EDMONSTONE, JOHN (1790–unknown), formerly enslaved Black British taxidermist. Edmonstone taught taxidermy to Charles Darwin, a skill that would later prove crucial in advancing the latter’s ideas about evolution.
Edmonstone was born into slavery in British Guiana. He was owned by the Scotsman Charles Edmonstone and worked on his timber plantation at Mibiri Creek in the colony of Demerara until the age of twenty-seven.
John Edmonstone learned taxidermy from Charles Edmonstone's neighbor, the naturalist Charles Waterton, who was also a slaveowner. Waterton’s extensive expeditions in the Guyanese rainforest had heightened his interest in the preservation of both birds and mammals. While traditional taxidermy involved stuffing a specimen’s body with cotton, Waterton developed a method of removing specimens’ skin and hardening it with mercuric acid, a compound used in the hatmaking trade. Waterton taught this technique to several of Charles’ slaves, including John.
In 1807 Charles Edmonstone brought John back to Scotland with him. Once the latter set foot on Scottish soil he was a free man, as slavery had been outlawed there since 1778. Settling in Glasgow, John Edmonstone earned his living selling animal specimens to the local museum. He moved to Edinburgh in 1824 and began working in Edinburgh University’s Museum of Zoology, where he encountered the fifteen-yearold student Charles Darwin, to whom he gave taxidermy lessons at the rate of one guinea per hour. In his autobiography Darwin remembered Edmonstone as “a very pleasant and intelligent man.” Though Darwin had intended to study medicine upon enrolling at the university, Edmonstone’s accounts of the Guyanese rainforest are thought to have inspired his interest in the natural world, setting him on a different path.
After two years of study at the university, Darwin gave up medicine and began pursuing a career as a naturalist, eventually embarking on his legendary five-year journey around the world on the HMS Beagle. Throughout his travels, Darwin relied on the taxidermy techniques he had learned from Edmonstone to preserve the animals, such as the Galapagos finches, upon which he based his theory of evolution.
Edmonstone maintained an independent taxidermy shop in Edinburgh for decades, moving locations several times. The year and and place of his death are unknown.
In 2009 London’s King’s Palace commissioned a plaque honoring Edmonstone. For several years the plaque was displayed in front of a Brazilian restaurant on Lothian Street in Edinburgh—the street where both Edmonstone and Darwin were neighbors for a time—but it has since disappeared.