HISTORY BUFF Miles Harvey likes digging up the past.

When Miles Harvey needed inspiration for his next book, he only had to look at the cover of his last one.

Adorning the jacket of his best-selling The Island of Lost Maps was an early map of Florida by the French painter Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. Though the artist is hardly well-known, our understanding of the New World and its native inhabitants would be far less complete had it not been for his work. Long before the invention of the camera, artists and painters often accompanied the world’s great explorers to create visual records of the exotic lands and people they encountered, making them forerunners of the modern-day documentarian.

Though Le Moyne was long ago relegated to obscurity, Chicago author Harvey grew curious and set out to unravel the mysterious life of the first European painter in North America—a man whose journeys proved to be an extraordinary chronicle of his times. That quest culminates in Harvey’s new book Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America (Random House, $27).

“I love the Zelig quality of this guy,” says Harvey, a longtime journalist and writing teacher. “He’s lived through all the upheavals of his time—religious, political and scientific.”

Harvey’s initial research was frustrating. Libraries had little to offer, and there were major gaps in Le Moyne’s life. So he enlisted the aid of an art historian and traveled to England and France to visit archives where he pored over rare documents and books. Records show that the artist sailed from France with 300 other French Protestants and arrived in what is now Jacksonville, Florida, in 1564. Their mission was to establish the first permanent European settlement on the continent at Fort Caroline.

Le Moyne’s job was to document the area in drawings and paintings. Perhaps more importantly, he served as intelligence gatherer for France, which planned to claim Florida as its own in hopes of finding silver and gold. “It’s one of those stories that has epic Hollywood qualities,” Harvey says. “You’ve got hurricanes, mass murder, mutiny, war, famine, international intrigue, shipwrecks and piracy.”

The artist’s stay was marked by hardship, hunger and battle. He survived when the Spanish stormed Fort Caroline and slaughtered hundreds of French colonists. “He may have begun the trip as a courtly painter of flowers,” Harvey writes, “but he was now a grizzled adventurer.”

Back in France, Le Moyne escaped religious persecution, moved to London and became part of a revolution in Renaissance-era botanical illustration. He served as an adviser to Sir Walter Raleigh and published a book of flora and fauna likely used to supply patterns for embroidery and other crafts.

Harvey’s most exciting discovery was a possible link between Le Moyne and Mary, Queen of Scots, who employed an embroiderer named Henry Le Moyne. Harvey found the elder Le Moyne worked for the queen in the mid–16th century and was 23 years old around the time of Jacques’s birth. Harvey believes the artist was the son or nephew of the royal embroiderer.

Still, much of Le Moyne’s private life remained elusive, and the artist’s own journals yielded little. Nonetheless, Harvey feels he shed new light on a long forgotten, but important artist. “To use the explorer’s metaphor, it’s possible I discovered a little piece of the past that had been hiding,” Harvey says. “But there’s still much terra incognita.”

Painter in a Savage Land is out now.