|
A little more than a month
after the destruction of the mill in Trout's Hollow, John Muir had arrived
at Indianapolis, Indiana, for early in May, 1866, he writes from there to
his sister Sarah as follows:
I never before felt so
utterly homeless as now. I do not feel sad, but I cannot find a good
boarding- place, to say nothing of a home, and so I have not yet unpacked my
trunk, and am at any moment as ready to leave this house for a march as were
the Israelites while eating the passover. Much as I love the peace and quiet
of retirement, I feel something within, some restless fires that urge me on
in a way very different from my real wishes, and I suppose that I am doomed
to live in some of these noisy commercial centers.
Circumstances over which I
have had no control almost compel me to abandon the profession of my choice,
and to take up the business of an inventor, and now that I am among machines
I begin to feel that I have some talent that way, and so I almost think,
unless things change soon, I shall turn my whole mind into that channel.
But even at this time, if one
may judge from another passage in the same letter, the prospective physician
or inventor had not nearly so good a backing in his feelings as the
naturalist. "The forest here," he writes, "is almost in full leaf. I have
found wild flowers for more than a month now. I gathered a handful about a
mile and a half from town this morning before breakfast. When I first
entered the woods and stood among the beautiful flowers and trees of God's
own garden, so pure and chaste and lovely, I could not help shedding tears
of joy."
The considerations that
influenced him to go to the capital of Indiana are best told in his
autobiographical narrative which is resumed at this point:
Looking over the map I saw
that Indianapolis was an important railroad center, and probably had
manufactories of different sorts in which I could find employment, with the
advantage of being in the heart of one of the very richest forests of
deciduous hard wood trees on the continent. Here I was successful in gaining
employment in a carriage material factory, full of circular saws and chucks
and eccentric and concentric lathes, etc. I first worked for ten dollars a
week, without board, of course. The second week my wages were increased to
eighteen a week, and later to about twenty-five a week. I greatly enjoyed
this mechanical work, began to invent and introduce labor-saving
improvements and was so successful that my botanical and geological studies
were in danger of being seriously interrupted.
One day a member of the firm
asked me, "How long are you gong to stay with us?" "Not long," I said. "Just
long enough to earn a few hundred dollars, then I am going on with my
studies in the woods." He said, "You are doing very well, and if you will
stop, we will give you the foremanship of the shop," and held out hopes of a
partnership interest in the money-making business. To this I replied that
although I liked the inventive work and the earnest rush and roar and whirl
of the factory, Nature's attractions were stronger and I must soon get away.
A serious accident hurried me
away sooner than I had planned. I had put in a countershaft for a new
circular saw and as the belt connecting with the main shaft was new it
stretched considerably after running a few hours and had to be shortened.
While I was unlacing it, making use of the nail-like end of a file to draw
out the stitches, it slipped and pierced my right eye on the edge of the
cornea. After the first shock was over I closed my eye, and when I lifted
the lid of the injured one the aqueous humor dripped on my hand - the sight
gradually failed and in a few minutes came perfect darkness. "My right eye
is gone," I murmured, "closed forever on all God's beauty." At first I felt
no particular weakness. I walked steadily enough to the house where I was
boarding, but in a few hours the shock sent me trembling to bed, and very
soon by sympathy the other eye became blind, so that I was in total darkness
and feared that I would become permanently blind.
When Professor Butler learned
that I was in Indianapolis, he sent me a letter of introduction to one of
the best families there, and in some way they heard of the accident and came
to see me and brought an oculist, who had studied abroad, to examine the
pierced eye. He told me that on account of the blunt point of the file
having pushed aside the iris, it would never again be perfect, but that if I
should chance to lose my left eye, the wounded one, though imperfect, would
then be very precious. "You are young and healthy," he said, "and the lost
aqueous humor will be restored and the sight also to some extent; and your
left eye after the inflammation has gone down and the nerve shock is
overcome - you will be able to see about as well as ever, and in two or
three months bid your dark room good-bye."
So I was encouraged to
believe that the world was still to be left open to me. The lonely dark days
of waiting were cheered by friends, many of them little children. After
sufficient light could be admitted they patiently read for me, and brought
great handfuls of the flowers I liked best.
