The three friends, Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley, were alike in this,
that each in his turn began his career with a great voyage of
scientific discovery in one of H.M. ships. Darwin was twenty-two when
the _Beagle_ sailed for the Straits of Magellan; Hooker, also, was
twenty-two when he sailed for the Antarctic with Ross on the _Erebus_;
Huxley was but twenty-one when he set forth with Owen Stanley for
Australian waters to survey the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea.
Each found in the years of distant travel a withdrawal from the
distracting bustle of ordinary life, which enabled him to concentrate
upon original work and to reflect deeply, unhampered by current
doctrines; each came back, not only deeply impressed by the elemental
problems of life, but "salted" with the sea and the discipline of the
sea.
It was good to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the
realities of existence by living on bare necessaries; to find
how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one
woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for
canopy, and cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for
breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake
of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the
bottom and I along with it.
Huxley was not so well situated as either Darwin, the well-to-do
amateur who was naturalist to the expedition, or Hooker, the son of
a distinguished botanist, receiving many privileges from his father's
friend, Captain Ross, while officially he was but an assistant-surgeon
and second naturalist. Huxley had neither friends nor influence beyond
the simple recommendation of "old John" Richardson. Macgillivray, the
naturalist, and the Captain himself had scientific interests, but not
so the other officers, who disliked seeing the decks messed by the
contents of the tow-net. Yet they were "as good fellows as sailors
ought to be, and generally are," though they did not understand why he
should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which his friends
the middies christened "Buffons," after his volume of the _Suites à
Buffon_. As assistant-surgeon he messed with the middies, but his good
spirits and fun and freedom from any assumption of superiority made
the boys his good comrades.
From the first he was very busy, glorying in the prospect of being
able to give himself up to his favourite pursuits, without thereby
neglecting the proper duties of life. A twenty-eight gun frigate was
anything but a floating palace. The _Rattlesnake_ was badly fitted
out, and always leaky; the lower deck gave a head-space of four feet
ten, which was cramping to a man of five feet eleven; but he had the
run of the commodious chart-room, as arranged for a surveying ship,
and would have had the run of the library if Captain Stanley's
requisition for books had not been "overlooked" by a parsimonious
Admiralty. His tiny cabin was light enough to work in on a dull day;
but as for the possibility of making a scientific collection, it was
but seven feet by six, by five feet six inches high, and infested with
cockroaches to boot.
His work took shape in a mass of drawings and descriptions from the
dissection of the perishable marine organisms of the tropical seas,
and, yet more important, in the new classification he established upon
anatomical grounds. His first papers were sent to the Linnean Society
by Captain Stanley; the later and more important he sent himself to
Edward Forbes, the most interested and helpful of the biologists
to whom he had been introduced before he left England. To his angry
disappointment, no news of them, no acknowledgment even, reached him
on the other side of the world; it was not till he returned, after the
four years of his voyage, that he found they had been published by
the Royal Society, and had established his reputation as a first-rate
investigator. But, though with much difficulty the scientific
authorities enabled him to secure the promised Government grant for
his book, and a temporary billet ashore while he worked at it, he was
only able to publish his _Oceanic Hydrozoa_; a vast quantity of his
researches remained unpublished, and subsequent investigators, going
over the same ground, won the credit for them.
The other scientific interest strongly aroused on the voyage was
anthropology. The cruise of the _Rattlesnake_ provided one of the last
opportunities of visiting tribes who had never before seen a white
man. The young surgeon made a point of getting into touch with these
primitive people at Cape York, and in the islands off New Guinea.
He made a preliminary exploration through the uncharted bush of
Queensland with the ill-fated Kennedy, and all but accompanied him on
his disastrous journey to Cape York, when of all the party only two
were rescued, through the devotion of the faithful native guide. He
exchanged names, and therefore affinities, with a friendly native of
the Louisiades, and learned much at first hand as to their physical
and mental characteristics, which stimulated his subsequent
anthropological work.
