A Curious Piece of Coral

As I was riding my bike on a trail not far from my house, I stopped, as I sometimes do, to check for fossils at a creek bed. During the summer, the creek is often nearly dry where it crosses the trail, and rocks that have been washed from the limestone hills are deposited in the bed and on the banks. In the past I've found small bivalve fossils, but this time I was rewarded with a sizable chunk of fossilized coral.

I was curious what type of coral I had found, and what time period it had come from. As I couldn't make it to the library at the time, I began some highly sophisticated Internet research. I learned from this interesting site that many of Missouri's fossils come from the Carboniferous, a period of the Paleozoic Era.

This map, from the Paleontology Portal, shows
the areas of Missouri whose surface fossils are
from the Carboniferous Period. The darker blue
is for the early Carboniferous (Mississippian)
and the lighter blue is for the later
Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian.)

 The Carboniferous is often treated as two periods, the earlier Mississippian and later Pennsylvanian. In Missouri and near St. Louis, Mississippian fossils are common along the river that gives the period its name. However, fossils from both periods can be found in the area. During these periods, as in others, a warm, shallow sea often covered Missouri. It retreated and returned throughout the Paleozoic Era. The St. Louis metro area was alternately coastline, shallow ocean, and marshland.  The result is that one can find both terrestrial and marine fossils here. A research project investigating Pennsylvanian fossils from a road cut of I-170 found a coral the researchers identified as being from the genus Michelinia, which bore a passing resemblance to my find. 


I wondered if I may have found a different species of Michelinia. A quick consultation with Internet colleagues has me fairly convinced that it is a species of Michelinia, perhaps favosa. Checking some fossil guides at the library seems to confirm this, mainly based on the honeycomb structure and the Carboniferous age of St. Louis's soil. Until someone more knowledgeable can tell me otherwise, that's what I'll believe.


I'm fascinated by the idea that this area was once a shallow sea, home to early fish. I was about 5 or 6 years old the first time I heard that Missouri was once underwater. I think I was spooked by that thought at the time. Later, I found the St. Louis Science Center's life-size display of just such a shallow sea from the Paleozoic. My high school was right next to the Science Center, and occasionally after school I'd wander around the museum. The shallow sea display meets you when you turn a corner in the natural history exhibit. You find yourself at eye level with strange tubular early sharks, ammonites, and trilobites. The lighting is dimmed, and the display casts a  deep blue haze. Sometimes I'd imagine as I looked at the display that the indigo haze swept across the whole of the state and that St. Louis was still covered by the prehistoric sea. The fact that this coral I found probably once grew from a coastal reef and that breaking waves could once be heard in South County is endlessly thought-provoking for me.

A Most Unworldly Fellow, 'pon My Word

Stephen Maturin as portrayed (quite well, I think) by Paul Bethany. Even if the plot of the movie has essentially nothing to do with the books, it brought the characters and the world of the Aubrey-Maturin series to thrilling life.

The year is 1804: Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., is returning from a near-run victory over a French squadron in the South China Sea, and has anchored at a small island in order to fix his coordinates by planetary observation. His ship’s surgeon and particular friend Dr. Stephen Maturin is recovering from an exceptionally painful time in India that culminated in a pistol duel that nearly killed him; the until-recently raving feverish doctor is deposited under a large shade tree to take some air while Aubrey and his officers set up their instruments. After the sun has set and Venus has been successfully observed, Aubrey looks to collect Maturin, and finds that the doctor has wandered off and returned with company.

“My God, what is that monstrous thing?’ Jack cried out.

‘It is a tortoise, my dear. The great land-tortoise of the world: a new genus. He must weigh a ton. I do not know that I have ever been so happy. I am in such spirits, Jack! How you will ever get him aboard, I cannot tell; but nothing is impossible to the Navy.’

'Must we get him aboard?'

‘Oh, no question about it. He is to immortalize your name. This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.’

‘Why, I am much obliged, Stephen, I am sure. I suppose we might parbuckle him down the beach. How did you come by him?’

‘I wandered a little way inland, looking for specimens, and there he was in an open space, eating Ficus religiosa. I plucked some high shoots he was straining for, and he followed me down here … See his gleaming eye! He would like another leaf. It does me good to see him. This tortoise has quite recovered me,’ he cried, putting his arm round the enormous carapace.”

