Biographical Record
Dr. Walter Crowther
Born 14 May 1758 · Died 3 September 1801
Occupation Ship's Surgeon
Region Mauritius
Cause of Death Yellow fever, contracted while attending a quarantined crew he refused to abandon. He had been told twice to leave the hulk. He is reported to have replied, on both occasions, that he had not yet finished.
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Thirty years at sea will teach a man to sew a wound in a gale, and Elias Crowther could do it one-handed, in the dark, while a Dutch captain screamed in his ear about the tide. What thirty years at sea taught him, he would share on a dark night with a dram of scotch, was something else entirely: that the ocean is a poor keeper of secrets, and the land around it is worse. He retired to Port Louis in 1791 with a surgeon's chest, a bad knee, and a habit of asking the locals what they had found lately, and paying for the answer.
They brought him bones. Cave bones, marsh bones, bones ploughed up in cane fields and bones handed over by children who found them in every corner of the island. Crowther cleaned each one, drew it to scale, and wrote beside it exactly what he believed it to be — and where he did not know, he wrote I do not know, which is a rarer and braver sentence than a man of learning generally allowed. Fourteen of his drawings carry no species name at all. Beside one, in a hand that has clearly slowed down to write it in thick ink, he has put: This is a bird. It is not a bird I have ever seen. It is not, I think, a bird anyone now living has seen. He showed the notebooks to perhaps a half-dozen people in his lifetime. He outlived five of them, and the sixth would not discuss it.
He died in a quarantine hulk in the harbour, of the fever he had been treating, in the company of men who could not thank him because they were already dead. His instruments were left and eventually looted. His notebooks were not —a junior officer, unwilling to throw them into the sea and unsure why, packed them with the ship's papers, where they sailed to England and sat in a college cellar for seventy years.
ARCHIVE ASSESSMENT: The Crowther notebooks constitute some of the earliest honest records in the Society's possession and are a highly consulted holding in the Archive. They are honest chiefly because Crowther possessed no theory to protect. Members are reminded that the notebooks are not to leave the reading room, regardless of seniority.
[Cross-reference: Wainwright, P.H. — the drawings on ff. 112–126 are the reason the 1893 expedition went where it went.]
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