10. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 265-295

Davy on the Gas, 5-10

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Robert Southey became one of Davy's most influential friends in his Bristol years, encouraging him to continue writing poetry and eventually introducing him to a greater poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose indulgence in opium naturally led him to want to try nitrous oxide. Coleridge and Davy met in October 1799 and became great friends a month later when Davy visited Coleridge in London. Coleridge introduced David to Charles and Mary Lamb, with whom the poet was living, and to William Godwin, among other prominent literary and artistic figures. Coleridge proclaimed that science, "being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope ... was poetical." Davy enthusiastically agreed.

Davy's experiments with nitrous oxide continued in a portable gas chamber designed by James Watt. It was airtight and allowed for a much longer exposure to the gas. As usual, Davy tried it on himself first: His "pulse rose to 124, his temperature to 106, and his cheeks went bright purple." His assistant, Robert Kinglake, stood by to record Davy's reactions when he emerged from the device, but Davy also recorded the experience in his laboratory notebook, saying that he had been "almost completely intoxicated," that it had been "Inconceivably pleasurable," and the he had "seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals." He also proclaimed, as Kinglake recorded, "Nothing exists, but Thoughts! -- the Universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!" He also experimented with combining nitrous oxide with alcohol, drinking a whole bottle of wine along with inhaling the gas. The chief effect was that he got sick but had no hangover the next morning when his "appetite was almost canine." But he began to wonder if the experiments were going a little too far.

In 1800, he published his first book, Researches Chemical and Philosophical chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration. The publisher was Joseph Johnson, a radical who had also published Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the book he reported on his experiments with live animals, which would later cause Davy some uneasiness, though none of the scientists who reviewed the book objected to this kind of research. In the preface to the book, Davy expressed some concern about his own methodology:

I have endeavoured to guard against sources of error; but I cannot flatter myself that I have altogether avoided them.... Early experience has taught me the folly of hasty generalization. We are ignorant of the laws of corpuscular motion.... Chemistry in its present state, is simply a partial history of phenomena, consisting of many series more or less extensive of accurately connected facts.

In addition to Davy's own self-criticism, there were also attacks on the nitrous oxide experiments from outside, including hints "that the Bristol laboratory witnessed scenes of intoxication, hysteria and even sexual debauchery." An anonymous pamphlet, The Sceptic, in 1800 attacked Beddoes and Davy in particular, suggesting that they used the experiments to seduce women and had even made one woman pregnant while she was under the influence of nitrous oxide.

Davy was himself beginning to doubt Beddoes's theories about the efficacy of inhaling gas, and his interests began to shift to galvanism and the new battery invented by Allesandro Volta. He communicated this interest in a letter to Coleridge, who was developing his ideas about the relationship of science and poetry. Coleridge urged Davy to move to the Lake District with him and Wordsworth, and to establish a laboratory there. For his part, Davy continued to write poetry, some of it about Anna Beddoes, though he never published any of the poems he wrote after 1800, confining them to his notebooks. He did, however, continue to compare the scientific and the poetic imagination in his lectures, and wrote in 1807 some words that suggest the ideas also expressed by Coleridge and Keats:

The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful. 

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783

Davy had begun to attract attention in London, which he visited again in 1801. Banks introduced him to Benjamin Thompson, a Fellow of the Royal Society who had been born in America but fought for the Loyalists and was knighted by George III. In 1785 he moved to Bavaria, where he lived for eleven years and was given the title of Count Rumford by the Elector of Bavaria.

Davy's eagerness to move on from his work with Beddoes in Bristol may have been heightened by his involvement with Anna Beddoes. She was unhappy in her marriage, and he became a confidant in her miseries. They began writing poem to each other, expressing not only affection but also a deep discomfort with the impossibility of furthering their relationship, although hers are more demonstrative than his. The extent of what Holmes calls "this flirtation or frustrated love affair (or whatever it was)" remains unclear. After Davy left Bristol, Anna gave birth to a daughter, Anna Maria, in the spring of 1802, and shortly after that ran off with Davies Giddy, Davy's old friend and patron from Penzance. She returned to Beddoes after several months' absence.

