Etc. Magazine Winter 2019

etc.

Winter 2019

The Magazine of The Redwood Library & Athenæum

To the Heavens and Back: Exploration and Enlightenment The Search for Capt.

Cook’s Endeavour in Newport Harbor The Moon as Mirror Sailing Adventures with the Buckleys Cloning the Redwood’s Fernleaf Beech

Explore. Discover. Synthesize. Then, explore some more.

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The gift of childlike curiosity leads us to some of the biggest, most profound discoveries about our world and our place in it.

The more we explore, the more we gain perspective, balance find just how much we have in common, and just how the Universe and we are inextricably linked to each other.

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CONTENTS

Dear Friends,

It has often been said that the eighteenth century was the first ‘global’ age, during which contact between previously separated parts of the globe fostered a greater appreciation of the world as an interlocking system. This new globalism was of course the result of the activities that gave the period its other traditional appellation: the ‘age of exploration.’

Today we rightly retain the exploits of Captain Cook in the Pacific, but the business of exploration was itself global: consider, as but one example, the Finn Henrik Wikar, initially an agent for the Dutch East India Company, who documented Southern Africa in the 1770s.

As we know, even as they provided much of the raw material that fueled the rise of modern science, these expeditions were hardly benign, prefacing as they did the manifold exploitations of colonialism, the aftermaths of which still bedevil us today. What they did do, on a more positive note, was fuel a fashion for learning—for intellectual exploration.

America, and the Redwood itself, loomed large in these interconnected narratives. For if, as Adam Smith affirmed, the discovery of America was one of the two “greatest and most important events in the history of mankind,” we should understand the profound symbolism no less than the mind-expanding benefits of the first purpose-built library in that watershed land. The Redwood’s erection in mid-eighteenth-century Newport was a public statement addressed to the world: ‘We aren’t untutored brutes at the margins of empire, but civilized people belonging to the Classical tradition.’ In practical terms, as a library containing the breadth of the Enlightenment’s ‘useful knowledge,’ the Redwood served as a bulwark against the unknown, equipping adherents for the adventure of life in a fast-changing world much like our own, defined by expansion into uncharted territories.

Thus today, fifty years on from the moon landing, as we ponder NASA’s recent announcement to have humans on Mars in fifteen years, as well as the daily forebodings of a new world dominated by AI and the dislocations of climate change, all the more reason to draw strength and historical wisdom from our forebears at the Redwood, so that we too might forge forth bravely—and informed.

Mission Statement Founded in 1747 on the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual pursuit and civic engagement, and committed to lifelong, interdisciplinary learning, the Redwood Library & Athenæum generates knowledge in the humanities for the benefit of the widest possible audience with “nothing in view but the good of mankind.”

Redwood Library & Athenæum Board of Directors 2019-2020

Marvin Abney Holly Bannister Daniel Benson Miles Bidwell Josiah Bunting III Vincent Buonanno Grenville Craig Jacalyn Egan Edwin G. Fischer, M.D.*

Liza Oliver, Ph.D.

7 The Search for Capt.

Cook’s Endeavour in

Newport Harbor

D. K. (Kathy) Abbass, Ph.D. 1 0 The Moon as Mirror

Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. 1 3 Treasures of the Redwood

Michelle Farias

1 4 Sailing Adventures with

the Buckleys

Amanda M. Grosvenor

1 6 Cloning the Redwood’s

Fernleaf Beech

Don Dery 1 8 At the Athenæum 2 0 Exhibitions at the Redwood

etc.

Winter 2019 | Vol. II, 2 redwoodlibrary.org Editorial Director Benedict Leca, Ph.D. Editor Patricia Barry Pettit Editorial Advisor Don Dery Design Pam Rogers Design Reprint of any content herein must bear following credit line: Originally Published in Etc., The Magazine of the Redwood Library & Athenæum Winter 2019

Benedict Leca, Ph.D. Executive Director

R. Daniel Prentiss, Esq. President

2 To the Heavens and

Back: Exploration and Enlightenment

John R. Grace Washington Irving III Dodie Kazanjian Elizabeth Leatherman M. Holt Massey Earl McMillen III Victoria Mele Janet A. Pell Earl A. Powell III R. Daniel Prentiss Frank Ray *Honorary Board Member

chartered 1747 Redwood Library & Athenæum 50 Bellevue Avenue Newport, Rhode Island 02840 401.847.0292 redwood@redwoodlibrary.org @redwoodlibrary @theredwoodlibrary @RedwoodLibrary

Cover: Terrestrial Globe John & William Cary, London, 1818 Special Collections: Decorative Arts Gift of George Tiffany March 1, 1815 with additions and corrections to 1818, sold by J & W Cary, London.

Contained in round Sheraton mahogany stand, having three turned and reeded Sheraton legs terminating to brass casters and turned cross stretchers containing a round medial platform to receive a compass.

The inscription reads “Cary’s New Terrestrial Globe, exhibiting the Tracks and Discoveries made by Captain Cook; also those of Captain Vancouver on the Northwest Coast of America; and M. Del. Perouse, on the coast of Tartary. Together with every other Improvement collected from Various Navigators to the present time.”

Photo: David Hansen

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Fig. 1. Galileo Galilei, etchings of the Moon, from Sidereus Nuncius, 1610

To the Heavens and Back: Exploration and Enlightenment

by Liza Oliver, Ph.D. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing of July 20, 1969, an event that early modern audiences could not have conceived of when Galileo Galilei published the first observations of the Moon with the aid of a telescope in his famed Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) of 1610. Galileo’s finely etched and highly detailed representations of the craters and valleys of the Moon’s surface aimed to guard against accusations of the telescope generating optical illusions, while his mapping of the Pleiades constellation pointed to stars yet undiscovered by the naked eye alone (fig.1). As Galileo noted, “These things can be comprehended only through the sense of sight, which nature has not granted so perfect to men that they can succeed in discerning such distinctions.

