Adventurers (part two)
Post #25: Theodosia
Theodosia. A water deity? (30 January 2023, Saint Andrews, N.B.) At the winter festival to hear nephew Max Keenlyside’s solo program of early piano jazz. Charming everyone in the Anglican hall, he enriches the set with pithy ragtime lore. In the front row, his 94-year-old grandfather delights in music that was still contemporary in his childhood. Listening to Max, I’m wondering if our ancestor, Mary Ann Greenfield, born within a few blocks of this church in 1855, ever heard talk of Charlotte County’s enigmatic beauty ‘Theodosia’? That name crops up in William Francis Ganong’s 1902 monograph, republished in 1945 as Champlain’s Island.
…(31 January) Onwards a few kilometres from the Algonquin Hotel to survey Île Sainte-Croix’s winter riverscape. Snow on the land, yet open water, fully navigable, above-zero Celsius. Nothing like January 1605’s terrible freeze-over, when frostbite and scurvy claimed nearly half of Samuel de Champlain’s company. That happened just below us on this deceptively serene isle but a cannon shot away.
Even in winter the estuary is pleasant: hilly banks descend with measured conviction to the sea. Pleasant, though for me not as ravishing as it was for Ganong. As a youth in the 1870s he explored this entire archipelago in sailing dinghies, recording its marine ecology. His pristine affection for the ‘Quoddies’ never faltered. Regarding Île Sainte- Croix, he assures readers, “I have myself been familiar with the island and its surroundings since early boyhood.”
Reading Ganong’s papers, I’d say his unconditional devotion to New Brunswick irised like a spotlight on ‘Dochet’ Island (a.k.a. “Île Sainte-Croix”, named by Champlain for rivers converging as a cross, or else “Bone Island,” named for protruding human remains, or “Neutral Island”, for its position on the US-Canada boundary). His literary and archaeological excavations of the island knit together Ganong’s Huguenot ancestry (Guenier) with that of Champlain, and Acadia’s aborted first settlement.
…Ganong lived a benign form of exile in Massachusetts, not at all political, but rather geographical, intellectual and professional. Yet, if I’m right in detecting a gentle reticence or withholding, then truly it was an adventurer’s exile. That is, exile that conceives neither of return (prodigality) nor destination (quest fulfillment). In this sense, the omnivorous fact-finding through which Ganong almost singlehandedly recuperated New Brunswick’s natural and cultural history was moreover the vessel for an interior quest whose itineraries and discoveries have remained unthematized.
…The gowned botanist at Smith College—by day neck-tied, clean-shaven, overseeing annual cohorts of well-bred female students—at evenings retired to his study. There, his beard grew in, his costume transformed to that of the woodsman, he’d commune with Champlain, Koluskap, the dramatis personae of his home province’s back woods and waters. He’d ink in his maps, index photographs, and meticulously write up findings from his arduous summer expeditions.
…Studying the 1604 map of St. Croix Island, “one of the best that Champlain made,” Ganong’s eye lingers on its sole human occupant, a cryptic entity on its south-facing promontory where the French explorer’s pinnace first landed. “I do not understand the significance of the human figure,” he concedes. “Unless… the Indians had there some kind of look-out.” He knew Champlain wasn’t inclined to fabular flourishes. Even the “hideous sea creature” depicted isn’t fanciful but rather the spiny sculpin well known to these waters.
…(1 February) Just as exile takes various forms, so a shipwreck may not involve the loss of a vessel. In June 1604, the Sieur De Mons’ vessels, under Champlain’s navigation, passed unscathed over Fundy’s vertiginous frothing tides. Skirting the jagged incisors of Letete Passage, they entered Passamaquoddy Bay to advance up the St. Croix River, sweet summer weather betraying not the slightest hint of the fatally harsh winter to come. Ganong surmises that De Mons, nervous of Indian attack, sought isolation on a fortifiable island. Conversely, David Hackett Fischer judges that his greatest fear was a more common occurrence: brutal attack by rival Europeans. Whatever the case, they were drawn by Dochet’s beauty, and swiftly they erected a model French garrison compound whose northern exposure would prove suicidal.
…Ganong hesitates to ascribe a gender to the tiny figure with a hat or else a mane of hair. Breastplate, or breasts? The forward gesture, welcoming or menacing? A water deity? A siren inviting sailors’ doom? He suggests no association, direct or indirect, to “Dosia” (Do-shay), Theodosia, the Charlotte County beauty purported to have lent her nickname to Dochet Island. Yet here she is, adjacent to Champlain in Ganong’s account:
The tradition derives the name from a young woman named Dosia (Theodosia) who, sometime after 1784 used to resort with her lover to the island, to the great scandal of the neighbourhood.
