57°03”N, 135°19”W #3
A new, terrifying word enters the lexicon: extinction.
The irreparable destruction of a species.
What a remarkable, godless notion, and at first scientists try to avoid it at all costs.
Perhaps these weird and wonderful bones belong to the ancestors of existing creatures, animals that changed as their climate and diet shaped them into new, sleeker forms. But the naturalists shake their heads.
The chalk beds do not reveal a complete lineage like this, palaeontologists have been unable to find a chain of evidence from one creature to the next, and besides, what living creature could possibly be a descendant of the tyrannosaurus or the glyptodon?
No, surely the earth cannot be home to such a beast.
Cuvier spends terrified nights considering the theological implications of his assertion, searching for a way to reconcile the truth of the Bible with what he can see in front of his very eyes.
Eventually, he comes up with an answer. The flood depicted in Genesis – this must be the catastrophe that submerged even the tallest mountains, drowning the dinosaurs and mammoths, all the creatures that the Lord did not deem it necessary to save.
But his explanation is imperfect, for the new science of geology is constantly revealing lost animals separated by millions of years.
The same flood cannot have swept away both the trilobite and the sabre-toothed tiger.
This means that the world must have experienced multiple catastrophes, one after the other.
The implications of this conclusion are immense, hard to fathom.
A stable, unchanging system becomes a world in which destruction follows destruction, waters flood the land, an asteroid can darken the sky, time and time again, and where all that is left of many species is bone and dust.
The idea of extinction is both thrilling and horrifying, and visitors cannot get enough of these beasts of the past. They throng around the skeletons, hungry for more, they read everything they can about the dinosaurs and the mammoths and fill the benches of lecture halls as palaeontologists present their latest discoveries.
Extinct species become almost fashionable, and eventually the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins is given the task of bringing these lost creatures to life.
His assistant is one Richard Owens, a keen young researcher who was the first to understand that the bones found within the earth form a distinct taxonomical class of their own.
He coins the word “dinosaur” and divides these ferocious reptiles into three genera: the carnivorous, the herbivorous and the armoured.
Hawkins and Owens examine the bones, imagine them covered with flesh and skin, and using clay and concrete Hawkins gradually restores these lost animals to their natural size.
The sculptures become a sensation long before the exhibition even opens.
On New Year’s Eve 1853, Hawkins and Owens hold a dinner to which they invite all the leading palaeontologists in the United Kingdom, journalists and the board of the Crystal Palace, and set out a dining table inside the iguanodon.
The occasion is unforgettable. The guests enjoy an eight-course meal inside a dinosaur – oysters, pigeon, lamb shanks, pheasant, pastries and the finest wines – and make merry long into the night.
The story of a banquet inside the body of an extinct animal quickly travels round the world.
Punch congratulates the men for the age in which they live, for “if it had been an earlier geological period, they might perhaps have occupied the Iguanodon’s inside without having any dinner there”, and the London Quarterly Review lauds the miracle that is humanity: “Saurians, Pterodactyls all! Dreamed ye ever of a race to come dwelling above your tombs and dining on your ghosts?”, and soon everybody is on tenterhooks, waiting for these beasts to be brought to life.
Hawkins and Owens do not offer the public mere statues; they create an entire world.
The gardens at the Crystal Palace become an archipelago of the extinct, a place where visitors can wander through the past, experience the marvels of palaeontology and see living history with their own eyes.
The Crystal Palace becomes the world’s first dinosaur theme park, a zoo whose enclosures are populated not by lions but by animals that have long since disappeared.
Before this, the dinosaurs were nothing but bones and sketches, but now these large, heavy beings are finally made flesh again.
A lake is dug for them, complete with three islands.
Hawkins’s sculptures are not displayed in a museum or gallery but are released into the wild.
Now these terrific reptiles can dig their claws into the mud, and Hawkins tries to imagine the moment at which they became trapped in the clay once and for all.
The silent cry of a flying lizard carries across the islands, and visitors see the world as it was long ago.
Anna’s second cousin takes her to the gardens at the Crystal Palace, and she finally has the chance to see the famed statues for herself.
Henry is considerate and borrows a wheelchair so she doesn’t have to exert herself, and the Palace’s very own curator gives them a private tour.
Anna gives her sunniest smile and Henry pushes her along the neatly raked pathways.
The winding walkways, the sparkling waters of the reservoir and the willows, pretty and pleasant, leaning over the water.
Then they see the statues, the ichthyosaurs and Teleosaurus lurking in the shallow waters, the rough-hewn monsters on the islands, the Megalosaurus and the warty-backed Labyrinthodon.
Hawkins has fashioned every scale and claw, chiselled lips that curve to give each of his creations a malevolent smile, and when the wind shakes the branches of the trees, their shadows shimmer above the statues, as though the dinosaurs are merely biding their time, their chests puffed out, ready to break into a gallop.
But then a squirrel climbs along the Iguanodon’s tail, starts nibbling a pinecone, and the vivacity of a living creature, the movement of its little paws, makes the statue look like a statue once again.
It is a curious frieze, two ages, two worlds, superimposed: the squirrels, the coots swimming lazily by, and the geese waddling in amongst the dinosaurs; the lost and the living side by side, one on top of the other.
Anna looks at the dinosaurs, at the squirrels and titmice resting on their scales, and is strangely moved.
How brutal and wild the world has been, how in flux.
Groves, the curator, interrupts his presentation and smiles.
That is true, he says, but no need for Madam Furuhjelm to worry, we are not at the mercy of nature like the poor dinosaurs.
The best scientific minds are at work charting the laws of nature, and before long the world will open up to us like a book.
Then we will be able to gauge the future and stave off catastrophes, to predict and prevent earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, to turn hostile forests and bogland into towns and beautiful, controllable systems, and the world will be like one enormous garden, a new Eden born of man’s needs and desires.
Wild nature is hideous and dying, and only man can make it agreeable and living, as the great naturalist de Buffon has written.
As she listens to the curator, Anna realises that this is their mission in the north too: they are to bring the colony into the realm of the laws of man, to bring culture and education and make Alaska a prim and proper place.
They leave the statues behind. Henry pushes Anna along the meandering pathways, and in the Palace’s little boutique they buy a small ceramic dinosaur as a souvenir.
The jaws of the plesiosaur are decorated with rows of sharp teeth, but its eyes seem to peer at them in a way that gives the toy a quirky appearance, and Anna smiles as she thinks of the child that will soon hold it in its hands.
The sailors ring the bells, and Anna grips her husband’s hand.
These are their final moments on the old continent.
Soon the ropes will be untied, the ship will carry them to a recently discovered corner of the new world, and a long silence will descend between Anna and her family.
Until now, she has been able to write to her mother and sister daily and has received post from them twice a day, but now this contact will be severed.
She has calculated that it might take up to two months for letters to reach Novo-Arkhangelsk.
Soon, their thoughts will be separated by an ocean and sixty long days, and Anna is reluctant to step aboard the ship and writes her mother one final letter, scratching her pen across the paper and trying not to let her breathing become too shallow.
The SS Magdalena begins her voyage across the Atlantic.
Crossing the ocean is an endless ordeal.
Anna lies in her cabin, unable to eat or sleep, she becomes weak with nausea and hunger, and Ida Hoerle is unable to console her, as she is every bit as poorly as her lady.
Anna starts to fear that she might lose the child – how can it possibly survive if she can barely swallow a single morsel?
Worry makes her as restless as the churning sea.
Weeks of agony and misery, for Anna must not let her husband see her in such a state, but eventually the ship arrives in the archipelago of the West Indies, and the winds die down.