A Legend Comes To Life: Mark Catesby

It was Dr. Allen who discovered the record of Mark Catesby's birth. He was born on March 24, 1682 and lived in the home of his grandfather at Castle Hedingham in Essex, about 40 miles from London. His father was the mayor of the town of Sudbury. His mother was born Elizabeth Jekyll; she was the granddaughter of a famous historian of Essex. Eight miles south of Castle Hedingham was the home of John Ray, a founder of modern scientific botany, who was then classifying all English and European animals, birds, fishes and plants. In some fashion not known, the boy came to the attention of Ray, then in his old age, and the great naturalist, according to a contemporary, "inspired Catesby with a genius for natural history."

Mark was the youngest in a family of seven children. The oldest girl, Elizabeth, defied her father and married Dr. William Cocke, a recent graduate of Cambridge University. Elizabeth was "a pretty sort of woman," as Byrd described her in his diary; it is on record that she was marrying without her father's consent and against his wishes. Dr. Cocke was a friend of Alexander Spotswood's, the new Governor of Virginia Colony, and it was not long before Dr. Cocke arrived in Williamsburg. That was in 1710, and Dr. Cocke left his wife and children in England in Mark Catesby's care while he established himself in the colony.

He accomplished this with phenomenal speed. While Dr. Cocke ostensibly was practicing medicine, he was really Spotswood's aide and adviser, and the Governor appointed him Secretary of State, judge of the admiralty court and a member of the Virginia Council. All the other members of the council, which was directly responsible to the crown, were men in Byrd's station of life, and in begging Queen Anne to approve his appointment of Dr. Cocke the Governor explained that the landowners lived so far from Williamsburg that it might be difficult to assemble them in an emergency. Byrd would certainly have been incensed if he had known this, for he never missed a meeting of the Virginia Council, but he had so little knowledge of what was going on that he thought Spotswood had promised him the appointment of Secretary of State. He did not know that Dr. Cocke had been appointed until a letter from England told him the news. It arrived on the same ship that brought Mark Catesby, who was taking care of his sister and her children on the voyage.

Byrd was beginning to smolder about Spotswood's double-dealing when Dr. Cocke, his wife and Mark Catesby arrived at Westover. They exerted themselves to charm him out of his irritation with such effect that they were asked to remain for a week, and then in the fall came back for a month's visit. The summer ended in a mellow glow of golden days, and the vision began to form in Mark Catesby's mind of the great work that was to occupy him for the rest of his life. "The declining of the heat begins to be perceived by the coolness of the nights," he wrote quaintly. The weather grew so moderate and the air so serene that it reminded him of southern Europe. The tempo of southern life changed subtly, a hidden animation coming with fall. It was on September 18 that Byrd first lit a fire in the great hall of Westover. Game began to be served more frequently (a favorite dish was fricassee of oppossum). Great flights of bluewing teal swept in from the north. They were beautiful birds with black heads, glossed green and violet, flying fast and descending suddenly, a native American bird which Catesby was the first to paint. They were preferred to all others by Virginians, and after Byrd had served him bluewings, Catesby wrote, "All who have eat of them give them the preference of all of the Duck kind for delicacy of taste."

Behind the bluewing came what Catesby called the white-faced teal, the subject of one of his finest paintings. Then came vast flights of Canada geese, the most common species of all, in heavy, straggling V-shaped formations, led by an old gander, hoarsely honking. Summer duck could be found on Virginia ponds, moving in small flights of three or four birds and nesting, as Catesby was the first to point out, in hollows in tall trees, often in holes made by woodpeckers. The most beautiful of all ducks, they were unforgettable for the wild crowing sound that the sentinel bird gave at the first sign of danger. Then there was the baffler-headed duck, sometimes called the butterball, with black wings and back and a glossy green velvety head with a rounded crest, remarkable for the velocity of its flight.