After eighteen months of work with nitrous oxide, Davy finally told Beddoes that he no longer believed there were therapeutic uses for the gas. Unfortunately, Davy had overlooked the fact that nitrous oxide had real potential as an anesthetic. It's not that he was unaware of the fact that it blotted out pain: He had treated his own toothache, caused by impacted wisdom teeth, with nitrous oxide, but "he did not take the next logical step of having the offending teeth removed while under the influence of nitrous oxide." He did note in writing up his experiments that nitrous oxide might be used to ease pain in surgery where there was no great blood loss -- because he believed that the gas was absorbed only through the bloodstream, he thought it would be ineffective if there was a lot of hemorrhaging. He had discussed the problem of pain with Coleridge, who had wondered why childbirth was so painful for human beings since it was essential for the continuation of the species, but again overlooked the potential use of nitrous oxide during labor. Holmes comments, "It would seem that Davy missed the greatest medical opportunity of his early career." It would be more than forty years before surgical anesthesia, using ether, was attempted, and it wasn't finally accepted "until Queen Victoria admitted to having taken a whiff of chloroform during the birth of her son Prince Leopold in April 1853."

Davy left Bristol in March 1801 to become assistant lecturer in chemistry and director of the chemical laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. The Institution, which was founded by Count Rumford, was only two years old and hadn't attracted much notice yet. But Davy's inaugural lecture on April 25 was a sensation: He was a natural educator and showman, as well as a popularizer of science, and the press raved about his presentation, noting also his effect on the many "completely spellbound" young women in the audience. He also published his first paper, on a new form of voltaic battery, in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions later that year.

After Davy's departure, Beddoes turned the Pneumatic Institute into a charitable clinic and gave up research. Anna left him for Davies Giddy twice, in 1804 and 1806. Beddoes's protégé continued to attract audiences -- and young women -- to his lectures. Coleridge wrote, "I attended Davy's lectures to enlarge my stock of metaphors.... Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of Vitality. Living thoughts spring up like Turf under his feet."

In his "Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry," Davy proclaimed chemistry's central role in the advancement of science, arguing that all the other sciences, from biology to astronomy, were based on a knowledge of chemical processes. For Davy, science was the only way out of ignorance and superstition, making humankind the master of its fate. But while his argument was revolutionary, Davy was careful not to antagonize the defenders of the established order, the wealthy men who supported the institution for which he worked. He argued that "we do not ... amuse ourselves with brilliant, though delusive dreams of the infinite improveability of man.... We consider only a state of human  progression arising out of its present condition. We look for a time that we may reasonably expect, for a bright day of which we already behold the dawn."

Coleridge was much influenced by Davy's view of science as "psychologically, even spiritually, therapeutic," as Holmes puts it. And Davy's explanation of the "carbon cycle" contributed to Coleridge's idea of harmony in nature. When he and Wordsworth wrote the preface to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802, they made explicit the analogy of scientific discovery to the poetic imagination.

Davy's success boosted support for the Institution, and apparently boosted his self-confidence. When Maria Edgeworth visited London with Anna Beddoes, Davy showed them around the Institution; Edgeworth commented that Davy "was much improved since I saw him last -- talking sound sense and has left off being the 'cosmology' man." His popularity with women was particularly noted by the caricaturists Rowlandson and Gillray. He was promoted from assistant to full lecturer in 1802, the following year to professor of chemistry. In 1804 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his salary had quadrupled, to £400, in just three years. He was invited to give summer lectures at universities, including Dublin, tripling his income.

He was shaken, however, by the death from consumption of his friend Gregory Watt in 1804, and wrote to a frend, "We know very little; but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality, the individual immortality of the better part of man." This hope is a far cry from the "certainty of the resurrection" proclaimed by the church's creed. And in the same letter he speculated, "We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are the slaves of some great and unknown beings," which Holmes observes is "more like the extraterrestrial intelligences of science fiction" than like God, or gods.

