French artist inspires local author's book

Miles Harvey wrote a book about a man who wouldn't speak with him, and now he's written another, but this time the subject has a convenient excuse: He lived and died almost 500 years ago.

Harvey's first book, "The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime," was a best seller about Gilbert Bland, an enigmatic person who made a livelihood out of stealing precious antique maps out from under the lax security of public libraries. Harvey's ultimately fruitless pursuit of an interview with Bland became as much a part of the book's quest as his tracking of Bland's actual story.

Eight years later, Harvey is back with "Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America." It concerns Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a French artist who joined in a little-known expedition to colonize the Florida coast in 1564. The qualities that served Harvey well in his first book - his inquisitive nature and skill at speculating over mysteries - are put to even better use in addressing a historical figure with misty origins, and he takes the storytelling even further, as much of the book concerns swashbuckling, seafaring tales of 16th-century exploration.

Harvey's own professional journey brings him back home to Downers Grove, where he grew up and attended Downers Grove North High School and where his mother still lives, as he gives a reading at Anderson's Bookshop, 5112 Main St., at 7 p.m. today.

Le Moyne had executed one of the pilfered maps in Harvey's first book, and while on a book tour in the area he said he was clued into "this great story that hadn't been told about the French in Florida." The saga of the French encampment at Fort Caroline in the Jacksonville region and their interaction with the (long extinct) Timucuan tribe had been touched on in academic texts, but "I was really surprised that no one had filtered the story," Harvey said. "No one had covered this really exciting story with this really fascinating figure."

Le Moyne was a natural book subject for a couple of reasons. Harvey sees him as one of the originators of the "documentarian impulse" present today in National Geographic magazine and its cable channel and the like. "He's also straddling modern science and social science," he said. "Also, there's this notion of trying to look at Native Americans as human beings," he added. "In his journals, he really does stand out even among his fellow Frenchmen."

The French were more humane than the Spanish in their treatment of American tribes, but the Europeans in general were brutal with them and with each other. In filling in the surrounding story of Le Moyne and the French colonists, Harvey tells not only of their dwindling supplies and increasingly rancorous dealings with the Timucuans - harrowing enough in itself - but of the race between a French rescue mission and a Spanish fleet bent on wiping the French, especially French Protestants, from Florida. In pursuing the main story's tangents, Harvey gets into the religious wars of the 16th century leading to the ill fates that befell the French explorers.

"The word 'savage' in the title partly just refers to the times," he said.

Without giving away the details, Le Moyne was lucky to be able to return to Europe, and Harvey follows him there, trying to trace his origins even as he tells of Le Moyne's later years doing horticulture drawings used in the embroidery of the times, a career path that would take him to Britain, where he'd connect with Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Queen of Scots.

To research the book, Harvey put in long hours in remote libraries reading 16th-century texts and journals. "I love libraries. If I could I'd pretty much live in them," Harvey said. "My parents were book freaks. They pretty much insisted we read."

Harvey has a background in journalism going back to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where, in the interest of full disclosure, we met and became good friends at The Daily Illini. Yet he has an MFA in creative writing from Michigan, and while he's best known for his nonfiction books, he still writes and teaches fiction. In fact, he's moving from Chicago this summer to take a teaching position at the University of New Orleans. "There's this whole thing since we were in school - creative nonfiction," he said. That places his work in the tradition of best sellers like Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild" and Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," true stories that are also well-told tales, which is what figures to bring readers out to the Anderson's Bookshop in Downers Grove tonight.