London, April to September 1822
LEAVING behind the lakes of Canada, we came to Pittsburgh and the confluence of the Kentucky and the Ohio. Here, the landscape displays an extraordinary splendor. Yet this magnificent country is called Kentucky, after the name of its river, which means “river of blood.” It owes this name to its beauty. For over two centuries, the nations on the Cherokee side and those on the Iroquois side have been fighting over its hunting grounds.
Will the European generations on its banks prove more virtuous and free than the annihilated American generations of old? Will slaves not plow the earth beneath the lashing of their masters in these wastelands of man’s primordial independence? Will prisons and gallows not take the place of the open hut and the tall tulip tree where the bird built its nest? Will the richness of the soil not engender new wars? Will Kentucky ever cease to be a land of blood and let the monuments of art make the banks of the Ohio still more beautiful than the monuments of nature?
Beyond the Wabash, the great Cypress, the Cumberland, the Cherokee or Tennessee, and the Yellow Banks, the traveler arrives at a strip of land frequently flooded by high waters. Here, at 36 deg. 51 min. latitude, the Ohio and the Mississippi converge. The two rivers resist each other, and this equal resistance slackens their course. Side by side, but without mingling, they slumber together for a few miles, like two great peoples of separate origins, which come to form a single race; like two famous rivals, sharing the same resting place after a battle; like husband and wife, but of enemy blood, who at first have no desire to mix their destinies in the marriage bed.
And I, too, like the powerful urns of the rivers, have divided the short course of my life between one side of the mountain and the other. Whimsical in my errors but never consciously wicked, I have preferred poor valleys to rich plains, and stopped for flowers rather than palaces. By now, I was so enraptured by my travels that I gave almost no thought to the Pole. A company of traders, lately arrived from the land of the Creeks, in the Floridas, allowed me to go with them.
We made our way toward the country then known under the general name of the Floridas, which today encompasses the states of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. We were following very close to the trails which now link the high road from Natchez to Nashville by way of Jackson and Florence, and which returns to Virginia by way of Knoxville and Salem: country which, at that time, was little frequented, and where Bartram had already explored the lakes and the sites. Planters from Georgia and the Florida Maritimes traveled all the way to the diverse tribes of the Creeks to buy horses and half-wild beasts, which multiplied to infinity on the dry savannahs interrupted only by those wellsprings beside which I had Atala and Chactas take their rest. Some of them extended their journeys even as far as the Ohio.
We were pushed onward by a fresh wind. The Ohio, swollen by a hundred streams, was sometimes lost in the lakes that spread before us, sometimes in the thick of the forests. Islands rose up in the middle of the lakes. We set sail for one of the largest, where we landed at eight in the morning.
I crossed a meadow sown with yellow-flowered ragwort, pink-plumed hollyhocks, and purple-tufted obelarias.
An Indian ruin struck my sight. The contrast between this ruin and the youthfulness of nature, this monument of man in a desert landscape, gave me a chill. What people once lived on this island? What was their name? Their tribe? How long had they endured? Were they alive when the continent on which they were concealed was unknown to the other three quarters of the globe? The silence of these people was perhaps contemporary with the noise of certain great nations since fallen, in turn, into silence.*
From the sandy anfractuosities of the ruins, or tumuli, there grew a species of poppy with red flowers that weighed down the tops of their pale green stalks. The stem and the flower have a scent that stays on your fingers long after you have touched the plant. An emblem of the memory of a life spent in solitude, this fragrance that outlives its flower.
I observed the water lilies, which began to hide their white buds in the water at the close of day, and the arbor tristis, which uncloses its flowers only at the dawn of night: the wife goes to bed when the courtesan rises.
The pyramidal oenothera, which grows up to seven or eight feet tall and has notched oblong leaves of a greenish black, follows other customs toward other ends. Its yellow flower starts to unfold toward evening, in the time it takes Venus to sink below the horizon; it continues to open beneath the starlight; dawn finds it in all its splendor; but halfway through morning it begins to fade; by noon, it withers and dies. It lives no more than a few hours, but it spends these hours beneath a tranquil sky, between the breaths of Venus and Aurora. What does it matter then, the briefness of life?
I came to a stream garlanded with dionea over which a thousand dragonflies buzzed. There were also hummingbirds and butterflies that, in their bright regalia, vied in splendor with the variegations of the flowers. Yet in the midst of these wanderings and these studies, I was often struck by their futility. What! Could the Revolution, which drove me into the woods and weighed upon my every moment, not inspire me to do something more serious? While my country was wracked and overturned, could I not find something to occupy me besides descriptions, and plants, and butterflies, and flowers? Human individuality reminds us of the smallness of the greatest events. For how many men are indifferent to these events, and how many others have not even heard of them? The total population of the globe is estimated to be between eleven and twelve hundred million. One of these people dies every second. Thus, in every minute of our existence, even as we enjoy ourselves and smile, sixty people perish; sixty families weep and mourn. Life is an interminable plague. The chain of mourning and funerals that encircles us is never broken; it is always growing: we ourselves form one of its links. And still we magnify the importance of catastrophes that seven-eighths of the world will never so much as mention! Let us pant after a vain reputation that will never fly more than a few leagues from our grave! Let us dive into an ocean of bliss where every minute sixty coffins float by, incessantly renewed!
Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora secuta est,
Quae non audierit mixtos vagitibus aegris
Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.
“No day has ever followed night, nor night ever followed dawn, that has not heard the sound of weeping mingled with mournful wailings, attendants of death and dark funerals.”[1]
*The ruins of Mitla and Palenque in Mexico now prove that the New World rivals the Old World in its antiquity. (Paris, 1834)