Merrick, Adelaide Biographical Record
SCANNED
Biographical Record
Adelaide Merrick
Born 5 Apr 1794 · Died 18 Aug 1831
Occupation: Mineralogist
Cause of Death: Buried by the collapse of a worked-out silver mine she had entered alone, at night, because the men would not go in, and she had run characteristically run out of patience.
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Adelaide Merrick sold rocks to rich men and used their money to search for better rocks, which is as complete a summary of a career as anyone could want. She was blunt, ferociously literate, and possessed of an eye for crystal habit that a Cambridge professor described — in writing, in a letter he plainly did not expect to be kept — as “unfair.” She sketched the Andes as a geologist sees them: not scenery, but a sequence of events, eloquently describing what the world had been doing while nobody watched. Her journals contain almost no weather and certainly no feelings, and are nevertheless very difficult to put down.
Her patrons were a small circle of collectors in London, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia — men with means and libraries and opinions. They wrote to one another, traded what they could not publish and could not explain, and they paid people like Adelaide Merrick to go and get more of it. It was these same men who, in 1822, had quietly bought a dead cave-surveyor’s last sketchbook out of a Buenos Aires estate because one page of it had frightened them — and who engaged Adelaide Merrick, for the first time, the following year, and sent her to South America. It must be said plainly: Mateo Ruiz’s final gallery and Adelaide Merrick’s field letters were placed in the same locked cabinet, in the same house, within a year of one another, and sat there together for fifty years before anybody thought to read them side by side.
That correspondence, forty-seven years after her death, was gathered up, sorted, and constituted into something with a charter and a name by . She never knew. She would have found the ceremony ridiculous and the reading room adequate at best.
ARCHIVE NOTE: The Beaumont chest was recovered intact in 1881 and its contents remain the responsibility of the Archive. Four objects have been catalogued (three of them have been catalogued twice, with divergent results). The remaining item is entered in the ledger only as "the remaining item," and the Society is satisfied, for the present, to leave the matter there.
ARCHIVIST NOTE: The surname is not a coincidence.