Names for the New World

Sunset, Nov, 1998 by Peter Fish

I am riding shotgun beside Terry Nevin, a Waimea resident who guides visitors around this part of the island. We are looking for the place where, more than 160 years ago, a man named David Douglas sought knowledge and found death.

One can list the reasons people journeyed into the American West: for land, for gold, for God. The pursuit of knowledge is not generally included on such lists. Yet David Douglas shows that it can be as potent and treacherous a lure as any of the others.

Douglas was born on the other side of the globe, at Scone, Scotland, in 1799. We are told by a biographer that his favorite childhood book was Robinson Crusoe, appropriately enough. Like a later Scot, John Muir, Douglas seemed enraptured by nature even as a boy. He learned botany as a gardener's apprentice, then studied with the preeminent botanist of the day, William Hooker, who recommended the young man to the Royal Horticultural Society.

From there, the wide world. It is hard from our vantage point to think of the American West as a scientific unknown. But that is what it represented to the learned societies of 19th-century England. When the Royal Horticultural Society sent Douglas to investigate the flora of the Pacific Northwest, they might as well have been sending him to Mars.

Terry Nevin steers his old truck along the rutted road. Nevin sees himself as a scientist of sorts, coming to the Big Island to work as a technician on the telescopes atop Mauna Kea. Now his tour business supports his avocation: analyzing the mathematics behind the pyramids of Egypt. He explains his theories to me, but I lose him in the sines and cosines and turn back to Douglas.

Douglas arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River in April 1825. During the next two years, he traveled up the Columbia, the Snake, the Okanogan: almost 4,000 miles, noting, comparing, and gathering and preparing specimens for shipment back to London. Such scientific types often strike us as laughable in their single-mindedness Consider Cary Grant's paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby, or Henry Fonda's herpetologist in The Lady Eve. "Snakes are my life," Fonda tells Barbara Stanwyck. "What a life," she replies. Douglas's travels too have their comic overtones - his eyesight grew so bad that one gets the image of Mr. Magoo roaming the Northwest bumping into trees. Yet when you read his journals, you feel thrilled.

Take his travels down the Multnomah River - now the Willamette - in search of a rumored large pine. On the way he contended with suspicious Umpqua Indians, a broken rib, and plants whose hostility, he noted with botanical precision: "My feet tonight are very painful and my toes cut with the burned stumps of a strong species of Arundo and Spiraea tomentosa." His reward was to be the first European to view a sugar pine: "this most beautiful and immensely large tree," he noted in his journal. He also wrote: "When my people in England are made acquainted with my travels, they may perhaps think I have told them nothing but my miseries. That may be very correct, but I now know that such objects as I am in quest of are not obtained without a share of labor, anxiety of mind, and sometimes risk of personal safety."

Here are some of the Western plant species that Douglas discovered or introduced to the outside world: Picea sitchensis (Sitka spruce), Pinus lambertiana (sugar pine), Pinus ponderosa (Western yellow pine), Pinus radiata (Monterey pine), and of course Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas fir), whose Latinate name recalls its first discoverer (Archibald Menzies, surgeon with explorer George Vancouver) but whose English title honors the first man to ship its seeds back to London. Also the California poppy, 5 species of monkey flower, 18 of lupine.

One can argue that Douglas's work represents a form of cultural imperialism. Those pines and those poppies already possessed names - Umpqua names, Chinook names. But there is something undeniably powerful about that march of Latinate species and genus designations, as if Douglas were writing his own Book of Genesis.

We drive on. It has begun to rain. Wipers thwack against the cracked windshield.

Douglas came to Hawaii to continue his botanical explorations, but his stay here formed a tragic coda to his distinguished travels. By the time he arrived, in 1833, he had been back to England. It was not a particularly happy homecoming. He felt unappreciated and underpaid. "His temper became more sensitive than ever and himself restless and dissatisfied," noted one contemporary. His health was shaky, his eyesight worse than ever.

In July 1834 he was pushing inland from Kohala Point on the island of Hawaii, planning to walk the 100 miles to Hilo. On July 12 he had breakfast at the lodge of one Ned Gurney, an Australian ex-convict of dubious reputation. Gurney would later state he warned Douglas about the bullock pits - camouflaged rock-walled pits where Gurney would trap wild bulls - along the trail. Before moon two of his men peered into one of the pits. They saw a trapped bull standing astride Douglas's torn body.