Chinchilla in Britain in 1849: HMS Constance, valuable cargo and a naval cover-up?

In my post of 16 November, I noted that live chinchillas had been brought to Britain for rich men's menageries decades before the get-rich-quick fur-breeding bubble of the 1950s. It is difficult to search old newspaper archives because references to chinchillas are usually to their fur and what items of clothing their fur had been made into. However, I did find this early snippet:

Norfolk News 8 December 1849. 

Several very fine eagles, a splendid bear, a lama, and a chinchilla were landed on Monday at Portsmouth from the Constance frigate, and conveyed to London for the Earl of Derby.

(The use of the Oxford comma is also interesting[,] and informative.)

Lord Derby was of course the 13th Earl, Edward Smith-Stanley (1775-1851) who kept a large menagerie at Knowsley in Lancashire and after whom a number of mammals and birds were named including Lord Derby’s Eland, the Derbyan Parakeet and the Stanley Rosella.

Incidentally, the ship that carried the chinchilla was HMS Constance, a 50-gun frigate of the fourth rate. She would have been returning from Valparaiso in Chile, then the base for the British pacific station. However, Constance was not a happy ship as this letter from the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette of the same date as the above newspaper report indicates:

H.M.S. “Constance”.—The following letter has appeared in one of the London papers:—“Sir,—The public mind has been painfully interested by naval courts-martial and rumours of others that were ordered or about to be ordered. That fine frigate Constance has just arrived from those distant regions California and the Colombia river, and all the papers, both daily and weekly, have been teeming with complaints as to the state of discipline this ship is in. One paper recommends that she should be paid off immediately, as continuing here any longer in commission would be a disgrace to the service. You, sir, have always stood prominently forward to assert the rights of superior officers, but you have not the less ready to defend and support those of the juniors. I therefore venture, through your medium, to ask the Admiralty if it be true that they, annoyed with the exposure caused by the “Pitmanic Case,” and fearful that a parliamentary inquiry may be called for and insisted upon to ascertain the exact nature of the powers intrusted to naval captains, have made use of the influence which they can so well command to induce the sufferers on board the Constance to withdraw their requests for an inquiry into their conduct, which, if granted, must at once have powerfully attracted the attention of the whole nation, which has only just recovered from the shock occasioned by the infamous affair I have already alluded to. I will not disguise from you that I am an interested party. I have friends on board whose future career may be seriously affected by the treatment they have received, but if they and their connections perceive that my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty refuse to turn a deaf ear to the complaints that must have reached them, they may yet hope to rise in the service, but with which the commencement of their career has almost tended to disgust them.

“I am, Sir, your obedient servant,“A COUNTRY CLERGYMAN,“St. Sidwell’s, Exeter, Nov. 27.”

The Times reported from Plymouth:

Her Majesty’s frigate Constance, 50 [guns]. Captain G.W.C. Courtenay, is to be unmasted to-morrow, and paid off on Saturday [8 December]. Considerable restriction has been put on the liberty of the officers and crew of this ship since her arrival. Three seamen have been sent for a month to Exeter Gaol, for going ashore without leave; the cost of their maintenance while confined will be deducted from their sea wages.

The reason for Courtenay’s behaviour and A Country Clergyman’s complaint was that Constance was carrying commercial cargo (probably a nice little earner for a captain) valued at $1,750,000. She sailed from Valparaiso on 28 August (The Times, 5 November 1849). That sum is reckoned to be worth $55 million in today’s money.

HMS Constance in 1848 by Julian Tunstall Haverfield
Haverfield was Lieutenant of Marines on Constance

George William Conway Courtenay’s (1793-1863) private notes are now in the Courtenay & District Museum on Vancouver Island. The area was named after the captain of Constance. He proclaimed the land on Vancouver island to the Crown from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The extraordinary disciplinary measures he instigated on Constance to protect his cargo including flogging any lookout who failed to see a sail before he did, insisting officers went ashore only in full uniform, and going to great lengths to prevent his crew deserting in order to join the gold rush in California. Clearly, his junior officers thought him paranoid but in these days of patronage, Courtenay was very well connected and after Constance was paid off he was promoted to Rear Admiral and finally to Vice Admiral. The Country Clergyman from Exeter seems to have been ignored.

