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Slate.com Table of Contents gabfest The Supreme Court Wrap-Up Gabfest gaming Advanced Search Keeping It Unreal books gearbox Why Implausibility Sells Finally, a Hybrid for the Country Club Set bushisms green room Bushism of the Day A Tick's Life bushisms hollywoodland Bushism of the Day Reality Bites chatterbox human guinea pig Guns of Convenience Diaper Genie Convictions human nature Nino Get Your Gun Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy corrections human nature Corrections Sexual Antagonism day to day jurisprudence A First for the Second Amendment Five Myths About the New Wiretapping Law dear prudence jurisprudence Who's My Daddy? 20 Questions for David Addington dispatches jurisprudence The Headmaster and the Schoolboy Taste-Testing Nutraloaf dvd extras jurisprudence The Complete Carlin The Supreme Court: A User Guide explainer map the candidates Why Don't Jehovah's Witnesses Vote? Together Again explainer moneybox Are Black Muslims Sunni or Shiite? 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LLC 1/93 Obamamania technology Barachmaninoff Victoria's Circuit Obamamania television Monobamatic The Apprentice Obamamania the best policy Post-Baratic Stress Disorder The Department of Forgetting Obamamania the breakfast table Barocrates The Supreme Court Breakfast Table other magazines the chat room How To Speak Bubba Low Pay, No Respect, High Satisfaction poem today's papers "Confinement" Year of the Gun politics today's papers Blessed Reassurance Not a Time To Kill press box today's papers How To Write for the Web Rise of the Insurgents reading list today's papers Yummy Mummys, Mongoose Mine-Detectors, and Leg-Lengthening Taking a Stand Surgery today's papers recycled Life Is Not Worth Losing What Kind of Terrorism Does North Korea Sponsor? today's papers recycled A Separate Peace Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Today's Papers rural life A Little Bit Racist My Dog Has a Crush on My Ram Science How Smart Is the Octopus? slate fare Advanced Search Work for the Slate Group Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET slate v Can Apes Really Talk? books slate v Dear Prudence: Dogs Gone Wild Why Implausibility Sells The strange quest to write history in the absence of evidence. summer vacation By Christopher Benfey Summer Staycation Monday, June 23, 2008, at 8:10 AM ET summer vacation The Great Barbecue Debate Nonfiction has to be true, of course, but it doesn't have to be summer vacation believable, which may help explain why so many recent best- The Pasta Salad Manifesto sellers are of the Ripley's variety. Coincidences that no novelist could get away with happen all the time in "real life." And while summer vacation characters in fiction have to be consistent, people rarely are. A We're Going on a Treasure Hunt man wakes up at 50 after a quiet life in the suburbs and goes on Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/93 a shooting spree or, a better option, decides to climb Mount Whether Le Moyne's drawings survived remains a mystery; Everest. Another leaves his wife and moves a few blocks away, engravings supposedly based on his watercolor sketches of the buys a wig, and spies on her for 20 years—oops, no, that's Timucua people were later published in Germany. Mannerist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield," a work of fiction style, the prints make the idealized Indians, with their sculpted purportedly based on a newspaper article. limbs and flowing locks, look like they've stepped out of Michelangelo's Garden of Eden. Like so much else in his life, Le Whole genres of nonfiction have sprung from this "stranger- Moyne's original artwork has vanished, however, and than-fiction" terrain. There's "true crime," an odd moniker when inconsistencies in the engravings—the Indians brandish you think about it, and all those perilous journeys such as Into Brazilian weapons and wield European farm implements— Thin Air, A Voyage Long and Strange, and The Perfect Storm. suggest that he may have made later drawings from memory And then there's the harder-to-name category of tales of after his return to France or that the engraver "improved" on his intellectual eccentricity, sometimes with a crime thrown in, originals. It's legitimate to wonder whether there actually were which Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel have made their own. originals. Such books often have subtitles beginning with "the true story of" (Sobel's Longitude and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm) The missing paintings are just one of many "gaps" in the or "the fantastic story of" (Winchester's The Man Who Loved biographical