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Volume CXXXIII, Number 4 |
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Packard finds a once in a lifetime adventure
KATHRYN
OSTROFSKY
COLUMNIST
One day in December of 1857, Professor Alpheus Packard, Sr. invited to dinner a colleague named Paul Ansel Chadbourne, professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Bowdoin. When the adolescent Alpheus Jr. proudly showed off his display cabinet of shells and such, the professor was quite impressed with the both the collection and the boy's enthusiasm. Professor Chadbourne not only gave Alpheus the names of some naturalists with whom to exchange specimens, but also offered to trade some pieces from his own collection. Soon, Alpheus was a student at Bowdoin, devoting much of his spare time to the study of science. He wrote in his diary of Professor Chadbourne: "I like to have an hour's chat with him whenever I can." In addition to academics, Alpheus enhanced his Bowdoin experience by participating in the Psi Upsilon fraternity, the Peucinean Society, and the Cleaveland Natural History Society. He was a founding member and curator of the latter club, which was named after the recently deceased science professor so revered in the ranks of contemporary Bowdoin men.
Meanwhile, Professor Chadbourne worked on a project of his own-securing the permission and the means to take students on the scientific trip to Greenland to which we have already been introduced in previous installments. In a letter to Bowdoin President Leonard Woods dated March 17, 1860, Chadbourne wrote of his intention to sail, "if the ice will allow," from Maine to Greenland by way of Labrador.
He continues: "The price for passage will be $125. This includes every thing except bed clothing & towels. Mattresses are furnished by the owner of the ship. The vessel is of 140 tons… and will be fitted up well. I have many applications, but as some are undecided I shall engage the first that offer…. Though three places are now vacant they will probably be very soon filled."
Of course the slots would be filled! An adventure such as this does not come but once in a lifetime. At the end of his junior year, Alpheus accepted Professor Chadbourne's invitation to join the expedition. Four years in Brunswick was apparently insufficient for Alpheus: after graduating Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. from Bowdoin, he earned his M.D., A.M., PhD., and LL.D. all from Bowdoin as well.
Like many of his classmates, Alpheus fought for the Union during the Civil War. He was an assistant surgeon in the 1st Maine Veteran Volunteers in 1864. Most of his postwar career, however, was in the field of entomology. He held lectureships at Massachusetts Agricultural College, the University of Maine, and Brown University. He was also the Massacusetts State Entomologist from 1871 to 1873, and the President of the International Society of Zoology in 1889. In 1891, Alpheus Spring Packard Jr. was to publish The Labrador Coast about his experiences and his findings from this and another Labrador excursion, but in 1860 he was but an eager student on board the Nautilus headed to northern seas.
As the Nautilus drew her course northeast from Maine, the voyage was
relatively uneventful, but yielded curiosities nonetheless. The writer
of the Williams Quarterly article described his first sight of the Clio
borealis, and how inadequate were all his descriptions of its "pellucid
body tipped with carmine, rising through the water with a movement of
its water wings, as though guided by sweet music." At his first sight
of the Labrador coast, he was awestruck by the flora, which he said could
not be equaled in its rich colors and contrasts where pure white snows
"rest on rugged rocks or black lavas, and then nestling in some little
nook a cluster of many richly tinted species, set round with soft mosses
and cripmled Lichens." He pointed out the futility of an attempt
to gain a true sense of life on the boat off Labrador through only stories
of the fantastic and awesome. "Countless incidents might be written
down," he wrote, "while the real flavor of the whole can no
more be expressed with pen and ink, than we can describe an iceberg to
those who have never seen one or paint by words the rainbow-colored Medusoe
that floated in the waters, or the rich tinted flowers that dotted the
Lichens at the base of those ice-crowned hills."
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