Charles Waterton

Charles Waterton
File:Charles Waterton by Charles Willson Peale, 1824, National Gallery, London.jpg
Born	3 June 1782 Walton, Wakefield, England
Died	27 May 1865 (aged 82) Walton, Wakefield, England
Burial place	Walton Hall
Monuments	Waterton Lake, Canada Waterton River, Canada
Education	Stonyhurst College
Occupations	naturalist explorer environmentalist taxidermist plantation overseer
Children	Edmund Waterton

Charles Waterton (3 June 1782 – 27 May 1865) was an English naturalist, plantation overseer and explorer best known for his pioneering work regarding conservation.

Family and religion

Waterton was of a Roman Catholic landed gentry family descended from Reiner de Waterton and Thomas More. The Watertons had remained Catholic after the English Reformation and consequently the vast majority of their estates were confiscated. Charles Waterton himself was a devout and ascetic Catholic, and maintained strong links with the Vatican.

"Squire" Waterton was born at Walton Hall, Wakefield, Yorkshire, to Thomas Waterton and Anne Bedingfield.

He was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire where his interest in exploration and wildlife were already evident. On one occasion Waterton was caught by the school's Jesuit Superior scaling the towers at the front of the building; almost at the top, the Superior ordered him to come down the way he had gone up. Waterton records in his autobiography that while he was at the school:

By a mutual understanding, I was considered rat-catcher to the establishment, and also fox-taker, foumart-killer, and cross-bow charger at the time when the young rooks were fledged.... I followed up my calling with great success. The vermin disappeared by the dozen; the books were moderately well-thumbed; and according to my notion of things, all went on perfectly right.

South America

In 1804 he travelled to British Guiana to take charge of his uncle's slave plantations near Georgetown. In 1812 he started to explore the hinterland of the colony, making four journeys between then and 1824, and reaching Brazil walking barefoot in the rainy season. He described his discoveries in his book Waterton's Wanderings in South America, which inspired British schoolboys such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. His explorations laid to rest the persistent myth of Raleigh's Lake Parime by suggesting that the seasonal flooding of the Rupununi savannah had been misidentified as a lake.

Waterton was a skilled taxidermist and preserved many of the animals he encountered on his expeditions. He employed a unique method of taxidermy, soaking the specimens in what he called "sublimate of mercury". Unlike many preserved ("stuffed") animals, his specimens are hollow and lifelike. He also displayed his anarchic sense of humour in some of his taxidermy: one tableau he created (now lost) consisted of reptiles dressed as famous English Protestants and entitled "The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated". Another specimen was the bottom of a howler monkey which he turned into an almost human face and simply labelled "The Nondescript". This specimen is still on display at the Wakefield Museum, along with other items from Waterton's collection.

While he was in British Guiana Waterton taught his skills to one of his uncle's slaves, John Edmonstone. Edmonstone, by then freed and practising taxidermy in Edinburgh, in turn taught the teenage Darwin.

Waterton is credited with bringing the anaesthetic agent wourali (curare) to Europe.

Walton Hall

In the 1820s Waterton returned to Walton Hall and built a nine-foot-high wall around three miles (5 km) of the estate, turning it into the world's first wildfowl and nature reserve, making him one of the world's first environmentalists. He also invented the bird nesting box. The Waterton Collection, on display at Stonyhurst College until 1966, is now in the Wakefield Museum. Waterton owned a dog who was prominent in the foundation of the modern English Mastiff and may be traced back to in the pedigrees of all living dogs of this breed. Waterton was voted as an honorary member of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in its founding year of 1822.

On 11 May 1829, at the age of 47, Waterton married 17-year-old Anne Edmonstone, the granddaughter of an Arawak Native. His wife died shortly after giving birth to their son, Edmund, when she was only 18. After her death he slept on the floor with a block of wood for a pillow, "as self-inflicted penance for her soul!"