As soon as I got out into
Heaven's light I started on another long excursion, making haste with all my
heart to store my mind with the Lord's beauty and thus be ready for any
fate, light or dark. And it was from this time that my long continuous
wanderings may be said to have fairly commenced. I bade adieu to all my
mechanical inventions, deter- :mined to devote the rest of my life to the
study of the inventions of God. I first went home to Wisconsin, botanizing
by the way, to take leave of my father and mother, brothers and sisters, all
of whom were still living near Portage. I also visited the neighbors I had
known as a boy, renewed my acquaintance with them after an absence of
several years, and bade each a formal good-bye. When they asked where I was
going, I said, "Oh! I don't know - just anywhere in the wilderness
southward. I have already had glorious glimpses of the Wisconsin, Iowa,
Michigan, Indiana and Canada wildernesses; now I propose to go south and see
something of the vegetation of the warm end of the country, and if possible
wander far enough into South America to see tropical vegetation in all its
palmy glory."
All the neighbors wished me
well and advised me to be careful of my health, reminding me that the swamps
in the south were full of malaria. I stopped overnight at the home of an old
Scotch lady who had long been my friend, and was now particularly motherly
in good wishes and advice. I told her that as I was sauntering along the
road near sundown I heard a little bird singing, "The day's gone, The day's
done." "Weel, John, my dear laddie," she replied, "your day will never be
done. There is no end to the kind of studies you are engaged in, and you are
sure to go on and on, but I want you to remember the fate of Hugh Miller."
She was one of the finest examples I ever knew of a kind, generous,
great-hearted Scotchwoman.
After all the good wishes and
good-byes were over, and I had visited Fountain Lake and Hickory Hill and my
first favorite gardens and ferneries, I took a thousand-mile walk to the
Gulf of Mexico from Louisville, across Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina,
Georgia, and Florida.
At this point Muir's memoirs
pass in a few sentences over the entire period between the beginning of this
remarkable walk and his arrival in California. His notes on the margin of
the manuscript, however, show that he intended to expand this portion of his
autobiography considerably, probably by using parts of the journal which he
kept during his southward journey in 1867. In the mean time this journal,
published separately under the title "A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf," has
become accessible to all interested readers. There are, however, some
unpublished passages, crossed out by the author during a revision in later
life, that throw light upon the struggle with himself in which he was
engaged during his stay in Indianapolis.
Muir's more intimate friends
like the Carrs, Butlers, and Merrills had ere this observed in him a strange
kind of restlessness, an inward compulsion, which at times caused him to
forsake his tools and his occupation for the beauteous ways of those middle
western wildernesses that still were pressing close upon the edge of towns.
Mrs. Carr, indeed, used to speak of Muir's "good demon" to whose behests he
paid heed as did Socrates to his invisible mentor. A letter written to her
but two days before he started on his southward journey reveals him under
the spell of his good genius. "I wish I knew where I was going," he writes.
"Doomed to be 'carried of the spirit into the wilderness,' I suppose. I wish
I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no
rest."
The opening sentences of his
journal, also, no less than the cover inscription "John Muir, Earth-planet,
Universe," contain significant bits of self-revelation. "Few bodies," he
wrote, "are inhabited by so satisfied a soul as to be allowed exemption from
extraordinary exertion through a whole life. The sea, the sky, the rivers
have their ebbs and floods, and the earth itself throbs and pulses from
calms to earthquakes. So also there are tides and floods in the affairs of
men, which in some are slight and may be kept within bounds, but in others
they overmaster everything." He was one of the "others."
The farewell visit to
Fountain Lake and Hickory lull had a much deeper significance for him than
one would infer from the brief reference to it in his memoirs. Twenty-seven
years later, in an address on "National Parks and Forest Reservations,"
delivered at a meeting of the Sierra Club in San Francisco, he related the
plans and hopes he had entertained with regard to Fountain Lake:
The preservation of specimen
sections of natural flora - bits of pure wildness - was a fond, favorite
notion of mine long before I heard of national parks. When my father came
from Scotland, he settled in a fine wild region in Wisconsin, beside a small
glacier lake bordered with white pond-lilies. And on the north side of the
lake, just below our house, there was a carex meadow full of charming
flowers - cypripediums, pogonias, calopogons, asters, goldenrods, etc. - and
around the margin of the meadow many nooks rich in flowering ferns and
heathworts. And when I was about to wander away on my long rambles I was
sorry to leave that precious meadow unprotected; therefore, I said to my
brother-in-law, who then owned it, "Sell me the forty acres of lake meadow,
and keep it fenced, and never allow cattle or hogs to break into it, and I
will gladly pay you whatever you say. I want to keep it untrampled for the
sake of its ferns and flowers; and even if I should never see it again, the
beauty of its lilies and orchids is so pressed into my mind I shall always
enjoy looking back at them in imagination, even across seas and continents,
and perhaps after I am dead."
