Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
I asked my cousin if he could stay for a few more days or if he had to get back to D.C.
“I have to get back,” he said. “This is headed for a showdown on the floor next month. Now’s when we go to work.” Lots of breakfasts, lots of office sweep-throughs. A senator was predicting “holy war.”
“The circumstances and fortunes of men and families,” said Franklin, “are continually changing.”
I hoped for my cousin to fail, and wished him luck.
LA•HWI•NE•SKI: CAREER OF AN ECCENTRIC NATURALIST
For Guy Davenport
All the histories of America are mere fragments or dreams.
—
CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is shaped like an alligator’s head. It is also shaped like the Commonwealth of Virginia, as if the latter were advancing westward by generation of mature clones. In a way this is so. The southern borders of these states are keyed to the same horizontal projection, one surveyed by the frontier planter William Byrd in 1728, while the rivers forming their northern extents fall back just opposite each other from the flanks of the Appalachian massif. There’s a mirroring there.
In 1818 one of the few people able to give even a semicoherent accounting of the ancient processes responsible for it neared Louisville, Kentucky, aboard a long covered flatboat, which, following local custom, he called an ark. It was summer. He traveled down the Ohio, along the alligator’s eye. For a full ten years he’d gone by his mother’s name, Schmaltz—he’d spent them in British-ruled Sicily; one didn’t need to sound overly French—but by the time he reached Kentucky, on a botanical trip financed with a hundred dollars he’d wrung from some Pittsburgh bookmongers as advance on a “New and More Accurate Map of the Ohio’s Tributaries” (a map he actually drew, but which they never published), he had resumed the name of Constantine Rafinesque.
“Who is Rafinesque, and what is his character?” once asked John Jacob Astor. Rafinesque himself grew dizzy before the complexity of the answer. “Versatility of talents,” he wrote, “is not uncommon in America, but those which I have exhibited … may appear to exceed belief: and yet it is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist…”
The river arks only went downstream. The owners broke them and sold the lumber once they’d made their destinations. They were more like floating islands, often lashed together (as during Rafinesque’s trip) into caravans. An 1810 document says they were shaped like “parallelograms.” Some were as long as seventy feet. You lived in a cabin or out on deck, other times in a tent, with an open cooking fire. There were animals. To go ashore and come back, which you did whenever you wanted, you took your own, smaller boat, kept tied to the gunwale. Arks went slow when the water was slow, fast when it was fast, and crashed when it was very fast. Typically there were only three rowers. This distinctly American mode of travel sufficed throughout the interior for longer than a century and is now so gone we struggle to reconstitute its crudest features. It had no Twain. Rafinesque liked the arks because he could botanize as they drifted. He felt the vegetable pulse of the continent shuddering down its veins. The green world whispered to him. He tells us—in his short, hectic, wounded memoir, written near the end—precisely what it said: “You are a conqueror.”
The New World had a way of never being new. Ever notice this? I don’t mean the Native Americans—that part’s obvious. Even in European terms, somebody was always already there. The first person De Soto met in Florida spoke Spanish. Was in fact a Spaniard! And was it the Plymouth voyage that had aboard a group of Indians coming back from a visit to London?
Just so, Rafinesque, that first, famous time he crossed the mountains, had a whole prior American career, a kind of prologue. From 1802 to 1805 he was all through New England, in the fields, at the high tables, driven in jolting carriages by Revolutionary veterans desperate to talk plants. Most places they received him as a boy genius—nineteen when he arrived and recognized internationally for the bold precocity of his juvenile publications. Perhaps one or two better-known naturalists squinted at his “mania” for discovery. It was said he attempted to rename and reclassify the first common weed he spotted on American soil. (True.)
Benjamin Rush, a Declaration signer and the first great American physician, offered Rafinesque an apprenticeship in his practice, medicine and botany being closer together then. Rafinesque refused. His destiny had been revealed to him and did not lie in the city. One must remember when he was here: 1803 to 1805 was the day of Lewis and Clark; Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery had reached the Far West. Later expeditions might look to the South, at Louisiana and Arkansas, or toward “the Apalachian mountains, the least known of all our mountains, and which,” wrote Rafinesque, “I pant to explore.” He was taken to meet Jefferson, and they started to correspond. The earth, which Rafinesque believed was an “organized animal rolling in space,” had arranged for him to be present and correctly positioned at that moment, as a continent of taxonomically pristine vastnesses offered itself to science. He would gladly, “
messer. le president
,” serve as official corps naturalist, being supremely and, though it gave him no pleasure to say so, uniquely qualified for the role. The New World, which Rafinesque called the Fourth World, had long ago been found; now it would be known.
Jefferson either never received or else neglected the letter. He thought of Lewis and Clark as half a military thing and knew the “nine young men from Kentucky” wouldn’t stand the deadweight of an eccentric French polymath. Instead he sent Lewis to Philadelphia and paid for him to be tutored by the local savants. Rafinesque, who was teaching in the city and had allowed himself to credit a claim that soon he’d be asked to join the mission, must have seethed. He watched another man’s body step into his future, inhabit his moment. The things we’d know if they’d sent Rafinesque to the Pacific! There was his fevered interest in Indian languages alone—almost without parallel for his time. Even as it was, even on his own, he somehow talked the War Department into sending out vocabulary questionnaires to all of its Indian agents. One sees these mentioned with great esteem by linguists who have no idea Rafinesque was behind them.
No less important, the work would have molded and disciplined him as a scientist. For once he’d have known a duty as large as his own self-regard. Every person of learning in the European and East Coast capitals would have awaited his findings on the flora and fauna and tribes. The mountains. He’d have been forced to anticipate scrutiny, to adapt and refine the radically advanced system of natural classification he was then beginning to apply, for he had already begun to peel away slightly from the “indelicate” and arbitrary sexual system of Linnaeus, once his great master and guide. No choice but to go methodically, keeping to what he could see—the number of specimens alone would dictate this.