In 1805 he lectured at the Royal Institution on geology and spent a summer in the Lake District with Wordsworth, Southey, and Walter Scott -- Coleridge was in Italy. He returned to London to receive the Copley Medal for work on agricultural chemistry. He still had no significant discovery to attach his name to, but "There seemed nothing that could now stop his career, and his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-six."

9. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 235-265

Davy on the Gas, 1-4

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In the 1790s, Joseph Banks began hearing about experiments conducted at a "Pneumatic Institute" in Bristol by Thomas Beddoes, a former lecturer at Oxford. They involved experiments on humans, who were breathing in various gases to see what effect they might have on their conditions and diseases. Beddoes was seeking funds for his research, but the nature of the experiments caused Banks to turn him down. But when one of Beddoes's assistants, a twenty-one-year-old chemist from Cornwall named Humphry Davy, came to London in 1801, Banks invited Davy to meet with him.

Davy was mostly self-educated and had never traveled abroad, but he demonstrated an impressive knowledge of the advances in chemistry that had been made in France by Antoine Lavoisier. Davy's father, Robert, had inherited a large estate in Cornwall, where he practiced his skill as a woodcarver. In 1776, he married Grace Millet, who had been raised since the age of five by a surgeon in Penzance, John Tonkin, who had adopted her along with her two sisters when their parents died. Humphry was Robert and Davy's oldest of their five children. Tonkin became Humphry's benefactor (Robert Davy seems to have been somewhat feckless) and paid for his grammar school education in Penzance and later in Truro. But Humphry had to leave school when his father, who was deeply in debt, died suddenly in December 1794.

In February 1795, sixteen-year-old Humphry was indentured to the surgeon and apothecary John Bingham Borlase, who was a friend of Tonkin's. Davy moved into Tonkin's house, and turned his attic rooms into a painting studio and laboratory, with paining and chemical supplies generously supplied by Tonkin. He also took French lessons from an émigré priest who was one of his mother's lodgers, which enabled him to read "the language of Enlightenment science: the language of Laplace, Lamarck and Cuvier; the language of the Encyclopédie and the Biographie Universelle; the language of the Académie des Sciences, the only scientific body which rivalled the Royal Society in London. Above all it was the language of the greatest chemist of the day, Antoine Lavoisier."

Davy's voracious reading turned him into a skeptic and a materialist. He began to write essays denying the existence of the soul and wrote in his notebooks "two supreme declarations of faith.... The first was: 'Man is capable of an infinite degree of Happiness.' The second was: 'The perfectibility of science is absolutely indefinite.'" His "radical ideas about the nature of material reality" led him to a fascination with chemistry. In Tonkin's library he found both a standard English work, William Nicholson's Dictionary of Chemistry, published in 1795, and Antoine Lavoisier's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, published in 1789.

Humphry Davy, 1803

Chemistry of the time was liberating itself not only from its roots in alchemy, but also from the ancient belief in four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Water had been shown by Lavoisier to be compounded of hydrogen and oxygen in 1785, and his experiment was repeated by Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle in 1800. Fire had been thought to be caused by a substance known as "phlogiston," a theory still held by Joseph Priestley. Lavoisier thought it was the result of the combination of carbon and oxygen in the presence of a substance he called "caloric." Air was known to be composed of oxygen and nitrogen and other gases, and both Priestley and Lavoisier had demonstrated the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants and animals, though the full significance of this exchange hadn't yet been made apparent. And the variety of minerals found in earth led to suspicions that it, too, was not a single "element." The undermining of the traditional notion of four elements was revolutionary because "it was counter-intuitive: it went against common sense and common appearances."

Davy recognized that the task of the chemist was to further decompose and analyze substances. Twelve elements had been established, including hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. By 1808, John Dalton was proposing a "Table of 20 Elements," the basis of the the Periodic Table created by Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869. Banks was eager to establish Great Britain as a leader in chemistry, a task tragically simplified by the execution of France's greatest chemist, Lavoisier, by order of the Revolutionary Convention in 1794, a consequence of his earlier role as a tax collector and a feud with Jean-Paul Marat. Lavoisier had been an anglophile and a devotee of the empirical scientific method promulgated by Francis Bacon. In Lavoisier's words, "We ought to form no idea but what is a necessary consequence, and immediate effect, of an experiment or observation.... We should proceed from known facts to the unknown." This became Davy's creed as well.

