a modern man who collected with the aid of an automobile packed with a
‘‘weed wagon.’’ Finally, the brothers Roland (–) and Francis (–
) Harper, New England–born botanists and workaholics, were devoted
to the study and preservation of Okefenokee Swamp, which Roland first
visited in . Here was a place Fishman could visit, too.
Fishman’s tightly scheduled and travels are of interest and re-
vealing. There was hardly a trace of Mark Catesby to be found in Charleston
or up the Ashley River, little surprise. But she documented Hardy Croom’s
connection with Alvan Chapman—Chapman was the young pupil to Croom
—and she hiked the Apalachicola Bluffs, where the two had botanized
together so long ago. The bluffs are a delight because they are protected
by the Nature Conservancy. Fishman also found the Croom family monu-
ment in a Tallahassee churchyard. Earlier, Fishman canoed through parts
of the Okefenokee with an informed companion, comparing landforms
with seventy- and eighty-year-old works by the Harpers. The great swamp
has been canalized, timbered, and mined for phosphates; comparisons did
not encourage.
To the south, St. Johns River had been a thoroughfare for so many of
her naturalists that Fishman persuaded an entomologist friend, a mos-
quito specialist with a twenty-two-foot motorized sailboat calledGator,to
undertake a voyage from Sanford to the northern end of Lake George. They
packed three coolers, ‘‘way too much food,’’ guidebooks, Bartramiana, ‘‘bin-
oculars, an assortment of cameras and lenses, clothes, sunscreens, hats,
rain suits, a portable toilet,’’ and more, for a week-long trip in May —
mildly embarrassed by the comparison with William Bartram’s equipment.
There was immediately much to see onshore: marinas, ‘‘yachts that reduced
Gatorto the size of a dinghy,’’ housing developments, and power plants.
Elsewhere wetland forests had returned from ruins of plantations; Bartram
had viewed eastern bank landscapes more open, here and there. Fishman
and the mosquito specialist, also a ‘‘Bartram aficionado,’’ looked for places
William had camped, had observed, or had battled alligators, and they saw
a few. They spotted ruins of Timucuan shell mounds—opened and spoiled
by artifact hunters, but especially carried off by highway departments, since
shells made fine roadbeds. Fishman ventilated about Mrs. Fuller’s folly, the
hazards to navigation posed by water hyacinth, and especially the plant’s
despoliation of the river’s bottom. A woman they met who lived on an island
spoke effectively for Fishman and her companion: ‘‘The bottom was clear
and sandy when I was a kid. We used to swim here, but not anymore. That
stuff [dead hyacinth sludge] is a foot or more deep and it isn’t going away.