THE ADIRONDACK AND FLORIDA
Of the rest of our company in that famous old camp by "Follansbee
Water" there is little more to be said which will interest others or
recall names known to the world. I painted a study of the camp and its
inhabitants, with the intention of making from it, at a future time, a
picture which should commemorate the meeting; but, owing to changes in
my plans, it remained a study, and was purchased by Judge Hoar, the
most eminent of my companions still to be described. He had been a
justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts,--a man as well known
for his intellectual fibre and sympathy with letters as for his
judicial abilities. He was one of the most brilliant members of the
old Saturday Club, of which ours might be considered the offspring and
succursal; of wit the most spontaneous and electric, whose sallies
burst in the merriment of our _al fresco_ camp dinners with the flash
and surprise of rockets, and left behind them the perfume of erudition
as did no others of the company, not even Lowell's. In my study the
party is divided in the habit of the morning occupations: Lowell,
Hoar, Binney, Woodman, and myself engaged in firing at the target;
Agassiz and Wyman dissecting a trout on a tree-stump, while Holmes
and Dr. Howe watch the operation; but Emerson, recognizing himself as
neither a marksman nor a scientist, choosing a position between the
two groups, pilgrim-staff in hand, watches the marksmen, with a slight
preference as between the two groups. My own figure I painted from a
photograph, the company insisting on my putting myself in; but it was
ill done, for I could never paint from a photograph.
When the company left me I returned to my painting, and remained in
camp as long as the weather permitted. On my return to Cambridge I
became affianced to Miss Mack, the eldest daughter of Dr. David Mack,
with whom I had been boarding while I was occupied in painting the
various pictures of the Oaks at Waverley.
The excursion had been so satisfactory that when the whole company
had come together again, in the autumn, at Cambridge, the formal
organization of the Club was called for, and to the number of those
who had been at Camp Maple there was a large accession of the most
prominent members of the intellectual society of Boston and Cambridge.
It was decided to purchase a tract in the Adirondack Wilderness, the
less accessible the better, and there to build a permanent club-house,
and I was appointed to select the site and lay it out. The meeting was
late in the autumn, and the winter had set in with heavy snow before I
had my orders. I caught a severe cold at New York,--a trivial
matter to notice, but one which very narrowly escaped the gravest
consequences to me; for the cold became aggravated to a bronchial
attack, disregarding which I pushed on into the Wilderness, and
drove from the settlements in to the Saranac in a storm, facing
a northwesterly wind which, filling the air with a cold fog as
penetrating as the wind, crystallized on every tree and twig, and made
the entire forest, as far as the eye could reach, like a forest of
frosted silver. It was a spectacle for a lifetime, and has never been
offered to me again; but I reached Martin's, where we had to put up,
dangerously chilled.
Next day, however, I had all the guides of the neighborhood in for
consultation as to a certain tract which I had fixed on from report
and general knowledge of the region, and we planned a survey in the
snow. It was fourteen miles from any house to the lake I had fixed
on,--that known as the Ampersand Pond; but, fortunately, there were,
amongst the guides called in, some who had been assistants in the
official survey, and, with their practical knowledge and memory of the
lines, I was enabled, without leaving the inn, to draw a map of the
section of a township which included the lake, and determine its exact
position, with the fact that it had been forfeited to the State at
the last tax sale, and was for sale at the land office in Albany. We
bought the entire section, less 500 acres, taxes on which had been
paid, for the sum of $600,--thus securing for the Club a tract
of 22,500 acres. My cough was increasing alarmingly, and, when I
consulted a physician at New York, he advised me to get home and to
bed as quickly as I might; so, returning to Boston, I called together
the executive committee of the Club to dinner, made my report, drank a
glass of champagne to the future lodge, and went to bed in the early
stages of pneumonia, which kept me prostrate six weeks.
I owed it to the fortunate and intelligent woodcraft of my guides that
I was not caught in the depth of the forest by the increasing lung
trouble, probably never to return to civilization. It was the closest
shave to death that I have ever had, and the actual survey of the
tract, buried four feet deep in snow, without a shelter or other bed
than the ground, would in all probability have finished me, for I
barely escaped as it was; but I was determined to finish my work,
animated by the same incomprehension of, rather than indifference to,
the danger before me which had obtained in my Hungarian expedition
and in many other circumstances of my life. Something of the splendid
physical health I brought back with me from the Wilderness helped me,
no doubt, through the attack of pneumonia and pleurisy, which
released me in the early spring, when I was ordered off to Florida to
recuperate. Being advised not to occupy myself with painting while
there, I bought a photographic apparatus, and learned photography
as it was practiced in 1857,--a rude, inefficient, and cumbersome
apparatus and process for field work, of which few amateurs nowadays
can conceive the inconveniences.
This trip--for the means to make which I was indebted to Norton, my
illness having exhausted my resources, and the great crisis which had
broken over New York the year before having swept off the fortune of
my brother--gave me a sight of the South before the war, with slavery
and the patriarchal system at its perfection. I went up the St. John's
River, and took board at a plantation called Hibernia, one of numerous
similar establishments on the river, hotels proper not existing there.