None of these creatures had previously been painted. Few had been described. The general impression prevailed in England that the American climate was stormy and cold, the forests gloomy and dank, the wild creatures savage and dangerous. When Catesby arrived in Virginia he had no fortune, no trade or profession and no training for the work he wanted to undertake, but he was childlike and direct, with the unstudied perception of obvious wonders that often escapes informed and sophisticated people. He wrote that the air was fresh and clear, the skies cloudless, and all around lay "the most delightful Prospects imaginable." The southern woods, dense with their luxuriant summer foliage, became more beautiful as the leaves dropped. Masses of shining black berries formed on the sassafras trees, attracting multitudes of birds. The berries of the yapon turned bright red, a shade they would retain all winter. Catesby combined flowers, animals, seeds and berries into brilliant and spectacular patterns, with wilting flower petals expiring like the melting watches of Dali's early surrealistic paintings. The laurel tree brightened with purple and scarlet seeds and pods. The red oval berries of the dogwood and the dark glistening berries of the tupelo were as brilliant as flowers. On the bay-leafed smilax, against the pale green background of the leaves, clusters of black berries ripened in October, a favorite food for the crested jay, or the "blew jay," as he called it.

For three days in a row a single flight of passenger pigeons passed overhead, the birds flying southward with great speed and steadiness, the sky full of them from one horizon to the other. Under the full moon the sounds of the wilderness changed: the blue herons, nocturnal feeders, grew fat and silent; the whippoorwill cried its name, accenting the last syllable and making a chucking sound after each cry; the bellowing of bullfrogs, some of which grew 16 inches long, was audible a quarter of a mile away. And wolves were numerous. "They go in droves by night," Catesby wrote, "and hunt deer like hounds, with dismal yelling cries." In the luminous shadows people sat on the lawn at Westover, enjoying the cool air, the men teasing ground frogs with the bright coals of their cigars, which the frogs confused with fireflies. The night birds moved overhead with vagrant wild sounds; owls hooted in the swamps; and there grew slowly in the mind of the artist the conception of an immense unspoiled wilderness, stretching away north, south and west, thousands of miles under this benign sky, adorned and enriched with unknown wild plants and animals, and surely "no contemptible Scene of the Glorious Works of the Creator."

Why, thought Catesby, should he not be the first to picture it in all its infinite color and variety? He would show to good Queen Anne the beauty of her American dominions, heretofore either concealed from her, as from all her royal predecessors, or the subject of evil reports. So it came about that Mark Catesby became the first of many gifted people to be moved by the enchantment of the American South, to present its magic and to spend a happy life in its behalf.

For 10 years he hiked through the forest, carrying his portfolio and his box of colors, painting acacias and buffaloes, wild ducks, alligators, game fish, flying squirrels, bullfrogs, rattlesnakes, butterflies, sweet potatoes, live oaks, hickory trees, blackberry bushes, turtles, crabs, honeysuckles and hundreds of then unknown American products. He usually stayed in plantation houses. We know a little of what his life in them was like, from the account in Byrd's diary. (It was decoded in 1941; a librarian at the Huntington Library in California discovered some of Byrd's jottings on the margin of a law book that gave the key to his cipher.) Catesby was in high spirits, in Byrd's account, interested in everything and constantly bursting into song. He was interested in the kind of wood that Indians used in their bows, in the chinkapin nuts that ripened in the fall and tasted better than chestnuts, in the acorns of live oaks that the Indians used for thickening venison soup, in the grain of the rosebay tree, the most beautiful he had ever seen, resembling watered satin when worked into cabinets. He was fascinated by the ivory-billed woodpecker (now extinct or on the verge of extinction), a majestic bird, as large as a domestic rooster, with a curious trumpet call, and so powerful it could cut a bushel of chips in an hour. He was disappointed to find that the American fox was no different from the fox in England, but he appreciated the raccoon because of all creatures it was most like the fox in subtlety.

The boredom of Byrd in his library was incomprehensible to Catesby. He was interested in the sweet gum tree because it exuded a fragrant resin "which by the heat of the sun congeals into transparent resinous drops, which the Indians chew, esteeming it a preservative of their teeth." He was equally interested in the pellitory, or "tooth-ach" tree, the subject of another fine painting: its leaves, he wrote, "are aromatic, very hot and astringent." He noted that they smelled like oranges and were used as a remedy for toothache. The first time he saw a flying squirrel he thought it was a dead leaf blown among the trees by the wind, but in the fall woods he found them gliding almost in flocks.