Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Read online

  Leonardo also needed to assert that the elevation of strata with fossils must represent a general and repeatable feature of the earth’s behavior, not an odd or anomalous event. Thus he had to refute the two explanations for fossils most common in his time—for Noah’s flood could only be viewed as a strange and singular phenomenon, and if all fossils derive from this event, then paleontology illustrates no general mechanism for the rising of land. And if fossils grow as objects of the mineral kingdom within rocks, then the mountains may always have stood high, and we can derive no evidence for any uplift at all. Thus Leonardo made his superb observations on fossils in order to validate his lovely, but ever so antiquated, view of a causally meaningful and precise unity between the human body as a microcosm and the earth as a macrocosm. Leonardo, the truly brilliant observer, was no spaceman, but a citizen of his own instructive and fascinating time.

  I like to contemplate Leonardo, this complex man of peace, of gentleness, of art, of scholarship; this military engineer who designed (but generally did not build) ingenious instruments of war, but who would not reveal his ideas for a submarine, as he stated in the Leicester Codex:

  This I do not publish or divulge on account of the evil nature of men who would practice assassinations at the bottom of the seas, by breaking the ships in their lowest parts and sinking them together with the crews who are in them.

  And I like to compare his views on the mechanism for raising mountains from the sea (and exposing fossils for collectors) with our most celebrated literary image on the same subject—Isaiah’s prophecy that “every valley shall be exalted.” I also recall the peace that shall reign on Isaiah’s mountain (festooned, no doubt, with fossils), where a scholar might study the raising of earth to his heart’s content, and not need to provide his warlike patron with plans for the raising of sieges or the razing of enemy cities. Isaiah’s summit, where “the wolf also shell dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . . They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.”

  2

  THE GREAT WESTERN AND THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE

  SCIENCE PROGRESSES; ART CHANGES. SCIENTISTS ARE INTERCHANGEABLE and anonymous before their universal achievements; artists are idiosyncratic and necessary creators of their unique masterpieces. If Copernicus and Galileo had never lived, the earth would still revolve around the sun, and earthlings would have learned this natural truth in due time. If Michelangelo had never lived, the Sistine Chapel might still have a painted vault, but the history of art would be different and humanity would be a good deal poorer. This “standard” account of the differences between art and science belongs to our distressing but prevalent genre of grossly oversimplified dichotomies—stark contrasts that both enlighten in their boldness and distort in their formulaic divisions of complexly intertwined entities into two strictly separated piles—“and never the twain shall meet, / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.”

  The supposed inexorability of technological progress, under this distorting dichotomy, leads to the myth of science as virtually disembodied—a machine endowed with its own momentum, and therefore striding forward almost independently of any human driver. Scientists, under this model, become anonymous and virtually invisible. A few names survive as icons and heroes—Edison and Bell as doers, Darwin and Einstein as thinkers. But, if we accept the premise that technological innovation (in manufacturing, warfare, transportation, and communication) has powered social change far beyond all other consequences of human emotion and ingenuity, how can we resolve the paradox that the people most responsible for propelling human history remain so invisible? Who can name anyone connected with the invention of the crossbow, the zipper, the typewriter, the Xerox machine, or the computer?

  Artists, politicians, and soldiers win plaudits and notoriety, though so many impose themselves only lightly and transiently upon the motors of social change. Scientists, engineers, and technologists forge history and gain oblivion as a reward—in large part as a consequence of the false belief that individuality has little relevance when a progressive chain of discoveries proceeds in logical and inexorable order. Let me illustrate our different treatment of scientists versus statesmen and artists with two pairings.

  Colonel Calverly, head of a company of dragoon guards in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, introduces his troops by giving the audience a formula for their construction:

  If you want a receipt for that popular mystery,

  Known to the world as a heavy dragoon,

  Take all the remarkable people in history,

  Rattle them off to a popular tune . . .

  The Colonel then rips off (at patter-song speed) two hilarious doggerel verses, listing thirty-eight historical figures, including a few fictional and general characters. Only one is a scientist. (The notoriously sexist Gilbert listed three times as many women—Queen Anne, the generic and demeaning “Odalisque on a divan,” and Madame Tussaud, founder of the great London wax museum.) The scientist appears in the first quatrain:

  The pluck of Lord Nelson on board of the Victory—

  Genius of Bismarck devising a plan—

  The humor of Fielding (which sounds contradictory)—

  Coolness of Paget about to trepan.

  Most of us will have no trouble with the first three—Admiral Horatio Nelson dying at the battle of Trafalgar, the great German statesman, and the author of Tom Jones. But scientists gain little recognition in their own times and quickly fade from later memory. So who is Mr. Paget, about to open his patient’s skull? Sir James Paget, surgeon to the queen and a founder of the science of pathology, may have been a household name to his Victorian contemporaries, but few of us know him today (and I couldn’t have made the identification without my trusty encyclopedia). So scientists and engineers create history, but Gilbert chooses only one to participate in the construction of English fiber, and even this man has since sunk to oblivion in the general culture of educated people.