Waterton was an early opponent of pollution. He fought a long-running court case against the owners of a soap works that had been set up near his estate in 1839, and sent out poisonous chemicals that severely damaged the trees in the park and polluted the lake. He was eventually successful in having the soap works moved.

Waterton died in May 1865, after fracturing his ribs and injuring his liver in a fall on his estate. His coffin was taken from the hall by barge to his chosen resting place, near the spot where the accident happened, in a funeral cortege led by the Bishop of Beverley, and followed at the lakeside by many local people. The grave was between two oak trees, which are no longer there.

Legacy

Waterton is chiefly remembered for his association with curare, and for his writings on natural history and conservation. David Attenborough has described him as "one of the first people anywhere to recognise, not only that the natural world was of great importance, but that it needed protection as humanity made more and more demands on it".

Waterton's house, Walton Hall, which may be approached only by a pedestrian bridge to its own island, is now the main building of a hotel. There is a golf course in the vicinity and various public footpaths, some leading to a nature reserve, Anglers Country Park. In 2024, Waterton Park was registered at Grade II by Historic England, to protect the landscape which Waterton designed to protect wildlife and is considered the world's first nature reserve.

Waterton Lakes in Alberta, Canada, now a national park, was named after him by Thomas Blakiston in 1858. A road and school in Wakefield, Yorkshire, are also named after him.

Waterton was a slave owner, although later wrote: "Slavery can never be defended: he whose heart is not of iron can never wish to be able to defend it."

Bibliography

• Waterton, Charles (1825). Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, in the years 1812, 1816, 1820 and 1824: with original instructions for the perfect preservation of birds, &c. for Cabinets of Natural History. London: Printed for J. Mawman.
  • 2nd edition 1828. London: Printed for B. Fellowes
  • 5th edition 1852. London: B. Fellowes
  • edition 1882, ed. Rev. J.G. Wood. London: MacMillan and Co. With a biographical introduction by J.G. Wood
  • edition 1887. New York: Cassell & Co. Ltd. With an introduction by Norman Moore, M.D. (pp. 5–34)
  • edition 1925. London / New York: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. / E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc. (Everyman Library edition). With an introduction by Edmund Selous
• —— (1838). Essays on natural history, chiefly ornithology: With an autobiography of the author, and a view of Walton Hall. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans.
  • 3rd edition 1839. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans
  • 5th edition 1844. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans
• —— (1844). Essays on natural history, chiefly ornithology: 2nd series. With a continuation of the autobiography of the author. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans.

• Charles Waterton at Our Heritage Accessed 24 November 2008.

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Charles Waterton — Naturalist and explorer, born in Walton Hall near Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, in 1782; died there in 1865. His family, originally from Lincolnshire, had migrated to Yorkshire several centuries before and its pre-Reformation members in many cases were eminent in the service of the State. Staunch Royalists as well as Catholics, they suffered from England's changes of faith and allegiance, and by the constant exactions and fines of penal times they become much impoverished. Charles's mother was a Bedingfeld of Inburgh, Norfolk, granddaughter of Sir Henry, the third baronet, and his paternal grandmother was Mary More, the seventh in descent from Blessed Thomas, the martyred chancellor.