Rather, the very instrument of seeing introduces a hindrance of its own.” 1 Indeed, the Sidereus Nunicus and the innovations in optical technologies it utilized ushered a new era of space exploration from the confines of Earth that paved the way for our contemporary age’s space missions to those “bright distant objects […] festooned with adventitious and alien rays,”2 as described by Galileo. And the astronomers and naturalists of the eighteenth century, with their self-appointed charge of classification and systemization, sought out and catalogued these discoveries more comprehensively than any preceding generation. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, for example, John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, had produced the most exhaustive star catalogue to date: the Historia Coelestis Britannica (published posthumously in 1725) containing his telescopic observations of nearly 3,000 stars.

Of course, eighteenth-century naturalists were fully aware that observing the heavens could also illuminate much about Earth, and the century saw a flood of state-funded expeditions to distant places to triangulate stars and observe lunar eclipses all for the purpose of informing the nature of Earth’s geographic and geodesic contours.

La Condamine’s expedition to modern-day Ecuador, for example, sought to answer one of the most pressing scientific questions of the age: was Earth a perfect sphere as Cartesian geography dictated, or was it spheroid in shape with slightly flattened poles as Isaac Newton would have it? A handful of astronomers and cartographers left France for South America in 1735 to collect data to compare with the results of a simultaneous expedition to Lapland. In the coming years, one would be murdered, one would go insane, and the remaining would get enmeshed in quarrels that would result in their parting of ways. La Condamine finally managed to emerge from the Amazon nine years after his expedition began with his data in hand, only to learn that the Lapland expedition had independently

Fig. 2. Georg Ehret, Methodus Plantarum Sexualis in Sistemate Naturae, 1736, illustrating Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, 1735

verified Earth’s spheroid shape several years earlier.

The debacle of La Condamine’s mission highlights how scientific expeditions were fraught and dangerous undertakings, just as they were also inseparable from the nationalist politics and colonial infrastructures of the period. Scientific observation and global exploration were closely intertwined endeavors, and both infrequently benign. Spain, for example, only granted passage to La Condamine’s expedition in its South American territories, of r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 3

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Fig. 3. L ‘Empereur frontispiece to Jardin Lorixa, c. 1695-1725 © Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle

which it was highly secretive and protective, to put a benevolent coastal region of Orissa in the early part of the eighteenth century. veneer on its colonial rule, thus hoping to combat the “black legend” His frontispiece (fig. 3) hints at the cross-cultural and collaborative of Spanish cruelty. Additionally, the Spanish government required nature of botanical exploration at this moment in time: the textile chaperones to accompany the expedition to ensure no one was painters at left, L’Empereur, and a seated fakir (mendicant) with engaged in espionage. text-based knowledge of ancient Indian cures all pay homage to While Renaissance natural historians mostly contented India’s flora symbolized by the potted plant at center. themselves with bioprospecting expeditions within Europe, by the But just as indigenous communities could provide valued eighteenth century the infrastructures of East India Companies informants, they could easily become victims of European imperial and the imperial ambitions of Europe made the study of natural aggression and objects of pseudo-scientific ethnographic study. history intimately connected with the exploration of areas outside This was especially so after the Seven Years’ War, when intense of Europe. Even La Condamine’s expedition to South America had European nationalism and competition precipitated newfound a botanist in attendance—Joseph de Jussieu (he is the one who went imperial fervor and chauvinism. Captain James Cook, for example, insane) of the famed line of eighteenth-century French natural took three voyages to the Pacific (in 1768-1771, 1772-1775, and historians. He traveled on the cusp of a 1776-1780, respectively) under the aegis watershed development in botanical study— of state-sponsored exploration. The aim of The debacle of La Condamine’s Linnaeus’s universal system of classification his first voyage was to map the transit of mission highlights how scientific according to the properties of plants’ pistils Venus across the sun. Like La Condamine’s expeditions were fraught and and stamens, illustrated by Georg Ehret in expedition earlier in the century, this was one dangerous undertakings, just as 1736 (fig. 2). This revolutionized botanical of numerous missions sent to various parts they were also inseparable from study and greatly expanded who could of the globe to take measurements of the the nationalist politics and colonial participate in it, as it allowed all plant species, heavens. His second and third expeditions infrastructures of the period. whether yet discovered or not, to be classified contained more explicit eighteenth-century within a single visual system. While this entanglements between exploration and system decontextualized plants from their natural environment and imperialism, as he was tasked with discovering both the Northwest from the social circumstances that led to their European discovery, Passage and the Southern Continent. in reality naturalists were heavily reliant on local and indigenous During his stops on numerous Pacific Islands Cook quickly systems of knowledge to help them navigate their way through the learned that science and exploration were inseparable from the overwhelming abundance of unknown plant and animal life. messiness and confusion of encounters with those of different In the 1720s, for example, Antoine de Jussieu, brother of languages and cultures, not all of whom welcomed his presence Joseph, sent out a call to action among French East India Company or shared his goals. As theft of his scientific instruments and members about their potential role in botanical exploration from his ship supplies became a problem, Cook flexed his imperial muscle position as director of the King’s Garden in Paris. He emphasized against uncooperative natives, and did so with increasing severity the importance of Company members sending him plant specimens throughout his three voyages. During Cook’s third voyage, he or drawings from faraway locales, and urged them to make use of ordered 35 armed men to destroy the houses and canoes of all those the knowledge of “the most intelligent people of the colonies” to he suspected of having stolen a small goat on the island of Mo’orea. aid in this endeavor.3 The urgent tone of Jussieu’s memo hints at George Gilbert, an able seaman on the expedition, stated in the high stakes of botanical exploration in the eighteenth century. his journal of the event: “[….] all their tears and entreaties could Botanizing was not an esoteric academic hobby, but a potential not move Capt Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those economic windfall if commercially or medicinally viable plants could cruel ravages [….].”4 Cook describes that unfortunate day in far be discovered, cultivated by slave labor, and turned to cash crops. less detail: “The loss of this Goat would have been nothing if it had As Jussieu learned from the responses he received from not interfered with my views of Stocking other islands with these Company men, the most intelligent and informed people of the Animals but as it did it was necessary to get it again if possible.”5 colonies were most often the slaves themselves, or other members of Cook’s troubles culminated in his death at the hands of Hawaiian the indigenous populations whose professions made them privy to Islanders in early 1779 after he attempted to kidnap and ransom the secrets of the natural world. Indian textile painters, in particular, their king in exchange for a dinghy they had stolen. proved to be some of the most helpful informants of the botanical Before the unfortunate events that led to Cook’s death, he world, as their skill sets both in procuring plants and roots for dyes brought with him to London an upper-class Pacific Islander he and in representing the natural world with those dyes overlapped met in Tahiti who served as his mediator and translator during comfortably with the aims European naturalists. Nicolas L’Empereur, his second expedition. Mai (or Omai as he incorrectly became a physician for the French East India Company in close contact known), traveled to London with the hope of securing alliances and with Antoine de Jussieu, commissioned several such textile painters weapons to retake his family’s homeland of Raiatea captured in his to aid in the collection and representation of the flora of India’s childhood by warriors from Borabora. Mai’s faraway origin made

