Without any preparations, a Maine artist stepped into the woods of Maine, determined that he could live like a primitive man for two months and not crave human companionship. By nightfall of the first night, he found himself without proper shelter and unable to start a fire.
Modern Adam Near Death in Bog, Naked All Night in Bitter Cold
SPENCER, Me., September 11, 1913. — Joseph Knowles, the “Modern Adam,” who is living a primitive life in the Maine woods to prove that a civilized man is as capable as a savage, is not finding the forest a genuine Garden of Eden.
Knowles passed a night floundering, nearly naked, through a dangerous swamp, emerging next morning so chilled and exhausted that it took days to recover his strength.
The artist was driven into this adventure by chagrin at being seen by another man and fear that he would yield under the stress of loneliness to seek human companionship.
When he approached a spring for a drink of water one day a man appeared and called him by name. Knowles remained silent, then walked rapidly away, determined to fulfill his pledge of two months’ solitude.
Toward evening he found himself in a swamp. Darkness overtook him. He chose the driest place he could find and decided to spend the night there, but everything was so wet from recent rains that he could not start a fire.
The temperature was almost at the freezing point. He gave up and started again to pick his way out of the morass, through tangled logs and underbrush.
His pack hampered him so that he finally hung it in a tree and went on, spotting a trail by breaking limbs and underbrush. The footing became worse. His body, naked from the waist up, was scratched and bruised. He shivered with cold and constantly fell over logs or sank deep in ooze.
In crossing a dead stream he slipped into the clinging mud and it took all his strength to pull himself free from the suction. Following up the stream, he found himself on the unsteady surface of a floating bog, to break through which would mean death.
He crept back into the thicket in the midst of the big swamp and huddled there, wet and frozen, till morning. Then he followed the spots back to his pack and sought high ground.
For his canvas he has made crude paper by mashing wood to a pulp with rough stones, spreading it on birch bark and rolling it smooth with a stick, then letting the layers dry in the sun. He has made brushes of the stiff hairs from the nose of the bear he killed, sticking them into the quills of eagle feathers and gluing them fast with his spruce gum.
His latest piece of hunting equipment is a bow and arrow. He made the bow by dressing down a piece of ironwood with his stone axe and rubbing it smooth with sand, and strung it with bear sinews. His arrows are tipped with bits of sharp stone.
Source: The day book. (Chicago, Ill.), 11 Sept. 1913.
