The Science of Herself (3 page)

And then strike home!

One morning, Mary was out early, the remnants of the storm still gusting about her, stinging her cheeks with salt. The year was 1815. The Napoleonic Wars would soon see their final battle. Anne Elliot was off somewhere, enjoying her happy ending.

Something large had washed up on the Lyme beach. Smugglers' brandy often came ashore. Mary usually hid any contraband she found until it could be
quietly retrieved. Lyme looked after Lyme and not the excise men. But this was not a box. She approached it cautiously. Perhaps she was finally to see one of her crocodiles in the flesh. Perhaps it was only a seal.

What she found was the body of a woman, lying with her face to the sky, her long hair tangled with seaweed, her eyes open and milky. Her sodden clothes were beautifully and expensively made.

Mary knelt and cleaned the sand from her face, untangled the seaweed from her hair, pulled her skirts so that her legs were covered. The woman was still beautiful, and Mary immediately associated her with Ophelia or some other storied creature. There was something so intimate in her ministrations as to make her feel that she had known this woman. The finding and the loss of her seemed like the exact same thing since they had happened at the exact same moment.

She saw the body taken into the church and then went there daily, to pray over her and to bring fresh flowers. As long as the woman went unidentified there was no one she belonged to more than Mary. Mary invented many pasts for her, many ways she might have ended on the beach. Tragic love stories, desperate gestures.

Eventually she was identified as a Lady Jackson, lost in the wreck of the
Alexander
with her husband and children. The
Alexander
, inbound from Bombay, had gone down in a gale on Easter Monday in a part of Chesil Beach known as Deadman's Cove. There were only five survivors, none of whom spoke English, and no account
of the ship's final hours, so close to home after a journey of 155 days, has survived. Friends came from London to take charge and Mary felt the loss not just of the body but of the stories she had told herself about the body. No Lady Jackson had been listed on the ship's manifest. There remained just that bit of mystery.

Fifteen years later, Mary recounted this to Anna Maria Pinney. Mary had been just sixteen when she found Lady Jackson. Pinney was just sixteen when Mary told her about it. The romance may well have doubled in the double adolescent telling of it. Anne Elliot would have recommended less poetry in the diet and more prose to the both of them.

When she was nineteen, Mary met Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James Birch, a retired officer of fifty-two, comfortably well off and a great collector of fossils. He began visiting Lyme, calling on Mary and her mother and usually making several purchases.

On one such occasion, he found both Mary and her mother in tears. He made them sit, brought cups of tea. He feared something dreadful had happened to Joseph, but the problems turned out to be financial. After years of support, there was to be no more money from the parish. Mary had not found a valuable fossil for many months. “We are selling the furniture,” Mary's mother told him. There was little enough of it, but all
made by her dead husband. “And once that's gone, we've no rent, we've no roof over our heads.”

Birch's sympathies were aroused, but also his anger. As valuable as Mary's contributions to science had been, it wasn't right that the Annings should be facing eviction. He would not have it.

He put the whole of his own collection up for auction, 102 items in all, an extraordinary grouping that he had gathered over years and continents. Many of these were things that Mary had found. The sale created enormous excitement. It lasted three days and drew bidders from Germany, France, Austria, and, of course, England. Cuvier himself bought several pieces. When it was over, Birch had earned more than £400, all of which he gave to the Anning family. For the first time in their lives, the Annings were financially secure.

The auction had also drawn a great deal of attention to Mary. Most of it was scientific. That such a young girl was capable of the arduous, dangerous work of fossil collecting! That she had found so many exemplary specimens!

Some of it was romantic. What had possessed Birch to make such an astonishing gesture? Rumors arose about the young girl and the old man; it was whispered that she
attended
to him on his visits to Lyme. Fortunately, according to Pinney's diaries, Mary “glories in being afraid of no one.” She went out and bought herself a bonnet, though as a Dissenter it cannot have been a gaudy one.

Three years later, Mary made her greatest find. She was out on a particularly treacherous section of cliff known as the Black Ven when she saw something, some bit of shine, still mostly covered with shale. It was December, the day after a great storm, and she was working in a blustery wind with an intermittent icy spray of rain. She spent all morning, chipping away the slate, her fingers numb and stiff with cold. When she was done, she had a skull unlike any she had ever seen.