Of the “sundry other variants to the tradition” one is less salacious: a party of young people on a picnic sometime after 1800 “named it Dosia’s Island because they had seen a very pretty young lady in Saint Stephen called Theodosia [Milbury].”
…Champlain’s little vessel winds “its cautious and curious way [into] our noble river,” wrote Ganong, “her keel … grates on the beach of Dochet Island … her sails furled… the leaders step ashore… declaring that it is good, and here they will plant the capital of the New World.” The event marks “the beginning of European colonization of the principal part of this continent.” And yet, Ganong cautions, Dochet Island has “more than a single meaning. It is one of those places where the thoughtful student may come into communion with the silent witness of history.”
“The history of any place is deeply influenced by the physical environment,” he explains, tracing the geological forces that produced the island and its natural history. A glacial movement 30,000 years ago produced a fine soil. Had it been a “coarse boulder stone… Dochet Island might have had no history.”
The bespoke method of Champlain’s Island might best be described as ‘island geobiography’. Ganong, the plant physiologist, intuitively locates “history” where human homeostasis is possible. Anticipating mid-twentieth century biology, he narrates how the island’s natural history ultimately fostered an ‘ecological niche’ suitable for human settlement.
Except, that winter was far too cold for ill-adapted Europeans. Matter-of-factly, the 37-year-old Champlain records rotting flesh, the miserable deaths from scurvy of thirty-four of the seventy-nine expedition members. His account elides personal details. Ganong must draw from Marc Lescarbot’s journal to glimpse daily life on Dochet Island. We learn that the French explorers, far from fearing the Passamaquoddy Nation, cohabited the island with a tribal group encamped near where the sentinel appears on its southern point.
Lescarbot reports a “great quarrel” in that encampment ensuing from an “attractive” girl’s elopement with her boyfriend Bituani working “in the Sieur de Mons’ kitchen.” Enraged at this unworthy match, the girl’s father fetched her back. Hearing both sides, the Sieur de Mons deemed Bituani “a good youth”, but also that he must “go a hunting to show what he could do.” Returning with “a great haul of salmon, and wearing a beautiful new robe of beaver skins,” thus did he gain his wife in “a fair fight,” wrote Lescarbot, “and has ever since loved her well.”
…(2 February) A liminal space, the island was employed variously over millennia as an indigenous exchange point, later by smugglers, but perhaps always for lovers’ trysts. Ganong records centuries of intermittent residencies on Dochet Island right up to its then present lighthouse keeper. It was the second lighthouse keeper who recorded the tale of the island’s ménage à trois:
The Hennikers lived and died on the island and are buried there. Henniker disappeared [during the American Revolution] for a long while and in his absence Mrs. Henniker was wooed and won by a man named Post. When Henniker made his appearance, he and her second choice lived there in happiness until the Hennikers died, when Post left, and knowledge of him died.”
Henniker bequeathed “all my property…my interest and titles in Dosh’s Island etc. to my wife Mary, and at her death the same to go to Daniel Post.”
…A Smith student wrote of Ganong’s “absolute openness and readiness to face reality,” his “buoyancy, enthusiasm, whimsical humor… the inspiration of the attitude of research.” Another recalled his plant physiology seminar, how “he combined in an unusual way the cool detachment of the research scientist, calling for impartiality of observation and scientific conclusion, with a passion for the material with which he worked, i.e., life, whether found in the humblest plant or man himself.”
She discerned in this an unstated philosophy:
The environment surrounding all things became a moral order, good or bad, as it helped or hindered the flow of life. He made us feel that the most thrilling adventure we could undertake was to learn all we could about the nature and behaviour of plants which surround us…. He loved the scientific world with such compassion that it became warm and full of meaning in which we could find goodness and beauty.
The signature of history thus resembles the morphology of a plant. Geological transformations created fertile niches for natural history, which in turn fostered niches for human history. The emergence of history, for Ganong at least, torqued by physis, becomes an adventure that occasionally blossoms into nations, but moreover is propelled by love to art and poetry, the ultimate expressions of the signature.
From a scattering of poetry inspired by the island, he selected an anonymous verse addressing “Theodosia” as a water deity:
Thou, too, art changing, wasting. Douchet’s Isle—
We mark thy crumbling rock, thy wasting sand—
Yet midst this autumn glory hast the smile
That lured the bold Caucasian to thy strand.
This post is beautifully-written, densely-packed. I am contemplating the speculations of the kinds of exile. New Brunswick, St. Croix River, Smith College (my fourth year Russian was taken there) all if interest.
R