Solomon's Secret Arts (57 page)

The Alchemist: Sigismund Bacstrom

There can be little debate about the most important alchemist operating in England in the late eighteenth century. His handwritten notes and copies of older alchemical works are strewn throughout great library collections in the English-speaking world, from Glasgow to Los Angeles. Yet we are not certain in what country he was born. His name was Sigismund Bacstrom, which sounds Swedish. So thought the Prussian publicist J.W. von Archenholz, who edited a German version of Bacstrom's only published article in 1802, calling him “an Englishman of Swedish origin.”
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Beyond the name, however, no evidence can be found of a Swedish connection—he wrote in English, German and Dutch, and he used the Dutch digraph “ij” for “y.” Bacstrom described his father as the possessor of “great medicinal Arcana” relating to “the quintEssences of Metalls, Minerals, Vegetable and Animal Substances,” which suggests that he was both a physician and an alchemist.
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Born in 1743, young Sigismund studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Strasbourg. This unusual institution had both a Lutheran and a Jesuit college, and it is not clear which one Bacstrom attended, although he seems to have been a Protestant later in life.
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He made three sea voyages as a surgeon on Dutch ships between 1763 and 1770. Between these journeys, he resided at Amsterdam.

By the time he came to London in 1771, Bacstrom was apparently fluent in English. Hoping to take part in James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific, he addressed a letter to the naturalist Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Cook's first voyage in 1768–71. Pleading his impoverished state, Bacstrom assured Banks of his sailing experience and his ability to trap live birds. In a separate letter, probably written to Banks's associate the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, Bacstrom suggested that participation in the expedition might “intitle me to more Respect and Encouragement, either here or in Germanij, than any merit of mine own may deserve!”
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Impressed by his eagerness, Banks engaged him at a generous salary of £100 per year. Soon after, however, Banks withdrew in anger from the Cook expedition, due to disputes over his accommodation, and decided to make a trip with Solander to Iceland and the Faeroe Islands instead. Bacstrom served as secretary to the two
celebrated naturalists on this excursion. He later made copies of the notes Solander had taken on the plants of New Zealand, illustrating them with his own watercolours. As Solander was a leading disciple of Carl Linnaeus, whose system of taxonomy he adopted, this would have introduced Bacstrom to the latest methods in botany.
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Bacstrom was not commercially minded. A skilled copyist, translator and illustrator, he always depended on wealthy patrons for support. After leaving the service of Banks and Solander in 1775, he attached himself for four years to Captain William Kent, a collector of plant specimens. Between 1780 and 1786, Bacstrom took to the sea again, making four northern voyages to the whale fisheries as a surgeon on merchant ships. Although he found that his captains had “little or no education” and complained about his treatment at their hands, he made use of his experience to write an account of a voyage to the Arctic island of Spitzbergen.
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Exasperated by the living conditions on whaling ships, Bacstrom turned to the slave trade. He made two personally disastrous expeditions, first to the West African coast and then to Jamaica. On the second voyage, he suffered an attack of blindness, as a result of “an epidemical Distemper, which was among our Slaves.” Bacstrom never stated any moral opposition to slavery, but he admitted that he had no wish to engage in further slaving expeditions.
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Following his return to England, he wrote again to Banks, offering “to assist a Gentleman to do chemical Experiments … I do not mean the Lapis Philosophorum seu potius Insanorum [Stone of the Philosophers or rather of the insane].” This may have been a private joke; it certainly did not signify a distaste for alchemy. Having tried in vain to obtain patronage from Hugh Percy, 2nd duke of Northumberland, “a Lover of Chemical Philosophy,” Bacstrom suggested an introduction to Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian Mason” and alchemist who was visiting England. Banks apparently made some efforts on his behalf, but none proved successful, and Bacstrom considered engaging himself on an expedition to New Holland (Australia), to seek specimens for botanical collectors as well as to search for gold, diamonds and precious stones. He promised Banks that he would keep his discoveries “sub Sigillo Harpocratis [under the seal of Harpocrates, Egyptian god of silence], for my Employers only.”
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At this low point in his career, Bacstrom was fortunate enough to find a protector—Edward Shute, another “Lover of Chymical Experiments,” who gave him an allowance of £150 a year and set him up in a laboratory in the appropriately named Paradise Row, Marylebone, where he was to make medicines. Shute lived in the Inner Temple (although he was not a barrister) and apparently had an interest in Dr Norris's Antinomial Drops, a patent medicine, as a letter of endorsement from him appeared in printed
advertisements for that nostrum.
