Charles Waterton: A Biography

by Brian W. Edginton

Charles Waterton (1782-1865) n a true English eccentric, ironically self-styled 'the most commonplace of men'. He talked to insects, fought with snakes, rode an alligator and lived like a monk. He was made famous in his own lifetime by publication of hiswide-ranging travels and natural history observations - always fun, often perceptive, and unfailingly individual. One of his more notable contributions to science was the introduction into Europe of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0718829247
• ISBN13: 9780718829247
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Lutterworth Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Charles Waterton. Biography.

November 29, 2005 Waterton was a traveller, writer, ornithologist, taxidermist, a lifelong student of natural history and an environmentalist. He was also prone to accidents and arguments. As a youth in Spain, he had a close call with death from the "black vomit." Later, on the Essequibo river in Guyana, he captured a cayman with a special baited hook, then rode it for forty yards on the bank, using its forelegs as a bridle. When he finally settled down in the 1820s, he converted his estate into a nature reserve long before National Parks were thought of. (The Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta was named in his honour.) He fought a legal battle with the owner of a neighbouring soap factory whose noxious gases and effluent were killing vegetation on his estate and poisoning a river. The author gives us a sense of Waterton's strong Catholic upbringing and background, his ascetic lifestyle, his love of wildlife and his charity towards human neighbours less fortunate than himself. He also provides cryptic, sometimes amusing, descriptions of Waterton's frank exchanges of opinion with "closet naturalists" and others who did not accept what were, to him, unassailable facts. Waterton was often right, sometimes he was wrong, but, right or wrong, he clung tenaciously to what he believed. He was intolerant of bigotry in others while not being entirely innocent himself. The section on curare is more accurate and comprehensive than those in other Waterton biographies. It also includes details of his animal experiments that do not appear in anaesthesia textbooks. Waterton set off on his first "wandering" into the interior of Guyana in 1812 to obtain curare from the Macusi Indians. His best known experiment was the one in England in 1814 in which a donkey was injected with curare, became paralysed and was kept alive by artificial repiration, using a pair of fire bellows through a tracheotomy, until the effect of the curare wore off. The author also includes verbatim quotations from Waterton's vivid and endearing accounts of his earlier experiments on birds and animals in Guyana, as well as Waterton's belief that curare could be an effective treatment against hydrophobia and tetanus. Such is the continuing fascination of Charles Waterton that this biography by Brian Edginton is the fourth to be published in the past fifty years. The author's refreshingly informal, sometimes unconventional, writing style is eminently suited to his subject. This is not to say that the book is casually written. It is extensively referenced from Waterton's own books, pamphlets and collections of his letters, from contemporary and modern newspaper and magazine articles on both sides of the Atlantic, and from many other miscellaneous sources. Those readers who would like to meet the "most incongruous mixture of bizarre eccentricity, credulity and unbelief, coupled with a brilliant originality of thought, in a somewhat rough setting of common sense" will