record. Nothing is known of Le Moyne's 30 years China), as though implausibility is itself the major selling point. of life before his departure for the New World, nor do we know what he did during the 15 years after his return, wounded and Miles Harvey, a former writer for Outside magazine, had a best- wretched after a near-miraculous Atlantic crossing without a seller in 2000 with The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of pilot or sufficient food and water. What we do know is that the th Cartographic Crime, in which he managed to combine all three late-16 century was a dangerous time for French Protestants, of the genres—true crime, perilous voyage, and tale of when religious wars erupted into periodic fits of ethnic intellectual eccentricity—in the story of the enigmatic Gilbert cleansing. Drawing on research of previous scholars, especially Bland (a name you couldn't get away with in a novel), who art historian Paul Hulton, Harvey picks up the trail when Le razored rare maps from American libraries and sold them to Moyne has moved his base of operations to London circa 1580, unscrupulous dealers. In Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange where he becomes an adviser to the great Sir Walter Raleigh, Saga of the First European Artist in North America, he has done who had New World schemes of his own. it again in a book that could bear a further subtitle: "The Strange Quest for a 'True' Saga When There Isn't Enough Evidence To More than once Harvey compares Le Moyne's journey into Go On." unknown territory with his own "quest" in search of Le Moyne, and he keeps the reader guessing with a few too many suspense- Maps, dealers in antiquities, and an enigmatic protagonist also creating clauses: "Their visit had lasted only three days. It would figure in Painter in a Savage Land, which goes in search of new change the world." Harvey is a master of injecting suspense even information about a shadowy 16th-century French Huguenot into admissions of ignorance, which he turns into occasions for painter named Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, best known for flamboyant prose and speculative improvisation, as in this his detailed botanical renderings of blossoms and fruit. "His "portrait" of the artist as a young man: story, I would learn, was stranger than fiction and sometimes more thrilling," Harvey writes, "a tale replete with shipwrecks, No portrait survives of the painter, then about mutinies, religious wars, political intrigues, pirate raids, Indian 30 years old. We do not know whether he was attacks, famines, hurricanes, and mass murders." Whether Le slim or burly, tall or short, handsome or Moyne's own life was "replete" with such high drama is less disfigured, his voice deep or nasal, his clear; the manuscript of the "riveting narrative of his adventures complexion olive or fair. We know only that in the New World," as Harvey concedes, "has long since he was thick-skinned, that some combination disappeared, leaving only Latin and German translations of of good genes and good luck bestowed on him questionable accuracy." Harvey's quest for plausible a genius for survival. We have no idea what a speculations amounts to a daring exploit—and one that inspires lover would have remembered about his touch vivid prose but ends up putting a strain on the author himself, or a fortuneteller would have discovered in his not just on the patience of his readers. palm, yet we can guess that his hands were strong and nimble, skilled at crafting In 1564, Le Moyne accompanied a party of roughly 300 other illustrations of infinitesimal detail yet also French Protestants to found a colony, Fort Caroline, near adept at handling a harquebus, the unwieldy present-day Jacksonville, Fla. He was apparently (if we believe predecessor to the musket. We cannot say the patchy visual documentation) an eyewitness to negotiations whether he inherited dark eyes from the Gauls and altercations with local Indians, and he survived the or blue from the Normans, but the more we destruction of the colony, the following year, by Spanish forces. learn about him, the more we are convinced Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/93 that those eyes, whatever their color, took odyssey." "I confess," he writes, "that I've finally grown tired of everything in and gave very little away. him, too." Faced with so much uncertainty, Harvey does some legwork of his own, tracking down a possible relative of Le Moyne's who served as embroiderer to Mary Queen of Scots, and arguing that Le Moyne's art may be more closely tied to embroidery patterns bushisms than has been thought.

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