The owner of the plantation, old Colonel Fleming, was one of the
traditional patriarchal planters, and the experience I gained there
certainly agreed with the views of the institution of slavery
entertained by the great majority of Southern people I have known. I
never heard of the punishment of a slave, or saw a discontented negro;
the black children were the jolliest little creatures I ever saw in
clothes, and the adults seemed to do as much or as little work as they
pleased.
I had carried my rifle with me, and young Fleming and I used to go
hunting for alligators, still abundant in the river. The thickets
of palmetto and the groves of magnolia filling the air with new and
cloying fragrance, alternating with other unaccustomed odors which
made the grove resemble an orchestra of perfumes, were to me a new and
delightful experience. There was a mythical wild turkey in the woods
around, and the hope of a shot at him carried me many a mile, though
he proved only a myth; but of rattlesnakes and copperheads there was
no lack. As I was collecting specimens for the natural-history museum
of Cambridge, I canned the largest snakes that I came across, and I
secured one rattlesnake which measured nine feet; but the fear of his
kind never damped my enthusiasm for the luxuriant forest. Into the
great cypress swamps, with their centennial trees, swarming with
reptiles of infinite variety, there run devious inlets which they call
"creeks," and up these I used to paddle my skiff, and lie and watch
the teeming life, wishing I were a naturalist. I spent a week at
the ancient (for America) town of St. Augustine, on the Atlantic
coast,--then the sleepy watering-place of a few Southern
invalids,--and enjoyed greatly its local color, so different from that
of all other American towns, its picturesque fortress of the days
of Spanish rule, and its Spanish fishermen, in their undiluted
nationality and costume. I here poisoned myself dreadfully, rubbing
with my legs some poison plant as I shinned up the trees for epiphytal
orchids, new to me and an irresistible attraction.
To naturalists, this part of Florida must have been a most interesting
field before the bird-slaughterers had invaded it to the extermination
of its myriad population of feathered winterers from the Northern
regions. The geological formation is a concrete of shells of enormous
thickness, which has hardened to the only semblance of rock which the
coast affords, and the low dunes have shut off from the Atlantic long
lagoons which swarm with life, marine and aquatic creatures occurring
in numberless species and orders; alligators lie in wait for their
prey, and schools of porpoises come in by the inlets in pursuit of
other schools of fat mullet which swarm in the water. Such teeming
life I had never before any conception of. In the surf the sharks
lurked and coasted up and down, watching us as we waded in fishing for
bass, if by chance we should give them an opportunity for a bite; the
sharp, warning fin showing in the hollow green of the combing breaker
ever and anon as we stood thigh-deep in the foam. It made one shudder
to see that silent terror patrolling up and down the margin of the
deep water, waiting for an incautious venture of the bather beyond the
shallows, into which the shark dared not come.
I went with a fishing party down the coast to Matanzas, an abandoned
fort of the early Spanish days, and passed there the most impressive
open-air night in my recollection. We camped on the beach, and my
shelter was a gauze mosquito netting stretched over four poles, about
three feet high, driven in the sand, and as wide as high, and my bed
was the sea sand, no covering being required. Through the gauze the
sea breeze blew gently; on one side of the long, narrow beach the
great Atlantic breakers roared a monotonous bass, and on the other
there came from the lagoon the many-toned murmur of a thousand bird
voices, some familiar and some strange, whooping of cranes and
chattering of coots, ducks, and divers, cries of pelicans, and now
and then the sound of flapping wings, as if some great bird had been
routed out and had changed his feeding-ground. Around me on the sand
ran and crawled the host of crabs, some pulling curiously at the gauze
of my shelter; and now and then a huge spider crab climbed up the
netting like a squirrel and danced an infernal jig over my head,
skipping about on the very tips of his claws, until I tired of his
frivolity and hit him from underneath, when he scuttled away, and
after half an hour, more or less, was succeeded by another, as if they
found an intoxication in dancing over my head. The gnats sang their
monody, and the midges put in their treble, but the meshes of my
gauze were too fine to let them pass; and after hours of this strange
pandemonium I fell asleep, to be waked in the morning by the sun
streaming over me from the broad Atlantic.
It is worthy to note here, in justice to the old days of the Floridian
society, a society now utterly extinct, and a subject of history, that
the kindliness to the slaves was universal on the St. John's River. At
nightfall they used to gather in their quarters and sing; and they had
a peculiar yodel, which, starting from one plantation, was caught up
by the others, and ran round and off along the river into the
distance and back, going and coming again and again with a peculiar
fascination, like the voice of a happy and careless common life. It
was a kindly and indulgent community, and that it was a slave-holding
society never forced itself on the attention. The lazy social virtues
had, no doubt, their lazy vices, but we never saw them on the surface.
