Tag: people

Making a guest appearance in these pages is Harry Goodsir, surgeon, anatomist and naturalist; and friend and mentee of Edward Forbes. Forbes was a close friend of Harry’s older brother John, with whom he studied, worked and flatshared¹, and it was through John that he met Harry, probably in the mid-1830s.

Born in Anstruther, Fife, in 1819, the fourth child of the local doctor, Harry is best known today as the assistant surgeon and naturalist on HMS Erebus when she sailed on Sir John Franklin’s disastrous expedition to find the North West Passage in 1845. Like all his shipmates, Harry died in the region of King William Island/Qikiqtaq in what is now Nunavut in Canada, probably in 1848. Unlike almost all of them, his skeleton – or what’s highly likely to be his skeleton² – was eventually found, thanks to advice from local Inuit, by Charles Francis Hall, and sent to London; it now rests under the Franklin Expedition memorial in the chapel at the Old Naval College in Greenwich.

In his time, however, Harry was fast making his name in scientific circles as a marine biologist, as well as an expert in the then-new field of microscopy³. He also variously researched internal parasites, assisted his father in his medical practice, served as Conservator at Edinburgh’s Surgeon’s Hall Museum⁴ and contributed to John’s book on cellular biology⁵, an early and pioneering work in that field. His main interest was in the crustacea but he studied, wrote about and published on all kinds of marine life, and at one point was also preparing work on the fauna of Fife as well as planning a book on crustaceans⁶. He was busy, productive and very much becoming embedded in the zoological world of the time⁷.

If you’re only familiar with Harry through the novel or TV show The Terror, set that person aside; he’s a fictional character⁸. The real person was brilliant, sociable⁹, parsimonious¹⁰, kind, snobbish¹¹, passionate about his subject, funny, outgoing, ambitious, disorganised¹², stubborn¹³, charismatic, immature¹⁴, dutiful and didn’t suffer fools gladly. In other words, a complex human being, like all of us.

He sent several scientific papers back from Erebus before she left Greenland, among them one on a genus of phoronid or entoproct¹⁵ he called Forbesia, as well as a more general account of the voyage and its natural history so far. This last was published in the Literary Gazette in September 1845¹⁶. The Forbesia paper wasn’t published until 1850, long after Harry’s death, when John included it in his short-lived magazine Annals of Anatomy and Physiology. Forbesia is also mentioned in a shorter paper, along with two species of ribbon worm (Serpentaria and Nemertes¹⁷) that was published in the June 1845 edition of the Annals and Magazine of Natural History under the title “Descriptions of some Gigantic Forms of Invertebrate Animals from the Coast of Scotland”. This was communicated to the magazine from London, while Erebus was being prepared; according to a letter from Harry he handed it in to the magazine on 12 April¹⁸.

However, this isn’t all the scientific work Harry sent from Erebus. In the archives at Edinburgh University is another paper, one which has never (to my knowledge) been published. This covers, in more detail, the worms Serpentaria and Nemertes, and contains some amends by John Goodsir including the note that Harry is currently assistant surgeon on “HM Arctic exploring ship Erebus”.

Although frustratingly the manuscript is undated, John’s addition of Harry’s current job indicates he received the paper after Harry had joined Erebus. In several letters to John, and to his father, from his time on the expedition, Harry mentions a paper he’s working on that he’s hurrying to get finished and sent to John¹⁹. This is a different paper from those sent to the Literary Gazette or to the Annals of Natural History, both of which are described and accounted for elsewhere in Harry’s letters. I think, given the contents and the context, that the manuscript on the two worm species is the paper he was working to finish for John while heading for Greenland aboard Erebus.

This manuscript describes Serpentaria and Nemertes in much more detail than the “Gigantic Invertebrates” article, and according to the title also covers Forbesia, but the latter isn’t part of the 36-page manuscript. Given the structure and style of the Forbesia article in John’s magazine are the same as those of the sections on the worms in this paper, I suspect they were originally part of the same paper and for some reason John ended up only publishing the section on Forbesia. The reason could possibly be that Harry was wrong about the function of some structures around the worms’ heads, believing them to be part of the reproductive system, when in fact they are part of the nervous system²⁰. The latter was already being seriously proposed when Harry wrote the paper, based on analogous structures in related species, so his hypothesis dated fast. John only made edits on the first couple of paragraphs, so may have set it aside and by the time he picked it back up, Harry’s hypothesis had been proved wrong.

