John Bradbury's Anger: the Earth Shook Under his Feet
Posted: Monday, December 05, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
John Bradbury despised Fredrick Traugott Pursh for using his specimens without permission and receiving credit for documenting the new plants. When previously unknown species he’d collected in the American mid-west appeared in Pursh’s 1813 publication, A Systematic Arrangement and Description of The Plants of North America, Bradbury was furious. It left him bitter and caused him to lose his life-long interest in botany. Bradbury was not the least bit sorry when, in 1820 he heard that Pursh had died drunk and destitute in Montreal. Until his own death in 1823, Bradbury could not forgive Pursh for robbing him of “both the credit and profit of what was justly due to me.”
Before approving an expensive expedition, regardless of Bradbury’s Fellowship and experience in the field, the trustees carefully scrutinized his proposal. Eventually the money was approved, though not exclusively because of Bradbury’s expertise in natural history. Sponsors of the institution asked him to seek out new business contacts in an effort to secure the supply of cotton being shipped from America to Liverpool, as well.
Upon arriving in the United States, Bradbury met with recently retired Thomas Jefferson. The former President convinced him to set up his base of study at St. Louis rather than New Orleans. On August 16, 1809, Jefferson wrote Bradbury a letter of introduction to Meriwether Lewis, who was then living in the city on the Missouri. However, by the time he arrived at St Louis, in December of 1809, Lewis was dead. Failing to get the expected aid, Bradbury began research on his own, studying and collected specimens in the vicinity of the city during the following year. He sent the dried plants and seeds to Liverpool late that autumn.
In 1810, Bradbury met and teamed up with zoologist/botanist and fellow Englishman, Thomas Nuttall. The two took several field trips together. In April of 1811, they traveled to Nodaway, in the northwest corner of present day Missouri, and joined a party led by William Price Hunt. Frequently called the “Overland Astorians” because John Jacob Astor funded the expedition, Hunt’s group and been commissioned to find a faster way to Oregon. They were the second expedition to make the journey up the Missouri and on to the Columbia River, preceded only by Lewis and Clark.
Bradbury stayed with the expedition only as far as the Mandan Indian villages in what is now eastern Montana. He had a very successful scientific excursion, however, documenting 40 new plant species. He sent dried specimens and seeds ahead to his son John Leigh Bradbury, in England.
Foolishly, his son did not attempt to sell the collection, but gave the whole lot to William Roscoe of the Liverpool Botanic Garden. Roscoe distributed duplicates to the Royal Botanic Garden, to Sir Joseph Banks in London and to Aylmer Bourke Lambert, a renowned British botanist. Lambert, in turn, gave the specimens to Fredrick Pursh who described and published them, not mentioning Bradbury.
Bradbury returned to St. Louis and, in exchange for passage to New Orleans, agreed to take charge of a friend’s flatboat which was carrying a ton and a half of lead. He set off with passenger John Bridge, and five French Creole crewmen, including boatmaster M. Morin. Bradbury was anxious to get back to England to what he expected would be the acclaim of the scientific community.
On the evening of December 15, 1811, they tied up for the night on a slope banked island in the river at Chicksaw Bluffs, the current site of Memphis. Since the sun had already set, they chose to not attempt the Devils Race Ground in the dark. The river rushed through the Devil’s Channel, as the section of rapids on the Mississippi was also called, with such speed and ferocity that the roar of the water could be heard for miles.
Bradbury and the crew were sleeping onboard when, at about 2:15 a. m. on December 16th, as legend has it, Shawnee Chief Tecumseh stomped his foot on the ground at Detroit and fulfilled the prophecy he’d made to the Creek tribes. The Earth lurched and shattered. The first of the New Madrid earthquakes struck, beginning almost three months of the most severe and wide spread tremors North America has experienced in recorded history.
{Bradbury’s 1817 book, Travels in the Interior of America, in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811, is the only eyewitness record of the New Madrid earthquake written by a scientist}
Bradbury and the others on his boat were awakened by a “most tremendous noise” and “so violent an agitation of the boat that it appeared in danger of upsetting.” When they got onto deck they saw that the riverbanks caving off were creating such a swell and turbulence that they were in danger of being capsized. Bradbury said that while “the noise was inconceivably loud and terrific, I could distinctly hear the crash of falling trees, and the screaming of the wild fowl on the river…all nature was in a state of dissolution.”
Master Morin was in a panic. In French, he kept shouting “We are going to die!” Bradbury tried to calm him, to no avail. He ran off the boat yelling, “Get onto land! Get onto land!” The crew followed him onto the island. As Bradbury and Bridge tried to join them, another huge shock hit. Both men hung on to the gunnels. When he finally got ashore, Bradbury found the island rent by a huge fissure. By candle light he measured it to be at least eighty feet long and four feet wide. At either end the banks had collapsed into the river.