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Indeed, the climate crisis compels a new and different age of exploration from that of the Enlightenment: the world will need to be remapped to measure the continents’ receded boundaries, and cataloguing what is lost of the natural world will supplant classification of the newly discovered.

him something of a celebrity in London such that Joshua Reynolds, the esteemed painter of the Grand Style and first president of the Royal Academy of Art, came to paint his portrait in 1776 (fig. 4).

The portrait’s exoticizing impulses (Mai was known to wear European clothes regularly) tap Rousseauian ideas of the noble savage untainted by civilization that were popular in the mid to late eighteenth century. Regardless, Mai’s portrait is a rare representational exception to the litany of images that display indigenous figures as objects to be classified alongside plants, shells, and other curiosities (as was the case in the Baudin Expedition to Australia from 1800 to 1803). Reynolds presents Mai to us in full length and within the conventions of classicizing academic portraiture that declare the subject as an autonomous, intelligent individual. Such conventions were usually reserved for white men of nobility, and their application to Mai at the same moment when racist binaries often underpinned European representations of the non-European world speaks to the complicated and often conflicting nexus of ideas and images wrought by eighteenthcentury exploration.

Today, melting glaciers threaten to envelop islands in the Pacific once visited by Cook and to reshape the shorelines mapped by early modern explorers. Even Mai’s home of Raiatea, which he was never able to retake, will be greatly impacted according to sealevel predictions. Likewise, mass extinction awaits many of the plant and animal species discovered in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the climate crisis compels a new and different age of exploration from that of the Enlightenment: the world will need to be remapped to measure the continents’ receded boundaries, and cataloguing what is lost of the natural world will supplant classification of the newly discovered. Even space exploration takes on new urgency in this context. The Moon may not be just a place of wonder to be gazed at with the naked eye, through a telescope, or on a television screen as millions did in 1969. It may one day be an extension of our irrevocably altered home of Earth, and a place that ensures our survival.

Fig. 4. Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Omai (Mai), c.1776

Liza Oliver is the Diana Chapman Walsh Assistant Professor in Art History and South Asia Studies at Wellesley College, and author of Art, Trade, and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).

1

Opere VII, 363, Dialogue, 335, cited in Brown, “Galileo on the Telescope and the Eye,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 46, 4 (1985), 491-2.

2

Opere VII, 363, Dialogue, 335-6, cited in Ibid., 492.

3

Jussieu, “Mémoire pour messieurs de la Compagnie des Indes “(undated, c. mid 1720s), Bibliothèque du Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

4

Cited from The Captain Cook Society: https://www.captaincooksociety.com/home/detail/225-years-ago-october-december-1777

5

Cited in The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. Philip Edwards (Penguin Classics, 2000).

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The Search for Capt. Cook’s Endeavour in Newport Harbor

by D. K. (Kathy) Abbass, Ph.D.

James Cook is known as the explorer who made the greatest additions to European knowledge of world geography. On his 1768-1771 circumnavigation of the globe in the Endeavour, he observed the Transit of Venus at Tahiti, circumnavigated New Zealand, explored the east coast of Australia and claimed that land for Britain. The year after his return to England, Cook sailed again, this time on the Resolution with the Adventure as companion vessel.

On this 1772-1774 voyage he explored more of the South Pacific and confirmed that there is no large land mass there, thought at the time needed to balance the land masses in the Northern Hemisphere. Cook sailed in 1775, again in the Resolution but this time with the Discovery, and his task was to find the Northwest Passage across North America. He was the first European to locate the Hawaiian Islands, but did not find the Passage. Cook was killed on his return to Hawaii in 1779, and this voyage was completed under other leadership in 1780.

By chance, or probably because Newport was a major colonial port, the two major vessels associated with Capt. Cook’s voyages ended their days in Newport. In 1793 a vessel named La Liberté arrived carrying a cargo of whale oil, ran aground and was so badly damaged that she was abandoned along the shore of Newport’s Inner Harbor. Parts of her hull were salvaged for use in a whaler then building in New Bedford. In 1828-29 La Liberté was identified as having been the Endeavour of Capt. Cook’s first voyage. Boxes and presentation pieces reputedly made from this ship’s timbers are now in collections around the world, and the sternpost was loaned to the Australian National Maritime Museum for that country’s Bicentennial in 1988.1 In 1997 two amateur Australian historians published an essay that identified the La Liberté as Cook’s Resolution of his second and third voyage.2 This article gave the hint that the Endeavour had been renamed the Lord Sandwich and was a transport out of London, and she then drops out of Lloyd’s Register after 1779. In 1993 the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) had begun an investigation of 13 Revolutionary War shipwrecks in Newport’s Outer Harbor, vessels known to have been scuttled there in 1778 to protect the British in Newport from the threatening French. One of these ships had been the Lord Sandwich transport, and after archival research in London, RIMAP announced that the Endeavour had instead been lost in the Outer Harbor, thus overturning the original La Liberté story that had lasted for more than 170 years.3 Over the years RIMAP has led many remote sensing surveys and dive expeditions to locate and map ten of these eighteenthcentury shipwreck sites in the Outer Harbor. At the same time, RIMAP assembled historical information about each ship in that fleet. By 2018 careful surface investigations of what can be seen of

Map Key Ballast Metal . ..

