Genius of Place by Justin Martin Page A

amounts for drinking, making coffee, washing their clothes, and other needs.
    By midjourney, the Ronaldson ’s crew was hungry, thirsty, tired, and enraged. An episode occurred that brought them to the brink of mutiny.
    Captain Fox ordered one of the young hands punished for that offense of offenses—cursing. The captain held the sailor while the first mate flogged him repeatedly. Fred looked on in horror, and one of his shipmates counted aloud: “Twenty-three, twenty-four . . . ”
    Another crewman yelled: “We are no men if we stand it longer!”
    Suddenly, all around him, sailors took up handspikes and knives. Fred fully expected the crew to kill Captain Fox and the first mate.
    Likely they would have, had one of the ship’s most experienced hands not begun yelling: “Avast! Avast! . . . what do you want to run your head into a halter for? Can’t you wait till we get home and let the law serve them out?”
    His argument was simple: Engaging in mutiny was a foolish and selfdestructive act that would surely result in the crew members being hung. Better to wait until the ship reached port and exact revenge on Captain Fox in a court of law. With his plea, the man managed to stop the uprising, and order was restored.
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    On April 20, 1844, the Ronaldson arrived in New York. The voyage had taken 104 days.
    The crewman who had urged legal recourse over violence immediately set off for the Sailor’s Home. There, he requested a voluntary lockdown to prevent himself from going on one of the alcoholic benders that
usually accompanied his shore leaves. He wanted to maintain a clear head so that he could testify at the trial of Captain Fox.
    The trial would happen surprisingly quickly. Fox would be convicted of using excessive force and ordered to pay $1,000 to the sailor that he had flogged.
    As for Fred, he arrived home just shy of his twenty-second birthday, looking yellow and skeletal, racked by scurvy. His head was shaved. At first, his father didn’t even recognize him.
    â€œWell, how do you like the sea?” Fred had asked rhetorically in one of his letters. Now, he had an answer: not very bloody much.
    He’d endured seasickness, illness, and a fall from a spar; he’d battled wind and water and snow; he’d been hungry, thirsty, and weary beyond imagining. Unlike some other notable Olmsteds, sailor was not a vocation for Fred. The sea didn’t call to him, and he’d never again consider a life aboard a ship.
    Yet, hard as it was, the voyage aboard the Ronaldson also changed something essential about Fred. He’d faced a formidable challenge and, for once, had stuck with something to completion. He may have appeared a gaunt and diminished figure on the wharf that April day. But he was larger somehow, too, having perhaps bulked up in terms of inner strength. He still had a long way to go; plenty of dead ends lay ahead, and settling into adulthood was going to be drastically more difficult for him than for most people. But Fred had taken the first steps toward filling out that grand name, Frederick Law Olmsted, and all the ambition that it implied.

CHAPTER 3
    Uncommon Friends
    THE VERY FIRST PHOTOS of Olmsted date from 1846, during the period after he returned from his ocean voyage. There’s a pair of pictures from the same sitting. Both are group shots featuring the same cast of characters: Olmsted, his brother John, and three other young men.
    Photography was brand-new at this point, having been invented in France less than a decade earlier. Getting one’s portrait taken was a fad then sweeping across America. In fact, this same year, 1846, marks the first time a photo was ever taken of a young congressman from Illinois—Abraham Lincoln. These earliest photographic images are known as daguerreotypes, and the process for creating them was painstaking. It required bulky camera equipment and tiresomely long sittings by subjects, spent coaxing an