Then, at a stroke, the summer of 1872, he was given a gun and a large pair of spectacles and nothing had prepared him for the shock, for the infinite difference in his entire perception of the world about him or his place in it.
The gun was a gift from Papa—a 12-gauge, double-barreled Frenchmade (Lefaucheux) shotgun with a lot of kick and of such simple, rugged design that it could be hammered open with a brick if need be, the ideal gun for an awkward, frequently absent-minded thirteen-year-old. But blasting away with it in the woods near Dobbs Ferry he found he had trouble hitting anything. More puzzling, his friends were constantly shooting at things he never even saw. This and the fact that they could also read words on billboards that he could barely see, he reported to his father, and it was thus, at summer’s end, that the spectacles were obtained.
They transformed everything. They “literally opened an entirely new world to me,” he wrote years afterward, remembering the moment. His range of vision until then had been about thirty feet, perhaps less. Everything beyond was a blur. Yet neither he nor the family had sensed how handicapped he was. “I had no idea how beautiful the world was . . . I could not see, and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.”
How such a condition could possibly have gone undetected for so long is something of a mystery, but once discovered it did much to explain his awkwardness and the characteristic detached look he had, those large blue eyes “not looking at anything present.”
3
It was the world of birds—birds, above all—that burst upon him now, upstaging all else in his eyes, now that he could actually see them in colors and in numbers beyond anything he had ever imagined.
Normally, with summer ended and city life resumed, he would have had to wait until spring to return to the woods, but that same fall, in October 1872, the family set off for a second sojourn abroad, an even longer tour than the last, beginning with a winter on the Nile. So by mid-December, with gun and spectacles, he was tramping the shores of the “great and mysterious river,” knocking birds from the sky as rapidly as he knew how, happy as he had ever been.
The birdlife of the Nile is extraordinary. The river is a flyway and a winter haven for thousands upon thousands of birds. The air is thick with them—larks, doves, herons, kingfishers, and tremendous flocks of snow-white cattle egrets, which are called ibises locally, or “the farmers’ friends”; wild ducks of a dozen different varieties, geese and vultures and hawks, and magnificent black-and-yellow kites that sail like hawks against the sky, their wings golden in the sunshine. And he could see it all—”quite well through my spectacles.” At sundown once, outside Cairo, he watched for nearly two hours as tens, then hundreds of “ibises” came in to roost in the treetops of a distant island in the river, until the trees were “whitened with immense multitudes.” In an hour’s time another day he counted fifteen different species of birds.
But seldom was he content merely to look. As a serious scientist, he must collect, and from the day the family expedition set forth, heading “up south” on the river, the collecting—the killing—commenced in earnest. He downed his first specimen, a warbler, the first bird he had ever killed, December 13, the first morning on the Nile, a few miles above Cairo. He next very proudly “blew a chat to pieces” and in the days following, combing the riverbanks, wandering through groves of date palms, he fired away at just about anything in sight, killed a wagtail, a pelican, hawks, larks, doves, then an ibis. Christmas morning he was given another shotgun with which he found he could bring down five starlings with a single shot.
Theodore allowed he, too, had caught the spirit, so intense was the boy’s pleasure. Theodore seems to have shown no prior enthusiasm for killing anything. He was the sort of father who, at breakfast, would rescue a yellow jacket from the honeypot, cup it in his hands and carry it out the door to freedom. But now it was “Father and I” who “sallied out with our guns,” day after day, leaving the rest of the family on board the great Nile houseboat, or dahabeah, which Theodore had chartered for the trip. “Father and I went out shooting and procured eighteen birds,” reads one entry. On another foray he “procured” a grosbeak, a sand lark, four chats, a crested lark, a ringed plover, and a dove. Writing to sister Anna, Mittie described how at Thebes Teedie came to her with “eyes sparkling with delight”—a dead crane in his arms. It was, he noted, the biggest thing he had as yet killed.