  For the second pairing, let us return to Admiral Nelson and the story of Trafalgar. On October 21, 1805, Nelson’s fleet of twenty-seven ships met and destroyed a combined French and Spanish force of thirty-three vessels off Cape Trafalgar, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Nelson’s forces captured twenty ships and put 14,000 of the enemy out of commission (about half killed or wounded, and half captured), while suffering only 1,500 casualties and losing no ships. This victory ended Napoleon’s threat to invade England and established a supremacy of British naval power that would endure for more than a century.

  Nelson, “on board of the Victory,” engaged his flagship with the French Redoutable. The opposing ship fired at such close range that a French sniper, shooting from the mizzentop of the Redoutable, easily picked off Nelson from a distance of only fifteen yards. Nelson died of this wound a few hours later, but with secure knowledge of his triumph.

  Nelson’s ship, and much of the battle, was saved by the second man-of-war on the line, the Temeraire. This vessel rescued the Victory by firing a port broadside into the Redoutable and disabling the French ship. (The mainmast of the Redoutable fell right across the Temeraire; the French ship then surrendered, and the Temeraire’s crew boarded her and lashed the defeated vessel to her port side.) Another French ship, the Fougueux, then attacked the Temeraire, but the British man-of-war fired her starboard broadside, to equally good effect, and secured her second prize, lashed this time to her starboard side. The Temeraire, now disabled herself, but with her two prizes lashed to her sides, had to be towed into port by a frigate.

  Enter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century artist and the first subject of my second pairing. Early in his career, in 1806, Turner painted a conventionally heroic scene of the conflict: The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory. We see Nelson, surrounded by his officers and dying on deck. The Temeraire stands in the background, firing away at the Fougueux.

  Late in his career, in 1839, Turne
r returned to the ships of Trafalgar and depicted a very different scene, magnificent in philosophical and emotional meaning, and one of the world’s most popular paintings ever since: The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838. The large men-of-war, with their three major tiers of guns, were beautiful, terrible (in the old sense of inspiring terror), and awesome fighting machines. The Temeraire, constructed of oak, was built at Chatham and launched in 1798. The ship carried a crew of 750, far more than needed to sail the ship (with a gundeck 185 feet in length), but required to operate the ninety-eight guns—for each gun employed several men in elaborate procedures of loading, aiming, firing, and controlling the recoil. But these “hearts of oak” (the favored patriotic name for the great men-of-war) fell victim to their own success. Their supremacy removed the threat of future war, while advancing technologies of steam and iron soon outpaced their wood and sails. These ships never fought again after the Napoleonic wars, and most were reduced to various workaday and unsentimental duties in or near port. The Temeraire, for example, was decommissioned in 1812 and then served as a floating prison and a victualing station.

  Eventually, as timbers rotted and obsolescence advanced, these great vessels were stripped and sold to ship breakers to be dismantled for timber, plank by plank. John Beatson, a ship breaker at the yards of Rotherhithe, bought the Temeraire at auction for 5,530 pounds. Two steam tugs towed the hulk of the Temeraire fifty-five miles from Sheerness to Rotherhithe in September 1838.

  Turner’s painting presents a wrenchingly dramatic view, quite inaccurate in an entirely studied way, of the Temeraire’s last sad trip. The great man-of-war, ghostly white, still bears its three masts proudly, with light rigging in place, and sails furled on the yards. The small steam tug, painted dark red to black, stands in front, smoke belching from its tall stack to obscure part of the Temeraire’s mast behind. One of Turner’s most brilliant sunsets—with clear metaphorical meaning—occupies the right half of the painting. The most majestic and heart-stopping product of the old order sails passively to her death, towed by a relatively diminutive object of the new technology. John Ruskin wrote: “Of all pictures not visibly involving human pain, this is the most pathetic that ever was painted.”

  Turner clearly set his scene for romance and meaning, not for accuracy. Ships sold for timber were always demasted, so the Temeraire sailed to her doom as a hulk without masts, sails, or rigging of any sort—a most uninspiring, if truthful, image. Moreover, Rotherhithe lies due west of Sheerness, so the sun never could have set behind the Temeraire!

  A simplistic and evidently false interpretation has often been presented for Turner’s painting—one that, if true, would establish bitter hostility between art and science, thus subverting the aim of this essay: to argue that the two fields, while legitimately separate in some crucial ways, remain bound in ties of potentially friendly and reinforcing interaction. In this adversarial interpretation, recalling Blake’s contrast of “dark Satanic mills” with “England’s green and pleasant land,” the little steam tug is a malicious enemy—a symbol of technology’s power to debase and destroy all that previous art had created in nobility. In a famous, if misguided, assessment, William Makepeace Thackeray (one of the thirty-eight in Gilbert’s recipe for a heavy dragoon), wrote in 1839, when Turner first displayed his painting:

  “The Fighting Temeraire”—as grand a picture as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Temeraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer . . . The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume . . . of foul, lurid, red-hot malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water around it; while behind it . . . slow, sad and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her.