But he regarded my plan as a
sentimental dream wholly impracticable. The fence he said would surely be
broken down sooner or later, and all the work would be in vain. Eighteen
years later I found the deep-water pond-lilies in fresh bloom, but the
delicate garden-sod of the meadow was broken up and trampled into black
mire. On the same Wisconsin farm there was a small flowery, ferny bog that I
also tried to save. It was less than half an acre in area, and I said,
"Surely you can at least keep for me this little bog." Yes, he would try.
And when I had left home, and kept writing about it, he would say in reply,
"Let your mind rest, my dear John; the mudhole is safe, and the frogs in it
are singing right merrily." But in less than twenty years the beauty of this
little glacier-bog also was trampled away.
From a letter to his friend
Catherine Merrill, written immediately after his visit to Muir's Lake, or
Fountain Lake, as he was later accustomed to call it, we excerpt a more than
usually detailed and appreciative description. He had started from
Indianapolis about the middle of June, taking with him his young friend
Merrill Moores. Eager to see the flora of the Illinois prairies in June, he
went to Decatur near the center of the state and then northward by way of
Rockford and Janesville. A week was spent in botanizing on the prairie seven
miles southwest of Pecatonica, and from there they made their way to his old
home in Wisconsin.
We have had our last
communion with Muir's Lake [he writes from there on the 12th of August]. It
was glassy, calm, and full of shadows in the twilight. I have said farewell
to nearly all my friends, too, and will soon leave home once more for I know
not where.
You would enjoy a visit to
that rocky hill we have spoken of so often, though a mere pimple, I suppose,
to the Alps you have enjoyed. The most of Wisconsin is not more than two
hundred and fifty or three hundred feet above Lake Michigan, or about one
thousand feet above the sea. The Blue Mounds, a few miles west of Madison,
are only one thousand six hundred and seventy feet above the sea - the
highest [Rib Hill in Marathon County, 1940 feet, is now regarded as the
highest point.] land in Wisconsin. Our Observatory is perhaps one hundred
and fifty or one hundred and eighty feet above the plain. It is a broad hill
with long sloping sides, and with a great pile of whinstone blocks cast upon
the top. It is not quite bare in any part, for its sides are clothed richly
in white and black oaks, and the rocky summit has gray cedars and rock
ferns. A great many ravines run up against the rocks on every side; these
have the Desmodiums and the harebells and many precious ferns and rare
peculiar plants of their own. One of these ravines has evidently been
scooped out for a fern garden. One hundred and twenty thousand of my
favorite Osmundas live there, all regularly planted at equal distances.
The highest point commands a
landscape circle of about one thousand square miles, composed of ten or
twelve miles of the Fox River, Lake Puekawa and five or six nameless little
lakes - marsh and woodland exquisitely arranged and joined - and about two
hundred hills, and some prairie. Ah! these are the gardens for me! There is
landscape gardening! While we were there clouds of every texture and size
were held above its flowers and moved about as needed, now increasing, now
diminishing, lighter and deeper shadow and full sunshine in small and
greater pieces, side by side as each portion of the great garden required. A
shower, too, was guided over some miles that required watering. The streams
and the lakes and dens and rains and clouds in the hand of God weighed and
measured myriads of plants daily coming into life, every leaf receiving its
daily bread - the infinite work done in calm effortless omnipotence.
But now, Miss Merrill, we
must leave our garden, and I am sure I do it with more pain than I should
ever feel in leaving all the jardins des plantes in the world, where poor
exiled flowers from all countries are mixed and huddled in royal pens.
After a botanical week spent
as the guest of his Madison friends, the Butlers and the Carrs, he returned
to Indianapolis with the overmastering impulse strong within him, and
started from there by rail for Louisville, 4Kentucky, on the first of
September. "Ii steered through the big city by compass with-j out speaking a
word to any one," he wrote in his journal. "Beyond the city I found a road-,
running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and
cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew
a plan for my journey."