In his tenth year Charles was sent to a small Catholic school at Tudhoe, near Durham, the first English home of Mr. Jutine Ushaw. Thence he passed in 1796 for his higher studies to Stonyhurst. His four years' stay at Stonyhurst, while it succeeded in making him a good Latin scholar, developed still more his early passion for natural history, especially for the study of ornithology. "By a mutual understanding, he writes in his "Autobiography", I was considered rat-catcher to the establishment, and also fox-taker, foumart-killer, and cross-bow charger at the time when the young rooks were fledged... I followed up my calling with great success. The vermin disappeared by the dozen; the books were moderately well thumbed; and according to my notion of things, all went on perfectly right." On leaving school the Peace of Amiens in 1802 gave him his first chance of travelling and he went to Spain, where two of his maternal uncles had settled. He was with them in Malaga when the great plague occurred there, and, though he escaped infection, he returned somewhat impaired in health. In search of a warmer climate he undertook the administration of his uncles' estates in British Guiana and resided in Georgetown from 1804 to 1812, with occasional visits home. Meanwhile, in 1806 his father died, leaving him heir to Walton Hall. After handing over the West Indian estates to their owners, he determined to start exploring the hinterland of Guiana and at intervals of four years, beginning with 1812, he made the four adventurous expeditions which are described in the well-known "Wanderings in South America". For this work his long residence in the colony had rendered him exceptionally well equipped and he made very valuable additions to the sum of human knowledge concerning the fauna, especially the bird life, of that portion of the tropics. The main object of his first journey was to collect as large a quantity as possible of the deadly "wourali" poison, which induces immediate and profound quiescence, and would therefore, it was hoped, prove a specific against the tetanus of hydrophobia. That result has not been attained; however, Waterton's experiments with the poison proved that its deadly effects could be neutralized by keeping up artificial respiration during the period of its activity. His other services to science have been more valuable and permanent. By combining an unrivalled knowledge of the living habits of the wild creation with a new method of preserving skins, he raised (to use the words of Dr. Moore) "taxidermy from a sorry handicraft to an art". In 1829, five years after his last expedition, Waterton married the daughter of an old Demerara friend, who, however died with a year, leaving him with one child, a boy, well known later on as an antiquary. His subsequent travels, of which he has given a summary in the "Autobiography", were confined to the Continent, but during his last sojourn in the New World he twice visited the States, considering, as he said, no Englishman's education complete till he had been there.

After surviving so many perils abroad, Waterton met his death in his own park through stumbling over a briar-root. This was in 1865 when he was in his eighty-third year: an internal injury resulted in his death in a few hours. He was so inured to hardship that it had become second nature. For the last thirty years of his life he always slept on bare boards, wrapped in a blanket and with a block of oak for a pillow. From this couch he rose at midnight to spend a few minutes in the chapel; he rose again at three o'clock, made his fire and lay down again till half-past, when he dressed and spent an hour at prayer. Breakfast followed a further three hours' work or reading, and the rest of the day was spent about his estate in the business of a country gentleman. He had walled in the park and forbade any destruction of wild life within its bounds, so that it became a perfect paradise of animated nature. His charity to the poor was constant and unostentatious, and his personal piety unaffected and deep. His faith was so staunch and undisguised that it was continually manifested, even in the most unexpected places, in his scientific papers. Of his strength of will and dauntless courage his own writings give much indirect evidence, for he made generally light of his exploits. The value of his work was recognized by Darwin, who visited him at Walton Hall, and his friend Thackeray, in a well-known passage in "The Newcomes", testifies to his moral worth: "I could not but feel a kindness and admiration for the good man. I know his works are made to square with his faith; that he dines on a crust, lives as chastely as a hermit, and gives his all to the poor."

Besides the author's works mentioned above and his Essays on Natural History, ed. MOORE, see: GERARD, Stonyhurst Centenary Record, viii; MOORE, in Dict. Nat. Biog., s.v.

Further reading

• Aldington, Richard (1949). The Strange Life of Charles Waterton, 1782-1865. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
• Aldington, Richard (1948). Four English Portraits, 1801–1851 (one of them being of Waterton). London: Evans Bros.
• Edginton, Brian W. (1996). Charles Waterton: A Biography. James Clarke. ISBN 9780718829247.
• Carver, Neil (2026). The First Wild Man: Charles Waterton and the Birth of Conservation. Amazon.

External links

• Works by Charles Waterton at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Charles Waterton at the Internet Archive
• Waterton and Wouralia
• Waterton at Wakefield Museum
• Charles Waterton, Squire of Walton Hall
• Archival Material at University of Leeds Libraries