The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (8 page)

1.
Originally, affected with the kind of insanity that was supposed to have recurring periods dependent on the changes of the moon. In mod. use, synonymous with I
NSANE
; current in popular and legal language, but not now employed technically by physicians.

Ceylon, the lushly overgrown tropical island that seems to hang from India’s southern tip like a teardrop—or a pear or a pearl or even (some say) a Virginia ham—is regarded by priests of the world’s stricter religions as the place to which Adam and Eve were exiled after their fall from grace. It is a Garden of Eden for sinners, an island limbo for those who yielded to temptation.

These days it is called Sri Lanka; once the Arab sea traders called it Serendib, and in the eighteenth century Horace Walpole created a fanciful story about three princes who reigned there, and who had the enchanting habit of stumbling across wonderful things quite by chance. Thus was the English language enriched by the word
serendipity
, without its inventor, who never traveled to the East, ever really knowing why.

But as it happens Walpole was more accurate than he could ever have known. Ceylon is in reality a kind of postlapsarian treasure island, where every sensual gift of the tropics is available, both to reward temptation and to beguile and charm. So there are cinnamon and coconut, coffee and tea; there are sapphires and rubies, mangoes and cashews, elephants and leopards; and everywhere a rich, hot, sweetly moist breeze, scented by the sea, spices, and blossoms.

And there are the girls—young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears—who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.

It was these nameless village girls—the likes of whom had frolicked naked in the Singhalese surf for scores of years past, just as they still do—that young William Chester Minor remembered most. It was these young girls of Ceylon, he later said he was sure, who had unknowingly set him on the spiral path to his eventually insatiable lust, to his incurable madness, and to his final perdition. He had first noticed the erotic thrill of their charms when he was just thirteen years old: It was to inflame a shaming obsession with sexuality that inspired his senses and sapped his energies from that moment on.

William Minor was born on the island in June 1834—a little more than three years before, and fully five thousand miles to the east of, James Murray, the man with whom he would soon become so inextricably linked. And in one respect—and one only—the lives of the two so widely separated families were similar: Both the Murrays and the Minors were exceedingly pious.

Thomas and Mary Murray were members of the Congregationalist Church, clinging to the conservative ways of seventeenth-century Scotland with a group known as the Covenanters. Eastman and Lucy Minor were Congregationalists too, but of the more muscularly evangelical kind that dominated the American colonies, and whose views and beliefs were descended from those of the Pilgrim Fathers. And although Eastman Strong Minor had learned the skills of printing, and had prospered as the owner of a press, his life eventually became devoted to taking the light of homespun American Protestantism into the dark interiors of the East Indies. The Minors were in Ceylon as missionaries, and when William was born it was at the mission clinic, into a devout mission family.

Unlike the Murrays, the Minors were first-line American aristocracy. The original settler in the New World was Thomas Minor, who came originally from the village of Chew Magna in Gloucestershire. He had sailed across the Atlantic less than a decade after the Pilgrims, aboard a ship called the
Lion’s Whelp
, which landed at Stonington, the port beside Mystic, at the mouth of Long Island Sound. Of the nine children born to Thomas and his wife, Grace, six were boys, all of whom went on to spread the family name throughout New England, and be counted among the devout and high-principled founding fathers of the state of Connecticut in the late seventeenth century.

Eastman Strong Minor, who was born in Milford in 1809, was the head of the seventh generation of American Minors; the family members were by now generally prosperous, settled, respected. Few thought it other than a badge of honor when Eastman and his young Bostonian wife, Lucy, whom he married in her city in 1833, closed down the family printshop and took off by steamer carrying a cargo of ice from Salem for Ceylon. Their piety was well known, and the Minor family seemed delighted that, in spite of the couple’s wealth and social standing, they felt strongly enough in their calling to contemplate spending what would probably be many years away from the United States, preaching the gospel to those regarded as less fortunate far away.

They arrived in Ceylon in March 1834, and were settled in the mission station in a village called Manepay, on the island’s northeast coast, close to the great British naval station at Trincomalee. It was only three months later, in June, that William was born—his mother having suffered badly through the addition of seasickness to morning sickness during the middle of her pregnancy. A second child, named Lucy, like her mother, was born two years later.

Although William’s medical file suggests a typically rugged Indian childhood—breaking a collarbone in a fall from a horse, being knocked unconscious after falling from a tree, the usual slight doses of malaria and blackwater fever—his was far from a normal childhood.

His mother died of consumption when he was three. Two years later, instead of returning home to the United States with his two young children, Eastman Minor set off on a journey through the Malay Peninsula, bent on finding a second wife among the mission communities there. He left his little girl in charge of a pair of missionaries in a Singhalese village called Oodooville and took off on an eastbound tramp steamer with young William in tow.

The pair arrived in Singapore, where Minor had a mutual friend who introduced him to a party of American missionaries bound upcountry to preach the gospels in Bangkok. One of them was a handsome (and conveniently orphaned) divine named Judith Manchester Taylor, who came from Madison, New York. They courted quickly, and tactfully out of sight of the curious child who had accompanied them. Minor persuaded Miss Taylor to come back with them on the next Jaffna-bound steamer, and they were married by the American consul in Colombo shortly before Christmas 1839.

Judith Minor was as energetic as her printer husband. She ran the local school, learned Singhalese, and taught it to her clearly very intelligent elder stepchild as well as, in due course, to her own six children.

