The Savage Garden

    'My father was a naturalist, a botanist. This was before he became an archaeologist. He was many other things too. He was a . . . disoriented man, I can see that now. At the time it was, well, exciting.'

    They were indeed orangutan skulls, keepsakes from a trip the family had made to the Dutch East Indies in the last century.

    Signora Docci said she couldn't remember if her mother had put up a fight when her father first proposed that the whole family travel with him. In fact, there was much she couldn't recall about that period in her life, being only six years old in 1884, the year they steamed out of Livorno.

    'Your Mr. Darwin was to blame, with his theories of evolution and natural selection. My father was a scientist, but he was also a religious man, a strict Catholic; it was not easy for him to accept the new ideas. He fought them for twenty years with words, then he went in search of the evidence his arguments lacked. That's why he dragged us halfway around the world.'

    Her memories of the East might have been patchy, but they were somehow no less vivid for it. She could recall the grandeur of her parents' stateroom on the boat over. She remembered the latitude starting to tell on familiar constellations, the Great Bear's tail dipping below the horizon as they slipped southward on the Suez Canal. This phenomenon was pointed out to her by a Scotsman many years her senior with whom she developed a close relationship (but only, she now realized, because her nanny had been so eager to spend time in the company of Walter F. Peploe—the F stands for foolish, Nanny had said).

    Walter F. Peploe claimed to be an expert on all matters pertaining to the weather, and he certainly had the equipment to prove it. The captain allowed him to lash a louvered cabinet fitted with thermometers and other paraphernalia to a spar in the after-part of the ship. His pride and joy, though, was what he called his 'Richard' barograph—a free-swinging contraption that he'd rigged in his cabin, and which gave accurate atmospheric readings irrespective of the ship's roll. He was adamant that all vessels should be fitted with such a device if they were to avoid the perils of a sudden tempest. His stated aim in life was to persuade the Dutch authorities in Java to adopt the barograph on all government vessels plying the treacherous waters of the East Indies, and thereby make his fortune.

    He was a little disappointed when their own ship's passage of the Indian Ocean unfolded without incident, even if the clement weather was borne out by the readings on his barograph. Denied the opportunity of forewarning the captain of some impending climatic disaster, he devoted his time to investigating the idiosyncrasies of the ocean currents. This involved dropping numerous messages over the side of the ship, and to this end he regularly dispatched the young Signora Docci to loot empty beer bottles from the ship's pantry—considerably more bottles, it seemed to her, than the actual number of messages he spent so much of his time dictating to Nanny back in his cabin.

    Maybe some of those bottles were cast up on foreign shores, their notes returned, as requested, to his home address in Glasgow. If they were, he never got to know of it. Within six months of their arrival in Java, a Dutch postal packet went down with all hands in a typhoon off the island of Celebes. Walter F. Peploe was among those listed missing, presumed dead. 'The silly fool,' Nanny had said. 'I can just see him at the end with his stupid barograph, oh so pleased with himself, shouting 'See, I told you so!''

    News of the meteorologist's untimely end only reached the Doccis just before they boarded the boat home, after a trying year in the tropics. Most of their time had been spent on Borneo, with a brief interlude in northern Sumatra, because that island was also home to orangutans—the great apes that had lured her father halfway around the world.

    Again, her memories were patchy yet precise. She could recall the Dutch gentlemen, kind and courtly, dressing for dinner in heavy black tailcoats despite the enervating heat and humidity. They were forever smoking cigars and drinking gin and bitters. She also remembered the black teeth of the natives (considered a mark of beauty), the milky white water of the coral reefs and the smoke of the volcanoes rising in misty clouds against the clear blue sky. Then there was the virgin forest that clad almost everything and called no one master. This was where they spent the greater part of their time, beneath the dense green canopy, where only the odd stray sunbeam penetrated to the mulchy forest floor. There were no views in the forest, no horizons, just the trees closing in behind you as you traveled through it. And then there was the eternal imminence of death.

    She had a strong recollection of the natives on Sumatra huddling in the treetops whenever the tigers came, which was often. There were no tigers on Borneo, but the banteng—the wild buffalo— was just as feared. It attacked for no apparent reason, and with lightning speed. One time a rhinoceros broke from a bamboo thicket, sundering their rank of bearers, leaving a path as broad as a cart track behind it in the matted undergrowth. And of course there were the snakes, the stuff of childhood nightmares. The king cobra had been known to pursue men for many miles, although if you had the presence of mind to shed one of your garments, it would halt to attack that, buying you precious moments to escape.

    She described how they had emerged one morning from their hut to find a giant python coiled in a wooden cage, unable to escape, having swallowed whole the former occupant of the cage, a goat they kept for its milk.

    Her most vivid memories, though, and the most disturbing, were of her father, of his physical and then his mental deterioration. When he wasn't hunting orangutans, he was preparing their skins and skeletons. He would emerge from his makeshift charnel house exhausted, reeking of putrefaction, his hands cut and red, raw from the arsenical soap he'd applied to the bones to deter insects. The feet of the trestle table he worked on were placed in bowls of water—a barrier to the ever-present ants—but somehow they always found a way onto his specimens. When he began to take this as a personal affront, her mother started to worry. When he threatened to shoot one of the bearers for sneaking sips of the arrack in which he preserved his pelts, it was time to talk of calling a halt to the venture.

    He resisted the suggestion, insisting that the skins and skeletons were a lucrative source of income—which they were, zoological museums paid handsomely for both—and rejecting the counterargument that he had traveled to the tropics in the name not of Mammon but of Science.

    With hindsight, Signora Docci went on, it was clear that the expedition was doomed from the first. It was the final stab of a desperate man intent on debunking Darwin. To her father's credit, his position had shifted since The Origin of Species was first published, moving from one of knee-jerk ridicule to a more tempered assessment of the scientific facts. The third phase of his own private evolution had taken the form of a preemptive strike: there was nothing wrong with Darwin's theories of natural selection because the most esteemed Christian thinkers, including Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, had already sanctioned a kind of 'derivative creation'—the argument being that when God declared 'Let the waters produce' and 'Let the earth produce,' he was conferring forces on the elements that enabled them, in accordance with his laws of nature, to produce various species of organic beings. Her father's efforts to harmonize the new science with Catholic orthodoxy soon foundered, though, as he struggled to bend the words of the venerable theologians to his own ends.

    Instead, he reached for another theory—his last, and the one that had carried him and his family to the East Indies. This conceded to Darwin the development of new species by natural selection, man included, while allowing for a divine, overarching plan. Put simply, her father argued that after innumerable generations of influence, natural