The Sea Inside

of menageries. He might have been writing with the fate of Chunee in mind; or indeed any other hunted or confined creature, whose treatment, as Blake had written, ‘puts all Heaven in a rage’:

    The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the
os sacrum
are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate … the question is not, Can they
reason
?, nor Can they
talk
? but, Can they
suffer
?
    Sir William Roscoe’s own views on animal liberation may go unrecorded, but like Bentham, he did not limit his energies to opposing the evils of slavery. As with so many men of his position and taste, he was an inveterate collector – not least of people. He counted among his friends Horace Walpole and Henri Fuseli, and he corresponded with notable Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Washington Irving. Evidently, he was keen to establish relations with the new republic. In May 1818 he had invited Allan Melvill, a Manhattan trader in fine goods, to his house; thirty years later, Melvill’s son Herman would visit the same port, having added an ‘e’ to the family name.
    Liverpool, like Southampton, was a great gateway, open to the world. It seemed to summon such an eclectic and oddly connected cast, among them another of Traill’s friends: William Scoresby, latterly of Whitby, at that point resident in Liverpool, where he preached in a dockside Floating Chapel. Scoresby had been a champion whaler, like his father; but he was also a scientist and vicar, professions which he saw as quite compatible. ‘They surely will not deem it intrusive,’ the Reverend Scoresby informed his readers, from the pulpit of his
Account of the Arctic Regions
(a book which Melville would plunder shamelessly for his own) ‘to be reminded that the most important preparation for such undertakings, as well as for the whole of life, is to surrender the heart to that Saviour who has died to redeem his servants from guilt and ruin.’ It was a time in which faith and exploitation were necessarily intertwined. ‘Reader, do you understand, and have you accepted, this gracious message?’

    Such was Scoresby’s admiration for Traill that he named an Arctic island for his Orcadian friend. The gesture was an acknowledgement of Traill’s own scientific cataloguing, not least as the first man to study the pilot whale, as Scoresby noted: ‘
Delphinus deductor
, defined by Dr. Traill … This kind of dolphin sometimes appears in large herds off the Orkney, Shetland, and Faroe islands. The main body of the herd follows the leading whales, and from this property the animal is called in Shetland the ca’ing whale, and by Dr. Traill the deductor … in modern times extensive slaughters have taken place on the shores of the British and other northern islands.’
    From slavery and science to mesmerism and whaling, these men were passionately interested in the issues of their age. And what more extraordinary case history than this tattooed figure from the other side of the world, whose story was as intriguing as any taxonomic study of a blackfish? Perhaps Traill – who would later assist John James Audubon in publishing his
Birds of America
– saw Kupe as an exotic coloured book plate. Yet in the role of doctor, he also understood that his new patient might be about to die. The M ā ori had been the subject of an experiment, having been inoculated with measles by a surgeon – possibly following the example of Edward Jenner, John Hunter’s pupil – and was now seriously ill.
    The measles morbilliviruses infected newly discovered islands with a ferocity beyond even venereal disease, halving the M ā ori population within two generations of James Cook’s first contact. Dr Traill used his lancet to blister the disease, an archaic and largely useless technique, widely adopted in lunatic asylums; Kupe’s recovery probably had more to do with his strong constitution and the ministrations of his friend, the sea captain Richard Reynolds. Fascinated by the M ā ori, Traill invited him to his home, with a view to finding out more about him and his countrymen. For Kupe himself, this too was an