He chafed at Jefferson’s lack of reply and in 1805 sailed for Sicily, muttering that they hadn’t been ready for him. This is how it was with Rafinesque, always too quick to take offense, too antsy—untouchable in the field, certainly, but never able to sit. Here his career had barely begun. In the weeks leading up to the departure, the papers openly lamented his decision. He left anyway, trailing a certain petulance that never wholly lifts from the biography.
Three days after his ship weighed anchor, one of his friends in Philadelphia intercepted a letter from Jefferson. A new expedition had formed. This one would seek the Red River. If Rafinesque were still interested, a place could be made. It was a unique provision on Jefferson’s part, made expressly with Rafinesque in mind. The former had seen very well what he was in the room with when they met. Now Rafinesque’s embarrassed friends had to reply with news of his rashness. The expedition left a year later with a student for naturalist.
I don’t know if America ever forgave Rafinesque this betrayal, this weakness of faith. By “America,” I mean the land. It had called him. He had not come. Where had he gone?
In Sicily he married the blond Josephine Vacarro. They had a son and daughter. It’s said he produced a much-admired brandy vintage without ever tasting a single drop, so strong was his loathing for spirituous liquors, so instinctive his understanding of chemical behavior. The sharpest detail from the Sicilian years is hidden in the journals of William Swainson, an English naturalist of the early nineteenth century who worked for a few years on Italian fishes and visited Rafinesque. Swainson says Rafinesque used to walk down to the fish markets near his house, where the fishermen knew to put aside anything weird for him. He found many new species this way, one while Swainson was there. Yet although Swainson begged him to dry and keep the fish after he’d drawn and named it, Rafinesque insisted on eating it. He lived well. He got involved in some kind of medicinal business and made loads of money. He paid litter bearers to carry him through the hills, laughing that in Sicily only beggars walked. The men slept in the meadows as he herborized. Ten years passed that way.
* * *
When at last Rafinesque returned to North America—of course he did; destiny can’t be eluded, only perverted—his ship could not make port. She headed for Cape Montauk and was baffled by westerly winds. She tried to cut to Newport, but the wind changed and blew her back northeast, so she turned toward New York again.
Between Long Island and Fisher’s Island, across the bottom of the channel, lay a row of tremendous granitic boulders, absorbed by a glacier in Hudson’s Bay twenty thousand years ago and extruded as glacial moraine ten thousand years after that, at a place sailors still call the Race. The moon had just changed. There may have been as little as five feet of water above the tip of the biggest rock, which sheared off the keel. It was ten o’clock at night near the beginning of November. The longboat got tangled in rigging and for a moment seemed about to be sucked under, but the ship itself, “being made buoyant by the air in the hold,” stopped sinking partway. The passengers cut themselves loose and rowed two hours in the cold toward a lighthouse.
Rafinesque wandered for a period of days in a sort of catatonia. His later memory of the event seems confused—he says he walked “to New London in Connecticut,” though we know that’s where he landed. At one point some men rowed out to try to save the cargo. The passengers gathered hopefully on the shore to watch. But when the men sawed off the masts, to make the ship more manageable, they upset its equilibrium. It righted and sank “after throwing up the confined air of the hold by an explosion.” Rafinesque stood there and watched this occur, he watched the ship explode, saw his prospects all but literally hanging in a balance, then fate like some great sea god turning down its thumb, taking his work, his money, his clothes. The enumeration of losses is nauseating:
a large parcel of drugs and merchandize, besides 50 boxes containing my herbal, cabinet, collections … My library. I took all my manuscripts with me, including 2000 maps and drawings, 300 copperplates, &c. My collection of shells was so large as to include 600,000 specimens large and small. My herbal was so large …
When Josephine heard of the wreck she assumed the worst. It’s remarkable in fact the total faith with which she instantly assumed the very worst. It took a mere two weeks for the news that Rafinesque had personally survived to reach Sicily, but she’d already married an actor. Actually what it says in the records is “a comedian.” Who turned Rafinesque’s only daughter, Emilia, into a singer. Using the insurance money, Rafinesque sent two brigs, the
Indian Chief
and the
Intelligence,
to collect this girl, but she refused to come. Her brother, Charles Linnaeus, had died an infant the year before. Rafinesque was alone.
A letter exists, written and posted during the horrible days after the wreck and addressed to an associate in the Apennines, wherein he reports having identified new species of fish and plants while swimming away from the doomed ship. It is the first of his strange unnecessary lies. The part about swimming away, that is. He had in fact identified a new fish, but it took place on the pier where the lifeboat docked.
The easiest way to fathom what all this did to his mind is to observe the change in his appearance. In the portrait that serves as frontispiece to his
Analyse de la Nature
(1815, the year of the wreck), he is physically shrewlike to a degree that fascinates, with a small nose and a thin, set mouth, his bangs combed forward in oily fronds. He’s a French leprechaun with what are remembered as “delicate and refined hands,” also “small feet.” Women noticed his eyelashes.
Look at him three years on, when he steps away from the ark. He’s in Hendersonville, Kentucky, now, hunting for the artist of birds John James Audubon. In Louisville he’d asked for the great man, but they told him Audubon had gone deeper, into the forest, where he’d opened a general store. Rafinesque longed to see Audubon’s new paintings of western species, not yet published but already circulating by reputation among the learned. He knew Audubon liked to incorporate local flora into his pictures and was sure he’d find new species of plants in the pictures, hidden, as it were, even from Audubon himself.
Audubon was walking when he noticed the boatmen staring at something by the landing. It’s through Audubon’s eyes, which so little escaped, that we can see Rafinesque again, almost, wearing