Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/456

 and stood on the head of the angel which surmounted the castle of St. Angelo.

Waterton succeeded to the estate of Walton Hall in 1806, and made it his home for most of his remaining life. The house, which was built in the eighteenth century in the place of a more ancient structure, stood on an island in a lake of about thirty acres, surrounded by a well-wooded park. He enclosed the park with a wall nine feet high, and allowed no guns to be fired within it. It thus became a safe retreat for all the species of birds known in the district, and in winter many species of waterfowl frequented the lake. In January 1865 there were visible on the lake, within view of one window of Walton Hall, 1640 wild duck, widgeon, teal, and pochard, 30 coots, and 28 Canada geese. In February 1820 Waterton went to Demerara again, and passed into the interior by the river Essequibo. He remained eleven months in the forest, and collected 230 birds, two land tortoises, five armadillos, two large serpents, a sloth, an antbear, and a cayman. This last was caught by a bait on a four-barbed wooden hook made by an Indian. It was then dragged out of the water by seven men, while Waterton himself knelt on the beach with the canoe mast in his hand. When the cayman was within two yards of him he threw down the mast and jumped on its back, seizing the forelegs to hold on by. The reptile was drawn further up, with Waterton on his back, the jaws were tied up and the throat cut, the object of the adventure, the securing of an uninjured skin, being thus attained. On his return to Liverpool after this voyage Waterton's specimens were made to pay a duty of twenty per cent. after a long detention, which killed several eggs which he had brought with the object of rearing the tinamou in England, and caused him much just irritation.

The perusal of Wilson's ‘Ornithology of the United States’ made him wish to visit that country, and he sailed to New York in the early summer of 1824, travelled in Canada and the United States, had his portrait painted by Titian Peale in Philadelphia, visited several of the West Indian Islands, at last landed in Demerara, and proceeded into the forest some two hundred miles up the river. Here he studied the habits of the jacamars, the red grosbeak, the sunbird, the tinamous, and the humming-birds, as well as of vampires, sloths, and monkeys. It was his last stay in the forests, and he sailed for England in December 1824. In 1825 he published an account of these four journeys in a quarto volume, entitled ‘Wanderings in South America, the North-west of the United States, and the Antilles in the years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824.’ A large octavo edition was published in 1828. The ‘Wanderings’ were widely read, and the book obtained a permanent place in English literature. Sydney Smith reviewed it in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ (February 1826) in a kindly and entertaining article. Waterton's descriptions are concise and exact, so that it would be possible to identify all the species which he mentions; but his aim was not to draw up a museum catalogue, but to write his observations in a readable form. His favourite English prose writer was Sterne, whose influence is often to be traced in his manner of expression. To the travels are appended ‘original instructions for the perfect preservation of birds, &c., for cabinets of natural history,’ and in accordance with this method Waterton prepared all the specimens he had brought home, and arranged them on the staircase of Walton Hall. The method of preparation was to soak the whole skin in an alcoholic solution of perchloride of mercury, to keep this moist, and to model the form from the interior, letting it harden when finished. Internal stuffing was thus rendered unnecessary, and admirable results were obtained. The frontispiece of the ‘Wanderings’ represents a human face made from that of a red monkey by this kind of modelling.

In 1829 he was married in the chapel of the English convent in Bruges to Anne, daughter of Charles Edmonstone of Cardross, at whose house in Demerara he had often stayed. She died a little more than a year after the marriage, leaving an infant son, Edmund (see below). Waterton placed a picture of St. Catharine of Alexandria, which resembled his wife, over the mantelpiece of the room in which he usually sat, and to the end of his life often fixed his eyes upon it as he sat by the fire. His wife's two sisters thenceforward kept house for him. In 1838 he published a volume of ‘Essays in Natural History,’ in 1844 a second series, and in 1857 a third. Each was preceded by a portion of autobiography. A few of the essays are on tropical subjects, but the majority are on English birds and wild animals, and they belong to the same kind of literature as Gilbert White's ‘Natural History of Selborne,’ and are not inferior to it in the quality of their observations. Several of the essays first appeared in Loudon's ‘Magazine of Natural History.’ He spent the winter of 1840–1841 in Rome, where he attended mass every morning at four in the church of the Gesù, made many ornithological observations, and prepared examples of most of the birds of the district. In later years he often visited Aix-la-Chapelle, generally went to Scarborough