The negro quarters were as merry as the day was long, and the negro
was a more important and better appreciated element of social life
than in the North. The whole valley joined in unreserved malediction
of a planter, one of our neighbors, who had profited by the accidental
burning of the free papers of a black family which had been bought out
of slavery by the father, with money earned as pilot to the steamers
of the United States Army during the Seminole War, to compel him to
purchase himself and his wife and children again, and the thief was
spoken of as the meanest of white men, out of the social pale of
self-respecting folk; cheating a slave being far worse than cheating
one of his own class. The old scoundrel was the reproach of the whole
community; but no more formal indictment of the system of slavery, as
established in the United States, is required than the fact that a
former master could recall to slavery an emancipated slave family, the
head of which had paid in hard cash for himself, his wife, and all his
children, because his free papers had been burned, in a fire of
which, moreover, the neighbors accused the former owner of being the
incendiary. While those papers were in existence the negro could
legally sue and be sued; but without them he had no more legal rights
than a dog. The life which honest people lived in that primitive
community was Arcadian, and it is probable that even in Arcadia they
had slaves. Certainly, in my experience of living in many countries
and under various systems, I have not found that the most primitive
system secures the largest personal liberty; rather the contrary.
I returned to my painting with the early summer, and, when the season
came, to the organization of the Club and the inauguration of its
club-house and grounds. It was certainly the most beautiful site I
have ever seen in the Adirondack country,--virgin forest, save where
the trappers or hunters had cut wood for their camp-fires, the tall
pines standing in their long ranks along the shores of a little lake
that lay in the middle of the estate, encircled by mountains, except
on one side, where the lake found its outlet; and the mountains were
cloaked to their summits in primeval woods. In a little valley where
a crystal spring sent its water down to the lake, and a grove of
deciduous trees gave high and airy shelter, I pitched the camp,--a
repetition slightly enlarged of that on Follansbee Pond. As usual I
preceded the Club party, accompanied by S.G. Ward and his son, and
also the son of Emerson, to prepare the ground. The solitude of the
locality may be judged from the first hunt. We had arrived late in the
day, and had no food except the bread we took with us, and the next
morning we had to kill our breakfast before we could eat it. I took
Mr. Ward and the boys in my boat and paddled down to the foot of the
lake, where was a wide beach, on which we found a two-year-old buck
grazing. I paddled to within fifty yards of him, and, though I found
that my rifle would not go off and had to change it for another, with
considerable movement, the deer took no notice of us, and I dropped
him in his tracks with a feeling of compunction only overcome by the
fact that we had no breakfast if he went away. So peaceful was our
realm! I have often paddled within easy shot of a deer on other
waters, but only by remaining motionless when he was looking round,
for the movement of a hand would send him flying in panic; but this
poor deer might have been reared in Eden.
The meeting of the Club that year was a most successful one; and when
it was over, and I was left alone to my painting, I selected a subject
in which, for the first time, I introduced a dramatic element. I
supposed that a hunter and a buck had had a hand-to-horn fight, and,
during it, had fallen together over a ledge of rocks, at the bottom of
which both lay dead. A perpendicular ledge of granite, about twenty
feet high, mosses and ferns clinging in its crevices, overhanging a
level space covered with a heavy growth of luxuriant fern, furnished
the background. There I laid the first large buck I killed, and
painted him with extreme care, and then painted my guide with his arms
locked in the antlers of the deer. The hour was the late afternoon,
when the red sunlight slanted through the trees and fell in broken
masses on the face of the cliff, catching the leaves here and there in
its path. All this was painted carefully from the scene, with as
much of the details of the forest as the time permitted, on a canvas
twenty-five by thirty inches, on which I worked about two months, till
the lake began to freeze and the snow fell. The thermometer was about
zero Fahrenheit before I broke off, early in November.
I never enjoyed so entirely the forest life as that autumn. I had laid
a line of sable traps for miles through the woods, and caught several
"prime" sable which I intended as a present to my fiancée, and the
long walks over the line in the absolute silence of the great forest,
the snowfall, and the gorgeous autumn were more fascinating than ever
before. The bears left their tracks around me, and several pumas made
themselves heard, but of wolves, which I had heard in other parts of
the woods, I heard none. Returning in the gloaming from my traps,
one day, I heard at a distance a wailing cry like that of a woman in
distress, to which I replied by hallooing at the top of my voice.
After a few minutes I heard the cry again, approaching me, and again
responded. The cry continued, still nearer and nearer, but slow in its
approach; and, wondering why so slow, I finally fired my rifle three
times rapidly, which is the conventional signal for help, and at the
same time a reply to the call for help; and it was only when this
evoked no further call that I remembered that the cry was that of a
puma.
As usual I lived alone, save for the weekly visit of my guide bringing
me bread and my post. It was with the greatest reluctance that I
obeyed the necessity to return to the state of civilization, and
took leave of that most charming retreat of the natural man from the
artificial life. That was my last serious experience of woodland
life. The uneasy and thriftless spirit which drove me out, like the
possessed of the Scripture, to wander in strange places at times,
again drove me that winter to England, putting, as it happened,
against my intention or prevision, an end to the American period of my
life.