THE FLORIDA QUEST |  |
Hideaway Times
Sunday, June 3, 2001
On the trail: Pioneer naturalists endured hardships
By GERRI BAUER
Garden Editor
A young man is stunned by grief. His wife is dead, his newborn child crying for attention. He's only 24. He'd been married less than a year.
Salvation lay in nature. The despondent widower eventually became one of the Southeast's premier pioneer naturalists. Acting as royal botanist to America, the enigmatic Frenchman Andre Michaux -- often accompanied by his son -- paddled the waters of what is now the Halifax River. He visited Fort Matanzas and followed the famous Bartram father and son team to the St. Johns River in the 1780s. He portaged the western shore of Mosquito Lagoon, where he discovered a necklace pod and custard apple.
More than 200 years later, author Gail Fishman of Tallahassee picked up Michaux's trail. She also followed the footsteps of John and William Bartram, the most famous of this area's early naturalists, and drove, hiked and re- assessed 10 other, now often paved, paths of exploration.
Profiles of these botanical explorers, and Fishman's modern-day retracing of their steps, are chronicled in "Journeys Through Paradise: Pioneering Naturalists in the Southeast."
Fishman's ambitious undertaking is arranged in chronological order, beginning with British explorer John Lawson, who was killed by Tuscarora Indians in 1711 in North Carolina, and ending with brothers Roland and Francis Harper, who focused attention on the Okefenokee Swamp in Southern Georgia in the early decades of the 20th century.
The information is almost too much to press between 306 pages. Fishman could not literally pick up every part of every path -- she pursued Michaux only through the Carolinas, and refused to trail John James Audubon to the Keys because she didn't want to disturb her own memories of the islands before progress changed them.
The reports of journeys she did make, however, are detailed and descriptive. Standing at the summit of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, Fishman writes that she understands why "Michaux had been seized with unbridled excitement."
Unlike Michaux's view, Fishman's was altered by a 10-story condominium atop Sugar Mountain. Such discoveries are not unexpected; it is reassuring, to readers, to know the author also saw the same type of Fraser magnolia blooms Michaux had described, and that she found, on the same trip, the same kind of trillium noted by British naturalist Mark Catesby in the 1720s.
Michaux's story was one of the more difficult to re-create, Fishman says in "Journeys." Few of his works have been translated into English, and those are out of print. "Of all the people in the book," Fishman writes, "William Bartram left the easiest path to follow."
She traced his watery explorations of the St. Johns River. Bartram traveled in a canoe, Fishman made the trip in a 22-foot sailboat. Bartram wrote of "Carolina paroquets fluttering," Fishman saw egrets and ospreys. The parakeets are extinct, as are the ivory-billed woodpeckers Bartram wrote about.
During her expedition, Fishman crossed paths with environmental activist and attorney Clay Henderson of New Smyrna Beach. He was also boating and also on the Bartram trail: He was ushering a reporter and photographer along the route.
At the time of the meeting, Henderson was president of the Florida Audubon Society. In "Journeys," Audubon surfaces as the naturalist who most confounds Fishman.
Revered today as the symbol of the bird- preservation movement, Audubon is portrayed as a deadbeat dad, a business failure who was charming, vain, stubborn, handsome, conceited and a bit too quick on the trigger. His wife sold her family heirlooms and worked as a tutor while he tried to find himself. Fishman writes that the owner of an estate on which Lucy Audubon established a private school became so infuriated with the naturalist that she once threw him off the premises when he returned for a visit.
"Researching Audubon, I felt a gamut of emotions: He was a genius, he was a cad, he was to be admired, he was loathsome," Fishman writes of the naturalist, whose 1830s visit to Volusia County is not recorded in "Journeys." She tells readers that she knows and understands why Audubon is appreciated for the work he left behind, and she acknowledges the passion and grace that infuse his paintings. Still ...
She notes that in one letter to Lucy, Audubon complained of boredom and wrote that he passed the time by shooting five bald eagles in 24 hours, "more than most Sportsmen can boast of." During an expedition in the Keys, he wrote that "sixty- five Great Godwits lay at our feet" after a few minutes of sport. When incoming tides drove herons and flamingos off mud flats, "the shooting behind the bushes began, until we had a heap not unlike a small haycock."
It has been said that Audubon was a man of his times, and that his actions reflected those of his contemporaries. Alexander Wilson also lived during those times, and the Scotsman known as the Father of American Ornithology used live specimens as models for his illustrations, Fishman points out. He became close to his subjects, eventually growing concerned about indiscriminate killing of birds because he had grown to understand their value.
There is a Wilson Ornithological Society. It has about 2,500 members. The National Audubon Society has half a million.
"Journeys" is an interesting read, a book to be read in pieces, with attention focused on one man at a time, on his life and work, and on a 21st century woman's reflections of what is left behind.