, fired at him with a musket. The man did not drop, although wounded in the thigh. But even this, unquestionably their first experience of firearms, did not intimidate the natives, one of whom, standing on a block of coral, threw a spear which passed across the breast of one of the boat's crew and lodged in the bend of one arm, opening a vein. They raised a loud shout when the spear was seen to take effect, and threw several others which missed. Lieutenant Simpson, who had been watching what was going on, then fired from the pinnace with buckshot and struck them, when, finding that the large boat, though at anchor, could assist the smaller one, the canoes were paddled inshore in great haste and confusion. Some more musket shots were fired, and the galley went in chase endeavouring to turn the canoes, so as to bring them under fire of the pinnace's twelve-pounder howitzer, which was speedily mounted and fired. The shot either struck one of the canoes or went within a few inches of the mark, on which the natives instantly jumped overboard into the shallow water, making for the mangroves, which they succeeded in reaching, dragging their canoes with them. Two rounds of grape-shot crashing through the branches dispersed the party, but afterwards they moved two of the canoes out of sight. The remaining one was brought out after breakfast by the galley under cover of the pinnace, and was towed off to some distance. The paddles having been taken out and the spears broken and left in her, she was let go to drift down toward a village whence the attacking party were supposed to have come. Some blood in this canoe, although not the one most aimed at, showed that the firing had not been ineffective. This act of deliberate treachery was perpetrated by persons who had always been well treated by us, for several of the natives present were recognised as having been alongside the ship in Coral Haven. This, their first act of positive hostility, affords, I think, conclusive evidence of the savage disposition of the natives of this part of the Louisiade Archipelago when incited by the hope of plunder, and shews that no confidence should ever be reposed in them, unless, perhaps in the presence of a numerically superior force, or in the close vicinity of a ship. At the same time, the boldness of these savages in attacking, with thirty men in three canoes, two boats known to contain at least twenty persons—even in the hopes of taking them by surprise—and in not being at once driven off upon feeling the novel and deadly effects of firearms, shews no little amount of bravery."

On their last visit to Cape York, in the extreme north of Australia, the party had the remarkable experience of rescuing a white woman from captivity among the natives.

"In the afternoon some of our people on shore were surprised to see a young white woman come up to claim their protection from a party of natives from whom she had recently made her escape, and who she thought would otherwise bring her back. Of course she received every attention, and was taken on board the ship by the first boat, when she told her story which is briefly as follows: Her name is Barbara Thomson. She was born at Aberdeen in Scotland, and, along with her parents, emigrated to New South Wales. About four years and a half ago she left Moreton Bay with her husband in a small cutter, called the America, of which he was the owner, for the purpose of picking up some of the oil from the wreck of a whaler, lost on the Bampton shoal, to which place one of her late crew undertook to guide them; their ultimate intention was to go on to Port Essington. The man who acted as pilot was unable to find the wreck, and after much quarreling on board in consequence, and the loss of two men by drowning and of another who was left on a small uninhabited island, they made their way up to the Torres Straits, where, during a gale of wind their vessel struck upon a reef on the eastern Prince of Wales Island. The two remaining men were lost in attempting to swim on shore through the surf, but the woman was afterwards rescued by a party of natives on a turtling excursion, who, when the gale subsided, swam on board and supported her on shore between two of their number. One of these blacks, Boroto by name, took possession of the woman as his share of the plunder; she was compelled to live with him, but was well treated by all the men, although many of the women, jealous of the attention shewn her, for a long time evinced anything but kindness. A curious circumstance secured for her the protection of one of the principal men of the tribe. This person, acting upon the belief, universal throughout Australia and the islands of the Torres Strait, so far as hitherto known, that white people are the ghosts of the aborigines, fancied that in the stranger he recognised a long-lost daughter, and at once admitted her into the relationship which he thought had formerly subsisted between them. She was immediately acknowledged by the whole tribe as one of themselves, thus securing an extensive connection in relatives of all denominations. The headquarters of the tribe being on an island which all vessels passing through the Torres Strait from the eastward must approach within two or three miles, she had the mortification of seeing from twenty to thirty or more ships go through every summer without anchoring in the neighbourhood, so as to afford the slightest opportunity of making her escape. Last year she heard of our two vessels being at Cape York, only twenty miles distant from some of the tribe who had communicated with us and had been well treated, but they would not take her over and watched her even more narrowly than before. On our second and present visit, however, which the Cape York people immediately announced by smoke signals to their friends, she was successful in persuading some of her more immediate friends to bring her across to the mainland within a short distance of where the vessels lay. The blacks were credulous enough to believe that as she had been so long with them and had been so well treated, she did not intend to leave them,—only 'she felt a strong desire to see the white people once more and shake hands with them': adding that she would be certain to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco, and other much-prized articles."

Although the external adventures of the Rattlesnake party were less varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great university of nature, and when he had finished it he was no longer a mere student, capricious and unsettled in his mental tastes and inclinations, but had set his face steadily towards his future life-work. It is interesting to compare the importance in Huxley's life of the Rattlesnake voyage with the importance in Darwin's life of the voyage on the Beagle undertaken some fifteen years earlier. Huxley, when he started, was a young surgeon with a taste of a vague kind for dissecting and for drawing the peculiarities of structure of different animals revealed by the knife and the microscope. Day after day, month after month, year after year, in the abundant leisure his slight professional duties left him, he dissected and drew, dissected and drew, animal after animal, as he got them from the dredge or tow-net, or from the surface of the coral reefs. He was not in any sense of the word a collecting naturalist. The identification and naming of species interested him little. What he cared for was, he tells us, "the architectural and engineering part of the business: the working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of divers living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve different ends." And so, on the Rattlesnake, and in his work in continuation of the Rattlesnake investigations,—which occupied most of his time for a few years after his return to London,—there was gradually growing up in his mind a dim conception of the animal kingdom as a group of creatures, not built on half a dozen or more separate plans or types, each unconnected with the other, but as a varied set of modifications of a single type.

When Darwin set out on the Beagle, unlike Huxley, he was an enthusiastic collecting naturalist. He had wandered from county to county in England adding new specimens to his collections of butterflies and beetles. As the Beagle went round the world visiting remote islands, far from land in the centre of the waters, archipelagoes of islands crowding together, islands hugging the shore of continents, and the great continents of the old and new worlds, he continued to collect and to classify. Gradually the resemblances and differences between the creatures inhabiting different parts of the earth began to strike him as exhibiting an orderly plan. He saw that under apparently the same conditions of food and temperature and moisture, in different parts of the world the genera and species were different, and that they were most alike in regions between which there was the most recent chance of migrations having taken place. In the quietness of England, while Huxley was on the Rattlesnake, Darwin was slowly working towards the explanation of all he had seen: towards the conception that animals and plants had spread slowly from common centres, becoming more and more different from each other as they spread. He realised on his voyage that species had come into existence by descent with modification, and before long he was to publish to the world in the Origin of Species a vast and convincing bulk of evidence as to the actual fact of a common descent for all the different existing organisms, and, in his theory of natural selection, a reasonable explanation of how the fact of evolution had come about. Darwin's greatest ally in bringing the new idea before the world was Huxley, and Huxley was teaching himself the absolute unity of the living world. The two men were dissimilar in tastes and temperament, and they were at work on quite different sides of nature. When the time came, Huxley, with his commanding knowledge of the structure of animals, was ready to support Darwin and to illustrate and amplify his arguments by a thousand anatomical proofs. It is a curious and dramatic coincidence to realise that both men learned their very different lessons under very similar circumstances in the tropical seas of the Southern Hemisphere.