No one appears to have objected to any of this. To him it was all “splendid sport.” Egypt was like another long summer of freedom, of brilliant skies and open space. Lessons in French and English taught by Bamie occupied only a few hours a day. Father was a steady companion.
Again his asthma vanished. He had never known such a winter, he wrote. To look over the desert gave one the same feeling as looking over the Great Prairies of America, said the boy who had never been west of Philadelphia but who knew his Cooper and Captain Mayne Reid. He was Natty Bumppo on the Nile. Or Rube Rawlings, Captain Reid’s version of Natty. He was Humboldt on the Orinoco, seeing new worlds with the eyes of science. Or John James Audubon, who in his time may have killed more varieties of birds than any man who ever lived.
Sky and river and birds became his element. Work, his “serious work,” was what gave the journey its “chief zest.” Only on Sundays was he required to put up his gun and abstain from the assault.
And in all there was something faintly comic about him. He had, as would be said, a kind of headlong, harum-scarum quality that was more Don Quixote than Humboldt. Bamie, remembering the big spectacles and the great gun slung over one shoulder, described how he would charge off astride a small donkey, “ruthlessly” in chase of “whatever object he had in view.” Appearing suddenly in the midst of other mounted tourists, his donkey out of control, he could be “distinctly dangerous,” as he and his gun bounced every which way.
Theodore wrote of plunging after him through a bog (both were on foot in this instance), doing his all to keep up” at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours . . . I felt I must keep up with Teedie.”
The advent of gun and spectacles, moreover, had coincided with marked physical changes. He was rapidly growing out of his clothes. He was suddenly all wrists and anklebones, unkempt and shaggy, wearing his hair “à-la-mop,” as he said. River mud clung to shoes and trousers. “The sporting is injurious to my trousers,” he explained in mock annoyance.
The return to the dahabeah at the end of each day’s hunt, game bag full, was his chance to shine. He performed right on deck, in the still, hot afternoons, his taxidermy kit—knives, scissors, arsenic, tweezers, needle, thread, cotton padding, an old toothbrush—spread before him. He worked in the shade of a long, sun-bleached canopy, skinning the day’s kill, surrounded usually by odd members of the family, guests, or some of the boat’s crew.
The procedure was the same for each bird, large or small. It was placed on its back on a clean towel or sheet of paper. He opened the beak, put in a bit of cotton padding, then bound the beak tight with thread. The anus also was packed with a bit of cotton, to keep it from excreting blood and excrement and soiling the feathers. Then he parted the feathers from the hollow of the breast to the anus and with his knife made an incision, being extremely careful not to bear down any more than necessary. With his fingers he then began slowly to peel the skin away from the body, again working with the greatest care, so as not to tear the skin. The legs had next to be cut away, at the first joint, then the end of the spine had to be severed, again very carefully, leaving all tail feathers intact. If he became too hurried, if he tore the skin or flooded the feathers with blood, the job would be ruined.
The wings were cut with scissors near the body. Then the skin from the skull had to be peeled back with utmost caution and particularly around the eyes, the skin being pulled away up to the beak, at which point he would cut the neck at the base of the skull. This done he could clean out the brain, tongue, and palate, then pull the skin back over the skull. And once all that was accomp
lished he had only to skin the legs, wings, and tail, each in itself a ticklish process requiring equal care and patience.
It was, plainly, work neither for the squeamish nor for anyone accustomed to tossing things off in half-hearted fashion. Many adults might find it beyond them, even as spectators.
Once, dissecting a kestrel, he discovered in its crop (to his utter delight) the remains of a lark, a lizard, and several beetles.
Neither the game bag nor the taxidermy kit nor he himself smelled any too good apparently. It was, remembered Bamie, “to the discomfort of everyone connected with him” that he carried forth with his new passion.
