Fiction’s first cryptozoologist
PETER COSTELLO finds a portrait of the first cryptozoologist in literature in Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel Nightmare Abbey
T he concept of cryptozoology was introduced by Dr Bernard Heuvelmans in the 1950s, the term becoming widely used in the course of the 1960s. But the idea itself – the pursuit and study of ‘unknown’ or legendary animals – was not new. Heuvelmans himself discusses several earlier pioneers, among them Denys de Montfort at the turn of the 18th century (see p55). But these men had many other interests, often in quite other areas of life.
The first presentation of a dedicated cryptozoologist is to be found, therefore, not in the scientific literature, but in fiction.
In the middle of November of 1818 Thomas Love Peacock, the friend and executor of the poet Shelley, published the third of his satirical social novels,
Nightmare Abbey. Like several of his other novels, this one used the device of assembling in a country house a party of very varied characters, representative of various trends of thought or attitudes in society. The book remains very readable and vastly entertaining to those who like to see the fashionable pretentions of any age humorously satirised; in this book, it’s the turn of the Scottish economists, the poets Shelley, Coleridge and Byron, the wit and essayist Sydney Smith, as well as transcendentalists and millenarian theologians.
About halfway through the novel, however, at the opening of chapter seven, Peacock introduces a new character. This is Mr Asterias, a celebrated ichthyologist. He is accompanied by his son Aquarius, who was reputedly brought into the world with the co-operation of a mermaid.
For Mr Asterias is not merely an expert on fishes of all kinds – his name comes from the scientific term for the starfish – he is a dedicated mermaid hunter, as Peacock explains:
“This gentleman had passed his life in seeking the living wonders of the deep through the four quarters of the world; he had a cabinet of stuffed and dried fishes, of shells, seaweeds, corals, and madrepores, that was the admiration and envy of the Royal Society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the sepia octopus, disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtledove of the ocean, and come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed in the tropical seas, and had watched, in eager expectation, though unhappily always in vain, to see the colossal polypus rise from the water, and entwine its enormous arms round the masts and the rigging. He maintained the origin of all things from water, and insisted that the polypodes were the first of animated things, and that, from their round bodies and many-shooting arms, the Hindus had taken their gods, the most ancient of deities. But the chief object of his ambition, the end and aim of his researches, was to discover a triton and a mermaid, the existence of which he most potently and implicitly believed, and was prepared to demonstrate, a priori, a posteriori, a fortiori, synthetically and analytically, syllogistically and inductively, by arguments deduced both from acknowledged facts and plausible hypotheses.”
Newspaper reports that a mermaid had been seen “sleeking her soft alluring locks” on the sea-coast of Lincolnshire, 1 had brought him in great haste down from London, to pay a long-promised visit to his old acquaintance, Mr Glowry, the proprietor of Nightmare Abbey and the genial host of these various eccentric guests, a company into which Mr Asterias fitted very nicely.
The notion that real mermaids could be seen off the coasts of Great Britain derived not from Peacock’s imagination, but from a recently topical controversy that had been a matter of conversation throughout Great Britain.
This was the affair of the Caithness Mermaids, and the acrimonious dispute they gave rise to. Here indeed were modern mermaid reports in the newspapers of the kind that had brought Asterias to Nightmare Abbey.
The Caithness mermaids had been a sensation of 1809, and had involved two ladies of Sandside, near Truro, the daughters of the local Church of Scotland minister, and a local teacher, a Mr Munro, whose encounter had taken place in 1798.
These reports, made by educated witnesses of social standing, were taken seriously by Sir John Sinclair, the district’s great landlord. He was an important public figure in Scotland, a member of Parliament and a distinguished statistician of the kind that Peacock would have been well aware of. Sir John laid his scientific reputation on the line by adding the creature (whatever it was) to the list of the fauna of his northern county, much to the derision of southerners.