He was now fairly started on
the longest and most adventurous of his many rambles. His general plan was
to push southward by the leafiest, wildest, and least trodden ways. This he
apparently succeeded in doing, for only about twenty-two towns and cities
are mentioned in his journal, a very small number when one considers the
distance he covered. Ile carried with him nothing but a small rubber bag
which held a change of underclothing, comb, towel, brush, and three small
books - a New Testament, Milton's "Paradise Lost," and Burns's "Poems." At
night he sought the shelter of farmhouses and country taverns and when this
resource failed him he would lie down, as near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, "in
the bushes by guess," or enter a schoolhouse and sleep. "on the
softest-looking of the benches." Indeed, there were stretches in his walk,
in the sparsely populated Cumberland mountain region, where he often had "to
sleep with the trees in the one great bedroom of the open night."
When he reached Savannah,
Georgia, his money was all but gone and the new supply, which he had
directed his brother to send thither, either had not arrived or was being
withheld by the express agent. He was unable to find work and his
impecunious condition did not permit him to live at an inn. It is
characteristic of Muir's shrewdness and freedom from ordinary prejudices and
superstitions that under these circumstances he sought out the beautiful
Bonaventure Cemetery, four miles east of Savannah. There he felt secure from
night-prowling negroes, and his scientific interest was gratified by "one of
the most impressive assemblages of animal and plant creatures" he had ever
seen. He built himself a shelter of rushes in a thicket of sparkle-berry
bushes and lodged there for a week until the money arrived. Meanwhile he had
ample time to reflect on the significance of his surroundings, the place of
death in the order of nature, and to describe the Tillandsia-draped oaks of
Bonaventure. One of the most beautiful passages in all his writings is the
account of this graveyard experience published under the title "Camping
Among the Tombs" in "A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf."
The journal of this walk is
especially interesting because it shows how his ideas upon certain subjects
were maturing at this time. The conception of death which he had inherited
with his religious training was bound to yield to a better understanding of
Nature's processes. He is convinced now that "on no subject are our ideas
more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the friendly sympathy,
the union of life and death so apparent in Nature, we are taught that death
is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the 'arch-enemy'
of life, etc. And upon these primary, never-to-be-questioned dogmas, these
time-honored bones of doctrine, our experiences are founded, tissue after
tissue in hideous development, until they form the grimmest body to be found
in the whole catalogue of civilized Christian manufactures."
He thinks it especially
unfortunate that town children, generation after generation of them, should
be steeped in "this morbid death orthodoxy." In the country observation of
Nature's on-goings is apt to interpose a corrective, whereas in towns the
morbidity of burial customs makes an overpowering impression. "But let a
child walk with Nature," he writes, "let him behold the beautiful blendings
and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity as taught
ii woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star,
and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and has no victory, for
it never fights. All is divine harmony."
These excerpts show that he
had entirely abandoned the historicity of the early chapters of Genesis as
well as the Pauline conception of death based upon them. It was inevitable
that the anthropocentric nature philosophy of his day, which held that man
was the principal object of creation and that all things existed only for
his good, should also fall under his condemnation. In spite of the long
letters in which his father urged this theological view of Nature upon him
as orthodox Biblical doctrine, he broke away from it radically as contrary
to reason and evidence, though without being apparently disturbed in his own
strong religious convictions.
The world, we are told [he
confides to his journal}, was made especially for man - a presumption not
supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished
whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which
they cannot cat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.
They have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator, and it
is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any
more than of heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding
gentleman in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited
monarchy; believes in the literature and language of England, is a warm
supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary
societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a
half-penny theater.
With such views of the
Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be
entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for
example, is an easy problem - food and clothing "for us," eating grass and
daisies white by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on
perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the
apple in the Garden of Eden.
In the same pleasant plan,
whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our
dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants,
hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is a case of evident destination for
ships' rigging, wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked. Cotton is another
plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for
bullets; all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of
insignificant things.
In satirical mood he then
asks these "profound expositors of God's intentions" whether the logic of
their reasoning does not indicate also that man is the divinely intended
prey of lions, tigers, alligators, and the myriads of noxious insects that
p1ag1e and destroy him. To say that these maladjustments are "unresolvable
difficulties connected with Eden's apple and the devil" is mere evasion. "It
never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers," he writes, "that
Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all
the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness
of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one
great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the
pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the
cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without the smallest
transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and
knowledge."