Although it clearly needs editing, and John made a start, this is a rare opportunity to glimpse Harry the author at work. The document is full of crossings-out and rewordings, and has several footnotes that appear to be both explanatory and afterthoughts; at least one is, from the look of the handwriting, written in a hurry. It’s interesting to imagine him in his tiny cabin with lap desk on his knees, or at the table in Sir John’s great cabin, trying to finish the paper and ignore all the distractions around him, including the lure of the dredge.

I’ve transcribed the paper and it’s available below; if you cite or quote this I’d appreciate a credit as a transcription of this length takes hours of work, including researching the meanings of various terms as they were used then. I don’t, and won’t, use AI for transcribing.

Notes

1. John was also with him when he died. ↩︎
2. The skeleton was originally thought to be that of Lt. Henry Le Vesconte, second lieutenant on Erebus, although even some of his own family weren’t convinced. It was examined in 2009 while the memorial was being moved. No DNA matches for that taken from the skeleton in 2009 have been found as yet, and because of this Harry is not usually included in the very short list of those crew members whose remains have been identified (only six, as of this writing). However, the skeleton matches Harry’s age and build, it was found with fragments of silk clothing (so indicating an officer), isotope analysis of the teeth indicates an upbringing in eastern Scotland, and the jaw shows a misalignment that would result in its owner breathing through his mouth and having a receding chin. Harry’s mouth is slightly open in all three extant images of him, and he did have a receding chin (visible in images, plus Commander James Fitzjames remarked on and even doodled it in a letter). There is also a gold filling in the lower left premolar, and although we don’t know for certain whether Harry had such a filling, his father was close friends with the prominent Edinburgh dentist Robert Nasmyth, who also briefly took John Goodsir Jr on as an apprentice, so if anyone from the east of Scotland on those ships was likely to have such expensive and modern dental work, it was Harry. ↩︎
3. Sir James Young Simpson described John and Harry Goodsir as “two of the best microscopists in Scotland”. ↩︎
4. He resigned this position before setting sail on Erebus. He had not been happy in it anyway, as due to the need for maintenance on dry rot the College of Surgeons had reduced his wage to £100 a year and largely stopped accepting new specimens or allowing visitors. So there wasn’t much for him to do, and not much money to do not much on (£100 a year was not enough to allow a gentleman to live independently or appropriately). ↩︎
5. Anatomical and Pathological Observations, by John Goodsir FRSE and Harry D. S. Goodsir MWS, 1845. ↩︎
6. On the last endpaper of Anatomical and Pathological Observations, there’s a small ad stating that “in the press” is Crustaceological Researches, a Series of Quarto Drawings on Stone, with Letterpress Illustrations of the Anatomy, Developement [sic], and Economy of the Crustacea, including the Cirripeds. By Harry D. S. Goodsir. This was apparently never published. ↩︎
7. As early as 1840 he was submitting papers to the Literary and Philosophical Society at St Andrews. He was not a member, however, until January 1845, when he was elected an honorary member, as he didn’t live or work in St Andrews. So his papers were read to the Society by his friend, the physiologist, anatomist and marine fauna enthusiast (and possibly one-time boss – Harry may have briefly worked as his assistant while at university) John Reid, who was a member. He was also a member of the Wernerian Society, a natural-history-focused offshoot of the Royal Society of Edinburgh founded by Robert Jameson and considered something of an elite group. In addition, he served as one of the secretaries of Section D (Zoology) at the 1844 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in York. ↩︎
8. Albeit a fantastic and memorable character. But a fictional character, there to serve the narrative, nonetheless. In the TV show he’s English, somewhat soft and diffident (until late in the story), and nowhere near the same age as the actual man, and the actual man also had a lot less hair than the excellent and follically-gifted actor Paul Ready. ↩︎
9. An enthusiastic member of several clubs and societies, including, from 1844, Forbes’ Red Lions, and described by James Fitzjames of Erebus as “a pleasant companion and an acquisition to the mess”. ↩︎
10. To be fair, he had to do a lot with a limited amount of money while in London pre-expedition, but he does go on about it a lot and persuaded his father to pay a couple of small debts for him. ↩︎
11. Very much an intellectual snob, for starters. In a letter he refers to his superior, Erebus’ surgeon Stephen Stanley, “reading novels in bed” and you’d better believe he mentions novels deliberately. Novels were for women, idlers and servants, not educated men of science!!! ↩︎
12. In his letters from Erebus he’s constantly apologising for not writing more or sooner and admits to his uncle he’s not much of a letter writer. He also often took on too many commitments at once and then struggled to finish everything – for example he was supposed to be examining and writing up the crustacean specimens from Ross’ Antarctic expedition, which Joseph Hooker complained he had had for a long time, and which he still hadn’t finished by the time he left on Erebus (they were picked up by John Edward Gray and then by Adam White, who never finished the work either). ↩︎
13. In a letter to Harry’s schoolteacher during his childhood, his father explains young Harry is likely to become “indifferent and muleish [sic]” if harshly punished. ↩︎
14. Based on his letters from Erebus, he did not handle his early relationship with Stephen Stanley very well; making it clear to your boss, with whom you’re about to be stuck for at least a couple of years, that you don’t like or respect them, is never a good idea. Stanley seems to have taken it with equanimity but hopefully they eventually sorted it out. In his defence, Harry was young and had had a comparatively sheltered life so far. And nobody’s perfect. ↩︎
15. Absolutely not an insect or a plant, both of which it’s been called in various places. Harry calls it an animal in the first few words of the published piece, and from his description and illustrations I fail to see how anyone could think it was an insect. It appears, from his description and drawings, to be either an unusually large entoproct (also known as a goblet worm) or a phoronid (aka a horseshoe worm) and was found off Scotland, not in the Arctic. I haven’t been able to find it under the name Harry gave it (Forbesia formosa) on the World Register of Marine Species, nor is it listed there as one of Harry’s discoveries. ↩︎
16. A slightly different version also appeared in The Leisure Hour magazine in October 1869. Which was, coincidentally, the year Hall found Harry’s remains. ↩︎
17. These are the generic names; the species name he gave Serpentaria is S fragilis and for Nemertes, N gracilis. Neither is accepted, under the principle of priority, having been named previously by others. ↩︎
18. He wrote to John on 12 April, mentioning that “I gave in my paper today to the Annals but am afraid it will be too late for next month.” It was; it appeared in the June issue. ↩︎
19. E.g, to John on 18 May 1845: “I will have to send the papers for you per Steamers from the Orkneys as I have not got them finished yet”, and to his father on 31 May 1845: “my time is so much occupied with the papers for John that it is out of my power to write her [his sister, Jane] at present”. He eventually sent the papers he’s talking about on 28 June, from Greenland. ↩︎
20. You can almost hear him scoffing derisively as he writes about other naturalists’ opinions on this. Perhaps it’s as well he never had to walk back his hypothesis. ↩︎