The Australian voyage, then, provided a magnificent field for original
research and original thought: the unknown naval surgeon returned from
it to find himself recognized as one of the coming men. Contact
with the larger world had broadened his outlook; the touch of naval
discipline concentrated his powers. But Australia gave him another
gift. He met at Sydney his future wife. The young couple fell in love
almost at first sight, and became engaged. They were of the same age,
22; they hoped to get married when he was promoted to the rank of full
surgeon; they were destined to wait seven-and-a-half years before she
returned home to fulfil his early jesting prophecy of making her a
Frau Professorin. Here, again, was stern disciplining on the part
of destiny. For the first years they were able to meet during the
intervals between the long surveying cruises of the ship; they cheated
the months of separation by keeping journals for each other. But for
nearly five years they were parted by twelve thousand miles of sea,
and, worse, by slow sailing ships, when letters would take five months
or more to receive an answer, which by that time might be entirely at
cross purposes with the changed aspect of affairs. The possibilities
of estrangement were incalculable. Their lives were developing on
entirely different lines. He had been admitted to the inmost circle of
men of science as an intellectual peer; he was elected F.R.S. when
he was barely twenty-six, and received the Royal Medal the following
year, as well as being chosen to serve on the Council of the Society;
he wrote; he lectured at the Royal Institution. And yet, with all the
support of the leaders in science, he could not find any post wherein
to earn his bread and butter. He stood for professorships at
Toronto, at Sydney, at Aberdeen, Cork and King's College, London.
The Admiralty, in March, 1854, even refused further leave for the
publication of the scientific work to do which he had been sent out.
He took the bull by the horns, and, rather than return to the hopeless
routine of a naval surgeon, let the Admiralty fulfil their threat to
deprive him of his appointment, and the slender pay which was his
only certain support. His scientific friends besought him to hold on;
something must come in his way, and a brilliant career was before him;
but was he justified, he asked himself again and again, in pursuing
the glorious phantom, so miserably paid at the best, instead of taking
up some business career, perhaps in Australia, and ending the cruel
delay which bore so hardly upon the woman he loved? Yet would not this
be a desertion of his manifest duty, his intellectual duty to himself
and to Science? He knew full well that there was only one course which
could bring him either hope or peace, and yet, between the two calls
upon him, he never knew which course he would ultimately follow.
[Illustration: From a Daguerrotype made in 1846]
For her there was no such mental development. Assuredly she kept up
her literary pursuits, her study of German, in which they had found
common ground of interest, for she had spent two years at school in
Germany; but she was cribbed and cabined by the ups and downs of early
colonial life, and the fluctuating ventures upon which her father
delighted to embark; there was, naturally, no possibility of her
moving in the stimulating intellectual society which was his, and
hope deferred wore upon her as the laurels of scientific success were
consistently followed by failure in all solid prospects. Yet neither
possible misunderstandings, nor actual disappointments, had power to
shake the foundations of their mutual trust, and the inspiration of
the ideal which each built on the other's so different character; the
one more compact of fire, the other more of noble patience, different,
but alike in a largeness of soul and freedom from pettiness, which
made their forty years of united life something out of the common. She
believed in him; in the darkest season of disappointment she bade him
remember that a man should pursue those things for which he is most
fitted, let them be what they will. Her "noble and self-sacrificing"
words brought him comfort, and banished "the spectre of a wasted
life that had passed before him--a vision of that servant who hid his
talent in a napkin and buried it."
At last the gleams of promise, which had begun to gather, broke
through the clouds. On the sudden death of Professor Jamieson, his
good friend Edward Forbes was called away in the spring of 1854 to
take the Edinburgh professorship. At a few days' notice Huxley was
lecturing as Forbes's substitute at the Royal School of Mines. In July
he was appointed permanently, with a salary for his course of £100
a year. A few days later his income was doubled. Forbes had held two
lectureships; the man who had accepted the other drew back, and it
was given to Huxley. In August he was "entrusted with the Coast Survey
Investigations under the Geological Survey," becoming the regular
Naturalist to the Survey the following year, with pay of £200,
afterwards increased to £400, rising to £600. The way was clear; the
Heathorn family had already determined to come home. Miss Heathorn had
been very ill; she was still far from strong, and, indeed, one gloomy
doctor only gave her six months to live. The lover defied him: "I
shall marry her all the same;" but the gloomy doctor was alone in his
opinion, and, indeed, she lived till she was nearly eighty-nine. The
marriage, which was to bring so much active happiness in a life of
much struggle and stress, was celebrated on July 1, 1855. They had
become engaged at twenty-two; they had waited and striven for eight
years; they were rewarded by forty years of mutual love and support.
V