The mammals and birds bought back for Lord Derby—to curry favour with a powerful patron or for profit? Were they all South American, like the chinchilla and llama, and taken aboard at Valaparaiso, en route from Canada and around Cape Horn) If so, the bear would have been a Spectacled Bear. Or were some collected in North America as well?

That simple chinchilla story after a bit more digging provided a fascinating glimpse of the early Victorian Royal Navy and its system of favouritism and patronage. The system bears more than a passing resemblance to life in research in the 2010s.

Chinchillas in Zoos, and early import

AJP Photograph

Long-tailed Chinchillas (Chinchilla laniger) appear to be in deep trouble in the wild. However, I have not been able to find any definitive evidence on their status that is not nearly 20 years old. There are, of course, lots of domesticated chinchillas which have their origins in this species (see my earlier post). The few zoos I have visited in recent years seem to show them as domesticated ‘educational’ animals rather than in a nocturnal house setting of naturalistic habitat or in the size of colony that might occur in the wild—in other words, an exhibit that would really play an ambassadorial role in drawing attention to the parlous state of this species in the wild. I thought I had read somewhere that a British Zoo once had such a colony of chinchillas. Then the Bartlett Society Journal dropped on my desk. Russell Tofts in his article on the history of Jersey Zoo (now called, euphemistically in what must be another example of political correctness and focus-group inspired marketing strategy, Wildlife Park) provided what I had been trying to remember, under the year heading 1966:

In Jersey, an airy block building measuring 10 feet by 12 feet, well-lit by natural light, was constructed for an initial colony of twenty-five animals. By the end of a successful breeding season, the colony had risen to thirty-one (including seven animals that had had to be removed).

I would not think the Jersey effort would have been successful as an exhibit. Chinchillas really do sleep all day and a reversed daylight system would be needed to see them on the move. Nor do I underestimate the difficulty of setting up a colony in the first place. Adult chinchillas take very unkindly to being introduced to new potential cagemates; very unkindly is an underestimate.

In the 1950s chinchilla bubble in UK, when gullible individuals thought they were would be able to make their fortunes by breeding chinchillas for fur, and prices of live chinchillas rocketed, pairs of chinchillas were advertised at from £50 in 1957, the equivalent of £875 today. I think these chinchillas were from imported stock that was probably derived from the Chapman collection which was taken to California in 1923.

Advertisement: Cage Birds 21 February 1957

However, Britain had seen chinchillas before then, both in zoos and private collections. I came across this mention in an article by HD Astley in the September 1913 issue of Avicultural Magazine

Mr Goodfellow [Walter Goodfellow, 1866-1953, the renowned collector] brought home from Chili [sic], landing in the first week of July, some birds which were a puzzle to those who had never before seen them. Mrs. Johnston very kindly invited me to go to Burrswood on the day after their arrival. Incidentally, the principal interest was not birds, but Chlnchillas; which I preferred infinitely to see in their skins, rather than the latter made into muffs and boas, etc. As however, they are not birds, I must refrain from studying them too closely, at any rate in the Magazine suffice it to say, they are most fascinating, and a pearly-grey coated Chinchilla, when tame, would make a charming pet. 

I do not know whether any of the chinchillas imported into Britain survived until after the Second World War. It is possible that they did because the super-rich of the day kept extensive collections, particularly of birds, and it is doubtful if records of what many of them had and bred were kept or preserved.

Whose Genes Are In My Chinchilla?

We are a family of rodentophiles. The current family champion in this pursuit is #2 son, who, for the past ten years, has kept chinchillas, first the late Misses Inca and Chimu and, at present, the ridiculously tame Miss Picchu. It may seem incongruous to keep inhabitants of the Andes in the heat and humidity of Hong Kong but chinchillas are popular pets there, living in air-conditioned comfort for six months of the year and waking up to entertain their diurnal keepers after the latter’s dinner.