She left her dog Tray to guard the spot and called on men from the village to help her before the tide returned. They worked into the evening until the whole skeleton had been revealed, nine feet long and six feet wide, but with a strangely elongated neck and a strangely tiny head. The creature had paddles instead of feet and would have resembled a turtle if not for the neck.

Conybeare had speculated on the possibility of this creature from fragments he'd found and now here was the whole of it. He responded with jubilation, writing to Henry De la Beche who was off in Jamaica attending his plantation. “The Annings have discovered an entire Plesiosaurus,” Conybeare wrote. Mary had made meticulous drawings of the skeleton and one of these went to Henry, her childhood friend.

Another found its way to Georges Cuvier. Cuvier said that the neck was far too long—thirty-five verte-brae—when no creature that walked on four legs had more than seven. Birds might have as many as twenty-five, reptiles no more than eight, and this was clearly
a reptile. Mary, he suggested, had taken the head of a snake and put it on the body of an ichthyosaur. He felt he could even identify the place in the neck where she had made the joining.

Skeletons in the Blue Lias were often found scattered; there was always the danger of mistakenly welding two creatures together. But Cuvier was not alleging a mistake. He was accusing Mary of deliberate fraud.

A special meeting of the Geological Society of London was called, which, as a woman, Mary could not have attended even if she'd had the money to go to London. She paced the beach at dawn, prayed in the church at noon, picked at her dinner as she waited to hear. Sleep was impossible. She was still so young. The wrong finding would destroy her reputation and end her career.

The skeleton had been shipped by sea to London but didn't arrive in time, and Mary's drawings had to suffice. The meeting went late, hot with debate, a duel of science against science. Around this same time, Mary wrote a letter, which contained the following: “The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of all mankind.”

By the end of the meeting, Cuvier had completely recanted. On closer inspection, he accepted Mary's specimen as the genuine article.

The village of Lyme Regis did not fare as well; the year ended in an epic storm. The first floor of the Annings' house flooded and all their fossils had to be moved to the
upstairs, where Tray whimpered and the family huddled as the wind howled outside. Dozens of ships along the coast went down, scores of people drowned. Trees were pulled from the ground and hurled down the hills. The great Cobb itself cracked and let the ocean through.

Mary had at least two close friendships with younger women. Both were diarists; both are remembered only because they left a record of her. Both appear to have been thoroughly infatuated, at least initially. Frances Augustus Bell was the first of these. Sickly herself, she was greatly impressed with Mary's strength and courage. On one occasion, out on the cliffs with a dangerous tide already at their ankles, she says that Mary simply seized her and carried her up the cliffs to safety. She describes Mary as a person impossible to dislike.

But Anna Maria Pinney, who knew Mary later and wrote more of her, said that she “gossiped and abused almost everyone in Lyme” and that the company of her own class had become distasteful to her. Her likes and her dislikes, Pinney said, were equally violent and unshakeable.

Visitors to Lyme vary greatly in their descriptions of her over the years:

“A clever funny Creature.”

“A prim, pedantic, vinegar-looking, thin female, shrewd and rather satirical in her conversation.”

“A strong, energetic spinster of about twenty-eight years
[she would have been thirty-eight at this time] …
tanned and masculine in expression …”

“She would serve us with the sweetest temper, bearing with all our little fancies and never finding us too troublesome as we turned over her trays of curiosities.”

“It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl
…
understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.”

By the time she was twenty-seven, Mary had saved enough money to buy a shop with a glass display window in the front. She named it Anning's Fossil Depot and she and her mother lived in the rooms above. In 1844, King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her there and for £15 purchased an entire ichthyosaurus skeleton. His physician who accompanied him wrote the following:

We had alighted from the carriage and were proceeding on foot, when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications and fossil remains—the head of an
Ichthyosaurus
, beautiful ammonites, etc.—were exhibited in the window. We entered and found the small shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast …

He asked Mary Anning for her name and address which she wrote in his notebook. “I am well known throughout
the whole of Europe,” she told him since he seemed not to know this already.