John Davy later recalled his brother's early laboratory: "His apparatus consisted chiefly of phials, wine-glasses, teacups, tobacco pipes, and earthen crucibles; and his materials were chiefly the mineral acids and alkalis in common use in medicine. He began his experimental trials in his bedroom in Mr Tonkin's house." In 1797, Tokin took in a new lodger, Gregory Watt, the son of the Scottish engineer James Watt. Gregory wrote home to his father about Davy and his experiments, and Watt in turn wrote to his friend Thomas Beddoes in Bristol. Beddoes had been a lecturer at Oxford, but was forced to resign his fellowship because of his outspoken republican and atheist views. One of his students at Oxford had been Davies Giddy, a Cornishman who also knew Davy.

Thomas Beddoes

Beddoes decided to put an idea he had in effect: the Bristol Pneumatic Medical Institute, which would provide free medical care and research. He was already experimenting with drugs and diet to treat various diseases, and became interested in the chemistry of respiration, theorizing that inhaled gases entering the bloodstream might bring about cures for diseases. Though he applied to Banks for a grant from the Royal Society, he was forced to solicit his funds from private philanthropies, particularly William Henry Lambton, who bankrolled Beddoes's project in exchange for tutorial of his sons. Hearing about Davy, he decided the young man, not yet twenty, would be perfect as an assistant in his research.

Anna Beddoes, 1787

On October 1, 1798, Davy was released from his indenture and became supervisor of Beddoes's institution. In Bristol he met Beddoes's twenty-four-year-old wife, Anna, a pretty, energetic woman who was half-sister to the novelist Maria Edgeworth. Humphry was smitten with his employer's wife. That winter, Thomas Beddoes published Davy's first essays, in one of which he challenged "the imaginary fluid caloric" proposed by Lavoisier. He also wrote an essay, "On Heat, Light and the Combinations of Light," in which he set forth "an entire cosmological vision, in which the whole universe was powered by starlight as well as Newtonian gravity, and would eventually be understood as a single unified idea." He also speculated that human consciousness was a function of physiological processes, "making an almost metaphysical claim that chemistry might prove to be the path to ultimate knowledge." And in an essay in which he pointed out the interrelationship between oxygen-breathing animals and carbon dioxide breathing plants as suggesting an equilibrium in nature, he anticipated "what is now known as the 'carbon cycle.'"

In the spring of 1799, Davy began a series of experiments with gas inhalations. For the first time, he had a well-equipped laboratory, including gas-inhalation equipment which was designed for him by James Watt and based on balloon technology. He studied the work of human respiration and then tried the effects of inhaling hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrous gases. Before subjecting any of his patients to the tests, he tried them out himself, nearly killing himself with carbon monoxide, as well as suffering fainting fits, nausea, and headaches. Fortunately, he kept a supply of oxygen at hand.  He finally settled on nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, as the most promising gas for trials.

At first Davy was largely concerned with the process of respiration, and possible therapeutic benefits. Later, with his human subjects, he became more interested in the physiological reactions of the whole body; and effects of pleasure and pain. Finally he became fascinated by purely psychological responses. 

There were risks to using nitrous oxide, which some, including Priestley, considered lethal, and the ammonium nitrate that was heated to produce it could explode. But Davy went ahead with it and experienced giddiness and euphoria. He wrote a poem about it:

Not in the ideal dreams of wild desire
Have I beheld a rapture-waking form;
My bosom burns with no unhallowed fire:
Yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm
Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled
Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound
Yet are my limbs with inward transport thrilled
And clad with newborn mightiness around.

He began regularly experimenting with nitrous oxide, carefully annotating his physical and emotional reactions to the gas, noting once that "he was 'more irritable than usual,' though that might have had other 'moral' causes. In retrospect it appears that these 'moral causes' might have been connected with Anna Beddoes." One evening he decided to take a larger dose than usual, during which he briefly lost consciousness. He was disappointed that the gas gave him no spiritual revelation or insight into the universe, which may have made him overlook the potential of the gas as an anesthetic.