Granite Ceramic ...

Wood . ... Concrete Bone

The pre-disturbance site map of RI 2394 (Newport Harbor). ©RIMAP 2010, revised 2016

each of these shipwrecks determined that site RI 2394 northwest of Goat Island appeared to be the most likely candidate to be the Lord Sandwich ex Endeavour®. With the continuing support of the Australian National Maritime Museum, this site became the focus of RIMAP’s 2019 preliminary excavations to expose part of the structure and collect artifacts and samples.4 r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 7

The importance of Cook and the Endeavour means more exploration of the east coast of Australia. is known about that vessel than any of the other ships scuttled After Cook left the Endeavour, for three more years the in 1778, thereby skewing the historical data. However, if what is Royal Navy used her to carry supplies to the Falkland station. known of the Endeavour matches conditions and features of the Then she was sold to a private owner who sent her on at least archaeological site RI 2394, and especially if none of the other sites one commercial voyage to Archangel, and in 1775 he chartered are a match and nothing is found on RI 2394 to suggest it is a her to the British transport service. Now named Lord Sandwich, different ship, then we may with confidence conclude that site has she carried Hessian soldiers to North America to serve with the British in the Revolutionary War. In 1776 the Lord Sandwich was been identified.

There is a wide variety of evidence that will help to confirm such among the ships that carried these soldiers to occupy Aquidneck and Conanicut Islands, and by 1777 she was an identification, and the first are the construction used to hold Patriot sympathizers in Newport’s details of the vessel. The Earl of Pembroke was By 2018 careful surface Outer Harbor. originally built at Whitby along the Yorkshire investigations of what can Little is known about how her structure coast in 1764. She was a flat-bottomed, beamy be seen of each of these was changed to accommodate all those vessel designed to carry heavy loads to the Baltic, shipwrecks determined that post-Cook uses, but RIMAP is looking for and especially coal to London. The Royal Navy site RI 2394 northwest of structural details that match what is known of made detailed drawings and measurements Goat Island appeared to be of this vessel when she was taken into service how the vessel was originally built, wood that the most likely candidate and adapted for Cook’s first circumnavigation was sourced from Yorkshire, evidence of later to be the Lord Sandwich ex under the name Endeavour Bark.5 Cook’s crew repairs, and possibly details of the adaptations Endeavour®. for her later uses. RI 2394 is a heavily built made many temporary repairs to the Endeavour, vessel and the preliminary wood analysis is especially after grounding on the Great Barrier Reef along the east coast of Australia, and the Dutch shipyard promising, although the small area excavated in 2019 showed no in Batavia (now Jakarta) made major repairs before her return to evidence of repairs or adaptive reuse.

The second sorts of evidence to identify the site may come from London.

Timber measurements in 2019 of the structure at a small artifacts related to the people who were known to be on board. By exposed area of RI 2394 are consistent with typical eighteenth- the time the Lord Sandwich came to Rhode Island, there was little century ship design, especially the heavily-built British colliers. chance that anything associated with Cook’s voyage would have We are waiting for confirmation of the sources of the wood in the remained. Instead there may be evidence of what she carried to the timbers, and there has as yet been no discovery of materials in her Falklands or possibly her cargo to Archangel. If we are especially construction that might have been added during her voyage across lucky, we may find artifacts associated with the specific Hessian the South Pacific, her circumnavigation of New Zealand or her troops she carried to serve in the Revolution. We also know the

Exposed hull frames of possible Lord Sandwich ex Endeavour. 3-D Photo by James Hunter. © RIMAP 2019

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Even if this site turns out not to be the Endeavour, all of the ships of the 1778 fleet in Newport’s Outer Harbor are important to US history and to the Revolution in Rhode Island.

RIMAP diver Greg DeAscentis at the grid, showing typical poor underwater visibility in Newport’s Outer Harbor. Photo by John Cassese. © RIMAP 2019

names of many of the Patriots kept on board when she was used as a prison ship in Newport Harbor, such as cabinetmaker John Townsend and Newport shipwright John Cahoone.

The 2019 limited excavation at RI 2394 retrieved eighteenthcentury artifacts and samples, including sheaves and bits of line from the rigging, a lead scupper, scraps of leather and textiles, glass and ceramics, coal and charcoal, ballast and worked stone such as gun flints, copper button backs and a broken kaolin pipe stem (for smoking tobacco). These artifacts and samples are now under conservation and study at RIMAP’s new artifact management facility at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol. None of this material is specific to Cook or his voyage, but if we find evidence that any of these items were associated with the Hessian regiments or the Newport prisoners on board the Lord Sandwich, then we have also found the Endeavour.

Even if this site turns out not to be the Endeavour, all of the ships of the 1778 fleet in Newport’s Outer Harbor are important to US history and to the Revolution in Rhode Island. Unfortunately, their stories attract less international attention than Capt. Cook and his Endeavour.

The explanation for how this mistake happened has to do with Newport’s economic decline following the Revolutionary War, a mother’s attempt to protect the remains of the family fortune from a greedy son, and the fact that the identification of La Liberté as the Endeavour was made 35 years after the ship came to Newport and after most of the principal players were long dead.

1

Mike Connell and Des Liddy (1997) “Cook’s Endeavour Bark: Did This Vessel End Its Days in Newport, Rhode Island?”, The Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History, 19:1:40-49.

2

D. K. Abbass (1999) “Endeavour and Resolution Revisited: Newport and Captain James Cook’s Vessels,” Newport History, 70:1:1-19. All of the focus on finding the Endeavour overlooks the fact that Cook explored more in the Resolution, but the chance is minimal to find anything left of that vessel under the built-out and often disturbed shore along Newport’s Thames Street.

