The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [22]
Stifled by city life, Roosevelt educated himself as best he could about zoology on the streets of Manhattan. As if cramming for a final exam, he grew determined to learn the song of every fast-fluttering bird in New York and the nesting habits of every small mammal in Central Park. Studying marine species in the nearby Atlantic Ocean was another interest; he actually enjoyed analyzing the radula (mouthparts) of mollusks. One afternoon he spied a dead seal at a fish stand among the piles of maritime products available for sale on the wharf—scallops, tuna, and other food fish; dried sea horses and pipefishes hawked for their “medicinal” qualities; and much more. Roosevelt fixated on the dead seal’s bulk and whiskers.33 The fact that the species had been netted in New York Harbor, where it is a rare visitor, flabbergasted him. Day after day, as if drawn to a talisman, he kept begging to be brought to the pier to study the seal’s anatomy more closely.34 As a budding naturalist, acquainted with The Voyage of the Beagle, the seven- or eight-year-old noted that seals had no external ears and that their back flippers didn’t bend forward to help their bodies when they were on dry land. Zoology books taught him that there were nineteen seal species in the world, most living around Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.
“That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure,” he later recalled in his autobiography. “I had already begun to read some of Mayne Reid’s books and other boys’ books of adventure, and I felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic fashion before me. As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal.” 35
Eventually, once the seal’s body was sold for blubber, Roosevelt was given the head as a souvenir. With this in hand, the ten-year-old created his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.” Its purpose was to help train him to become a natural history professional like Darwin. Bookshelf space was made in the upstairs hall at 28 East Twentieth Street for “Tag #1,” and before long he had rows of bird nests, dead insects, and mouse skeletons. He considered himself a “general collector,” with a particular interest in salamanders and squirrels. After a few months, however, he turned his focus primarily to birds. Before long, he had numerous specimens to call his own. There is, in fact, a precious historical document housed at Harvard University, handwritten and five pages long, that illuminates the sheer earnestness with which young Theodore maintained his natural history collection. Titled “Record of the Roosevelt Museum,” it begins with a proclamation of professional accomplishment. “At the commencement of the year 1867 Mr. T. Roosevelt, Jr. started the Museum with 12 specimins [sic]: at the close of the same year Mr. J. W. Roosevelt [West Roosevelt, his cousin] joined him but each kept his own specimens, these amounting to hardly 100. During 1868 they accumulated 150 specimens, making a total of 250 specimens.”36
Roosevelt scrambled for new specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects wherever he could. Conch shells, larvae, hollowed eggs, and even a common cockroach were worth inclusion into his growing windowsill and bookshelf collection. In an article titled “My Life as a Naturalist,” written in 1918 when he was an ex-president, Roosevelt recalled that he collected specimens the