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[at-l] Who is Andre Michaux?
- Subject: [at-l] Who is Andre Michaux?
- From: "Coosa" <coosa@fox21.net>
- Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 10:31:01 -0400
Tribute To The Noted French Botanist
Andre Michaux
By Charles Kuralt
Grandfather Mountain,
Linville, North Carolina,
August 28, 1994
Two hundred years ago today, a man was climbing Grandfather
Mountain. There was no road to the top then, of course, no trail
of any
kind; and this was his second day of clearing a way through the
thick
tangles of rhododendron - which the mountain people came to refer
to as laurel hells - dodging
around fallen trees, edging along rock faces, working his way
higher. Two hundred years ago tonight,
he slept on the ground somewhere up there behind us, and then
spent another day climbing, and
another night impatiently camped, waiting for the break of day.
On the fourth day of his ascent,
August 30th, 1794, he jubilantly recorded in his diary: “Reached
the summit of the highest mountain
in North America...I sang the Marseillaise and shouted, `Long
live America and the Republic of
France! Long live liberty!'”
He can be forgiven for thinking this old mountain was the
highest on the continent. It certainly looks
like it might be the highest from down here below. Up on the top,
it feels like it might be the highest
(have you seen Hugh Morton's photograph of the skyline of
Charlotte from up there?) and,
moreover, in 1794, a higher mountain had not been recorded on
this continent in all the annals of
exploration.
So here was a 48-year-old Frenchman, standing up there on top
of the world, singing to the
heavens the new national anthem of his country, and shouting to
the wind his love for France, and for
America, and for the great wave of liberty which had only
recently washed across both lands.
we should all remember his name
His name was Andre Michaux, and we should all
remember his name, for he
was one of the most remarkable human beings of the
18th Century, or of any
century. In paying tribute to his memory here
today, we are honoring the great
impulses of the human spirit, all of which were in
him: courage, vision, strength,
generosity, persistence — and intellectual
achievement which, in these
intellectually lazy times, we can hardly
comprehend or appreciate. Andre
Michaux was a linguist...master of French,
English, Latin, Greek and every other
language he ever encountered within a few weeks of
encountering it, including, in
due course, the Cherokee language. He was an
explorer, artist, naturalist,
scholar. If you asked him what he was, he might have replied
modestly, “botanist.” If you ask me I
can only reply, Monsieur Michaux was a piece of work...a man for
the ages.
He was a young well-born farmer in France. His beautiful young
wife died in childbirth, and in his
grief, the farm came to feel like a prison to him. He resolved to
escape it by becoming a footloose
student of the world beyond his own village. His lively mind and
fascination with everything green and
growing led him to an association with the great gardeners of the
royal gardens at Versailles and at
Marie Antoinette's Trianon. Soon, he was making botanical
expeditions of his own under the
sponsorship of the brother of the king. There was never a horizon
beyond which he feared to venture
in search of plants and seeds. When it was suggested that he
travel east, he traveled east to Bagdad,
east to Afghanistan, it may be - and on to the borders of India.
He was waylaid by bandits and left
for dead, naked on a mountain trail in Persia, and while nursing
himself back to health, thought he
would pass the time by compiling a French-Persian dictionary, and
so he did — just one of his
incidental accomplishments, a model of linguistic scholarship.
When he felt well enough, he returned
to France, bringing with him from the east to Europe the camellia
and the mimosa, and gingko, and
pomegranate, and sweet olive and Grecian laurel.
Well, “Thank you, Michaux,” said the director of the royal
parks and gardens. “And now, will you
please go to America and find some useful trees — large ones
adaptable to the climate and soil of
France for use as timbers for ships?” “Of course,” said Andre
Michaux, and within days, he gathered
up his 15-year-old son, Francois, and a trained gardener and a
servant, and he sailed for New York.
And on arriving in New York, as we say, he hit the ground
running. Three weeks later, his first
shipment of several boxes was already on its way to France —
trees, seeds, cranberries, sweet
potatoes. Three weeks after that, he had established a garden on
the Hackensack River across the
Hudson from New York to produce seedlings and serve as a way
station for the plants he
discovered in the north. Soon after that, he had established
another garden near Charleston, South
Carolina, to serve the same purpose for plants he discovered in
the south. In between, he discovered
plants — many dozens the world had not known before. He paid his
respects to American scholars,
he dined with Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and George
Washington in Williamsburg. But ninety
nights of every hundred found him dining sparsely and alone,
writing his notes by campfire or under
the light of the moon somewhere in the wilderness of the
Carolinas or Florida or Georgia, and in
those notes, you can read the suppressed excitement of his
encounters with live oaks and cypresses,
and bay trees and magnolias, and orchids and azaleas.
Daniel Boone occupies a place in our imagination that should
belong to Michaux
Andre Michaux traveled in America for eleven years and along
many thousands of miles of Indian
trails and animal tracks, often venturing, alone with his pack
horses, into territory unknown to
settlers. Before he was done, I say he knew this country better
than anybody else, better than any
Indian or woodsman or trapper or trader. Daniel Boone occupies
the place in our imagination which
really should belong to Andre Michaux, whose travels were
infinitely more daring and more
extensive. And unlike Boone and other trail-blazers of the
period, Andre Michaux made no claim of
land or timber or mineral wealth. The only wealth he sought was
scientific knowledge. Seeking it,
insatiably, he traveled south into the impassable marshes of
southern Florida and north into the tundra
of British Canada and west through the thick forests of Kentucky
and Illinois and into the unmapped
territory west of the Mississippi. He was repeatedly swamped and
overturned in flatboats and
canoes. His horses wandered away or were stolen. He suffered vile
and life threatening fevers, and
hunger and thirst, and bruises and broken bones. His journals
hardly mention these hazards and
discomforts. His journals say, “Gathered seed,” “Prepared seed
for shipping.”