3

The year 2020 is the 250th anniversary of Cook’s exploration of Australia’s east coast. The Museum’s interest is to help identify the ship considered to be that country’s founding vessel.

4

She is properly called HMB Endeavour because there was another Endeavour in the Royal Navy at the time and she was HMS.

5

D. K. (Kathy) Abbass, Ph.D. Executive Director and Principal Investigator Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project Box 1492, Newport, RI 02840

r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 9

The Moon as Mirror

by Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. We have long cradled the moon in our gaze. Hanging, globular, waxing and waning, humans have tracked it and prayed to it, used it to measure time, and cast it as an object of mystery: an ever-present source of proximate wonder. Artists, like others, have fantasized about exploring it, as did George Meliès in his 1902 film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Journey to The Moon), one of the medium’s earliest offerings. In Meliès’s vaudevillian production of hand painted sets and stilted choreography, a group of French male explorers arrive by rocket in an archetypally “exotic” landscape.

Their jaunty exploration is halted by their capture by “aliens” clad in masks, striped clothing and bearing “tribal” spears, who march the Frenchmen to their exuberantly decorated court (fig. 1).

The explorers effect a hasty retreat back to Paris, but not before Meliès’s scene of lunar “otherness” is revealed to be suspiciously familiar: a jumbled conglomeration of West and North African architecture and visual culture sutured together into an exotic rhythm of patterned textiles, crescent motifs and horseshoe arches.

Meliès’s film inadvertently teaches us more about how French culture viewed Africa, circa 1902, than anything about the moon, which remains an object of speculation and projection. Like other colonial voyages, Meliès’s Journey to the Moon collapses the distant and alien into the most familiar of stereotypes – it flattens the moon into a mirror – so that, as Joseph Conrad figured it in Heart of Darkness (published the same year as Meliès’s film), the voyage outward traces a voyage within.

A century later, when South African artist and filmmaker William Kentridge viewed Meliès’s film again, it served as a provocation for an ambivalent filmic tribute he called Seven Fragments for George Meliès (2003). One of these fragments, Kentridge’s own Journey to the Moon, begins with a book and a coffee pot, in a familiar scene of the artist sitting, drinking and reading. But the vintage encyclopedia becomes a springboard into realms unknown when Kentridge rubs his hand across the book’s page and a charcoal moon emerges as a stubborn smudge.

He marshals an espresso cup to his eye as a telescope, and a wobbly espresso pot-rocket blasts off from the drawing pad, moon-bound.

From his southern studio-as-reading room, Kentridge ponders the

way in which books mediate our knowledge of distant worlds (like the moon): most of what we know, he has stated, is “secondhand.”1 Despite the vaunted value of direct experience and firsthand investigation, he suggests that we largely accept the things we believe based on the claims and experience of others, making our storehouse of “knowledge” second, if not third- or fourth-hand.

And happily so. For what is first-handedness but an impossible dream of pure access to things, a Platonic myth of essence as truth?

Through the distant orb of the moon, and a rocket ship journey that ends right where it began—in the dry scrubby brush of the Highveld just north of the artist’s backyard, where flat ridges of gold tailings pose as lunar mountains (fig. 2 right)—Kentridge’s Journey to the Moon maps the distant lunar landscape onto the local South African terrain, rerouting the “alien” back to the landscape of self. A century after Conrad, we can see more clearly the moon as mirror. More than that, Kentridge’s arrival back at the point of departure intimates the limits of our imagination, which may be the edges of thought itself. These limits produce the sobering challenge of conceiving novelty outside the frameworks of the known. Perhaps this has always been the moon’s taunting question to humans?

American artist Katy Schimert also calls on the moon to think through problems of conception, pressing deeper on the boundaries of what we know and how we know it. For her, looking back in the 1990s at the heroic rhetoric and imagery of the 1968 moon landing, the planting of the American flag reiterated the landscapes of manifest destiny of American nineteenth-century painting. Fresh out of Yale’s graduate program in sculpture, Schimert embarked on a series of lunar works that processed the triumphalism of moon exploration through an array of quirky gestures that included: a pile of mirrored ceramic moon rocks (of the sort that future moon tourists might slip in a bag to take home, fig. 3), love letters to Neil Armstrong, Count Dracula and others; a diagrammatic drawing of the journey of the prodigal son, showing Armstrong dutifully carting along aforementioned shiny moon rock (fig. 4), and a 1996 film The Astronaut that mines her allegorical vocabulary of projection and myth.2

Figure 1, film stills from George Meliès, Le Voyage dans la Lun, 1902, showing the opening image of the moon, and the “aliens’” court retouched in color, and in the original black and white

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Figure 2, William Kentridge, stills from Journey to the Moon, 2003, 35 mm and 16 mm, transferred to video, 7:10 minutes. The espresso pot–rocket blasts off from a drawing of the Johannesburg Highveld, marked by the region’s artificial horizontal “mountains” of low-grade gold ore, and eventually hits the moon (right) with a nod to Meliès’s 1902 film.

