Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,508

This is the grave of Robert Cushman Murphy.

Born in 1887 in Brooklyn, Murphy started his involvement with birds at a young age. He grew up on Long Island, one of nine children in a big Catholic family, though he would later become a Unitarian when he was in college. He was one of those kids who loved the outdoors, which was being pushed pretty hard in the late 19th century as an antidote to the cities supposedly corrupting our next generation of young Anglo Saxon boys.

In 1906, Murphy got a job with Frank Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he worked on the proofs for Warblers of North America, an important ornithology. About this time, he started college work at Brown. He met and married a fellow student named Grace Barstow in 1911, the year he graduated. She was super supportive of his opportunities. He had a sweet gig lined up, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to take it if it was to separate him from his new wife. There was a whaling ship leaving out of the Caribbean named the Daisy. He had a chance to travel on it to explore ocean birds. She told him to take it. He did and spent most of 1912 and 1913 on it. He later wrote about his experience and some of his scientific notes in Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig Daisy, 1912-1913, which he published in 1947. By that time, Murphy was perhaps the most prominent ornithologist in the country. What made Murphy somewhat interesting here is that he rejected the role he could have played–the scientist watching other people work while he read or whatever (which let’s be honest, is totally what I would have done). No, he wanted to labor on the ship and gain the respect of the crew. So he was out there pulling animals out of the ocean.

After his return, Murphy and his wife lived in Brooklyn, before moving to the early fancy suburbs of Westchester County in the early 1920s. But he was on the ocean around the world a lot, leaving his wife to take care of the kids while he went and checked out birds. At least he was good at it. He worked with Rollo Beck on the Brewster-Sanford Expedition, named for the funders and which took place at various times between 1912 and 1917, exploring especially areas around South America. He did a big trip to Peru and published his findings in Bird Islands of Peru in 1925. Of course what all this meant was shooting a lot of birds. That was pretty much how people investigated these things. They shot them. Murphy noted in Oceanic Birds of South America, about the Brewster-Sandford Expedition that he and his fellow workers killed, according to his count, 7,853 birds on the trip. Except he didn’t use the word “kill.” He called it “obtaining specimens.”

For all of these trips, Murphy was a compulsive notetaker. He has huge diaries and kept everything. This makes life a lot easier for the historian, I will tell you that. It also allows historians to spin stories out of the primary sources to narrate histories of American exploration, such as Gary Kroll did in his 2008 book America’s Ocean Wilderness: A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, which has a whole chapter dedicated to Murphy and uses his voluminous notes effectively. (Note: I will also push you all to buy more history books by recommending titles! The Internet’s Least Important Series is highly dedicated to the most true form of study, non-science edition.)

Murphy’s 1936 book Oceanic Birds of South America became one of the most important ornithological works of the early twentieth century, really quite complete. He also found that the Bermuda petrel was not in fact extinct, as had been thought for a long time, as he was on the expedition that discovered 18 nesting pairs in 1951. He did not kill them all at least for the project of “obtaining specimens.” Today, this is still the second rarest seabird in the world, but the population is at least pretty stable. Murphy also was at least a co-author on about 600 academic articles, though I am sure most of them are the extremely short papers with 23 authors that build up the bibliographies of a lot of scientists.

Like a lot of these early environmentalists, Murphy was deeply ambivalent about modern civilization, which he saw as both destroying the beauty of the Earth and creating weak people, even as he recognized its advantages that he lived every day. He was openly anti-modernist and he loved both nature and history. He saw himself as more a Linnaeus figure than a 20th century corporate man. He articulated his own life in terms of the pioneers of environmental study that were his heroes. Murphy saw that Americans acted like natural resources would never end, which was wrong, as anyone who follows the state of the oceans today should agree with. He also was a huge supporter of the humanities and stated that the study of history and the languages was at least as important as studying science and that no one could really understand the science they did without understanding history and humanist ideas. THANK YOU ROBERT CUSHMAN MURPHY! PREACH THAT TO THE MODERN UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATOR AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY, ESPECIALLY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON WHO IS COMPLETE TRASH ON THIS POINT!!!

In 1957, Murphy retired and lived in a fancy place out on Long Island. As such, he was one of the early people fighting against the indiscriminate spraying of DDT, by which time the scientific literature was clearly showing had a disastrous impact on bird populations. It would be another five years until Rachel Carson published Silent Spring that this would really reach the general public, but the work of people such as Murphy at the grassroots should not be ignored in its eventual banning in 1972.

Murphy also has a species named for him, but it is a fish, not a bird. Trachurus murphyi is better known as the Chilean jack mackerel, which is being massively overfished and is on the verge of collapse, because of course it is as we eat everything in the ocean at a completely insane rate.

Murphy’s last big expedition came in 1970, when he back to South Georgia, 58 years after his first expedition there. Big trip for an old dude. But then he was a very energetic man. He was known for kind of blowing people away. For example, the year he turned 80, he didn’t just go to Australia for a conference. He spent weeks there traversing the whole of the continent. Sounds like a fun guy to hang and travel with and listen to his knowledge and curiosity. He was in great shape all the way up until the very end and when he got sick and died, it was very quick. That happened in 1973, and he was 85 years old.

Robert Cushman Murphy is buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island.

If you would like this series to visit other American ocean naturalists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Brown Goode is in Washington, D.C. and Samuel Stillman Berry is in Unity, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.