When we visit and displace the chinchillas to the dining room from the spare bedroom, talk is inevitably of chinchillas when they are let out each night for a run around the room. We have often talked about the origins of the domestic chinchilla but found that evidence-based information on chinchillas is surprisingly hard to find, especially on the genetic origins of the domestic population and current status in the wild.

Most rodents which are kept as pets were either commensals (mice and rats) or spilled over from laboratory colonies (golden hamster, Mongolian gerbil). By contrast, the chinchilla was bred for its fur and, only later, became a desirable pet, and, even later still, a laboratory animal.

A number of different colour varieties have been bred. This is Picchu, a ridiculously tame Black Ebony chinchilla with aspirations to becoming a supermodel.

While the story of how M.F. Chapman hired 23 men to capture as many chinchillas as possible and that it took these men three years to capture eleven adults is well known, as is the story of their arrival in the U.S.A. in 1923, it is more difficult to find out what happened as the stock was built up in the ranch Chapman built and in the chinchilla ranches that followed in terms of genetic origins.

The general view is that Chapman’s eleven original chinchillas were a montane form of Chinchilla laniger or lanigera (see below on spelling) — the Long-tailed Chinchilla. A smaller form, from lower altitudes (costina) was said to have been trapped out by the time Chapman started his collection.

However, one also reads that, later, some costina form and a few brevicaudata were imported into the U.S.A. and crossed with the chinchillas in ranches. Chinchilla brevicaudata (now known as Chinchilla chinchilla under the rules of priority) — the Short-tailed Chinchilla — is recognised as a separate species. It is written (and repeated) that the male brevicaudata x laniger(a) crosses were sterile but that the females were fertile. When the females were back-crossed, two-thirds of the offspring were sterile.

Because it is said that all chinchillas in the fur and pet trades are derived from the chinchilla ranches of North America, it has been inferred that to a greater or lesser extent the captive population is of an interspecific hybrid derivation. The implication of this inference has, of course, been that the present population must be discounted as a source of animals for possible re-introduction into the wild.

This view also appears to have gained some credence from the breeding of chinchillas for their brevicaudata-type appearance. However, artificial selection can result in markedly changed morphology and the appearance of animals with some of the characters of C. brevicaudata (C. chinchilla) does not mean that the latter species was present in a hybrid ancestry.

However, more recently, and with the ‘re-discovery’ of C. chinchilla in the wild, the conclusions on the hybrid nature of the captive, domestic population have not been supported.

All the information on Chinchilla laniger(a) has been pulled together by Angel E. Spotorno, Carlos A. Zuleta, J. Pablo Valladares, Amy L. Deane, and Jaime E. Jiménez in Mammalian Species Number 758, pages 1-9, published on 15 December 2004 by the American Society of Mammalogists.

Incidentally, and to get nomenclature out of the way, these authors consider the correct name for this species to be Chinchilla laniger — not lanigera. I would say hooray to that since I always knew the species as C. laniger. My edition (4th) of Walker’s Mammals of the World (1983) uses laniger. E.T. Bennett in 1829 changed Molina’s (1782) laniger to lanigera seemingly in a fit of cod-latinitis and recent authors have tended to use lanigera. To add to the confusion, Corbet & Hill’s World List of Mammalian Species (3rd edition, OUP 1991) gives lanigera in the text and laniger as a caption to a drawing. I shall stick with Chinchilla laniger.

To get to the main point of this post and quoting from the paper on the species by Spotorno and colleagues, cytochrome-b gene sequences from mitochondrial DNA showed: no traces of C. brevicaudata variants... were found in any of 5 domestic C. laniger (Spotorno et al. 2004 [Journal of Mammalogy 85:384–388]).

In other words, current evidence favours the view that the domestic chinchilla is pure Chinchilla laniger. That finding, especially if confirmed with larger numbers from diverse sources, does have implications for the conservation of this species. Conservation of the two species is a topic I will turn to in a future post.