SIR JOHN RICHARDSON.*
THE name of Sir John Richardson is best known to the general public as that of an Arctic explorer, who was the devoted and worthy compeer of the departed Franklin, and a fellow labourer of Back, Rae, Sherard Osborn, and McClintock, who are still living amongst us. To the scientific world he is best known as a zoologist, but in physical and ethnological geography he has also left his mark. In social and daily life he was distinguished as one who knew how to combine an active and even punctilious dis- charge of detail-duties with the most perfect kindliness towards every one with whom he was brought into contact. After a little observation, it was obvious, though not obtrusively obvious, that religious influences counted for much in the fashioning of his life. The Life of Sir John Richardson recently published by a clergyman, the Rev. John McIlraith, and now before us, gives due prominence to this latter phase of his character ; but whilst this has been done, the other and less private elements of his biography have been dwelt upon in as much detail and fullness as the limits of a small octavo have allowed. And it may be safely said that whatever omissions particular tastes may regret and circumstances may have neces- sitated in this history of a long life of multiform activities, from it parent or guardian may teach boy or youth, or these latter may learn for themselves, how it is possible to combine a life of religion and duty with a life of enterprise ; and both lives with scientific and social success.
Sir John Richardson died about three years ago, at the advanced age of seventy-eight, having been actively and publicly engaged in one employment or another for no less than sixty of these years, and up to the very day of his death. Of these sixty years eight were spent in the Arctic explorations which have given the dis- tinctive colouring to his life, and eight more were hurried through in active naval service afloat during the stirring years between the second expedition to Copenhagen and what an Irish historian would call the " breaking out" of peace in 1815. Medical and scientific labour at home filled up the other years. Dr. Richardson was thirty-two, years of age when he took service, in 1819, as surgeon and naturalist under Franklin in his first Arctic expedition ; and one of the most remarkable points in his history is the fact that, beginning his more purely scientific career as late in life as the age of thirty-two, and with little more of special preparation than that which a surgeon's education and the practice of the art in active naval warfare would confer, or rather admit of, he
Life of Sir John Richardson, C.B., LL.D., F.R.B. 1-c. By the Rev. John McIlraith, Minister of the English Reformed Church, Amsterdam. London: Longmans. less. nevertheless accomplished so much in those very departments of natural science in which aptness is so generally found to be unattainable in default of early initiation. The excitement of boat expeditions for cutting out the enemy's ships in the Tagus, and the buccaneering descents in which the Government of the day employed our naval and military forces somewhat ignobly on the United States' seaboard, gave scope, no doubt, for the display of courage and coolness ; but the courage and perseverance which were necessary to the young surgeon for entering on quite other fields of action, and attacking the vast and unexplored realm of Arctic natural history, must have been even greater. In obtaining the power of recognizing those peculiarities of structural arrangement upon which classification depends, for acquiring the tact, discrimination, and judgment in the balancing of affinities which make the scientific zoologist, early habituation to the dealing with such questions is all but invariably necessary. Richardson's history, however, and the record of his services between 1807 and 1815 in the Belt, off the Tagus, in the Mediterranean, and in Georgia, show that it is possible for a man of ability to make himself a real naturalist by force of will, perseverance, and application even when he has had no special education in zoolo- gical observation early in life. Of his " early deficiencies " Sir John Richardson would speak, of the way in which he made up for them we learn little or indeed nothing from his Life, and as self-laudation was not his forte, we apprehend we should have learnt little or nothing from himself. It is not our intention to give a resume of the results of the three Arctic expeditions in which Richardson's energy and insight told for so much, both during the life of and the search for Sir John Franklin. But one incident of these expeditions to which Richardson himself scarcely ever alluded we will herewith relate, thinking, as we do, that the way in which a man of proved bravery and daring writes of the necessity of taking away the life of a fellow-creature may be a useful story for days like these, when our military Thrasoes liken battles to "rabbit-shooting," and in their diaries make entries such as this, " Little sport to day—enemy very wild." Sir John Franklin's first expedition had become in 1821 reduced to the very greatest straits through a variety of shortcomings and failures on the part of men whom he had had more or less reason to trust ; much, in fact, though not altogether, as his last expedi- tion, a whole generation later, is supposed to have been brought to destruction through the failure and putrefaction of