In May 1799 he began clinical trials on the institution's patients. He pioneered the use of "blind" trials by not telling the patients how much nitrous oxide they were inhaling or even if they were actually inhaling plain air, as some of them were. He was fascinated by the hallucinogenic effects of the gas, and began to glimpse the possibility of its anesthetic use in surgery. In addition to patients, he also tried it out on friends and family, including Anna Beddoes. In a couple of instance women who inhaled the gas had such extreme, even hysterical reactions that it launched the notion that the gas could be used to make women lose their inhibitions and become sexually aroused.  Among others who partook of the gas were Robert Southey, several members of the Edgeworth family, Gregory and James Watt, and Peter Mark Roget, who would go on to compile the eponymous thesaurus. Southey reported that the gas made him "gloriously happy!" Maria Edgeworth visited her half-sister at the time and observed that Anna showed unusual "grace, genius, vivacity, and kindness."

Cartoon by James Gillray, "Scientific Researches! - New Discoveries in Pneumaticks! - or - an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air" (1802).  Davy is shown with the bellows behind the desk.

8. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 211-234

Mungo Park in Africa

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Tied down by gout and administrative responsibility, Joseph Banks was still fascinated by exploration, so in 1788 he became one of the founders of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inland Districts of Africa  (later mercifully shortened to the Africa Association and finally merged with the Royal Geographic Society in 1831).  The association was designed to promote exploration and commerce, though it of course also paved the way for colonialism and the cultural imperialism of Christian evangelicals, particularly after the war against Napoleon began and Banks became a member of the Privy Council. The great goal of the explorers of the late eighteenth century was the city of Timbuctoo (now Timbuktu in the nation of Mali), which had the legendary aura of an El Dorado.

In 1792 Banks met a twenty-one-year old Scottish-physician named Mungo Park. The tall, athletic Park had come to London to find something more interesting to do with his life than being a doctor. Banks arranged for him to go on a naval expedition to Sumatra as an assistant ship's surgeon. He acquitted himself so well on the eighteen-month voyage that Banks suggested to the Africa Association that they send Park to explore the Niger. He was outfitted with "two shotguns, two compasses, a sextant, a thermometer, a small medicine chest (the regular use of quinine as a prophylactic against malaria had not yet been adopted), a wide-brimmed hat and the indispensable British umbrella. There were also two vital objects of sartorial formality: a blue dress coat with brass buttons, and a malacca cane with a silver top." His objective was to seek out the source of the Niger and to try to get as far as Timbuctoo.

By July 1795 Park was at Pasania, a hundred miles up the river Gambia. He spent five months there, learning Mandingo and recovering from a bout with malarial fever, before setting off with an African guide and interpreter named Johnson and an African slave boy, Demba, whom Park intended to set free on his return. Their expedition began, following the Gambia eastward, on December 2.  But when he entered the territory controlled by a Moorish chieftain known as Ali, all of the good he had brought with him for trading were stolen, Johnson and Demba disappeared, and Park became a virtual prisoner of Ali. He recalled in particular a rather embarrassing examination by Ali's wife, Fatima, and her female entourage, who wanted to know if he was circumcised.

Park escaped, and on July 20, 1796, got his first sight of the Niger, which, he was pleased to note, flowed eastward, as Herodotus had predicted. He was treated kindly by a group of women who invited him in, fed him, and sang him to sleep. He realized that the extemporized song was about him, the poor white man that they had fed and sheltered. "The women reversed all Park's assumptions about his travels in Africa. He realised that it was he -- the heroic white man -- who was in reality the lonely, ignorant, pitiable, motherless and unloved outcast. It was he who came and sat under their tree and drank at their river." When he left he gave the woman who had taken him in the four brass buttons from his coat.