“Shipped eleven
hundred and sixty-eight seeds and plants.”
Andre Michaux went far. He wanted to go farther. In 1793, he
proposed to Thomas Jefferson the
secret mission that resulted in the journey of Lewis and Clark
across the continent to the Pacific
northwest. Loyalty to an undertaking for France is the only thing
that prevented Michaux from
making that expedition of discovery himself — and 12 years
earlier. He wanted to do so, and
Jefferson wanted him to do so. Michaux dreamed dreams of waves
washing the Pacific coast, but he
never saw them.
He contented himself with returning the next year to the North
Carolina mountains, which he now
recognized as the great botanical laboratory and paradise of
North America. After a few weeks in
Charleston that spring, slowly and agonizingly recovering from
yet another bout with malaria, he felt
strong enough to set out again...up the valleys of Santee and
Wateree and Catawba...toward the
blue ridges in the distance. It was his first late-summer trip to
these mountains, and he found plants
new even to him...a new stewartia between Charlotte and
Lincolnton...a lily of the valley on the
mountianside above Linville...a flame azalea...white alder and
mountain cranberry...the green and
growing things that always made his heart beat faster. And in
that spirit of excitement, we find Andre
Michaux climbing toward the peak of Grandfather Mountain two
hundred years ago today. He had
been sent to America by the royal establishment of France. But he
had lived for nine years now
among the formidable democrats of the young American
republic...the ones we call the Founding
Fathers...and even though he did not know what would become of
his own land holdings and
possessions at home in the chaos that followed the French
Revolution, he had embraced the birth of
liberty in France with all his heart...even, while nearly
starving on one of his wilderness expeditions,
refusing a meal from a frontier settler with royalist sympathies
who insulted the new French
Republic...Michaux preferred, as he wrote in his diary, to go
hungry another night and sleep on his
deerskin rather than in the bed of a fanatical partisan of
royalty.
this mountain is botanically extraordinary almost beyond
expressing it
So now, here he is, a proud citizen of the new France, a warm
friend of the new United States of
America, here he is, two hundred years ago this afternoon,
climbing Grandfather Mountain. He was
alive with the thrill of discovery. He knew something then that
most of us do not appreciate even
today...that this place where he climbed, where we are gathered,
is botanically extraordinary almost
beyond expressing it. When Andre Michaux reached the summit of
Grandfather Mountain, he knew
that within his sight on this mountain and in this valley, in a
circle of a few miles, exists a greater
variety of plant life that can be found in all of Europe from the
arctic capes of Scandinavia to the
shores of southern Greece. Here he found plants and roots which
exist — amazingly — only in the
southern Appalachians, or only here and in Tibet, or only here
and in China. This place was his
Eden. No wonder he sang that day up there at the top of
Grandfather, and shouted in exultation! He
would have sung “The Star Spangled Banner” but for the
inconvenient fact that it had not been
written, and would not be for another 20 years.
We should all know more of Andre
Michaux. He was a
genuine hero of science and of
exploration. His name lives
on, affixed after the Latin names
of plants he
discovered...among these were the
60-thousand plants and
trees he sent from the New World to
the old. His great
books are there to be read and
learned from, his
comprehensive work on American
oaks, and his illustrated
two-volume description of growing
things on this continent,
Flora Boreali-Americana. His
journals are in the care of
the American Philosophical Society.
I have drawn this brief
sketch of his life from the book,
Lost Heritage by Henry
Savage, Jr. And there are other
monographs and
biographies. To read about his life is to be impressed at every
turning of the page.
Wild Flowers of North Carolina, just counting the times that
Michaux's name appears. Among his
discoveries are some of our best-loved plants. The purple
rhododendron that sets our mountains
ablaze in the spring. Malus angustifolia Michaux - the crab
apple. Ranuculus hispidus Michaux - the
buttercup. You can find two dozen such examples in Ritchie Bell's
Wild Flowers of North Carolina.
Two years after his ascent of Grandfather Mountain, having
sent his son ahead before him, Andre
Michaux finally sailed from Charleston to return to France. His
ship was wrecked in a storm off the
coast of Holland...he was rescued, unconscious on the beach, by
some villagers...and when he came
to, immediately — of course, since we know him now, we know what
he did...he set about
recovering his boxes which had washed ashore, his notebooks, and
his precious plants and seeds.
He was able to salvage most of them, and spent six weeks in
Holland drying them out, and,
laboriously, but with no complaint, make his way finally to
Paris.
He never returned to America. He died of a tropical fever in
Madagascar in November, 1802, of
course while collecting plants and seeds.
Andre Michaux was a disciplined scholar, but his soul had
wings. He was a free spirit, as we all
should aspire to be. No words can honor him more than the words
he himself declared to the wind
from the top of this mountain over here two hundred years ago:
“Long live America and the Republic of France!”
“Long live liberty!”
-CK-
http://www.grandfather-mountain.com/museum/michaux/CKmichaux.htm
But then, I'm related to Daniel Boone and not Andre Michaux or else I'd
promote this information. Coosa
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