A Biographical Sketch of A.
Hyatt Verrill
This may be the best summary
of the life of A. Hyatt Verrill that I have read in my 15 years of research on
the author. I have added a few footnotes and hyperlinks to add some details. There are
hundreds of other pages on the author in my blog and I have republished many
rare stories which are available on Lulu./drf
VERRILL, Alpheus Hyatt (23
July 1871-14 Nov. 1954), author and anthropologist, was born in New Haven,
Connecticut, the son of Addison Emery Verrill, a professor and curator of the
Peabody Museum at Yale, and Flora Louisa Smith. He was educated at New Haven’s
Hopkins Grammar School, the Yale School of Fine Arts, and in zoology and
geology at the Yale Sheffield Scientific School. He married Kathryn L. McCarthy
in 1892; they had one son and three daughters. Lida Ruth Shaw Kohler became his
second wife in 1944; they had no children.
Able to produce accurate
drawings of insects from life at age nine, Verrill illustrated the natural
history section of Webster’s International Dictionary in 1896 and later did
illustrations for the Clarendon Dictionary and a subsequent edition of Webster’s. He often illustrated his own
works and other scientific reports. An expert photographer, he developed the
autochrome process of natural color photography in 1902.
For the Yale museum, at age
seventeen Verrill became perhaps the youngest collector to make a one-man
expedition to obtain fauna of tropical jungles, beginning a series of
explorations in the Caribbean and Central and South America. He lived in
Dominica from 1903 to 1906, British Guiana from 1913 to 1917, and Panama from
1917 to 1921. In 1907 Verrill rediscovered a supposedly extinct shrew-like
animal, Solenodon paradoxus, in Santo Domingo. He made
his last collecting trip to Latin America in 1950.
Under the auspices of George
G. Heye and his Museum of the American Indian in New York City, Verrill
undertook archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork from 1916 to 1932,
collecting cultural artifacts, vocabulary lists, and oil painting from life of
members of the Caribs of British Guiana; the San Blas Indians and the Guaymis
of Panama; the Aymara, Colla, and Sirionos of Bolivia; the Yungas of Peru; and
the Panos of Chile. These oils were displayed in the Museum of the American
Indian and exhibited in London at the Royal Geographical Society (c. 1926).
Verrill’s most important
archaeological contribution, for which he is cited in the Handbook
of Middle American Indians (1966), was his work at a ceremonial center of the
previously unknown Coclé culture of Panama. Interested in representative
samples rather than extensive excavations, and suspecting Verrill of stealing
material that should have gone to the museum, Heye withdrew financial support,
which forced Verrill to terminate excavations. Verrill went on his own to South
America and got back into Heye’s favor by sending him anthropological and
archaeological material from Bolivia, Chile, and Peru from 1928 to 1932.
Shortly after his return from
Dominica in 1906, Verrill became the popular science editor of American
Boy Magazine. His work attracted the notice of publishers, and he began writing
popular adult and boy’s books and articles on ethnography, archaeology, natural
history, history and geography, and mechanical and scientific subjects. His The
A.B.C. of Automobile Driving (1909) was translated and used as an instructional
manual for the Japanese army. In his autobiography he states that at his peak
in the 1930s he was writing two books at a time and turned out seven books in
one year (probably 1936), a feat that was noted in the World
Almanac.
His subjects covered areas such as biography, history, geography, natural history,
geology, and treasure hunting. Verrill claimed to have written South
and Central American Trade Conditions of Today (1914) in ten days. His 1916
book on airplanes,
the first popular book on the subject, was updated and remained a standard work
for years. Having produced books on aircraft and gasoline engines, he received
an appointment (c. 1912) as technical advisor on gasoline engines for the
Aeronautical Society. Among his other books were Motor
Boats and Boat Motors (1910); The American Crusoe (1914); Harper’s
Book of Gasoline Engines (1916); Radio Detectives in the Jungle (1918); The
Real Story of the Pirate (1923); South and Central American Trade Conditions of Today,
rev. ed.
(1919); Boy Adventures in the Land of El Dorado (1921); Panama
Past and Present (1922); Romantic and Historic Maine (1933); Lost
Treasures
(1938); Wonder Creatures of the Sea (1940); Perfumes
and Spices (1940);
and Shell Collector’s Handbook (1950).