On August 25, he decided not to proceed as far as Timbuktu and to begin his return journey. But he was set upon by Moorish bandits, who robbed him of everything he had left, except his trousers, his boots (which were falling apart) and his hat, in the band of which he had hidden his travel journal. He recorded sitting there in despair, naked, hungry and exhausted, staring at the ground, with "no alternative, but to lie down and perish."

He noticed a tiny piece of flowering moss pushing up through the stony earth beside his boot. In a flash, his scientific interest was aroused, and leaning forward to examine the minute plant, for one moment he forgot his terrible situation. He carefully described this movement out of paralysing despair: "At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this to show from what trifling circumstance the mind will sometimes derive consolation.... Can the Being (thought I) who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and suffering of creatures formed after his own image? -- surely not!" 

He kept going on his journey westward, discovering that he could pay his way by writing out verses from the Quran on scraps of paper torn off of the pages of his journal and selling them. Holmes likens Park's redemption from despair to that of the Ancient Mariner, who is released from the curse of killing the albatross when he blesses the sea creatures surrounding his ship.

Park returned to London just before Christmas in 1797. His adventures made him a celebrity and when his account of them was published in the spring of 1799 as Travels in the Interior of Africa, he earned enough to marry Allison Anderson, who had been his childhood sweetheart. He settled down as a physician in Peebles, and fathered two sons and a daughter. Among his patients was the young Walter Scott, to whom Park confessed in 1803 that he was discontented with being a country doctor on the "lonely heaths and gloomy hills" of Scotland and "would rather brave Africa and all its horrors."

So in 1805 Park set out on his second expedition, this one well-financed and -equipped. The war with France changed the aim of the expedition "from a geographical survey to that of an armed trading caravan, its main purpose to seek to establish a commercial trade down the Niger." Banks proposed it as a step "to secure to the British Throne, either by conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the Coast of Africa from Arguin [in Mauritania] to Sierra Leone." He sounded the note of British imperialism, to bring the benefits of Christianity and benign rule to the natives, though "It is not clear how much of this imperial dream he ever vouchsafed to Park himself."

Park would be accompanied by his wife's brother, Alexander Anderson. They were to be given the military ranks of captain and lieutenant respectively, and though Park pleaded to be allowed to travel with only two or three people, including George Scott, the expedition's artist, in the end he was accompanied by forty soldiers under the command of twenty-two-year-old Captain John Martyn. They arrived at Goree on March 28, 1805, just before the beginning of the rainy season, and finally set off on the Gambia on April 27. The rains came, and the soldiers began to succumb to malaria fever and dysentery. By the time they reached the Niger on August 19, only twelve Europeans from the original party remained alive. Five more, including Scott, died when they reached Sansanding, and Park nearly poisoned himself with mercury calomel trying to cure a bad case of dysentery.

They set out on the Niger with a party of nine, including Anderson, three troopers, Martyn, two slaves who had been promised freedom, and an Arabic-speaking guide, Amadi. Park planned to descend the river after it turned southward at Timbuktu and follow it to the bay of Benin. Martyn recorded Park's efficiency in a letter written to a fellow officer, but on November 4, he added a note on the outside of the envelope telling of the death of Anderson and a trooper. Park also recorded Anderson's death and burial in his journal: "I then felt myself as if left a second time, lonely and friendless, amidst the wilds of Africa." Before leaving Sansanding, he wrote farewells to the sponsor of the expedition, Lord Camden at the Colonial Office, to Banks, and to his wife. "But he also sent back to Goree by Arabic messenger his journals written up to that date, as if this would be the last chance."

About November 21, 1805, accompanied by Martyn and three soldiers (he wrote in a last note that one of the soldiers was "deranged in his mind"), he set off downriver from Sansanding. They never reached Timbuctoo, which became a symbol of an inaccessible goal. One of Tennyson's early poems is called "Timbucto," and it won him the Chancellor's Medal at Cambridge in 1827.  Park was reportedly attacked from the riverbank because he refused to pay the tribute demanded by local chiefs. Amadi, the guide, left them by agreement, but later found a witness who reported that after the rest of the party was killed, Park and Martyn jumped into the river. Their bodies were never found.

