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Waterton, Charles, 1782-1865

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Charles Waterton
Charles Waterton

Charles Waterton (June 3, 1782 - May 27, 1865) was an English naturalist and explorer.

Life

Waterton was born at Walton Hall, Wakefield, Yorkshire. He was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. His Roman Catholic ancestry is alleged to include seven saints: Vladimir the Great, St Anne of Russia, the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb, King Stephen of Hungary, Queen Margaret of Scotland and Mathilde of Germany together with Thomas More, Count Humbert III of Savoy and several European royal families.

He was also a descendant of the Old English Chieftein Ailric, Kings Thane to Edward the Confessor, who held Cawthorne and much of South Yorkshire before the Conquest. The heiress Sara le Neville inherited a vast estate from her grandfather Adam FitzSwain (the grandson of Ailric) and it passed to the De Burghes, then they to the Watertons in 1435. The Watertons were one of the few aristocratic families who refused to convert to the new Protestant religion during the reign of Henry VIII, and consequently the vast bulk of their estates were confiscated.[citation needed] Charles Waterton was a devout, ascetic Catholic and maintained strong links with the Vatican.

In 1804 he travelled to Guyana to take charge of his uncle's estates near Georgetown. In 1812 he started to explore the hinterland of Guyana, making four journeys between then and 1824. He later described his discoveries in his book Waterton's Wanderings in South America. He was a highly skilled taxidermist and preserved many of the animals he encountered on his expeditions. Whilst in Guyana he taught one of his uncle's slaves, John Edmonstone his skills. Edmonstone, by then freed and practising taxidermy in Edinburgh, in turn taught the teenage Charles Darwin. Waterton is credited with bringing the anaesthetic agent curare to Europe.

In the 1820s he returned to Walton Hall and built a nine-foot-high wall around three miles of his estate, turning it into the world's first wildfowl and nature reserve. He also invented the bird nesting box. The Waterton Collection is now in Wakefield Museum.

Waterton died after fracturing his ribs and injuring his liver in a fall on his estate. His body is interred near the spot where the accident happened.

Part of the folklore of the area, has it that Charles Waterton still haunts the hall and that his spirit can take the form of a heron, to be seen flying over the hall lake. Some say it is a snowy egret, which was commonly seen on his travels in Guiana.

Alleged Eccentricities

A range of colourful stories have been handed down about Charles Waterton, not all of which are verifiable, but which add up to a popular portrait of an archetypal aristocratic eccentric:

  • Waterton had his hair cut in a crew cut at a time when a full head of hair piled up or brushed forward was in style.
  • In 1817, he climbed St. Peter's in Rome and left his gloves on top of the lightning conductor. Pope Pius VII asked him to remove the gloves, which he did.
  • Waterton sometimes enjoyed biting the legs of his guests from under the dinner table, imitating a dog.
  • He tried to fly by jumping from the top of an outhouse on his estate, calling the exercise "Navigating the atmosphere"
  • He devised his own methods for preserving animal skins and used them to create unusual caricatures of his enemies. He also utilised his taxidermy skills to create models critiquing political events of the day
  • He believed in the medical remedy of blood-letting, which was largely an abandoned practice at that point in time. When ill he bled himself heavily
  • He fell in love with an orphan baby called Anne Edmonstone who was descended from Arawak and Scottish royalty, waiting until she was 17 years old (and he was 48) before marrying her in a Belgian convent. Anne died a year later during childbirth, for which Waterton blamed himself and thereafter he is reputed to have slept on the floor as a penance with a block of wood for a pillow.

Charles Waterton also had a road and a school named after him (Waterton Junior and Infant school).

Passions

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

Legacy

  • Walton Hall is now open to the public as a nature trail
  • Waterton Lakes, now a national park in Alberta, Canada, was named for Charles Waterton by Thomas Blakiston in 1858.
  • Charles Waterton also has a Wakefield road and primary school named after him.

External links


This biographical information was gathered from the Charles_Waterton page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project.

Books

Wanderings in South America

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