Review: February 2010

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In 1825, ten years before the fabled visit of the Beagle, a Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship sailed into the Galápagos archipelago, en route to the Pacific Northwest. Aboard was the young Scottish naturalist David Douglas, who was employed by the London Horticultural Society to collect samples of interesting plants for their burgeoning collection. During three landings on the islands, Douglas collected 45 birds and 175 plants, most of them previously unclassified by science. The Galápagos, which were to be the high point of Charles Darwin’s field experience, were only passing landmarks in Douglas’s career, in part because rainy weather on the next stage of the voyage rotted almost all of the young collector’s specimens.

What followed, however, is one of the classic natural history adventures of the nineteenth century. For most of the next decade, Douglas made his home primarily along the Columbia River and its tributaries—insofar as it can be said that he had a home. He seized every opportunity to explore new territory, forging deep into what is now western and central Canada and down the coast, by sea, as far as Monterey, California (then still part of Mexico). Everywhere he roamed he filled his journals with notes and his collecting bags with skins, seeds, and live plants. Just two years after his arrival in the region, he estimated that he had already traveled 7,032 miles by foot, horseback, and canoe.

He suffered near starvation, thirst, fever, and narrow escapes from poisonous snakes and from angry Indians (though more were friendly). His journals provide lively source material for historian and nature writer Jack Nisbet. Although not the first book to detail Douglas’s life, Nisbet’s travelogue both provokes and satisfies readers, like me, who envy the botanist for his wilderness adventures long before the age of road building.

Today, botanists know Douglas from the plants he collected, many of them flagged by the Linnaean species designation douglasii. To the rest of us, he has, like the hero Cyparissus in Greek myth, turned into a tree: Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), one of the building industry’s prime timber sources and a mainstay of the Pacific Northwest economy.

Had Douglas lived longer, we might remember him as the preeminent botanical collector of his era. Instead, his death at age thirty-five, on the big island of Hawaii in July 1834, adds a final mystique to his accomplishments and travails. A feral bull fatally gored him in a pitfall trap set by a local hunter. Did he slip on the muddy volcanic soil, or was he pushed in a robbery attempt? Wisely, biographer Nisbet doesn’t spend much time on idle speculation. The uncommon life of David Douglas, not his untimely death, is what makes this book such a pleasure to read.