  This reading makes little sense because Turner, like so many artists of the nineteenth century, was captivated by new technologies, and purposefully sought to include them in his paintings. In fact, Turner had a special fascination for steam, and he clearly delighted in mixing the dark smoke of the new technology with nature’s lighter daytime colors.

  In Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, art historian Judy Egerton documents Turner’s numerous, and clearly loving, paintings of steam vessels—starting with a paddle-steamer shown prominently in a painting of Dover Castle in 1822 (passenger steamboats only started to operate between Calais and Dover in 1821), and culminating in a long series of paintings and drawings featuring steamboats on the Seine, and done during the 1830s. A perceptive commentator, writing anonymously in the Quarterly Review in 1836, praised Turner for creating “a new object of admiration—a new instance of the beautiful—the upright and indomitable march of the self-impelling steamboat.” He then specifically lauded “the admirable manner in which Turner, the most ideal of our landscape painters, has introduced the steamboat in some views taken from the Seine.”

  This reviewer then credits Turner for his fruitful and reinforcing union of nature and technology:

  The tall black chimney, the black hull, and the long wreath of smoke left lying on the air, present, on this river, an image of life, and of majestic life, which appears only to have assumed its rightful position when seen amongst the simple and grand productions of nature.

  The steam tug in The Fighting Temeraire is not spiteful or demonic. She does not mock her passive burden on the way to destruction. She is a little workaday boat doing her appointed job. If Turner’s painting implies any villain, we must surely look to the bureaucrats of the British Admiralty who let the great men-of-war decay, and then sold them for scrap.

  Which brings me to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer who goes with Turner in my second pairing. How many of you know his name? How many even recognized the words as identifying a person, rather than a tiny principality somehow never noticed in our atlas or stamp album? Yet one can make a good argument—certainly in symbolic terms for the enterprise he represented, if not in actuality for his personal influence—that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the most important figure in the entire nineteenth-century history of Britain.

  Brunel was the greatest practical builder and engineer in British industrial history—and industry powered the Victorian world, often setting the course of politics as firmly as the routes of transportation. Brunel (1806–1859) built bridges, docks, and tunnels. He constructed a floating armored barge, and designed the large guns as well, for the attack on Kronstadt during the Crimean War. He built a complete prefabricated hospital, shipped in sections to the Crimea in 1855.

  But Brunel achieved his greatest impact in the world of steam, both on land and at sea—and now we begin to grasp the tie to Turner. He constructed more than one thousand miles of railroad in Great Britain and Ireland. He also built two railways in Italy and served as adviser for other lines in Australia and India. In the culmination of his career, Brunel constructed the three greatest steam vessels of his age, each the world’s largest at launching. His first, the Great Western, establishes the symbolic connection with Turner and The Fighting Temeraire. The Great Western, a wooden paddle-wheel vessel 236 feet in length and weighing 1,340 tons, was the first steamship to provide regular transatlantic service. She began her crossings in 1838, the year of the Temeraire’s last tow and demise. In fact, on August 17, 1838, the day after the sale of the Temeraire, the Great Western arrived in New York and the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette declared that “the whole of the mercantile world . . . will from this moment adopt the new conveyance.” The little tug in Turner’s painting did not doom or threaten the great sailing ships. Brunel’s massive steam vessels signaled the inevitable end of sail as a principal and practical method of oceanic transport.

  Brunel went on, building bigger and better steamships. He launched the Great Britain in 1844, an iron-hulled ship 322 feet long, and the first large steam vessel powered by a screw propeller rather than side paddles. Finally, in 1859, Brunel launched the Great Eastern, with a double iron hull and propulsion by both screws
and paddles. The Great Eastern remained the world’s largest steamship for forty years. She never worked well as a passenger vessel, but garnered her greatest fame in laying the first successful transatlantic cable. Brunel, unfortunately, did not live to see the Great Eastern depart on her first transoceanic voyage. He suffered a serious stroke on board the ship, and died just a few days before the voyage.

  Turner and Brunel are bound by tighter connections than the fortuitous link of the Temeraire’s demise with the inauguration of regular transoceanic service by the Great Western in the same year of 1838. Turner also loved steam in its major manifestation on land—railroads. In 1844, his seventieth year, Turner painted a canvas that many critics regard as his last great work: Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway. Brunel built this two-hundred-mile line between London and Birmingham between 1834 and 1838 (and then used the same name for his first great steamship). Turner’s painting shows a train, running on Brunel’s wide seven-foot gauge, as the engine passes over the Maidenhead Railway Bridge, another famous construction, featuring the world’s flattest brick arch, as designed and built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The trains could achieve speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour, but Turner has painted a hare running in front of the engine—and, though one can’t be sure, the hare seems poised to outrun the train, not to be crushed under “the ringing grooves of change,” to cite Tennyson’s famous metaphor about progress, inspired by the poet’s first view of a railroad.