Stephen has discovered a fictional tortoise apparently larger than the Galapagos species, winning himself (and of course the creature’s namesake) immortal fame. I searched the Internet for an illustration of the victorious Stephen, his arm round the dear tortoise’s shell: I searched in vain. Nonetheless, this scene, towards the end of H.M.S. Surprise, the third book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, is illustrative of Stephen Maturin’s behavior. His speech is full of praise for unusual plants—“vegetable magnificence!”—unusual creatures—“the tapir, the boa, the peccary! You may find it hard to credit, Jack, but never yet have I beheld a boa”—and disparagements of “vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads” with whom he disagrees, usually regarding his unpopular beliefs on the social contract, the abolition of slavery, the independence of the Irish and the Catalans, and other such hopeless causes near to his heart. Stephen’s wonderfully complex character, and the shocking political and personal messes into which he delivers himself, are some of the chief joys of the books.

Many of my friends know of my obsession, my long-carried love for this series: an affliction that seems no closer to ending than it did four years ago, the first time I picked up Master and Commander and was swept into the world of sun-struck port cities, proud tall-masted ships, an impossibly amusing late-Georgian form of English, and the weather-tested, year-seasoned friendship of  Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin—a friendship that began when Maturin drove an irritated elbow into Aubrey’s ample side when the good captain began to enthusiastically beat the time on his knee to a spirited Locatteli quartet.

What I was first enamored with in Master and Commander was a powerful sense, underneath the winding, globe-trotting plot and democratic sweep of characters, that Deus providebit—that no matter what happens, humor and humanity will carry us through it, and one way or another we will be carried to some kind of safety, be it our intended destination or not. O’Brian, I believe, saw heaven ordinant in the contingencies of history. The most important ship in the book is named Surprise. Friendships begin with blows, battles are won with barely-successful ruses, governments are a hair’s breadth from backing the wrong revolutionaries, squalls are survived by the improbable integrity of a single tiny sail. Though the books portray a time now gone, nothing seems inevitable; the sun brightening their sea is as young as ours. This is largely due to the way O’Brian relentlessly takes advantage of the many contradictions, blind-spots and blips in the historical record and creates whole worlds around them—believable alternate fates, 1800a or b, as he once put it, and always sparkling with intimate details of that time.

I often find myself re-reading favorite books in the series to experience this largely unspoken faith in Providence. But lately, the biggest draw has been the chance to commune with my alter-ego Stephen Maturin. Like me, dear Stephen is barely nine stone (well I am not even nine stone). Stephen plays the ’cello (one of the many things I have learned from these books is that cello is short for violoncello) and Jack the violin (as do I, a bit). A “learned cove,” he is trained as a physician and a Fellow of the Royal Society, with a keen interest in natural history. He has a sharp, often unexpected wit and is a polyglot of immense ability. His official employment is as ship’s surgeon. But his most memorable trait is his unworldliness: his inability, most of the time, to accept the basic tenets of social behavior in his contemporary culture; his shy and reserved nature, though open with a few close friends; his immensely varied academic pursuits.

He is set in sharp contrast to the books’ more widely celebrated hero, Jack. A big, boyish, red-faced lieutenant at the start of the series, Jack is infinitely more worldly than Stephen. He loves the noise and excitement of battles, fox-hunts, the strategy of making a ship go as fast as ever it can. But most importantly he develops a great heart and great affection for his unusual friend.  Somewhat given to whoring in his youth and overeating and drinking all his life, he somehow matures enough in book two to become engaged to Sophie, a wholesome, intelligent woman from a country estate, and has a stable family life all his days (in spite of the occasional quickly forgotten infidelity on the other side of the world.) Stephen, on the other hand, nearly destroys himself again and again in the pursuit of the dashing, capricious socialite Diana Villiers, and family is something that seems forever just over the next horizon.

Yet as different as they are, and as much friction as there sometimes exists between them, each develops deep appreciation for the other’s talents. Aubrey has an indefatigable, even blasphemous belief in Maturin’s medical abilities: “It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.” Stephen, likewise, has a wholly ignorant faith in Jack’s abilities as a sailor, often completely trusting his friend’s skills even as the ship sinks under them (though of course Stephen, a hopeless lubber, would like as not confuse the settling of a dying vessel for the natural movement of a ship at sea).

They both find themselves in need of the other many times; Stephen, in particular, desperately needs the home that Jack’s ships provide, though he is not even entirely aware of it. “Poor dear thing, how very much he is in need of darning—how very much he needs someone to look after him. He really is not fit to wander about the world alone; it is so hard to unworldly people … How little learning does for a man—he knows almost nothing.” So says Sophie of Stephen, her close friend. And she is quite right—though medically, academically, Stephen has few equals, he is much like a child in social matters.

