Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals - Hardcover

PART ONE

The Resurrectionists

CHAPTER ONE

WINTER, 1883. BROOKLYN

 

WAS THIS REALLY IT? BEFORE HIS LIFE HAD EVEN BEGUN, TO BE cast out and condemned to sit day in, day out in this basement dungeon before a great pile of dead birds? It was like a bad dream. The pile, heaped on the table, never got any smaller. He might think for a while that it was shrinking. He'd work his way into one corner for a while, skinning birds in one particular quadrant, digging a small cave, chipping away at the side of the mountain one dead bird at a time, but then another plume hunter would arrive in his muddy hip boots with a sack over his shoulder, stinking of gunpowder and bird shit. Then Wallace, the ogre who owned this dismal chop shop, would step out of the shadows to negotiate a price, and another sack of terns and egrets and robins and warblers would come tumbling out on the table, and the work would be just as daunting and endless as before.

He had really flubbed his one great chance to have ended up here. One day you've got your whole life ahead of you; the next you're condemned for an eternity to keep pushing yourself back up a mountain of dead birds. It was the most barbaric work in the world, skinning birds for ladies' hats. It was a world away from the future he'd been promised at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. There he might have eventually seen his own handiwork end up in the world'sgreatest natural history museums. But then there'd been a kind of misunderstanding. He'd been too ambitious. He'd been too careless, and yes, possibly even arrogant. Mistakes were made. And then Professor Ward--the great maestro--had gone and cast him out of the only Eden he'd ever known. He'd been fired.

And now Carl Akeley was a virtual prisoner in this dank basement of a moldy warehouse below the Brooklyn Bridge, where he could barely hear his own gloomy thoughts over the screech of tugboat whistles and the drone of the oil barges and naval vessels that crowded the East River. The sickening stench of the workshop, lit by the sallow light of gas jet lamps, was ghoulish. John Wallace was a short, intense man with a cockney accent often thickened by beer as he lorded it over his underground realm, dealing brashly with the hunters who brought him birds by the sackload daily, and the boys who worked for him, turning the flightless lumps of feather into cash.

Carl and several other young men came in the morning before sunup, hung their coats by the door, and sat on wooden benches around a large table heaped with the day's work. The hunters came in from the rookeries on Long Island and the forests of New Jersey, bringing in as many as four hundred birds a day. They were dumped onto the table--bluebirds, sparrows, grebes, waxwings, all mixed together in a welter of beaks and bloodied plumage. Carl would reach into the heap, where it was sometimes still warm in the center, take hold of a bird, skin it, quickly shape it into something that might look chic on a lady's head, and then move on to the next. The boys' fingers were nicked and scratched and bled from the sharp talons and sewing needles. Loose feathers dusted the floor in drifts. At best, the work was a sort of assembly line: One boy skinned a bird, passed it along to the next, who wound tow for the body. Another bent wire for the necks; another cleaned wings with turpentine. Another might poison skins all day long. In the end they were dried, boxed, and shipped off to the milliners in the fashion district of Fourteenth Street, where they were affixed to ladies' hats for J. Gurney & Son, the New York Millinery Supply Co., and others. Given how this peculiar fashion was at its absolute zenith, Mr. Wallace had earned a reputation as the most prolific stuffer of birds in the long and sordid history of taxidermy. He always had need for skilled and semiskilled boys.

Akeley had had no trouble getting the job.

To sit before this avalanche of dead birds that would never grow any smaller--this was his punishment for having had the temerity to try to make something of himself. The worst part was the stinging regret that never went away, that never got smaller, that stared back at him out of a thousand cooled eyes. If only Professor Ward had given him a chance to explain himself! Working at Ward's Natural Science Establishment had been the closest he would ever get to serious museum taxidermy. His only crime had been youthful ambition. Well, that, and falling asleep on the job; but Carl felt certain Professor Ward would have been kinder if only he'd known about the late-night experiments he'd been conducting, if he'd only bothered to ask before giving him the boot. If only whichever envious snake hadn't destroyed his experiments before he'd had the chance to show the professor. He'd actually thought he was on the verge of reinventing the art of taxidermy. How stupid he'd been. There was nothing artful about this work. It was brutal and disgusting. He was no sculptor, like he'd boasted. He was a nobody. That was all there was to it, and all that was left was to accept the fact that he'd been sentenced to a lifetime of utter insignificance--skinning birds for ladies' hats.

Things could have turned out so differently! He thought of all the countless hours he'd spent as a boy cloistered in his room, studying the spattered copy of the taxidermy manual ordered from the back of Youth's Companion--he'd passed right over the ads for the Velocipede and the Reading Machine, even if he did go in for the adventure stories where explorers faced off against rabid panthers and savage Indians, the serialized features like "Cast Away in Japan"--the ad had been right there between the flexible rubber mittens and a kit for becoming a licensed telegraphy operator. Price one dollar. As small as a chapbook of poems, the book was bound by a dark brown cloth cover with gold embossed letters that read, simply, Taxidermist's Manual. The author was a Professor J. W. P. Jenks. Taking heed of the manual's first and primary admonition to work in secret so that "none may know the mysteries of the art," he had hidden himself in his room to begin his experimentations. Under his bed and crowding every free surface, splayed on sheets of newsprint, were the victims of his education. On his window ledge rested the frail skeletons of chipmunks, robins, and defleshed wrens bleaching in the sun. His desk was littered with awls and thread and scissors and pins--much of which had been pilfered from his mother'ssewing basket. In the summer, flies thrummed outside his open window but seemed to know better than to light on any of the still lifes inside; however tantalizing they may have looked, the poison that preserved the illusion of life had a tendency to ward off intruders.

To Carl, this was more than a hobby. It was liberation. An escape from the pall that hung over the house, cast by the ghosts of his three dead infant brothers and his mother's grief, which kept her trapped in its dark weeds. Something "unnatural" had happened to this house, to this family. A friction had grown over the years, and his mother, more and more, put the blame on Carl's father, turning all her bitterness toward him, castrating him for failing to give her a life as good as her well-to-do and puritanical sisters'. Even though it had been she who refused to go west, as her husband wanted, to make a better go, to...