Product Description

In this vibrantly told, meticulously researched book, Miles Harvey reveals one of the most fascinating and overlooked lives in American history. Like The Island of Lost Maps, his bestselling book about a legendary map thief, Painter in a Savage Land is a compelling search into the mysteries of the past. This is the thrilling story of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European artist to journey to what is now the continental United States with the express purpose of recording its wonders in pencil and paint. Le Moyne’s images, which survive today in a series of spectacular engravings, provide a rare glimpse of Native American life at the pivotal time of first contact with the Europeans–most of whom arrived with the preconceived notion that the New World was an almost mythical place in which anything was possible.

In 1564 Le Moyne and three hundred other French Protestants landed off the coast of Florida, hoping to establish the first permanent European settlement in the sprawling territory that would become the United States. Their quest ended in gruesome violence, but Le Moyne was one of the few colonists to escape, returning across the Atlantic to create dozens of illustrations of the local Native Americans–works of lasting importance to scholars. Today, he is also recognized as an influential early painter of flowers and plants.
A Zelig-like persona, Le Moyne worked for some of the most prominent figures of his time, including Sir Walter Raleigh. Harvey’s research, moreover, suggests a fascinating link to the notorious Mary Queen of Scots. Largely forgotten until the twentieth century, Le Moyne’s pieces have become increasingly sought after in the art world–at a 2005 auction, a previously unknown book of his botanical drawings sold for a million dollars.
In re-creating the life and legacy of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Miles Harvey weaves a tale of both intellectual intrigue and swashbuckling drama. Replete with shipwrecks, mutinies, religious wars, pirate raids, and Indian attacks, Painter in a Savage Land is truly a tour de force of narrative nonfiction.

Praise for Painter in a Savage Land

"Inspired, beautiful, and wholly original. Miles Harvey is an archeologist of forgotten stories, a master of finding astounding characters folded into the crevices of withered documents. In Painter in a Savage Land, he has breathed life into a thrilling and unlikely tale that, in the end, connects us all." --Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers and Crashing Through
"Like some lovable sleuth of the esoteric--a sort of scholarly Columbo--Miles Harvey has a way of stumbling onto intriguing historical tales entirely missed by others. With equal parts rigor and wonder, he has transported us to a surprising dawn-world when a bewildered Europe was making its first contacts with a bizarre and vulnerable continent." --Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers
"A fantastic brew of art, exploration and exploitation. Miles Harvey's story bristles with surprises on every page." --Laurence Bergreen, author of Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu and Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
"Miles Harvey has outdone himself with this absorbing account of the life and work of a mysterious French artist who was the first European to record visual impressions of North America. Harvey's investigation into the curious life, swashbuckling adventures and enduring legacy of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is appealing on a number of compelling levels, adeptly done with style, elegance and a sure sense of story." --Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, Among the Gently Mad and A Splendor of Letters
"Insatiable curiosity and fierce pursuit of fact combine to create a graceful exploration of worlds old and new." --Kirkus Reviews
"A fascinating exploration of the obscure life and violent times of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. … Harvey's volume hits the sweet spot for both adventure buffs and history fans." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"One astonishing discovery after another …  Harvey's groundbreaking, fun-to-read biography blows dust off significant swathes of history and makes for a rousing read." --Booklist (starred review)
"[A] rip-roaring account of Le Moyne's adventures. ... It's a testament to Harvey's research and style that he can powerfully evoke a man about whom so few documentary traces remain." --Entertainment Weekly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118991 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-24
• Released on: 2008-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* From a doomed French fort on what became the site for Jacksonville, Florida, to the streets of Paris and London, where Huguenots and Lutherans were burned at the stake, to the auction rooms of Sotheby’s, the dramatic story of the long-lost artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is a veritable tale of nine lives. Historian Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps, 2000) marvels at the “epic strangeness” of his subject’s complicated life story. Le Moyne was the first artist sent to North America when he set sail from Le Havre in 1564 with 300 men sent to stake a claim for France in Florida but fated to suffer starvation and violent death. Le Moyne not only survived and returned home; he also managed to create marvelously stylized drawings of the tragically doomed Timucuan people. He then escaped religious persecution in France and found sanctuary in London, where he became a leading botanical artist and advisor to Walter Raleigh. It’s one astonishing discovery after another as Harvey retrieves the buried truth about Le Moyne and chronicles the nearly miraculous preservation of his work. With hugely entertaining side journeys, energetic analysis, and a diabolical surprise ending, Harvey’s groundbreaking, fun-to-read biography blows the dust off significant swathes of history and makes for a rousing read. --Donna Seaman