This resonates with me every day of my life, though in less extreme ways. As soon as I think I’m clever, as soon as I think I understand my fellow humans, it all comes down on my head. I am absent-minded and misunderstand direct address many times each day; I ignorantly flout traffic and pedestrian laws and conventions; I attempt to convey something I find interesting, a book (like these), a little-known classical composer, and I am greeted with the familiar polite interest, the dubious promise to look it up someday. But I am not really that disappointed most of the time. I have learned to expect and accept that I am slow to absorb customs of behavior and that my interests are shared by precious few people. It makes finding those people all the more exciting.

Now, Stephen is not entirely my doppleganger. For one thing, he is much smarter than me, cleverer, and braver, and is employed by the Royal Navy as an intelligence agent. I am no polyglot, though I do study Russian, which can sound like Martian to those unfamiliar with it. Stephen was also addicted to laudanum until he took up chewing coca leaves. But he is the dramatization of a type, and we are one in our strangeness, in our peculiar and passionate interests in unloved facets of the world that often seem to draw us away from other people. Few other individuals could study beetles at such length, could nearly die in the pursuit of defecating gulls on a bare rock near the Equator, could adopt a sloth, could take such delight in successful suprapubic cystotomy. Not that I completely have all his same interests, nor do I pretend to know exactly what a suprapubic cystotomy is (except for shockingly painful without modern anesthetics) but I have my own set of strange passions and hobbies that I share with so few others that Dr. Maturin is about as close as I’m going to get in literature to a reflection of the peculiar part of myself.

That’s why I ran for these books towards the end of the second semester of college. At no other time had I felt more unready for the world, unsuited for even the basic, ubiquitous experiences of college students. I do not cope with change well, but often that was not what I was struggling with. Most often, I struggled with basic acceptance of myself. I wanted so strongly at times to just be a different person. The shy, quiet, observant, overly studious person must change, and change utterly, I thought. In hindsight, I do not think that I ever really needed to change in the ways that I thought I had to. Growth and change would come, but they would come from a more subtle engine than passing myself under the harrow again and again because I felt like I did not measure up to how others near and far were “adjusting.” The relentless, self-applied pressure on myself to be different wore me down incredibly; at the end of the year, I slowly began to realize my mistake and began to stumble back to the familiar. I had to read those books again. I had to call on my particular friend Dr. Maturin.

For all his originality, Stephen always finds a place in the ad-hoc family of Jack’s ships. More specifically, Jack and Stephen’s friendship is as close as a sibling relationship, such as ones that neither of them had growing up. Like brothers, with all the squabbles and shared experiences, but also in a sense stronger, because they chose and created their friendship themselves. And through the series, partly due to spending so much time around Jack, the accepting, bright part of Stephen’s nature becomes stronger; he always had a good heart, but before meeting Jack he was something of a cantankerous hermit vagabond philosopher who happened to have a good heart.

I’ve been exponentially more fortunate than Stephen as far as being accepted goes—in my family, first of all, who do not question when I raise a ladder to peer into a robin’s nest; in my high school’s newspaper staff, a group that in many ways resembles the ragtag band that make up H.M.S. Surprise’s company; in my friends in St. Louis and from Truman. I am grateful for these relationships, for all the people that support who I am, either by joyously living their own lovable peculiarities or with their large-hearted, Aubrey-esque appreciation for those different than them. Right now I’m particularly grateful to my new friends from school, who helped me through a rough time, and probably did not realize how much they were helping just with simple friendship and by being amused at my many quirks.

Ultimately, I think the power of Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship lies in the differences in their personalities. They are not the kind of differences that make a friendship impossible, though they seem to threaten to at times; ultimately, the differences bear witness to the truth that worldly and unworldly people can live happily alongside each other, and even be friends—that the paths of asceticism and affirmation are equally valid, that identity is not some sort of necessary evil we must overcome in order to be part of a community, but rather our greatest gift. So ultimately, I do not think it is such a bad thing that I spend much of my time reading peculiar books which have not yet been read by a single living soul among any of my acquaintances; or that the first thing I think of when I step out of the house is to search for peculiar birds in the yard; that I use semicolons (and artless parenthetical asides) too much; or that I remain, even in college, a relatively shy, reserved person. No, not a bad thing at all, to be unworldly: not a bad thing at all, to be myself.