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.