About the Author
Miles Harvey is the author of The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, a national and international bestseller that was named one of the top ten books of 2000 by USA Today and the Chicago Sun-Times. The recipient of a 2004-2005 Illinois Arts Council Award for prose and a 2007-2008 Knight-Wallace fellowship at the University of Michigan, he teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

Customer Reviews

A powerful, highly recommended art history
PAINTER IN A SAVAGE LAND; THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE FIRST EUROPEAN ARTIST IN NORTH AMERICA is a top pick for any art history collection: it offers a well-researched yet lively survey of one Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European artist to travel around the U.S. capturing its wonders I pencil and paint. In 1564 he and three hundred other French Protestants landed off the coast of Florida - he was one of the few to live the experience, returning home to create dozens of illustrations of America's Native Americans. A powerful, highly recommended art history, this also deserves a place in any collection strong in early American history.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Excellent storytelling
Miles Harvey once again provides an example of excellent storytelling; not only does he give life to an important but relatively unknown period in our collective history, but he excels at crafting a story that subtly ties the past to the present.
I like his exhaustive research, and how he can stick to the facts while exploring possibilities and make relevant the lives of people who previously felt so distant.
His treatment of indigenous Terra Floridians speaks to his ability to examine people and places from more than one perspective. He knows how to engage a reader!

Compelling & dramatic saga of an accidental adventurer
Jacque le Moyne de Morgues, Miles Harvey ultimately concludes, may never have intended to lead quite as adventurous life as he did. Still, given just how dramatic that life proved to be -- he escaped death narrowly on countless occasions during his travels in the New World, only to flee his home country and settle in England to avoid religious persecution, churning out pioneering art work along the way -- it's astonishing that le Moyne is so unknown outside a narrow circle of conoisseurs and collectors of his botanical prints.

Even Harvey stumbled across le Moyne by accident, while promoting his previous book The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (which tells an equally obscure but fascinating tale albeit in a more idiosyncratic way). In Florida, a chance encounter makes him aware of a real-life story that lies behind the early map of Florida that illustrated his first book: the saga of France's efforts to found a permanent settlement in the New World -- Fort Caroline, now long since vanished -- and to the artist who accompanied them, Jacques Le Moyne. The handful of artistic works that he produced of Florida's native inhabitants as well as its flaura and fauna are not only the earliest record of region, but a tribute to a now-vanished civilization. Within decades of le Moyne's capturing their images, the Spanish had converted them by force to Catholicism and many were dead of disease, leaving their traditions to vanish into thin air.

Le Moyne, a botanic illustrator by trade, won a place on the French expedition to Florida and spent a turbulent year or so on the North American continent, details of which have been exhaustively researched by Harvey and are dramatically retold, blending the survivors' own recollections whenever possible to portray the initial euphoria of the French explorers, followed by conflict with the local tribes, wintertime starvation, mutiny and ultimately, just as the fledgling colony was about to be relieved, an attack by Spanish forces. Le Moyne survived to bring back to Europe some of the earliest pictures of the North American continent.

This was compelling enough, but I found Harvey's later investigations into le Moyne and Fort Caroline and his quest for answers to long-standing historical questions to be just as intriguing. He is probably more frustrated than any reader will be at the lack of definitive answers, but some of the hypotheses -- did le Moyne have a family connection to the court of Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance? -- are just as dramatic and exciting in their own right as the artist's own adventures.

The only part of this otherwise superb narrative that I felt could have been stronger is some insight into why Harvey and others consider le Moyne to be worthy of such great attention as an artist. He was first on the scene in a few areas -- in portraying life in what Harvey describes in the title as a "savage land" and also in producing compendiums of flower paintings, known as florilegia, long before others followed. But being first doesn't always mean being of superior quality. Harvey notes the Mannerist tendency in le Moyne's drawings of the Florida Indians, which romanticizes and distorts them, and English artists painting in the Carolinas only a few decades later produced what we would see today as far more lifelike renditions of life in the New World. And there is no substantive discussion of the ways in which his botanical illustrations were better than those of his peers or successors; earlier, yes, but better? True, le Moyne led a dramatic life that is probably too much overlooked by historians, but what was it that made it worthy of a book today, more than four centuries later?

Perhaps it's a tribute to Miles Harvey's storytelling talents that even in the absence of an answer to that question, I'd still rate this a solid four-and-a-half stars. It will be of greatest interest to those who have a fascination with the history of first encounters between Europeans and the North American native inhabitants, and of European exploration. But Harvey's own narrative, as he stubbornly tries to find out more about le Moyne -- what he did before and after this dramatic adventure -- is an equally intriguing adventure saga in its own fashion.

If you're interested in pursuing a more scholarly (and very hefty) tome about France's New World explorations, one new narrative that is less dramatic in tone but equally intriguing in content is a new biography of Samuel de Champlain. Champlain's Dream