4
“The traveler is a perfect king in his boat,” explained Lloyd’s guidebook to the Nile, and large, bearded Theodore Roosevelt might have served as the model. When not off with Teedie chasing after birds, he liked to sit on deck smoking his cigar or reading aloud to the assembled group from a heavy volume of Egyptian history. It was he who organized picnics ashore and planned their outings to the great monuments. Sundays he served as pastor to his fold, preaching on deck. Watching the shoreline slide by, he found that “everything carries me back to old Bible times.” Like countless other travelers on the river, he seems to have been filled with a sense of the everlastingness of life. These were the people who had held the Jews in bondage, he said, and they looked no different, he imagined, from what they had then. “We have even seen the magicians with their snakes in the public streets,” he wrote to Anna Gracie, “taking quietly scorpions and cobras out of their shirt bosoms, and the old bricks that gave the Jews so much worry are still made of mud and straw now lying on the bank as I look up.”
Once, in Cairo, Teedie had noted how “a beautiful Circassian lady, inmate of a rich man’s harem, was looking (with veil dropped) out of a window above us . . . and appeared to have no objection to being openly admired by Father.”
Mittie, from what she and others wrote of the journey, may be pictured rising early each day to get the morning air, a slim, youthful woman in white, lovely as the morning, and tiny beneath the sweep of canopy. Temperatures by midday were in the high seventies, mornings and evenings were more like October, and though her dyspepsia caused her to feel “pretty bad” at times, her spirits were high. The heavenly air and sunshine, the slow lulling rhythm of their progress on the river, stirred a sensual joy in the elements and in her own being. She relished the privacy and comfort of the boat, the “open air life with nothing to do,” “the splendid sun.” Theodore questioned how such advanced people as those of the ancient kingdoms could have worshiped birds and wolves. Mittie wrote, “In such a climate as this, I do not wonder that they became sun worshippers.”
As a way to travel there was really nothing like it. Henry Adams, who was also “doing” the Nile that winter in a dahabeah, said he had never known until then what luxury was. To Mittie it was the ultimate departure from life as usual. She was the Roosevelt who knew how to relax; the hours of peace and quiet, the service on board, suited her exactly. “The children have gone to bed,” she begins a letter about ten one evening. “I am seated in the little salon of our dahabeah. The door is open which leads to our deck, and by the lamp which is on the table there I can see Ibrahim, our waiter, ironing some of our linen. . . . Some of his front teeth are gone, but I love him still.”
The boat, the Aboul Irdan (Ibis in English), had a crew of thirteen, not counting the captain and steersman, a “first-class cook” and his assistant, plus two servants. As specified in the contract, it was well supplied with “everything (excepting wines and liquors) necessary for the comfort of the passengers.” Teedie describe it as “the nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place you ever saw.” Three meals daily were served in a paneled dining salon. There were staterooms for everyone, bath, divans on deck.
In total, in two months’ time, they traveled nearly twelve hundred miles on the river, from Cairo to the First Cataract at Aswan and back again, and along with climate and scenery and monumental ruins, they enjoyed a very social time, since they were actually traveling in a small convoy with two other parties. Four young Harvard men—Nathaniel Thayer, Augustus Jay, Francis Merriam, and Harry Godey—were aboard the dahabeah Rachel. Mr. and Mrs. Smith Clift of New York, with their daughters Edith and Elizabeth, were on the Gazelle.
Because of Egypt’s prevailing northerly winds, progress southbound, upriver on the Nile, was good most of the time. With sufficient wind they were under sail day and night. (It was also specified in the contract that day and night “one of the crew shall at all times of sailing hold the rope or sheet that is attached to each sail.”) Those times when the wind suddenly dropped, the river would take hold. “Sometimes we sail head foremost,” wrote Conie to her friend Edie Carow, “and sometimes the current turns us all the way around . . .” On days when there was no wind at all, the choices were to wait at anchor near shore, accept a tow from a steam tug, or start “tracking,” the immemorial system whereby the crew went wading ashore to drag the boat forward.
Initially, it had been suggested that a steam tug be hired at Cairo to tow the whole convoy of Americans to Aswan, but the Roosevelts declined, “as we go for the entirely different life,” Mittie explained. On the return trip they could ride with the current.