Schimert’s animating question, steeped in art histories of the another definition of motherhood (the “part of oneself that one can’t feminized landscape, was the following: how might the moon – get rid of.”) Imperfect separation of the infant from the mother so-called “virgin” land – feel about the men who, after centuries may be a lifelong condition, linking the narcissism of the portable of staring at her, finally come visit? Slipping her gaze past the mirror/ part-object with what Schimert sees as “the hero’s need to vertical figure of the astronaut to the horizontal body of the lunar maintain a narcissistic relationship with the self.” landscape, Schimert stages a drama of love and loss between The Moon Rocks’ “partness” is rooted in the way that these the long isolated she-moon, and the male lovers who now come complex, ceramic forms are “slab-built:” hand-built from pieces and go upon her pitted surface. Lunar craters become lips; and or slabs of clay that Schimert rolled, twisted, cut into, trimmed, revolved, added to, twisted, rotated, and then a journey to the moon takes the elliptical glazed with a stunning solution of platinum course of a gynecological drawing (fig. 4), so As Schimert puts it: “a couple dust. When fired, the glaze hardens to render that the landscape of the unknown – Freud’s of people actually went to the “dark continent” – takes form not as the moon moon, but most of us experience matte clay as reflective metal, earth becomes known cerebrally, but the moon as felt through it only at a distance. We feel it mirror, as the sedentary landscape takes the watery female body.3 Via mapping female and know through its effects— form as a portable rock. For Schimert, the central problem of sculpture, or the problem reproductive cycles, Schimert too approaches tides and menstrual periods— to how to remake the tradition of sculpture the larger epistemological quandary of how to rather than as an a priori object.” know that which we experience only indirectly. in the 1990s, was that: “sculpture is solid, it’s As Schimert puts it: “a couple of people actually went to the moon, not made of parts,” she explained to me, “so you have to create a but most of us experience it only at a distance. We feel it and know quality or an illusion of dissolution.” At the level of form, Schimert through its effects—tides and menstrual periods—rather than as effects an implicit collapse or fragmentation of the whole into parts an a priori object.” by building so much spatial tension into her asymmetric objects When I asked Schimert about the size of her ceramic moon that they threaten to fall over, or fall apart (and upon firing, some rocks (which I had not yet seen in person), she responded: “I don’t actually do). But she also mobilizes the specter of the fragmentary know…like the size of a newborn, or the size of a belly…” Her and disintegrative at the level of content: “I try to find subjects reply not only underscores the bond between the female body and that appear and disappear, or things that you know emotionally the rocky lunar landscape, but also intimates the relationship of but don’t know physically. The moon is one of those subjects: it imperfect separation between the baby and the maternal body. emerges and vanishes…So I created two layers of it: the moon and Because, according to Winnicott, the infant is unsure of where his its shadow.” or her body ends and the mother begins, he encounters the mother Schimert’s doubled representation of the moon and its as a set of part-objects: a breast, a hand, a mouth. Schimert’s moon shadow materializes the paradox between felt proximity and actual rocks are fragments, part-objects that mirror a tiny, distorted “part” distance: for the moon can be an unreliable mirror, appearing of the self on their surface. “It’s as if the rock is a part of himself under our nose, yet beyond our grasp. Likewise, Schimert’s Moon that he can’t get rid of,” she explains of Armstrong, carrying a Rocks reflect the tension between the dream of a priori knowledge moon rock mirror in the drawing on the right. The rock becomes of things—traditionally elevated as the real, empirical truth—and both the sticky mirror that grounds or attaches him, and, perhaps, the impoverished state of actual experience, in that (as Kentridge r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 11

Figure 3, Katy Schimert, Moon Rocks, ceramic with platinum luster, 1994

argued) most of what we know, is read or heard, and taken on faith.

We like to understand such faith as scientific “reason,” believing that we have been swayed by proof or fact. Yet Schimert’s work pushes us to ponder that comfortable image of ourselves as rationalists, not only by pointing to the moons all around us—the things that feel close but remain distant and unattainable—but also by collapsing the defensive post-Enlightenment border between science and myth; between the rational and the emotional; between what we know based on empiricism, and what we take on trust, or faith, or whatever. Perhaps the reflective power of the moon lies in reminding us of the paradox between what we feel and what we know. And how the one gradually lost power to the other.

To view a video of Kentridge’s lecture, Second-Hand-Reading, on books, words, and trees, please see https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/introduction-to-second-handreading-a-lecture-by-william-kentridge/. For some thoughts on it, see my Thinking about the Forest and the Trees, also at https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/thinking-aboutthe-forest-and-the-trees/

1

Some of these works are currently included in the exhibition Moon Shot at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, September 20 - December 21, 2019, Houston, TX. Schimert’s 1996 film The Astronaut and a group of related and preparatory drawings were the subject of a recent show at Black Ball Projects, Brooklyn, NY, September 23 - November 3, 2019.

2

The “dark continent” was the term explorer Henry Morton Stanley coined to describe Africa in his book Through the Dark Continent or The Source of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial African and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean (London: Sampson Low, 1890). Freud later borrowed this term to describe female sexuality. The male body is just as watery as the female; the relevant notion is that humans “feel” the moon as a result of how liquidy we are, so that, like ocean tides we are affected by the movements of the moon.

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Figure 4, Katy Schimert, Prodigal Son, Diagram for the Film, ink on paper, 1994 Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Global Contemporary Art Dept. Head, Theory & History of Art & Design, RISD Curator of Contemporary Projects, Redwood Library & Athenæum

Treasures OF THE REDWOOD

by Michelle Farias, Archivist & Special Collections Librarian, Redwood Library & Athenæum

Atlas Coelestis by John Flamsteed (1646-1719) London: Printed in the year 1729 John Flamsteed was England’s first Astronomer Royal, appointed by King Charles II in 1675. In this role, he presided over the construction of the Greenwich Observatory and dedicated himself to cataloging the stars. Flamsteed sought to correct the errors that he had observed in Johann Bayer’s Uranometria, published in 1603, and to create an accurate atlas that could be used for navigation. His catalog of almost 3,000 stars was published after his death in 1725 as Historia Coelestis Britannica. The Atlas Coelestis followed in 1729 as a companion to the catalog. His atlas was the largest and most accurate star chart published at the time, and was updated and republished as a smaller volume in the 1770s.

Both the Historia Coelestis Britannica and the Atlas Coelestis were purchased as part of the Original Collection of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in 1750. Pictured is one of the pages from the star atlas, with an image of the sea monster “Cetus” at its center.

Cetus was one of the 48 Greek constellations listed by Ptolemy in the Almagest, and is depicted as a hybrid creature not quite fit for land or sea. The illustrations in the star chart are a large part of its appeal, although it was likely collected by the Library’s founders as a reference work for navigational use rather than as a visual treat.

Photo: David Hansen

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“Great Men Always Have Too Much Sail Out” A Son’s Sailing Adventures with William F. Buckley Jr.

