On Christmas Eve 1907, a young English palaeontologistsat sat a lab bench in Tokyo contemplating a lump of rock 鈥� or more precisely an ancient plant long since turned to stone. Even with the laboratory鈥檚 newly overhauled cutting machine, slicing this fossil would be a long, slow job, and tomorrow work would have to give way to the obligatory round of parties and handing out presents. Frustratingly, in a few more days the whole of Tokyo would be celebrating the start of the New Year. Instead of slicing fossils, the single-minded scientist would have to dress up in her best silks, sip sake and socialise. It wasn鈥檛 that she objected to having fun, but she was impatient to find a fossil that would provide clues to one of botany鈥檚 great mysteries.
WHEN David Gelsthorpe took up his new job last year as curator of palaeontology at the , one of the UK鈥檚 great Victorian institutions, among his first tasks was cataloguing its scattered collection of fossils. As he opened boxes and checked labels he spotted a familiar name: Marie Stopes. Like most, he knew Stopes as the pioneer of sexual equality for women. He also knew that before she won fame as the champion of birth control and a woman鈥檚 right to sexual fulfilment, Stopes had made a name for herself as an expert on fossil plants. 鈥淭hese 鈥榣ost鈥� specimens show that she was as pioneering in her pursuit of fossils as she was in social reform,鈥� says Gelsthorpe.
Stopes arrived in Manchester in 1904 with a reputation for flouting regulations and defying convention. She had bent the rules to complete her degree at University College London in just two years. Then Stopes was off to Germany to study at the Botanical Institute in Munich on a research scholarship. The lone woman among 500 men, she was unable to speak the language and barred from taking a doctorate because she was a woman. Stopes worked furiously, learned German and had the rules changed. In 1904 she returned home with her doctorate and started a job at the University of Manchester, where she was the first woman to teach science. Stopes had also fallen in love: out of 500 men, she had picked the one that Edwardian England was least likely to approve of 鈥� Kenjiro Fujii, a man almost twice her age, married and Japanese.
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In Manchester, Stopes taught student doctors and engineers, gave lectures to working men on the joys of plants, and collected fossils. 鈥淭he fossils provide glimpses into the life of a quite extraordinary woman,鈥� says Gelsthorpe. 鈥淪he crawled along mine shafts, hacked her way through some of the wildest parts of Japan and even tried to join Captain Scott鈥檚 expedition to the South Pole.鈥�
Towards the end of 1904, Robert Scott, recently returned from his Discovery expedition to Antarctica, visited Manchester during a fund-raising tour to pay off the expedition鈥檚 debts. Stopes met him at a lunch and again the same evening at a dance. She was smitten 鈥� not with Scott but with the idea of joining him on his next voyage to Antarctica.
Only a few years earlier, Austrian geologist Eduard Suess had suggested that the southern continents had once been part of a single landmass, which he called Gondwanaland. The best evidence for this came from fossils, in particular fossils of a long-extinct group of plants known as seed ferns. These had been found in a band stretching round the southern hemisphere, from South America to Africa, India and Australia. The last piece of the puzzle was Antarctica: if seed ferns had once grown there then Suess had to be right.
Scott, Stopes confided to a friend, was the most 鈥渄ivine waltzer and reverser鈥� she had ever met. He was also diplomatic and promised that if it proved impossible to take her, he would try to find the fossils she wanted. According to the museum鈥檚 鈥渁utograph book鈥�, a visitor鈥檚 book for VIPs, on 1 December 1904 Scott called on Stopes for a crash course in fossil recognition, a lesson that would prove invaluable eight years later.
In the meantime there were mines for Stopes to explore. At the turn of the 20th century, working in a coal mine was difficult, dirty and dangerous, but that was no deterrent. The mines around Manchester were a good place to hunt for coal balls, lumps of mineralised plant material that contained parts of extinct plants so complete it was possible to piece together their structure and biology. Much to the astonishment of miners and mine owners, Stopes insisted on doing her own collecting. Clad in a long gown and armed with a hammer, she picked and poked her way along the coal seams. No one should have been surprised: Stopes鈥檚 idea of fun was tramping across mountains, bogs and glaciers. 鈥淚 must have some exploration,鈥� she wrote to her professor in Munich. 鈥淎nd coal mines are the only things here to take the place of mountains or tropical forests.鈥�
Questions about how coal and coal balls formed were immensely important, but the biggest palaeobotanical question of the day concerned the origins of the angiosperms, or flowering plants. When had they appeared and how had they given rise to so many species in so short a time? Charles Darwin had called it an 鈥渁bominable mystery鈥�. Stopes was no doubt interested in the question, but she had another reason to get excited about angiosperms: the earliest traces of flowering plants were leaf impressions found in Japan. Fujii, the man she hoped to marry, was back in Tokyo and in 1906 wrote to say he was divorced. 鈥淢arie had to find a way to get to Japan,鈥� says Gelsthorpe. 鈥淭he angiosperms provided the excuse.鈥�
Solving the mystery of the angiosperms required more complete fossils with fruits and seeds, and the most likely place to find them was in Japan鈥檚 northernmost island of Hokkaido. Stopes asked Fujii to send some rock nodules from Hokkaido, and amazingly the very first one she opened contained an angiosperm. She could hardly believe her luck: armed with the new finds, she persuaded the Royal Society of London to fund her one-woman expedition to Japan.
In August 1907, Stopes arrived in Yokohama. Ten days later, after a brief reunion with Fujii, she left for Hokkaido. Western women were a rarity in Japan and female scientists didn鈥檛 exist at all. 鈥淭hey all marvel at me as though I were some curious kind of butterfly,鈥� she wrote in A Journal from Japan. Rather than try to block her efforts, however, the Japanese authorities gave her every assistance 鈥� too much, she complained. By the time she reached Hokkaido, she had acquired an entourage of more than 30 men, including her own personal policeman.
Hokkaido was wild and little explored, and when the road ran out the expedition had to struggle through dense bamboo forests and along riverbeds. Stopes soon swapped her muslin frocks for short Japanese trousers and jacket and her boots for straw sandals that gave a better grip on wet stones. She conceded that her unwanted companions had their uses after heavy rains had turned the riverbed tracks into dangerous waterways full of deep pools. 鈥淲ithout a couple of them to put their feet to make steps or to give a hand around corners, I could not have got along at all. How the loaded coolies could manage I cannot imagine. It was only the feeling that as I was the leader I daren鈥檛 show fright, that kept me going over some of those places. However, we were well rewarded, for the fossils I got that afternoon were the best obtained so far.鈥�
鈥淪he soon swapped muslin frocks for short Japanese trousers鈥�
Stopes made many other trips during her 18 months in Japan. Between stints cutting fossils in the lab, she went down coal mines, to the dismay of her terrified escorts, and collected the first fossil insects from the now famous fossil lake at Shiobara. And she found what she was looking for 鈥� the earliest example of a fossil fruit of what was undoubtedly a flowering plant. The fossil remained the earliest evidence of angiosperms for many years.
Love proved more elusive. Fujii鈥檚 ardour cooled. To put her off he pretended to have leprosy. Stopes returned to Manchester with her fossils 鈥� just in time for Scott鈥檚 expedition to Antarctica. It was impossible for her to go, of course, and she was bitterly disappointed.
When Scott and his men died on their return from the South Pole, they famously had with them 16 kilograms of rocks and fossils, which they had refused to abandon despite the terrible conditions. Although Scott never knew it, among the fossils was the missing piece of the Gondwana puzzle.