Verrill’s 109[1]
books included several on adventure and fantasy subjects. Uncle
Abner’s Legacy (1915) was the first of six Verrill science-fiction novels. He wrote
another novel, When the Moon Ran Wild (1931), under the name Ray
Ainsbury. Between 1926 and 1935 Verrill wrote more than twenty science-fiction
stories for the early pulps, utilizing his experiences in Central and South
American jungles with “lost” ancient civilizations and his knowledge of the
biological and physical sciences.
Verrill’s writings on pirates
and lost treasures led him to be considered an expert on the subject by some.
He was hired in 1929 by a syndicate interested in recovering Spanish treasure
lost in 1637 on Silver Shoals, 100 miles north of the Dominican Republic.
Research among the records of Sir William Phipps’s 1687 recovery of part of the
treasure led Verrill to locate a wreck and bring up artifacts, including a few
coins, before the season’s funds ran out. He failed later to relocate the
wreck. A second syndicate hired him to head an attempt in 1937-1938 to recover
treasure attributed to Jean Lafitte on the Suwannee River in western Florida.
Verrill claimed that traces of gold were found on his drill but that the chest
kept slipping deeper into “quicksand” and could not be recovered.
Following this excavation,
Verrill built a cabin in 1940 in nearby Chiefland on the site of Anhiarka, the
Indian village at which Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto had wintered on his
trek to the Mississippi. Verrill established experimental gardens and a natural
history museum and zoo and supplied the Philadelphia Zoo with live specimens
from the area. Mounted specimens went to the Universities of Miami and Florida
and to Cornell University.
Moving to Lake Worth,
Florida, in 1944, Verrill gave art lessons and then opened a shell business. On
a shell collecting trip to the West Indies he discovered five unknown species
and the second known specimen of Murex spectrum, a carnivorous rock or dye
snail. Verrill died in Chiefland, Florida.
Heye credited Verrill with
having “written a new chapter of Middle American archaeology” (“Never A DullMoment,” Box 0C032, Folder 9, p. 390). Theodore Roosevelt stated in a museum
talk that “my friend Verrill. . . really put the West Indies on the map.”
Although considered an authority in his day, no anthropological journal noted
Verrill’s passing. Ground-breaking, informative, and popular in their time,
many of his anthropological works contain references to “primitive” tribes and
“races,” “wooly-headed” native “rascals,” and other expressions now out of
favor. Working before the development of scientific dating methods, Verrill
sometimes proposed theories not accepted by professional anthropologists. The
“first” American to penetrate many areas, he reported his explorations with a
sense of adventure, wonder, and humanity, as in this passage from his autobiography:
“Such people [of the town of Huarachiri, Peru] were
those whom Pizarro and his fellows saw, robbed, enslaved and butchered, and as I watched them I felt that somehow, by some
magical means, I . . . must be watching a dance in the days of
Atahualpa . . . Never will I forget the scene, the Indians
in their gorgeous Incan costumes and flashing ornaments bathed in the golden
light of the sinking sun, the majestic snow-capped peaks towering above, the
great purple shadowed gorge below, the marvelous Incan road clinging like a
slender thread to the mountain side and the yearning chorus floating to us from
across the quebrada. (Box OC032, Folder 8, pp. 406-7, 409-10)”
Verrill’s papers, including archaeological and
ethnological reports, artifact lists, correspondence, and his unpublished
autobiography “Never
a Dull Moment,” are in the National Museum of the American Indian,
Smithsonian Institution, New York City. Partly autobiographical works are Thirty
Years in the Jungle (1929) and My Jungle Trails (1937). His anthropological
books include Old Civilizations of the New World (1918), Strange
Manners, Customs, and Beliefs (1946), America’s Ancient
Civilizations (1953), and The Real Americans (1954). In 1927 he published
an archaeological report, “Excavations in Coclé Province, Panama,” in Indian
Notes 4, no.
10: 47-61. A critical review of his science-fiction writing by Walter Gillings
is in Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers, ed. Curtis C. Smith (1991).
Obituaries are in the New York Times, 16 Nov. 1954 and Wilson
Library Bulletin 29 (Jan. 1955): 344.
J. Jefferson MacKinnon
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