Mr Asterias’s search for the mermaid arouses amusement among the other guests. One of these, a fashionable fop named Listless, asks him if he positively believed there were such things as mermaids? “Most assuredly”, says Mr Asterias, “and tritons too”. Things that were half human and half fish, Mr Listless wonders.
“Precisely. They are the orang-utans of the sea. But I am persuaded that there are also complete sea men, differing in no respect from us, but that they are stupid, and covered with scales; for, though our organisation seems to exclude us essentially from the class of amphibious animals, yet anatomists well know that the foramen ovale may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case, not necessary to life: and how can it be otherwise explained
The Caithness mermaids had been a sensation of 1809
that the Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under the water; and that the famous Swedish gardener of Troningholm lived a day and a half under the ice without being drowned?”
The reference to orangutans may need clarification. The Western or Lowland gorilla would not be described until 1847, on the basis of remains from Liberia. However, the orangutan had been known since the 17th century, and had been the subject of much speculation, especially by Lord Monboddo, the 18th century Scottish philosopher. As a term for a man-like entity it came naturally to Mr Asterias’s mind (and to Peacock’s pen). The ichthyologist then gives a brief resumé of some more or less modern encounters with such creatures.
Mr Listless and the other guests are astonished. But Mr Listless questions the cui bono of all this fatigue and expense. Who does it all benefit? Mr Asterias is provoked into defending his own dedicated search for mermaids, and the reasons behind it.
Mr Asterias, who readers and critics still persist in seeing as an absurd person despite Peacock’s intention to the contrary, proceeds to give the company an encomium on the universal benefits of pure research, which is not intended to be seen in any way as absurd, but to be read as a serious justification of his vocation. It is a pæan in praise of all true scientific endeavour, and one which most serious researchers would agree with today.
The ideas in Peacock’s novels are built up through conversations, but the philosophy of Mr Asterias is expressed in two long and very striking passages, both of which are relevant, I think, to the history of cryptozoology:
“I have made many voyages, Mr Listless, to remote and barren shores: I have travelled over desert and inhospitable lands: I have defied danger – I have endured fatigue – I have submitted to privation. In the midst of these I have experienced pleasures which I would not at any time have exchanged for that of existing and doing nothing. I have known many evils, but I have never known the worst of all, which, as it seems to me, are those which are comprehended in the inexhaustible varieties of ennui: spleen, chagrin, vapours, blue devils, time-killing, discontent, misanthropy, and all their interminable train of fretfulness, querulousness, suspicions, jealousies, and fears, which have alike infected society, and the literature of society; and which would make an arctic ocean of the human mind, if the more humane pursuits of philosophy and science did not keep alive the better feelings and more valuable energies of our nature.”
Here Mr Listless remarks that the philosopher seems to be “severe upon our fashionable belles-lettres”. But again Mr Asterias speaks plainly:
“Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the speculative energy. A gloomy brow and a tragical voice seem to have been of late the characteristics of fashionable manners: and a morbid, withering, deadly, antisocial sirocco, loaded with moral and political despair, breathes through all the groves and valleys of the modern Parnassus; while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course, affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid – to maturity, calm and grateful occupation – to old age, the most pleasing recollections and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and, while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His days are always too short for his enjoyment: ennui is a stranger to his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.” (Here a footnote by Peacock draws the reader’s attention directly to remarks by Pierre Denys de Montfort in 1801, found at the start of the first volume of his Histoire Naturelle des Mollusques; Vues Generales, pp37-38.), the work from which Mr Asterias’s image of the colossal polypus engulfing an entire ship is directly taken.
In Mr Asterias we have not only a rather charming and amusing portrait of a pioneer cryptozoologist, largely inspired by the notorious Denys de Montfort perhaps, but seriously intended by Peacock. Here surely is a literary hero for all admirers of Charles Fort. What Mr Asterias has to say in defence of science and the philosophical benefits of what we would call today fortean research deserves to be more widely noticed.