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By 1789, however, Bacstrom's patron was dead. He and his wife were now reduced to selling their own clothes, and he again begged Banks for support. General Charles Rainsford, a dedicated alchemist who happened to be a distant cousin of Banks, had proposed that a subscription might be raised for Bacstrom among “his chemical friends.” Banks contributed five guineas, while the instrument designer and alchemist Peter Woulfe sent another two, but Rainsford did not keep his promise to gather more money.
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Happily, Bacstrom was soon after engaged to serve on an expedition to the Pacific, to discover “valuable druggs or natural products.” It was funded by the shipowner Theophilus Pritzler, who had visited Bacstrom's laboratory, and William Curtis, a banker, Member of Parliament for the City of London and supporter of the government of William Pitt the younger. The expedition may have had the unstated goal of challenging Spanish territorial claims to the fur-trading area around Nootka Sound on the northwest coast of North America. A naval expedition had been sent out in spring 1791 under the command of Captain George Vancouver, with the intention of settling the Nootka question in favour of British interests. The flotilla of three merchant ships sent out by Curtis and his associates later that year may have been designed to bolster Vancouver's bargaining position with the Spanish, although it was certainly also planned as a scientific voyage. Banks offered to pay Bacstrom for specimens, “sixpence for each species of which there is either flowers or fruits & a shilling when there are both.”
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The expedition took a bad turn when it reached Nootka Sound, where its commander, Captain William Brown, allowed his men to rob and kill Haida Indians. Bacstrom became disgusted with the captain's violent conduct. Watercolour sketches that he made of Haida chiefs and their families testify to his sympathetic attitude towards them. He opted to jump ship, seeking shelter at the Spanish military settlement. Bacstrom's ultimate intention, however, was to return to Britain, which he attempted first on a Newcastle brig, then on an American ship with French owners that was impounded at Macao by the British, and finally on an ex-East Indiaman with an English captain and a mixed foreign crew. A mutiny on the last of these ships led to Bacstrom's confinement for six months on the French island of Mauritius in 1794.
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It was here, in the “Pineapple Canton,” that he met the comte de Chazal, who initiated him into the “Société de la R[ose]. Croix,” an occult Masonic fraternity that was probably an offshoot of the Chapter of Clermont. Formed around 1740 (although its members claimed that it had originated in 1490), these Rosy Crucians had some remarkable rules according to the various admission certificates found in Bacstrom's papers. Dedicated to “the great
work”—namely, alchemy—membership in the Society was to be kept secret. Each initiate was to instruct “one or two persons at most in our Secret Knowledge.” Amazingly, “as there is no distinction of Sexes in the Spiritual world … our Society does not exclude a worthy woman from being initiated.” Although the Society was avowedly Christian and recommended charity to the poor, the initiate who found the secret to making gold was not to donate any money towards the building of churches, chapels or hospitals, “as there are already a sufficient number of such public buildings and institutions.” Nor was he or she to “aid or assist or Support with Gold or Silver any Government King or Sovereign (except by paying taxes),” instead leaving public affairs “to the Government of God.”
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The disillusionment of a French aristocrat who had just witnessed the revolution in his own country might be read into these words, although it is possible of course that Bacstrom himself composed them.

Bacstrom finally left Mauritius on an American ship, but an attempt to reach Britain failed when the vessel in which he was travelling was blown by gales to the Virgin Islands. There a kindly British governor befriended him, and paid for his passage back to London, which he reached in July 1795. Having had plenty of time on board various ships to think about occult matters, he came home with his head full of ideas, which he set down in a treatise. This included, among other things, “the curious Scientific Allegories in the Old Testament,” and Bacstrom hoped to publish it by subscription. He solicited Banks once again, found thirteen other supporters for the scheme and was even received at the Masonic Lodge of Antients no. 10, “with a View to get Subscribers at the Lodges.”
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In spite of this brief burst of salesmanship, however, it does not seem that the book was ever published.

By 1797, Bacstrom was employed again as an alchemist, but his new patron was more interested in old-fashioned gold-making than in occult philosophy. He was Alexander Tilloch, a Scottish printer resident for the past decade in London. Having invented a process for stereotyping or printing by letterpress plates rather than moveable type, Tilloch had become a very wealthy man. He spent his money on the purchase of a newspaper,
The Star
, as well as on a scientific journal,
The Philosophical Magazine
, which he founded in 1798 “to diffuse Philosophical Knowledge among every Class of Society.”
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Bacstrom's only published article appeared in this periodical. Tilloch was the perfect model of a practical, enlightened businessman of the late eighteenth century, but two details set him apart. First, he was a member of a small Calvinist Church, the Sandemanians, who held to a narrow interpretation of faith that depended on correct judgment; second, he was a committed devotee of the occult sciences.