To the children, for the rest of their lives it would always be “that wonderful winter” on the Nile. “Our life on board I cannot describe,” wrote Ellie; “it is lazy I know and yet I have not a minute to spare.” Conie recalled “an absolute sense of well being”; Bamie, the “golden sunshine with never a moment’s rain.”
They were all three years older than they had been the first time abroad. It was not Teedie alone who was changing; they all were. Bamie, who at Vienna in another few months would make the first of her several debuts, turned eighteen at Aswan, an event celebrated with a family expedition by moonlight to the island of Philae. It had been discovered that she too was painfully nearsighted and like Teedie she was fitted with spectacles, but so great was her fathers power over her that when he said—in jest presumably—that he had no wish to present a daughter to society who wore such things, she put them away and refused ever to wear them.
She sits with him in a studio portrait made at about this point in her life, the only photograph we know for which he posed with any one child. It is in the classic Victorian father-daughter mode. There are yards of damask drapery, a tasseled bell cord, a pedestal, a painted backdrop of a garden wall. She has a footstool and sits hands in lap. Her feathered hat and tailored jacket, the large bow at her neck, are the height of fashion, and her small figure, for all that conceals it, is plainly that of a young woman. He studies her from behind, one elbow on the pedestal, only his head and upper torso revealed, which is what makes the picture so interesting. Father is seen quite literally on a pedestal, his pensive, adoring gaze fixed forever on the focal point of the arrangement, her plain, pale, but somehow very determined little face.
She was interested, very interested, in the Harvard foursome who came aboard to visit time after time, but then she realized all at once that it was Mittie they came to see; it was her “darling little mother” who so fascinated them, just as later in Europe Mittie would be taken for her sister, her younger sister.
“Still, we all became devoted friends,” she would recall by way of dismissing the incident, yet for her to have harbored no resentment, no jealously toward her mother would have been nearly inhuman, and one day her own son would confirm that she was in fact quite jealous of Mittie through much of her youth.
Her duties as tutor to the younger three were assumed without complaint. It was an effort, she said, that “taught me more than I had ever learned before . . . it did make us work, and that was what Father wished. . . .”
Elliott, still the larger, more robust of the two brothers, was an ingratiating youngster, as naturally sociable, open-faced, and now as carefully combed and particular about his appearance as Teedie was the opposite. He seemed to have little of Teedie
’s hunger for attention. Conversation, friends, came easily. He loved to sing and to write nonsense verse and was good at both:
There was an old fellow named Teedie,
Whose clothes at best looked so seedy
That his friends in dismay
Hollered out, “Oh! I say!”
At this dirty old fellow named Teedie.
His gift from Papa at Christmas was a rowboat, by which he put off from the dahabeah to wander alone over the river at will, disturbing neither man nor beast so far as we know.
Possibly the most changed of all the children was Corinne, who at eleven was an infant no more, but a pert, unmistakably female little presence, quick to learn, quick to laugh or cry over not very much, yet sufficiently mature to be moved both by the majesty of Karnak and the “mystic” face of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson too was on the Nile that same season, and when, at Rhoda, he and his daughter anchored close by the Roosevelts, Theodore at once took his four to meet him. Later Emerson and his daughter, Ellen, returned the visit and Ellen in a letter has left us one of the rare observations on the children written by somebody outside the family. “Enchanting children,” she called them, “healthy, natural well-brought-up, and with beautiful manners.”
New Year’s Eve Theodore organized a party on deck that the children remembered as the high point of the trip. They were anchored at Minya, four dahabeahs tied up in the dark, another boat, Waterlily, with some people named Waitman, having joined the flotilla. With the newcomers, the Clift family, the Harvard men, and the Roosevelts there were fifteen to twenty people by the time everybody assembled. Theodore and Bamie made eggnog and young Francis Merriam started off the singing with something called “She’s Naughty but So Nice.” They did “Paddy, Come Over the Hill” and “Clochette, Clochette, She Was a Sad Coquette” and “Old Folks at Home”:
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 289