They Made Their Mark

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Chapter 2. Blair Niles

            “Often the silence which follows the letters of an explorer is as eloquent as are the letters themselves. For memory supplies the Secretary with the towering snows of Kinchinjunga and the lofty trail where, above the tree-line, some lonely Pan flutes his tribute to the majestic beauty of the Hills.  Another postmark and another silence will reconstruct for her the mystery of a jungle river, far from mail communication.”

Blair Niles

Born Mary Blair Rice on the family’s Coles Ferry Virginia plantation on June 15, 1880, her father was Henry Crenshaw Rice and her grandfather was New York Supreme Court Judge Roger Pryor. Blair’s mother Marie Gordon Pryor Rice was born April 1850 to Roger A. Pryor and Sarah Agnes Rice Pryor. Marie grew up in Charlotte County, Virginia, but after the Civil War moved to New York,  with her parents. Marie moved back to Charlotte County after her marriage to Henry Crenshaw Rice. Blair, or Mary as she was known to her family, would grow up with her two brothers Thomas and Henry on the Oaks plantation at Coles Ferry Virginia with strong antebellum views. Blair would publicly defend her grandfather in the New York Times. Roger Pryor had served as a Confederate general during the Civil War. She denied that Pryor had fired the first shot at Fort Sumter or that he had given the order to fire before receiving such orders. She also denied that “as an ardent secessionist and a Virginian, Pryor’s attitude may have colored his later recollections.” According to Blair, Pryor had achance to fire the first shot in the civil war, but he turned it down. He happened to be at Fort Sumter South Carolina on that fateful day in April 1861 while serving as an aide to General Beauregard. During his ninety year lifetime, Pryor worked as a newspaper editor, Congressman, a Confederate Congressman, a Confederate general and after the war, he practiced law in New York and then served as a New York Supreme Court Justice. Her father Henry Crenshaw Rice managed the family plantations. From her mother, Blair may have gotten her writing talent. Her mother wrote a book on how the family survived during the Civil War.

In Blair’s book Journeys in Time, from the Halls of Montezuma to Patagonia's Plains: A Treasury, Garnered from Four Centuries of Writers (1519-1942), published in 1946, she wrote that growing up she had lived a sheltered life. She enjoyed spending time in the plantation's library reading books by Dickens, Thoreau, Hugo and Tolstoy, but her favorite author was Jane Austen. She also enjoyed passing time in the kitchen, talking with the Black servants

In 1927, she became the first white woman to visit Devil's Island, a notorious penal colony in French Guiana. The horrors of Devil’s Island became notorious with revelations surrounding the plight of the Jewish French army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongfully convicted of treason and imprisoned there on January 5, 1895. In 1938, the French government stopped sending prisoners to Devil's Island and in 1952, the prison closed permanently and is now open to tourists looking for a macabre vacation.

When she was seventeen, Mary met the much older naturalist William Beebe when he visited the Virginia plantation. Blair’s family also had a home in Nova Scotia and there’s a chance they may have met each other there. After a brief courtship, they were married on August 6, 1902. The ceremony was held on the Rice family's plantation, in Mary’s mother’s prized English boxwood garden. Their wedding announcement made the front page of the New York Times, "Wedded at Sunrise 'Mid Dew-Kissed Lilies." Word had it that several wedding party guests were a little cranky because they had to wake up so early for the sunrise service. The article called Blair "one of the most beautiful young women in the state." 

 Blair and Will visited Trinidad and Venezuela in the spring of 1908 and wrote of these adventures in another book, Our Search for a Wilderness. While married to Beebe, she co-wrote a number of works with him as Mary Blair Beebe.  As Beebe’s wife and assistant, she traveled to Mexico, Venezuela, Trinidad and British Guinea. They also ventured to Europe, Egypt, Ceylon, India, Burma, the Malay States, Java, Borneo, China and Japan. In 1909, Blair took an active part in the seventeen-month-long "Kuser-Beebe" expedition to study pheasants. A wealthy patron of the New York Zoological Park and avid pheasant enthusiast, Colonel Anthony R. Kuser agreed to fund $60,000 for the expedition, pay for the best bird artists in the world to do color plates for the book, and cover the costs of the binding, printing and advertising. The book would be published under the name of the New York Zoological Society, but Kuser wanted only William Beebe to lead the expedition. The journey involved a twenty-country tour and lasted from 1909 to 1911, during which their marriage began to deteriorate. Blair made plans for a divorce. She wrote several articles and books about this trip, including Casual Wanderings in Ecuador (1923), Columbia. Although she played a primary role in the expedition, after their bitter divorce, Will expunged her from their writings about the expedition.

In early January 1913, Blair traveled to Nevada to begin a six-month residency requirement for a divorce from Beebe. Their divorce on August 28, 1913, was granted "on the grounds of extreme cruelty" on the part of Beebe. The divorce attracted bitter publicity because of Beebe’s scientific fame. Blair made The New York Times again when it headlined the scandalous relationship with the words, “Naturalist was Cruel.” The day after her divorce, Blair married an architect and photographer named Robert L. Niles and changed her name to Blair Niles. They co-wrote Columbia Land of Miracles (1924), but for the most part she wrote on her own after that. However, Niles enjoyed travel and he often took photographs for Blair’s publications.

Whether in fiction or non-fiction, Blair sought to understand and interpret the human condition. This is evident in Black Haiti where she explored the residual Jewish traditions among Blacks; in Condemned to Devil’s Island where she examined the terrible cruelty of man on Devil’s Island. In Casual Wanderings in Ecuador she explored a nation’s culture and heritage.

One of the finest projects on which she and Robert collaborated was for a four-part series of articles on "Devil's Island," published in the Sunday New York Times Magazine in 1927. At that time, Blair is said to have been the only woman ever to have set foot on the notorious penal colony in French Guiana. For her book Condemned she not only visited the famous prison, but followed the trail the prisoners used when they tried to escape into Brazil, Dutch Guiana, British Guiana and Venezuela.  ... (More)