Park was thirty-four at the time of his assumed death in February 1896. His wife was paid £4,000 in  prearranged compensation, and the portion of his journal that survived was published in 1815. But legends of Park's survival persisted, and in 1826 his son Thomas set out to try to find him. Thomas had studied science at Edinburgh University and was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, but he left without warning his family. The accounts of his travels and death are various and unreliable. His body was never found, but "in November 1827, a clean white shirt, pressed and labeled 'T Park,' turned up in a basket of laundry delivered to the explorer Richard Lander at Sokoto, a hundred miles away on the western coast." (Note: Thomas Park's journey, as described by Holmes, is impossible to follow on a map today. "Yansong," which Holmes says is "140 miles inland" from Accra, has either disappeared or undergone a name change. The references to it on Google seem to be from the sources contemporary with Park's journey on which Holmes based his account. There is a Sokoto in northwest Nigeria, but not on the "western coast.") 

Mungo Park's story had the kind of appeal you might expect to the Romantic imagination. It was picked up by Wordsworth in an early version of The Prelude and by Robert Southey in Thalaba the Destroyer, though Holmes observes that "Park's quiet, fresh, limpid prose has easily outlasted Southey's gaudy, melodramatic poem." A better tribute to Park may be Shelley's Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, which "reflects the spiritual loneliness of the desert traveller who pursues a perilous river, and knows he will never return.... [Shelley] captures something of Mungo Park's enigmatic wanderlust, and transforms it into an unearthly Miltonic quest for the strange and magnificent limits of the known world." And Keats gave a copy of his poem Endymion to the explorer Joseph Ritchie when he set out on a journey into the Sahara, with instruction to read it and "throw it into the heart of the Sahara Desert." Ritchie wrote to Keats in December 1818 from Cairo that "Endymion has arrived thus far on his way to the Desart." Ritchie never returned.

6. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 147-181

Part II: Water, 2. Reflection from "What he also sought in water or in mirrors ..." through end. 3. Escape through "... leaned down towards an embrace."

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Reflections were also, in Shelley's Platonic idealism, a medium through which ultimate reality could be perceived. "The mind, Plato said, should be treated like an eye, guided gently from obscurity to light." For Shelley, the eye was also the window to the soul. He gazed deeply into Mary's eyes, and sketched images of eyes in his noteooks.

Eyes, he believed, became intricate from "the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment." Dreams, too, could be read there. In their "mazy depth of colour behind colour" he could lose himself with looking, as Narcissus did, at his own idealised image reflected in the mind of another.... In deepest thought, using the inner eye of his mind, he could sometimes begin to observe within himself the bright form of which Shelley, with his lined cheeks and greying hair, was only the mortal shadow.... Hence the hours spent musing by ponds and pools and, in female company, the uncomfortable intensity of his longing, blue-eyed stare. 

It was Southey, whom Shelley visited in 1811, who suggested he read Berkeley, who conceived of reality as "a construct of mind." He didn't go to the solipsistic extreme, but argued, "Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive." He also posited a universal Mind, not a divinity to be worshiped but "a source from which his thoughts drew energy." This concept was reinforced by an Alpine epiphany in the summer of 1816 in which he "sensed a presence in the mountains" when he visited the glacier at Chamounix.

As he picnicked with Mary and Claire at the glacier's edge they could hear it creak and crack; they once saw, not far off, the thunderclap smoke and rubble of an avalanche it caused, bearing down into the valley "all the ruins of the mountains."... Three years later, in Prometheus Unbound, he made this the echo of all men's thoughts suddenly released from the ice.... The great mountain represented the secret law that governed though: solemn, inaccessible, transcendent. Mutability and chance could not come near it. Only mind could ponder it. In its remoteness it marked the last of the visible and natural causes men could see before ... they lost the thread of their understanding and reached, clumsily and blindly for the notion "God." 