Photo: Jessica Pohl

by Amanda M. Grosvenor

Christopher Buckley

Looking back, I finally understood that his greatness, if you will, was entirely consistent with the way he conducted himself at sea. By which I mean: great men always have too much sail out. They are always overcanvassed. Great men take great risks. More timid souls, souls like myself, err on the side of caution.

—Christopher Buckley, “My Old Man and the Sea” On the evening of October 26th, 250 guests gathered in Salve Regina University’s Bazarsky Hall to hear prolific novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor and memoirist Christopher Buckley recount his sailing adventures with his well-known father, William F. Buckley Jr. It was the Redwood’s first-ever John J. Slocum Jr. Memorial Lecture, a new series commemorating a longtime Redwood supporter and beloved friend and featuring fascinating speakers.

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Buckley is best known for authoring 18 books including Thank You for Smoking, The Judge Hunter, and The Relic Master, and has won both the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence; his legendary father wrote 50 books, thousands of articles, and founded the magazine National Review and the television show Firing Line, hosting over 1,500 episodes. Most lecture attendees were no doubt already familiar with the elder Buckley’s legacy, but that evening, they were treated to an intimate, poignant, and at times quite comical verbal portrait of a great man pursuing one of his (and Newport’s) pastime hobbies: sailing. The talk was aptly titled “My Old Man and the Sea.” Following introductions from Redwood Board President Dan Prentiss and Executive Director Benedict Leca, Buckley took to the stage and immediately charmed his audience with his wry, deadpan humor and witty turns of literary phrase. Citing the obvious Hemingway reference in his title, he joked that any relatives should “please come up after the talk, and I will refund you 15% of your ticket price.”

A graduate of Portsmouth Abbey (then called Portsmouth Priory), Buckley possesses “Old Newport” roots; one of his former teachers, Jim Garman, was even able to attend the lecture. Buckley joked that in his Priory days, when Newport was “a rather different place” and Thames Street “consisted of tattoo parlors, bars, and… other types of waterfront establishments,” he and his classmates would feign interest in studying Colonial history “which could only be thoroughly researched at the Redwood Library,” he said.

This gave them license to venture into the “tierra prohibida” of downtown Newport in the 1960s.

The sailing part of the lecture then commenced, garnering exuberant laughter as Buckley shared lively anecdotes from the unique perspective of a talented wordsmith and doting son of a “great man” in the “literal, technical sense.” His father’s sailing vessels themselves played memorable characters: a 38-foot wooden cutter rig sloop called The Panic appeared in Yachting Magazine lying on its side in “knock down” pose at the start of the 1958 Bermuda Race; another 72 foot-long schooner had an 18 foot-long bowsprit that would become a “jousting lance” as William F. Buckley Jr. steered full speed towards his destinations, causing those in his path to scatter. He took out so many sections of dock that his family dubbed him “Captain Crunch.”

One memorable yarn had seven-year-old Buckley voyaging across Long Island Sound in search of treasure. His father had filled a chest with silver dollars and his wife’s borrowed jewelry, buried it at Eaton’s Neck, Long Island, and drafted up a Robert Louis Stevenson-style map for his son.

The night before, Buckley was too excited to sleep. “60 years later, I still vividly remember the thrill as my fingers scraped through the sand and found the wooden lid of the chest,” he recalls.

He spoke of sailing off the coast of Maine each summer on a 42-foot Sparkman & Stevens yawl, built in Hong Kong and named Susie Wong. His mother, Patricia Buckley, the Vancouver debutante who Women’s Wear Daily later called “the chic and stunning Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr.,” served as a “dutiful yachtsman’s wife,” cooking for eight men, scrubbing toilets, and muttering darkly, “I was made for better things,” Buckley recalls. When the crew tired of canned food, the senior Mr. Buckley would occasionally steal catches from lobstermen’s traps, leaving two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label as payment.

Notably, Buckley and his father traversed the Atlantic Ocean in 1975, from Miami to Marbella, Spain, “navigating by the stars using a sextant.” A cross-Pacific voyage from Honolulu to New Guinea followed a decade later. During the trip, his father rarely allowed the crew more than a few hours at each port of call, eager to keep moving to the next destination.

“I was learning that for my old man, it was the voyage—not the places in between,” Buckley says. He wrote in his journal, “’We are racing through paradise.’ Pop liked that, and he made it the title of a book that he wrote about that trip.”

Buckley described one last sail with his father: an overnight trip back to “Treasure Island” in October 1997. The day was accompanied by a Nor’easter with 40-55 knot winds and 12-foot waves, but the elder Buckley was undeterred. It was a less than pleasant experience, “You’ve seen the movie The Perfect Storm?”

Buckley asked his audience. Back at home, Buckley wrote his father a stern letter saying, “Never again!”

William F. Buckley Jr. passed away in 2008, and his son envisions him approaching the pearly gates, “no doubt at the same speed he used to approach the dock—did the angels scatter?”

Buckley taught his own son to sail, imparting the art his father showed him: “something elemental, thrilling, and joyous.” More than two decades later, he finds himself “thinking back to that night in ’97—that experience I vowed never to repeat.” To a now hushed room, he continued, “Yet now, I think I’d give almost anything for one more sail together, even in a howling Nor’easter.”

He offered a final quote from Joseph Conrad: A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone for ever; and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.

Buckley is currently working on book #19, a political satire; “Please don’t ask me why, on Earth, I would be attempting political satire in this day and age,” he said in an interview following the lecture. He always enjoys his visits to Newport, where he has “a marvelous time at the Redwood.”

“It’s quite one of my favorite places on Earth, the dear old Redwood.”

Amanda M. Grosvenor Content creator, writer, editor and awardwinning arts and culture journalist

Photo: Jessica Pohl

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Cloning the Redwood’s Fernleaf Beech Newport’s Living History in Trees

by Don Dery slavery was abolished in Jamaica and all other countries comprising the British Empire. The tree, as old and incredible as it is, reminds us that our trees carry the living history of our City—both good and bad—forward into our future, equally as much as our most impressive preserved architecture.