He is convinced that the
origin of man is bound up inextricably with the origin of every other
creature and that therefore the animal world stands to him in a relation
quite different from that which is assigned to it by the religious thought
of his day. It arouses his indignation to think that "the fearfully good,
the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry
'Heresy' on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond
the boundary epidermis of our own species." Nor is he able to accept the
"closest researches of clergy" according to whom the world is to be cleansed
and renewed by a "universal planetary combustion." Finding that whole
kingdoms of creatures have enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man
appeared, he apprehends that human beings also, when they have "played their
part in Creation's plan, may disappear without any general burning or
extraordinary commotion whatever."
It was the middle of October
when Muir reached Florida by a little coastwise steamer, Sylvan Shore, then
plying between Savannah and Fernandina. The latter town, with its fine
harbor, was not only a principal port of entry for marine commerce, but was
also the Atlantic terminus of a railroad, opened in 1861, that crossed
Florida to Cedar Keys on the Gulf, a distance of one hundred and fifty-five
miles. Along this railroad Muir footed his way leisurely across the flowery
peninsula, though not without many side excursions into the swamps and
pine-barrens wherever new plants beckoned to him. His enthusiasm over the
novel flora, even at that time of the year, was unbounded. Several notebook
drawings of the palmetto in all stages of growth and maturity testify to his
rapture over this new plant acquaintance which, as often under such
circumstances, took on a spiritual significance to him. "This palm was
indescribably impressive," he writes, "and told me grander things than I
ever got from human priest."
It will have occurred to the
reader that Muir's habit of sleeping out in the open occasionally when night
overtook him, without protection from mosquitoes, was especially dangerous
in the South. In the Florida pine- barrens where one shelterless night he
plashed and groped about until he found a place dry enough to lie down, he
observed marked evidences of malaria in the people whom he met. It is not
surprising, therefore, that he was taken severely ill soon after he reached
Cedar Keys.
In this remote and moribund
little town Muir passed one of the most serious crises of his life. Had it
not been for a family by the name of Hodgson, who took him into their home
and nursed him back to health, he would have filled a nameless grave there
soon after his arrival. Mr. Hodgson was the owner of a sawmill which he was
operating on a spit of land about two miles from town. Having ascertained
that schooners, freighted with lumber, sailed at irregular intervals from
Cedar Keys to Galveston, Texas, Muir decided to apply for work at the mill
and to await the coming of one of these schooners. His mechanical skill had
scarcely secured him the desired employment when he was seized with an
attack of fever so violent that he lay unconscious for days.
Exactly half a century after
these events my wife and I followed Muir's old trail to Cedar Keys. We had
some difficulty even in finding, two miles north of the town, the knoll on
which had stood the Hodgson residence in which Muir was nursed back to
health, and where he wrote charming descriptions of his surroundings. Amid
some picturesque old Tillandsiadraped live-oaks, clearly the same which he
had sketched in his journal fifty years earlier, we found evidence of a
former habitation- remnants of foundations, of garden-beds bordered by conch
shells, all overgrown with cactus and underbrush. From here, during days of
convalescence, he sketched Lime Key with its fringe of palmettos and yuccas,
and watched the water-birds feeding when the tide went out. The snowy egret
was no longer to be seen, but here and there a pelican flapped along on
solemn wing; gulls made patches of gleaming white upon the water, and blue
herons stalked along the reedy margin of the shore. They settled down at
times in the treetops and looked out gravely from umbrageous caves. Seaward,
through openings among the trees, one caught glimpses of distant islands -
Keys - that floated like giant birds upon the purplish-blue waters, or faded
into the opalescent haze, visible only as supports for the plumey palmetto
crowns that waved on slender trunks above them.
It was amusing to see how the
jaws of the natives dropped under a facial expanse of blank astonishment
whenever I made inquiries about things as they were in Cedar Keys fifty
years ago. The longest memory was that of an old negro by the name of Jack
Cloud, who was introduced as "McLeod." "You certainly are not a Scotchman,"
I said; "how do you come by that name?" Both he and the benchful of black
cronies in front of the store broke into laughter. "No, sah," he said, "my
name is Jack Cloud, sah, but ebberybody done calls me 'McLeod." "Were you
born here?" "Oh, Lawd, no; I wuz bawn in Georgia, sah! Aftah de wah, I come
down heah to start a cotton plantation for a man. Dat wuz in 1865. Yes, sah,
de railroad wuz heah, but so delapurdated, it done took a train a week to
get heah from Fernandina. De ties and piles wuz all rotten." He told how all
the business then went over a strait to the neighboring Key of Atsena Otie
where the first settlement had been begun. He remembered Hodgson's sawmill
and had assisted in dismantling what was left of it many decades ago.
