John Edmonstone

The ex-slave who influenced Darwin

John Edmonstone was a freed Guyanese slave who taught taxidermy to famed naturalist Charles Darwin at Edinburgh University in Scotland.

Edmonstone is said to have been born in Demerara, Guyana and while still a slave,he learned taxidermy from British naturalist Charles Waterton (1782 -1865). His ‘master’, Charles Edmonstone, had a daughter who married Waterton in 1829, and Waterton was a regular visitor at his father-in-law’s Mibiri Creek, Demerara estate.

John Edmonstone, writes Melissa Pandika, author of OZY magazine online, accompanied Waterton on bird collecting expeditions, entrusted with the crucial task of stuffing captured birds on the spot, before they rotted.

According to Professor Janet Brown in the BBC programme “Making History: John Edmonstone”, in 1807, Charles Edmonstone brought John to Glasgow to his estate north of the city then later freed him.

When Edmonstone was freed he moved to Edinburgh and settled in a house a few doors down from Darwin and his brother, Erasmus, where he became self-employed, earning his living stuffing birds at the Natural History Museum and teaching taxidermy to Edinburgh University students.

Seventeen-year-old Darwin had arrived in Edinburgh in 1825 to study medicine but he was more of an outdoorsman and discovered a diversion during his first winter at Edinburgh when he hired Edmonstone to teach him taxidermy for one guinea a week.

It has also been suggested that Edmonstone also influenced Darwin’s outlook on the institution of slavery and racism, of which Edmonstone was a victim.

According to authors Adrian Desmond and James Moore in “Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution” (2009), Darwin was one of those “genteel shooters” whom John taught to stuff their hunting trophies.

Darwin came to consider his teacher “an intimate”, and testified in his autobiography that when he was a student at Edinburgh (1825 Oct – 1827 Apr), “a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Warton, and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently; he gave me lessons for payment and I often used to sit with him for he was a pleasant and intelligent man.”

As Darwin perfected his taxidermy skills, Edmonstone narrated his accounts of plantation life and lush rainforests teeming with wildlife.

According to Scientific American blogger and biologist DN Lee, Edmonstone is believed to have tutored the young Darwin on the natural history of the fauna and flora of South America prior to Darwin’s historic voyage on the SS Beagle.

At the time, Waterton’s then new book about his expeditions to Guyana, “Wanderings in South America”, was hugely popular, and Edmonstone’s stories probably whetted Darwin’s appetite for exploration and discovery.

Hooked on natural history, Darwin dropped out of medical school and signed up for travel aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. The taxidermy skills Darwin learned from Edmonstone were indispensable during his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle in 1831.

Little is known of John Edmonstone’s death or where he was buried. (Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)