Darwin’s Taxidermy Teacher

John Edmonstone (1790?–1842?) was born a slave on a forest plantation in Demerara in present-day Guyana, South America.

He was given the surname of his owner, Charles Edmonstone, who owned the Guyanese forest plantation as well as the Cardross Park estate near Dumbarton in Scotland.

Around 1812 the forest plantation was visited by slave plantation overseer and naturalist Charles Waterton, who taught John Edmonstone taxidermy, then called “bird stuffing”.  Waterton was Charles Edmonstone’s nephew.

When Charles Edmonstone moved back to Scotland in 1817, he brought John with him, perhaps to become a servant to the Edmonstone family at Cardross Park.

Now free in Scotland (where owning slaves has been banned since 1778), John Edmonstone worked as a taxidermy teacher at Edinburgh University, where he taught the skill and trade to his neighbor, a young Charles Darwin, over the course of two months in 1826.

Darwin, then around 17 years old, was fascinated by John Edmonstone’s accounts of the tropical rain forests of South America. These account may have been part of Darwin’s inspiration to join the HMS Beagle expedition to South America in 1831.

Without a doubt, it was Darwin’s taxidermy skills which helped him preserve specimens collected on the five-year voyage, and it was those specimen’s that helped him flesh out his general theory of evolution.