CHAPTER XV
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.