Shelley crossed a bridge over the river Arve and saw the torrent below as an image of "his own thoughts, 'now dark -- now glittering,' and ceaselessly bursting and raving among the rocks." He wrote to Peacock of his "realisation that his existence and the mountain's were one in his mind. He had made the whole landscape his idea, his thought, and part of him. Mind became what it contemplated, and what he saw became himself." As Poet, "he could shape, colour, fill with meaning, invest with light and life." The human mind was a mirror of the vast sea of mind. "The notion of 'distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature,' was a delusion. He was simply an infinitesimal ripple in a Mind infinitely extensive."

In Dante's Convito, God dreamed man and the divine Intelligences made him, according to God's idea. But in Shelley's Queen Mab, man dreamed God. Y los sueños, sueños son. ... Others, standing in awe under the same Swiss sky, had bowed before the God who made the mountain. Shelley had been made aware of, and had tested, his own power. 

This concept of the power of mind informed his politics. "Perceptions, opinions and dispositions could be changed, not least by his own writing and incessant, urgent arguing.... Mind would triumph over matter, and the world could be transformed."

"You talk Utopia," said Byron shortly. Perhaps Shelley did; he knew that men did not dare this, that they did not even know their lack of daring, that "the good want power, but to weep barren tears," and that the revolution in France had failed precisely because its promoters had persisted in seeing the world in terms of oppression and revenge. But he talked Utopia because "some few, like we know who" saw it believed it, and knew it had to be shown forth to other minds. It could be built that way.

Shelley thought of his political writings as stones cast into the lake, the ripple made by the disturbance spreading outward. It was an image suggested by Godwin, who called truth "the pebble in the lake." "The Necessity of Atheism had been one such pebble, in Shelley's view." In November 1817, he wrote his Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, in which he contrasted the widespread grief over the death of the young princess with the "indifference to the death of Liberty in England." Two years later, in Italy, he began work on A Philosophical View of Reform, but it was left unfinished and unpublished for a century. "Shelley crouched by the water with his mind full of spreading circles of light. But the pond, and England, slept again."

One problem is that Shelley had a short attention span: "His life seemed compounded of eddying ideas that begged to be heeded and followed. Sudden notions drove him to grab friends by the arm and tug them eastwards, westwards, sideways, into bread-shops and pawn-shops in the London streets." Trelawny said, "He overbore all opposition in those less self-willed than he was." In Hogg's view, "Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from whatever it was that moved him."

Increasingly, Shelley resorted to images of "free fall through nothingness, or water, or the illusory solidity of the body and the self." In 1820, he jumped into the Arno from the Ponte della Trinità in Florence, from which Trelawny, who had failed to teach him to swim, rescued him. Despite the horror of Harriet's drowning, he had convinced himself that he would drown calmly. In 1816, he had been sailing with Byron on Lake Geneva when they were caught in a sudden windstorm. Byron, a strong swimmer, "assured him he could save him, as long as he did not struggle. Shelley replied that he had no notion of being saved." And when Trelawny rescued him from the Arno, "Shelley was sorely disappointed that he had not left him there."

He took Jane Williams and her two small children out in a small boat in the Bay of Lerici in the spring of 1822 and fell oddly silent as the little coracle drifted far from shore. "Jane watched him as he sat, head bowed, motionless and wordless. His melancholy was terrifying." Finally he announced his interest in finding out what mysteries lay in the afterlife. Jane told him that she and the children would rather have dinner first, and when they got back to shore she "swore she would never go out in a boat with Shelley again."

He had persuaded himself that drowning "was a state much like sleeping."

He was confident ... that thought did not die. It might even become more influential once the thinker had gone. Books, paintings, sculptures, products of mind, survived, with immortality in them as long as men lived to admire them. ... Yet the question for Shelley was whether minds themselves persisted, and whether his own mind, with all its pulsings of thought, would dissolve as a billow in the ocean or go on. His reasoning self insisted that things beyond the grave could not be known. Men could believe, if they cared to, in eternal life; but in belief of that sort, the sort that priests demanded, the will was passive and the intellect suspended.... Nothing beyond visible phenomena could be subjected to rational analysis. It was a realm of phantoms and faith. The first he had outgrown, the second he rejected as poison. But looking into water -- water running deep and quiet, his own face looking back at him -- he sometimes felt he was on the edge of understanding, and leaned down towards an embrace.