A few months ago, in May 2019, that marvelous fernleaf beech tree gave birth to its first offsprings with the capable assistance of the Heritage Tree Center of the Newport Tree Conservancy.

Horticulturists successfully grafted a vastly smaller offshoot using the ancient cloning method that has been used for thousands of years.

Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927), Director of the Arnold Arboretum called the parent tree “the finest of its kind in America.”

The Tree Conservancy staff and horticultural interns from the Newport Project at Rogers High School helped write the newest chapter of Newport’s fascinating horticultural history. In the past Newport residents planted for the excitement of showcasing new species arriving in America from all over the world.

Today, the Tree Conservancy staff and interns are replanting an aging urban forest, fighting climate change, responding to the ongoing extinction event in our region and across the globe . . . and building a true arboretum across our entire City.

Birthday greetings to the Redwood’s 184-year-old fernleaf beech tree as we await the arrival of your successor.

Don Dery is a Corporate Communications Consultant and etc.

Editorial Advisor.

Photo: David Hansen

It was born in England about 1830, carried gently across the Atlantic Ocean in 1835 by Robert Johnston (1783 – 1839), and planted in the front yard of The Redwood Library and Athenæum.

It stands there still almost 200 years later, stately and majestic.

Its trunk is enormous, its many branches huge, supporting thousands of beautiful leaves which shade the surrounding lawn and Library visitors.

Johnston was a Scotsman, born in Jamaica but living in Newport. He was an enthusiastic patron of sylviculture, a popular pursuit of many of the colony’s earliest community members, including Abraham Redwood, founder of the Redwood in 1764.

Abraham was an avid gardener.

Johnston often returned to his birthplace to manage the family’s plantations, and like so many of the colonists he brought with him the English tradition of experimental horticulture mixed with lifelong exposure to exotic tropical flora. The British Governor of Granada, in a 1764 letter, wrote of a world community steeped in domestic cultivation.

“The roads of the Island are bordered with a variety of ornamental trees,” he wrote. “Nearly every farm has its orchard of engrafted trees of every description, suited to the climate. The whole Island is of an excellent soil, and under the highest state of cultivation. In the vicinity of the Town are several fine gardens . . . their greenhouses and hot houses producing the fruits and plants of every clime.”

Johnston’s fernleaf beech tree was planted in front of the Redwood’s magnificent architectural building just one year after

Horticultural interns from Rogers High School stand by the enormous trunk of the Redwood’s ancient fernleaf beech tree. The students assisted Heritage Tree Center staff in grafting a baby tree from the parent.

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The fernleaf beech tree on the front lawn of the Redwood Library & AthenĂŚum has stood guard in front of the building for almost 200 years.

Photos: David Hansen

The young fernleaf beech tree grafted from the original by the Heritage Tree Center of the Newport Tree Conservancy and horticultural students from Rogers High School

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At The AthenĂŚum

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EXHIBITIONS AT THE REDWOOD Russell Lee: A Documentarian’s Personal Kodachromes Remembered as one of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration’s trio of great photographers alongside Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee’s legacy has up to now rested largely on his iconic black & white photographs of rural America. Presenting 67 enlarged color prints of shots Lee took during trips in the States, Canada, Norway and Mexico in the 1950s and 60s, the exhibition offers an alternative body of work that nonetheless reveals Lee’s enduring eye for the “candid,” and his mastery of detail, framing and moment.

Co-curators: Leora Maltz-Leca and Benedict Leca with J. B. Colson Van Alen Gallery Now – March 22, 2020

Lost Americans: Patterns to Remember Produced by Redwood artist-in-residence Kevin Dacey, the presentation invites viewers to consider the Charles Bird King Native American paintings once in the Redwood collection, their loss being emblematic of art history’s frequent omission of, and often our own ambivalence towards, non-traditional subjects. kevindacey.com

Newport in the Age of Revolution 1763-1783

The Redwood Library & Athenæum’s commitment to environmental responsibility includes utilizing paper products manufactured through sustainable forest practices and using low VOC inks and solvents.

The fifth largest seaport in British North America by the 1770s, the City-by-theSea figured as a flashpoint locale of the American Revolution. Bringing together a comprehensive array of historical material drawn from major public and private collections—period objects, paintings, maps, prints, and diaries—the show will trace Newport’s complex Revolutionary-era history from multiple perspectives.

Co-curators: Brandon Aglio and Nick Manganiello with Benedict Leca June 26 – October 4, 2020

Join us in

Honoring

the Past and

Celebrating the Future

Become a Redwood Member redwoodlibrary.org/membership Tel: 401.847.0292 x 115

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Back cover graphic: Fleming + Company

Embark on an enriching journey with the Museum Travel Alliance Redwood Library & Athenaeum and the MTA have teamed up to provide our members with journeys that awaken new insights into art and culture. Visit UNESCO World Heritage sites, enjoy exclusive events, see private collections, and travel on elegant chartered ships and luxury trains.

UPCOMING JOURNEYS:

Met Classics: Rome — March 16 to 22, 2020 Mediterranean Masterpieces: Cádiz to Nice aboard Sea Cloud II — April 16 to 25, 2020 Insider’s Bermuda: Exclusive Receptions & Private Collections — April 21 to 25, 2020 English Elegance: Majestic Manors of Bath & Cornwall — May 12 to 20, 2020 Sailing Ancient Trade Routes: Helsinki to Copenhagen Aboard Sea Cloud II June 27 to July 9, 2020 Treasures of the Brandywine Valley: Private Estates & Exclusive Collections October 4 to 8, 2020

MUSEUM TRAVEL ALLIANCE

MUSEUM TRAVEL ALLIANCE 1040 Avenue of the Americas, 23rd Floor, New York, NY 10018-3721 212-324-1893 or 855-533-0033 • Fax 212-344-7493 trips@museumtravelalliance.com www.MuseumTravelAlliance.com r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 21

From Redwood Library & AthenĂŚum charter, 1747

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www.redwoodlibrary.org