The Squire Who Taught Darwin Everything

Charles Waterton was one of the first conservationists on Earth. In the 1820s he gave up drinking, saved every penny, and spent five years building a nine-foot stone wall around three miles of his Yorkshire estate — creating the world's first nature reserve.

He also rode a caiman like a horse, climbed the lightning conductor of St. Peter's Basilica to leave his glove on top, and slept on bare wooden boards with a block of wood for a pillow as penance for his dead wife's soul.

The glove incident forced the Pope to order its removal. No one in Rome would attempt the climb. Waterton went back up and fetched it himself. In South America, he once walked barefoot six hundred kilometers through the rainy season to reach Brazil. At home in Yorkshire, well into his seventies, he is said to have still climbed trees without shoes. At night he sometimes dangled a bare foot out his hammock window so vampire bats could feed on his toes, because he wanted to study them.

But the strangest thing Waterton ever did looked, at the time, like nothing at all. While overseeing his uncle's plantation in British Guiana, he taught taxidermy to an enslaved man named John Edmonstone. Edmonstone eventually gained his freedom and opened a taxidermy shop in Edinburgh, where a bored sixteen-year-old medical student named Charles Darwin walked in and paid him for lessons.

Five years later, Darwin sailed on the Beagle. The specimens he preserved on that voyage changed the world.

He learned how from a man who learned how from a barefoot squire in a jungle.