But neither he nor any one else had any recollection of "sharp-visaged"
Captain Par- Sons and his schooner Island Belle which Muir, in January,
1868, saw threading her way along the tortuous channel that leads into the
harbor of Cedar Keys. Fifty years had swallowed up all memory of him and his
ship; of John Muir and his sojourn; of his friends and their home. In this
unlettered corner of the South, where decay in league with warmth and sun
and rain obliterates the works of man more speedily than anywhere else,
oblivion had swallowed up with equal haste the records of human memories.
Muir still was a convalescent
when he boarded the Island Belle and sailed away to Cuba. For a month he
made his home on the vessel, at anchor in the harbor of Havana, and spent
his days botanizing on the outskirts of the city. The captain and the
sailors were accustomed to gather about him when he returned in the evening
in order to be entertained with a recital of the day's adventures and
discoveries. He was consumed with a desire to explore the central mountain
range of Cuba through the whole length of the island and then embark for
South America. "My plan," he writes, "was to go ashore anywhere on the north
end of the continent, push on southward through the wilderness around the
headwaters of the Orinoco, until I reached a tributary of the Amazon, and
float down on a raft or skiff the whole length of the great river to its
mouth." It seems strange that such a trip should ever have entered the
dreams of any person, however enthusiastic and full of daring, particularly
under the disadvantages of poor health, of funds less than a hundred
dollars, and of the insalubrity of the Amazon valley.
His weakened physical
condition forced him to admit that the plan to explore the mountainous
wildernesses of Cuba was impossible. After visiting all the shipping
agencies in a vain search for a vessel bound for South America this rash
enterprise was abandoned also, or rather postponed, as he was accustomed to
say. It was then that his mind turned to California, whose wonders had
engaged his fancy for many a year. Upon consulting Captain Parsons
concerning a passage to New York, the latter pointed out to him a trim
little fruit schooner loaded with oranges and ready to weigh anchor. With
his usual promptness in making decisions he was aboard the little fruiter
and bound for New York within twenty-four hours.
Muir's enthusiastic
description of this trip in one of the chapters of his "Thousand-Mile Walk
to the Gulf" shows that he took almost as much delight in the scenes of the
ocean as in those on land. But New York bewildered him by its size, throngs,
and noise. By permission of the captain the schooner remained his home while
he made arrangements for his passage to Panama. His walks about the city of
New York, he says, "extended but little beyond sight of my little schooner
home. . . . Often I thought I would like to explore the city if, like a lot
of wild hills and valleys, it was clear of inhabitants."
The North American Company at
this time had ordered from New York a new steamship for its Pacific Coast
traffic. This was the Nebraska, and she had sailed early in January, 1868,
on her long maiden voyage around Cape Horn. Muir found that the Santiago de
Cuba was scheduled to sail for Aspinwall on the 6th of March, and that her
passengers would connect with the northward-bound Nebraska on the Pacific
side of the Isthmus of Panama in about ten days. The records show that the
Santiago de Cuba, not a large boat, carried on this trip four hundred
passengers and five hundred and forty-two tons of freight. So overcrowded
was the vessel that many passengers had to sleep on the decks. Nevertheless
Muir engaged steerage passage on this boat and made connections with the
Nebraska.
Over his experiences on
shipboard, both to Panama and from there to California, Muir has drawn the
veil of oblivion. He rarely referred to them, even in the circle of his own
family, and then only to indicate that they were such as one would have to
forget in order to retain one's faith in humanity. But of the trip across
the Isthmus he wrote, "Never shall I forget the glorious flora, especially
for the first fifteen or twenty miles along the Chagres River. The riotous
exuberance of great forest trees, glowing in purple, red, and yellow
flowers, far surpassed anything I had ever seen, especially of flowering
trees, either in Florida or Cuba. I gazed from the car platform enchanted. I
fairly cried for joy and hoped that sometime I should be able to return and
enjoy and study this most glorious of forests to my heart's content." |