Sources

Goodsir, Harry D.S., Anatomy of Serpentaria, Nemertes, and Forbesia (manuscript), Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, ref. Gen.300a/1

Goodsir, Harry D. S., Descriptions of some Gigantic Forms of Invertebrate Animals from the Coast of Scotland, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, no. 100, June 1845

Goodsir, Harry D. S., On the Anatomy of Forbesia, Annals of Anatomy and Physiology, 1850

Goodsir, Harry D. S., Zoology of the Arctic, Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, and Sciences, 6 September 1845

Goodsir, John and Goodsir, Harry D.S., Anatomical and Pathological Observations, Myles MacPhail, 1845

Goodsir, John Sr, letter to Alexander Webster, 19 June 1827. Goodsir Papers, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, ref. Gen.301/2/3/31

Hooker, Joseph Dalton, letter to Charles Darwin, 8 November 1844. Darwin Correspondence Project, ref. DCP-LETT-788

Mays et al, New light on the personal identification of a skeleton of a member of Sir John Franklin’s last expedition to the Arctic, 1845. Journal of Archaeological Science no. 38, 2011

Minutes of the St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society, 6 January 1845. University of St Andrews Special Collections, ID: UYUY8525/1

Nemertes gracilis (Goodsir 1845), World Register of Marine Species

Potter, Russell; Koellner, Regina; Carney, Peter; Williamson, Mary, May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth: Letters of the Lost Franklin Expedition, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

Serpentaria and Serpentaria fragilis (Goodsir 1845), World Register of Marine Species

The Trial of Thomas Hamilton for Assault, with Intent to Ravish. – Tests for the Seminal Fluid. London and Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medicine, vol. XV, April 1844 issue

Thanks to: Shemadene Edwards, Alison Freebairn and Allison Lane for sense-checking!