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in a class of 177.14 And the Phi Beta Kappa graduate had even managed to publish two ornithology chapbooks, a thesis on women’s rights, and wrote chapters of The Naval War of 1812. “I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he recorded in his diary. “I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had half a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation; and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together—I have won the sweetest girl for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.”15

After dutifully following all the rituals on commencement day—spending time, for example, with Alice Lee’s family in Chestnut Hill—Roosevelt packed up the contents of Winthrop Street and shipped them to the Fifty-Seventh Street house in New York. His plan was to first spend a few weeks in Oyster Bay and then head to the blue-green Maine coast to sun, sail, and explore. Instead of climbing Mount Katahdin, he would enjoy the tumble of the surf on Mount Desert Island, the second-largest island on the Eastern Seaboard. Surrounding the main island were numerous tiny shore islands, each with marine enchantment all its own. After some days with friends Alice would join him.

Partly because Roosevelt was writing The Naval War of 1812—an act of genuine hubris for a twenty-two-year-old—he wanted proximity to the boundless Atlantic Ocean to study the cold, buffeting waters around Mount Desert Island.* Two of Roosevelt’s favorite painters of the Hudson River school, Frederick Church and Thomas Cole, had summered around the Maine island in the 1850s. Recognizing the island as one of God’s great galleries, Church had both painted and sketched landscapes of the indented shoreline with great skill. Two of his faithful renderings—Fog of Mount Desert and Newport Mountain—were beloved by locals for generations. As for Cole, he sketched sixteen natural sites on Mount Desert Island ranging from bold headlands to strands of northern white cedar, red spruce, and black spruce. A particular emphasis was given to blasted pine standing alone on rocky cliffs and to the gorgeous islets that dot Frenchman Bay.16

Roosevelt went to Mount Desert Island with his friends Dick Saltonstall and Jack Tebbetts. They lodged four miles from Bar Harbor near Schooner Head, a huge jagged rock very near the Atlantic Ocean. The trio called the bungalow where they slept “bachelors’ hall.” Right outside their door was the stony beach where crab skeletons, seaweed tangles, and broken shell bits were washed ashore. An immediate favorite locale for Roosevelt was Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard, and the first place in the United States where you could see the sunrise. Roosevelt also rode horseback over stone bridges and hunted for sea urchins among the shell heaps on Fernald’s Point. He was lulled by the murmuring ocean; he picked baskets of cranberries, collected shellfish in the tidal marsh, and gathered wild berries; and when Alice, unchaperoned, arrived, strolled “with my darling in the woods and on the rocky shores.”

To an ornithologist the sheer diversity of the marine environment of Mount Desert Island offered merriment. Seabirds such as jaegers, shearwaters, puffins, and razorbills were everywhere, prancing around in the surf then flying away when the shades of twilight fell under the full onset of the sea. At Thunder Hole, Theodore and Alice sat entranced as seawater waves rushed in and out of a perfectly formed cave while debonair black skimmers circled above. Soon, however, Roosevelt was sick again, this time stricken with cholera morbus. Dehydration, diarrhea, and body flux ensued. There were no pills or port or morphine to make him feel better. Not only was he unable to show off for Alice but, as he wrote to his sister Corinne