Bradbury urged the men to get back onboard where he was convinced it would be safer than on the island, which was crumbling under them, but they refused. The shocks and tremors continued. Some of them were so severe that the men were nearly knocked off their feet. Through the night Bradbury counted 27 of them. He wrote that “the sound which was heard at the time of every shock, always preceded it by at least a second, and it uniformly came from the same point, and went off in an opposite direction.”
As the sky grew light the horror of the catastrophe began to emerge. “The river was covered with foam and drift timber, and had risen considerably.” Bradbury wrote. A pair of empty canoes floated by, the kind usually towed by flatboats and used by crews to get ashore. Bradbury said it was “a melancholy proof” that many of the boats they’d passed the previous day were now gone, along with their crews.
At sunup Bradbury ordered everyone to get onboard and prepare to cast off. As two of the crewmen were loosening the ropes another tremendous shock hit. Terrified, they ran up onto the island. Before they could get across a fissure that had split the bank from the rest of the island a tree crashed down blocking their way. The bank began to crumble into the river. The two men, at Bradbury’s urging, quickly freed the ropes and jumped onboard.
When they approached the Devil’s Race Ground they found the channel clogged with trees and driftwood that had floated down during the night. The passage appeared to be completely blocked. Regardless, Bradbury knew that Morin and the crewmen were in such a state of panic that they would be unable to get the boat through safely under any circumstances.
Bradbury spied a small island and had the boat moored again, to give the men a chance to gather their wits and get their emotions under control. They disembarked. As the men cooked breakfast and Morin and Bradbury tried to scope a course through the Devil’s Channel, the mammoth 7:15 a.m. shock hit, knocking them off their feet. As they ate breakfast, another huge shock hit; and another, as they prepared to board the boat. The last one nearly toppled John Bridge into the river as the sandy bank gave way beneath him.
Before they cast off, Bradbury couldn’t help but notice that the crew was still badly rattled. They had numb, blank looks on their faces. He ordered Morin to give each man a full glass of whiskey to bolster their courage. After the drink, Bradbury gave them a spirited pep talk, reminding them that the boat’s and their own safety and survival depended on their performance.
It was a successful tactic. They managed to thread their way through the dangerous debris choked channel, making some incredible maneuvers that avoided disaster. When they passed the dangerous section of river, the men threw down their oars, crossed themselves and let out a rousing cheer. They slapped each other on the backs and shook Bradbury’s hand.
As the day wore on, they proceeded south on the debris filled river, past forests of broken trees and collapsing riverbanks. The shocks and tremors continued. At one point they put to shore to visit with some people they saw huddled on the bank in prayer. Bradbury said that one man attributed the quake to the Great Comet that loomed over head every night. The man predicted that the end of the world was at hand. Bradbury wrote, “Finding him confident in his hypothesis, and myself unable to refute it, I did not dispute the point.”
As Bradbury’s boat approached Natchez the shocks and tremors became less severe and further apart. But, around New Madrid, the ground continued to tremble periodically until January 23, 1812, when a quake nearly as severe as the one on December 16th hit the same region. Then, on February 7th, the greatest, most powerful of the three major quakes struck, destroying what ever remained.
Before then, Bradbury was able to safely deliver his load of lead, his crew and his passenger to New Orleans. Though he’d planned to return to England promptly, he was delayed by his attention to other part of his ‘job’—the cotton business. When the War of 1812 broke out, he was stranded in America.
The naturalist took advantage of his extended stay. He studied the flora of the states east of the Mississippi and wrote “Remarks on the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, with the Illinois and Western Territory and on Emigrations to Those Countries.” By then, Tippecanoe was destroyed, the Shawnee Prophet was discredited, Tecumseh was dead, there were steamboats on the Mississippi, and the New Madrid earthquakes had begun to fade from memory as the conquest of the continent's interior began in earnest.
By the time John Bradbury returned to his home in 1816, Fredrick Pursh’s book describing new found plant species of the American mid-west was in the library of most serious botanists and he was considered a giant in the field. John Bradbury never achieved anything of significance in the science he’d loved since childhood. Though he died only seven years later at a relatively young age, he had the perverse satisfaction of seeing Pursh deteriorate into a destitute drunkard and die.
{In April of 1842, the Bradbury specimens that were described by and credited to Pursh were sold by Sotheby as part of the Lambert estate. Dr. Thomas B. Wilson purchased them and presented the collection to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where they can still be examined today}
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)What a great piece. I am a complete sucker for this kind of history, and the detail you provide. You are one good writer, and I admire your skill. Thanks for this wonderful contribution.wow, thanks so much for saying that.
Your details are amazing...Gotta make the reader experience it, eh? Thanks
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