Both points were duly noted in an obituary that appeared soon after Tilloch's death in 1826. After praising a study of the Apocalypse on which Tilloch had
laboured for forty years, the author described his religious views as “what in general estimation would be deemed somewhat singular.” With evident embarrassment, the obituarist admitted of his subject that “the occult sciences, in early life, at one time attracted much of his attention,” but claimed that “it was not long that he wandered in those visionary regions.” Still, “judicial astrology he was never disposed to treat with sovereign contempt.”
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In fact, Tilloch's interest in alchemy lasted until at least 1808, when he was almost fifty years old. Bacstrom initiated him into the Rosy Cross Society, and copied out for him a stunning variety of alchemical tracts.
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Tilloch was an attentive reader and did not hesitate to make cutting comments on the errors and enthusiastic expressions of other alchemists, including Bacstrom. “These remarks are more fanciful than solid,” he noted drily on one recipe, painstakingly reconstructed from a private conversation and transcribed by the assiduous doctor (a title Bacstrom now freely used, although he may not have had an M.D.). Regarding another process, the hard-nosed Tilloch writes: “In the work before us there is no small share of sophistry.”
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As might be imagined, Tilloch was more concerned with how to achieve the goal of alchemy and less fascinated than Bacstrom with obscure philosophical points.

Tilloch did not maintain his partner in luxury. By 1804, Bacstrom was living in Albion Street, a new development south of Commercial Road in the East End of London. He complained to Tilloch that the location of his “hut” was “excessively dirty” and “inaccessible without boots.” One experiment “filled our 3 rooms with poisonous vapours, so that we had nearly been all 3—Mrs. B, myself and Alexsen [his assistant]—been suffocated if I had not quickly thrown open all the Windows.”
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As this shows, he did not labour alone, however. While in Tilloch's employ, he had at least three assistants—S.M. Belisario, Mr Hawkins and the unfortunate Captain Alexsen, who almost asphyxiated him. He also records numerous conversations with other local adepts, including Mr R. Ford, Mr Lentz who had lived in New York, Mr Hands and his friend Mr Clerck.
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Bacstrom knew Ebenezer Sibly, who provided him with transcriptions of alchemical manuscripts and letters between 1789 and 1792. He did not think much of the astrologer's scholarship, as he pointed out a “blunder” in dating one manuscript and a “barbarous translation” in another. Bacstrom also owned three handwritten astrological treatises by Sibly, dating from 1795, which may have been given to him by Tilloch.
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Unlike his patron, however, he never showed much interest in astrology.

Bacstrom's work depended heavily on processes that had been relayed to him verbally by others. He spent enormous time and effort trying to interpret the recipe confided by John Yardley, a glover and silversmith in Worcester, in a letter of 1716 to Mr Garden, silversmith of London. In 1787–9, Bacstrom made
several visits to the Goldsmiths Almshouses in Hackney, where Garden's septuagenarian son lived—having “spent foolishly and without judgment 40,000£ upon the great Secret.” The younger Garden insisted that his father had been able to make gold, but Bacstrom still had a number of questions about Yardley's process, which were apparently never resolved.
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Even more elusive was the recipe of Dr Dippelius, conveyed to Bacstrom by his friend Abraham Gommée, supposedly an alderman of Amsterdam, whose father (allegedly
burgemeester
of the city) had often seen Dippelius transmute mercury into gold. Bacstrom mislaid the paper on which he wrote the recipe, and did not find it again for twenty years.
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He also exchanged notes on alchemy with his “good friend Baron von Rosenheim,” a Viennese aristocrat. For years, Bacstrom laboured in vain to reconstruct the lead-based process of Frederic Lafontaine of Chelsea. This well-connected individual was the son of George I's court painter at Hanover, brother to the court painter at Brunswick (a Freemason, who depicted himself in a series of portraits of members of the local lodge) and uncle of the popular novelist August Lafontaine. As late as 1804, Bacstrom interviewed Mrs Van Hest, a widow living in the Dutch Almshouses near Finsbury Square, whose father, a minister at Ziericksee, had been questioned many years before on suspicion of witchcraft after making various experiments with plants.
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