“Early in June [1934] I visited a most impressive spot — Silver Springs, some 60 miles from De Land [Florida, home of Robert Barlow. Presumably Barlow was with him.] Here is found a series of placid lagoons … whose floor is riddled with vast pits 30 to 60 feet deep, & covered with curious marine vegetation. In many places divers have encountered the huge bones of prehistoric animals … I saw these varied wonders from a glass-bottomed boat.
Out of the lagoons flows the Silver River, as typical a tropic stream as the Congo or Amazon, with tall palms, trailing vines & moss, & bending cypresses along the swampy banks. Alligators, turtles, & snakes abound, & on either side the jungle stretches away uninterruptedly for miles. … I took a 10 mile launch trip on the river, & could easily have imagined myself in the heart of Africa.” — Lovecraft in Selected Letters IV, page 414.
The leaflet adds the important point that the glass-bottom boats were electric, and therefore relatively silent and thus did not scare the fish away. He also visited New York some months later, to find his friend Belknap Long obsessed by his new hobby of tropical fish-keeping, thus giving another opportunity for close observation of the finny ones.
Evidently there were two types of trip, the “glass-bottom” boat trip and the speedboat “launch” trip of ten miles. Lovecraft talks as if he did both.
One wonders if this trip influenced his decision to set “The Shadow out of Time”, written nine months later, in the prehistoric era?
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.” from — “The Shadow out of Time”.
Bloch, and possibly others, had also sent him pictures of the life-sized dinosaurs from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-34.
Dinosaurs as we know them today were then in their first flush of popularity, and Lovecraft also saw lit dioramas of them as models when he visited the Natural History Museum at New Haven, and he came away greatly impressed.
Lovecraft had a second opportunity for a jungle-like river exploration in June 1935, this time more primitive — but also free of things like the bored tour-guides and perpetually gossiping fellow-tourists who can ruin such trips. The second trip happened toward the end of his long final stay in Florida with young Barlow. The building of Barlow’s printing-house hut on his ‘island across the lake’ was finally completed around June 1935. He and Barlow rowed across to the island each day, and his comment that the “trip” made for “good exercise” suggests it was a fair distance. Lovecraft was quite familiar with rowing-boats, having at Barlow’s age made many solo trips up and down his native Seekonk. I’ve also established elsewhere that the Seekonk of the 1900s was a difficult river, thus Lovecraft would have had no fear of pulling across a mere lake (I presume Barlow’s military family had shot out all the alligators). As Lovecraft tells Bloch, he machete-hacked a track through the undergrowth to a road (presumably un-paved) that lay on the far side of the hut’s boat-landing. Possibly that was how the heavy and the noisy printing equipment was moved in, via his new track and perhaps a short raft journey. He and Barlow went on a celebratory expedition…
Bob’s cabin across the lake is now finished … we row across each day … [also] we explored a marvellous tropical river — with leaning palms, sunken logs, twister cypress roots and the water’s edge — etc etc etc — much like the river at Silver Springs which I described to you last year. This aught to make good descriptive material for some tale, some time … jungle stuff, to use as a background for pre-human ruins, & and all that.
Was this river accessible via an outlet from the lake, or perhaps by carrying the lake-boat along Lovecraft’s newly-hewn jungle track and over the road? The area is reported to have become far more well-drained and drier than it was in the mid 1930s, but the current satellite imagery still suggests a possible small winding river across the road, which looks as though it would be accessible with a small boat taken along the new-cut track…
Wherever the rather more rough-hewn river trip was, it was made after the final completion of “The Shadow out of Time”. Thus he never had the chance to use that particular ‘jungle’ experience in fiction. But finding the above quote further confirms my earlier hunch that, had he lived, some of his fiction would have gone in a ‘Solomon Kane in Africa’-like direction, probably set on the liminal frontier where Ancient Rome met the fringes of the African interior. Such a move could have followed on from his several non-cosmic stories that have a wide international spread in their plotting and back-stories, but here projected back in time in such a way that Lovecraft’s full knowledge of the diasporic Ancient Roman world and pagan rites and superstitions could have been brought to bear. Imagine “Rats” re-written for such a setting, for instance. He would also have been able to explore ideas of the decadence and decline of Empires, and degeneration in the face of certain types of environment.
Further reading:
Stephen J. Jordan, “H.P. Lovecraft in Florida”, Lovecraft Studies 42-43 (Summer/Autumn 2001). Now effectively inaccessible — something really should be done about getting the Lovecraft Studies journal online and searchable.