Two of the sons that resulted from this marriage died, the first aged one, the second five. One of William’s stepsisters died when she was eight. His own sister, Lucy, died of consumption when she was twenty-one. (A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later. He moved to the American West, first as doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaskan Territory to collect specimens of Arctic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor. In 1889, still holding the post, he took off on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned. Neither boats nor bodies were ever found. A Minor Street and a Thomas T. Minor School remain, as well as a reputation in Seattle that equates the name of Minor with some degree of glamour, pioneering, and mystery.)

The mission library at Manepay was well stocked, and though the accommodation for the family was “very poor,” according to Judith’s diaries, the mission school itself was excellent—allowing young William to win a markedly better education than he might have received back in New England. His father’s printing tasks gave him access to literature and newspapers; and his parents traveled by horse and buggy often, taking him along and encouraging him to learn as many of the local languages as possible. By the time he was twelve he spoke good Singhalese and is supposed to have had a fair grounding in Burmese, as well as some Hindi and Tamil, and a smattering of various Chinese dialects. He also knew his way around Singapore, Bangkok, and Rangoon, as well as the island of Penang, off the coast of what was then British Malaya.

William was just thirteen, he later told his doctors, when he first started to enjoy “lascivious thoughts” about the young Ceylonese girls on the sands around him: they must have seemed a rare constant in a shifting, inconstant life. But by the time he was fourteen, his parents (who were perhaps aware of his pubescent longings) decided to send him back to the United States, well away from the temptations of the tropics. He was to live with his uncle Alfred, who then ran a large crockery shop in the center of New Haven. So William was seen off from the port of Colombo on one of the regular P & O liners that made the unendurably lengthy passage between Bombay and London—via (this being in 1848, long before the completion of the Suez Canal) the long seas around the Cape of Good Hope.

He later admitted to vividly erotic recollections from the voyage. In particular he remembered being “fiercely attracted” to a young English girl he met aboard ship. He seems not to have been warned that long tropical days and nights at sea—combined with the slow, rocking motion of the swell and the tendency for women to wear short, light cotton dresses and for bartenders to offer exotic drinks—could very well, in those days as well as these, lead to romance, particularly when one or even both sets of parents were absent.

Much appears to have happened during the four weeks at sea—though not, perhaps, the ultimate. The friendship appears to have gone unconsummated, no matter how much time the pair spent alone. Many years later Minor was to point out to his doctors that, as with his fantasies over the young Indian girls, he never “gratified himself in an unnatural way” or ever let his sexual feelings for his fellow passenger get the better of him. Matters might have turned out very differently if they had.

Guilt—perhaps a frequent handmaiden among the peculiarly pious—seems to have intervened, even more than a teenager’s shyness or natural caution. From this moment on in William Minor’s long and tormented life, sex and guilt come to appear firmly and fatally riveted together. He keeps apologizing to his questioners of later years: His thoughts were “lascivious,” he was “ashamed” of them, he did his best not to “yield” to them. He seems to have been looking over his shoulder all the time, making sure that his parents—perhaps the mother whom he lost when he was barely out of infancy, or perhaps the stepmother, so often the cause of problems for male children—never came to know the “vile machinations,” as he saw them, of his increasingly troubled mind.

But these feelings were still nascent in William Minor’s teenage years, and at the time he was unworried by them. He had his academic life to pursue, and eagerly. From London he took another ship to Boston, and thence home to New Haven, where he began the arduous task of studying medicine at Yale University. His parents and their much-diminished family were not to return for six more years, by which time he was twenty. He appears to have spent these—and indeed the following nine years of his medical apprenticeship—in quietly assiduous study, setting to one side what would soon become his deeper concerns.

He passed all his examinations without any apparent undue problems and was graduated by the Yale Medical School with a degree and a specialization in comparative anatomy in February 1863, when he was twenty-nine. The only recorded drama of those years came when he caught a serious infection after cutting his hand while conducting a postmortem on a man who had died of septicemia: He reacted quickly, painting his hand with iodine—but not quickly enough. He had been gravely ill, his doctors later said, and had nearly died.

By now he was a grown man, tempered by his years in the East and honed by his studies at what was already one of the finest American schools. Although he had no inkling that his mind was in so perilously fragile a state, he was about to embark on what was almost certainly the most traumatic period of his young life. He applied to join the army as a surgeon—an army that at the time was keenly short of medical personnel. For it was not just the army—it was then calling itself the Union army: The United States, still young also, was just then suffering the most traumatic period of its national life. The Civil War was well under way.

When Minor signed his first contract with the army—which first trained him conveniently close to home at the Knight Hospital in New Haven—the war was almost precisely halfway over, though naturally none knew this at the time. Eight hundred days of it had been fought so far: Men had seen the Battles of Forts Sumter, Clark, Hatteras, and Henry; the First and Second Battles of Bull Run; and the fights over patches of land at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, and scores of otherwise unsung and unremembered trophies, like Mississippi’s Big Black River Bridge, or Island Number Ten, Missouri, or Greasy Creek, Kentucky. The South had so far had an abundance of victories: The Union Army, sorely pressed by eight hundred days of bitter fighting and far too many reverses, would take all the men it could: It was eager to accept someone as apparently competent and well-Yankee-born as William Chester Minor of Yale.

Four days after he joined up, on June 29, 1863, came the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest of the entire war, the turning point, beyond which the Confederacy’s military ambitions began to fail. The newspapers that Minor read each evening in New Haven were full of accounts of the progress of the fighting; there were twenty thousand casualties on the Union side, and to those numbers even a tiny state like Connecticut contributed a monstrous share—it lost more than a quarter of the men it sent to fight in Pennsylvania over those three July days. The world, President Lincoln was to say six months later when he consecrated the land as a memorial to the fallen, could never forget what they had done there.