Edward Clarke

Here at Willingdon was born an 18th century traveller who created a sensation bringing from Greece a colossal statue, now at Cambridge. He was Edward Clarke, and this is his story.

Edward was interested in poetry, history, coins, plants, and mineralogy. It was a great day for him at Cambridge when he made a balloon and sent it up from Jesus College with a kitten as passenger. Later in his life he invented a gas blowpipe, writing an account of its action on 96 minerals. But it is not for this branch of science we remember Clarke: it is as a traveller and collector of antiquities.

His father died penniless when Edward was at Cambridge and he became tutor in turn to wealthy patrons who loved to take this vivacious young man on their tours. He hardly slept abroad, four hours in forty-eight frequently sufficing. He was collecting plants, minerals, 800 from Siberia alone, coins, antiquities, and writing vivid descriptions of the men and manners of foreign countries. He climbed Mount Ida and from the source of the River Simois wrote:

 

'Judge of my rapture. Enterprise has subdued all. I have health in all its vigour.

Here I sit on a spot that never traveller witnessed since the first Christians made these wilds their refuge, surrounded by scenery more sublime than Salvator Rosa ever conceived or viewed.'

It was on this journey that Clarke collected his biggest stone of all, a two-ton fragment of a Creek statue of the third century before Christ. It was the upper part of a Cistoporus, a maiden who carried salt, reeds, poppies, and pomegranates in a basket on her head in procession during the Eleusinian Festivals. It probably helped to support the huge temple of Demeter at Eleusis, and, anyway, the natives regarded the statue as protector of their crops and refused to part with it.

Several ambassadors had failed to acquire it, but Clarke, with the loose morality of that time, bribed the officials at Athens and invented a machine which carried it over the hill to a ship, amid the curses of the Creeks, who said that it would never reach port. They were right, for this ship with all its treasures was wrecked off Beachy Head and the statue rescued with great difficulty.

Clarke gave it to Cambridge, where it now lies in the Fitzwilliam museum, with many other treasures of his. He went no more a-roving but took Holy Orders and settled down to write his travels and give lectures at the university, where the Professorship of Mineralogy was first instituted for him in 1808.

One other venture he made as an antiquarian when the British captured the beautiful sarcophagus from the French at Alexandria and brought it home to the British Museum. It was then called the Sarcophagus of Iscander, but Clarke wrote an essay to prove that it was the tomb of Alexander, and it has ever since been called by the name of the conqueror, though Clarke's view is no longer upheld.

 

 

 

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