Golduer's villanous preserved meat. The exploring party was divided into three detachments, which were struggling under Franklin, Richardson, and Back respectively to reach some Indian settle- ments, when an Iroquois, by name Michel, yielding to the promptings of his wild - beast nature, murdered a couple of the Canadian voyageurs, Perrault and Belanger, like himself, in Franklin's detachment, and fed himself, of course in secret, upon their flesh, in place of the lichen and leather which were the diet of his companions. Some of this horrible food, which was keeping him in vigour whilst the rest of the travellers were in the lowest stages of debility, Michel brought and offered to Richardson and his two companions, Lieutenant Hood, and John Hepburn, an Orkney seaman, telling them that it was part of a wolf which he had found killed by the stroke of a deer's horn. " We implicitly believed this story then," says Richardson, in his own account of the matter, but afterwards became convinced from circumstances the detail of which may be spared that it must have been a portion of the body of Belanger or Perrault." After this Satan seems to have wholly entered into Michel, and he proceeded to shoot Lieutenant Hood when left alone with him. Hepburn and Richardson had some difficulty in finding an oppor- tunity for conferring together apart from Michel after this, his third murder, but when the opportunity did occur Hepburn offered to be the instrument for saving their two lives by destroying the Iroquois. "I determined, however," says Richardson, " as I was thoroughly convinced of the necessity of such a dreadful act, to take the whole responsibility upon myself ; and immediately upon Michel's coming up, I put an end to his life by shooting him through the head with a pistol. Had my own life alone been threatened, I would not have purchased it by such a measure ; but I con- sidered myself as entrusted also with the protection of Hepburn's, a man who, by his humane attentions and devotedness, had so endeared himself to me, that I felt more anxiety for his safety than for my own." It would be well indeed if such terrible stories were always so told.
Of his two other Arctic expeditions, the first in the years 1825-1827, under Franklin, and the second in 1848-1849, under his own command, and in search for his old commander, a clear account may be gathered from the biography before us ; but of
Sir John's own share in urging and directing, in inspiring and managing, both at home and abroad, both when first and when second in command, his own reticence and, we suppose, also the rules of the service have rendered it difficult for the general public to obtain an adequate idea. Art has, however, in this matter been truer to facts than history, and in pictures of Arctic explorers in council we observe a prominent place assigned to his solid but animated figure. Of the way in which events of one kind or other answered to Sir John's predictions, or were moulded by his prevision, our space does not allow us to speak ; but of his noble self-sacrifice in handing over his command to a man whose fitness for the post his own fitness for it had enabled him to recog- nize, we may say a few words. Dr. Rae had been associated with Sir John Richardson, at his own request, as his second in command of the Boat Expedition of 1848, and when in the second year, owing to the loss of their boats, it became necessary to decide which of the two should retire from the enterprise, Sir John decided to give the command to Dr. Rae. He knew Dr. Rae to be twenty years -younger than himself, and from his connection with the Hudson's Bay Company, to be possessed of certain local facilities, of which he himself could not but be destitute ; and feeling that the object of the expedition was not his own glorification, but the rescue of Franklin's party, he resigned his command, and gave, so far as he -could judge, Dr. Rae the opportunity of making in 1849 the discovery, which it did actually fall to his lot to make, but not for six more years. In small matters, as in large ones, Sir John was scrupulously conscientious ; and " to save expense to the Govern- ment, he with as many of the men as were not required for the -enterprise returned to England."
A similar history to that of the relations which were thus set up between Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae may serve to connect the medical life of the former with his life of -expeditions and searches. Whilst Physician to the Fleet at Haslar, Sir John discovered under the uniform of a -naval assistant-surgeon the abilities which the world at large now recognizes under the professorial gown of Mr. Huxley. In his preface to the magnificent work on Oceanic Hydrozoa, pub- lished by the Ray Society, Professor Huxley tells us that while he -was doing duty at Hasler, Sir John Richardson, "always thoughtful -and kindly in act, though sparing of words" to his subordinates, had, without any solicitation on his part, endeavoured to obtain for him an appointment to the Haslar Museum. " Failing in -this," he continues, " my chief still kept me in mind," and by procuring for him an appointment as assistant-surgeon and naturalist in the Rattlesnake, Sir John Richardson enabled his _gifted subordinate to lay the foundations of his present fame and note at a very early age. The chief was not sparing of exertion, and his like-minded subaltern has not been chary of acknowledging the extent of his obligations.
The departments of science in which Sir John did most work, and upon which he is most quoted by such writers as Darwin and Lyell, are mammalogy and ichthyology. Upon this latter subject lie wrote and edited treatises in the very latest years of his life, though in his old age ethnology was the one of all the natural sciences to which he seemed most devoted. His account of four great North American races, the Esquiinaux, the Kutchins, the Crees, and the Chepewyans, will long remain not merely storehouses of ethnographical facts, but models of anthropological research. Between these studies, for the proper dealing with which the zoologi- cal pursuits of his previous life had so well fitted him, and the kindred subject of philology, he beguiled his leisure during the last years of his life. Of his death, which was sudden in the sense in which sudden death is to be prayed for, and not prayed against, the Editor of the Dictionary of the Philological Society spoke thus in an .address to its members :—" We have suffered a great loss in the -death of Sir John Richardson, one of the most careful and -accurate of our contributors. His last work was for the Dictionary. His pen had just finished a verse from the Wycliffite version of Isaiah, when his gentle, able, and manly spirit was called to its rest."
Haslar, at which he spent seventeen years of his life, retains, and we hope will long retain, the impress of his administration upon two of its establishments, its museum and its hospital for the insane. The former of these is interesting only to the scientific public, and to them it is needless to dilate upon its merits. But all men can admire the zeal and envy the success with which Sir John's efforts to introduce into Naval hospitals the milder system of lunatic treatment already in vogue in civil hospitals were carried on and crowned. When we consider that even now, whilst Florence Nightingale is a living power, and Sidney Herbert, though dead, speaks through the voices of the many lives his
labours have saved, the spirit of Mr. Bumble is still found to haunt hospital board-rooms, we are astonished that such a reform as this could have been effected in a Government establishment in default of pressure from without, and years before Scutari had thrown its ghastly illumination upon the Circumlocution Office. But when the desired result was produced, Sir John seems to have remembered no more the anguish with which it was brought to the birth, and with the pure joy with which he contemplated the working of the new system strangers will not intermeddle.
It is a little remarkable that Mr. MoIlraith should not have enumerated the Fellowship of the Royal Society amongst the other honours which (p. 279) he records as having been con- ferred upon the subject of his biography. This is as real an
honour assuredly as " the honour of knighthood," or as " the rank and privileges of the Third Class of Companions of the Bath," which he might have obtained with no further trouble than that entailed in letting a regiment or division freeze to death in the mud at Sebastopol, or burn away in the fevers of a sugar island.
Sir John Richardson's character was eminently and distinctively remarkable for its solidity and its strength, and when he died, at the age of seventy-eight, after the labours of sixty years, his natural force was but little abated. The distinctive merit of this biography is, that it gives us the secret of this strength, and makes his history thus to be eminently an exemplary one. His path was not pointed out to him by the brilliant flashes of genius, but by the steady light of his sense of duty ; and the influences which made his life what it was can be cultivated up or choked down in
all of us,— "His strength was as the strength of ten, Because his heart was pure."
Sir George Back, who saved his life and that of Franklin in the expedition of 1819, and who is now the only surviving officer of that band of heroes, has given us (p. 269) the following estimate of his character, with which we will close this notice of his life :— "No one could perfectly understand the admirable qualities of his nature who had not been with him in trials of no ordinary description, even when life itself was in question. In storm and sunshine, in plenty and famine, in moments of great danger, requiring unusual self-pos- session and coolness, he was ever firmly balanced and collected—a fine example to others. With a keen sense of humour, quick to discern, and ready to applaud, he was ever a pleasant companion, and, better than all, a moral, good man."
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